Recipients Of The 2022/23 City Of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project Announced

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs has announced the recipients of the 2022/23 City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project (COLA IMAP). These ten master artists will each produce a series, set, or singular new artwork with a grant of $10,000 from the City of Los Angeles. The original works will be premiered and promoted by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in the Spring of 2023 as part of the 26th edition of this annual initiative.

"The COLA IMAP grants serve as catalysts for the development of new artworks by a selection of the City's master artists and allow LA's residents and visitors to celebrate their creative talent," said Daniel Tarica, Interim General Manager of the Department of Cultural Affairs. "This program represents an important recognition of these artists' outstanding ability and experience with engaging others through their works."

The 2022/23 COLA Individual Master Artist Project recipients in the performing, literary, design, and visual arts are:

Performing and Literary Artists

Daniel Corral

Alia Mohamed

Jasmine Orpilla

David Ulin

Design and Visual Artists

Patricia Fernández

Wakana Kimura

Michael Massenburg

Duane Paul

Elyse Pignolet

Kyungmi Shin

Each of these COLA IMAP recipients demonstrates an exemplary career-trajectory of more than 15 years of professional public presentations in the LA region. In addition, their ongoing creative endeavors and contributions to the community have earned these artists the highest respect from their peers.

COLA-IMAP provides independent artists the opportunity to create new works to be premiered by the City of Los Angeles in one or more group presentations (catalog, exhibition, or performance showcase). This is one of the many grant-categories offered annually by DCA, all of which honor the synergetic relationship between Los Angeles and its creative entrepreneurs, the spectrum of our collective cultural history, and the city's status as a global center of creative talent.

About the 2022/23 COLA Fellows

Performing and Literary Artists

Daniel Corral

Daniel Corral is a Filipino/American born composer/performer born and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. Mr. Corral came to Los Angeles in 2005 as a percussionist/ composer. In Los Angeles, his unique voice finds outlet in accordion orchestras, multimedia microtonal electronics, puppet operas, handmade music boxes, site-specific sound installations, chamber music, and various collaborations. Corral's music has been commissioned and presented by venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sundance Film Festival, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Joe's Pub, REDCAT, Iceland University of the Arts, Mengi, Harpa, MATA, HERE Arts Center, Miami Light Project, Operadagen Rotterdam, Wayward Music, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Synchromy, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Göteborg Art Sound Festival, USC Thornton School of Music, Center for New Music, CSUN College of Arts, Pianospheres, Automata Los Angeles, Machine Project, SASSAS, the wulf., Pasadena All Saints Choir, Santa Monica GLOW Festival, CalArts, UCSD School of Music, Carlsbad Music Festival, and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. For more information, visit: News - Daniel Corral.

Alia Mohamed

Ali Mohamed is a multidisciplinary artist combining live music with Middle Eastern dance and experimental visuals. Ms. Mohamed layers live instrumentation using theremin, zither, and various percussion instruments to create otherworldly melodies and soundscapes which she then explores through movement. She also projects visuals and uses scent to supplement the experience and transport her audience to unfamiliar, yet warm, spaces. This grant project will allow Ms. Mohamed to combine dance with all of the practices she has been developing over the past few years while also exploring the concept of "tarab." Tarab, in Arab culture, refers to a trance-like state, most often occurring during musical performance, when the musician, and the dancer and/or spectator is fully immersed in the emotion of the music. One of her goals for this project is to cultivate a space, using music, movement, and visuals, that is conducive to the experience of tarab. Her Instagram link is: ALIA (@aliamo) • Instagram photos and videos.

Jasmine Orpilla

Jasmine Orpilla is a multiplicitous Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and operatic composer of experimental theatrical sound installations, in which she activates her lifelong practices of folk ritual dance, combat systems, and music of the Philippine diaspora against the contemporary American framing of the 1st-generation, imperialist, military culture of her own childhood. Unlimited by "soprano" nor so-called classical beauty, her unfiltered voice-in-motion exorcizes eurocentric performance structures from her muscle memory, while remaining accountable to the oral legacies and languages of the Indigenous Pilipino musical systems she, her family, and community remains indebted to. With decades embodying center with her energetically intensive solo practice as a multi-instrumental and multilingual writer/performer, Ms. Orpilla's work serves to humanize and honor the intersectionality of the Filipina/x-American body in agency, despite ongoing minimization of colonial history's revisionist narratives. For more information, visit: https://jasmineorpilla.com/.

David Ulin

David Ulin is a writer and editor working in various literary genres, including: fiction, poetry, essays/nonfiction, and criticism. In recent years, Mr. Ulin has become especially interested in work that blurs the lines of genre because of how it upends, or challenges, the expectations of both writer and readers. His work often explores textures of personal narrative, and such blurriness helps him highlight the subjectivity of experience and emotion. This is a key part of his practice, even when he is working in such traditional forms as the novel or the essay. Mr. Ulin's style is generally narrative-driven, with an attention to the specificity of language, as well as to the inchoate emotional territory that language both illuminates and obfuscates. He is interested in literature as a mechanism of discovery, for writer and reader alike.

Design and Visual Artists

Patricia Fernández

Patricia Fernández is an artist born in Burgos, Spain, who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work includes a research aspect out in the field, as well as a painting and object making studio practice. Her works emerge from an interest in history, texture, and time contained within landscape. She uses personal narrative, memory, omission, and abstraction to transmit histories and build connections between people and places. By applying an archeological approach to the family archive, the work reveals the inaccuracy of our inherited memories and the subjectivity of personal experience. Painting, drawing, carving, and object making are the tools used to recuperate an unknown history. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), Pollock Krasner Grant (2017), California Community Foundation Fellowship (2011), and France Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012). For more information, visit: https://www.patriciafernandez.com/.

