Category: Exhibitions

Events, Exhibitions, Foundation News, Ojai Institute

Nora Garza: Embracing The Absurd, September 9 – October 10, 2023

Nora Garza: Embracing the Absurd
On view September 9 – October 10, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, September 9, 2023, from 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Nora Garza. The exhibition Embracing the Absurd will be on view September 9 – October 10, 2023 as part of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s Ojai Institute initiative. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 9, 2023, from 5:00 – 7:00 pm. The artist will be present, and all are welcome to attend. 

Embracing the Absurd merges the artist’s long standing fascination with the subjects of archaeology, ancient history, biblical studies, and ufology. From a young age, and with a Catholic upbringing, she was captivated by such happenings as the search for Noah’s Ark, the Shroud of Turin, the Virgin Mary of Medjugorje, Virgin of Fatima, and her apparitions. She eventually began to read and start her research into events surrounding paranormal and unexplained phenomena such as alien encounters, both ancient and contemporary. 

In the artist’s own words: 

In my paintings, I leave behind a historical record from a common person’s perspective concerning the constant revelation of aliens. Up to today, the alien craft that hover over our countries have shown to be much more advanced than our aircraft and our technology. As Time passes, more and more encounters between humans and aliens occur…I am excited at the prospect of interacting more with aliens and hopefully they will be willing to bring us up to par with them in their knowledge of technology and there might be hundreds of other types of knowledge and perspectives that they would want to share with us. l am excited, and my mind is in awe. I feel so lucky to live to see this new alien revelation.

Works in the exhibition have been organized into four chapters: Messages, Interactions, Real Life Contacts, and Future of Humanity. Overall this exhibition of twelve acrylic paintings on canvas presents images of real life experiences, and those imagined by the artist based on press accounts, historical events, and other encounters. 

Nora Garza is originally from the border region of Northern Mexico and Southern Texas, and now lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. She received her MA in Education from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and had a long career as a public education teacher, school principal and museum educator. After retiring, Garza taught art classes for eight years at the Brownsville Museum of Art and dedicated herself full-time to painting and drawing. In addition to her art practice, she regularly attends museum exhibitions and engages with other artists in her community.

Image: Nora Garza, Personal Sedona UFO Tour, 2022. Courtesy The Artist.

Events, Exhibitions, Foundation News, Ojai Institute

Queer Art Pop Up Exhibition & Poetry Reading: August 5-6, 2023

Queer Art Pop Up Exhibition and Poetry Reading:
Ren D’Angelo, Adi DeClerk, Hope Fairbanks, Maya Leeloo Rohe, and Sieren Ureño Clayton

August 5-6, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 5, 4:00 – 7:00 pm

Support Local Queer Artists! Pop up Art Exhibition August 5th!

The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation and Ojai Institute proudly present a Queer Art Pop Up Exhibition and Poetry Reading showcasing emerging Ojai artists! Please join us at 248 South Montgomery St. in Downtown Ojai, August 5th at 4-7pm to celebrate the work of Noah Cannaday, Ren D’Angelo, Adi DeClerk, Hope Fairbanks, Maya Leeloo Rohe, and Sieren Ureño Clayton. This pop up show will be open to the public Saturday, August 5th at the opening reception from 4-7pm and Sunday, August 6th from 12-4pm.This exhibition has been curated by Sieren Ureño Clayton as the culmination of his summer Artist Fellowship with the foundation. 

Clayton says “This exhibition was created to be a safe space to center and celebrate queer artists in Ojai. Each artist was given the freedom to choose the pieces that they feel represent them most as artists and as people. My hope with this show is to create a space for people to make meaningful connections within the queer and art communities as well as celebrate the wonderful artists showcasing their work…Community is integral in the lives of all queer people and it is something that I would like to foster in Ojai; for the many generations of queer people who, like myself, wanted to have more of a community growing up and for the new generation of queer youth who I hope will feel like they have more community than those before them.” 

Come support these five, wonderful queer Ojai artists!

