2021 San Diego Art Prize Exhibition

NOTE: Extended through Jan. 8, 2022.
The 2021 San Diego Art Prize recipients are Beliz Iristay, Panca, Hugo Crosthwaite and Perry Vasquez. To commemorate the prize, the recipients will show new work together in a group exhibition at Bread and salt gallery, opening Oct. 9 with a reception from 5-8 p.m.

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Opening reception: Saturday, Oct. 9, 5-8 p.m.
Bread and Salt gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

From the KPBS/Arts newsletter, Oct. 7, 2021:
This weekend, the 2021 San Diego Art Prize exhibition opens at Bread and Salt in Logan Heights, with work from prize winners Panca, Hugo Crosthwaite, Perry Vásquez and Beliz Iristay.

The prize has been around since 2006, dreamed up by the San Diego Visual Arts Network, primarily using a mentorship model with two outstanding emerging artists linked with two established artists to create work together. In 2020, the split between emerging and established was set aside, and the four finalists that year (Melissa Walter, Kaori Fukuyama, Alanna Airitam and Griselda Rosas) all agreed to share the honor rather than wait for one winner to be announced, setting the new precedent.

I've been following each of the four 2021 artists, and my most recent feature is on Beliz Iristay, who calls Mexico, San Diego and Turkey home — read it here. You can also learn about the way Panca draws on myth and her Tijuana street art roots to invent her own disruptive, vivid and weird narratives. Or read about the way Crosthwaite plays with folklore in his murals and how he uses stop-motion animation to bring portraits, drawings — and his process — to life in my feature here.

Artist Perry Vásquez is also having a big month — in addition to showing works in the Art Prize exhibition, he will also open a solo show at Sparks Gallery, "Oasis." All told, he'll be throwing some 75 to 80 works into the world this month alone.

I'm especially fond of Vásquez's massive palm tree paintings, including some of them on fire (timely!). He told me that in painting these trees, they become almost sentient. "The format suggests a kind of human-type scale, the anthropomorphic quality. So I feel like I'm painting portraits. I feel like they're very individual," Vásquez said. Watch for my feature on his work next week.

Each artist has been busy installing works at the gallery, including a mixture of new works and murals plus older faves we may have seen before. At Saturday's opening reception, stick around for a performance by The Color Forty Nine.
—Julia Dixon Evans, KPBS
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