Programs

Programs

Bruce Munro at Montalvo: Stories in Light

Featuring 10 light-based works ranging in scale from immersive to intimate, Bruce Munro at Montalvo: Stories in Light is an ambitious outdoor exhibition that has transformed Montalvo’s historic Villa and its extensive public areas into a spectacle of light. The exhibition includes existing and new works conceived and developed by Munro while in residence at the Lucas Artists Program. 
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We the People

This July 20th,  we were joined by poets, musicians, and visual and sound artists from across the globe as we collectively consider: How can we expand our understanding of “we” and imagine new, more inclusive ways of being together?​ This communal gathering on Montalvo’s grounds featured poetry, performance, sound works, installation art, and participatory engagement activities. This event was also an opportunity to experience three newly commissioned works for Montalvo's grounds by Lucas Artists Fellows, all of which prompted timely conversations around processes of othering and the politics of belonging and home. ​​​See clips from the various performances of the evening…
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Programs

Marilá Dardot: Saudade (Our Flags)

In her first exhibition in the United States, Brazilian artist Marilá Dardot premiered a large-scale installation of flags created by immigrant and refugee community participants during a series of public workshops. The flags, which represent in text or visual form something their maker misses about the country where they were born, were raised on Montalvo’s grounds on Sunday, July 15 at a communal flag-raising ceremony. With this work, Dardot seeks to amplify the voices of our varied diaspora communities, and honor the complexities and challenges of their experience in the midst of a divisive national conversation about immigrants and the…
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Programs

Howard Hersh: Four Bridges

Four Bridges is a site-specific sound work by award-winning composer Howard Hersh designed to be heard by listeners over mobile devices as they walk through Montalvo’s woodland environment. The work coordinates space, sound, and motion into a unique immersive ambulatory experience: as listeners follow a meandering woodland path on Montalvo’s grounds, they are taken on a sonic odyssey that leads them through redwood canyons into oak-lined meadows. Four Bridges’ narrative is inspired by our primal memories of the forest and the mythology that depicts it as an enchanted, mysterious place. It also explores the woods as a metaphor for our common journey and what it…
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Programs

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Imole Blue II (Field of Memories)

One of the most significant artists to emerge from post-Revolutionary Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons created a garden for Montalvo’s grounds with participation from the community. Taking inspiration from an aerial photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile installation taken by a US Air force plane during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, this garden is part peace memorial and part living sketch. Campos-Pons is interested in the uneasy juxtaposition of the visual beauty of the photograph upon which she based her garden plan—which looks like blooming flowers set inside a hexagram shape--and the horror and destructive capability that the image…
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Programs

Don’t Look Away

On February 23, 2018, Montalvo’s Carriage House Theatre was the venue for an inspiring evening of poetry and performance featuring Lucas Artists Literary Fellows Danez Smith, Monica Sok, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and two-time Grammy winning musician and co-founding member of the genre-busting rock band Living Colour, Will Calhoun. Moving effortlessly from spoken word to song, Julian read from their 2017 book of poems, Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017) and Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), among other works. In poems and songs that synthesize and meld experimental and traditional voices and forms, Julian “breaks language open from the inside.”…
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Programs

The Collector: A Proposal

This exhibition represents a proposal for an ambitious, large-scale outdoor installation and community engagement project by Lucas Artists Fellow Máximo González. Over a period of six years, González has carefully crafted a mysterious alter ego he calls “the collector.” Performed by the artist, this elusive figure has traveled the world painting portraits of dead and dying trees. Many of these works are on view here.​In July 2016, González undertook a one-month residency at the Lucas Artists Program (LAP) at Montalvo Arts Center. During his stay he traveled to some of California’s most treasured national parks to continue working on this…
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Programs

NOW HEAR THIS! An Exercise in Listening

NOW HEAR THIS! is an outdoor exhibition and sound festival featuring the work of thirty-one different local and national sound artists, composers, instrument-builders, performers, and visual artists for whom listening plays a vital role in their creative process. Visitors are invited to consider the following questions: How can listening disrupt or enhance our sense of place and space? Can the act of listening produce new forms of public engagement and awareness? How can we listen more deeply and differently? The exhibition includes five newly commissioned site-specific works of sound-based art by national and local artists Taraneh Hemami, Walter Kitundu, Hugh…
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Rolling Counterpoint

Developed by artist Taro Hattori, Rolling Counterpoint is a space for encounter designed to foster dialogue about experiences of division and belonging in contemporary society. ​The project consists of two teahouses: one stationary space installed outdoors on Montalvo Arts Center’s 175-acre public park in Saratoga, California and one mobile teahouse, which travelled to various cities in the Bay Area in 2017 (Cupertino, San Jose; Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco). Please visit the Rolling Counterpoint website to find out more about the project.
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Karen Finley: Far East of Eden

Far East of Eden is an experimental film short developed by internationally recognized artists Karen Finley and Bruce Yonemoto. The work, which was developed by Finley and Yonemoto during their tenure as visiting artists at the Lucas Artists Residency in 2016, was commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center.Far East of Eden draws on the story of Senator James Duval Phelan, three-time mayor of San Francisco and the first popularly elected California Senator. In 1912, Phelan built Villa Montalvo as his country estate in Saratoga, California. Villa Montalvo was Senator Phelan's favorite home and a center of artistic, political and social life in…
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