ABCNT is a sociopolitical activist/anarchist, the product of mid-nineties expressionism and new-millennium activism, who describes himself as “[a] real west coast hip-hop fanatic, with a kind of militant attitude towards consciousness.” And how does he execute his expression and voice? Through avenues in politically charged street art and music.

http://abcnt.info

My family and I emigrated to Los Angeles in 1975 from Apatzingan, Michoacan, Mexico. It was, in many ways, akin to traveling from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, given the rudimentary conditions to which we were accustomed. This experience – of leaving one land for another, having to constantly redefine what it means to be a human being, a man, a part of a community – is a constant and central theme within my work. I am interested in narratives and vignettes about the seemingly discarded or unimportant moments that shape our culture. I believe that these discounted moments harbor importance and, in isolating these moments, I endeavor to stimulate reflection.

http://abelalejandre.com

LA born and raised artist Aiseborn, always knew he would be a painter. Inspired by the graffiti he saw on the streets of his neighborhood, he dedicated himself to his art from a young age. His paintings exist to defy physical boundaries and illuminate the essence of One connection among all life on Earth. Ancient spiritual art, classical art, and architecture have had a tremendous influence on him. Once the famous LA graffiti crew UTI caught sight of Aise’s work, he accepted their invitation to join them. Aiseborn’s work has been shown at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Art Share L.A., The Container Yard, the California African American Museum, LA Art Show 2018, UTI Crew’s 30th Anniversary Mural at the Westbrass building in Los Angeles and “Synthesis,” a collaborative show with Cache at Tonalli Studio.

https://www.aiseborn.com/

Keith Magruder—also known as the Baker’s Son—graduated from the California College of the Arts in 2008 with a focus on Illustration. Currently he splits his time between studios located in Oakland and Los Angeles. At an early age, Keith developed a strong connection to food by helping his mother and grandmother bake cakes, pies, and bread in the kitchen. He was able to experience the joys and happiness their baked goods brought to people. Through that experience, Keith realized baking can represent much more than what appears on the surface. In exploring the origins, costs, and transformational properties of ingredients, Keith’s artwork offers an artistic commentary on the socio-political aspects of food and the relationship that people and cultures around the world share with it.

http://bakers-son.com

Bisco Smith is a contemporary visual artist with roots in music, graffiti, and street art. A Los Angeles local, who currently resides and works in Queens, New York. Bisco works in a variety of formats, including canvas and large outdoor murals, and is known for his “visual freestyle”—characterized as a blend of graffiti deconstruction, gestural abstraction, and lyric-based stylewriting. Made predominantly with a black and white color palette, his art visually captures the rhythms of music and the energy of the moment through its spontaneous marks and abstracted text.

http://biscosmith.com

Calder Greenwood is a Los Angeles based artist who works with recycled materials. Born and raised in New York, he inherited the artistic eye of his father, an art teacher. He grew up making art, mostly out of cardboard, including props and sets for his own films. His work appears in features such as Swiss Army Man, Harbinger Down, the upcoming Nosferatu, Flying Lotus’ “Kuso,” as well as music videos for Die Antwoord, Muse and Bjork.

https://www.asobiproductions.com/

Cassie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. She creates murals, drawings, sculptures, and immersive installations through which she explores concepts of play and conflict, often in regard to humanity’s relationship to the natural environment.

http://www.cassiezhang.studio/

Chaz Bojorquez is a luminary in the old days of lawless invention and the new world of fine art’s global embrace of street art, especially in Los Angeles, who after 40 years of building a living legacy, is today more creative and prolific than ever. His career began as a graffiti writer who tagged mostly in the Arroyo Seco and Highland Park, where his “Señor Suerte” became the first known stencil tag 30 years before there was a Banksy, and was adopted by the Avenues gang as a symbol of protection they called Mr. Luck. 

