Oceanside Museum of Art Celebrates 4 new exhibitions

Matt Devine's sculpture Offshore in from of OMA with Director Maria Mingalone

by Patricia Frischer 

We checked out the Oceanside Museum of Art at a Virtual Exhibition Celebration produced in partnership with Oceanside Community Television (KOCT) to explore fresh artwork recently installed at the museum. We heard directly from artists and curators behind the exhibitions. You can get a taste to help prepare for visiting when the galleries reopens on April 1 or to connect from afar. The program will highlight four newly installed exhibitions at OMA and we have made a very small selection of images from all the shows on view.  

OMA director Maria Mingalone

•  Amanda Kachadoorian: Botanical Hybridity of San Diego's Multicultural History
• Kevin Vincent: Material Memory
•  Inspired: Selections From OMA Staff, Manuelita Brown, Trinh Mai, Michael Massenburg, Quinton McCurine, Carole Choucair Oueijan, Gustavo Rimada, Katie Ruiz, and Kurosh Yahyai
• Twenty Women Artists: NOW.  This last exhibition curated by Alessandra Moctezuma features artwork by Maite Benito Agahnia, Manuelita Brown, Diana Carey, Rin Colabucci, Bronle Crosby, Susan Darnall, Ellen Dieter, Theresa Vandenberg Donche, Kaori Fukuyama, Julia C R Gray, Diane Hall, Kathleen Kane-Murrell, Kathy McChesney, Lori Mitchell, Gillian Moss, Alison Haley Paul, Julia San Román-Naughton, Christine Schwimmer, Gail Titus, and Brenda York.
  
  
•  Plus Matt Devine new sculpture Offshore in front of the Museum and Wild and Beautiful sculptures in  the San Diego Botanic Gardens in Encinitas by members of the OMA Artist Alliance.

OMA Artist Alliance members at SD Botanic Gardens

 

Amanda Kachadoorian: Botanical Hybridity of San Diego's Multicultural History.  This local artist from Chula Vista researched native flora and then invents hybrid plants: part real and part surreal.

 

Kevin Vincent: Material Memory,  Vincent's mediums are wood and rope. He changes the historical trauma connotation of rope from a Black American’s perspective and tries to treat it as a life giving material. 

 

Inspired: Selections From OMA Staff, Manuelita Brown, Trinh Mai, Michael Massenburg, Quinton McCurine, Carole Choucair Oueijan, Gustavo Rimada, Katie Ruiz, and Kurosh Yahyai.  Each work in this section has a few words by the staff that choose the artist. 

Trinh Mai

Carole Choucair Oueijan

Gustavo Rimada

Katie Ruiz

Michael Massenburg

Kurosh Yahyai.

Manuelita Brown

Manuelita Brown is also included below in the TWA: NOW exhibition (see details below)

Twenty Women Artists: NOW.  This last exhibition curated by Alessandra Moctezuma features artwork by Maite Benito Agahnia, Manuelita Brown, Diana Carey, Rin Colabucci, Bronle Crosby, Susan Darnall, Ellen Dieter, Theresa Vandenberg Donche, Kaori Fukuyama, Julia C R Gray, Diane Hall, Kathleen Kane-Murrell, Kathy McChesney, Lori Mitchell, Gillian Moss, Alison Haley Paul, Julia San Román-Naughton, Christine Schwimmer, Gail Titus, and Brenda York who make up the TWA artists collective. Much of this work was made during the pandemic and reflects many of the traumas of the last year including the fires and the protest of the killing of George Floyd, but also the hope for a better future.  

Manuelita Brown

Curator Alessandra Moctezuma and Julia Grey with Julia's sculptures

 

Watch the video presentation to see more of the artwork in these four shows and to installation views. 

Lucky Number: 13 Sculptures Find Perfect Settings at San Diego Botanic Garden

Full view of Warren Bakley’s Cherub in its SDBG location (Kay Colvin)

By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt.
Photos by Maurice Hewitt, except as noted.

For over a decade, just about every spring, there’s been a sculpture exhibition installed amid the greenery at San Diego Botanic Garden.  Even a pandemic can’t undo this tradition, which this year is a collaboration between SDGB and OMA, the Oceanside Museum of Art. 

Curator Kay Colvin, former director of L Street Gallery in downtown San Diego, selected 13 works from submissions by members of OMA’s Artist Alliance. Inspired by nature, each piece was placed in a setting that would highlight its charms and add some artful sparkle to its environment.

The 37-acre Garden is an attraction in itself, a great springtime destination where you can admire the foliage as you hunt for the artworks with a map of the numbered sculptures in hand. My personal favorite is #10: Warren Bakley’s Cherub, for which Colvin found the perfect setting: it’s surrounded by boulders and situated next to a Paperbark Tree—Melaleuca linarifolia, an Eastern Australian member of the eucalyptus family—whose bark she described as looking like peeling phyllo dough. “The tree and the boulders are all about the same color as the sculpture, creating a whole composition that just works so beautifully,” she said.

