Melinda Smith Altshuler, M Susan Broussard, Barbara Carrasco, Gregg Chadwick, Claudia Concha, Rena Cruz, Lola Del Fresno, Alexandra Dillon, Wendy Edlen, Rachel Grynberg, Deborah Lynn Irmas, Sara Issakharian, Sheila Karbassian, Annette Miae Kim, Susie McKay Krieser, Sally Lamb, Maddy Le Mel, Luigia Martelloni, Crystal Michaelson, Mobina Nouri, Margaret Oakley, Sabine Pearlman, Elham Sagharchi, Gwen Samuels, Daniela Schweitzer, Pamela Simon, Doni Silver Simons, Julie Weiss, Karen Woo, Joan Wulf, Rebecca Youssef, and Leila Youssefi.
Mobina is a multi-disciplinary Iranian-American artist whose practice reflects her personal history as a female immigrant who left Iran to live in the UK and later the US. Working across a variety of media, the artist mines her country’s tradition of storytelling, often turning to Persian literature, philosophies, and mysticism to contemplate and reconsider the complexities she bears witness to in the contemporary world.
Crystal is an LA based mixed media artist with a great appreciation for the dynamic landscape and bohemian spirit enveloping the beaches, mountains and deserts of Southern California.
Being medium driven, she loves getting her hands messy, delving into the paints, gels, and other mediums, often incorporating found objects, or items that have special meaning, or speak to her.
Her mixed media art is a conversation with the world around us.
Susan's art expresses her quiet joy in the beauty of our world, coupled with a belief in the ageless and timeless connectivity of humankind. Her focus is on the figure or portraiture whether painting, etching, doing collage, photography or mixed media installation. Themes frequently delve into female connectivity, anti-racism and humankind's connectedness to our earth.
Leila Youssefi, aka LvL Up Kid, is an Iranian-American artist and environmentalist known for her multi-disciplinary approach to addressing the complexities of our modern world. Using research as a foundation, she creates prismatic, layered compositions which offer an alternative to how we envision our future. Leila’s leadership extends beyond art—she serves on the Board of Directors for the Human Relations Council of Santa Monica, is a certified Women Business Enterprise of Los Angeles, and a California Arts Council Fellow. Currently based in Los Angeles, she continues to bridge cultures and disciplines in her creative endeavors.
Assemblage, sculpture, and installation artist Maddy LeMel has been called a "scavenger poet." She is known for mixed-media constructions incorporating found objects that are reclaimed and given second lives in pieces created with wire, screen, thread, paper, metal fragments, and a deft articulation of light and space.
With her latest work, LeMel balances the notion of actual physical confinement with self-inflicted prisons of emotion, convention, and habit. "Stepping outside our familiar worlds could cause us to plummet to the ground," she says, "or perhaps we would learn to fly."
Lola del Fresno was born in Madrid and studied at the University of Fine Arts in Madrid. She moved to New York in 1997 and since then her work has been recognized internationally, showing in galleries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Milan and New York. She is a visual artist whose projects involve large-scale mixed media installations with an active public component that involves the viewer as part of the project in the space. Her work is composed of mixed media pieces that include drawings, photography, paintings, and sculptures.
She has exhibited her work locally and internationally. Her large scale installations and paintings are housed in well-known private collections and museums.
Sheila Karbassian, born in the United States, moved to Iran at the age of 11, two years into the Iran and Iraq war, post the 1978 Islamic Revolution, contrary to what most Iranians were doing—leaving Iran.
This journey has deeply influenced her expressive and diverse visual vocabulary, bringing into color and formation the continued expansion and contraction of self-identity and existence in the context of modernity and tradition, being an immigrant, a woman, a mother, a widow, a survivor of loss, an observer of war, a partner, an Iranian, an American and all other dimensions of being a human.
Alexandra Dillon is a Los Angeles-based surrealistic painter who creates art on found objects.
With a flair for the theatrical, Dillon employs European painting traditions, from Roman-Egyptian Mummy paintings to Baroque portraiture, to contemplate the crossroads of character, psychology, self-hood, and the feminine persona.
Gwen Samuels' love of textiles began early and has continued as a life-long resource. She started as a textile designer before becoming a full time artist. The joy of pattern informed her vision from very early on.
