SaveArtSpace is pleased to present Your Art Los Angeles 5 a group public art exhibition on billboard ad spaces throughout Los Angeles, CA. Curated by Amy Smith & Brendan Pattengale. Selected artists are Jessica Alazraki, Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira, and Donna Bates. On view starting March 8, 2021, for at least one month.
Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.
Curators
Self-trained and always evolving, my artwork includes stencils, collage work, illustrations, digital graphic design, paint, and spray paint, all to create one-of-a-kind pieces that reflect both my passions and my fury, juxtaposed through the lens of imagination. While some of my work is driven by political, social, and environmental injustice, most reflect my deeply-rooted optimism and belief in the power of the feminist spirit, unity and love.
My portraiture collage series is created from torn, recycled fashion magazines to represent both my love for fashion and my contempt for excessive consumption. Tearing fashion magazines that were carefully crafted to objectify women, I transform consumer messaging into words and images that celebrate the diversity and identity of both iconic and “everyday” strong, powerful women.
My "Iconic Women" series pays homage to the courage, strength, and independence of women for whom we all owe a debt of gratitude. The mixed-media approach offers a new perspective on women’s empowerment that leaves behind what society demands. My artistic roots began in New Jersey, but the rich California art community is where I found new levels of inspiration and mentorship.
Featured in galleries including Saatchi’s The Other Art Fair, LA Art Show, and Wallspace LA, my pieces can be found in private collections and in several major city office buildings while other pieces have served as backdrops on popular tv and film sets including “Dear White People,”“Grownish,” and “Insecure.” My murals include an 8-foot image of Frieda Kahlo, featured at the San Diego North Park Art Festival and the painting of Maya Angelou in Hollywood, CA, was painted just before a peaceful protest in support of Black Lives Matter in 2020.I am a proud mother, activist, and an artist who never tires of exploring the edges of art, humanity, and hope.
Connect with Amy on Instagram at @amysmithart.
Taking up the tradition of landscape photography to situate his musings, Pattengale probes photographic methods as well as the truth in color perception. His photographs are strikingly abstract, psychedelic in the way that they vividly depict valleys and vistas, yet they maintain a certain realism in the subject matter. Utilizing an unorthodox set of tools to capture his chosen terrain—Pattengale travels to the far reaches of the world to find new sceneries—he calls into question the role of the camera as vicarious viewer relative to an image making process that involves other mechanical and non-mechanical agents. As was said by Goethe in his Theory of Colors, colors belong to the eye; Pattengale conveys this in his images, which are entirely true in their retelling of light and, therefore, vision, while they are also altered in their process prior to the instant of the photograph.
Connect with Brendan on Instagram at @brendanpattengale.
Selected Artists
Jessica Alazraki Cats & kids on Yellow, oil on canvas, 2020. 43x65 inches.
Location: Sunset Blvd & Sutherland St, Los Angeles, CA
Jessica Alazraki was born and raised in Mexico City and is based in N.Y.C. since 1998. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Universidad Anáhuac, a Diploma in Graphic Design from Parsons School of Design, a Certificate in Drawing & Painting from The New York Academy of Art.
She has exhibited her work in the U.S. in three solo exhibitions and over 40 group shows in both the U.S. and Mexico. She completed the Trestle Art Space Residency Program in 2020 and participated in the 2019 ARTWorks fellowship at JCAL. In 2019 she was accepted into the Creative Capital N.Y.C. “El taller program,” in collaboration with Hemispheric Institute.
In 2020 she was awarded by the Queens Art Fund the New Work Grant recipient. Her work got published in a few publications, including New American Paintings, No. 152, Northeast Issue. The Diane Etienne Founders Award, from Stamford Art Association, 2020. Shortlist Hopper Price and 2020 winner of the MvVo AdArt Show. She received “The Award of Excellence” from Huntington Arts Council. She was given an “Honorable Mention Award” by the Barrett Art Center at the Circle Foundation for the Arts and the prize for second place at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. Received “The Passion Project Award” and the “Artdex Award.” Member of the New Latinx Art Collective.
As a Mexican woman living in New York, I feel it is my responsibility to open up a dialogue about immigrants. My work intends to bring Latinx life into contemporary art by celebrating the culture and highlighting family values. The narrative shows interior domestic scenes surrounding tables. Bright colors and decorative patterns are very characteristic of my works; in my pictures, portraits are always in the foreground and close to the viewer. Intense brushwork provides unique character combined with flat backgrounds to highlights emotion.
Connect with Jessica on Instagram at @jessicaalazraki1.
Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira Spider woman embrace from the series MEDA
Location: Wilshire Blvd & South Cochran Ave, Los Angeles, CA
KMR, grew up along the shores and mountains of Ecuador. Her work focuses on memory, geo-poetics and storytelling through collaborative processes and personal narratives. Intersectional theories, and earth-based healing inform her practice.
She has exhibited widely among places The Portrait gallery at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC, Queens Museum, She has participated in the Musee Quai du Branly biennial and received their artist in residence fellowship in 2017. She is currently a master mentor for the Woman Photograph mentorship program, she is a recipient of the We, Women photo award and is an artist in residence at BRIClab.
My art is rooted in the land that shaped me, and the stories it continuously tells. Blurring the lines between observer and participant, I use the body as a space to narrate stories that defy categorization, that grow in the peripheries, I seek the animistic territories stored in the depth of thoughts.
I see of the body as a vessel for the most primal creative force, and the essentiality to dream with inter-species and co-create with the earth.
I create from the fervent belief that there is a legacy of traditions in each person and that ritual and stories animate the primordial memory, connecting the human and the cell; a memory that spoke a common language of oceans, mountains and black earth to later become migrant bodies.
Contemplating the earth, I go to the past and future simultaneously and this act of contemplation; ignites the soul.
Connect with Karen on Instagram at @karenmirandarivadeneira.
Donna Bates Her Fine Art
Location: N Normandie Ave & De Longpre Ave, Los Angeles, CA
Native Southern Californian, Donna Bates years of experience as a commercial illustrator, 3D Artist and teacher for over 20 years has evolved into a career in painting. She is a self-taught artist that is known for her own mash-up of urban, tough-chic, edgy and fresh style.
She has exhibited in various group shows such as RJD Gallery, Rehs Contemporary Galleries, 33 Contemporary Gallery and Zhou B. Art Center. She was a featured artist in a four woman show at Annenberg Beach House, Santa Monica and had two paintings on HBO's show “Insecure” Season 3 plus a third painting slotted for “Insecure” Season 5. Her work has been in the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art's "Painting the Figure Now 2018” and in “Painting the Figure Now 2019" at Zhou B Art Center co-curated with PoetArtists and was a finalist in WMOCA’s International Biennial Portrait Competition and ARC Salon 14.
Her work has been published with PoetsArtists, Klassik International Magazine, The Argonaut Magazine and Sag Harbor Express.
She has work that is part of the Bennett Collection and works in various other private collections.
Having always been fascinated by people and their story, I guess that is why I create and am a fan of Figurative Art! Having worked in the graphics/ illustration/ 3D Animation field for many years, I have created my own mash-up style of urban, tough-chic, edgy, fresh, strong independent humans or “BadAsses”. My people aren't traditional pin-ups nor portraits, they are a different vision of power and sex, flavored with leather, graffiti, human rights and fantasy!
Connect with Donna on Instagram at @donnabatesart.