PICA Celebrates the 2022 Awardees & Announces the 2023 Golden Spot Residency Recipients
Administered by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) as part of The Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Residency Program, we are pleased to share with you the 2022/2023 Golden Spot Residency recipients Patricia Vázquez Gómez, Jose de Jesus, Lawren/Lawrence Oliver III, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, and Maya Vivas. As with PICA’s other recurring residency programs, the Golden Spot Residency Program is a funded opportunity.
Each recipient works with Artistic Director / Curator of Visual Art Kristan Kennedy on realizing research and developing new projects. The artists are offered support for travel, research materials, and access to professionals such as fabricators, technicians, writers, designers, and translators who can inform their practices and allow them to dive deeply into creating new work. Please join us in congratulating these artists!
About the Recipients:
Patricia Vázquez Gómez works and lives between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded and occupied lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah, and other Indigenous peoples. Her art practice investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics and politics, and the expansion of community-based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music, and socially engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements...
Jose de Jesus began painting after attending several art workshops at the Voz Workers Rights Center, where he worked as an independent contractor for many years. For de Jesus, painting is a form of communication mobilization. He paints images of his lived experience as an immigrant focusing on portraying the solitary journey of crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. He sees his work as a form of protest. Jose de Jesus has exhibited work at Paragon Art Gallery (Portland, OR) and at the Voz Workers Rights Center (Portland, OR).
Lawrence Oliver III, who also goes by Lawren, was born in Los Angeles in 1981. They spent most of their youth and started making art in Hope, Arkansas, where summer thunderstorms feel like a giant air conditioner with a powerful fan. Lawren has always been fascinated by fans, trains, highway bridges, and tall weeds that look like miniature trees. They make art using many different materials, but have a knack for coming up with unique ways of repurposing household materials in transformative sculptural processes--making home-made clay recipes, saturating paper and chipboard with wood glue in thick layers to form durable wood-like surfaces, and reminding people that things are never quite the way they seem.
Lender and designer Bogosi Sekhukhuni (b. 1991, South Africa) offers considerations on cultures and histories of technology and science. Since 2013, Sekhukhuni’s work has been featured internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, with institutions that include MoMA, Foxy Productions, Fondazione Prada, Tate Modern & Kunsthalle Bern. They have been awarded the Prix Net Art Award. Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the artist group NTU and is co-founder of the design firm INFANT.
Maya Vivas is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums such as ceramic, performance, painting, and installation. Maya has exhibited work, spoken on panels and hosted workshops throughout the United States including venues and institutions such as The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, Louisiana State University and Yale. Vivas is also co-founder of Ori Gallery, whose mission is to redefine "the white cube" through amplifying the voices of Queer and Trans Artists of color, community organizing and mobilization through the arts.