Mentors
Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art; co-editor/founder of literary arts publication The Encyclopedia Project. She also co-edited War Diaries, an anthology of Black gay men’s desire and survival, which was nominated for a LAMBDA literary award. She has been a juror for Frameline’s San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Film Arts Foundation Independent Film Festival. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the journals Animal Shelter, Black Clock, and Mandorla; Essay Press’ e-chapbook Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay; the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series, and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women. She has given numerous visual presentations on Black arts, culture, research and creative phenomena at the Brooklyn Museum, Pratt Institute, the Peabody Essex Museum, Evergreen College, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Hammer Museum, the West Hollywood Library, and elsewhere. Her writing has also appeared in artist’s catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Cauleen Smith. Tisa Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts, and is at work on a novel, The Curator. She lives in Los Angeles.
Erica Cho is a visual artist who works in experimental film, short-form narrative, and LGBTQ and Asian American media art. The subjects of her work include the intersection of settler-colonialism and climate change, and the history of Korean War and migration. Her first DIY stop-motion animation KIMBERLY BAHP MAKES SUSHI FOR TWO premiered at the MADCAT WIMMIN’S FILM FESTIVAL in 1998. Other films include SCHOOL BOY ART, WE GOT MOVES YOU AIN’T EVEN HEARD OF, and OUR COSMOS OUR CHAOS. She has exhibited and screened at the San Jose Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Redcat Gallery at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Wing Luke Museum, and the Center for Contemporary Arts in Scotland. She is Assistant Professor of Visual Art at UC San Diego and LGBT Film Curator for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Cho has received grants from Leeway, Traction, Creative Capital, California Community Foundation and was honored as one of OUT Magazine’s OUT100 for “remarkable contributions to LGBTQ culture.”
Sandra de la Loza utilizes a transdisciplinary approach to examine underlying power dynamics embedded in social space often drawing upon extensive archival research and mobilizing community-based networks. She is the founder of The Pocho Research Society, an on-going project that engages the subject of “History” through critical inquiry and artistic processes. The PRS explores mythmaking and History through research based projects that result in installations, films and public interventions. In a recent project, Mural Remix, a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of art as part of the Getty’s PST initiative, she took the role of a performative archivist to expand on existing understandings of 1970’s Chicana/o murals. As an artist entering the archive, she occupies the position normally held by historians, curators and scholars to interrogate the power embedded in the act of history making. By gathering slicing, blowing up and remixing archival material, she explores History as an elastic space of practice, one that can be shaped, stretched and expanded while making visible the processes in which dominant narratives are created. De la Loza received her B.A. in Chicano Studies at the University of California, at Berkeley and her MFA in Photography at Cal State Long Beach. Her book, The Pocho Research Society’s Field Guide to Erased and Invisible Histories, (2011) is now available through the University of Washington Press.
Rafa Esparza was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges in medium from installation, sculpture, and drawing to painting and, predominantly, live performance. Woven into his bodies of work are interests in history, personal narrative, and kinship. Esparza is also inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. In addition, he is persistent in staging situations where he attempts to experience a time and space inaccessible to him. Esparza has performed in a variety of spaces including community-engaged organizations, such as AIDS Project Los Angeles, galleries and museums, such as the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, and SOMArts, as well as a variety of public sites throughout LA. He is a recipient of the 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, the 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, and the 2014 Art Matters Grant.
Simon Leung is Professor of Art at UC Irvine. His projects in various media include an opera set in Griffith Park; a live/video performance addressing AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a trilogy on “the residual space of the Vietnam War;” an extended proposal of Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics; a meditation on the site/non-site dialectic by way of E. A. Poe; site/situation specific works based on the squatting body; contemporary “art worker’s theater” as institutional critique; and a two decade long collaboration with Warren Niesluchowski, an ongoing extended project which takes one person’s life language as an intertexual meditation on desertion, exile, precarity, refusal, and war. Leung has participated in the Guangzhou Triennial (2008), the Venice Biennale (2003), the Whitney Biennial (1993), as well as exhibitions at MoMA, MOCA, 1A Space (Hong Kong), the Generali Foundation (Vienna), and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw). Leung has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Clark Institute, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council, ARTMATTERS, the University of California Institute for the Arts, the Durfee Foundation, the California Community Foundation, and the City of Los Angeles. As a writer, he has published in a variety of formats and venues. He received the 2008 Art Journal Award from the College Art Association for his essay “The Look of Law” and is co-editor, with Zoya Kocur, of the anthology Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985.
