ARTIST TALK: MAY SUN WITH JURI KOLL

As part of the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art (ViCA) and otherwise, Juri Koll curates and presents traveling exhibits at museums in the U.S. and abroad, such art the Chabot Museum in Rotterdam and the Wilhelm Morgner Haus Museum in Germany and the Museum of Art and History in California. Koll regularly exhibits his paintings and photographs, and art videos and produces and directs Art/World, a series of documentaries on artists and other art world figures. He has produced and managed feature films such as Joanne, Her Voices, Until The Music Ends (Slash, Chrystal Method), American Cowslip (Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, Rip Torn), Hardcore Hearts, The Truth About Kerry (Stana Katic), and That Game of Chess. Juri has produced and/or directed over 90 short films, both fiction and documentaries. His films have screened all over the world in over 70 festivals, including Cannes, the Cork International Film Festival, the Australian International Film Festival, and won many awards. After graduating from the California Institute of the Arts with majors in Fine Art and Filmmaking, Mr. Koll produced the first Art/World documentaries from 1990-1995. He worked with major curators in their museums and galleries, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. His subjects included world-famous and infamous artists and curators from the Renaissance period to the present. Recently, Juri’s first documentary, In The Steel: A Portrait of Mark di Suvero, (1991), was accepted into the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. He recently curated the show Levels, which exhibited at Photo LA 2017.

May Sun is a Los Angeles based artist who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her work is in numerous private and public collections, and her room-sized installation UnderGround is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. She first received critical attention for her multi-media performance art piece The Great Wall or How Red Is My China? in the mid-80s which was originally performed at LACE in Los Angeles. She subsequently created large scale multi-media installations where the visitor is engulfed by visual, aural, and at times olfactory senses. These spatially expansive, culturally relevant site-specific installations in museums and art institutions such as the Santa Monica Museum of Art and Capp Street Project in San Francisco led to her first public art commission when she was selected to be a member of the design team for the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Hollywood Blvd. & Western Ave. Red Line Metro Station in Hollywood, California. She has since received many significant commissions including Union Station Gateway in Los Angeles, the Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park, an award-winning urban park that honors the life and work of Robert Kennedy at the site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a terrazzo floor for the San Antonio International Airport, and a public plaza in front of the gateway to Chinatown in Boston, Massachusetts.

Her work strives to uncover rich cultural and environmental connections that are unique to each site that will resonate with the public and future generations to come. She has worked in collaboration with fellow visual artists, theatre artists, composers, architects, and other design professionals. Awards and residencies include two National Endowment for the Arts awards in New Genres, a Getty Visual Artists Fellowship, a California Arts Council Artists Fellowship, a Vesta Award for Performance Art from the Woman’s Building, and artist residencies at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas and at the Monet Foundation in Giverny, France.

She has been a visiting artist at universities across the country and was a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts and at Otis College of Art and Design where her students designed an international public art monument for the people of Palau in Micronesia. She was the 2017-2018 artist in residence at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sun was born in Shanghai, China, raised in the British colony of Hong Kong, and has lived in California since the age of sixteen. She received her B.A. in Art from UCLA and was in the MFA program at Otis Art Institute.