Programs of the Lucas Artists Residency

As a creative incubator and presenter, the LAP both supports artists to create new work and offers presentation opportunities. LAP artists enjoy unique access to the resources of Montalvo Arts Center, enabling them to present their work and engage with Silicon Valley and Bay Area audiences.

Exhibitions, festivals, commissions, and more.

LAP programs include: an annual Art on the Grounds exhibition and an accompanying performance festival; rotating exhibitions in Montalvo’s Cottage Gallery; commissions; off-site artistic partnerships; and a variety of public offerings through Open Access and Scratch Space, including workshops, conversations, and screenings.

The Lucas Artists Program supports the development of new experimental works of visual arts and performance across a wide range of interrelated disciplines, including dance, music, performing arts, and drama through our commissioning program. We also develop new works with strategic partners in order to leverage our shared values. New works are presented on the grounds of Montalvo’s property, including its outdoor and indoor theatre venues, the Historic Villa, and at offsite venues locally and nationally.

2024 Programs

P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists

The ICA San José and Montalvo Arts Center jointly present an exhibition that opens on March 23 and runs through August 11, 2024, entitled P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists.

2023 Programs

Marcus Exhibition:
Take Time

Take Time features works by four artists who provide participatory experiences in which Montalvo visitors may lose track of time and discover the joy of engagement and creative contemplation.  On view July–October, 2023.

AI.Assembly

Stephanie Dinkins and a group of interdisciplinary artists, technologists, and humanists gather to discuss shaping the future and working toward more fair, ethical, equitable, and inclusive technological protocols from a diversity of approaches. In residency summer of 2023.

Abundant Intelligences

A sustained period of individual and collective engagement with creative responses to the challenge of designing AI systems that support Indigenous flourishing. Produced in collaboration with the Indigenous Futures Research Centre, in residency spring of 2023.

A Celebration of Earth Day 2023
While It Lasts: An Earth Day Sound Garden by JG Everest

Minneapolis-based composer JG Everest composes and and designs a new site-specific temporary sound + performance installation for the grounds at Montalvo, to be experienced along the paths and bridges that line the creek in the Redwood forest between the Villa and the LAP studios.

2022 Programs

Marcus Festival:
Claiming Space

This exhibition presented a series of works by local and national artists that reimagine how the body is represented in landscape and upend the exclusionary figurative traditions that dominate historic American gardens and other civic and public spaces. Works were on view in the summer of 2022.

Thick Solidarity:
from the Who Else But Americans series

Thick Solidarity is a project in Related Tactics’s ongoing Who Else But Americans series that explores the liberatory potential of relationships between communities of color as we navigate the extractive and violent systems of nation-building, power, and American exceptionalism. In residence at the Lucas Artists Program (LAP) from August 1 – September 11, 2022.

Underworlding:
Speculative + Counter-Extractive Earth Practices

The Underworlding residency, convened by UCSB Art Professor Kim Yasuda, assembles a diverse group of California-based practitioners and community knowledge holders for the first time as an exploratory cohort in residence at our Lucas Artists Program (LAP) from May 16 – June 24, 2022.

Past Programs