Fred Moten lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer, 2000); In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007); HUGHSON’S TAVERN (Leon Works, 2008); B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2009); THE FEEL TRIO (Letter Machine Editions, 2014); The Little Edges (Wesleyan, 2014); THE SERVICE PORCH (Letter Machine Editions, 2016); and co-author with Stefano Harney of THE UNDERCOMMONS: FUGITIVE PLANNING & BLACK STUDY (Minor Compositions, 2013).
Yong Soon Min has always considered herself a Cold War baby, having been born in Korea the same year the Korean War ended in armistice. Cold War is a marker for the ideological divide that affects us to this day and has become a foundation for her multi-disciplinary artistic practice. Her immigration history continues to inform her subject formations in a career spanning 40 years that includes art, activism, teaching, and independent curating. Min’s art practice, inclusive of curatorial projects, engages interdisciplinary sources and processes in the examination of representation and cultural identities as well as the intersection of history and memory. Among her numerous grants and awards, she has received the Fulbright Senior Research Grant, the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship from the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Korea Foundation Grant, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Highlights of Min’s national and international exhibitions have been the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Baguio Art Festivals (Philippines), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (Korea), the 10th Havana Biennial (Cuba), and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (China). Her curatorial projects have most notably been THERE: Sites of Korean Diaspora (2002) and transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix (2007-9). With an MFA degree from the University of California, Berkeley, she is now Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine.
Camilo Ontiveros is an artist based in Los Angeles. Originally from Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico, he migrated to California in 1993. His projects focus on the subject of migration and work at the intersection of systems of art, law, and politics. Some examples of his work include 2000 Pounds of Metal, where he intervened in the informal economy of scrap metal collectors in Los Angeles, Free Entry, where he interrogated the racial profiling of S.B.1070 and proposed that the museum allow all who were being profiled by this law to enter the museum for free, and El Pedon, where he cut one square meter of soil from Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico, and asked the museum to deal with the United States Department of Agricultural in order to bring the soil into the country for an exhibition. While the latter two projects were not technically realized, Ontiveros engaged in a form of institutional collaboration, where he asked the institution to participate in the economic, political, and legal processes that would result in the realization of the work. He received his BFA in Art in 2006 from the University of California, San Diego and his MFA in Art in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the co-owner of New Electronic World Security, a family-run company based in Orange County.
Mario Ontiveros is an art critic, curator and assistance professor of modern and contemporary art history in the Department of Art at CSUN. His research centers on issues of solidarity, empowerment, impermanence, and social belonging. His current projects consider the ways artists, curators, cultural practitioners address cross cultural exchange, initiate public debate/dialogue, and facilitate political mobilization in response to the economic pressures and geopolitical transformations of transnationalism in general and the material conditions and sociopolitical factors of daily life in particular. He has written essays about or presented research on Mario Ybarra, Jr., Faith Wilding, Shizu Saldamando, Ana Serrano, Yreina Cervántez, Christina Fernandez, Gran Fury, Group Material, Harry Gamboa Jr., Judith F. Baca, Asco, and Michael Alvarez, among others. Since 2012, he has served on the editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Along with his contributions to the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA), he has collaborated on projects organized by the Getty Research Institute, UCLA’s World Arts and Culture, the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA, Amherst), the California Arts Council, and the Social and Public Resource Center (SPARC), to name a few. He received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California Los Angeles.
Gina Osterloh earned her BA from DePaul University in 1996 and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2007. Upcoming solo exhibitions include the artist’s first solo exhibition in NYC at Higher Pictures in November 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include Nothing To See Here There Never Was (2015) at Silverlens Gallery in Manila, Philippines; Press Erase Outline Slice Strike Make An X Prick! (2014) at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles; and Anonymous Front (2012) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Osterloh’s work was also included in Fragments of an Unknowable Whole (2014) at the Urban Arts Space, the Ohio State University; and This Is Not America: Resistance, Protest and Poetics (2014) at the Arizona State University Art Museum. Group Dynamic, Osterloh’s first monograph, was published by LACE and distributed by RAM Publications in 2013. In addition to Land’s Edge, Osterloh teaches at various universities in Southern California. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Suné Woods is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work takes the form of multi-channel video installations, photographs, and collage. Woods practice examines absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. She also uses microsomal sites such as family to understand larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms, & formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence/presence of a physical body. To Sleep With Terra presently at Papillion in Leimert Park and Nadar at Commonwealth & Council in Koreatown. She has participated in residencies at Headlands Center of the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Woods is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative. A ritual of questioning is at the core of Woods’ own practice and she is committed to the decolonial strategies that are At Land’s Edge mission. Woods is interested in an affordable platform that reaches across communities that At Lands’s Edge provides for research fellows. Woods served four years as Visiting Faculty in the Photography and Media Program at California Institute of the Arts, has worked with graduate students at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and youth throughout the United States in various community programs in the visual arts.