Her work is about transformation. She's interested in reconfiguring shapes and patterns in repeat on a transparent material that interacts with light to create a unique visual experience.
Luigia Martelloni is influenced by the Italian Arte Povera movement, her ouvre
is inspired by artistic freedoms liberated by Duchamp's
readymades and framed by the literary and psychological
rhetorics surrounding the surrealist movement.
Her artist practice thus developed a focus on uncovering
hidden layers of truth, exploring dimensions of collective
unconscious and subjective interpretation.
Deborah Lynn Irmas is a Los Angeles based visual artist. Her practice considers the textile and tactile materiality that was deeply embedded in her childhood. Growing up in a household surrounded by fabrics, yarn and other sewing notions, she developed an attachment to the materials that her Salvadoran mother worked with.
Margaret Oakley creates ecological, material-driven works and experiences that honor the quiet intelligence of natural systems and our place within the fabric of life. Her work explores how plants, soil, water, and weather shape the built environment and our embodied human experiences.
Rooted in Los Angeles, her practice engages plants, earth-based pigments, handmade papers, and other sustainable materials to explore ecological memory and resilience.
Melinda Smith Altshuler is a Los Angeles-based artist who approaches her practice as a way of taking notes and communicating. She employs translucent materials such as stained tea bag papers and paint mediums, as well as appropriated objects, choreographed installations, and sculptural forms. The juxtaposition of materials and meaning echoes immigrant histories while calling into question our political and environmental climate.
Joan Wulf is a painter and mixed media artist based in Los Angeles who reductively explores the nexus of nature and science. She focuses in particular on the elements: water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Once points of departure for her paintings, the elements have transformed into “collaborators" in Wulf’s studio practice. She has variously burned, torched, sprayed, oxidized, ripped, glued, and bent materials in her quest to distill nature to its most basic state. The resulting forms reveal the brutal and entropic processes that mold our natural world and underscore our fraught relationship with its elemental force.
Gregg Chadwick is an American artist, based in Santa Monica, whose luminous paintings pay tribute to the historic moments and figures of our time ”as well as the beauty he finds in everyday life. With the same masterful handling of color and loose brushwork, he renders sensations of movement and a timeless grace unto his subjects, whether they be machine or beast, celebrity or anonymous hero.
His artworks have been exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally.
Susie McKay Krieser is a Los Angeles based artist whose practice consists of figurative and abstract work, including drawing, painting, sculpture, and furniture design. Her formative years were spent in Mexico and California, which influences the bright colors and sense of light in her work. Her work hangs in collections in the US, Mexico, England, France, and at the American Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal. There is a permanent exhibit of 4 of her works of art at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, CA
Nina's lifelong love of clay brought her to amazing teachers in the age old craft of ceramics. A dedicated student, she began working in the medium in the 1990s but only recently began creating in earnest, fueled by a desire to help the many people - both friends and strangers - who suffered just great loss during last January's devastating wildfires.
Nina's work is both beautiful and functional.
Rebecca Youssef is a mixed media artist with a special focus on the use of repurposed materials. Raised on the north shore of O’ahu, Hawaii, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Galvanized by the sustainability movement to protect our planet, Rebecca employs a broad range of experimental processes to give new life to discarded paper, boxes, and bags, immortalizing them in art, and thus honoring their journey from tree to canvas.
Daniela paints figurative and non-representational abstractions. Although classically trained, her art is inspired by the influences of many contemporary artistic movements as well as the energy, vibrancy, and colors of South America. Born and raised in Argentina, she relocated to Los Angeles, where the importance of human connections, the appreciation for the simplicity of everyday happenings, the intersection of memories and new experiences, and the rich cultural diversity that surrounds her here helped shape her craft.
Studios 3026 artist Rebecca Youssef, founder and co-event producer of Art at the Airport, teamed up with fellow Studios 3026 artist Alexandra Dillon to help reinvigorate the artistic community at the Santa Monica Airport Arts Center post-pandemic. Through the promotion of Open Studios and their curation of 2024's gallery show - Whiplash - they reconnected artists with the greater Santa Monica community. What began as a small gathering blossomed into a significant event, attracting over 500 visitors per event. "It's a testament to the power of art and its ability to bring people together," says co-event producer Alexandra Dillon, “These events mark yet another step forward in Santa Monica's transformation into a thriving arts destination."
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