About this Event
Join Lisa Anne Auerbach, Ako Castuera, Maria Maea, and Elana Mann for a conversation about gender, community, and the political in visual art, moderated by poet-in-residence Chloe Martinez.
Free with registration. Seating is limited, so reserve seats today!
Lisa Anne Auerbach
Lisa Anne Auerbach makes sweaters, knitted tapestries, flags, photographs, drawings, and publications, often in response to the current political moment. She explores agency and voice within chaos and cacophony, inspired by America and the American experience. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries, and on flagpoles and fences in the United States and beyond. Solo exhibitions include Election Sweaters at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2008); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan (2009); Chicken Strikken at Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (2012); Sweater Parade at Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont(2022); Forever… at Campbell Hall Art Gallery, North Hollywood, CA (2023), and gallery shows at Gavlak. Commissioned work includes Psychic Art Advisor at Frieze LA (2019) and a series of wall graphics at Beverly Center Mall (2017). Her work has been included in exhibitions at Parasophia Kyoto International Festival of Culture, Philagrafika2010, Hammer Museum, Getty Research Institute, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She was a recipient of a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists in 2007, a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant in 2013, MacDowell Fellowships in 2012 and in 2016, and a Lucas Artist Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center in 2023. Recent publications include catalogs for Forever… (Campbell Hall, 2022) and Sweater Parade (Bennington, 2022) as well as the photography book PIT, published by Grass is Green in the Fields for You, Glasgow, Scotland. Self-published publications include the Telegram Trilogy (Great Awakenings, This is What Democracy Looks Like, It’s Going to be Biblical) and the monthly The Mount Washington Post. Auerbach has a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from Art Center, Pasadena. She lives in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA.
Ako Castuera
Ako Castuera is a Los Angeles born and based artist. Her sculpture and textile projects are offerings to intersection and transformation through which play, prayer and mutuality unfold.
Ako’s lively engagement of materiality is guided by slow growing relationships with living bodies of land, material, kin and neighbors of every kind. Her work with clay, soil and fiber embody practices of attunement and a spirit of resistance to modernity’s demands for individualism and extraction.
Work by Ako has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California Art, the Japanese American National Museum of Art, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. She is also known for her work as a story artist on ‘Adventure Time’ and Emmy-Award winning director of the children’s series, ‘City of Ghosts’.
Maria Maea
Maria Maea is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, film and sound. Through her art practice, she deepens her connection to land, somatic memory, and ancestry. Her works act as a residue of her lived experience as a first generation Los Angeleno of Samoan and Mexican heritage. Using plants and repurposed found material gathered throughout Los Angeles, Maea builds film set-like sculptures that relate to storytelling & myth-making. With experience in film production, she understands the invisible labor and processes that happen behind the scenes and creates works that invite viewers into a cinematic universe of her own imagination. She uses palm fronds foraged from the greater Los Angeles area to build these sculptures that play in the space between figurative and abstraction. These sculptures, called future ancestors, are made from concrete, rebar, collected objects and both living and dead plants. The work seeks to complicate art’s relationship with institutions around ideas of contamination and preservation. Many works structurally contain seed pods that over time will crumble to dust, however the seed will remain - making the artworks multi-generational. Maea’s greatest inspiration and collaborator is nature itself. Mythos and time also function as sculptural materials in the artist’s work, much in the same way as the plants, concrete, and rebar do. By composing pictures of family with family, Maea produces fragmentary, nonlinear narratives for herself and her relatives, which pointedly work against Western notions of both temporality and lineage.
Elana Mann
Elana Mann is an artist and activist who makes artwork about the power of the collective voice, the embodiment of language, and deafness. Mann was born Hard of Hearing and for twenty years she has researched the act of listening through sculpture, sound, works on paper, and public performances.
Recent solo exhibitions took place at the Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, CA), 18th Street Art Center (Santa Monica, CA), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), and Artpace (San Antonio, TX) and Pitzer College Art Galleries (Claremont, CA). Mann has participated in group exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum. She has been commissioned to create public projects by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Montalvo Art Center, the Getty Villa and the LA County Public Defender's Office.
Mann’s artwork has been written about in Artforum, the LA Times, and Hyperallergic, among others. She has received numerous awards, including an International Artist-In-Residence at Artpace San Antonio (2020), the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award (2019), the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship (2020), the Cali Catalyst Award (2022) and she was the inaugural artist-in-residence at Pitzer College's ceramics department (2017-18).
Chloe Martinez
Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She lives in Claremont and works at Claremont McKenna College as the Associate Director of Programming for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and a Lecturer in Religious Studies. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow; the MA/PhD program in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara; Boston University’s Creative Writing MA; and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Scholar.
Her two newest projects, both forthcoming in March 2026, are a book of translations, Songs of Mirabai (New Directions) and a craft anthology she co-edited, Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD (Chicago). She is also the author of the poetry collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her research has appeared in journals including The Medieval History Journal, South Asia, and The Journal of Vaishnava Studies. Her poems, translations, reviews, and essays appear in Ploughshares, POETRY, Agni, American Poetry Review, Best Literary Translations 2026, Sierra Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and the Anne Frydman Prize in translation, as well as residencies from Hedgebrook, the Vermont Studio Center, and SWWIM. She is assistant editor for Beloit Poetry Journal and poetry editor for The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, 200 West 1st Street, Claremont, United States
USD 0.00
