Calico Brown

 

VADA, the Visual Arts & Design Academy at Santa Barbara High School, is thrilled to announce a very special mural collaboration project with artists Joe Shea and Yoskay Yamamato. The artists will work with VADA students on a series of mural paintings, which will then be installed on the Anacapa Project building in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone.

Visual Arts & Design Academy

VADA is a "school‐within‐a‐school" that integrates rigorous academic coursework with project‐based, career‐focused, and art & design instruction in a supportive and creative environment. VADA serves 175 students in grades 10 through 12 at a culturally and economically diverse urban high school in downtown Santa Barbara. VADA teachers collaborate to create a thematically and conceptually integrated curriculum. Field trips to major Southern California museums and design firms, artist residencies, guest speakers, mentorships, and internships give students exposure to and experience in the creative sector.

For our Spring Artist-in Residence project, we are bringing in two prominent West Coast artists with strong local ties to lead a public mural project and act as mentors to VADA students, who will be working alongside the professional artists as interns and collaborators in the creation of the mural panels. Joe Shea and Yoskay Yamamato both formerly resided in Santa Barbara and were very active in the local art community. They have both collaborated extensively, including on large-scale mural projects. They both still have close ties to Santa Barbara, but now live and work in Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong, and Japan, and are also involved in commercial art ventures (toy and shoe design) as well as continuing to make and show fine art.

VADA was invited to create 12-4X8 mural panels which will be prominently displayed outdoors on a newly re-designed building (extending a full city block) housing some of Santa Barbara’s hottest new restaurants (The Lark & The Lucky Penny) and wine tasting rooms on part of the Urban Wine Trail. This hip tourist destination in an industrial warehouse district also includes many artist studios and galleries. The mural panels will be on display for 6 months, and after their de-installation, will be used to fundraise for the program.

This ambitious project could not have been possible without funding VADA received from the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, as well as from Vans/Americans for the Arts. VADA was one of only 10 schools nation-wide to be awarded the Vans grant, and it enabled us to up-the-ante on this project by bringing in internationally-renowned artists to work with our talented students. Thanks Vans-we are stoked!