How to apply: Fill out application, upload images that best represent your body of work and pay the application fee before deadline of January 31, 2019 at 5pm. 14 participants will be selected by our Jury.  Accepted artists will be notified by Wednesday, February 6, 2019 and must pay their tuition of $775 (housing included) in advance in order to confirm and hold their place.  Participants are responsible for their own travel and expenses. Workshop will run Saturday - Sunday, June 15 - 16, 2019 from 10am - 4pm, with optional morning and evening activities. Check in for artists will be Friday, June 14, 2019 after 3pm. A Welcome event will take place Friday, June 14 at 6pm. Joshua Tree Retreat is a rustic desert community and has shared housing and public spaces. Deadline to apply is January 31, 2019 at 6 pm PST.

Through private one-on-one sessions and group meetings, participants will have the rare opportunity to meet with a team of guest professionals. This year's faculty includes:

Ray Beldner has worked in art education and marketing for the last 20 years with the goal of inspiring people to create, value, and support the visual arts. As an artist he has exhibited in more than 15 solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, and his artwork can be found in numerous public and private collections including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Federal Reserve Board, Washington DC; the Saks Fifth Ave Collection, New York; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among many others. At several Bay Area colleges and universities, he taught courses in sculpture and installation art, conceptual art, and professional practices for artists. Ray is also a fine art appraiser, art collection manager and artist advisor. Ray is also the co-founder and Director of the Start Up Art Fair.

Kimberly Brooks is an American painter whose work integrates figuration and abstraction to explore a variety of subjects dealing with history, memory and identity.  Brooks has solo exhibitions throughout the United States and her work has been showcased in juried exhibitions including curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For two years, Brooks maintained a weekly column, entitled First Person Artist which then led to her founding the Huffington Post Arts Section. She founded Griffith Moon publishing which focuses on artist monographs. Brooks received her BA at UC Berkeley and studied painting at Otis and UCLA. A coffee table book of her work will be available Fall 2018 (Vivant Publishing).

Betty Ann Brown is an art historian, critic, and curator. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art in 1978 and joined the California State University at Northridge faculty in 1986. Her research and teaching have ranged from the ancient--Precolumbian Art of Mexico--to contemporary--Los Angeles Art Today. Brown has curated retrospective exhibitions for Hans Burkhardt, Roland Reiss, the Saar Family, Linda Vallejo, June Wayne, and John White, as well as numerous themed exhibitions. Her most recent curatorial project was Time, Space & Matter: Five Installations Exploring Natural Phenomena, which featured the work of Lita Albuquerque, Suvan Geer, George Geyer, Mineko Grimmer, Tom McMillan, and Christine Nguyen.

Andi Campognone is California-based curator, author, and film producer, known for championing contemporary southern California artists. Andi has over 25 years of arts experience in the southern California region.  She is the Owner/Director of AC Projects, a private consulting organization focused on promoting arts and culture. Projects include developing museum exhibitions, public engagement, mentoring programs and book and film publications of historically relevant southern California artists. Campognone is also the Museum Manager/Curator for the City of Lancaster.  She is responsible for the development and maintenance of partnerships and community engagement initiatives with local artists, local businesses, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Los Angeles County Supervisors office and higher level institutions.  She develops curatorial direction for exhibition programming and educational programming and additionally she is directing the Museum accreditation process for MOAH. She has previously served the City of Pomona as Cultural Arts Commissioner where she co-wrote and implemented the City’s Master Cultural Arts Plan and the adopted Arts in Public Places Policy. She volunteers as a regular speaker and mentor to art students at both the undergraduate and graduate level and is on the advisory boards of LMPAF and Los Angeles Arts Association.  She is a member of ArTTable.

Diane Costigan provides executive, career, life and health coaching to individuals who want to enhance themselves and maximize their performance. Diane’s approach to her work centers around the development and leveraging of emotional intelligence—particularly self-awareness and self-assessment. How we choose to implement self-knowledge is at the root of sustainable behavioral change. Diane gives clients the tools to make positive, productive choices at every level. Diane earned her B.A., cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the College of the Holy Cross and her M.A. in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, Teachers College. She has a certificate in Organizational and Executive Coaching from NYU, is an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) with the International Coaching Federation and is a Certified Health Coach (CHC) through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. She is certified in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT/Meridian Tapping).