Exhibitions, Foundation News

Cross Country: May 19 – July 30, 2023

Cross Country

An exhibition to benefit Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Ojai, CA & Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, MN

May 19 – July 30, 2023

Opening Reception: Friday, May 19, 5-7pm

248 S. Montgomery St Ojai, CA

Julie Buffalohead, Rachel Collier, Meghan Duda, Bruce Engebretson, Nathanael Fink, Amber Fletschock, Cameron Gainer, Christopher Harrison, Alexa Horachowski, Brad Kahlhamer, Andy Messerschmidt, Georgia Mrazkova, Melba Price, Yunior Rebollar, Ginny Sims, TL Solien, Aaron Spangler

Click here to download the pdf of available works!

Art Prize, Events, Exhibitions, Foundation News, Minneapolis

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prizes 2023

(left) Janna Ireland, portrait by Carlos Jaramillo (right) Cameron Patricia Downey

The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 awards. The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize will be awarded to Janna Ireland. The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize will be awarded to Cameron Patricia Downey. 

Downey will present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) opening September 17, 2023. This will be their debut institutional exhibition. Their collaborative video work Hymn of Dust, with Ize Commers, M Jamison, Cooper Felien, will have its West Coast debut January 22 – March 29, 2023  also at MCASB.

Both artists will be feted at the annual Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Annual Art Prize Gala on May 20, 2023. Tickets and tables will be available shortly. Save the date for the Art Prize Gala Weekend, May 19-21, 2023.

The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize consists of an unrestricted gift of $10,000. Previous prize recipients include Sarah Rosalena Brady (2022), Porfirio Gutiérrez (2021), Tanya Aguiñiga (2020), Kelly Akashi (2019), Ry Rocklen (2018), and Rob Fischer (2017). The prize is awarded on an annual basis and the current focus is on supporting artists living in Southern California.

The Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize consists of an unrestricted gift of $5,000. Previous prize recipients include Aaron Spangler (2022) Jovan C. Speller (2021), and Dyani White Hawk (2020). The prize is awarded on an annual basis and the current focus is on supporting artists living in Minnesota.

Artist Biographies:

Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home, and the expression of Black identity in American culture. In 2016, she began photographing structures designed by legendary Black architect Paul R. Williams. A collection of 250 of these photographs was published in a monograph entitled Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, in 2020. In 2021, Ireland was awarded a Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship by the Nevada Museum of Art to photograph Williams’ work in Nevada. A solo exhibition of this work opened at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2022 and traveled to the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, where it will be on view until May 30, 2023.

A broad selection of Ireland’s work was included in the exhibition “Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland and Contemporary Works from LACMA” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Charles White Elementary School Gallery. Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU.

Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998) is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise — seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious, the misremembered and the banal. Their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation.

Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS in: HAIR+NAILS at 9 Herkimer (Brooklyn, 2019), FUTURE FUTURE (2020), “The Human Scale” at Rochester Art Center (2021), and in their first solo show “Three Things Last Forever” (2020). Downey will present their next solo show of new work at HAIR+NAILS in spring 2023 as well as at Midway Contemporary Art in fall of 2023. Downey guest curated HOLDING SPACE, an exhibition of video, image, light and sound, in the H+N front yard (summer 2020). Downey’s recent exhibitions and screenings have included those at the Walker Art Center (2022), “Wild Frictions” at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin (2021), “Intersections” at Engage Projects in Chicago (2021–2022) and “In The River” as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program (2022). Downey is currently an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center’s mediatheque and at Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul.

Art Prize, Exhibitions, Foundation News

Aaron Spangler: Sweeping Up The Shadows, November 12, 2022 – May 6, 2023

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present Sweeping Up The Shadows, a solo exhibition project by Aaron Spangler for the Ojai Institute. The exhibition will be on view November 12, 2022 – May 6, 2023. Spangler is the recipient of the 2022 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize.

Aaron Spangler (b. 1971, Minneapolis) is a sculptor and printmaker best known for his monumental, monochromatic carved wooden sculptures and for resuscitating and contemporizing the traditional art of bas relief. His themes emerge from his roots in a heavily forested area of northern Minnesota, and began in darkly calamitous, intricately carved wood bas relief. Painted black with gesso and rubbed with graphite, the surfaces appear to be machined, the surrealistic scenes–of twisted tree roots, limbs, and extinct hand tools–illustrating, or presaging, various breakdowns of rural society. Since moving back home to his house and studio in the Two Inlets Forest in Minnesota in 2009, his work has grown in a more smoothly abstracted, heavily patterned, and intimate direction. In bas relief, freestanding sculpture, and woodblock and hand-rubbed prints, he continues to explore and provoke the ineffable truths and mythologies of the rural ethos.

