Programs

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

OneBeat Marathon Live Online!

"This Fall marks the 10th anniversary of OneBeat, the series of revolutionary international collaborations led by our Found Sound Nation team. This is some of the most noble work we know of - using music to build bridges across geographies and nationalities and cultures, redefining and expanding our artistic family, giving deep and meaningful opportunities to musicians coming from a wide spectrum of disciplines and traditions, underlining the recognition that our communities need to be central to how we all make music together. In honor of these 10 years, we are excited to showcase some of this groundbreaking work in…
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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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Programs

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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Programs

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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Programs

5 Hour Sculpture, A Pop-up Arts Festival

In March 2016, Montalvo launched an open call for proposals for our annual summer Art on the Grounds festival. We asked would-be applicants, “if you had five hours to present a work of sculpture in a public park, what would you create?” The eleven works on view at the festival opening, featuring more than 35 artists and their collaborators from the Bay Area, Greater US, and beyond―represented the final projects selected through this process. These mostly new works represented the expanded field of contemporary sculpture, ranging from temporary installations, interventions, gestures, actions, participatory engagements, spectacular intrusions, and performances. Many of…
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Programs

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…
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Programs

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…
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