He has pursued a refinement of these poetically vandalizing impulses between then and now — resulting in a unique combination of legible passages, invented fonts, and familiar symbols that describe, depict, and evoke the cultural and linguistic mash-up he inhabits. He is known as the Godfather of Graffiti — but he has also found success and acclaim in the adjacent realms of fine art, publishing, and design, producing work for gallery — and increasingly, institutional — contexts. Art-world success notwithstanding, his compositions tenaciously refer to the risky impulses that inspire maverick writers to festoon their cities with emblems of individual existence, contested history, political dissidence, and cultural resistance.

Darcy Yates is a So-Cal native who grew up next to the LA forest. Her artistic journey began at a young age by visual problem solving through color. Unable to shake her visual awareness, she embraced her career as an artist. Yates received her BA from California State University Northridge (CSUN) in 2013 and won “Best in Show” from CSUN’s juried art competition her Senior Year.  She is now a seasoned artist and animator being shown at multiple galleries all over the United States. On top of her gallery and animations, Yates has murals throughout Los Angeles. Yates’ work captures the spirit of soul and imagination through colors and shapes. Her work evokes the feelings of a child walking through a dark and silent hallway; frightened but ceaselessly curious of what lies ahead.

http://darcyyates.com/

Dave Tourjé’s work reflects the history and family religions of his beloved Highland Park neighborhood, where childhood was rough and wild but also colorful and lively, thanks to the hot-rod, gang, and motocross cultures that permeated the LA consciousness during his youth — especially his immersion in mural cultures of both LA and Mexico. He is known for employing various techniques, non-traditional materials, and hybrid styles into a volatile but measured vision that combines both narrative instances and abstract derivations based on his eclectic influences. He is a master of his deliberately analog and unwieldy reverse-painting technique where he gets the best of two worlds — gesture and perfection, as raw color and line assume a glossy, architectural surface. He likes to build things, too, out of wood and concrete, resin and polymers, favoring inconvenient but unforgettable handmade objects. Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Rick Griffin, Zapp Comics, and Mad Magazine were at least as big a deal to Dave as school was in forming his unique artistic identity, and his belief that a skate deck or a longboard make the perfect place to put a painting.

Los Angeles artist David Lovejoy has worked as an artist and designer since the 1980s.  His early career in graphic design supported an extensive arts education at several schools and studios, focusing on ceramics and 2D/3D design.

Known primarily for his assemblage and installation work, Lovejoy repurposes existing artifacts and fragments, arranging them to form new compositions.

His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in California, Hawaii and Oregon and is in collections in the U.S. and Europe.  He has won a few awards, and in 1993 was named one of the “Art Stars of California” by Art in California magazine. In 2015, his sculptures served as props in a short film produced by Terry Gilliam, and he was recently commissioned for several permanent installations in the new Google Canada headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario.

http://www.lovejoyart.com/

Dytch66 is a Graffiti Artist from Los Angeles. He started doing graffiti in 1987. Over the years, he has refined his three-dimensional graffiti style and character design technique. You can find Dytch’s work in TV, film, galleries and graffiti murals around the country and abroad.

http://dytch66.com/

Artist Emmeric James Konrad was born on July 31st 1964, the year of the Dragon. Even as a young child Emmeric was fascinated by art, making drawings and small paintings for his relatives and friends by the time he was three. By 3rd grad, he was making and selling his own comic books at school (to make money to buy real comic books for his collection). He convinced his parents to let him take life drawing classes at age 11, and in 8th grade got a scholarship to go to the Brentwood School of Art. After high school he joined the United States Marine Corps, where he served for four years before being accepted to Otis/Parsons to get his BFA. He sold his first painting his junior year. Since 1991, he has been a part of the Downtown Los Angeles art scene. He, his wife Faye and two dogs, Penny and Moggy still call DTLA home. His work has been shown all over the US, Tokyo, Munich and Cuba.

Francesca Quintano was born in Santa Monica, California in 1987. She did her undergraduate work at Tufts University/ School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Francesca is one of the artists at the Hawthorne Arts Complex in Hawthorne California. Here, she has collaborated on a mural with fellow collaborator and friend Diana Relth. Francesca is in extensive private collections as well as restaurants such as Tender Greens Santa Monica.

