ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART TO FEATURE SIX PACIFIC RIM ARTISTS IN LAUNCH OF OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA

Community Open House on November 3 celebrates opening of new temporary space at South Coast Plaza Village.

Admission is free.

Santa Ana, CA, October 8, 2018 – The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) will open its new temporary space at South Coast Plaza Village, OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA, with an ambitious presentation featuring exhibitions by six artists working throughout the Pacific Rim. The opening presentation, which will run through March 17, 2019, will also include an exhibition of works from OCMA’s permanent collection. Admission is free.

On November 3rd, OCMA will host a special community open house to celebrate the opening of OCMAEXPAND- SANTA ANA. The free event will feature artist talks, performances, live music, and food trucks as the museum welcomes guests to experience its new temporary space at South Coast Plaza Village.

OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA is the name of the museum’s interim residency of a former retail space in Santa Ana as it builds its new home a few blocks away at Segerstrom Center. The new permanent home, slated to open in 2021, is designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis.

“The Orange County Museum of Art has championed innovative artists throughout its 65 year-history. At this important milestone in our life, we are proud to honor that bold tradition with a unique series of special exhibitions with OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA, our temporary space at South Coast Plaza Village,” stated Todd D. Smith, OCMA’s director and CEO. “These presentations represent the thoughtful programming, risk taking, and support for artists that define OCMA.

“As we build our new home at Segerstrom Center, we have a unique opportunity to broaden our programs and our reach,” continued Smith. “OCMAEXPAND is a guiding principle, an umbrella term, for the museum during the transition. The term is not only descriptive of what we are doing in building our new home, but it is also serves as a call to action for the organization. It’s meant to push us to think differently and more creatively about how we engage audiences today and into the future.”

“Our goal is to create a dynamic space for artistic innovation, experimentation, and dialogue,” said Cassandra Coblentz, senior curator and director of public engagement for OCMA. In keeping with OCMA’s programmatic focus on California and the Pacific Rim, the exhibitions at OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA will showcase significant new works by emerging artists from across the region. “Each distinct artist project will explore timely topics and socio-cultural themes reflecting on the diverse perspectives of these international artists,” added Coblentz.

OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA will feature five seasons of approximately six months each in duration. These seasons will begin in October and continue through March 2021. The first season will feature exhibitions by the following artists:

Kathryn Garcia
Born: 1978, Los Angeles
Lives / works: Los Angeles and Ibiza, Spain

Valentina Jager
Born: 1985, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Lives / works: Guadalajara, Mexico

Alan Nakagawa
Born: 1958, Los Angeles
Lives / works: Los Angeles

Ni Youyu
Born: 1984 Jiangxi, Province, China
Lives / works: Shanghai, China

Mariángeles Soto-Díaz
Born: 1970, Caracas, Venezuela
Lives / works: Irvine

Rodrigo Valenzuela
Born: 1982, Santiago, Chile
Lives / works: Los Angeles

(Complete bios are below.)

OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA will take a fresh approach to structuring exhibitions. Some presentations will follow a more traditional installation format; other projects will change and evolve over the course of their run. The works will represent a broad range of artistic media, including sculpture, painting, photography, video, sound, and performance. OCMA will complement these projects with exhibitions from the museum’s own permanent collection.

A robust public programming calendar of talks, performances, events, workshops, and hands-on creative activities will offer a wide range of learning and entertainment opportunities for visitors and ensure that each visit is unique.

Saturday, November 3: Community Open House
The public is invited to experience the new temporary space of OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA with a special day celebrating OCMA’s new approach to showing contemporary art. Exhibiting artists Rodrigo Valenzuela, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Valentina Jager, Alan Nakagawa, and Kathryn Garcia will engage with visitors through talks and performances.

OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA Exhibition Opening

1:00 p.m. Rodrigo Valenzuela | Artist Talk
Join the artist for a walkthrough of his exhibition at OCMA, which will debut new works from his series American-Type.

2:00 p.m. Mariángeles Soto-Díaz | Artist Talk
Join the artist for a discussion about her exhibition at OCMA, Everyday Grappling Operations.

2:30 PM Valentina Jager | Artist Talk
Join the artist for a discussion about her exhibition at OCMA, the face the mouth the back.

3:00 p.m. Alan Nakagawa | Peace Resonance: Hiroshima/Wendover, Artist Talk and interactive sound performance
This multi-speaker audio presentation by the artist uses a composition of sounds recorded at the Hiroshima Atomic Dome to re-link current Hiroshima–reverent, resilient, contemporary and bustling– to the Wendover Hangar in Utah, from where the Enola Gay B-29 left to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

4:00 p.m. Kathryn Garcia | Artist walk through, Performance with Jen Sotelo
Join the artist in a talk about her exhibition, gone, gone way beyond, followed by Movement, Embodiment and the Female Form – a performance with Jen Sotelo.

