Programs

Of Maori, Indian, and Pacific Island decent, Lucas Artists Visual Arts Fellow Tiffany Singh (Auckland, New Zealand) draws inspiration from her varied cultural backgrounds to create work consisting largely of natural mixed-media-based installation and participatory community building. She has garnered critical acclaim for her use of ceremonial and ritualistic materials gathered from and transcending everyday culture. Continuing her ongoing investigation into the concept of sacred spaces, in 2013 she created the participatory sculpture The Bells of Mindfulness at Montalvo Arts Center. Working with community groups and in collaboration with rural artisans in western India, she produced an installation of 1000…

Through existing works and new commissions, artists Susan O’Malley, Leah Rosenberg, and Christine Wong Yap explored the question: ​How do we cultivate happiness? Wong Yap's series of text-based works sewn from ribbons and installed directly on the gallery wall depicted messages encouraging positive mental habits, while a large-scale drawing diagrammed the interconnections between theories of subjective well-being. Rosenberg explored how color, light and material impact our sense of contentment. Inspired by the use of light as a therapy for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), she invited gallery visitors to stand in front of her Illuminated Stripe Works, a series of small striped…

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…