The New Arts Foundation

Rodrigo Arruda
Joachim Castaneda
Siena Foster-Soltis
Kristofor Giordano
Elizabeth Herring
Leila Jarman
Antonio Okun
Minga Opazo
Yana Pan
Stephanie Quirola
Gert Resinger
Hal Roeser
Anny Wass
Yanbin Zhao

Curated by Greg Jenkins

Produced by Armand Brescia

Bios

Rodrigo Arruda
Rodrigo Arruda is a visual artist from São Paulo, Brazil, currently based in Los Angeles. He received his bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Universidade de São Paulo, and his MFA from the Art Program at CalArts. His recent works investigate colonial relations between Brazil and the US through imagery of cattle, anthropophagy (cannibalism), and the zombie. The artist is currently working on workshops and classes that merge art, visual poetry, and sign language.
www.rodrigoarruda.com
@rodrigoarrudaproto

Joachim Castañeda
Spending his childhood near Chicano Park in San Diego, Ca, artist Joachim Castañeda remembers the colors of those Chicano themed murals being painted in the early 1990’s, the sunsets at the beach during those southern California summers.  As he grew up his scenery changed to the overcast of San Francisco in the early 2000’s while attending SFS where he studied fine art. After nearly a decade in San Francisco, Castañeda moved to Barcelona Spain, and attended a University of Barcelona studio arts program for international students.  In his five year abroad Castañeda took up residencies with La Escocesa in Barcelona, Spain and another with Red Dragon in Vienna, Austria.  In 2015  Castañeda returned to California and is now based in Los Angeles.  During his time in Los Angeles, the Californian artist has shown works with Wonzimer Gallery, Bozo Mag Gallery, and M+B Gallery.  At the moment Castañeda will be joining the Maple St. Construct residency this summer in Omaha Nebraska.
@joachimcastaneda

Siena Foster-Soltis
Siena is an artist born and based in Los Angeles California. Her performances, paintings, and rituals focus on the abject, corporeal storytelling, mythos, and exhibitionized violence.
www.sienafs.com
@sienafs

Kristofor Giordano
Kristofor Giordano was born in Newton, New Jersey in 1985, and grew up in the post-industrial town of Franklin, New Jersey. His grandfather, a second-generation Italian immigrant, built a home in an area known — geologically — as the New Jersey Highlands. The property became a boneyard of raw materials, mechanical relics, and acquisitions from his bricklaying trade. This immersion in the “backstage” of labor was an early creative laboratory that would shape Giordano's practice and thinking. After graduating with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2007, Giordano held a studio at P.S.122 in New York City. He worked as a nightshift doorman while developing his studio practice, studying critical theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and comparative religions and psychology at Hunter College. In 2018, he co-founded the event series Talk Show Screenings in his live/work space. Giordano has participated in and organized group shows, film screenings, and interdisciplinary classes nationally, internationally, and virtually. He recently received his MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts.
www.fugitivelove.com
@kristoforgiordano

Elizabeth Herring
Elizabeth Herring (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is an artist working in photography and installation living and working in Ojai, California. Her practice often investigates the intersection between material obsession, social networks and community building, leading her to develop a practice also rooted in curation and arts organizing. Herring’s 2020 solo show Ojai City Gift, began her para-fictional exploration of places of business as agents for cultural shifts, which led her to build an installation project titled Cappuccino Cafe: Outpost for her CalArts MFA thesis project. Cappuccino Cafe: Outpost was a temporary room full of artworks created to further unpack the relationships between image production, aesthetic subcultures, and human connection in the current era of peak social media usage. Additionally, Herring’s photographs have been published in The Editorial Magazine, Zweikommasieben, Sleek Magazine, Esquire, and Vice.
www.eclaireherring.com 
@elizabethpostingstuff

Leila Jarman
b. April 14, 1986 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Leila is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and activist.  A process-based artist across various mediums, her work integrates unconventional narratives that subvert expectations of social and cultural binaries informed by her multi-cultural upbringing and identity (Iranian-Brazilian-American). Her work has been exhibited in film festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide including the TATE Britain, LACMA, MOCA, and Ars Electronica. Her films have been in countless film festivals and premiered and been featured on outlets such as MUBI, Vice, The Creator’s Project, Paper Magazine, THUMP!, Afropunk, Paste Magazine, VH1, MTV, Autre Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Guardian among others.
www.leilajarman.com
@leila_jarman

