Programs

AI.Assembly

July – August, 2023 Made possible by Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Artists Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Started by Stephanie Dinkins in 2017 as meetings at NEW INC, a New York-based art and tech incubator at the New Museum, AI.Assembly is an ongoing series of intimate, exploratory encounters addressing the question “What does AI need from you?  Since the first AI.Assembly we start with that very question and then expand outward to explore more facets of the technological future. Each AI.Assembly gathering seeks to build fellowship catalyzed by sharing of meals featuring foods that are…
Programs

Montalvo Announces New Lucas Artist Fellows, 2023

Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program (LAP) is proud to announce the fellowships awarded from its California open call held earlier this year, the first open call held by the LAP in over ten years.  Of 370 applicants, 65 artists—spanning careers from emerging to established—were awarded Lucas Artists Fellowships: 30 in the field of visual arts, 19 in literary arts, and 16 in music/composition and performing arts. Fellows will receive three months of residency time which can be used at their discretion over a three-year period, beginning in October of this year and extending through 2026. Since its…
Programs

Abundant Intelligences

A project of the Indigenous Futures Research CenterMay – June, 2023 Made possible by Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Artists Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Abundant Intelligences Residency will provide a sustained period of individual and collective engagement with creative responses to the challenge of designing AI systems that support Indigenous flourishing. The goal will be to produce future imaginaries that illustrate the abundant diversity of how humans interact intelligently with the world, and to illuminate how such intelligences might be expressed through computational systems. Questions about the ethical design of AI have taken on…
Programs

A Celebration of Earth Day 2023

Join us for a celebration of Earth Day with a special Open Access event on Thursday, April 20 from 5:30–8:30pm featuring three exciting installations presented by artists from our Lucas Artists Residency Program. One of these installations will then continue to be available for visitors to engage with during the weekend of April 22–23. Minneapolis-based composer JG Everest will present 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. This installation, entitled While…
Programs

Open Call for California Artists

DEADLINE PASSED. Sorry, we are no longer accepting applications. The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency (LAP) at Montalvo opened in 2004 as a new facility, designed especially for artists, consisting of ten unique live/work studios designed to accommodate many artistic practices including music, visual, literary and performing arts. The facility has a commons building that provides a flexible space where artists can gather for meals prepared by our culinary artist/chef, collaboration and social events. Lucas Artists Fellows can access and utilize Montalvo’s many buildings and grounds, including a workshop for woodworking and an adjacent ceramics studio. Since its inception,…
Programs

Thick Solidarity

A project of Related TacticsAugust 1 – September 11, 2022 Made possible by Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Artists Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts 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.  Thick Solidarity is a residency project organized by Related Tactics inviting two cohorts of multidisciplinary artists to join together in building community, resting, and carving out space for each artist to conduct research. The ongoing work as…
Programs

Underworlding

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.  Underworlding, as a practice, counters the extractivist logics embedded in our institutions that have surfaced in the current pandemic to reveal essential realities over whose body, whose labor, and whose land has been exploited in the uneven settlements of our social order between precarity and privilege.  This residency draws individuals who share a grounded ethos and anchor their practices across and beneath surfaces, generations, genders, and…
Programs

Creando Espacio

Creando Espacio is a participatory art installation by Bay Area based artist, Hector Dionicio Mendoza in collaboration with Amalia Mesa-Bains, Viviana Paredes, and Steve White. As a child, Mendoza grew up with a great appreciation for the importance of faith, ritual, and alternative healing traditions as practiced by his grandfather, a fifth-generation curandero (shaman). In Mexico as well as Central and South America, the curandera/o plays an important role to many people embarking on the long and challenging journey to El Norte/The North (the United States), providing blessings and protection before they depart in search of a better way of life. Creando Espacio draws on Mendoza’s childhood memories creating an outdoor…
Programs

Scratch Space Archive

In this series of virtual conversations, we bring together visual artists, scholars, composers, activists, writers, and others to explore what kinds of radical imaginaries can unfold in this moment of pandemic, racial reckoning, economic uncertainty, civil unrest, and environmental crisis. How do we think about what is possible? How can we use our imaginations to build a better present/future? How can we attend to the past in service of the future? ​​And how can we retool and build better more equitable models for living and working together? In March 2020, Indian author Arundhati Roy described our current moment as “a portal, a gateway…
Programs

Studio Visit with James Gouldthorpe

An intimate virtual visit with visual artist and painter James Gouldthorpe. View and discuss the brand new body of work created by Gouldthorpe during these past eight months of shelter in place, and the new Coronavirus reality we share. The Covid Artifacts 2020 series of paintings has been a daily practice for Gouldthorpe, beginning after he arrived home from his first visit to the grocery store, and the ensuing efforts of tirelessly wiping down each purchased item, to rid it of any potential contamination. In the words of the artist, “…I began to consider our new world. What previous innocuous…