NEW EDITION: Work by Recent Verge Studio Artists
April 4 - May 11, 2025
reception: Friday, April 4, 5-8pm
artist talk:
Featuring: Amy Elkins, Serena Cole, Lyn Freeman, Jupiter Lockett, Nitheen Ramalingam, Orlando Tirado, Amy Vidra
Verge Center for the Arts is pleased to present New Edition: Work by Recent Verge Studio Artists.
New Edition showcases the work of Verge resident artists who have joined the program since our last studio survey exhibition in 2023. The work featured spans everything from gestural sculpture and narrative painting to reclaimed materials and sensual photography. Recent Verge studio artists include transplants to Sacramento, both national and international, recent MFA graduates, and existing regional artists. This exhibition is an exciting opportunity to get acquainted with new art and artists in our community.
Verge’s residency program is now in its 15th year serving close to 150 emerging and career artists. The program offers low and in some cases no cost studio space as well as access to an array of resources including a clay studio, printmaking facility, risographic printer, and figure drawing studio. Applications are accepted twice annually and are reviewed by a panel of community artists and arts professionals.
ARTIST BIOS:
AMY ELKINS – Amy Elkins is a visual artist and educator based in Berkeley and Sacramento, CA. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She works primarily in photography and installation and has spent the past fifteen years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of gender, race and identity, including how they are impacted by systems of power: prisons, the military, colonization, and hierarchies built upon social constructs. Most recently Elkins’ work pivots to include explorations of self as well as her family’s deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th generation born on Tongva/Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles area with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary.
SERENA COLE – Serena Cole received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2011 from the California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work in multiple solo exhibitions including Gallery 16 (San Francisco), Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis), and Stephanie Chefas Projects (Portland). Her work has also been exhibited widely at venues such as Dodge Gallery (New York), Roberts and Tilton (Los Angeles), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Phillips de Pury (New York). Her work has been published in The Huffington Post, Juxtapoz Magazine, KQED Arts, Comstock’s Magazine, and more. She lives and works in Sacramento, CA. She is an adjunct professor at Sierra College and American River College.
LYN FREEMAN – Lyn Freeman made a recent return to a dedicated studio practice a few years ago after originally earning her MFA from Ohio University in 1980. Freeman’s lyrical sculptures are both weightless and substantive, using playful gestural forms to occupy space.
JUPITER LOCKETT – Jupiter is a contemporary abstract artist, who currently resides in Sacramento, California. His work is created to make the viewer feel comfortable and uneasy at the same time. Focusing on beings who are daily ostracized, while giving light to the humanity of dark skinned people, who originate from Africa. Capturing the essence from the figures on canvas, through a child’s perspective; reminding the viewer of the innocence, that Black Americans are robbed of daily. The imagery in his paintings evokes a reminder, that no matter the form of suppression, beauty and power cannot be taken away. His goal as an artist is not to make the viewer like him, but to make them see the world through a pair of eyes that will convict the ignorance humanity has been taught. Fresh back from his artist residency in France, at Chateau d’Orquevaux, Jupiter is gearing up for his second and third residencies in September 2021, at the Imago Artist Residency in Tsarimir, Bulgaria; as well as the SkopArt Residency in Skopelos, Greece of October 2021.
NITHEEN RAMALINGAM – Nitheen is an Indian Artist currently living and working in Sacramento, California, having recently earned his MFA from UC Davis. “I was living at my home in Chennai, India during the pandemic after a gap of six years. I was observing and sketching my place in our family home. However, I was also sketching a lot in the streets, especially the traffic junctions, tea shops and fruit & flower markets in the evenings. On large sheets of paper, I have been making repeated marks and erasures using Charcoal and pastels to depict and think about the restful scenes from my home and the contrasting busy streets outside of it. I have been placing different large drawings next to each other, giving them an imposing presence. This body of work is born with a background of only spending vacations at my hometown while I was away in a different geography and linguistic region in India with a contrasting socio-political ethos (fascist politics). I am interested and curious to understand my own place with this new experience, knowledge, and time. I am trying to look at it from a new perspective, trying to understand its socio-political present and the possible future. As I am living in northern California the past six months, I find myself drawing places from back home along with the places from here, where I am finding both similarities and great differences. Depicting signages and using writing contextualizes the images talking about these two places.”
ORLANDO TIRADO – Orlando Tirado (b. 1982, El Organo, San Luis Potosí, Mexico) is a photographer and an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. His feature films include Medeas (2013), Hannah (2017), and Monica (2022), co-written with Director Andrea Pallaoro. He received the Sergei Parajanov Award for Outstanding Poetic Vision for Medeas at the Tbilisi International Film Festival. Hannah was nominated for a César for Best Foreign Film in 2018 and star Charlotte Rampling won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. Monica features Trace Lysette, Patricia Clarkson, Adriana Barraza, and Emily Browning, and will premiere in the official competition of the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
AMY VIDRA – Amy Vidra is a Sacramento-based conceptual and abstract alternative media artist challenging the narratives we are told or that we tell ourselves. Her work combines and transforms narratives of past, present, and future, connecting and integrating old and new narratives. Her work often utilizes materials of textiles, photographs, and plaster, while thread is the connector, connecting time, connecting space; stitched, embedded, metaphorically and literally holding them together. Vidra holds her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and her Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling from Southwestern College, Santa Fe. She is an art preparator and teaches art healing workshops throughout the Sacramento area.
