KaleidoLA welcomes artist June Edmonds to launch the fall 2020 season. Edmonds is a Los Angeles-based painter, teaching artist, and public artist. Edmonds creates richly textured abstract paintings to explore how color, repetition, movement, and balance can serve as conduits to connection with her African American roots and to spiritual contemplation. The exploration of the psychological construct of skin color and tone through pattern and abstraction has been a revealing gesture for her. For example, her critically-acclaimed series entitled, “Flag Paintings,” considers the alignment of multiple identities such as race, nationality, gender, or political leanings. Another recent series, “Energy Wheel Paintings,” is inspired by her meditation practice.

About the Artist

Edmonds received her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, and a BA in art from San Diego State University. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been shown extensively in California at venues including the California African American Museum; Huntington Beach Art Center; Watts Towers Art Center; and the Korean Cultural Center. Edmonds’s public artworks include a Venetian glass mosaic at the MTA Pacific Station in Long Beach and a mural, "Windows to Health," created in partnership with LA Commons at the Expo Center in Exposition Park. In 2018, Edmonds was a recipient of the City of Los Angeles (COLA) artist fellowship, and in 2020, her series “Flag Paintings” garnered the inaugural $10,000 Aware Prize at the Armory Show in NYC, presented by the Paris-based nonprofit Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (Aware). Edmonds is represented by Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Artist’s Website

About KaleidoLA

KaleidoLA is the Department of Art and Art History’s annual guest speaker series and is a featured program of the College of Communication and Fine Arts (CFA). For the past eight years, KaleidoLA has been a vital connection between Loyola Marymount University and the Los Angeles arts community. For fall 2020, in collaboration with LMU’s Laband Art Gallery, KaleidoLA will thematically center artists whose artwork and lived experiences foreground issues of racial, economic and social justice. In light of COVID-19 restrictions, all lectures will be delivered live on Zoom.

For more information about this event, contact Karen Rapp, Director & Curator, Laband Art Gallery, karen.rapp@lmu.edu

Photo by Chris Warmald, courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles