How to apply: Fill out application, upload images that best represent your body of work and pay the application fee before deadline of July 5, 2019. 14 participants will be selected by our Jury.  Accepted artists will be notified between July 10 and July 15, 2019 and must pay their tuition of $1000 (housing and meals 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, November 23 - 24, 2019 from 10am - 4pm, with optional morning and evening activities. Check in for artists will be Friday, November 22, 2019 after 3pm. Deadline to apply is July 5, 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. Some of this year's faculty include:

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).

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).

Andi Campognone is a Los Angeles-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 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 and a Hambidge Fellow.

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.

Aria Gannon is founder of aPR Creative Marketing Management, she has over twenty years of experience consulting on brand building, brand management and with marketing strategies. Aria’s public relations outreach has secured thousands of editorial placements in high-profile national and international media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Conde Nast Publications, Time-Life, Inc., Hearst Corporation, Grazia Japan, Pan Pacific News and Huffington Post. She has also initiated and secured exhibitions in major national museums and galleries for the artists she represents. She has cultivated a global network of key media figures, tastemakers, major curators, leading educational institutions, and national and international media figures. This network, combined with significant marketing expertise and her unique brand strategy, has provided high-profile exposure and brand awareness opportunities for her clients.

Aria travels extensively, organizing venues and events related to her clients, and researching and compiling information to serve her clients. Highly regarded in her field as an expert advisor and strategist, she has secured museum exhibitions and high exposure art installations across the nation and was the keynote speaker at the 2010 Canadian Trade Commission's “Business of Fashion” seminar in Vancouver B.C. Aria is an active member and committee participant of ArtTable, a leadership organization for professional women in the visual arts. Philanthropy is an important aspect of Aria's work, and she has consulted to develop programs for various non-profit entities such as LA’s Best's after-school enrichment program, United Way of Orange County, Mama Earth and the Manhattan Borough President’s Office in New York City. Aria was owner and director of the North Spring Street Gallery in Los Angeles's Chinatown for seven years, exhibiting unique works by international contemporary artists and designers. Aria resides in Los Angeles with her family of three beautiful children. 

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.

Michael Lyons Wier of Lyons Wier Gallery in NYC has a B.A. in Art History, with an emphasis in Feminist and Political Art and a M.A. in Arts Administration and Museum Studies. In 1993, Michael Lyons Wier opened LYONS WIER GALLERY in River North Art Community of Chicago and helped establish the second wave of young galleries in that district. Over the past 23 years, LYONS WIER GALLERY has championed contemporary artists who bring a fresh and innovative vocabulary to their chosen genre and hold dear the fiduciary responsibility between the artists they represent and community at large. Lyons Wier Gallery is now based in Chelsea district in New York City.

Daniel Maidman is best known for his vivid depiction of the figure. Maidman’s drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. His art and writing on art have been featured in The Huffington Post, PoetsArtists, ARTnews, Beautiful/Bizarre, Forbes, W, Juxtapoz, Hyperallergic, International Artist, American Art Collector, D/Railed, Whitehot and Manifest. He has been shown in solo shows in New York City and in group shows across New York, the United States, and Europe. He is a repeat guest critic at the New York Academy of Art. His books, Daniel Maidman: Nudes and Theseus: Vincent Desiderio on Art, are available from Griffith Moon Publishing. He lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

Nicholas West is the Curator of Collections at the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford and a masters in Arts and Cultural Management from Claremont Graduate University. At the Picker Art Gallery, West oversees the research, interpretation, and exhibition of the museum’s collection, conceptualizes and manages temporary exhibitions, and coordinates related programs, such as artist residencies and panel discussions. Recent exhibitions include Three Acts: Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Senga Nengudi · Joe Overstreet (2019) and Landmarked: selected landscapes from the permanent collection (2017). Nicholas also works closely with faculty across departments and Colgate students to generate exhibitions and programs such as Making Space: Uzumaki Cepeda (2019) and Labor and Literature (2018). Previously, West has worked in several administrative and curatorial roles in the Los Angeles area, including the University of Southern California Fisher Museum of Art, City of Lancaster Museum of Art and History, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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