Bakley, a painter, clay artist and designer who lives in Pacific Beach and has taught at SDSU and Southwestern College, has been making angel and cherub figures for some years, and recently found himself wondering: what happens to baby cherubs when they grow up? “I decided to make an old cherub for the Garden,” he said. “And I gave him a paper airplane to play with. I wanted a garden background for this piece, which would look good in a small formal garden too. I let every piece I make speak for itself, but their size is always dictated by the question: Can I lift it or not?” 

This sculpture exhibition is really a voyage of discovery. As SDBG’s President/CEO Ari Novy pointed out: “Not all of the artworks are super-conspicuous,” so part of the pleasure is discovering each piece for yourself and taking time to interact with it from various perspectives.

All COVID safety precautions are observed at SDBG, and the 13 sculptures will be on view through July. Almost all are available for sale, so if you’d like to have one in your garden, contact OMA Exhibitions Manager Katie Dolgov at oma-online.org.

 Featured Artists and Artworks
Judy Salinsky:  Mariposa and Flower (#1)
Kim Ogburn:  Jungle Jan (#2)
Larry Vogel:  Rapa Nui (#3)
Scott Bruckner:  Abstract (#4)
Dan Peragine: Heron’s Watcher (#5)
Danielle Zhang:  Balance—Wild and Beautiful (#6)
Dustin Gimbel: Turquoise Sage Trio (#7) and Black Monstrosus (#8)
Warren Bakley: Bronze Form (#9) and Cherub (#10)
William Leslie:  DNA—The Magic Molecule (#11)
Ernie Pick:  Nature’s Spiral (#12)
Marianne McGrath:  Fenced (#13)

San Diego Botanic Garden
300 Quail Gardens Dr., Encinitas, CA 92024
Open Wed-Sun, 10 am-5pm
Tickets: $10-18. Tickets must be reserved in advance at sdbgarden.org or (760) 436-3036. Be sure to request a sculpture map at the admissions booth.
View photos of all the sculptures at  https://www.sdbgarden.org/sculpture.htm 

 

Side view of Warren Bakley’s Cherub with his paper airplane (Maurice Hewitt)

SDBG President/CEO Ari Novy posed beside Marianne McGrath’s Fenced, with its cascades of porcelain leaves

William Leslie’s DNA—The Magic Molecule is, like DNA, a spiral, but a colorful one that twirls in the wind

Dustin Gimbel’s glazed ceramic Black Monstrosus, flanked by living Cacti

Danielle Zhang’s Balance—Wild and Beautiful, made of palm fronds, recycled wood and plastic rod. “It puts the Garden into the piece, not just the piece into the Garden," Ari Novy said.

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has written about arts and lifestyle for the La Jolla Light and other local media for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net

Medium Photo Festival’s Han Nguyen. and Museum of Contemporary Art’s Glendalys Medina

By Patricia Frischer

Han Nguyen interviewed by Herein’s Elizabeth Rooklidge for 2021 Medium Festival

I have been following the work of Han Nguyen for years. He was one of our New Contemporary artists as part of the SD Art Prize .  And although I would love to see more of the work in person, I did see the Joseph Bellows exhibition and with all the new media, I love tracking new work on Instagram.  

This conversation with Elizabeth Rooklidge was so interesting because it revealed that the works are so much more complicated and so much simpler than they appear. How can that happen at the same time? I believe that is because Nguyen starts with a really simple idea. But he thinks he is not a very good photographer so he goes to great lengths to make sure the images are good. The results are more than they first appear because the technique of making them is so much more mysterious. His choices are never traditional. He will do whatever needs to be done no matter how tedious or unconventional. Because of this you get a really intimate result that is totally unique, amazingly sensitive, and 100% authentic.

The idea comes to him first. Maybe it is to explore plants in his yard or to make and photograph some small clay sculptures or to use some old negatives. Then he decides a process. It might start with a digital camera, a Pin hole one, large format, or polaroid. When the result is not what he wants he might add watercolor, tea, rite dye, or he might photoshop it.  He might have to invent a whole new technique. He did this with his collages using tiny bits of negatives all taped together using a method filmmakers use. Look close and you can see the tape lines…rather like those old films that have vertical scratches. He is a genius but prefers to think of himself as having a load of happy accidents!

Herein’s Article about Han Nguyen by scott b. davis

Glendalys Medina interviewed by Alana Hernandez as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego”s Charlas series.

“Glendalys Medina is an Afro-Caribbean Nuyorican conceptual interdisciplinary visual artist who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx.” ….so it is not surprising that she is looking for an identity that she can claim as her own. And she has done just that by first researching and inventing 50 shapes to create her own personal language. By changing the position, color and grouping of these shapes she has almost an endless repertoire of designs. Printing making is a perfect medium for mirroring these images into even greater combinations. 

She makes her own paper and incorporated her bank statements into that process. Paper is age old way of creating wealth and value. And also she uses gold and of course black in many of works. Some of the most exciting results are the sculptures that have resulted from these explorations. The are detailed and unusual which is a good reflection of Medina’s personality. But what I liked most about this interview was the question about what Medina has been doing during the pandemic. She said she is trying to find joy in every day. 

The Charlas present conversations between exhibition curator Hernandez and contemporary artists where they will discuss their practice in relation to the works presented in the digital exhibition Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop.

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