The Open House will also feature live performances, presented in association with Burger Records and visits from Green Truck and Il Caccia Caffé.

OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art.

Support for OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA has been provided by South Coast Plaza and OCMA Visionaries.

Admission is free.
Hours: Thursday 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Friday – Sunday 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Location: South Coast Plaza Village, 1661 W. Sunflower Avenue, Santa Ana, CA 92704

OCMAEXPAND-SANTA ANA Season One Artist Bios

Kathryn Garcia
Born: 1978, Los Angeles
Lives/works: Los Angeles and Ibiza, Spain

Kathryn Garcia investigates ancient and sacred sites and the ways in which feminist archetypes have informed human consciousness. Provocative and often interactive, her works take a variety of forms including site-specific performance, sculpture, and drawing. Garcia has exhibited nationally and internationally at Blum and Poe (2013),

356 Mission (2014), and Various Small Fires, (2018) in Los Angeles; MOMA PS1 (2010), Participant (2010), and Pace Gallery (2011) in New York, as well as DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece (2013); Southard Reid, London (2014); Arredondo/Arozarena, Mexico City (2015); Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2015); and Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2016). Her work is in the collections of the DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece and the Sansab Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand.

Valentina Jager
Born: 1985, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Lives/works: Guadalajara, Mexico

Valentina Jager is both an artist and a writer, and the two practices often influence one another. Her work is infused with a deeply poetic sensibility that sheds light on the precariousness of truth, the subjectivity of interpretation, and the fragile nature of memory. Jager studied Fine Arts at Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City and received a Masters in Fine Art at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Her work has been shown internationally at Huguenotten Haus, Kassel, Germany (2012); Casa del Lago and Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2014); Parallel, Oaxaca, Mexico (2015); Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico (2016), and Carta Blanca, Mexico City (2018) among others. She has completed residencies at Apoikia, Andros, Greece (2013); Luminous Flux, Syros Institute, Syros, Greece (2015); Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mexico City (2016); and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2018); Her publications include: Eleven Poems, Bom Dia Books, 2018; Nyma Graphia Cifra, AKV Berlin, 2015; Second Second, SIAAB, 2014; and The Self Builders Groove, DAAD & Wiens Verlag, 2012.

Alan Nakagawa
Born: 1958, Los Angeles
Lives/works: Los Angeles

Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working with sound, occasionally incorporating video, sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, food, and most recently, perfume. Since 2014, he has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-based environments, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of interiors. Nakagawa has an extensive exhibition history—most recently his work was included in SoundScene, DC Listening Lab at the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2018). He is currently the Artist in Residence for Great Streets L.A., a neighborhood improvement program through the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles; Creative Catalyst Artist in Residence for the Los Angeles County Library via L.A. County Arts Commission; and Artist in Residence for Praxis Art/ California State University Dominguez Hills focusing on the Ninomiya Photography Archive. Other

recent residency and exhibition projects include: the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Washington DC (2015); the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, Los Angeles (2015-18); Getty Villa, Malibu, California (2016); Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles (2017); and Cerritos College Printmaking Studio, Cerritos, California (2017). He is the host of VISITINGS Radio Show on DUBLAB Radio, surveying the international community of public practice.

Ni Youyu
Born: 1984, Jiangxi Province, China
Lives/works: Shanghai, China

Ni Youyu draws inspiration from the tradition of landscape in art history, his Chinese cultural background, and personal history. He is fascinated by science and seeks to push the boundaries of photography and painting to explore concepts of microcosm and macrocosm as well as the ephemeral and the eternal. Ni Youyu’s work has been shown extensively in China and internationally. He studied ink painting at the Fine Art Institute of the University of Shanghai where he graduated in 2007. He has had solo exhibitions at the Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2012); Shanghai 9 Museum Project Space, Shanghai (2013); the Hive Center for Contemporary Art of Beijing, Beijing (2013); Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Taiwan (2015); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2017); and Kunstverein Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany (2017). He has also been included in numerous international group shows including most recently at the 5th Singapore Biennale, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2016), M+ Museum, Hong Kong, (2017); and White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney Australia (2018). Ni Youyu received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for “Best Artist of the Year” in 2014. Ni Youyu’s work is represented in private and public collections such as M+ Museum, Hong Kong, the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; the Arario Museum, Seoul, South Korea; the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, Nanjing, China; the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; and the Me Collectors Room, Berlin, Germany.

