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…
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…
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…
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…
Programs

XLIII: A Contemporary Requiem

Co-commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center and the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, XLIII: A Contemporary Requiem was a site-specific performance work created by Mexico City-based composer and sound artist Andres Solis with choreographer and dancer Sandra Milena Gómez in association with the Santa Clara University Chamber Singers, and conductor Scot Hanna-Weir.The requiem is traditionally an act or token of remembrance for the dead and has inspired compositions by such musical luminaries as Mozart, Verdi, Brahms, and Dvořák. This immersive contemporary reworking of the genre by Solis and Gómez mixed traditional elements of organ and choir with…