Mercedes Dorame is a visual artist born and raised in her ancestral homelands of Tovaangar. She grew up playing on the hillsides of the Southern California, getting to know the deer trails and the smell of grasses in the summertime, learning when the water flows through the creeks and when to look out for rattlesnakes. She calls on these learned and ancestral connections to the land to explore the problematics of visibility and sense of place in a city that sought to erase its Tongva heritage.
Dorame received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Triton Museum, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, The de Saisset Museum, The Montblanc Foundation Collection, and The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum. She is currently permanent faculty at CalArts, was awarded a 2020 Creative Capital grant, and was honored in 2019 by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative “UCLA: Our Stories Our Impact”.
mercedesdorame.com
Kenturah Davis is an artist working between Los Angeles and Accra (Ghana). Her work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, textiles and objects. Her work is in several institutional collections and has been included in exhibitions internationally. She has also been a contributing writer for publications including the LA Times and Brooklyn Rail. She currently teaches at Occidental College in the Art and Art History department. Davis earned her BA from Occidental College and MFA Yale University School of Art.
www.kenturah.com
Occidental College's 2021/22 Wanlass Artist in Residence
EJ Hill is an artist committed to authoring objects, images, and experiences, which elevate bodies and amplify voices that have long been rendered invisible and inaudible by oppressive social structures. Rooted in an endurance-based performance practice, his work focuses largely on challenging the social aspects and systems that construct a body. Hill is interested in how bodies are formed, understood, and valued within different social and cultural contexts, but more specifically, how they redefine the parameters that govern which bodies are allowed to exist freely.
Occidental College's 2020/21 Wanlass Artist in Residence
Los Angeles based artist Carolina Caycedo’s practice is centered on vital issues of environmental justice, power relations, and organized resistance. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities.
Occidental College’s 2019/20 Wanlass Artist in Residence
Shizu Saldamando's drawings, paintings, sculptures, and videos have been exhibited both locally and internationally and experiment with a broad range of surfaces and materials. She has had solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Selected group exhibitions include shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. Saldamando received her B.A. from UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts.
Occidental College's 2018/19 Wanlass Artist in Residence
Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Lin’s recent solo exhibitions were at Portikus, Frankfurt; Bétonsalon, Paris; and Gasworks, London, with upcoming solo exhibitions at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.
Occidental College's 2017/18 Wanlass Artist in Residence
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Hinkle received her MFA in Art & Critical Studies Creative Writing from CalArts and BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Occidental College’s 2016/17 Wanlass Artist in Residence
rafa esparza received his BFA from UCLA and currently works in a variety of mediums, including installation, sculpture, drawing, painting and performance. His work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, Made in L.A. Biennial (2016) at the Hammer Museum; the MexiCali Biennial (2013) at the Vincent Price Art Museum; and in Native Strategies 3 at Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013). Esparza was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014) and an Art Matters Grant (2014).
Occidental College's 2015/16 Wanlass Artist in Residence
CamLab is the collaborative practice of Anna Mayer and Jemima Wyman, which began at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 2005. Mayer and Wyman are united by a common interest in phenomena such as scopophilia (sexual pleasure derived from looking), embodied knowledge, and the destabilization of a singular subjectivity. CamLab believes that a contemporary politics of pleasure must acknowledge the contiguity of language and body in facilitating a spectrum of experience that includes alterity, intimacy, and humor. This philosophy materializes in CamLab's process, in particular the duo's social practice work and relational object-making.
Occidental College's 2014/15 Wanlass Artist in Residence
Lucky Dragons is an ongoing collaboration between Los Angeles-based artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck. Active since 2000, Lucky Dragons explore a participatory and conceptual approach to making music, interactive performances and installations, and playful, humanistic use of digital tools. Their cooperative performances blur the line between teacher and student or performer and audience to create a shared experience and dialogue. Fischbeck and Rara have presented collaborative work in a wide variety of contexts, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.
Occidental College's First Wanlass Artist in Residence
Liz Collins was Occidental College's inaugural Wanlass Artist in Residence. Her day long site-specific performance on November 6, 2013 was the first artwork brought to the campus through the Wanlass program. For her work, KN12 , Collins worked with Advanced Projects in Interdisciplinary Arts students.
