Roxie Ray Artist Endowment Fund
Roxie Ray was a founding member of Studio Channel Islands; she was an artist, philanthropist, and political activist. Roxie worked with then president of California State University Channel Islands to establish a colony of artists on the campus of the emerging University. She created a garden at the University and supported the development of the galleries which enabled world class art exhibitions to be presented within our community.
When Studio Channel Islands moved to Old Town Camarillo Roxie brought her energy and love for the organization to its new home. She served on the board and on several committees, advancing the artistic ambition and community impact of the organization. She established the Roxie Ray Endowment in 2019 to support Studio Channel Islands in delivering its mission.
Studio Channel Islands is excited to offer emerging artists access to subsidized studio space through support from the Roxie Ray Endowment. View the application information here.
Roxie Ray Artist Endowment Fund 2024 Recipient
I am truly honored to have been chosen for the Roxie Ray Endowment Fund to receive temporary studio space. As an Oxnard resident, I’m excited to dedicate time to creating in this new environment and look forward to discovering what will emerge from this opportunity and the meaningful connections I will make along the way.
Roxie Ray Artist Endowment Fund 2023 Recipient
Stories permeate my work; some stories are true, some are not. I share them to build connections that follow a maternal line, instead of those that have been force-fed by patriarchally influenced, mainstream history. My work connects to the past, and I reflect upon a diaspora that is disappearing from collective memory. Despite this, the Dutch Indonesian Diaspora persistently retraces itself through maternal lines that have been erased by the process of colonialism. Descended from this colonization, I recontextualize colonial portraiture to challenge historic narratives that have been passed down by both colonizer and colonized.
The history I imagine isn’t one in which documentation reassures cultural memory. Instead, fantasy, women’s postures, faces, and half sentences too embarrassing to be uttered aloud populate the archives from which I create my work. My history painting transforms shame into vulnerability as I grapple with memories on the brink of erasure. Archival and vintage photographs, from both found and personal sources, are layered with natural and textile patterns. They allude to a dream-like internal space tinged with earthen hues.
In my work, patterns, and landscapes indicative of the past envelop a variety of portraits. They allude to a dream-like, internal space and conjure a connection to the past. Collaged, painted, woven, and printed layers intermingle, obscuring and revealing recurring elements that suggest history, migration, and transformation. The figures in my paintings emerge out of disjunctive spaces, reflecting an awakening to new ideas. My works on paper embody disruption and lack of control, the shifting realities of foreground, figure, and background depicting a sense of dislocation while paving a path towards healing.
My work functions as Herstory, appropriating, othering, and objectifying to reclaim something lost. These tools of subversion salvage dignity for myself and women like me. But this work is twofold; while documenting the past it also reaches into the future, creating a new story, rematriating (a term Indigenous women of Turtle Island use) and restoring balance to my culture, both intellectually and spiritually.
Roxie Ray Artist Endowment Fund 2020 Recipient
Maria Laura Hendrix is a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist, currently living in Southern California. She earned her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2020, and her BA in Psychology from Cal State Northridge. She looks at identity through the materiality of paint by creating portraits that resemble her cultural reality. Her use of deconstruction in the form through fragmentation is an important element in her work, where she interrogates identity through the use of multiple figures fragmented within a picture plane. She deconstructs the image to re-imagine a new form, one that makes sense to how she perceives the world around her.
“The doubling and deconstruction of the form is an integral tool used in my work. By deconstructing the image to re-imagine a new form allows me to make sense of how I perceive the world around me. As a Latina and first-generation immigrant, I see my art as a way of resistance. In my Mujer series, I take inspiration from the women around me. Women who struggle, persevere, and resist societal labels.”
Maria Laura Hendrix featured in Emergence, February 2022.