POINTS OF ACCESS: ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION

Isabelle Lutterodt is the Director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Barnsdall Art Park for the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs. She formerly served as the Director of Visual Arts at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, where she curated for the gallery and oversaw a studio artist program. She holds an MFA in Photography from the California Institute of Arts and an MA in Art Museum and Gallery Studies from the University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. Prior to moving to the UK, she curated as part of the collective M.U.L.E. exhibitions throughout the Los Angeles area focused on cultural and community-based issues. In addition to curating Isabelle has worked with organizations in Europe, New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles developing programming that supports arts education, including the Getty Museum, Maryland Parks and Recreation, the Fresh Air Fund, the CalArts Community Arts Partnership (CAP), and the Marlborough School in Los Angeles.

Isabelle has served on the boards of MESC, Gallery@calit2, Trade&Row, Side Street Projects; advisory boards of Pasadena High School’s Visual Art and Design Academy and East Los Angeles Animation; and the exhibition council for Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock. Most recently, she has served as a panelist on the California Community Foundation fellowships and the Long Beach Arts Council fellowships.

In addition, Isabelle is an exhibiting artist. Her work has been shown at the New Walk Museum, UK, California African American Museum, Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona, and at the University of Redlands. Her photographs have been published in Nueva Luz Photographic Journal, Saturday Morning, Sunday Night, ed. by Deborah Willis and 25 Under 25: Up-and-coming American Photographers.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the “Historical Present,” as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, the Made in LA 2012 Biennial and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is also the recipient of several awards including the Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Student Fellowship, and The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award. Her writing has appeared in Not That But This, Obsidian Journal, Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics, and she has a forthcoming first book called SIR, a reflection on naming as a tool for undefining the defined, that will be published with Litmus Press. Hinkle’s critically acclaimed solo show The Evanesced focused on the erasure of black women historically and presently debuted at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in the spring of 2017.

A native Angelino, Mark Steven Greenfield studied under Charles White and John Riddle at Otis Art Institute in a program sponsored by the Golden State Life Insurance Company. He went on to receive his Bachelor’s degree in Art Education in 1973 from California State University, Long Beach and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing from California State University, Los Angeles in 1987. He served as director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1993 – 2002 and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery from 2004 – 2010. Greenfield’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, and the California African American Museum. Internationally he has exhibited in Thailand at the Chiang Mai Art Museum, in Naples, Italy at Art 1307, Villa Donato, the Gang Dong Art Center in Seoul, South Korea, IBox Gallery in Chengdu, PRC, and Art 1333 in Tokyo, Japan. His work deals primarily with the African American experience and in recent years has focused on the effects of stereotypes and racial politics on American culture. He is a recipient of the L.A. Artcore Crystal Award (2006), the Los Angeles Artist Laboratory Fellowship Grant (2011), the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2012), The California Community Foundation Artist Fellowship (2012), the Instituto Sacatar Artist Residency Fellowship in Salvador, Brazil (2013) and the McColl Center for Art and Innovation Residency in Charlotte, North Carolina (2016). He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts in 2013 and California State University, Los Angeles in 2016. He is represented by Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica and Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York.

Ramsess is a self-taught artist and educator who works in multiple mediums, including textiles, painting, mosaic, illustration, and stained glass. He contributed political cartoons and illustrations to the Los Angeles Times from 1976 to 1994. A longtime resident and leading creative voice in Leimert Park, Ramsess began renting his Degnan Boulevard studio from Dale and Alonzo Davis of Brockman Gallery in 1981, where he lived and worked until 2002. A Los Angeles native, Ramsess continues to live and work in Leimert Park. A life-long fan and lover of blues and jazz music, much of his art is a reflection of that interest, honoring the musicians and the music they create. He frequently travels the country to sell his Jazz-focused works at music festivals. Ramsess is a member of the Afro-American Quilters of Los Angeles, a partner of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts.