CSUDH News

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Fine Arts

Daily Breeze: Upcoming CSUDH Exhibition Takes on Mass Incarceration

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Installation view of “Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family”
Installation view of “Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family”

Source: Daily Breeze

A free art exhibition that sheds light on the impact of prison on incarcerated individuals and their families will be available for public viewing at Cal State Dominguez Hills starting Saturday, Sept. 30.

“Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family,” an installation by Mario Ybarra Jr., will run through Dec. 8 at the University Art Gallery. A public opening reception is scheduled for 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday.

“Mario Ybarra’s work uses the everyday to make his audience reconsider big concepts such as mass incarceration,” said Aandrea Stang, director of CSUDH’s University Art Gallery. “His work makes it personal, and makes those that experience the installation stop and think.”

Ybarra Jr. was born in Los Angeles in 1973 and currently lives in Wilmington. He graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design with a bachelor’s degree in 1999. He went on to receive a master’s degree in fine arts from UC Irvine in 2001.

Through sculptures, installations and community-based projects, Ybarra Jr. examines the experiences of Mexican Americans living in Southern California. His work also looks at excluded social norms often by combining narratives, histories and complete environments.

His works have been showcased at venues such as Pasadena City College’s Boone Family Art Gallery, The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.

He has also been featured at local, national and international exhibitions/fairs, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the Tate Museum in London, the Orange County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The CSUDH exhibition will explore mass incarceration by drawing on Ybarra Jr’s own experiences of watching a childhood friend who went to prison as a teenager.

It includes interview footage from the friend, who spent 32 years in prison, and scale images in the installation of Red West Pizzeria, a pizza restaurant in Wilmington where Ybarra Jr. and his friend dined as children in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you go

What: “Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family,” a free art exhibition by Mario Ybarra, Jr.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays from Sept. 30 to Dec. 8.

Where: The University Art Gallery at CSUDH, 1000 E. Victoria St.

Information: gallery.csudh.edu.

KOKO’s Neighborhood Exhibit Opens in the University Art Gallery

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KOKO's Neighborhood, an exhibition that runs Jan. 30 - March 23, 2019 at California State University, Dominguez Hills
KOKO’s Neighborhood, an exhibition that runs Jan. 30 – March 23, 2019 at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

(Carson, Calif.) KOKO’s Neighborhood, an exhibition that runs Jan. 30 – March 23, 2019 at California State University, Dominguez Hills’ (CSUDH) University Art Gallery, features new work by contemporary Los Angeles artist Yoshie Sakai. The exhibition is Sakai’s fourth installment of her ongoing video project “KOKO’s Love,”which explores the everyday anxieties, fears, and joys of living, all depicted using the over-the-top tropes of a soap opera.

In the “KOKO’s Neighborhood” exhibition, Sakai introduces new characters to her ongoing video project. This new installment is called KOKO’s House, a fully scripted reality show created in the vein of the current Netflix Japanese reality show “Terrace House.” For example, KOKO’s House features three CSUDH students who become part of Sakai’s dysfunctional Japanese American soap opera family, the Sakimotos. The new characters further challenge the myth of the “model minority” and the underlying patriarchy in a family.

KOKO’s Neighborhood by L.A. artist Yoshie Sakai will run from Jan. 30 to March 23, 2019 in the University Art Gallery, located in LaCorte Hall, A-107. The exhibit is open Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., or by appointment. The student preview reception will take place Jan. 26, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Admission is free.

“I first interviewed each [CSUDH student] to get a sense of their familiarity with various characters of my soap opera KOKO’s Love. Some wanted to be students who were helping to find a missing daughter, another wanted to be the mean girl’s best friend, while others became participants in the house,” explained Sakai about the students, who served as consultants as well as actors. “I took their input and wrote a script to include them in this reality show, KOKO’s House.”

KOKO’s House enables Sakai to expand KOKO’s Love from just the Sakimoto family to a new world and slightly larger “neighborhood” of characters to go beyond the usual insular family household in the regular show to include more perspectives and viewpoints from a diverse and fresh audience.

The exhibition KOKO’s Neighborhood is the culmination of Yoshie Sakai’s 2018 PRAXIS Residency at CSUDH throughout which she collaborated with students Israel Perez, Santos Nuñez, Christina Laybon, Richelle Caampued, Vanessa Renovales, Sierra Robles, Joe Smith, Jacqueline Mendoza, Andreinna Giron, Danielle Harris, and Brianna Correa to create new characters that the students embody. PRAXIS is the University’s extracurricular, cross-disciplinary art engagement program. Praxis brings artists, designers, students, and community members together to explore the history, social conditions, neighborhoods, and storylines of South Los Angeles.

