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My work is included in a group exhibition organized by Artworks For Change at the Patan Museum in Kathmandu, Nepal. The True Stories Project: Exploitation and Empowerment runs May 1-31, 2017. Read more about the project here: press release .
Artworks for Change and the exhibition were featured in a New York Times article: New Message at Some Museums: Don’t Just Look. Do.
I was one of several artists invited to participate in the group exhibition "With Liberty and Justice for Some," co-curated by Monica Lundy on view at Walter Maciel Gallery. The exhibition includes over 100 portraits of immigrants: artists, friends, relatives, historical figures, politicians and celebrities. A portion of proceeds from the exhibition go to organizations that provide support to marginalized communities, including: ACLU https://www.aclu.org/, Trevor Project http://www.thetrevorproject.org/ , Center for Reproductive Rights https://www.reproductiverights.org/ , Planned Parenthood https://www.plannedparenthood.org , LA LGBT Center https://lalgbtcenter.org/ and The SF LGBT Center http://www.sfcenter.org/
The exhibition received a wonderful review in the Huffington Post and a video and write up on KQED!
Exhibition Dates: January 7 - March 4
Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Culver City, CA
I have been awarded a 2017 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. I hope to see you at the Headlands Fall Open House this October!
I am thrilled and honored that the Smithsonian American Art Museum has acquired "Requiem for Charleston." Excerpt from Leah Garchick's article in the San Francisco Chronicle below.
Works from my new series, “Antecendent,” will be presented at Chicago Expo September 22-25 in Booth 245 with Rena Bransten Gallery. I hope to see you there!
Antecedent 1, 2016
This exhibition, inspired by the late and great Prince, runs from September 14 – October 1, 2016 at 1275 Minnesota Street in Gallery 104. My piece, “His Royal Discography” is included in the exhibition, along with work from over thirty artists that pay tribute to the beloved pop star.
An excerpt from “Looking Back and Seeing now” is in Collect!, Exhibition and Art Auction at the Berkeley Art Center. The exhibition runs September 10-24 with an auction on September 24th from 6-9pm. Tickets are available at the Berkeley Art Center Website. Please help support this important local arts organization!
Please join me at Art Market San Francisco at Rena Bransten Gallery (booth 201). One of my large drawings is being exhibited along with works by Edward Burtynsky, Rupert Garcia, Vik Muniz, Tameka Jenean Norris, Nobuyuki Takahashi, and Daren Wilson. Stop by and say hello!
Public Hours
Friday, April 29, 2016 — 11:00am to 7:00pm
Saturday, April 30, 2016 — 11:00am to 7:00pm
Sunday, May 1, 2016 — 12:00pm to 6:00pm
Fort Mason, Festival Pavilion
contact: 415-519-1439
www.renabranstengallery.com
www.artmarketsf.com
Lava Thomas, "Mildred," 2015, Graphite on paper panel
Opening Reception
Saturday March 19th 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Bridging the Art Center’s historical role in presenting formative exhibitions of the Bay Area Figurative artists in the 1950s, The Human Spirit: Contemporary Figuration as an Expression of Humanism will extend our consideration of this legacy to the work of over 20 contemporary Bay Area artists who have continued and expanded the figurative art tradition through paintings, sculpture, photography, video, and performance. This survey will include the work of Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Terry St. John, Christopher Brown, Charles Garabedian, and Enrique Chagoya. Following a highly personal path with exuberant use of materials and iconography, these artists have forged visual language built on vocabularies including folk, medieval, aboriginal, and outsider art. The work has engaged popular culture, autobiography, inner landscape and dream to produce unusual palettes, inflected mark making, and often dizzying perspectives.
Pursuing other modes of autobiography, social commentary, and cultural reflection, the sculpture, film, video, and performance of Lava Thomas, Kota Ezawa, Farley Gwazda, and Allan deSouza draw the painted dialogue into other media. From the intimacy of the photography of Judy Dater, Katy Grannan, and Richard Misrach, to the beading and capturing of images in the memorial hangings of Taraneh Hemami, the myriad manifestations of the human visage and the human spirit for survival extend this exhibition beyond the personal or the domestic. In a time of social, economic, and environmental instability, the art employing the human figure to illuminate the struggles and spirit of contemporary life is of greater power and significance than it has been in nearly a century.
