Panelist Bios

Panelist Biographies

Architecture for Artists
Friday, June 28 / 5:30 pm / Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts

Jamie G. Manné, Director, Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Jamie G. Manné was born and raised in Los Angeles and London. With nearly fifteen years of experience working in the professional art world in New York and Los Angeles, Jamie managed the Marciano Collection for seven years before opening the Marciano Art Foundation to the public in the spring of 2017, where she served as the Director for two years and organized large-scale, site-specific exhibitions such as Ai WeiWei: Life Cycle. Most recently she consulted on special projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and will begin her new role as Director at Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery this summer. Jamie lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three rescue dogs.

Fred Fisher, Founding Partner of FF&P

As Founding Partner of FF&P, Frederick Fisher, AIA, FAAR is a self-described “liberal arts guy,.” He is an avid reader, traveler, and arts-lover, and his approach to architecture reflects his innate intellectual curiosity and broad cultural and social perspective. His list of projects includes MoMA/PS1 in New York, The Annenberg Community Beach House, The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, the renovation of Princeton’s Firestone Library, The Colby College Museum, and numerous galleries, studios and homes. FF&P is currently working on the City of Santa Monica Public Services Building, the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Hall at USC, a new building for the Center Theatre Group, a conference center for Vassar College, a Master plan for Charles Drew University, and a major addition to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.

Fred’s long-spanning accomplishments as a design leader were recognized in 2013 by his receipt of the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles chapter Gold Medal. He received the 2008 Rome Prize in Design.

Fisher received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin College in Art and Art History and a Master’s of Architecture from UCLA. He is a Board Member of Otis College of Art and Design, the USC School of Architecture, the UCLA School of the Arts and the Ojai Music Festival.

Troy Schaum, Partner, SCHAUM/SHIEH

Troy Schaum is a partner in SCHAUM/SHIEH and Associate Professor at the Rice School of Architecture, where he was the 2008-2010 Wortham Fellow. His design and research interests focus on new possibilities for form, representation, and politics in the post-megalopolitan city. Troy has extensive experience building at a range of scales; prior to founding SCHAUM/SHIEH, he was a project architect at OMA New York responsible for the design of Cornell’s Paul Milstein Hall and has also worked at LTL and Studio Daniel Libeskind, both in New York, and Jim Jennings Architect in San Francisco. Troy holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton and a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech, where he was the Donald and Joanna Sunshine Alumni Travel Fellow. He is NCARB certified and licensed in New York, California, North Carolina, and Texas. Portrait credit: © Yuko Torihara.

Kevin Wallace, Director, Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts

Kevin Wallace is the Director of the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai, California. As a guest-curator, he has created exhibitions presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Mingei Museum, The Oakland Museum of California, the St. George Museum, the Center for Art in Wood, the Myrtle Beach Museum, the Cultural Affairs Department of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles International Airport, and the San Luis Obispo Art Center.

Books include Intersection: Art and Life, Shadow of The Turning, Celebrating Nature: Craft Traditions/Contemporary Expressions; Transforming Vision: The Wood Sculpture of William Hunter, 1970-2005; River of Destiny: The Life and Work of Binh Pho; Moulthrop: A Legacy in Wood; Every Exit is an Entry: The Life and Work of Liam O’Gallagher, The Cutting Edge: Contemporary Wood Art & The Lipton Collection and Shadow of The Turning.

Wallace has also co-authored a number of books, including New Masters of Woodturning: Expanding the Boundaries of Wood Art; The Art of Vivika and Otto Heino; Michael Peterson: Evolution/Revolution; Contemporary Turned Wood: New Perspectives in a Rich Tradition; Baskets: Tradition & Beyond; and Contemporary Glass: Color, Light & Form.

As a curator and author, Wallace specializes in media utilized by humans from before recorded time – pigment, clay, wood, fiber, and metal. He feels that these media connect us with humanity through our shared desire for expression and communion with nature, while representing what is essential to civilization and culture.

 

Architecture and Race
Saturday, June 29 / 10:30 am / Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation

Dr. Thomas Carrasco, Chair and Professor of American Ethnic Studies, Santa Barbara City College

Thomas Avila Carrasco, Ph.D. One of the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in Chicana and Chicano Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Currently the Chair/professor in American Ethnic/Chicana/o Studies at Santa Barbara City College. Will be releasing a documentary title, “ Teatrista, In a Moment of Emancipation” featuring the genealogy of Chicano Secret Service. Tomas has performed in television shows as a writer and an actor with John Lequiziamo’s, House of Buggin and Culture Clash and HBO’S first comedy festival in NYC. As a scholar/Teatrista Tomas has sought to intertwine, Art, Science, Religion and Politics to create new forms on knowledge’s on and off stage. Born and raised in Oxnard California.

