The Alma Ruiz Artist Fellowship
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.
Established in 2007, JTHAR is a nonprofit artist residency that awards an international community of artists the gifts of time and space amidst the extraordinary natural beauty of Joshua Tree National Park. Group and solo residencies of six to seven weeks include scholarship funds, living accommodations, studio space designed to accommodate a broad range of artistic activity and a gallery exhibition.
Artists selected for this program are at all stages of their careers and work in all media, including drawing, painting, photography, film, video, new media, installation, fiction and non fiction writing, interdisciplinary, social practice and architecture.
JTHAR fosters creativity through opportunities for exploring, experimenting, quiet reflection, engagement and cross-cultural exchange with the vibrant local artist community. We establish spaces where inspiration happens on a daily basis, so artists can do the work of innovating, changing the cultural landscape and generating a fresh look at the way we connect to each other and to the world.
Established in 2007, JTHAR is a nonprofit artist residency that awards an international community of artists the gifts of time and space amidst the extraordinary natural beauty of Joshua Tree National Park. Group and solo residencies of six to seven weeks include scholarship funds, living accommodations, studio space designed to accommodate a broad range of artistic activity and a gallery exhibition.
Artists selected for this program are at all stages of their careers and work in all media, including drawing, painting, photography, film, video, new media, installation, fiction and non fiction writing, interdisciplinary, social practice and architecture.
JTHAR fosters creativity through opportunities for exploring, experimenting, quiet reflection, engagement and cross-cultural exchange with the vibrant local artist community. We establish spaces where inspiration happens on a daily basis, so artists can do the work of innovating, changing the cultural landscape and generating a fresh look at the way we connect to each other and to the world.
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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 Photo by Carolyn Cole, LA Times
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Photo by Ana Venegas. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
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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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