2540 Barrett Avenue
Richmond, California 94804
510.620.6772
You are welcome to attend our free opening reception on March 19. Click here for more details.
Lava Thomas, Requiem for Charleston (detail), 2016
Opening reception Friday, March 18, 6- 10 pm
MINNESOTA STREET PROJECT
RENA BRANSTEN GALLERY
1275 MINNESOTA ST
San Francisco, CA 94107
MAR 18–MAY 14, 2016
Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present the opening exhibition at 1275 Minnesota, These American Lives, exploring the collision of past and present, humor and horror, beauty and tragedy. Themes that are simultaneously part of the human experience and uniquely American: the vanishing west, urbanization, surveillance, displacement, insurrection, and the increasingly unattainable American Dream, are explored by artists John Baldessari, Dawoud Bey, Lee Friedlander, Rupert Garcia, Doug Hall, Lewis Hine, Hung Liu, Chip Lord, Vik Muniz, Tameka Norris, Aaron Siskin, Lava Thomas, John Waters, and Henry Wessel, among others. This exhibition presents a multiplicity of voices, narratives and subjects, sometimes reframing and sometimes affirming the American experience.
Dawoud Bey, Hung Liu, and John Waters address events from America’s history. Bey’s portraits from The Birmingham Project mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Hung Liu contemporizes Russell Lee’s FSA image of a migrant family, and John Waters, ever one to revel in the ride from the sacred to the profane, corrupts stock images of the Kennedys as they deplane Air Force One in Dallas, and an iconic image of a segregated drinking fountain. Rupert Garcia and Lava Thomas respond to unconscionable events and circumstance with a beauty that both abates and enhances the reference. Thomas addresses the recent Charleston shooting using a silent chorus of black tambourines; Rupert Garcia’s politically charged silkscreens from the late sixties and early seventies use intense color and pop culture imagery to decry social and racial injustice. Through photography, performance, and painting, Tameka Norris claims the right to her body and image as she explores issues of race, gender, and politics. Drawing on her experiences Norris assumes a range of identities: a black woman, a sexy woman, an educated elite, a hip hop star, and an artist with roots in the deep American South. Doug Hall’s Neighborhood Watch considers advances in camera technologies as tools of surveillance, demonstrating the anxiety that accompanies these innovations. Using a central image taken from a bird’s eye view, Hall extracts and enlarges details exposing people at work or children at play – unaware of being caught on camera. Similarly anxiety invoking, Henry Wessel’s photographs reveal hidden domestic life, as with the ironically titled Pink Cup, a black and white image of a cup balanced precariously on a countertop. Vik Muniz and Chip Lord pay homage to American car culture and comment on the automobile as a manifestation of financial success and the promise of the open road. Vik Muniz, cutting and collaging personal, vintage, black and white photographs and their inscriptions to create Album, New Car, 2014, presents an image that recalls all our family albums – a man proudly posing in front of his house with his foot on the fender. Chip Lord has partnered with Hayden Pedigo, a 21 year old musician and native of Amarillo, TX, to produce a single channel time based video, Greetings from Amarillo.
INTROSPECTIVE
February 4th - March 19th 2016
Opening Thursday, February 4th, 6-8pm
The self portrait is the lingua franca of the smartphone era. The scourage and proliferation of “selfes” and “profiles” is certainly indicative that we are enduring the best of times-as well as the worst of times in the apothesosis of onanistic humanism. Despite its utter debasement in the hand-held device, adolesentalized epoch, the self portrait in the 21st Century remains an elevated, vital, interesting, important and revealing genre. The show includes nearly 60 self-portraits, some are literal, others allude to autobiography in a psychological or metaphorical way.
