Pasadena Playhouse District’s Blog

The Playhouse District is getting a new garden featuring water- conservation techniques and drought-tolerant native plants on a sliver of land at the corner of Cordova and Union. Read the rest of the article in today’s Pasadena Star News by clicking HERE.

(photo by Walt Mancini / Pasadena Star News Staff Photographer)

Please join Mayor Bill Bogaard and Councilmember Terry Tornek for the dedication of the new Rotating Public Art Exhibition Program this Saturday:

Saturday, March 10 at 10:00 am 
at Sidney F. Tyler Park, Lake Avenue and Lakewood Place
(just south of California Boulevard—street parking available)

You are invited to meet participating artists and visit their artworks after the program. For more information contact the Cultural Affairs division: (626) 744-7062 or visit www.cityofpasadena.net/arts

The newly installed storefront exhibition at 561 Green St. and 73 N. Madison highlights Los Angeles’s rich history of assemblage art and features the work of five artists from the Associated Assemblage Artists of Los Angeles.

Kate Carvellas
Kate Carvellas is a self-taught artist who lives and creates in Pasadena, CA. In 2004, she found herself in desperate need of an artistic outlet and began creating two-dimensional thematic montages using imagery from various magazines and clip art sources. With further exploration and a new-found confidence, she began to pursue a different direction, creating, original, three dimensional collages. She now find great joy working in collage, mixed-media and assemblage.

Kate finds great joy in working in assemblage mixed media and collage– resurrecting the discarded and forgotten things of this world and giving them new life and meaning. Her artwork is an essential and intensely personal part of her life. It explores and expresses the inner workings of her heart, mind and spirit in a way that words cannot express. She hopes that when people see her work, it will resonate with them on some level, be it intellectual, emotional or spiritual.”

Dave Lovejoy
David Lovejoy has been working as a maker and designer since the early 1980’s. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in California, Hawaii and Oregon and is in collections in the U.S. and Europe. He has won a grant and a few awards, and in 1993 was named one of the “Art Stars of California” by Art in California magazine.

As a maker of things, his artistic direction has always included using and repurposing whatever materials fit the need. Trained as a ceramic artist, his current work includes assemblage and installation art. Recently, he was commissioned for the work ‘Walk / Don’t Walk”, filling the street-level windows of the Spring Arts Tower on Gallery Row in downtown Los Angeles. He is also reworking a 1962 Airstream trailer to be used as sleeping quarters for Buzz Aldrin and Steve Wozniak in an upcoming expedition to the South Pole.

Patrick Quinn
Patrick Quinn is a self-made artist who creates Multi-Media & Assemblage Sculpture. Each piece is constructed using found objects and materials. Discarded memories found at swap meets & yard sales. His work is emotional, provocative, and personal.

Cynthia Paige Aaron
Cynthia Paige Aaron has been making art since childhood and assemblage since 1990. She creates a dialog with found objects,collage, paint and graphite in her work. She infuses humor, the macabre and the mystical into her sculptural wall or free-standing constructions. She works intuitively, always playing with the phenomenon of synchronicity in her work. Cynthia’s home and studio is in South Pasadena, CA.

Jena Priebe
Conceptual sculptor Jena Priebe has always been creative. From childhood, the spark of seeing things just a little bit differently has always fueled her artistic endeavors.
She uses a myriad of media, assembling with mirrors, glass, machine age artifacts, antiquated found objects, and the guts of machines. Some things are haggled over, bartered for, unearthed in a forgotten family attic or pulled from the depths of tangled industrial salvage yards. Objects that have been forgotten are reclaimed and given a breath of new life.

We are excited to welcome an art installation by Sarah Amanda Jones to our district at 600 E. Colorado Blvd.

Artist Statement: With its vast mystery and dynamic beauty, nature provides a special, intuitive way for me to connect with God. This connection resonates with the deepest part of me and calls out my creativity. Feeling powerfully linked to life itself, I see a vision of what I will paint, where the lights and darks will be and how the lines will move. When I am ready to paint, the first thing I do is brush water onto some of the paper. This way, while I lay down my india ink and watercolor, the water can spontaneously move everything around, spreading the ink here, bleeding or holding the color there. The painting process doesn’t take long: in thirty minutes to an hour, it is finished.

The artwork displayed is an initiative of the Pasadena Playhouse District - Pasadena’s Center for Culture, Commerce, and Community. Curated by Michelle McCreary.

If you are an artist interested in future exhibitions or would like to have art installed in your Pasadena storefront, please contact playhousedistrictart@gmail.com

Sarah Amanda Jones
Entering the Ocean I, 2011
Watercolor on paper, 24” x 18”

See more of Sarah’s artwork on her website by clicking HERE.