Biography

Gary Lang is an internationally exhibited artist, his work has been featured in more than seventy solo exhibitions in the United States, Austria, France, Japan, The Netherlands, and Spain. Born in Los Angeles, he is a painter, lecturer, sculptor, and muralist. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, earned a BFA degree in 1970 form the California Institute of Arts and an MFA degree from Yale University in 1975. In the 1970’s he lived in Barcelona on a Fulbright/Hayes Travel Grant and lived in New York and Los Angeles before settling in Ojai, CA.

He has completed murals in La Jolla, California and outdoor sculpture in New Haven, Connecticut. He has been a lecturer at the University of California in Los Angeles, Claremont Colleges of California, and Yale University.

Lang’s work are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Portland Museum of Art, ME; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL; Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, MI; Gemeentemuseum den Haag, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Plains Art Museum, Moorehead, MN; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Museum of Art Contemporain, Angers, France. In 2015 he received the Arts & Letters Award, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in NYC, and in 2017 he received the Francis J. Greenburger Award. Lang currently lives and works in Ojai, CA.

Statement

My art has been devoted to process and environmental concerns. My goal is to point out the intrinsic beauty within these natural systems.

Biography

“Tom McMillin’s process of using earth and water as opposing raw materials can be traced back to his time spent in the late 1970s and early 1980s constructing on-site installations of conceptual Earthworks formed in collaboration with the landscape. In the 1970s, McMillin transported twelve tons of earth into a gallery to form Continental Shelf, a three walled structure composed entirely of compressed soil. McMillin later documented the impact of tidal erosion in a series of forms constructed along a shoreline in Irvine, California.

McMillin continues to use the forces of nature to break down the surface of his clay. In this new series, McMillin situates his ceramic murals to allow rainwater to erode the unfired clay. He then introduces a variety of clays that when heated will expand and contract, fusing together and breaking apart. McMillin probes the limits of the material to emphasize its fragility. McMillin sees poetry in decay. He seeks to capture the transitory dance of destruction. In processing his work within the environment, McMillin alludes to the power an ever-changing climate can have upon natural phenomena.”

Excerpt from MOAH Sages Program Summer 2023

Maria

Biography

John Nava studied art at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara and did graduate work at the Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art in Florence, Italy. His work is found in numerous private, corporate and public collections throughout the United States, Europe and Japan.

Additionally, Nava has done large-scale public works including projects for the Tokyo Grain Exchange in Tokyo, Japan and for Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

In 1999 Nava was commissioned to create three major cycles of tapestries for the new cathedral of Los Angeles. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the largest Catholic cathedral in the United States, opened in September of 2002.

In 2003 Nava’s tapestries for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels won the National Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture (IFRAA) Design Honor Award for Visual Art.

In 2017 Sacred Material, a book that covers the work done for the Los Angeles cathedral tapestry project, was published by Angel City Press of Santa Monica, California.

Additional projects include large-scale tapestries for the Ronald Tutor Campus Center at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California (2011), the Firestone Library at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (2014) and painting for the School of Music at Yale University (2016). Further large-scale tapestry cycles include projects for Holy Spirit Catholic Church, Las Vegas, Nevada (2018) and the University of San Diego, San Diego California (2020).

In 2021 five new large-scale tapestries were unveiled depicting Our Lady of the Angels for the Sanctuary wall of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angelses, California.

Biography

Carol Shaw-Sutton has been exhibiting her fiber sculpture in the U.S. and internationally since the 1970’s starting with the California Design Exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Young American Award exhibition at Museum of Art and Design in NYC, Poetry of the Physical at the same museum, a three-time invitee to the presigeous Lausanne Biennale in Switzerland and the Kyoto Museum of Art, Japan where her large installation won the Fine Art Award. Her art is included in numerous major museum collections, as well as corporate and private holdings worldwide. She received three NEA Individual Artist Fellowships, the prestigious Young American Award, the US/Japan and the US/France Fellowships among other awards, including Professor of The Year. Shaw-Sutton retired from the School of Art at California State University, Long Beach where she headed their Fiber Program for more than thirty years and is now Professor Emeritus.

Besides working as an artist and educator she has curated influential exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles tiled Generations, the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park in Los Angeles titled Fiberlicious, at Blackboard Gallery at Studio Channel Island in Ventura County titled Garden of Earthly Delights and at the Helm’s Bakery Building in Los Angeles titled Tricksters and Transformation. She also designed and constructed a stage set for the Ojai Art Center’s production of MacBeth.

