Ink & Clay 40

Jeannie Denholm has been active in the art business for over 30 years and has an extensive background assisting corporations and private collectors with art acquisitions, collection management and curatorial services.  She worked for The Broad Art Foundation as Assistant Curator for Special Collections from 1993-2003. She  established Southern California Art Projects and Exhibitions (SCAPE) in Corona Del Mar, CA in 2003 where she continues her work today as co-owner, curator of exhibitions and private art advisor. Her educational background includes a Bachelor's Degree (BA) in Art History, graduate studies in Art History at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a Master's Degree (MA) in Museum Studies and Exhibition Design from California State University, Fullerton. Denholm is a Board Member and Vice-Chair of Programs for the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University.  She is often an invited guest speaker on the arts, taught Professional Studies for senior graduating students at the Laguna College of Art and Design, and has been a guest curator for a number of public exhibitions. 

Raised in Canada, Phyllis Green moved to California to pursue graduate studies in art. In 1978, her work was exhibited in the 4th Annual Ink and Clay exhibition. She received an MFA from UCLA in 1981, and began her professional career as an artist, educator and curator in Los Angeles. Her practice integrates gender politics, the sphere of craft and influences of Modernism. Green is primarily an object maker who represents the body. Over thirty years, these bodily surrogates have taken the form of skeletal fragments, organs and containers. She often incorporates clay with other materials to create mixed media sculpture and installations. Green’s work has been exhibited extensively in exhibitions nationally and internationally, including From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in 20th Century Art, Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, both at LACMA, and Fiction@Love at MOCA, Shanghai. A survey exhibition titled Splendid Entities: 25 Years of Objects by Phyllis Green was presented at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles in 2011. She is the recipient of individual artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; and was among the first group of artists to be awarded a C.O.L.A. grant by the City of Los Angeles in 1996. She produced and hosted a radio show on the visual arts, LOOK/ hear, on KXLU: 88.9FM from 1996 to 1998. She was appointed to the Santa Monica Arts Commission in 2000, and elected Chair from 2004 to 2006. Green served as Guest Curator for Scripps College 64th Ceramic Annual in 2008.  In 2010, she received project grants from the City of Santa Monica and the Durfee Foundation. She was named a Fellow in Fine Arts by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014. Green has lectured in colleges and universities worldwide and has held teaching positions at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is currently an adjunct faculty at the Roski School of Art and Design at USC and Deputy Director of The Christopher Isherwood Foundation. 

Dave Lefner is a native-born Angelino, who, for the last 15 years, has lived and worked in his studio at The Brewery, the world’s largest artist colony. He received a BA in Art from California State University Northridge, where he discovered a love of typography and its many faces, the graphic prints of the German expressionists of the 1940s, and, his biggest inspiration, Picasso’s series of linocuts from the 1950s. His work reflects the beauty for the city that surrounds him with a nostalgia for its aging, but unique storefronts, signage and architecture from all areas of Los Angeles including the Valley, glamorous Hollywood, and especially his current home in Downtown LA. The urban landscape, complete with its burnt-out, broken neon signs, its faded and peeling movie posters and billboards, its web of power-lines and telephone wires overhead, and the occasional intricately-painted graffiti piece serve as the perfect inspiration for his detailed, very limited-edition, reduction linoleum block prints. For over twenty years, Lefner has dedicated himself to preserving and perfecting what seems to be the dying art form of reduction block printing. Because of the immediacy of today’s world, this technique is being lost in the face of a digital age. But it is the mystery of this labor-intensive process that intrigues him most. There is no room for error as the piece slowly reveals itself through a series of carving/printing stages from a singe block of linoleum. To him, the journey is definitely as important as the destination. 

Images top to Bottom: Photo Portrait of Jeannie Denholm, Photo Portrait of Phyllis Green, Photo Portrait of Dave Lefner