Flourish: The Aline Smithson Next Generation Award + Holiday Party – RSVP

About

Join us for our annual Holiday Party and Opening Reception on Sunday, December 15th, 11am-1pm@ LACP Headquarters, 252 S. Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012, RSVP Below.

Opening Reception and Holiday Cheer, in partnership with ASMP Los Angeles.

Sunday, December 15, 11am-1pm @ LACP Headquarters, 252 S. Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Exhibition Run Dates

December 15, 2024 – February 8, 2025 @ LACP Headquarters, 252 S. Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

The Event

We are excited to invite you to our Holiday Party and Opening Reception on Sunday, December 15th, from 11 am to 1 pm PST, a special celebration presented in partnership with ASMP Los Angeles. This festive gathering not only offers a chance to come together and celebrate the season but also marks the opening of a remarkable solo exhibition by Stephanie Shih, the first recipient of the Aline Smithson Next Generation Award. Stephanie’s work, on display for the first time at LACP, offers a captivating glimpse into the vision of one of our community’s most promising emerging artists.

We look forward to connecting with old friends, welcoming new faces, and sharing in the joy of this exciting occasion. Join us as we celebrate the holidays, support Stephanie’s incredible talent, and look ahead to a new year of creative possibilities.

About Stephanie Shih and Flourish

Stephanie Shih is a visual still life artist (photo-based and multimedia installations), known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food. As a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, Shih explores themes of contemporary and historical cultural dynamics of the diaspora through still life creations, drawing on her background in semiotics and research to recode the symbologies of the still life canon.

Flourish explores Shih’s work in the last five years, seeking to articulate central themes and approaches. The exhibition offers a cacophonous celebration of the complexities of Asian-American and immigrant experiences. Shih’s exhibition space refuses the surgically-clean white cube, by (re)introducing color, beauty, emotion, imperfection, and the narratives of culturally othered communities. So often the cultural and personal traumas of these communities are diminished in institutional spaces. Shih responds instead–often with collaborators from the AAPI community–with an unbridled maximalism dedicated to Asian diasporic presence and excellence, understanding at the same time that joy goes hand in hand with the messy multiplicities of human narratives.

Beyond still life, Shih’s work also speaks directly to the presence of the Asian-American experience in institutional archives in the west, by mining and exhuming objects and observing both the point of view of the collection and the various histories of the archived pieces. In Long Time No See (2023-2024) she anchors artifacts found in the Asian export porcelain collection at the Museums at Washington & Lee as diasporic objects that are interwoven in an intricate web of personal experiences, materials histories and the natural world around southwestern Virginia, where the ceramics now reside.

In Asian American Still Life (2020-ongoing), Shih claims a space for the Asian-American cultural experience, seen through an Asian-American lens. Questioning the idea of “All American,” the series reminds of the complex multi-cultural traditions that inform how California experiences its own culinary culture. The series features home comfort foods from Shih’s upbringing as a Taiwanese-Chinese American—foods that are derided as “strange” in the U.S. but hold great significance in Chinese culture. The artist partnered with Asian American small business owners, foregrounding hyper-local-yet-diasporic food practices that are embedded in local fabrics of personal, familial and collective experiences.

The Aline Smithson Next Generation Award is designed to empower and promote emerging, female identified photographic artists based in Los Angeles. LACP will organize five solo exhibitions for five artists for a period of five years, while providing curatorial guidance and professional development support. The artists are selected through a nomination process. The award is created in the spirit of Aline Smithson’s commitment to nurturing the photographic arts and uplifting the next generation of female identified artists. To pledge your support, click here.

Back to In-Person Show page HERE.

Tickets

Admission is FREE. Please RSVP below. Suggested Donation HERE

Details

• Date: Sunday, December 15, 11am-1pm PST
• Cost: FREE: Donations are encouraged (see below)
• Location: LACP Headquarters, 252 S. Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
• Parking: Street parking, Public parking: Terasaki Budokan Recreation Center (paid, underground, just across the street from LACP) and Joe’s Auto Parks Parking, 330 Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90013 (paid, surface).

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