Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency Announces:
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.
Photo by Ana Venegas. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based painter and our 2020 Alma Ruiz Fellows. 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 will push her on-going research into new territories engaging with the Joshua Tree area of the Mojave desert. The outcome will be 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.