Ordinary People Panel Conversation

In conjunction with Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, join MOCA for a conversation with exhibiting artists Cynthia Daignault, Shizu Saldamando, and Takako Yamaguchi, moderated by curator Anna Katz.

Cynthia Daignault has presented solo exhibitions at Kasmin Gallery, New York; The Sunday Painter, London; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and White Columns, New York. She has exhibited in several major museums and institutions, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York. Daignault’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Blanton Museum of Art, TX; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; and the Walker Art Center, MN. Daignault is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 Macdowell Colony Fellowship. In 2021, her work was featured in “Soft Water Hard Stone,” the fifth New Museum Triennial.

Shizu Saldamando is a Los Angeles based mixed media artist originally from San Francisco’s Mission district. Primarily concerned with portraiture and drawing, she experiments with a broad range of surfaces and materials from wood panels to bed sheets. Saldamando’s practice employs tattooing, video, painting and drawing on canvas, wood, paper, and cloth, and functions as celebration, and homage to peers and loved ones. Her mother’s family is Japanese American, by way of Boyle Heights/Sawtelle areas of L.A., and survivors of the Japanese American Internment camps. Her father is Chicano from Nogales, AZ. She received her B.A. from UCLA School of Art and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. She is currently represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

Takako Yamaguchi lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received a BA from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1975 and a MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978. She has held solo exhibitions at as-is.la, Los Angeles (2024, 2022); Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023); Ramiken Crucible, New York (2021); Egan and Rosen, New York (2021); STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); Nevada Museum, Reno (2007); Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (2007); and Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles (2006). She has been included in institutional surveys including Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Musuem of American Art, New York (2024); The Ocean, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2021); With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2019-2021); Transcendence: Abstraction & Symbolism in the American West, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah (2015); California Echoes: Women Inspired by Nature, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, California (2007); and L.A. Post-Cool, Museum of Art, San Jose, California (2002). Her work is in the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nevada Museum, Reno; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles; the Lynda and Stuart Resnick Collection, Los Angeles; and Deutsche Bank, New York, among others.

This program is organized by Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach, and Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.