alumni exhibition

With Frieze L.A. upon us, Los Angeles is popping with Otis College alumni and faculty who are showing work in and around the art fair.

Over the weekend, there’s a good chance your social media feeds were flooded with photos and video from Coachella.

Over the past two decades, the music festival has become a kind of unavoidable cultural juggernaut, famously spawning not just scores of imitators, but also an entire season on the fashion calendar. 

Most of Kenzi Shiokava’s sculptures consist of organic matter, like bark and dragon-tree fronds, combined with found materials, such as chicken wire or brooms. In Untitled (Urban Totem Series), 2000, an upright railroad tie narrows into two sharp prongs at the top. Of a similar shape, Untitled (Urban Totem Series), 2005, was carved from a discarded telephone pole. Each sculpture resembles a statuesque humanoid form.

Lotería is to the pastel drawings of Judithe Hernández ('74) what the I Ching was to John Cage’s avant-garde music after World War II or the “Three Standard Stoppages” were to the Dada objects of Marcel Duchamp a century ago.

LOS ANGELES — The artist Alison Saar set a goal for herself long ago: to clearly communicate her ideas and emotions through the power of form. Her sculptures have their own personal vocabulary that speaks in a direct language about history, race, and mythology. If her sculptures are the melodies that capture one’s soul, the narratives behind them are the lyrics.

L.A. Louver is hosting Alison Saar’s "Topsy Turvy” at its Los Angeles venue.

An exhibition of new works by the Los Angeles-based artist takes inspiration from the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Civil War-era novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Saar re-contextualizes the sprightly uncouth slave girl as a symbol of defiance, through paintings on dyed vintage linens and sculptures carved from wood.

With genre-bending bodies of work that span a range of mediums and materials, these are the names to know in today’s evolving scene. First up is sculptor Kelly Akashi (BFA Fine Arts '06).