As I have continued to travel to Cuba over the past several years, immersing myself into its vibrant community, I have built wonderful relationships with their emerging art culture. My love for these artists’ work, combined with my desire to help share their vision and beauty with a larger audience, has motivated me to support and represent their collection of work. 

"Despite international acclaim as one Cuba’s foremost living artists, Havana born Hector Frank never received a professional artistic education yet specialized in electronics. Now, in his artistic practice, Hector Frank employs a similar process to reveal a nation’s shared feelings, shared visions, shared dreams with a minimalist sophistication. Hector Frank employs in these works an understanding and appreciation of material quality and the potential for reuse that exists little outside of a place like Cuba, an understanding that has allowed him to create this aesthetically complex, multi-faceted new form of portraiture that poetically captures the essence of his people." -Toth Gallery

My practice is object based, materially and philosophically rooted; much of this work investigates the ways in which art can generate the sensory experience of consciousness. Some of the work does entirely other things. Understanding that the "expanded field" is blown utterly apart, I make things that stay together, that find their own order in a condition of disorder, and that at the same time refuse that which orders everything.

Mark Loria has held multiple senior positions with art institutions, and has worked closely with leading Indigenous artists from Australia and Canada, most recently with a focus on Coast Salish art of the Northwest Coast. Mark is also a visual artist himself.

Artists Representing Artists

VIETNAM

Panel Led by...

Panelist...

Panelist...

Bich-Phuong Le grew up in Vietnam and is now a Portland-based and Saigon-based visual artist. Her artwork is driven by the individuality and the ambiguity about social structures, reality and mindscaping. Le started using traditional Vietnamese silk as her primary medium after she graduated from Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts, Vietnam in 2010. Her recent works have expanded to include ceramics and fiber-based materials. 

Born Vietnam in 1971, UuDam briefly attended the University of Fine Art in HCMC. He graduated from UCLA in 2001 and got his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005.

The Artists

“My work investigates the nature of existence, knowledge, perception, consciousness, the ground of being, totality, liberation, nonlinear consummation, and non-dual awareness. I’m currently a PhD student in Eastern and Western philosophies – the non-dual tradition, dialectical tradition, postmodern philosophy – at Claremont Graduate University, and I integrate philosophical insights into my artwork.”

"... a gifted painter with a penchant for subtle but nonetheless critical narrative. Phong juxtaposes heavily impasto layers with finer, more transparent ones, as well as vaguely delineated images to convey the complexity of her feelings.

"Artist Hung Viet Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1957... He developed his artistry skills independently, studying many traditional Eastern and Western forms, media and techniques. Nguyen's complex, labor intensive investigations of oil paint reveal a methodical mastery of texture. While portions of Nguyen s work suggest the influence of many traditional art forms including woodblock prints, Oriental scroll paintings, ceramic art, mosaic, and stained glass, his ultimate expression asserts a contemporary pedigree.

 As part of ViCA, Juri Koll curates and presents traveling exhibits at museums, galleries and alternative spaces in the U.S. and abroad, such as Trans Angeles: Crossover Experimentation (curated by Senior Curatorial Advisor Peter Frank) seen at the Chabot Museum in Rotterdam and the Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenberg e.V. and Wilhelm Morgner Haus Museum in Germany, among other institutions. 

safer styles popularized by western artists. In particular, the artist who best demonstrated this was master muralist–Diego Rivera. In response to the Russian revolution, Rivera moved away from the Cubist movement, which had begun to trend towards more politically focused propaganda. Alongside David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo, described as great Mexican muralists in their own right, they narrated their people’s struggles as they revolutionized contemporary artistic expression. They broke barriers that gave way to the successful stars of today's contemporary art world like sculptor and painter Gabriel Orozco and installation and interventionist Pia Camil.

... is bordered to the north by the United States, to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea, and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexican society is characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, with a limited middle class wedged between an elite cadre of landowners and investors and masses of rural and urban poor. Despite the socio-economic polarities, it faces as a developing country, Mexico is one of Latin America’s most dominant economic and political forces. It has a dynamic industrial base, vast mineral resources, a wide-ranging service sector, and the world’s largest population of Spanish speakers—about two and a half times that of Spain or Colombia.

Mexico

It wasn't until the 20th-century artists were encouraged to embrace their identity and creativity rather than opt for