She has shown work through solo shows, group shows, live paintings, and a multitude of auctions and group shows, all throughout Los Angeles. She has participated in the Venice Family Clinic Art Auction, the Venice Art Crawl, Unicef NextGen Art Party and several organized shows for profit and for charities. She is currently working and living in Venice Beach, CA.

https://www.francescaquintano.com

Gabriella grew up in Sweden and started painting and drawing at an early age, which led her to design. After exploring fashion illustration, interior and product design, she found that the graphic design and illustration field is where she belongs. This brought her to LA and Otis College of Art and Design, where she graduated with a Bachelor in Graphic Design.

Gabriella has 18 years of experience as a Graphic Designer, and has had several art exhibits where she showcased her illustrations.

http://www.gabriellafash.com

Gary Wong is a profoundly confounding figure of monastic ubiquity with a penchant for character-based performance-art and Blues music. His life and his artwork are indelibly fused into a sort of performance of consciousness said to be “about jazz and baseball,” which nevertheless finds physical expression in exciting expressionistic collage, painting, photographs, and drawings. Wong like many of the Locos is assertively a perspectival exemplar more than a producer of art objects — but one who nevertheless makes gorgeous images of saturated, rough-handed elegance, and objects of visceral impact, often incorporating the symbols and signs of outsider, transnational identity into his program. Language, presence, and sound are important to Wong, for whom context and attention are the primary mediums of the esoteric dimensions of his practice, frequently deployed in support or service of colleagues and collaborators.

https://californialocos.com/artists

INDECLINE is an Activist Art Collective founded in 2001. It is comprised of graffiti writers, filmmakers, photographers and full-time rebels and activists. INDECLINE focuses on social, ecological and economical injustices carried out by American and International governments, corporations and law enforcement agencies.

https://thisisindecline.com/

James works in digital, photographic, and traditional mediums, focusing on Southern California subject matter, specifically the urban landscape, street signs, and the LA Arts District. With these sources in mind, he creates images that explore the complex system that is Los Angeles. To feed the layering processes that make up the work, he revisits the subject matter with new perspectives, techniques and an intimate understanding of working, living, and growing in Los Angeles. James’ work mixes the geographic landscapes of our city, and its diverse identities with materials to create poignant windows into an ever-changing urban center.

http://jamespscott.com/

Jeff Ho is a Los Angeles icon. Since the late 60’s, Jeff Ho has used surfboards, skateboards, Pier Pilings, empty walls and canvas to reflect the evolving street culture in Los Angeles. Jeff and his Zephyr Team upset the status quo of surfing and skateboard by understanding the intersection of urban culture and the fine art world.

Jeff’s installation for Hidden Rooms is an expression of his understanding of the failure of urban culture and the profound isolation of the men who lived in these rooms.

https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/jeff-ho

Of all the factors propelling the cultural revolution of the 1960s, you could argue that none was more pervasive and evocative than the era’s iconic album covers, movie posters, and magazine illustrations. The artists and designers of the time tapped into the same broad desire for revolution, peace, beauty, adventure, freedom, and the absolutely new as the splashier on-stage performers. Among the greatest of these greats is the still-prolific, eternally iconic John Van Hamersveld. His more than 50-year career includes time as art director at Surfer Magazine and Capitol Records, and he’s responsible for a graphics pantheon that includes album art for the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street, the Grateful Dead skull, and indelible images of surfer heaven like the oft-sampled, iconic poster for the king of all surf films, 1966’s The Endless Summer. Shepard Fairey has been known to credit his work in these interlaced worlds of surf, rock and film posters as a seminal influence his early OBEY campaign, and JVH continues to make and exhibit large-scale public artworks and editions, getting a hero’s welcome from new generations of audiences.

http://jvh.cool/

Johnny Cubert White is an L.A. based producer of still and motion pictures.  Earning an MFA from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA in philosophy from Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University, Johnny White has spent his life creating and producing a wide variety of projects. Having begun his exploration of photography in the 1970’s, White has experimented with various mediums of the photographic image; including lenticular 3-D, 35mm, and various digital processes. He has had three one man shows in Los Angeles – links and reviews below – and sells pieces regularly.