Since 1998 Spangler’s work has been the subject of many national and international exhibitions, including solo shows in galleries in New York and Berlin. In recent years he’s been included in group shows such as “Working Thought,” The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Takashi Murakami’s “Superflat Collection,” Yokohama, Japan; the two-person “American Gothic” at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (with Alison Elizabeth Taylor), Winston-Salem, N.C.; “Spectacular of Vernacular” (2011–12), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; “Heartland” (2008–10), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. His work belongs to many public and private collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Rubell Family Collection, among others. He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2014), McKnight Foundation (2009), Minnesota State Arts Board (1998), and Jerome Foundation (1997). In 2017, Spangler’s first large-scale bronze, Bog Walker, was commissioned by Walker Art Center for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Spangler lives with his wife, writer Amy Thielen, and their son, just outside their hometown of Park Rapids, Minnesota. In a volunteer capacity, Spangler advises and curates exhibitions for the Nemeth Art Center, a contemporary art center housed in the historic Hubbard County courthouse.

Exhibitions, Foundation News, Ojai Institute

The California Monuments Consortium Lab, September 10 – November 6, 2022

The California Monuments Consortium Lab

September 10, 2022 – November 6, 2022

Saturday, September 10, 2022: Community Town Hall and opening reception, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present The California Monuments Consortium Lab, an exhibition project for the Ojai Institute, presented in partnership with The Free Republic of California, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), and ESMoA. The California Monuments Consortium Lab will be on view September 10 – November 6, 2022. The Lab will open its doors Saturday, September 10, at 5:00pm with a community Town Hall Meeting, reception, and as a blank slate beckoning for participation. 

The California Monuments Consortium is a theoretical agency aimed to create communal, artistic and sustainable dialogues about monuments. In partnership with the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, the Ojai Consortium Lab will act as a think tank, research archive, community sounding board and organizing platform. A range of events and panels will highlight the mission and its underpinnings while offering stakeholders the chance to interact with the space, conduct research, take polls, draft surveys and create artistic expressions.

Over a three month period, the Consortium’s statement will grow, welcoming a range of artists, speakers, NGOs and government representatives to participate. The hope is that the findings of these three months of interaction will become a springboard to physical manifestations of the ideas found therein. California deserves monuments respectful and honoring of its people, history and land, while looking forward with the momentum it has always possessed.

Physical components of the installation will include large scale vinyl installation in the windows, a Library featuring an ever-growing selection of relevant books and maps of California, A Communal Workspace, as well as a Community Survey Portal, an interactive area where visitors can comment on monuments, take surveys/polls, etc.

Calendar of Related Events:

Saturday, September 10, 2022: Community Town Hall and opening reception, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Saturday, October 8, 2022: Special Guests: Ojai Jail Art Initiative Artists’ Reception, 5:00 – 7:00 pm 

Thursday, October 13, 2022: Public Land for Dummies, Special Guest: Natasha Wheat in Conversation, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Saturday, October 15, 2022: Ojai Day Open House and The Free Republic of California poster scavenger hunt, 12:00 – 4:00 pm

Sunday, October 16, 2022: Special Guests: Ojai Jail Art Initiative Artist Panel and Closing Reception

Tuesday, October 25, 2022: Special Guest: Meet Your Neighbors, Blue Sky Art Center, 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Sunday, November 6, 2022: Closing Panel Discussion: The Intersection of Monuments & Land Acknowledgements, closing reception, 12:00 – 2:00 pm

About the partners:

The Free Republic of California is an ongoing conceptual piece by artist Cole Sternberg, which plays with notions of statehood and freedom by offering a vision for a more enlightened nation through the guise of Californian secession. Sternberg coordinates a variety of strategies for a state’s rebirth: alternative history and identity established in a new flag, photographic documentation, and ephemera; a constitution, budget, peace agreements, and international conventions in support of the environment and human rights; and, a proposed future conjured through sculpture, performance and engagement.

