Behind the Scenes

On February 25, Joie Lee, Simon Pettet and Zeinab Alhashemi engaged in a public conversation at our Open Access program about the element of surprise in the creative process. Take a listen to their conversations here.

Listening to poets talking amongst themselves is a rare pleasure. On their last day at the LAP, after a rainy winter, poets Julian Talamantez Brolaski and Ariana Reines sit down and consider the question: What can poets do?

By Zeyn Joukhadar, Lucas Artists Literary Arts Fellow. On the evening of September 29, 2018, Lucas Artists Visual Arts Fellow Matteo Rubbi and I painted a projection of the night sky on Montalvo’s Nissan Altima using professional grade glow-in-the-dark paint. We projected a live view of the night sky onto the car using the Stellarium program and the LAP’s video projector, and then painted each star and planet by hand.

In my third installment of a series of interviews with Lucas Artists Fellows working in performance, I interview singer-songwriter-performer Jennifer Johns before the premiere of her new performance work LIV: A Ritual For Humanity at the Art on the Grounds: We the People event in July 2018. One month later, we meet again to discuss how it went. Listen along in this before-and-after audio-blog journey as we discuss Johns’ courageous piece in which she builds a home for the history of police brutality in the US and “arrests” a police officer as part of a ritual for finding love and…

In this interview, I chat with Co-Artistic Director of Kaimera Productions Simón Adinia Hanukai about his new installation project, DATAPRINT, which will premiere this weekend at the Tech Museum in downtown San Jose, California. Working with a group of collaborators across the disciplines of data science, video game writing and data ethics, Simón is taking some major risks with a project that sits on the cutting edge of new media installation work. Listen along as he shares his thoughts on collaboration and describes the challenges involved in mounting a simultaneous presentation of DATAPRINT in two global capitals of technological innovation—Bangalore,…

Over the past year, the Lucas Artist Residency Program welcomed an inaugural group of playwriting Fellows. It has been my pleasure to spend time with this talented and diverse group of artists and observe how the discipline of theater makes a home for itself at Montalvo. The following is Part 1 in a series of audio-blog portraits that discuss their playwriting projects and topical questions about the theater—past and present, here and elsewhere.

Lucas Artists Program Curator Donna Conwell sat down with RADIOEE.NET for a wide ranging conversation about their work and upcoming broadcast project AUTOPILOTO. The collective explore their interest in radio and mobility and the impetus for their new broadcast focusing on the evolving technology of self-driving transit in this edited interview. What will our streets and cities look and sound like in a driverless future? How will society and infrastructure systems adapt? What might humans do during their newly available transit time? In what ways do machines imitate human’s auto-pilot modes of engaging with the world?

Playwright, performer and composer Alva Rogers is deeply versed in the uses of enchantment, drawing inspiration for her plays from the Surrealist painters and magic realist writers. Rogers has been called “a visionary playwright whose rich poetic language and kaleidoscopic theatrical aesthetic challenges audiences to reexamine their understanding of what theatre can be and do.” Meet Alva Rogers in her studio at the Lucas Artists Program in this new video.

Visual artist Kio Griffith handed Henry Threadgill a thin wand with a light on its tip: the new endoscope Griffith had delivered to the LAP two weeks ago. And the lights went out and the sound experience began. Across the sail, Kio projected images drawn from the Montalvo grounds, mixed with live images that Threadgill created while drawing the lens of the endoscope closely across the objects on the table.

After dinner this week, the LAP artists visited jazz great Henry Threadgill’s studio, where Threadgill spoke in his musical cadences about his creative process.

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 that will be performed throughout the Montalvo grounds in October. 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.

As Montalvo’s Culinary Artist, I have the pleasure of cooking meals for the other creative thinkers, dancers, composers, and visual artists who work and live alongside me here at the Lucas Artists Program. My inspiration comes from Montalvo’s grounds where I look for edible plants and mushrooms to use in our daily meals.

Cassils arrived at Montalvo’s Lucas Artists Residency Program on one of those soft days in March after the big rains. Seven deer grazed just off the road as we drove up to Studio 60, and the stairs to the studio were framed in blue lupine. The artist looked around at the quiet hillside and seemed a bit bewildered. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been out of the city.”

