Artist Talk: Martin Alexander and Lauren Verdugo

On the occasion of the exhibition, Building Blocks: Process & Wood, Los Angeles-based artists Martin Alexander and Lauren Verdugo talk about their work and their shared interests in materiality, reconceptions of functionality, and expressions of identity. Both artists were filmed for the Craft Video Dictionary.

Martin Alexander Hernandez is a multidisciplinary sculptor and woodworker. He graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a BFA in Woodworking in 2018. Shortly after this, he opened his studio practice, Martin Alexander Studio, in Los Angeles, California. Since then, he has produced sculptural work and designed furniture utilizing both his personal studio and wood shops throughout the Los Angeles area. He has also honed his skills by apprenticing under a variety of artists and furniture studios.   

Hernandez’s work fuses traditional craft techniques with a conceptual design approach. He is interested in material sustainability, often producing sculptural work with found materials. He currently serves as the shop tech at Allied Woodshop in Los Angeles.

Lauren Verdugo is a Southern California-based artist, woodworker, and furniture designer. Verdugo began their formal training in 2016 by apprenticing with master woodworker Larry White, whom they met through an internship at the Sam and Alfreda Maloof foundation. They went on to complete their BA in Applied Design at San Diego State University in 2021, and are currently enrolled in the Wood MFA program at California State University, Long Beach.

Verdugo’s designs emphasize the unique attributes of their source material, including history, meaning, and physical features. Minimalist forms are punctuated by playful decorative elements. Verdugo rhythmically juxtaposes hard and soft lines, heavy and light features, resulting in works which appear sturdy, yet distinctly energetic. In addition to their multimedia arts practice, they teach wood workshops at the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation in Alta Loma, California and at Allied Woodshop in Los Angeles.

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Artist Talk: Larry White

Woodworking artist Larry White talks about his development with Sam Maloof and his ensuing decades-long practice in both woodworking and art. Learn about his stream-of-consciousness creative process and how his inspiration comes from a wide range of sources.

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Artist Talk: Reuben Foat and Ryan Taber

On the occasion of the exhibition, Building Blocks: Process & Wood, Los Angeles-based artists Reuben Foat and Ryan Taber will talk about their shared interest in reconsidering historic furniture processes and their perspectives on furniture education approaches and opportunities. Both artists were consulted for the Craft Video Dictionary.

Reuben Foat is a furniture designer and sculptor who is recognized for his traditional and technological approach to furniture. Finding inspiration in both old and new approaches to making, Foat creates much of his work using technologies like computer-aided-design and computer-aided-manufacturing.

Foat was raised in Mukwonago, Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin where he received a BS in Art and learned furniture design. Foat then took on several positions as a cabinet maker, furniture restorer, and furniture designer before attending San Diego State University where he received his MFA with a concentration in furniture design and digital fabrication. Foat currently works out of his studio in Long Beach, California, while serving as a professor and chair of the Woodworking Department at Cerritos College.

Ryan Taber is an artist, woodworker, and educator. Since 2015, he has served as head of the Wood program at the School of Art at California State University, Long Beach. The program has continued to evolve under Taber’s leadership, emphasizing sustainability and critical thinking at every step in the creative process. 

Taber’s art practice is discursive, drawing on painting, photography, sculpture and furniture making. Each piece utilizes an intricate web of historical references to interrogate notions of art and visual culture. The work considers historical shifts in social perspectives on objecthood and materiality, which is reflected in the CSULB Wood program’s initiative to up cycle wood from nearby dead trees in order to reduce the industrially produced materials used by students. The challenges inherent in working with imperfect, recycled wood encourage Taber’s students to continuously problem solve and maintain an ongoing dialogue with their materials.

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Artist Talk: John Luebtow and Stephen Edwards

On the occasion of the exhibition, Between the Lines, John Luebtow and Stephen Edwards talk about their overlapping early development in Los Angeles, careers as teaching artists, and how they used their experience to build state-of-the-art shops for glassmaking on the West and East coasts.

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Textile Arts LA Artist Talk: Ben Cuevas

The Craft in America Center hosted this talk for Textile Arts Los Angeles.

A Deep Dive into My Body of Work and Artistic Practice

Ben works most notably in the art of hand knitting that transcends across platforms of performance, video, sculpture, and installation. His work seeks to defy the distinctions of art and craft, digital and handmade, male and female binaries.

“I am an artist whose work is rooted in concepts of otherness, inspired by my queer, non-binary, HIV-positive, Latinx identity. As intersectionality informs my practice, my work is naturally interdisciplinary — involving textiles, photography, sculpture, installation, and more.  A central part of my artwork is based in fiber, underscoring queer/feminist ideologies within the gendered history of women’s work.”

Photo by Stacey Meineke

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Tea Time with Potter Jeff Oestreich: Artist Talk & Trunk Show 

Jeff Oestreich was trained in the austere simplicity of traditional Asian pottery while serving as an apprentice to Bernard Leach in England in the 1960s–70s. He will talk about his time at Leach Pottery in St. Ives and how its legacy continues to influence and resonate with contemporary artists. He will discuss and show his own work and the work of three potters who also apprenticed with Leach:  Kat Wheeler, John Beddings, Roelof Ulys.

In the British tradition, after the talk, tea and scones will be served while attendees can meet the artist.

Libby Buckley, current director of Leach Pottery, will begin the presentation with a brief Zoom conversation about recent developments at the studio, including new buildings and exciting programs. 

Let us know if you plan to attend: rsvp@craftinamerica.org

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Online Artist Talk: Mira Nakashima

Mira Nakashima, director of George Nakashima Woodworkers and daughter of the innovative furniture maker, gave a presentation on her father’s legacy and philosophy.

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Fueled by Fury with Joan Takayama-Ogawa & Renee Tajima-Peña

The Japanese American National Museum presents a conversation between ceramic artist Joan Takayama-Ogawa and award-winning filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña about using their anger at injustice to create powerful art that inspires social change. This conversation is presented on the occasion of our current exhibition, Joan Takayama-Ogawa: Ceramic Beacon.

The event will take place in person at the Tateuchi Democracy Forum at the Japanese American National Museum (100 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, 90012) and will also be streaming online. RSVP is requested.

Not My America: Online Artist Talk with Joan Takayama-Ogawa

Join ceramic artist Joan Takayama-Ogawa for an insightful discussion of her decades-long practice. Joan Takayama-Ogawa’s work consistently tackles the critical issues of our times; from the degradation of the ocean and coral to school shootings. She delivers her sculptural commentary with fierce intensity, tempered by levity and visual whimsy. Listen in and learn about how she channels her anger into art. Live streamed October, 7, 2022.

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Reading Craft Book Event—Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision

Please join the Craft in America Center for an online presentation and discussion with editors Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer on their book Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision. The book was awarded the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publishing Grant.

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s artwork is marked by her compassionate and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues, from immigration and environmental precarity to the resilience of Indigenous ancestral values and the necessity of decolonial aesthetics in art making. Drawing on the fiber arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminist art, and Indigenous fiber- and loom-based traditions, Jimenez Underwood’s art encompasses needlework, weaving, painted and silkscreened pieces, installations, sculptures, and performance. This volume’s contributors write about her place in feminist textile art history, situate her work among that of other Indigenous-identified feminist artists, and explore her signature works, series, techniques, images, and materials.

Redefining the practice of weaving, Jimenez Underwood works with repurposed barbed wire, yellow caution tape, safety pins, plastic bags, and crosses Indigenous, Chicana, European, and Euro-American art practices, pushing the arts of the Americas beyond Eurocentric aesthetics toward culturally hybrid and Indigenous understandings of art making. Jimenez Underwood’s redefinition of weaving and painting alongside the socially and environmentally engaged dimensions of her work position her as one of the most vital artists of our time.

The book is available for purchase directly from the Duke University Press or your preferred bookseller.

You can preview the book’s introduction here. And find a discount coupon here.

About the editors

Laura Elisa Pérez is professor in the Program of Chicanx Latinx Studies and the Department of Ethnic Studies, and since 2018-19, is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas Latinx Research Center, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a core faculty member of the doctoral program in Performance Studies and of the Department of Women’s Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies. Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007), a work in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities. Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial was published by Duke University Press in the fall of 2019 and received a Book Award Honorable mention from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies in 2020. She is currently co-curating with María Esther Fernández a major retrospective of the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive which will open spring of 2023, and editing the exhibition catalog for “Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory.” 

Ann Marie Leimer is Professor of Art at the Juanita and Ralph Harvey School of Visual Arts at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Her published work has appeared in the journals Afterimage, Chicana/Latina Studies, The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies (JOLLAS), and Religion and the Arts and in the books Beyond Heritage, Border Crossings, Chican@ Critical Perspectives and Praxis, New Frontiers in Latin American Borderlands, Tina Fuentes: Marcando el relámpago, LatinX: Artistas de Tejas, Voices in Concert: In the Spirit of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Los Maestros: Early Explorers of Chicano Identity. She has curated several exhibitions of Chicana/o/x art including “¡Adelante Siempre! Recent Work by Southern California Chicana Photographers,” “Chicano Photographer: The 1970s from a Chicano’s Perspective,” and “Globe, AZ: A Community at the Crossroads.” Leimer serves on the National Advisory Board for Mexican American Art Since 1848, a research initiative inaugurated by Karen Mary Davalos and Constance Cortez in 2016, which hosts a searchable digital platform (MAAS1848.umn.edu) and will produce a multi-volume book, Adjacent Imaginaries.

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