Janna Ireland, Artist

Janna Ireland was born in Philadelphia, but has chosen Los Angeles as her home. Her work is concerned with the expression of black identity in American culture. She holds an MFA the from UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU. Ireland is the 2013 recipient of the Snider Prize, presented by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago, and in group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. She has been published in Aperture, Harper’s, Art Papers, Vice, and The Los Angeles Times.

Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Director, Vincent Price Museum of Art

Pilar Tompkins Rivas is the director of Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) at East Los
Angeles College, a collecting institution with diverse holdings including Pre-Columbian,
Native American, and modern and contemporary art. At VPAM she has spearheaded
partnerships between the museum and the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical
Gardens. Prior to her appointment as director, she served as the coordinator of
curatorial initiatives at LACMA, where she helped launch and co-directed two Mellon-
funded programs for the museum: the UCLA-LACMA Art History Practicum Initiative
and The Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program. She has
practiced as an independent curator since 2002, and was the director of residency
programs at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.

Specializing in U.S. Latino and Latin American contemporary art, she has organized
dozens of exhibitions throughout the United States, Colombia, Egypt, France, and
Mexico. Among the exhibitions that she has curated or co-curated are Home – So
Different, So Appealing (LACMA; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston), A Universal
History of Infamy (LACMA), Regeneración: Three Generations of Revolutionary
Ideology (VPAM), Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture,
1943-2016 (VPAM), A Decolonial Atlas: Strategies in Contemporary Art of the Americas
(VPAM; Tufts University Art Gallery; Union College; Oficina de Proyectos Culturales,
Puerta Vallarta, Mexico; OFF Biennial Cairo, Egypt), Guadalupe Rosales: Echoes of a
Collective Memory (VPAM), Patrick Martinez: America is For Dreamers (VPAM), ASCO
and Friends: Exiled Portraits (Triangle France, Marseille), L.A. Xicano (LACMA; the
UCLA Fowler Museum; the Autry National Center), and Vexing: Female Voices from
East L.A. Punk (Claremont Museum of Art).

 

Artists Looking at Architecture
Sunday, June 30 / 10:30 am / Porch Gallery Ojai

Julian Hoeber, Artist

Julian Hoeber (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) holds a BA in Art History from Tufts University, Medford, MA, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA and an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Hoeber is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on themes such as the problem of the proximity of thought and form, intuitive processes within geometrical compositional systems, and the quest to combine conceptualist strategies (mind) with that which is experiential (body). For Hoeber, many of the binary categories used to define art, culture, and social relations are non-functional or imperfect. Rather than operating as polarities, categories such as interior and exterior, psychic and somatic, rational and irrational, are able to occupy the same space in his work. Hoeber harnesses rigor and exactitude in service of the emotional and idiosyncratic, revealing that his conceptual strategies and modes of inquiry are subjective and poetic. Going Nowhere, a years-long endeavor to design an architectural structure in the shape of the artist’s thinking is explored through tromp l’oeil paintings, architecturally inspired sculpture, and drawing.

Hoeber’s work is featured in public and private collections internationally including Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Rosenblum Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Western Bridge Museum, Seattle, WA. Julian Hoeber lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Cole M James, Artist, Ojai Institute Artist in Residence

The work of Cole M James is that of a negotiator, navigating the African Diaspora, circling the expanse of queerness and fumbling through womanhood. James creates paintings, digital prints and video work that explore the intersections between digital production and the analog collections of lived experiences. James was born in Chicago and raised in Moreno Valley California. She received a BA from Cal State San Bernardino and MFA from Claremont Graduate University. CM James works and lives in Los Angeles CA.

Mona Kuhn, Artist

Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969, of German descent. In 1989, Kuhn moved to the US and earned her BA from The Ohio State University, before furthering her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently and independent scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Mona Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debuted by Steidl in 2004; followed by Evidence (2007), Native (2010), Bordeaux Series (2011), Private (2014), and She Disappeared into Complete Silence (2018/19). In addition, Kuhn’s latest monograph titled Bushes and Succulents has been published by Stanley Barker Editions, with a debut at Jeu de Paume in Paris, France. Occasionally, Mona teaches at UCLA and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Mona Kuhn’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Kiyosato Museum in Japan. Kuhn’s work has been exhibited at The Louvre Museum and Le Bal in Paris; The Whitechapel Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London; Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland; Leopold Museum in Vienna, and Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Mona Kuhn lives and works in Los Angeles.