​Last month, emerging filmmaker Sam Gouldthorpe joined his father, Lucas Artists Program Fellow James Gouldthorpe, to document the creation of Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters. This video portrait movingly brings father and son’s creative practices together in a shared exploration of artistic experimentation, familial ties, and the passing of time.

Food is where we meet, where we build, where we struggle, and where we survive. Written in our family’s recipes are the maps of our migrations and the stories of our resilience. We, as the People’s Kitchen Collective based in Oakland, California, believe that sharing food with each other is a powerful tool for organizing communities.

Fieldworks Collaborative was founded in 2012 by Trena Noval and Ann Wettrich to invent new approaches to creative inquiry and collaborative systems that explore the world we live in. Informed by place, we are interested in stimulating curiosity by creating inclusive, interdisciplinary, and multidimensional experiences.

​The botanical theme of Lundy’s newest body of work, created while she was a Fellow at the Lucas Artists Program, seems at first glance to be a radical departure for the artist. Indeed, the artist has talked at length about how exchanging her normal studio space in urban Oakland for the natural setting of Montalvo served as a creative stimulus.

​Are we alone? No! A think tank of SETI and NASA scientists, together with artists, dancers, and other experts, is gathering to expand our ability to communicate with non-humans here on earth and out in the cosmos, using art and science and language. After our think tank, we will open out our research to the public so people with all kinds of intelligence can understand and help us learn even more.

Hall’s new body of work, entitled Correspondence, is inspired by his rediscovery of a cache of letters his father had written to him while deployed in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. The experience of rereading these letters twenty years after he first received them began to inform a new series of paintings, drawings, and videos based on the letters and cultural signifiers from the period.

​A large part of my work the past decade has been constructed around ecosystemic programming. This term refers to approaching any performance or presentation space as a sonic ecosystem. Computer programming (in my case, in the sound design program Kyma) “listens” to the behavior of sound in the space via microphones. Specifically, I have been programming Kyma to listen to the literal ecosystem at Montalvo and control the lighting I have installed in the Richard Serra-designed sculpture studio (Studio 50).

Composer Scott Miller arrived at Montalvo’s Lucas Artists Residency (LAP) on a Tuesday, and by the end of the day he had already rigged up his studio as a living sound ecosystem. Evening found him sitting thoughtfully at the piano bench, listening. I brought him a power cord, and when I walked around the grand piano, sound responded like water around me. ​ ​

This month, a new kind of cacophony echoed over the orchard hillside of the Lucas Artists Residency Program (LAP). Throughout the day and into the night, from the dancer’s studio at the top of the hill came bellowing shouts, grunts, and cries. At artist dinner, two artists came down exhausted, sometimes stained with red food coloring, asking all kinds of questions.

On Friday, September 25, we open a new exhibition in our Project Space Gallery: Botanica Poetica, which showcases new work by Lucas Artist Fellows inspired by the varied and diverse plant life found in Montalvo Arts Center’s 175-acre public park. Among the featured artists is Mexico-born Hector Dionicio Mendoza, currently based in Monterey, California.

In this ongoing series, we answer visitors’ questions about Montalvo’s history and grounds: “During my visit last week, I was struck by the Italian-style satyr sculpture in the Love Temple of the Italianate garden. What does the sculpture signify, and why is it placed in the Love Temple? It’s so macabre”.

In this ongoing series, we answer visitors’ questions about Montalvo’s history and grounds: “A friend and I drove up to the Montalvo Arts Center last weekend from San Diego. As we drove up to and past the Villa, we noticed signs along the road that were all abbreviated. We could interpret most of them, except the last two. It had something to do with a journey in the forest…”

Something that former Montalvo Artist-in-Residence Daniel Canogar said when we spoke to him a few weeks ago about his work resonated with us: the idea of the countless people who have passed through the Villa Montalvo during the hundred years of its existence. This inspired us to make a trip to the Montalvo archive to peruse its photographic holdings.

Montalvo artist-in-residence Nina Waisman will present an evening of dance, movement, and interactive sound work as part of a series of performances entitled “9 evenings” arranged as part of the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial.

The countdown to current artist-in-residence Nina Waisman’s presentation is on! In 8 days (on Thursday, November 8 at 7pm), she will activate her work Body Envelope (think of it as a six foot square interactive sound chandelier) with a special dance performance she has developed during her Montalvo residency