CCA News
Artist Lydia Nakashima Degarrod: Center for Art and Public Life Visiting Artist for 2007–8
Posted on Monday, September 24, 2007, by Kim Lessard
The artist and visual anthropologist Lydia Nakashima Degarrod will be the California College of the Arts (CCA) Center for Art and Public Life visiting artist for 2007–8. Drawing on her background as a Chilean immigrant, Dr. Degarrod will create an installation that addresses the emotional and physical aspects of memory through a depiction of the journey of Chilean migrants to the San Francisco Bay Area. The installation will be exhibited to the public in fall 2008 at the Oliver Art Center on CCA's Oakland campus.
Since 1848 Chileans have maintained a continuous presence in the Bay Area. They came by the thousands during the first years of the gold rush and created "little Chiles" in San Francisco and nearby mining towns. Throughout the twentieth century they came to California for economic, personal, and political reasons. The most recent major wave to arrive in the Bay Area was comprised largely of political exiles from the military government of Augusto Pinochet. Throughout her residency Dr. Degarrod will organize various events in collaboration with members of the Bay Area Chilean community, and she will teach a course in diversity studies at CCA.
About Lydia Nakashima Degarrod
A visual artist and cultural anthropologist, Dr. Degarrod aims to expand the boundaries of both disciplines by questioning traditional ethnographic and artistic representations. Dr. Degarrod says her work conveys the aesthetics of social events, or places in which individuals share events of an extraordinary nature.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries in the United States, Chile, and Switzerland. She has received awards from the Ministry of Culture of Chile, Saint John's University, and the Wing Luke Asian Museum. She has also been awarded a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a postdoctoral position at the University of Virginia, a senior scholar fellowship at Harvard University, and a visiting artist and scholar position at the University of California, Berkeley. She recently participated in the Eranos Foundation symposium in Ascona, Switzerland.
About the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program
The Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at CCA's Center for Art and Public Life is a yearlong residency for artists and scholars whose work focuses on issues related to the arts, education, and community. In addition to teaching, residents collaborate with their communities to create special projects and events that serve both the campus community and the diverse populations of the Bay Area. Past projects have included Pieces of Cloth, Pieces of Culture: Tongan Tapa Cloth, facilitated by the scholar Ping-Ann Addo and the artist Siu Tuita, and Cross Connections: Iranian and Iranian American Dialogue Through the Arts, led by the artist Taraneh Hemami and the scholar Persis Karim.
About the CCA Center for Art and Public Life
The Center for Art and Public Life was founded by California College of the Arts in 1998 for the purpose of creating and facilitating programs that provide and enhance arts education in underserved communities within and beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. The center fosters opportunities for CCA students and working artists to partner with public schools and community organizations, where they use their talents to make a difference as mentors for youth and leaders in community development. The center administers the college's Community Arts Program as well as the art teacher pre-credential program and courses in diversity studies. It also offers intensive programs in arts education and integration for K–12 educators, and a higher-education conference on best practices in community arts education.
In June 2005 the center initiated 100 Families Oakland: Art and Social Change, an ongoing community arts program that each year brings together 100 inner-city families from all over Oakland to work on projects with professional artists for the purpose of strengthening and revitalizing their communities. For more information about the center's academic, professional, and public programs, please see Center for Art and Public Life.
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod's project is made possible, in part, by grants from the California Council for the Humanities as part of the Council's statewide California Stories Initiative, the Skirball Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.