BravinLee programs
508-526 West 26th Street, Second Floor #211
Tuesday-Saturday 11-5
info@bravinlee.com
I am pleased to announce that I am a recipient of this year's Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.
"The Painters & Sculptors Grant Program was established in 1993 to acknowledge painters and sculptors creating work of exceptional quality through unrestricted career support. The first year of grants was awarded in 1994 and the Foundation has funded individual artists annually since that time. Nominators from across the country are invited to recommend artists whom they feel deserve more recognition for their creative achievements and whose practice would significantly benefit from the grant. The candidates' images were viewed for consideration through an anonymous process by a jury panel that convened this fall at the office of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Nominators and jurors include prominent visual artists, curators, and arts administrators. Established in 1993, the Joan Mitchell Foundation is an artist-endowed non-profit organization. The Foundation celebrates the legacy of Joan Mitchell and expands her vision to support the aspirations and development of diverse contemporary artists. We work to broaden the recognition of artists and their essential contributions to communities and society. In addition to the Painters & Sculptors Grant Program, other programs undertaken by the Foundation include the Emerging Artist Grant Program, free art education programming for New York City youth and young adults, grants to arts organizations, the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program that supports mature artists in the areas of studio organization, archiving and inventory management, as well as grants to artists and arts communities in need of emergency support after a disaster. The Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans is an artist residency center that hosts national and local artists, and provides public programming that serves the broader community of New Orleans." —Joan Mitchell Foundation
Tickets are available through Eventbrite.
Reframe your view of the art world at the RE[FRAME] Arts Industry Conference on Saturday, September 26, 2015. Presented by 3.9 Art Collective and produced by A Simple Collective, RE[FRAME] is a unique look at all aspects of the art industry through the eyes and experience of black artists and arts professionals. Hosted by the Museum of the African Diaspora, RE[FRAME] will present discussion forums on industry trends, multidisciplinary works by self-identifying black Bay Area artists, and professional development workshops. Portfolio reviews and networking opportunities will also be provided. Re[present], re[examine], re[connect], re[fresh]…RE[FRAME] Arts Industry Conference, examining the industry of arts through an African American lens. Confirmed speakers include...
Ashara Ekundayo
Jacqueline Francis, Ph.D.
David Huffman
Karen Jenkins-Johnson
Maria Jenson
Ernest Jolly
Niema Jordan
Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen
Kristine Mays
Ebony McKinney
Ron Moultrie Saunders
Jessica Shaefer
Lava Thomas
Special performances will be presented by...
Chris Evans & David Boyce
Tim Roseborough
Anthony Julius Williams
Join me at Expo Chicago from 9/17-20! Navy Pier 600 E Grand Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
My two large portraits will be at Rena Bransten Projects, Booth 640. Hope to see you there.
The final celebratory at Looking Back and Seeing Now at the Berkeley Art Center. Generously supported by the City of Berkeley and Rena Bransten Projects.
Join artist Lava Thomas for a final look at her transformative installation and purchase a limited edition catalog produced by Berkeley Art Center.
If you are unable to attend, you can purchase the Looking Back and Seeing Now catalog online ($15).
Generously supported by the City of Berkeley and Rena Bransten Projects.
Photo: John Wilson White
This is the last chance to see this exhibition!
August 23, 3:00 to 5:00pm
Join artist Lava Thomas for a final look at her transformative installation and purchase a limited edition catalog produced by Berkeley Art Center and generously supported by Rena Bransten Projects. The catalog contains an essay by art historian Jacqueline Francis, Lava's inspiring artist statement and beautiful photographs of the exhibition by John Wilson White.
Free and open to the public. if you cannot attend but would like to purchase a catalog, please email programs@berkeleyartcenter.org.
Photo: Jennifer Noland
Jessica Zack reviews Looking Back and Seeing Now in the SF Chronicle on July 31, 2015.
Lava Thomas' art with mirrors helps viewers reflect
Check out the review of Looking Back and Seeing Now in the East Bay Express by Sarah Burke. Click below.
Lava Thomas' Tambourine Dream