Johnny Cubert White is an active member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.  He has been fortunate to have art directed and production designed for various reality television shows including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Top Chef.  He is the designer and host of the upcoming show LIARS.

Temporary Girl, the feature film White co-produced and directed with writer/actess Lisa Kotin was sold in 2004 and is available on Netflix. Included on his producing resume are independent films directed by Paula M Froehle, Laura Colella, and Hollie Lavenstein. In 2013, KLCS – Los Angeles’ local pbs – purchased sixteen episodes of Johnny White’s children’s cooking show, Kidz Kitchen.  He has spent 22summers offering 16mm film production classes to students aged 10 – 17 at The Center for Gifted in Chicago.

Photo credit: Roch Armando

Joseph “Nuke” Montalvo is a multidisciplinary graffiti artist who has worked in Los Angeles for over 30 years. As a UTI Crew member, he has produced several murals in LA and Mexico. Nuke grew up in Boyle Heights; as a longtime resident, he grew up listening to stories of Zoot Suiters and the life of pachucos in the 1940’s, which have inspired his installation for Hidden Rooms. He is currently working on the restoration of Earth Crew’s 1992 iconic mural, “Undiscovered America,”  located in the heart of the Arts District. Nuke maintains a strong presence in LA. He has created public artwork relating to Native American cult and history for the MTA , Council Districts 12 and 14, and the City of Bell.

https://nuke.one/

Josh Webb aka JoeX2, is an urban artist. Previously bound to the underground subculture of municipal art, he has emerged with rapid fire in solo and group shows spanning from New York City to Miami to San Francisco. JoeX2 has served as favorite of the entertainment industry for some time with his work being seen regularly on the television shows CSI: NY, Everybody Hates Chris, and the music videos of P.Diddy, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Natasha Bedingfield and Daddy Yankee among others. He has been profiled in internationally publicized magazines such as Vapors, Style, Mass Appeal, WWD and Frank 151. Recent props came from Abort Magazine with their recommendation in a group show at LA Contemporary, “Go for the Joe” (and u can take that to Bank-sy)”, and fashion journalist Blythe Sheldon commenting on his luggage collaboration with JanSport, “First Stephen Sprouse for Louis Vuitton, now JoeX2 for JanSport”. With accounts including global heavyweights such as VFC, McDonalds and Telemundo in branding and advertising, JoeX2 is not only an underground legend but a household name. He continues to prove his unique style and vision comfortably situated between the fast track of superstardom and gully street artist.

Jose “PRIME” Reza (K2S) is a Mexican-American graffiti artist born and raised in the Pico-Union District of Downtown Los Angeles. Prime is credited with being a founding father of Los Angeles stylized graffiti lettering, a hybrid of Cholo lettering and East Coast style graffiti that is often bold, aggressive, and monochromatic. Prime is considered one of the most influential artists in the history of Los Angeles public wall writing, combining “traditional east coast painting techniques with geometric gangster-style blocks.” 

Kelcey Fisher, better known as KFiSH, has become a fixture in the Los Angeles art scene over the last few years with his personable, stylistic expression that is unique all on its own. The love at the foundation of Kelcey’s artistic character combined with the inspiration obtained by the surrounding eccentric culture of Los Angles can be felt at the core of his work. Juxtaposition of his signature colors and culturally relevant mixed media images provide relatable, inimitable works that evoke a sense of familiarity and accessibility from those he touches with his visual expressions.