Wakana Kimura

Wakana Kimura (Wakana Komatsu), was born in Shizuoka Japan. Ms. Kimura received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Tokyo University of the Arts in oil painting and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Otis College of Arts and Design in California. Kimura was commissioned to paint the City of Inglewood for the LA Metro project, Through the Eyes of Artists. She also has been a cultural envoy and had served as the cultural arts manager and curator at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Kimura is one of the 12 official City of Los Angeles Muralists. Kimura has exhibited her work at the Union Station Los Angeles, Pomona College Museum of Art, Baldwin Wallace Museum, Koyasan Beikoku Betsuin, Wilshire Blvd Temple, Japan Foundation Los Angeles, Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, Brand Library Art Center, LA Artcore, Angeles Gate Culture Center, and Maui Art Center. Presently, Kimura has been commissioned to produce a Nehanzu painting for the Zenshuji Temple in the Arts District and a Robertson Recreation Center mural by the City of Los Angeles. For more information, visit: Wakana Art Studio - Wakana Kimura Artist Studio Homepage.　　

Michael Massenburg

Michael Massenburg was born in San Diego and raised in Los Angeles, California. Mr. Massenburg pursued his studies at California State University, Long Beach and Otis School of Art and Design. Mr. Massenburg has exhibited in galleries and museums, completed private commissions, and worked on public art projects throughout the country and abroad. His list of public artwork clients includes: Verizon, MTA Metro, ESPN, American Jazz Museum, and the Fabulous Forum. He is also the recipient of various grants, including from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the California Arts Council. Along with his art-making practices, Michael is a teaching artist, community organizer, and activist for various organizations and causes. For more information, visit: 2019 - massenburg (michaelmassenburg.com).

Duane Paul

Duane Paul is a multidisciplinary artist with a current practice concerned with "constructed sculptures," building on personalized modular biomorphic and amorphous shapes he calls "my alphabet." He concentrates on the fractured, fragmented memories of childhood, strung together and conflated by his adult reflection on past memories and experiences as an Afro-Caribbean immigrant, Gay man living within the Black American experience. The materials used and cultivated are varied. However, the through-line in their usage is the layering of materials, in order to construct narratives. The nature of his process and the sculptures represent a conduit to his experience, to explore ideas within the social zeitgeist of the historical and current. Mr. Paul draws from numerous inspirations informing the works' thematic elements of nature and the urban landscape and sculpted biomorphic forms that link the human body (the organic) to the Man-made (geometric architecture) and the natural environment (foliage). Combining traditional sculptural materials with repurposed and utilitarian industrial media, he builds up the metaphoric surfaces of memories and experiences. The process then is to tear through and expose those layers to get the desired effect of damage/decay. The intent of the surface treatment is to evoke the wear and tear of living - "Life." For more information, visit: DUANE PAUL.

Elyse Pignolet

Elyse Pignolet is an American with Filipino heritage based in Los Angeles, born in Oakland, California. Ms. Pignolet works primarily in ceramics, inspired by numerous social issues and urban themes. Her works attempt to relate the traditions of ceramics and the permanence of the medium to the fleeting and transitory nature of the contemporary world. Her work is primarily in ceramics and her artwork has been inspired by, and dealt with, various themes including political and social issues, the dialectic between feminism and misogyny, inequality, and cultural stereotypes. Ms. Pignolet's work explores the boundaries between ceramics, painting, and sculpture, and she attempts to place the permanence and traditions of ceramics with the fleeting and transitory nature of the contemporary world. She has completed several public art projects including three large murals at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco and the Gaffey Street Public Swimming Pool in

Los Angeles' San Pedro neighborhood. For more information, visit: Artist | Elyse Pignolet | United States.

Kyungmi Shin

Kyungmi Shin is a visual artist working with painting, sculpture, and photography. She received MFA from UC Berkeley in 1995. Her current work utilizes archival family photographs as a base to build her artwork. Building on top of the

photographs, she introduces painted images taken from Chinoiserie paintings, Korean Shaman paintings, Christian Iconography, and traditional Korean Still Life elements. These various painted elements are overlaid on top and intermix with each other to create complex, transparent, and opaque historical and personal narratives. Her works have been exhibited at Berkeley Art Museum, Sonje Art Museum (Korea), Japanese American National Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), and have received numerous grants including: California Community Foundation Grant, Durfee Grant, Pasadena City Individual Artist Fellowship and LA Cultural Affairs Artist in Residence Grants. She has completed over 20 public artworks, and her most recent public video sculpture was installed at the Netflix headquarters in Hollywood, CA in 2018. For more information, visit Kyungmi Shin.

About the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA)

As a leading, progressive arts and cultural agency, DCA empowers Los Angeles's vibrant communities by supporting and providing access to quality visual, literary, musical, performing, and educational arts programming; managing vital cultural centers; preserving historic sites; creating public art; and funding services provided by arts organizations and individual artists.

Formed in 1925, DCA promotes arts and culture as a way to ignite a powerful dialogue, engage LA's residents and visitors, and ensure LA's varied cultures are recognized, acknowledged, and experienced. DCA's mission is to strengthen the quality of life in Los Angeles by stimulating and supporting arts and cultural activities, ensuring public access to the arts for residents and visitors alike.

DCA advances the social and economic impact of arts and culture through grant-making; public art; community arts; performing arts; and strategic marketing, development, design, and digital research. DCA creates and supports arts programming, maximizing relationships with other city agencies, artists, and arts and cultural nonprofit organizations to provide excellent service in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles.

For more information, please visit culturela.org or follow us on Facebook at: facebook.com/culturela, Instagram @culture_la, and Twitter @culture_la.

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