Montalvo, Author at Montalvo Arts Center • Page 12 of 13

Romeo & Juliet at Villa Montalvo

For the month of May 2016, the Lucas Artists Residency Program (LAP) turned the eleven artist studios on our orchard site over to the We Players, a remarkable site-specific theater company, as they developed a new production of Romeo and Juliet. Founded 16 years ago by Artistic Director Ava Roy, the We Players adapts classic pieces of theater for historic places and keeps audiences on their toes as their performances wend their way through these striking environments. The We Players have performed Ondine in San Francisco’s Sutro Baths, Macbeth at Fort Point, and Hamlet on Alcatraz, creating once-in-a-lifetime experiences for audience members.As the We Players cast and crew worked together…

James Gouldthorpe’s Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters

In his expansive new installation, Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters, James Gouldthorpe explores the passage of time and the aggregation of the self over a lifetime. The artist projects forward into the future and reaches back into the past, mixing humor with melancholy as he explores birth, childhood, adolescence, middle and old age, and death, and reflects on both the poignant and absurd nature of existence. Comprised of around two thousand individual mixed media paintings, Gouldthorpe developed Particles over a three-year period while an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artists Program. With this new body of work, he continues…

XLIII: A Contemporary Requiem

Co-commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center and the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, XLIII: A Contemporary Requiem was a site-specific performance work created by Mexico City-based composer and sound artist Andres Solis with choreographer and dancer Sandra Milena Gómez in association with the Santa Clara University Chamber Singers, and conductor Scot Hanna-Weir.The requiem is traditionally an act or token of remembrance for the dead and has inspired compositions by such musical luminaries as Mozart, Verdi, Brahms, and Dvořák. This immersive contemporary reworking of the genre by Solis and Gómez mixed traditional elements of organ and choir with…

Innovation in Music: OneBeat 2015

From October 10-27, the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo hosted a youthful international consortium as 25 musicians (ages 19 – 35) from all over the world gathered for OneBeat, an electrifying fellowship enjoined to collaboratively write, produce, record, and perform genre-shattering musical works. An act of musical diplomacy and an inimitable force of creative energy, OneBeat kicked off its 2015 whirlwind of collaboration and international engagement with its Montalvo residency. This year’s fellows came from a vast array of backgrounds, chosen because they reject constraints and challenge traditional modes of creativity and thought in their music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X83Jm-Y1ir0 OneBeat is an…

Botanica Poetica: New Work by Lucas Artists Fellows

Home to formal gardens, oak and redwood forests, and various exotic plantings, Montalvo's horticultural diversity serves as inspiration for a series of new works created by Lucas Artist Fellows Kija Lucas, Monica Lundy, Hector Dionicio Mendoza, and Fieldworks Collaborative (Trena Noval and Ann Wettrich). Identifying, collecting, and documenting various specimens of plant life discovered while exploring Montalvo's 175-acre public park, these artists have adopted creative processes that resemble the activities of the backyard naturalist. Through sculpture, painting, photography, and works on paper, viewers are invited to reflect on the ill-defined boundary between the natural and unnatural, and the intimate entanglement…

Art on the Grounds 2015: Performance in the Park

On July 24th 2015, we held a large-scale performance festival on the Montalvo grounds, Performance in the Park, featuring site-specific performances by Lucas Artist Fellows. This event is documented in a short video by local filmmakers Pierce Leggin and Alexis Constanza. The festival was organized in association with a year-long celebration of the 75/10 anniversary of the Lucas Artists Residency Program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Mjev0wGjk Joanna Haigood and members of Zaccho Dance Theatre transformed the Italianate Garden with the haunting site-specific performance, The Visitors. Nikki Borodi, Glenn Easley, and Nehara Kalev soared high above us in the trees in new dance and sound performance, Whisper Before…

75/10: Alumni Celebrations Across the Globe

2015 is a year for celebration at Montalvo! We mark two important anniversaries: 75 continuous years as an artists residency (making us the oldest such program west of the Mississippi) and the 10-year jubilee of our international Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency campus. To commemorate this historic occasion, our alumni Artist Fellows around the world are mounting happenings in their home cities honoring Montalvo's commitment to supporting artists and their work. These range in scale from large parties to solo moments and interventions. Photos, videos, original artwork, and more from these events will be posted as they take place.

Possibilities of Paper

This exhibition highlighted the diverse and innovative ways that Lucas Artists Program (LAP) Fellows and Guest Artists have used paper as a vehicle for creative expression. Whether crafted from delicate, handmade Nepalese paper or inexpensive and readily available cardboard, works on view recalled the rich and varied histories of paper and its changing societal role and value. Some artists employed paper as a register for marks made by ink, paint, graphite, and more unusual media like coffee, and dyed twine; while others explored the possibilities of paper as a sculptural material, carving, cutting, folding, embossing, weaving and molding it into forms. Possibilities…

OneBeat 2014

OneBeat is an incubator for music-based social entrepreneurship, where innovative musicians from around the world launch collaborative projects designed to make a positive impact on local and global communities. An initiative of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in collaboration with the groundbreaking New York-based music organization Bang on a Can's Found Sound Nation, OneBeat employs collaborative original music as a potent new form of cultural diplomacy.OneBeat is a musical journey like no other. It is a chance for adventurous musicians from an incredible diversity of traditions to seek common ground, create new musical combinations, push…

Justin Lowman: Untitled (Belvedere Temple)

Untitled (Belvedere Temple) was a site conditioned architectural intervention inhabiting an existing structure that forms part of Montalvo’s historic property. Responding to the original purpose of the Belvedere Temple to incorporate a specific vantage point or view, Justin Lowman used ambient and artificial light, PVC, redwood, plexiglas, textilene, and filters to frame and direct the viewer’s gaze to various overlooked vistas. Developed in conversation with experiments the artist conducted in his studio at the Lucas Artists Residency Program in 2012 and his recent installation in the Project Space Gallery, Justin described this work as a “mechanism for seeing.” Like Pixel Panes,…

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