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Oolong Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming four person show at the gallery that flirts with Southern California art history while adding a new wave of diversity. The 20th century LA Cool School worked in a semi-urban abyss between the desert and coast and consisted of a mid-century style that combined both Pop and abstract expressionist influences alongside some homemade ingredients. This predominantly white male art movement produced immense work that has remained inspirational to a myriad of artists working today. Cool School (trane of thought) at Oolong Gallery brings together said new artists and their unique bodies of work, related to a degree but created independently from one another. Please join us August 26th from 6 to 9pm for an opening reception at the gallery and outdoor terrace level.
Amanda Farber makes work combining painting, drawing and sculpture. Her imagery exists between
memory, imagination and daily life. Her work has been exhibited at the La Jolla Athenaeum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others. "Amanda Farber exhibits works of acrylic on wood, ink on paper, and graphite on paper. Her images derive from imaginary forms, personal memories, photographs, textile patterns, vintage illustrations, and advertisements. The paintings contain high contrasts and rhyming negative spaces, with distortion or abstraction often blurring the line between two and three dimensions." (La Jolla Athenaeum)
Amanda Farber's work is in the permanent collections of MCASD, the La Jolla Athenaeum and ResMed, as well as numerous private collections. She has been an artist board member at the New Children’s Museum, San Diego. She has received artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Art Matters Inc. Farber was born and raised in New York City. She graduated from Cooper Union with a BFA in painting and went on to complete her MFA from UC San Diego with a concentration in painting and sculpture. Farber was on the faculty of the Design Institute of San Diego for many years and has taught at UC San Diego, San Diego State University, Palomar College, and Point Loma Nazarene University. She has developed the art curricula at two San Diego primary and middle schools. (CV)
Mensah Bey explores the juxtaposition between physical and virtual reality via the use of social media. New worlds are navigated in his paintings with influences from Afro-surreal and abstract expressionism. Bey found solace in observance and imagination while being raised in a sub-culture of the African-American experience. His teachings in the Moorish Science Temple of America instilled pride in his people when the larger society often demonized those experiences. He chooses asiatic subjects like visual affirmations promising an empowered experience in the future. Symbolisms are overlaid and personified through figurative subjects. Spirits take form in an evolutionary subconscious enabling tethered minds to roam freely yet staying grounded in the world of manifest.
Mensah Bey is a native of Richmond, VA now residing in San Diego, CA. He received his Bachelor’s of Art in Graphic Design from the historic black college, Hampton University, and his Master’s of Fine
Art in Visual Studies from Norfolk State University. Bey has exhibited nationally in Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. He has participated in a number of residencies and served on various art committees in Virginia. As an artist and educator Bey encourages creatives to master process as a way to awaken environment shifting epiphanic ideas. (site)
Ceres Madoo is the 2023 recipient of the Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence at UCSD within the Visual Arts Department starting this October 2023. Madoo is a Los Angeles based mixed media artist, who describes herself as a Mix of a Mix: West Indian, American, Black, East Indian, Jewish and Mormon, east coast, west coast, everything and nothing. Ceres defies categorization much like her artwork. Madoo teaches and works in all mediums. With a BA from UC San Diego ('89) and a MFA from Rutgers University (‘92), her bi-costal, conceptual, critical educational roots happily collide with inherent interests in non-western art, folk and craft methodologies. Incongruities are a comfort zone for Madoo. This year her primary studio focus has been working in ceramics and painting. She often uses animal references as a representation of dumbfounded innocence; a gallows humor that keeps the cruel world at bay and allows for her esthetic and material exploration. (more info)
Adam Rabinowitz was born in Hadera, Israel and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He took his BFA at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. "His paintings are manifestations of appearance and disappearance through matter, space and light. Rabinowitz’s works are influenced by Walt Disney animation films, as well as by abstract post-war American art. His paintings are marked with psychedelic configurations and seem to be affected by heat or stuck by war, recalling the burnt landscapes of the Sinai Desert. Rabinowitz’s process begins with raw, unprimed linen or denim, on which he paints gradient fields of color. Many thin layers of fluid acrylic are applied using a brush, a process that requires several weeks. The gradient colors create an effect of depth of field in the background. He then silkscreens images onto the painted linen, combining graphic and painterly means, deep and flat." (Matthew Chevallard).
Rabinowitz's paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions (click here). His work is featured in prominent public and private collections such as: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Haifa Museum of Art; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; Ein-Harod Museum of Art; Ha’aretz Art Collection, Tel Aviv; Shpilman Institute of Photography, Tel Aviv.
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