Alex Couwenberg, a graduate from Art Center College of Design and The Claremont Graduate School, worked under the guidance of Karl Benjamin, one of the leading figures in the southern California based school of hard-edge geometric abstraction. Benjamin was instrumental in the early development of Couwenberg's painting style, process and philosophy. A southern California native, Couwenberg naturally embraced the sensibility of his birth place and applied it to his art making practices. By instilling the discipline and rigor associated with the fundamentals of painting and abstract language, the paintings began to mature and develop an aesthetic voice unique to Couwenberg. The vocabulary references the dedication toward craft, process and the progression of concepts and techniques. Couwenberg's paintings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. His work can be found in numerous public, private, corporate and museum collections around the world. Couwenberg was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for his achievements in painting and was recently featured as the subject of Los Angeles based film maker Eric Minh Swenson's film La Fonda, which focuses on the artist's life and studio practice in Los Angeles. Couwenberg exhibited a body of paintings in a two person show along with his mentor Karl Benjamin. The show was part of the Getty Museum's Pacific Standard Time project highlighting southern California artists and their contributions towards art making.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic & curator. She is based in Downtown Los Angeles, Dambrot is currently LA Editor for Whitehot Magazine, contributor to KCET’s Artbound, Flaunt, Huffington Post, The Creators Project, Fabrik, VS. Magazine, Palm Springs Life, and Porter & Sail. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes loads of essays for art books and exhibition catalogs, curates and/or juries a few exhibitions each year, sometimes exhibits her original photography and publishes short fiction, and speaks in public at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally.

Shanon Kay A natural entrepreneur, Shannon has run creative businesses for most of her career. From starting a decorative home services company, Finishing Touches, to hosting shows on national television and smart channel platforms, producing creative marketing video series for national channels and international brands, and creating Plein Heir, a line of home furnishings and custom art commissions. Shannon exhibits her paintings locally. Her artwork and color advice have been featured in Esquire, Elle Décor, Dr. Oz’s Good Life, and Sunset magazines. Her work has been commissioned by Carlos Santana’s Universal Tone Management and highlighted in a documentary for SKB (South Korean Broadcasting) about low-tech artists who thrive in high-tech communities.

As Business Development Director, Shannon works behind the scenes at stARTup Art Fair to build relationships, develop operational systems, and create unique experiential programs.

Mike O'Connor  For over 20 years Mike has been training, counseling and leading workshops with financial advisors throughout the Mainland, Hawaii and Guam.  Mike’s focus is on identifying one's own story and how to use it to become a more effective sales person.  Mike’s Mantra for his workshops is “to learn your story and learn to tell it effectively”. Mike not only guides participants through the storytelling process, he also spends time on presentation skills and warding off that innate fear of public speaking.  Mike’s presentation, Sell Yourself Through the Fine Art of Storytelling was developed to aid artists, gallerists and museum directors on the importance of the WHY, not the How or the What of your work. 

Mike was a presenter for the two Kipaipai workshops at the Donkey Mill Art Center and is still counseling many of the attendees on perfecting their story and their delivery skills.  Mike is a frequent stage presenter at “The Moth” where he develops stories on the fly based upon a prescribed subject and presents them in a very entertaining manner.

Mark Zimmermann, an American artist and writer, was born to a military family in Munich, Germany, in 1967 and grew up in Hawaii and the southern United States. Since 1998, he has exhibited his paintings in 18 solo shows and numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe.

Zimmermann’s paintings are based on the marriage of meditative fields, architectonic structures and an organic gestural line. In discussing this work, the editor and writer, Larry Qualls noted, “…a majestic landscape narrative… they illuminate the nature of painting itself. In a sense what these paintings do is bring a synthesis of the conceptual and the realistic; it is as if there is the conflux of two grand traditions: the purely abstract and the purely objective.”

In 2000, Zimmermann became the first American artist to exhibit in a commercial gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2009, he was commissioned to create of suite of monumental paintings for the VIP Lounge of the Palazzo Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2010, he was photographed by Andres Serrano, in a project documenting New York artists. Most recently, Zimmermann has been the subject of 3 short films by Los Angeles filmmaker, Eric Minh Swenson and London based filmmaker, Lawrence Berry.

As a writer, he has widely published poetry and short fiction, as well as essays and critical works on painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, theatre, and film throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His writing has been translated into six languages. He lives and works in New York City and Encino, California.

Application Requirements

Eligibility Criteria