Antonio Okun
Antonio Okun (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose sculptural pieces delve into personal layers of identity, as well as the complex relationship between one's self and how culture plays into how we navigate the spaces we occupy. Okun’s identity as both a queer man and biracial Latino person often informs his work as he often found strife within these two existences. His interest in combining ceramic and textiles into his work serves as a figurative duality between the hard and soft points of the complex experiences we face. While he often pulls upon imagery that evokes a sense of childlike wonder, his work usually subverts said imagery to create a sense of unease and tension. Antonio Okun received his BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California and is currently at the California Institute of the Arts pursuing his MFA in Art.
www.antoniookun.com
@a.okun

Minga Opazo
Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Minga immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. Her recent works question the textile industry by exploring the idea of solastalgia — the mental or existential distress caused by environmental change and living in an era of excess. Opazo has exhibited across the US and Latin America, including at the Museum of Visual Art of Santiago, Chile; ACRE gallery in Chicago; and the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara. In Los Angeles, her work has been shown at the MAK Center, Dab Art Co., and CalArts. She has been awarded residencies at Banff Art Center, ACRE Residency, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, The Reef Residency, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MASS MoCA. She recently had her work published in Artforum and Lumzine Art Magazine. She is also the co-founder of Textile Resource LA a developing community fiber studio and curatorial initiative. Opazo received her BFA at University of California, Berkeley in 2016 and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts in 2020.
www.mingaopazo.com
@mingaopazo

Yana Pan
Yana Pan is an animation director and designer, originally from China, currently working and living in Los Angeles. Once a New Yorker, she forever pronounces coffee as “caw-fee.” Yana focuses on 2D frame-by-frame animation with a multimedia visual. She uses animation as a means to investigate her own relationship to the world around her, the intimate relationship between the animator and single frame allows her to think and analyze the puzzle again and again. The puzzle can be social psychology, culture, mother-daughter relationship or sometimes simply, “Why are there so many little bird houses in my neighborhood?”
www.yanapan.com
@yanapan.animation

Stephanie Quirola
Stephanie Quirola (*1988 Jersey City, NJ E.U.A.) lives and works between Mexico and Brussels. Both of her parents are Ecuadorian, and she grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador (1994-2000). In 2010 she received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York and completed her master's degree in critical tools and art practice at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels. In 2019, she participated in the residency program Flora ars+natura in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2021 she completed a one-year pedagogical training program at La Cambre and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Her works include multimedia installations and public interventions that address themes such as hybridization, symbiotic relationships, power structures, identity, non-productivity, contemporary culture, and multisensory perception. She primarily conceives and creates spaces that are inviting yet uncomfortable. She uses sculptural elements, music, dance and video, food, and aromas. 
www.stephaniequirola.com
@squirola

Gert Resinger
My name is Gert Resinger and I am an artist and designer. I paint, build furniture, draw, design spaces, make performances, music videos, photos, collages, sew, and print fabrics. My works are often created from mixtures and remnants of other works, and thus my entire process becomes endless. Ideas and concepts manifest themselves cyclically in other forms, over and over again. I draw inspiration from social processes, literature, pop culture, fashion, music, and psychology, and engage heavily with themes of humor, tragicomic, and the abysmal. I like the idea of people coming into physical contact with the work and becoming part of the artwork through use. Since 2014, I’ve been running the project Dessous with the artist Anny Wass. Starting as an exhibition format, the idea has since evolved into a spatial project, social sculpture, and residency program. Dessous aims to strengthen the relationships between national & international creatives, and to promote interdisciplinary discourse and cultural exchange.
www.gertresinger.com
@gertresinger

Hal Roeser
Hal is a baker, urban planner, and dj whose practices are both connected and driven by care. Her work focuses on the nourishment of belly, heart, spirit, and community, believing strongly in the abundance of love and healing that can be offered through relationships and slices of cake.
@strawbb.jams

Anny Wass
Anny Wass – born in Hallein, Austria in 1983 – has a multidisciplinary practice that ranges from sculpture and painting to design and photography, and is characterized by material investigation and a passion for color and detail. Wass often photographs herself in a replicating, performative process that alternates between and questions the role of object and photographer. Wass’ work has been exhibited in Austria, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Mexico and China and can be found in international collections. She co-founded the curatorial project and exhibition space ‘Dessous’ with Gert Resinger. Wass received her diploma in design and sculpture, as well as in photography at fotoK Vienna in 2009. She lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
www.annywass.com
@annywass

Yanbin Zhao
Yanbin Zhao is a filmmaker based in Shanghai and Los Angeles.
@zhao.yanbin

Beneficiary

This project is supported in part by an arts grant from the City of West Hollywood.