The Alma Ruiz Artist Fellowship
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The Alma Ruiz Artist Fellowship awards a Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency position to a Latin American and U.S. Latino/a artists of exceptional ability in the visual arts from the US or around the world. Each year, a deserving recipient will be chosen by Alma Ruiz, JTHAR advisor and former senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Fellowship consists of a six or seven week residency, studio space, living accommodations, monetary stipend, and a gallery exhibition. The residency is designed to foster creativity while interacting with other JTHAR artists in residence and the artistic community of Joshua Tree, California. This is a non-application fellowship.
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SELECTED FELLOWS
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Máximo González was born on May 25th, 1971. He resides between Mexico and Argentina. He has completed 48 solo shows and participated in 181 group shows. Creator of the ‘Changarrito’ project (described below), he also wrote Vaho / Mist poetry book during the pandemics. This Book includes 42 poems recited and written by Máximo from March 15th to June 30th, 2020.
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Fabian Ramírez paints dreamscapes: ghost images of vegetation, domestics interiors and other environs, concealed in a barrage of expressive colorful brush strokes, creating kaleidoscopic abstractions that only hint towards a certain place and time. His works revisit some of the fundamental elements for modern art such as the “notion of image” and “abstraction”, in order to point out the unacknowledged aspects of it, and the connection it has with some indigenous concepts. Since image represents a central phenomenon to humanity, it is precisely the origin of images that constitutes one of the fundamental enigmas to solve, not only to understand the being, but its existence within the universe.
Born in Mexico City, Fabian Ramírez graduated from the Faculty of Art UNAM in Mexico City 2016, and is currently undertaking a Masters at Kunstakademie Düsseldorfunder under Ellen Gallagher’s tutelage. |
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Diego Sagastume is a self-taught artist and coder living and working in Guatemala City and the recipient of our 2022 Alma Ruiz Fellowship. Mainly focused on sculpture, photography, and video, his work analyzes the city as a space in which, through the confluence of multiple agents, tangible and intangible phenomena take place, as well as processes of mutual transformation between individuals and their surroundings. Resonating ideas throughout the development of his work are the interdependence theory (Kelley, Thibaut & Kriti Sharma) and the "off-modern"—a "term-in-progress" as author Svetlana Boym described it. He is co-founder of Riña, an artist-run gallery and La Construcción, an exhibition space, both based in Guatemala City. Selected exhibitions: "Killing the Tropic," Cherry Gallery, Richmond, USA (upcoming, 2020), "The 10s or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Do It Anyway,” Riña, Guatemala City (upcoming, 2020), "Guatemala from 33,000 km: Contemporary Art, 1960–Present," Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, USA (2017), "Overload," The 9.99 Gallery, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2017), "Cycle of Guatemalan Film—The 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts," Ljubljana, Slovenia (2017), "Trans/visible—Paiz Biennial," Guatemala City (2014), "La Otra Bienal", Colombia (2013), "Ciudad de Mente", Matucana 100, Santiago de Chile (2013).
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Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary award-winning artist based in Los Angeles and the recipient of our 2021 Alma Ruiz Fellowship. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. While at JTHAR Beatriz will carve a series of stones for sections of a large-scale installation for a new Smithsonian museum opening this year in Washington, DC. Currently, her work is on view at the Michigan State University’s Broad Museum as part of the exhibitions Interstates of Mind and Seeds of Resistance, and at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas. CA. She has exhibited at the Rockefeller Center, New York; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Clockshop, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Museo MARTE, El Salvador; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador; among others. She teaches in the Department of Central American and Transborder Studies at California State University, Northridge. Read more about her current work at the Lux institute on KPBS.
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Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based painter and our 2020 Alma Ruiz Fellow. Her work investigates the methods and materials of painting across cultures and histories. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragon is made up of a collection of maps and specimen paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Sandy’s creative process synthesizes interdisciplinary research – especially historical and ethnobotanical investigations – with the urgency of the current human rights crisis in the United States, particularly as it impacts Latina/o communities on both sides of the US-Mexico Border. The JTHAR residency pushed her on-going research into new territories engaging with the Joshua Tree area of the Mojave desert. The outcome was a series of landscapes, star maps and studies of native plants using colorants and mineral pigments that are hand-processed into inks and watercolors. The recuperation of Indigenous knowledge systems is crucial to her project, with special emphasis on understanding plant use and recovering paint and pigment recipes. Recovering the medicinal and esthetic uses of local plants and pigments enables her work to provide a space of healing and visual possibilities for current and historical traumas. Read more about her work in the Hyperallergic.
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