
Spring 2025 Artists in Residence
Theresa Wong
9 Apr. – 11 May 2025
Photo by Andria Lo
Theresa Wong is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and intermedia artist whose work encompasses composition, improvisation, and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Originally active in the field of design, she embarked on her current artistic path after encountering experimental music while working as a designer in Venice, Italy. As a cellist and vocalist, Wong has forged a unique vocabulary on her instruments through extensive explorations in new playing techniques, alternative tunings, and the timbral merging of singing and playing together.
Wong’s compositions include Fluency of Trees for solo cello and voice which premiered at the Other Minds Festival in 2022, She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill for The Future Is Female project, and The Unlearning, a multi-media song cycle inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, released on Tzadik. Her long-time collaboration with Long String Instrument inventor Ellen Fullman includes Harbors, released on room40 and chosen as one of Wire’s top 50 releases of 2020. Their new work, Soundless, extends Wong’s string explorations into just intonation electric guitar and electronics, and has been presented at the Volume Festival in Sidney, MOCA Los Angeles, and Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. Wong is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition and a 2012 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow. She is the founder of fo'c'sle, a record label dedicated to releasing adventurous music from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Originally from Schenectady, New York, Theresa currently resides in Berkeley, California. For more information, please visit: www.theresawong.org
Performance of Fluency of Trees, Other Minds Festival 2022 (Photo by ebbe roe yovino-smith)
Still from Mud Nest Signals, for string quartet, cello, voice, & video, commissioned by Del Sol Quartet
Performance of O Sleep, Southern Exposure 2010, (with Shayna Dunkelman, Luciano Chessa, Dohee Lee, Preshish Moments, Ellen Fullman, costumes by Alice Wu and video by Heike Liss)
Film still from As We Breathe, (with David Castillo, text by Mercedes Roffé), commissioned by Long Beach Opera
Pepe López
9 Apr. – 11 May 2025
Pepe López Reus (b. 1966, Caracas, Venezuela) is an artist who lives and works between Paris and Caracas. His work is based on a vast trajectory of diverse transmutation. He explores the map of the social spectrum through the translation of aesthetic codes, while developing his perception and concepts in a prolific variety of mediums such as: textiles, objects, collages, paintings, installations, photography, video and performances.
As part of López research as an artist, he has gained wide experience curating major multidisciplinary and collective art projects at The Puffin Foundation in New York City and Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, among other prestigious institutions. He has also exhibited his work at the New York Museum of Arts and Design, Mercosur Art Biennial in Brasil, La Havana Biennial; Ruya foundation and The Gasworks in London; Museo Amparo in Mexico; Museo Rosario in Argentina, among others. He has been working with creative communities as in Todasana village where the artist develops a project of artistic exchange with drum makers and musicians since 2012.
López work is deeply rooted in the foundations of abstraction, but his motivation, process and meanings question crucial aspects of contemporary life such as aesthetics, identity, simulation, consumerism and communication, among others, which allows the artist to connect: the individual with the community, the arts with the politics and the pain with the beauty. In Guapisimas series, the artist maps global interactions. Pepe López beckons his audience to confront the reality of global consumerism through cultural codes of society. By painting and weaving fashion industry logos and manga characters on traditional indigenous baskets, a cartography of consumerism, a cultural exchange or syncretism which occurs in the outskirts of Puerto Ayacucho in the borderline of Amazon rain forest, transforming these simple objects into allegorical representations of their own beauty.
The artist has a very particular way of inventing his methods of communication, developing several series of works at the same time. He walks through cities with a supermarket cart, recording his path with a video-camera while collecting trash, that later, in his studio, he classifies to use for his urban sculptures and costume designs.
Pepe López, Crisalida, 2018, Installation and performance. Ruya Maps/Fitzrovia Chapel, London. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Pepe López, Fantastic Plastic, 2016, Recovered plastics. Performance at Patmos, Greece. Photo by Paloma Lopez.
Pepe López, Root/Routes, 2017, Plastic and paper sewn on paper. Dot fiftyone Gallery, Miami. Photo by Zachary Balber.
Pepe López, Crisalida, 2017, Installation and performance. Espacio Monitor, Caracas. Photo by Julio Osorio.