RTS is excited to host Real Talks with resident artist Richard-Jonathan Nelson and Alex Arzt. Event via zoom from 6-8pm PDT.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81924008136?pwd=cEg0QTJWaFg0WW43Ni92Q0RiWjVWdz09
Richards residency program was from August-October and Alex’s program is November-January 2022. In this way we(RTS) are trying an “exit” and “intro” approach to our Real Talks series.
Richard-Jonathan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. His work is multi-layered, chromatically intense and mixes images of the natural world with reference to hoodoo, queer culture, and Afro-Futurism. He uses his constructed worlds to examine the overlapping spheres of culturally perceived identity and the emotional memory of what it means to be a queer black man. Thereby creating a limbic space free from the weighted excepted western cultural reality, and able to examine the unspoken ways systems of power persist.
Born in Savannah, Georgia (1987) and working in Oakland, CA Nelson received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. His work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Embark Gallery, Root Division in San Francisco, and Aggregate Space in Oakland.Rooted in a connection to place and material explorations, Alex Arzt facilitates connections between human and nonhuman spaces by creating projects in the form of publications, interactive objects, workshops, group performances, lectures, videos, and experimental gardens. From 2018-2021, she was an Affiliate Artist at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA. She runs a Risograph press called A Magic Mountain, and her publishing projects are in the collections of libraries such as Stanford, Getty Research Institute, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2018, she was awarded grants from The Puffin Foundation and The East Bay Community Foundation towards the completion of The Positions and Situations Project book series. She earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and has since attended residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, PLAYA Summer Lake, Hambidge Center, A-Z West, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mildred’s Lane, and This Will Take Time. She is currently a lecturer at UC Davis’ Department of Art and Art History and has taught at UC Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and VCU.