press

The latest colorful, jam-packed show at the Laguna College of Art + Design’s Gallery is, appropriately, turning heads.
Heads, which is offering a public curator talk on Saturday, Sept. 13 at 11 a.m. is an exhibition that defies expectations. After all, how exciting could it be to look at a bunch of images just from the neck up? In reality, the show is revealing, thought-provoking and very powerful.

Dan McCleary founded the Art Division, a community-based arts program, in 2010 to provide in-depth services to young adults aged 18-27.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center's Advocate & Gochis Galleries announced a collaboration with Art Division. Art Division is a community organization dedicated to training young adults interested in studying visual arts. Los Angeles LGBT Center's Advocate & Gochis Galleries And Art Division Present "Art Division: The First Decade" Featuring Works By Art Division Students Past And Present which opened on Thursday, September 23.

“It has to do with using art as a medium to tell a story about immigrants and to humanize them,” Huerta said. “Statistics are important but when you know people as human beings, it’s more difficult to put them in cages.”

Oaxaca and Los Angeles are 2,000 miles apart, but stories of migration have made these cities inseparable. That’s the idea behind the Annenberg Community Beach House’s “Memories of Diaspora: Narratives of Los Angeles” exhibit, which places artwork by first-generation Los Angeles artists alongside works created in Oaxaca.

The organization is an educational and artistic beacon, a non-profit arts program that includes a 10,000-book library, and both painting and printmaking studios, which can also be used as an exhibition space. McCleary hosts at least two major shows each year.

El legado del artista oaxaqueño Francisco Toledo (1940-2019) va más allá de los recintos culturales que pudo aportar a Oaxaca. El gran trabajo que hizo 一 coinciden artistas 一 fue adaptarse a los cambios que han habido en el mundo, sin perder la identidad de un pueblo.

Reyes used hummingbirds, the sun and the moon to illustrate an ancient Guatemalan love story, and Nick Arciero, Alex OtisWoods and Luis Mateo helped him complete the project at Alvarado.

Mortality is a subtle subtext in Dan McCleary’s ravishing exhibition of recent paintings, drawings and etchings, some hand-colored with pastels and watercolors. The tone is profoundly civilized and searching.

To complement the exhibition “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” The Huntington engaged young Angeleno artists, ages 18 to 26, to look at Latin America from their own viewpoints.

On Sunday, I went to the USC Fisher Museum of Art for the opening of the multi-faceted exhibition showcasing a collaboration between the museum and students of Art Division, a nonprofit organization dedicated to training and supporting underserved youth who are committed to studying the visual arts.

The 10,000 book library is the “heart and soul” of Art Division. From there, the nonprofit offers a range of courses and access to arts materials, providing something of a “high-end Master's program for inner-city young adults,” said McCleary.

But today, I want to talk about an art exhibition, Art & Spirit, recently installed inside of the Church's Shatto Chapel. The exhibition includes a surprising range of artworks, from etchings by Rembrandt and Dürer, to contemporary works by Ed Ruscha, Sister Corita Kent, and John Nava.

A portion of the show will focus on art created by students from Art Division--a school that offers a professional training program for underserved young adults--who were asked to create works as a reaction to the theme. "The students had many reactions," explains Art Division's Executive Director, Dan McCleary, "confusion, excitement, resistance, bewilderment. They were given enormous freedom to respond as they saw fit - and the work they produced is as varied and imaginative as they are."

Titled “Art & Spirit,” the show features 85 works by 69 artists that showcase what is sacred to each of them. So renderings of the stations of the cross hang next to a cross composed of brain scans, and the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs above an acrylic painting of a single upholstered chair.

Black and his wife, Tanya Haden, have helped fanned the flames of small, select handful of projects including Art Division, an organization run by Dan McCleary, who teaches painting to young people in the Rampart district;

Galvez presents painting as a delectable social confection. His small, radiant still-life paintings lay out an array of pan dulce pastries -- conchas, chilindrinas, margarita cookies, etc., some partly eaten and others cut into pieces.

“This is now the heart and soul (of Art Division),” he said on a recent weekday afternoon at the new library, which was already being used by about six of his 20 students. “Looking at the art books really does change people’s lives…I think we’ve become too reliant on the Internet. They can Google artists and see their work online, but it doesn’t compare to seeing it in books.”

Emmanuel Galvez also met Dan at HOLA, but not as a student. Galvez was serving as a drawing model and when he mentioned to Dan that it was his birthday McCleary responded by handing him a small gift: a pen. "That made an impact," Galvez recalls, "someone actually cared."