Keya Tama is an African street artist living in Los Angeles, who has been producing murals and participating in exhibitions around the world since the age of thirteen. He is the son of celebrated street artist Faith 47 and influential tattoo artist Tyler B. Murphy. So far, he has had three solo shows, designed an international campaign for one of South Africa’s biggest clothing brands, and released three independent graphic novels. He is a multitalented artist simultaneously producing music, filming, animating, and painting walls. He aims to bring all these elements together to create a new way of storytelling.

http://keyatama.com/

Lisa Schulte, an American sculptor born in Long Island, New York, has mastered the many “faces” of neon, earning her the moniker, “The Neon Queen.” A woman of German, Irish, and Spanish descent, Lisa has lived the majority of her life in Los Angeles, California, while working (in some capacity) with light. After a childhood eye injury left the artist in darkness for several months of healing, the then seven year old not only emerged re-gifted with sight, she now possessed a fierce appreciation of the nuanced interactions between light and dark. After amassing experience and exposure, Lisa shifted her focus to envisioning and creating intricate, abstract designs often absent in neon, and for the last decade, Lisa has turned inward to create personal pieces she has exhibited in museums and fine art galleries nationwide. This includes work exploring the artist’s passion for organic forms; work that provokes a broader dialogue pertaining to relativity and environmental adaptation. Lisa Schulte has merged artistic genres by collaborating with contemporary artists such as RISK, Gregory Siff and Cleon Peterson. In 2017, working with illustrator Brendan Donnelly, the artist constructed a vibrant, celebratory neon sign for Bulleit Frontier Whiskey, which is currently on display in downtown Los Angeles.

http://lisaschulteneonartist.com/

Involved with the Graffiti Art movement since 1987, Man One began his artistic journey on the streets of Los Angeles tagging and leaving his trademark of bold, colorful aerosol strokes as he searched for his artistic purpose. After completing his B.A. degree in Fine Arts from Loyola Marymount University, his newly inspired passion began to change the way the world interpreted graffiti and urban art. His bright and colorful murals made their way into the underground urban art movement pioneering the evolution of graffiti as an art form, not a negative statement of culture. Today, his artwork now reaches internationally having been featured in venues throughout the world. To date, his artwork has been showcased in over 50 group exhibitions domestically and internationally, numerous solo exhibits, and displayed at many museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian. He is also the founder of Crewest, L.A.’s first full time urban art gallery (2002-2012) and continues to represent and support artists through his newest venture Crewest Studio.

http://www.manone.com

Maria Greenshields-Ziman is a multidisciplinary fine artist, who is equally at home working on large-scale street murals or smaller scale detailed work in her studio practice. Born in England, she now lives and works in LA.

 Her chosen materials include steel, wood, wax and paper as well as painting and illustrative drawing.

Maria draws her inspiration from the complexity of nature. Her work is a discursive inquiry into its unpredictability and fragility.

http://www.mariagreenshields-ziman.com/

After many years as a director/cinematographer of television commercials, Mark changed directions to still photography as it was what fueled him creatively.  “I am drawn to the intimate nature of still photography as it allows me to get right in there, one-on-one, with someone to get to their essence, their true personality.  That’s what drives me.”

http://www.markdektor.com/

Michael Torquato deNicola is a world traveling and award-winning surfer, artist and filmmaker.

Mike grew up making sense of the world through surfing and art. Born and raised in Southern California, he is a lifelong surfer with much of his inspiration coming from the Ocean and his experiences around the globe in locations such as Indonesia, Iceland, Samoa, Peru, The Galapagos Islands and more.

Mike started surfing at the age of 12 and was competing with the US team by age 19. As the first pro surfer from the US team to graduate from College, he learned to negotiate between his athletic and creative pursuits, and the business of surf. 

Mike has always designed the work on his surfboards, but it was only when he started traveling and competing internationally that his work developed into the style it is today. Mike’s boards tell the story of his relationship with the Oceans from around the globe. If Mike’s surf style can be called fluid his large and colorful mixed media pieces resonate the same fluidity in a layered collage of rhythms, patterns and forms.