Her work often consists of poetically narrative objects and installations utilizing both ancient and modern processes that require a labor-intensive commitment with the goal of simultaneously valuing and transcending the concept of time. These address the deep human concern for harmony and release through our bodies into nature and the mysterious beyond.

For more information go to: http://www.carolshawsutton.com/

Grid Poem (Where)

Biography

Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend is a glass artist. Stinsmuehlen-Amend’s early work concentrated on bold, experimental pieces that defied idealized standards of beauty, taste, form and pattern. She crossed over the various methods of manipulating glass and incorporated other media into her assemblage-like pieces, using scraps of everyday material to give them texture and depth. In the late 1990s, the structure of her work moved towards rectilinearity, with diptychs and triptychs of contrasted figures and patterns. She broke her compositions down into split segments that were meant to be absorbed together despite being separated into individual panels. Recently she has begun to sandwich the individual glass planes of images on top of one another, giving them multi-dimensionality. In these layered wall panels the viewer is meant to see into the depth of the piece but not through it, as would be the case if these panes were acting as traditional windows or screens.

Born in Baltimore, Stinsmuehlen-Amend was educated at Hood College, Indiana University at Bloomington, and the University of Texas at Austin. She studied painting and drawing before going on to run a successful Austin architectural glass business starting in 1973. Stinsmuehlen-Amend studied with glass artists Narcissus Quagliata and Paul Marioni.

A former member and president of the board of directors of the Glass Art Society, Stinsmuehlen-Amend has served as a guest artist and lecturer at many schools, including Penland School of Crafts, Rhode Island School of Design, and Pilchuck Glass School. Her work can be found in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Oakland Museum of California, and the Museum of Arts and Design.

Isla

I was a resident artist at SCIART at the earlier location on the Camarillo campus. I shared a studio with Kathy Waggoner and Tom McMillan. I made many lasting friendships and have fond memories of the exhibits and exchanges with fellow artists.

Statement

Cheryl Ann Thomas delights in accident. Formed from tiny threads of clay or fiber, her works collapse and take form as objects in the natural world through the actions of heat and gravity. These meditative objects speak of growth and decline, loss and reconciliation.

Cheryl is a graduate of Art Center College of Design with a major in Fine Art. She is the recipient of The Pollock/Krasner Grant and the Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her works are in several museum collections in the USA, Canada and China.

Biography

Hiroko Yoshimoto is a visual artist residing in Southern California. She was born and raised in Japan and moved to Los Angeles as a teen. She has BA and MA (summa cum laude) in Art from UCLA. Her newest works may be viewed in The Crosscurrent 2019 exhibition at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, January, 2019 and solo show “Biodiversity:New Works” Gallery Rin, Tokyo, January 2019. Her up-coming shows are scheduled at Red Bud Gallery in Houston and Wichita Falls Art Museum in Texas in 2021 and at Santa Paula Art Museum in southern California in 2022.

For full exhibition record and other activities, please refer to C/V Page.

Her most recent series of more than 120 canvases, “Biodiversity”, which began in 2012 and still on-going, was shown as solo shows at LA Artcore Gallery, Los Angeles (2017), at Bryant Street Gallery, Palo Alto (2014) and at Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA (2014). She was the featured solo artist for Ventura Chamber Music Festival in 1996 and the Visual Art Curator for VCMF Art Exhibitions ’98. She designed the stage set and costumes for the opera “Magic Flute” for Ventura College/Ventura County Master Chorale opera production in 1990, for “Unicorn” production by Ventura County Master Chorale in 1991 and for “L’histoire du Soldat” for Ventura Chamber Music Festival in 2000. She was a member of the Ventura Municipal Art Acquisition Committee 2001-2002. She served for the Museum of Ventura County Fine Arts Committee for more than ten years and Community Memorial Hospital Art Collection Committee for five years. She curated many exhibitions including the Contemporary Asian American Art Exhibition at SCIART, Camarillo, CA, in 2003 and “Four Legends – Four Masters” for Museum of Ventura County in 2010-2011.

Yoshimoto was one of the founders of Studio 83 (1983-1999), an artists’ co-op group and for the Ventura College Friends of the Arts, a non-profit art scholarship fund-raising organization. She taught studio art as a tenured professor at Ventura College, Ventura CA.