YOUTH ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Our artist in residency provides a platform for two emerging youth artists to deepen their practice while receiving the practical knowledge, mentorship, and professional connections needed to foster a holistic and sustainable artistic career.

  • BIPOC artists in Los Angeles continue to face systemic barriers to entering and sustaining careers in the arts. Access to opportunities is often determined by networks, institutional affiliation, and insider knowledge rather than artistic merit alone. For artists who are self-taught, first-generation, low-income, or who did not grow up with access to museums, galleries, and arts education, there is often no clear pathway into the professional art world. Even art school graduates leave without the practical knowledge, mentorship, and professional connections needed to build sustainable careers. Our residency addresses this gap by providing the scaffolding that is often missing: mentorship, professional development, visibility, and access to networks that are typically difficult to navigate without insider support.

    • Legendary L.A. artist Dale Brockman Davis

    • Trailblazing gallerist, Dominique Clayton

    • Visionary Founder and Sovern Executive Director, Nicole Shostak-Sabourian

2026

2025

Aanii Tate

Aanii Tate (Diné and white, she/her) works across printmaking, digital media, and fiber arts. Her art challenges settler colonial ways of display and is rooted in themes of land remembrance and sisterhood. She grew up in Portland, Oregon, creating art with her two older sisters. She is a recent graduate  of USC, majoring in American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife) and minoring in Communication Design (Roski). She is passionate about arts education, community organizing, and arts resource redistribution. 

Her work engages hyper-visible photos of Native people and landscapes, popularized by white settler photographers, anthropologists and bureaucratics.  Engaging with these images as exploitative and threatening, her current series of works offers these colonially-corrupted images a new life, one rooted in  protection with annotations aimed to challenge the viewer’s perspective.

Alyssa Newsham

Alyssa Newsham (b. 1997) is Creole, New Orleans born and bred is a self taught artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Being born in a family that is full of life and colorful stories, she is steeped in the essence of her Creole culture. Her work is grounded in the importance of family and the acknowledgment of her ancestral traditions. She casts her characters through the movements of her materials, exaggerating hidden archival details that she seeks to accentuate in her work. She aims to illuminate the forgotten, neglected, and lost treasures through her assemblage practice. She predominantly highlights organic materials such as coffee grinds, nut shells, and corn to echo the vulnerability of shifting archival narratives. With her ongoing research inside her familial branches, she traces her steps back into the past to connect evidence with the truths and tales of the present.

Zoë Solis

Zoë Solis is a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA, whose practice reflects a curiosity of home- and the people, places, and things she identifies with the concept. Using painting, pastels, and ceramics, Solís’s work explores figures, still lifes, and landscapes in which there is a visceral connection. The foundation of her practice rests upon her work with oil pastels, she has translated the skills from this medium into large scale oil works that reflect themes of love and loss. In 2024, Solís graduated with a BA in Art History from UCLA. Zoë is also currently experimenting with air dry clay sculptures incorporating other materials such as acrylic paint and resin — tools that ensure the archiveability of the structures.

Daeton Abalos Oclarays

Daeton Abalos Oclaray is an interdisciplinary artist born in Hawai'i and raised between West O'ahu and Seattle, currently based in Los Angeles. His practice spans oil painting, charcoal drawings, and archival video, often extending into installation and material experimentation with surfaces such as raw canvas, linen, and found textiles. Drawing from his Filipino and Black American heritage, Oclaray's work reflects on his family's layered histories of migration, labor, and belonging. Through recurring imagery of domestic interiors and exteriors, floral motifs, and familiar objects, he explores how environments shape identity and memory, blurring the boundaries between figure, landscape, and pattern. Oclaray received his BA in Studio Art from UCLA in 2025, where he was also active in cultural programming and community organizing through the Cultural Affairs Commission.