Santa Monica Artist Fellowships Awarded to Santa Monica Artists
January 4, 2021 5:00 PM
by Nathan Birnbaum
Five Santa Monica-based artists have been presented with Santa Monica Artist Fellowship awards for 2020-21: visual artist Toba Khedoori and performance artist Marcus Kuiland-Nazario were selected to receive $16,000 Artist Fellowships and writer/performer Lauren Weedman, playwright Leo Garcia, and visual and conceptual artist Hans Baumann, were awarded $4,200 Project Fellowships for the year.
Photos and biographies of the artists may be found on the Cultural Affairs website here.
Direct support to local artists is a priority for the City of Santa Monica, and the City’s Artist Fellowship program is among the largest, public-sector, individual artist programs in the U.S.
"It’s an honor to receive this Fellowship from the City of Santa Monica,” says Mr. Kuiland-Nazario. “It is especially meaningful because I became an artist and activist right here on these very shores.”
The Santa Monica Artist Fellowship was launched in 2009 as part of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs’ Creative Capital cultural plan, which identified support for individual artists as a pillar of the City’s creative ecosystem.
Awardee Lauren Weedman thanks the City for the Fellowship, which, she said, “will allow me to complete my latest show about single mothers living in Santa Monica, Plastic Air.”
A panel of arts professionals convened last spring to conduct a competitive review process and recommend these awardees to the Santa Monica Arts Commission, which has final approval of the awards. Panelists for the 2020-21 awards were visual artist Deborah Scacco, playwright and performance artist Asher Hartman, and former City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Director Olga Garay-English.
ABOUT THE ARTIST FELLOWS
Toba Khedoori was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1994) and a MacArthur Foundation Grant (2002). In 2016, a major survey of Khedoori’s work, curated by Franklin Sirmans, was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami in 2017. Her work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions worldwide, including the Saint Louis Art Museum (2003); Royal Hiberian Academy, Dublin (2002); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2001); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1997); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompido; Schaulager, Basel; Albertina, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Walker Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Broad; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an artist in residence at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. He is a Founding Artist of both Highways Performance Space and the 18th Street Arts Center, and co-founder of both the Community Health Project (Formerly Clean Needles Now) and Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, a contemporary art space in Puerto Vallarta. His practice is rooted in storytelling and manifests in curatorial and event production on the local and international art world stage, building on his long career as a visual and performance artist. His focus has been emotionally intense, psychologically - and sometimes physically - intimate performances that unpack the interwoven threads of poignant personal and broader societal histories. He has performed and exhibited his works both nationally and internationally.
Leo Garcia is an award‐winning playwright, filmmaker, performance curator, producer, visual artist, and actor who has served as Highways Performance Space's Artistic Director and Executive Director since 2003. He developed and presented more than 800 performance works at Highways. As a playwright, Garcia chronicled more than ten generations of his New Mexico family history in The Abduction of Hernan Cortes: The New Mexico Cycle. The cycle explores the themes of abduction: of land, of self, and of alien abduction, and follows the lives of five New Mexican families from 1598 to the present. Garcia’s plays have won awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, New York Foundation for the Arts, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, The National Hispanic Media Coalition, and MCA/Universal, and have been presented by New York Shakespeare Public Festival (The Public), Jewish Repertory Theatre, International Arts Relations Theatre (INTAR), Los Angeles Theater Center, South Coast Repertory, Tiffany Theatre, and Santa Fe Stages, among many others.
Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner. His work addresses emergent energy futures, ecological collapse, and nonhuman timescales. Baumann holds degrees from Harvard University and Prifysgol Caerdydd and has lectured at many institutions, including the Universität Bern, Cornell University, and the Art Center College of Design. His projects and essays have been featured in a variety of publications, including e-flux architecture and The Invention of the American Desert (forthcoming, University of California Press). His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Antipode Foundation for Radical Geography, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).
Lauren Weedman is an actress, playwright and author. Her first show, Homecoming, began at Seattle’s On the Boards before transferring to off-Broadway. Bust, which focuses on her work in the L.A. county jail, was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship for playwriting. Lauren has written and performed more than eleven solo plays including Homecoming, Amsterdam, If Ornaments Had Lips, Huu, Rash, Wreckage, Bust, No… You Shut Up, People's Republic of Portland. The latest, Lauren Weedman Doesn't Live Here Anymore, is her second commission from Portland Center Stage. Television credits include The Daily Show, True Blood, United States of Tara, Reno 911, Curb Your Enthusiasm, New Girl, Arrested Development. She was Doris on HBO’s Looking, and Horny Patty on HBO’s Hung. Film: Imagine That, Date Night, Judd Apatow’s A Five Year Engagement, The Gambler, Little Hours and Joshy. Lauren’s new book, Miss Fortune: Fresh Perspectives on Having it All from Someone Who is NOT OKAY, was published by Plume in March 2016. Lauren is the host of the popular Moth storytelling slam in Santa Monica and continues to perform and tour across the country.
Authored By
Nathan Birnbaum
Cultural Affairs Administrator