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) is a non-profit organization founded in 2009 committed to curating site-specific public art exhibitions in Los Angeles and beyond. LAND believes that all people deserve the opportunity to experience innovative contemporary art in their everyday existence, to enhance their quality of life and ways of thinking about their community. In turn, artists deserve the opportunity to realize projects in the public realm, unsupported through traditional institutions. LAND brings contemporary art outside of the walls of museums and galleries, into our shared public spaces and unique sites.

ESMoA is an art laboratory located in El Segundo, California and it is run by artlab21 Foundation. Our mission is to Spread the Spark of Creativity through the display and education of visual arts. ESMoA functions as a catalyst for creative thinking offering unique Experiences. The Experiences – our word for exhibition/exhibit – present a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, works on paper, performances, and photography. ESMoA was founded in 2013 by Eva Sweeney, Brian Sweeney and Bernhard Zünkeler.

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is committed to supporting and advocating the arts and sciences. Current initiatives include awards for visual artists, as well as The Ojai Institute, an artist-residency program in Ojai, that extends the dialogue between artists and the public through exhibitions and programs. Currently based in Ojai, California, the organization, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 2015 by artists, family, and friends to celebrate the legacy of esteemed art patron and private art dealer Carolyn Glasoe Bailey.

Image: Cole Sternberg, TREE MONUMENT IN THE WILD – another kind of growth. Photo by Jon Viscott

Exhibitions, Foundation News

Fragile / Fiber: May 20 – July 31, 2022

Fragile / Fiber – May 20 – July 31, 2022

CLICK TO VIEW THE EXHIBITION ONLINE HERE!

Fragile / Fiber is a group exhibition exploring contradiction and materiality, funds raised will benefit the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation and the Artists. Join us!

Opening reception: Friday, May 20, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
248 S Montgomery St, Ojai, California

The exhibition will be on view in person through July 31, 2022, and works will be online shortly.

Artists include:

Tanya Aguiñiga
Kelly Akashi
Doña Viviana Alávez
Juliana Altamirano
Alison Andersson
Brian Calvin
Četáŋ Ská designs by Dyani White Hawk
Mark Churchill
Sally England
Dena Paige Fischer
Porfirio Gutiérrez
Elizabeth Herring
David Horvitz
Janna Ireland
Cole M James
Jmy James Kidd
P.Lyn
Shana Mabari
Zenaida Maldonado Martinez
Julie Maren
Ana Martinez Alarzon
Monty J
Yassi Mazandi
Yunhee Min
Joe Mama-Nitzberg
Tara Jane O’Neil
Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs
Jim Robie
Ry Rocklen
Sarah Rosalena
Melanie Schiff
Aaron Spangler
Cole Sternberg
Marc Swanson
Cayetano Talavera
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales
Natasha Wheat
Rosha Yaghmai

Arts Education at CGBF, Events, Exhibitions, Foundation News, Ojai Institute

Book Club: Thought Forms by Annie Besant & C. W. Leadbeater Saturday, May 7, 2022

Book Club: Thought Forms by Annie Besant & C. W. Leadbeater
Saturday, May 7, 3:00 pm, reception to follow at 5:00 pm

Join us for a short symposium exploring the book Thought Forms and related ideas around consciousness and the history of Ojai with Rosha Yaghmai and invited special guests. You are encouraged to read along with us these next few weeks and arrive ready to discuss the book on May 7th. Books may be purchased locally at Barts Books, or at your local bookstore.

The symposium will conclude with a closing reception for the exhibition.

Please note time change to 3:00 pm.

Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation is a seminal occult book compiled by the leaders of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. It was originally published in 1905 in London. According to the teachings of Theosophy, thoughts and emotions create distinctive patterns of color and form in the human aura—visible only to those who are gifted with a sufficient degree of clairvoyance and can see beyond our normal perceptions. Besant and Leadbeater dictated their clairvoyant “thought-forms” to a group of friends who then created the 58 magnificent illustrations contained in the book. This book was a major influence on the artists Hilma Af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky among many others but has long been overlooked as a foundational pillar in art history.
Image: Artwork plate from Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
Arts Education at CGBF, Events, Exhibitions, Foundation News, Ojai Institute

On Heidi Bucher, Saturday, April 23, 2022

On Heidi Bucher
Saturday, April 23, 5:00 pm

Join us for a conversation with Rosha Yaghmai as we discuss her interest in the work of Heidi Bucher. The Swiss avant-garde artist Heidi Bucher (1926-1993, born Adelheid Hildegard Müller) distinguished herself particularly through her legendary “mouldings”, focussing and exploring the architectural space and the body through sculpture. It is a transformative and poetic work, that deals primarily with private spaces and belongings, architectural fragments from mostly the 19th century, feminism, domestication and the individual or collective experiences and memory.

