Tyler Stallings

Tyler Stallings’ curatorial work focuses on political, social, and popular culture themes through the arts. Currently, he is director of Orange Coast College’s Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion. Most recently, he was at University of California, Riverside. During his eleven-year tenure at UCR ARTSblock, since 2006, he served as Director of the Sweeney Art Gallery, Artistic Director of the Culver Arts Center and Interim Executive Director of ARTSblock (which also included the California Museum of Photography as part of the three-venue consortium). He was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum from 1999 to 2006. For UCR ARTSblock, he curated or co-curated: Absurd Recreation: Contemporary Art from China (2008), Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture (2008), Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response (2009), Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art (2009), Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy (2009), The Great Picture: The World’s Largest Photograph & the Legacy Project (2011), Margarita Cabrera: Puslo y Martillo (Pulse and Hammer) (2011), Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna's Photographs of the Mexican Revolution (2012), Lewis deSoto & Erin Neff: Tahquitz (2012), Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration (2013), and Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (2017), to name a few. Mundos Alternos received two major grants from The Getty Foundation as part of its Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. Other notable exhibitions at other venues include CLASS: C presents Ruben Ochoa and Marco Rios: Rigor Motors (2004), Whiteness, A Wayward Construction (2003), Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing (2002), Desmothernismo: Ruben Ortiz Torres (1998), and Kara Walker: African’t (1997). Many of these exhibitions have been accompanied by books. Upcoming ARTSblock exhibitions in 2018 that he will continue to curate include Yunhee Min & Peter Tolkin: Red Carpet in C and Painting Architecture. Upcoming Doyle Arts Pavilion exhibitions include Amy Elkins: Photographs of Contemporary Masculinity and Stargazers: Intersections of Contemporary Art and Astronomy. He is also the co-editor of the anthology, Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), and is a columnist for KCET-TV’s Artbound program. His most recent book of essays is Aridtopia: Essays on Art & Culture from Deserts in the Southwest United States (Blue West Books, 2014).

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PASOS: Video Installations by Marsia Alexander-Clarke

Marsia Alexander-Clarke is interested in developing silent video pieces similar to notated musical compositions with the use of small fragments of recorded video material.

Reconsidering Fourth of July Fireworks and Independence Day in Light of Cai Guo-Qiang's 'Sky Ladder'

New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang is known for creating public spectacles with fireworks and using them to create more traditional drawings with a very non-traditional technique based on pyrotechnics.

Levitating the Archaic Mind with Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass" at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Tyler Stallings ruminates on the connections between the archaic and contemporary in Michael Heizer's project "Levitated Mass," which perhaps represents a desire to reconnect with the sacred: the planet itself.

The Idyll-Beast: The Imaginary (Idyll)Wild Child

Our species' past or future is about an hour's drive, due east from Riverside, in the mountain hamlet of Idyllwild. There, the Idyll-Beast is said to exist -- a creature akin to Bigfoot, or Sasquatch.