Homepage

Mr. Trixter, a Los Angeles native, began doing graffiti and graffiti art in 1990. Being the son of an artist, he began experimenting with different mediums at an early age and discovered his passion for the arts through the cultures of skateboarding and hip-hop. During his years as assistant art director for campus advertising at SFSU (San Francisco State University) Mr. Trixter further carved his mark on the greater west coast and global graffiti and graffiti art scene. Majoring in graphic design helped develop his career in the arts and in 1999 became a member of the world famous graffiti crew / artist collective WCA (West Coast Artists) and  has since spread his creative talents from coast to coast and overseas working in the fields of art, fashion, design, film and music. A true renaissance man. His list of clients includes companies like Guess, Nike, Miss Sixty, Energie, Scion/Toyota, HBO and Showtime. Mr. Trixter’s art appears in numerous movies, commercials and music videos for recording artists such as Usher, Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, T-Pain, Lil Bow Wow, 311, 50 Cent, Christina Aguilera and Macy Gray. Since making the transition from the street to the gallery his work has been displayed in San Francisco’s MOMA at the Yuerba Buena Center, The Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and several galleries coast to coast.

Currently living In Los Angeles, Mr. Trixter continues his career in the arts doing freelance graphic design, scenic art, fine art and commission art projects.

http://www.mrtrixter.com/

Her murals and festival installations have become urban shrines of sorts, known to remove energy blocks and lift spirits. ‬‬One such mural in a township in Cape Town has become a popular meeting place for locals. In LA groups gather in front to take selfies and hangout.

http://www.mimomali.com/

Nicholas Bonamy was born and raised in Los Angeles and knew early on that he wanted to pursue a career in art. He graduated from Art Center College of Design in 2003 with a BFA in Illustration. After graduating, he began a career in freelance illustration and graphic design. In 2006, Nicholas’ focus switched to production design, where he participated in several independent projects for film and internet release, and added set design, scenic painting, carpentry, and set and prop fabrication to his growing list of skills. In 2012, Nicholas took a break from the movie business to focus on his roots in painting. Since then, Nicholas has been committed to producing large and small-scale mixed media works inspired by Los Angeles and the people and places he grew up with. His work reflects a layered approach that seeks to show the textures of life, living and working in Los Angeles.

http://nicholasbonamy.com/

Norton Wisdom calls himself an anti-war activist before an artist or performer, and following his studies at Berkeley, he also had a whole career as a decorated and legendary coastal lifeguard. Despite being a student and lifelong practitioner of painting, he’s spent the last decade or so focusing on his performance art, taking his live-painting improv act on the road in collaborations with musicians like Banyan, Lili Haydn, Nels Cline and Llyn Foulkes. But the political and frequently sexed-up pictures resulting from the live shows are just the most public part of Wisdom’s story. He’s dedicated his career to exploring the infinite possibilities of an abstract structure, the proscenium/rectangle and the way its five-part shape yields endless variations. Since the late 1960s, Wisdom has been tirelessly, unendingly rendering this shape in pure color, expressively distressed surfaces, and collages made with images both found and cannibalized from his own canvases. This is in pursuit of a practice he first undertook way back up in the Bay Area, when he experienced an epiphany in which he envisioned a solo, steady, private studio practice as a form of peaceful, Buddhist-inflected social protest. He still paints every day.

Photo by Adam Cude

http://www.nortonwisdom.com/

Focusing on the collective unconscious of Los Angeles, Ryan Graeff, aka Restitution Press, aims to provoke and challenge the status quo to improve and be a catalyst for change, through screen printing posters and zines on newsprint.

Russell ‘BOOH’ Ramirez is a veteran San Fernando Valley graffiti artist who started painting wildstyle graffiti in the late eighties. Booh is from the legendary valley crew TCF (The Chosen Few) with other crew members Mystic/Look, Nyse, Rage, Sync, Phever, Krush, Eklips among others. TCF and the famous AWR crew eventually merged together. He has worked as a Scenic Artist for Warner Bros. Studios. He is a dedicated illustrator, painter and experimentalist in all forms of his thoughts and execution.