We will be referencing the Heidi Bucher symposium produced by Haus der Kunst on the occasion of the retrospective Heidi Bucher. Metamorphoses with The Estate of Heidi Bucher. Watch the previously recorded symposium online.

Image: Heidi Bucher, Untitled, 1991, December, Postcard collage, 16,7 x 14,8cm, Copyright 2021 The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
Exhibitions, Foundation News, Ojai Institute

Rosha Yaghmai: The eyes, March 12 – May 7, 2022

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to present The eyes, a solo exhibition project by Rosha Yaghmai for the Ojai Institute. The exhibition will be on view March 12 – May 7, 2022. 

There will be a public reception to celebrate the opening on Saturday, March 12, 2022, from 5-7 pm.

The eyes is a site-responsive installation that draws attention to the architecture, geology, and history of place. This intervention by Yaghmai seeks to shift and blend vision, unearth and expose knowledge, while creating a multidimensional psychedelic space. The Ojai Institute and Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation gallery space becomes a platform for accessing the esoteric history of Ojai, while being transformed into an imagined portal through which one might transcend time and space. Additional sculptural works in the show explore material and meaning, offering many interpretations and avoiding specific revelation. Or perhaps the works reveal more to the individual upon closer examination. 

Through a sculptural practice that melds industrial and craft processes, Rosha Yaghmai’s work utilizes these provocations to alter the familiar. She uses materials such as silicon and resin for their skin-like translucency and bodily, fleshy quality. Yaghmai contrasts this softness with hard mediums like cast plaster or fiberglass to contradict the expected. Her work, in exhibition form, often takes shape as an assemblage of fragmented objects that evoke an environment of estrangement. Yaghmai is most interested in exploring themes of the psychedelic that includes feelings of transcendence and otherness. Using architectural structures like gates, doorways, courtyard walls, she hopes to push the feeling of passing through, telepathic transformation or metamorphosis. Yaghmai was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) (2021), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco (2019). She was also included in the 2018 iteration of Made in LA at the Hammer Museum curated by Erin Christovale and Anne Ellegood.

Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2007. Solo and 2 person exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, CA; Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles, CA; The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA; Marlborough Contemporary, New York, NY; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, CA; Weiss Berlin, Germany; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA; Tif’s Desk, Los Angeles/Miami; and Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA amongst others. Selected group shows include: Made in LA curated by Erin Christovale and Anne Ellegood, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Domestic Plane curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, and David Adamo, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Mad World curated by Ali Subotnick, Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Virginia Woolf: An exhibition inspired by her Writings curated by Laura Smith, Tate ST. Ives, Cornwall, UK; The Annex, M+B, Los Angeles, CA; Hanging With Friends curated by Diana Molzan, The Finley, Los Angeles, CA; California Curse curated by Pejman Shojaei, Mothers Beach, CA; KNOWLEDGES curated by Christina Ondrus, Mount Wilson Observatory, Alta Dena, CA; Present Future curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, Artissima Turin, Italy; THE STAND IN (OR A GLASS OF MILK) curated by Lauren Mackler and Alex Gaty, Public Fiction, Los Angeles, CA;  9/11 15 Years Later, Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; ET IN ARCADIA EGO, Estacion Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico; Seeing is Believing curated by Carol Cheh, Cal State Long Beach, CA; and HOT ROCK, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland amongst others. Yaghmai is a Terra Foundation Fellow, Giverny, France (2009), a Villa Aurora Fellow, Berlin, Germany (2016), a recipient of the California Community Foundation grant (2019), The Chara Schreyer Arts Initiative (2020), and the Bullseye Glass Residency (2021).