KOKO’s Neighborhood is made possible by generous funding from the Pasadena Art Alliance.

For more information, please contact the University Art Gallery at (310) 243-3334 or artgallery@csudh.edu.

About the Artist
Yoshie Sakai is a multidisciplinary artist who works in the mediums of video, sculpture, installation, and performance. Previously based in Los Angeles, she now resides in her hometown of Gardena. Since moving back home with her mother, Yoshie has been immersed in how her 84-year-old, first-generation Japanese mother entertains herself by watching hours of East-Asian soap operas daily. It is “what she lives for.” Sakai attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014 and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Fellowship, a 2018 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and a 2018 inaugural bar-fund Artist Grant. Her work has been shown throughout the United States in film festivals and art exhibitions from Los Angeles to Miami, as well as internationally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Victoria, Canada. She received her BFA from California State University Long Beach and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

About the University Art Gallery
The Cal State Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery serves the campus and broader community as a laboratory for contemporary art and design practices presenting exhibitions and programming. The University Art Gallery is deeply committed to building a creative and innovative art and design culture that celebrates artists and engages audiences.

‘Made in Cotton’ Exhibit Intertwines Production of Cotton with African American Experience

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Three Los Angeles artists interpret the legacy of cotton in powerful mixed media works

WHAT: “Made in Cotton: Mark Steven Greenfield, Karen Hampton and Raksha Parekh
WHEN: October 25 – December 7, 2017
Mon-Thurs, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Opening reception, Wednesday, October 25, 5:30-7:30 p.m.; Conversation with the artists: 6 p.m.
WHERE: University Art Gallery, LaCorte Hall, A-107
California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1000 E. Victoria St., Carson, Calif.

Editors: Click here to download images of the artists’ work.

Closely intertwined with racial politics, the production of cotton and the history of slavery are encapsulated in the potent exhibit “Made in Cotton: Mark Steven Greenfield, Karen Hampton and Raksha Parekh,” which opens Wednesday, October 25 at the California State University, Dominguez Hill (CSUDH) University Art Gallery, and continues through December 7, 2017.

“Made in Cotton” features the edgy work of Mark Steven Greenfield, Karen Hampton, and Raksha Parekh. Originally organized by LA Artcore, Los Angeles in 2016, the exhibit includes cotton as a common thematic thread in a range of techniques including assemblage, textile, photography and drawing.

Each artist utilizes cotton in variegated ways in relationship to the African American experience, sometimes as powerful imagery, as in Greenfield’s delicate but dynamic linear abstractions of cotton fields, or as actual media, as in Parekh’s layered cotton constructions. Hampton also appropriates cotton as the material for her passionate exploration of her heritage with images of powerful matriarchs holding court on her textiles.

Greenfield’s incisive ink drawings are chilling reminders of the stunted generational evolution of equality as he reams history in his continuing series of works probing racial and political bias. In his drawings, slavery and its residue of social injustice and inequality still looms large in the political landscape and historic cotton production is an unhappy reminder of this burden.

Hampton’s visual genealogy is on display in a series of suspended textiles as she uses layers of imagery and writing to create her evocative, rich narratives. She immerses her stories in the media of cotton, natural dyes, media transfers, and hand stitches her oblique words.

Parekh works in an abstract vein, collating her South African legacy into poetic assemblages composed of elemental natural materials including raw cotton, sugarcane, gourds, and burnt sugar. Her large installation pieces are created by layering and stacking these materials into all-encompassing sculptures.

An opening reception for the artists will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 25, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the University Art Gallery. At 6 p.m. a conversation with the artists will be held.

This exhibitions and related events are sponsored by CSUDH’s College of Arts and Humanities and the Instructionally Related Activities Committee of the Associated Students, Inc. organization.

Open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, the University Art Gallery is in room A-107 on the first floor of LaCorte Hall. Admission is free. CSU Dominguez Hills is located at 1000 E. Victoria St. in Carson. LaCorte Hall is on the west side of campus off Toro Center Drive/Tamcliff Street. Visitor parking in campus lots requires a parking permit, which is sold for $8 at yellow dispensing machines at each lot.