Robert ‘Sticky’ Shaw was born and raised in Newport Beach, CA. Having struggled with learning disabilities growing up, in high school, he turned to art as an escape from the traditional school structure. He thrived on the creative freedom he was finally allowed and has made art the most important aspect of his life ever since. However, if you ask his friends to define him, not all of them know him as Sticky the Artist. To many others he is All-Access Sticky, going from one gig to the next and mingling with the biggest musicians of the moment. Still, to others, he is Sticky the Snowboarder, constantly out of town at some amazing mountain like Mammoth, Whistler, or Breckenridge. He’s always on some fantastic adventure to who-knows-where but art and his family will always bring him home.

http://stickyshawart.com/

Sarah Keliher Walsh is a landscape painter and photographer whose work is inspired by the perception of movement, space and memory. Working primarily with oil paint, watercolor and instant film, Walsh enjoys using the unpredictability of instant photography to inform her paintings and visa versa. Having recently expanded into video and projection, Walsh combines moving and still pictures to create dreamlike environments that speak to our memories of childhood and the influence “place” has on our sense of selves. Walsh received her BFA from Cal State Long Beach and lives and works in Los Angeles.

http://sarahkwalsh.com/

Sma Litzsinger is a self-taught visual artist based in Downtown Los Angeles. Working primarily in ink, she combines elements of ancient symbolism, traditional ethnic war paint, religion and mythology form a wide variety of world cultures, repurposed on thrifted 19th century photographs. Sma has exhibited throughout the Los Angeles area including Copro Gallery, The Hive Gallery, The Last Bookstore and the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica. She is currently a resident artist at The Hive Gallery and Studios.

Stephen Seemayer is a Los Angeles-born painter, filmmaker and performance artist. In a career spanning four decades, he has mounted performances and exhibitions at galleries and museums across the United States. Using controversial imagery and materials — such as aborted fetuses, raw meat and masks on fire — Seemayer’s early films, performances and photographs confronted his audience with the question of what it means to be human in a dehumanizing world. Moving to a loft on Central Avenue in the mid-1970s, Seemayer was among the pioneers of the Downtown Los Angeles art scene. His documentary film “Young Turks” chronicles those early days and is available on iTunes and other digital platforms. Seemayer’s latest documentary, Tales of the American, premiered at the Downtown Independent in March 2018, and will be available on DVD and streaming this summer.

https://stephenseemayer.com

Susan Feldman is a mixed media artist, working primarily with found wood while also using a wide variety of other materials such as yarn, string, photography, and plexiglass. Her current series of work began as an inspiration from her meditation practice and her yearning to rise UP. By creating ladder-like frameworks and weaving various layers of wood, yarns, and imagery, she addresses the many perceived layers that are involved in the spiritual “moving up” process. What began as an exploration into that aspect of her spiritual practice over time branched out to combine her love of architecture and building and has led her into further construction of structural pieces that are both 3D sculptures, wall works, and installations.

Susan maintains a studio at the Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood, CA, and has been showing her work for over 30 years at various galleries throughout California and New York, including the Craft And Folk Art Museum and Descanso Gardens.

http://susanfeldmanart.com/

Teale Hatheway is a Los Angeles-based artist exploring the intersection of observation, recollection and architecture. Her mixed-media paintings and installations explore the theory that environments are remembered as compilations of elements with which we develop emotional or intellectual connections. She extracts details (such as pattern, color, form and texture) from the urban environment and utilizes them to inspire recognition of or connection to place. The results are layered, fragmented representations which convey the way we frame, archive, and recall our physical surroundings. These symbolic landscapes help satisfy Teale’s search for connectedness and enhance the way we experience our environment.

https://www.tealehatheway.com/

The Couto Brothers are two self-taught artists who share a passion merging their kaleidoscopic style with cultural imagery in contrasting ways.

As brothers who were raised in Brooklyn and Brazil, and having traveled extensively around the world, they connected later in their lives to suddenly create works of art together and simultaneously.

They introduce their work by using historical and social themes against bright colors and shapes to channel a refreshing perspective and challenge the ideas of the world.

https://www.coutoart.com/

Vanessa was born in Hong Kong and moved to the United States as a teenager. She received her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design.  She usually makes work that is low tech, human scale. Her work possesses a sense of muchness that is not manufactured. She is interested in things that are profoundly handmade and things that are sustainable to the environment. Exploring the element of play is a common theme in her work. She currently lives and works in Santa Monica, CA.

http://vanessaychow.com/