Contemporary Artist Styles

Share

Pilar Agüero-Esparza

Visual Artist: Mixed Media, Print Maker, Sculptor, Textile

Born in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Pilar Agüero-Esparza was exposed to the potential of materials and the love of the hand-made working with her parents in their shoe repair shop. She received a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and MFA from San Jose State University. Pilar has been an active artist, arts educator and arts administrator in the Bay Area exhibiting her work in numerous institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Cruz Museum, MACLA, Palo Alto Art Center, Galeria de la Raza, and the De Young Museum. Her public art commissions include a series of murals in the main reading area of the Biblioteca Latinoamericana Branch Library in San Jose.

Jonathan L. Clark

Visual Artist: Photographer

Jonathan L. Clark is a multi-faceted artist whose work encompasses photography and the creation of books using letterpress, gravure, and digital printing. Clark is the 2012 recipient of the Oscar Lewis Award for outstanding contributions to the Book Arts from the Book Club of California. He has received two USIA travel grants to Poland and Spain; a fellowship from the Arts Council Silicon Valley; the JGS Foundation Book Award; the Western Books Award of Merit; and Photo-eye’s Best Photography Book Design of the Year Award. His work is included in many permanent collections in the USA, Japan, and Europe. Solo shows of Clark’s photographs have been held in Japan, Spain, and Eastern Europe, as well as the United States. A show organized by the US Information Service traveled to museums throughout Poland. His books and prints have been included in scores of exhibitions at venues including: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco; Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; Stanford University Library; De Saisset Museum; Center for Photographic Art, Carmel; Photo Gallery International, Tokyo; Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco; San Francisco Center for the Book; George Krevsky Gallery, San Francisco; Gallery 291, San Francisco; and many others. He has lectured or held residencies at: The Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco; Stanford University; The Book Club of California; University of Barcelona, Spain; Institute for North American Studies, Barcelona; Center for Photographic Art, Carmel; University of West Florida, Pensacola; University of South Florida, Tampa; University of Rochester; and the US Consulate and Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, among others. His publications include: Carmine (Artichoke Editions, 2011); Ottawa, Illinois 1967 (Nazraeli Press, 2008); Prospects of Florence (a photogravure album with text); Cut-Paper (with Frederick Sommer; 2006); as well as articles and photographs in various books and journals. He is co-editor of The Hedgehog, an international arts review published in San Francisco. Clark was born in Ottawa, Illinois in 1952, and has spent most of his life in California. He began taking photographs at the age of 14. He studied with George A. Tice at the Aspen School of Contemporary Art, and enjoyed long creative friendships with Wynn Bullock and Frederick Sommer. He received a BA in Photography from UC Santa Cruz and a MA in Humanities from CSU Dominguez Hills.

Yvonne Escalante

Visual Artist: Jeweler, Sculptor

Yvonne Escalante is a metalsmith artist based in San Jose. She is a lecturer at San Jose State University in metalsmithing, jewelry, and small sculpture. In addition to metal, her work also incorporates wood, glass, and found objects. Using these media, she employs mostly traditional craft techniques to produce sculpture that evokes items of manufacture while attempting to bring humor and frank attention to issues of global importance and personal meaning. Recent works have been exhibited at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), City College of San Francisco, and the Oakland Museum of California.

Pancho Jiménez

Visual Artist: 3D, Ceramist, Sculptor

Pancho Jiménez holds an MFA in Sculptural Ceramics from San Francisco State University, and his BA degree from Santa Clara University. He has exhibited extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally at universities, private galleries, and in civic spaces. His work is part of numerous private and public collections including the permanent collection at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, and at the University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University Jesuit Community. He has been featured in Ceramics Monthly and numerous publications including, “The Ceramic Design Book,” “Extruded Ceramics,” “500 Ceramic Sculptures,” and “500 Figures in Clay Vol. II.” He has held artist residencies at Mission Clay Company and Annie Glass. He has taught courses at San Francisco State University, West Valley College and is currently a Senior Lecturer at Santa Clara University where he has been teaching since 1999.

Joel Slayton

Educator; Visual Artist: 3D, Computer Arts

Joel Slayton is a pioneering artist, educator, and curator. His professional activities explore contemporary culture as informed by emerging technologies. As co-founder of the L&J Ranch (launching fall 2018), Slayton is focused on cutting-edge research, creative projects and sense of place. He’s Professor Emeritus at San Jose State where he founded the CADRE Laboratory for New Media in 1984. Slayton’s artwork has been featured in over 100 exhibitions around the world including Berlin, Austria, Buenos Aires, and New York. For eight years he served as Executive Director of ZERO1, a Silicon Valley-based arts organization and agency for four international art biennials that featured over 600 artists from 45 countries. The SVNexus Award, sponsored by Adobe, was created to recognize pioneering artistic achievement at the intersection of arts and technology.

Flo Oy Wong

Visual Artist: 3D, Mixed Media

My art is symbolic of this country’s multiple canons. My work is significant because it inserts little-known chronicles into the cultural landscape. Influenced by the contemporary artists, Faith Ringgold, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Joseph Cornell, I make art that speaks of personal, family, community, cultural, and historical stories. To retrieve these narratives I interview people that I find heroic in order to explore disquieting matters that transform me and viewers to a place of healing, connecting, and understanding. I use cloth rice sacks, sequins, beads, old suitcases, scanned photographs, magazine text, Chinese funeral paper, flags of the United States, needle, and thread to create my mixed-media installations. In acknowledgement of my identity as an American of Chinese descent I frequently use Chinese and English text in my work. Featured on KQED’s Spark: http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=4392

Shannon Wright

Visual Artist: 3D, Architecture, Mixed Media, Sculptor

Shannon Wright is a sculptor and installation artist based in San José, California. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wright is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Spatial Art Program at San José State University. She is represented by ADA Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Wright’s recent exhibition venues include the Dallas Art Fair; Untitled Miami Beach; Mulherin + Pollard Projects, New York City; ADA Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and Scope Art Fairs in New York, Miami and London Wright was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up primarily in Sydney, Australia. Her formative years as an artist were spent among the iron trestle bridges and abandoned turn-of-the-last-century hydroelectric power plants and foundries of Richmond, Virginia. She considers this environment to be the single biggest influence on all the artwork she has made since college.

Find An Artist