Please join us for a lecture with artist Bessma Khalaf.

Date: Tuesday, October 15, 2019 7:00 — 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Born in Iraq, Bessma Khalaf emigrated to San Diego, California in 1990 just two years after the end of the Iraq/Iran war and just before the first Gulf War - those years of her childhood are not lost in the work.

Balancing mischievousness and malice, Khalaf’s processes of degradation (burning, smashing, consuming, etc.) explore the boundaries of landscape, place, and image. Khalaf proposes that beyond the nihilism of destruction, voids and absences possess generative possibilities, either in nature or in her practice. Figuratively and pictorially, voids carve an ambiguous space in the representation of landscape and the documentation of performance. Entrenched in process, Khalaf mixes mysticism, futility, and endurance when pitting herself against the overwhelming vastness of her surroundings, and the largeness of the romantic landscape.

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Please join us for a lecture with artist Kamrooz Aram.

Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2019 7:00 — 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Aram’s diverse practice often engages the complicated relationship between Modernism and the so-called decorative arts. Through a variety of forms including painting, collage, drawing and installation, Aram has found the potential for image-making to function critically in its use as a tool for a certain renegotiation of history.

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Please join us for a lecture with artist Robin Hill.

Date: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 7:00 — 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Robin Hill is an artist whose work focuses on the intersection between drawing, photography, and sculpture. Her recent work takes on a collaborative sensibility, where objects and materials which have been rejected by others have served as starting points for acts of transformation.

The underlying conceptual thread that moves throughout her work is her interest in collection, extraction, re-presentation, and in transforming seemingly inconsequential matter and into meaningful statements about matter itself, which ultimately becomes a mediation on time. She strives to give shape to nuance and to relocate familiar things in an unfamiliar order. While handmade might best describe her early work, hand-altered is a more apt description for the work she is doing today.

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Please join us for a lecture with Oxbow Alumni Artist Clay Gibson (OS20).

Date: Tuesday, April 9, 2019 7:00 — 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Clay Gibson is a tattooer and co-owner of the tattoo shop, Come What May. Prior to tattooing he attended Oxbow OS20 and later the California Institute of the Arts where he enlarged on ideas of building community through art-making and political praxis. He later went on to live in Mexico City where he attended the SOMA Summer Art Residency Program and began to work with the collective, Oa4s. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Please join us for a lecture with artist Judith Belzer.

Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2019 7:00 — 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First St

Artist Biography

Judith Belzer is an artist who lives and works in Berkeley, California. Using primarily oil paint on canvas, she explores human engagement with the natural world, often looking to the man-made landscape in order to consider this dynamic and sometimes fraught relationship.

Belzer's work is exhibited regularly in galleries and museums and has been acquired by numerous private and institutional collections. Most recently her work was included in group exhibitions at The Berkeley Art Museum, The San Francisco Jewish Museum and at the center for art + the environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. “Lana Turner a journal of poetry and opinion” published a portfolio of her work late last year and Terrain.com will do the same early this year. Belzer is a visiting lecturer in the department of Visual Art and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and is a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She Graduated Magna Cum Laude from Barnard College with a degree in English and studied art at The New York Studio School.

judithbelzer.com

Please join us for a lecture with artist Shiva Ahmadi.

Date: Tuesday, March 12, 2019 7:00 — 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography from Haines Gallery in San Francisco

Iranian-American, b. 1975

Lives and works in the Bay Area, California

Shiva Ahmadi’s practice borrows from the artistic traditions of Iran and the Middle East to critically examine global political tensions and social concerns. Having come of age in the tumultuous years following the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Ahmadi moved to the United States in 1998, and has been based in California since 2015.

Ahmadi works across a variety of media, including watercolor painting, sculpture, and video animation; consistent through her pieces are the ornate patterns and vibrant colors drawn from Persian, Indian and Middle Eastern art. In her carefully illustrated worlds, formal beauty complicates global legacies of violence and oppression. These playful fantasy realms are upon closer inspection macabre theaters of politics and war: watercolor paint bloodies the canvas, and sinister global machinations play out in abstracted landscapes populated by faceless figures and dominated by oil refineries and labyrinthine pipelines.

