Artist Residency Program 2024
6th Street Studios and Art Center supports a quarterly residency program. Residents have the freedom to choose the duration of their stay anywhere between 6 weeks and 3 months in one of our newly renovated studios. This opportunity provides a well-lit shared community studio, an exhibition area during residency, online exposure across several media platforms, and opportunities for community interaction through monthly Art Walks, Art Markets, exhibition openings, and more. Artists are welcome to use our large outdoor workspace areas at their leisure as well.
Paid teaching opportunities are available during the residency.
This residency is for a working studio only, no living space is provided. For special projects that require a stipend, the artist would have to fundraise in conjunction with the Studios and can include a fundraising plan in their application. Access to the studio is 24/7, accessible via biometric locks.
Current, Future and Past Residents
-
Jessie Zaylia - Spring
Jessie Zaylía, born in 1979 in Southern California, is a contemporary abstract painter currently residing in the Greater Los Angeles Area. She employs a range of media, depending upon the series; these media include oil, acrylic, spray paint, plaster, pigment powder, wire, and other mixed media on homemade stretched canvas or plywood. Her artwork is characterized by a focus on the subject of speciesism.
Zaylía’s current work explores intersectionalities related to speciesism, such as racism, consumerism, feminism, and post-industrialism. Her past portfolio includes a bold-color portrait of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, which is permanently displayed within the chambers of the United States Supreme Court. This significant project underscores her commitment to politically and socially relevant narratives, considering both macro and micro perspectives.
Zaylía's exhibit history includes a nationally juried group show at the Jo Mueller Reserve Gallery in Joplin, Missouri, which marked an historic milestone as the first LGBTQ-themed art exhibit in the city's history. She has also contributed to public art displays in Riverside, California, adding to the cultural landscape with her abstract work. Her paintings have been collected by art enthusiasts across California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Washington State, and Washington, DC.
-
Charly Malpass - Summer 2023 Resident
Charly’s childhood was spent in the woods behind the house that her father built. She was drawn to the woods as a place where she felt small as an observer and large as a narrator, and this is the same feeling that draws her to painting. Making art allows Charly to soak in her ever changing environment and visually reconstruct memories with poetic rendering. This past year, her work has broadly developed from interests in nature to a fascination for sustainability.
Charly is currently teamed up with “Tomorrow’s Artist”, a recycling company that collects and filters discarded paint from consumer drop off sites, to then create high-quality paint for artists. Since she is working with repurposed materials, Charly is able to use imagery to make a case to a broader, more diverse audience that art not only matters, it is indispensable to create a better world. Her paintings reflect the beauty of the natural world, the environmental challenges we face, and the opportunities for recovery and redemption.
-
Laura Diaz Tovar - Spring 2023 Resident
Laura Díaz Tovar (ella/she) is a poet, visual artist, and creative community educator worker born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, living on occupied Ohlone land. Her poetry and art celebrate culture, community, family, and love.
She is the co-founder of Colibrí Collective, a grassroots collective of women of color working to decolonize & redefine systems that keep communities oppressed through education, wellness, and culture by creating trauma-informed workshops based on social justice and equity.
-
Benton Bainbridge - Spring 2022 Resident
Benton is currently pursuing a series of video portraits of the Gilroy Community through his residency here at 6th Street. His work uses technology, but also questions how blindly we follow social media, and all the free labor in creating social media content.
Studio Open Hours: Sunday 11-3
Click Here for Benton’s Residency Statement
Click Here to Read About Benton’s Residency from Gilroy Dispatch
-
Lorena Diosdado - Winter 2021 Resident
Lorena is fascinated by stories and personal narratives especially those hailing from the working poor and other marginalized communities in the USA as that is my own background. Her work aims to intimately explore how marginalized people live their lives through aches and exultations at the whim of a sociopolitical background.
http://lorenadiosdado.com
Click Here to Read About Lorena’s Residency from Gilroy Dispatch
-
Hannah Miller - Fall 2021 Resident
Hannah Miller is an artist out of Rocklin, CA, and a recent graduate from CSU Northridge. Her current body of artwork examines the overlap between her family’s long-lasting adoration of sports and society’s progressing views on the subject of the female perspective in athletics.