ON VIEW: April 4 – May 11, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, April 4, 2025 | 5-8PM
DECOLONIZATION: Spencer Keeton Cunningham
January 11 - March 23, 2025
reception: Saturday, January 11th I 5-8 PM
artist talk:
DEDICATED TO RICHARD BLUECLOUD CASTANEDA
Spencer Keeton Cunningham
American Painter, Colville Tribe
Born 1983
Verge Center for the Arts is proud to present DECOLONIZATION, a solo show of work by visionary artist Spencer Keeton Cunningham. Cunningham is an enrolled member of the Colville Tribe from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Northeastern Washington. In his new work, Cunningham explores themes both autobiographical and societal in form from Decolonization and cultural archetypes to reservation life and alternate American Indian histories. In the past 22 years of his professional art career Cunningham continues to develop a unique visual language laced with humor, satire, and a tenacity to paint a vivid portrait of an ongoing colonization of North America. His work has earned him a place in the contemporary art world where he resides like a lone wolf.
With the scale of his current body of work, Cunningham’s paintings reach a mountainous 20ft tall, dwarfing the viewer with gargantuan works of art. Cunningham’s long-spanning career has led him to work with cult icons such as Buck 65 and his paintings are in the permanent collection of the SFMoMA, BAMPFA, the Crocker Art Museum amongst other museums. He has exhibited extensively internationally including museums in China, Los Angeles, New York, Japan, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In addition, Cunningham has worked locally in Sacramento on various public art projects and continues to create work in the form of large scale sculpture, paintings, books, records, films and public art in the San Francisco Bay Area where he has resided for the past 20 years, and beyond.
FROM THE ARTIST:
“This will be my most personal exhibition to date. I’m hoping the viewer can enjoy these paintings and get something from them. The exhibit will be an autobiographical journey blended together with the usual themes of my work — Indigenous rights, environmental issues, themes of animal mythology, history, archetypes, war, the future decolonization of North America and the rest of the planet, as well as some new ideas I have yet to explore in an exhibition thus far.
These paintings are a snapshot into my life and the world I’ve created up to this point with my art practice. I welcome people into that world and hopefully it’s an enjoyable experience.
The goal of the show is to help decolonize the minds of the viewers who see it; art should educate and bring up important dialogues. I choose to use humor at times in art to playfully talk about serious subject matter. It’s all about just starting a dialogue.
Hopefully this show might even inspire people to become artists themselves — because it’s not about me, or my ego, or alienating the working class person from the art world. I’d rather welcome them in and make art to help other people who are struggling.”
ON VIEW: January 11-March 23, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, January 11, 2025 | 5-9PM
With special guests: Ras K’ Dee and Nizhoni Ellenwood
with a performance by N8 the GR8 from The CUFISH
[PLACEHOLDER: SWALLOWTAIL]
November 22 - December 8, 2024
reception:
artist talk:
Student Photography Exhibit Explores Land and Belonging at Local State Parks
“You are not just visitors to this land anymore—you are also stewards who carry responsibility for its safekeeping.”
– Meyo Marrufo, artist and participant in the [Placeholder: Swallowtail] class project
Two concurrent two-week exhibits of student photography will be on display at the State Indian Museum and Verge Center for the Arts. The exhibits, both titled “[Placeholder: Swallowtail],” emerge from a collaboration between Sac State Photo and California State Parks, Sacramento District. Thirty-five senior students in the Photography BFA program spent months researching and photographing the landscape of the State Indian Museum and Sutter’s Fort. Students visited the site repeatedly, learning from Native American contemporary artists, culture bearers and tribal ecological knowledge holders as well as State Parks staff. The focus of the ongoing investigations is how to recognize —and, in many cases, attempt to repair — our relationships to the land we live on.
The exhibits run November 22nd through December 8th.
An Opening Reception will be from 5-8PM, Friday, November 22nd, and the Closing Reception is from 5-8PM Saturday, December 7th, each at both locations.
[Placeholder: Swallowtail] is supported by the Arts in California Parks initiative, a partnership between California State Parks, Parks California, the California Arts Council, by the donors of the Photography Special Projects Fund at Sacramento State, and by the California Indian Heritage Center Foundation.
OPENING RECEPTION:
Friday, November 22, 5-8PM
CLOSING RECEPTION:
Saturday, December 7th, 5-8PM
Verge Clay Club
December 7th - 22nd, 2024
reception: Saturday, December 14th I 5-8 PM
artist talk:
Immerse yourself in a gallery filled with hundreds of unique ceramic works by local Artisans!
We are excited to announce the return of Clay Club! This quirky exhibition will showcase many works from our Clay Lab members as well as other community ceramists. The works in this exhibition are available for purchase with 50% of the proceeds going back to the artist and the other half back into our integral Clay Lab program at Verge.
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, December 14 5-8 PM