SD Art Prize 2024
Open October 25, 2024
The San Diego Art Prize is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s prize: Gabriel Boils, Francisco Eme, and Marisol Rendón. This year’s exhibition, Stochastic Elegies: Life, Nature & Transcendence features artwork which offers up poetic explorations of universal themes surrounding our lived experience.
The San Diego Art Prize is predicated on the idea that the visual arts are a necessary and rewarding ingredient of any world-class city, and was conceived to promote and encourage dialogue, reflection, and social interaction around San Diego’s artistic and cultural life. This annual award honors artistic expression with a cash prize, exhibition opportunities, and spotlights artists in the San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico region whose outstanding achievements in the field of visual arts merit recognition. The San Diego Visual Arts Network (SDVAN) is the producer of the SD Art Prize. SDVAN is a volunteer non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating access to over 2500 visual arts resources in our region.
Recipients were nominated by sixteen local arts professionals and selected by an esteemed panel of curators from respected institutions: Silvia Karman Cubiñá, Director of The Bass Museum of Art (Miami), Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Lucia Sanroman, Director of the the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda (Mexico City) and Curator at Large for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco).
Writers that have contributed to the 2024 Art Prize catalog are:
Chelsea Behle Fralick, Art Historian, Writer, Lecturer, University of San Diego, for Francisco Eme
Derrick R. Cartwright, Director of University Galleries at the University of San Diego, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Timken Museum, for Marisol Rendón
Carlos E. Palacios, Independent curator, Lecturer, for Gabriel Boils
Curated by Lara Bullock, Ph.D. This exhibition was made possible by a collaboration between the San Diego History Center, The City of San Diego, Art Matters, and the San Diego Art Prize. San Diego Visual Arts Network is pleased to announce the recipients of the SD Art Prize.
Marisol Rendón
(b. 1975 Manizales, Colombia). Marisol Rendón works as artist, designer and educator. She received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California in 2003. During the last 15 years, she and her husband Ingram Ober have collaborated on projects in public art, museum exhibitions, social/civic events and have participated in art and aesthetics discussions. They have completed two public art projects for the City of San Diego and are currently working on one more for Beyer Park, as well as a completed project at Mira Costa College, San Elijo campus. Besides her creative practice, she works for the Chula Vista Community College District as a tenured professor and coordinator of Mixed Media Three-Dimensional Design and Art program at Southwestern College. As an individual artist she has exhibited in France, Switzerland, Colombia, the United Kingdom and the United States. In California, she has exhibited with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the California Center for the Arts, Escondido and the Oceanside Museum of Art. She has also exhibited at and worked closely with the New Children’s Museum, San Diego.
Gabriel Boils
(b. 1974 Tamaulipas, Mexico) is a Mexican visual artist and cultural agent living and working in Tijuana. He studied visual arts at the Faculty of Arts and Design of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. His practice is focused in the fracture between image and support, between information and matter. In his work, contemporary art strategies, scientific methodologies and traditional art models and techniques merge, to explore the environmental and social fragmentation of the post-industrial world in which we live. He has been awarded acquisition prize at the 12th Biennial of Visual Arts of the Northwest and honorable mentions in the International Biennial of Banners 2006 and the IV Miradas Biennial. Gabriel Boils has exhibited his work in the United States, Latin America, and Europe and is part of the art collections of the Museums of Art of Sonora and Sinaloa, the FEMSA and CODET Foundations and the Tijuana Cultural Center.
Francisco Eme
(b. 1981 Mexico City – Oaxaca, Mexico) currently lives and works in San Diego, CA. Francisco is a music composer, and multimedia artist. He primarily works with sound, but diverse disciplines are integrated into his practice. His work has been presented in museums, galleries and concert halls nationally and internationally. As a member of musical projects Rabbitlight & Rio Goya, he has released collaborative albums, and also has solo projects in various genres, mainly electroacoustic, experimental, and electronic pop. Francisco is the Arts & Culture Director at Casa Familiar and Gallery Director at The FRONT Arte & Cultura, a trans-border art gallery in San Diego, US – Tijuana. His art practice is driven by a deep observation of the culture in which he lives, personal, social interactions, and everyday situations. He strives to start a conversation with the audience about our culture, our family, nature, memory, and other preoccupations of our time and place. Art, society, technology and science merge in his practice. His works come out in the shape of a music composition, multimedia installation, a photograph, but most importantly as ideas.