Shiva Ahmadi studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; and Azad University, Tehran, Iran. In addition to recent solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017) and Asia Society Museum, New York, NY (2014), her work has been included in group shows including Home Land Security, For-Site Foundation, San Francisco, CA (2016); Fireflies in the Night Take Wing, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Athens, Greece; and Global/Local 1960-2015: Six Artists from Iran, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY (all 2016); Catastrophe and the Power of Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2018); and Revolution Generations, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Farjam Collection, Dubai, UAE; TDIC Corporate Collection, Abu Dhabi, UAE; and the private collection of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, among others.

In 2016, Ahmadi was awarded the ‘Anonymous Was A Woman’ Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Shiva, a new monograph of her work, was published by Skira in Spring 2017.

shivaahmadistudio.com

hainesgallery.com

Please join us for a lecture with artist Nicole Mueller.

Date: Tuesday, March 5, 2019 7:00 — 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Nicole Mueller is a San Francisco based artist and painter. Through large scale collages, murals, and installations fusing color and light, she creates shifting environments and navigates spaces in flux. Mueller’s paintings are both exuberant and complex, with fluctuating figure-ground relationships, vibrant color, and pockets of deep space creating pathways that weave in and out of compositions both dense and open-ended. Her process-based works are painted, cut, collaged, arranged and rearranged through an additive process of layering, with the resulting works existing in a perpetual state of motion in between chaos and cohesion. With her installations, Mueller aims to give physical form to the abstract sensation of light, merge the tangible and intangible, and provide pathways for moving through liminal states that remain fluid over time. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Proyecto 'ACE (Argentina), and Creative Paradox (Maryland). Her work has been exhibited in California, New York, and Maryland. She earned her BFA in painting and illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and recently was the recipient of the Mark M. Glickman and Lanette M. McClure Artist Award given to emerging artists in California.

nicolemueller.com

Please join us for a lecture with artist Natan Daskal

Date: Tuesday, February 19, 2019 7:00 — 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

When does Life become Art? Natan's interest lies in the performance of everyday life and how the artist mind and creative experience can aid us in living better lives. Primarily an educator, Natan is Teacher-As-Artist, approaching the classroom/studio as a laboratory of living, co-creating experiences with students that aim to deepen awareness and to open new possibilities for personal and worldwide change. A student of dance pioneer Anna Halprin's, he has been shaped by her approach to performance that merges the science of the moving body with felt experience, psychology, the natural environment, community, ritual, and the aesthetics of everyday activity.

Natan is on faculty at the Tamalpa Institute, an internationally recognized training program in movement-based expressive arts; teaches creative movement classes to children; and has taught movement workshops in a variety of settings. Natan studied ballet at the Joffrey School in New York City, received his BFA in Communication Design at Parsons the New School for Design, and received an MA in Education from Goddard College where he studied the intersection of somatics, creativity, and education.

Please join us for a lecture with Oxbow Alumni Artist Lydia Glenn-Murray (OS20).

Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018 7:00 — 8:30pm
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

Lydia Glenn-Murray is an artist, educator and organizer. She attended Oxbow OS20 and had a transformative experience there that confirmed her commitment to art and interdisciplinary learning. She ran an experimental art space in Highland Park, Los Angeles called Chin's Push, an ephemeral project mostly captured through third party documentation including press in Art in America, Artforum, LA Times, LA Weekly, ArtReview, ParisLA, Artsy, and others. Most recently, she moved to her hometown of Berkeley, California to direct 2727 California Street, a non-profit art and education initiative and residency program in an old corner store in South Berkeley.

Please join us for a lecture with artist James Sansing.

Date: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 7:00 — 8:30 PM
Location: The CIA at Copia Theater, 500 First Street, Napa, CA

Artist Biography

James Sansing’s films have shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival among others.

His work has also been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ampersand International Arts, Mark Wolfe Contemporary as well as other venues, nationally and internationally.

Awards, residencies, and fellowships include the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Pirkle Jones Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Kala Art Institute, Recology, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation and others.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is a graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute.

jamessansing.com