Mariángeles Soto-Díaz
Born: 1970, Caracas, Venezuela
Lives/works: Irvine, CA

Drawing on her early training in painting, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz’s affinity for abstraction and her shifting material practice explores feminist and domestic politics, notions of affect, group affinity, and empathy. Through solo, collaborative, and social practice, and incorporating a wide range of everyday materials, Soto-Díaz exposes the pleasures and frictions of relational entanglements. Soto-Díaz holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from Cal Arts and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2011); the University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Iowa (2012); the Wignall Museum, Rancho Cucamonga, California (2013), El Museo del Barrio, New York (2014-15); MAK Schindler Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2017); and 18th St Arts Center, Santa Monica (2018). She is also the founder of the Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM), a flexible project space conceived as a cultural intervention in suburban Irvine, California.

Rodrigo Valenzuela
Born: 1982, Santiago, Chile
Lives/works: Los Angeles

In his photography and video-based work, Rodrigo Valenzuela constructs narratives that reveal tensions between individual and communal experience. A master photographer, he is highly conscious of how the camera translates spaces, objects, and people into images. Valenzuela completed an art history degree at the University of Chile in

2004. He then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States, completing an MFA at the University of Washington in 2012. Ideas relating to construction, labor, and how work gets made remain central to his artistic practice. His work has been exhibited more recently in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2017); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2017); Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, PNCA, Portland (2018); and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2018). He has had multiple solo exhibitions, including at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2015); Portland Art Museum, Portland (2017); and Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, Oregon (2018), among others. Valenzuela’s numerous residencies include Skowhegan School, Maine (2013); a Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2014); the Center for

Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, New York (2014); Bemis Center, Omaha, Nebraska (2015); and MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire (2016). His work is in the collections of the C.C. Foundation, Shanghai; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, New York; and Dimensional Fund Advisors. He currently teaches at UCLA.

About the Orange County Museum of Art
Along with its predecessor institution, the Newport Harbor Art Museum, OCMA has an established reputation as an innovative art museum with a history of actively discovering and engaging with living artists at pivotal points in their careers. The museum has organized and presented critically praised exhibitions that have traveled nationally and internationally to more than 35 museums. The museum’s collection of more than 3,500 works of art includes important examples by artists from Southern California including John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Irwin, Catherine Opie, Charles Ray, and Ed Ruscha. Recognizing the growing influence of the Pacific Region within Southern California and the art world in general, in recent years the museum has broadened its focus to include artists of the Pacific Rim, transforming its biennial series into the California- Pacific Triennial, the first in the world to examine the totality of contemporary art from Pacific Rim. In the last five years, OCMA has featured works by artists from 23 Pacific Rim countries, including Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Colombia, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam.

As the preeminent visual arts organization in Orange County, OCMA is committed to making the arts accessible to all and offers a host of programs that engage the community with modern and contemporary art and artists.

In May 2018, OCMA unveiled the design for the museum’s new home at Segerstrom Center for the Arts by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis. The museum will break ground in 2019, with a projected opening in 2021. With nearly 25,000 square feet of exhibition galleries, the new 52,000-square-foot museum will allow OCMA to organize major special exhibitions alongside spacious installations from its world-traveled collection. It will also feature an additional 10,000 square-feet for education programs, performances, and public gatherings, and will include administrative offices, a gift shop, and a café.  The move from Newport Beach to Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa will provide the museum with a central location, expanded gallery space, and inviting public areas, further enabling the museum to engage the public through art.

Media Contact
Forte Strategies: Todd Bentjen, Todd@ForteStrategies.net, (714) 931-0875

Images: The above images are representative of artists’ previous work, but are not pieces that will be part of the opening exhibitions which will showcase new work from these artists. Exhibition images will be available beginning October 12.

(clockwise, from top left):

Alan Nakagawa. Organ of Corti Part II/Homage to Nancy Holtz’s Sun Tunnels (installation view at Lime Light/
Cordary Art Gallery, Hawthorne, CA.), 2014. Mixed media sound installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz; ©Alan Nakagawa.

Kathryn Garcia. A Tanit (installation view at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles), 2018. Mixed media installation and performances. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. © Kathryn Garcia.

Mariángeles Soto-Díaz. Color Felt, 2013. Mixed media installation. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Debbie Rasiel. © Mariángeles Soto-Díaz.

Rodrigo Valenzuela. Toward Hedonic Reversal No. 3, 2014; Archival pigment print, artist frame; 54×44 in. Edition of
3 plus 1 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Klowden Mann Gallery, Los Angeles. ©Rodrigo Valenzuela.

Valentina Jager. Berlin 2015, 2018. Sunprint on tissue paper and rebar, unique. 59 x 94 ½ x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist. © Valentina Jager.

Ni Youyu. Dust(Orion Nebula), 2016; Chalk powder and mixed media on wood board; mixed media on paper; 43-3/4 x 62 in. Sketch: 15-3/4 x 19-7/8 in. Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels. ©Ni Youyu.