Recap: POW! WOW! Long Beach + Art Renzei

Artist Tang-Wei Hsu 📍849 Pine Ave. From studio to gallery, from street to museum, Tang-Wei Hsu’s work has universal appeal. Hsu began his career as an artist in his birthplace of Taiwan. He moved to New York when he received an artist abroad subsidy from the Asian Cultural Council, and later obtained a Bachelor’s degree in architecture at the Shih Chien University and an MFA in visual arts at the Tainan National University of Arts.

Artists Brittney Price & Shack Smart 📍1731 East 4th st. Beautifying cities with every paint stroke, Shakir Manners — or Shak Smart — has made it his mission to experience unencumbered freedom of expression through art. Brittney Price is a Los Angeles-based fine artist and muralist specializing in impactful visual commentary on current events. Her work — featured at POW WOW Long Beach — is intended to uplift, celebrate and teach a diverse community using art as a vessel!

Artist Brendan Monroe 📍Seaside Way and Pine Ave. Brendan Monroe is a sculptor and painter who explores the duality and tension between reality and surreality. Inspired by scientific processes and internal landscapes, Monroe is widely known for his drawings, paintings, sculptures and illustrations.

Artist Andrea James 📍70 Atlantic Ave. Long Beach artist and high school teacher Drea James brings a unique sense of color play to POW! WOW! — her art is bright, bold and vibrant. She is inspired by travel, culture and the dichotomy of nature — both its imperfections and symmetry!

Artists Nat Iosbaker & Noelle Martinez 📍4975 Atlantic Ave. Noelle Martinez explores graphic patterns and eclectic color schemes. Signs of artist Nat Iosbaker’s work are all over Long Beach. The old-school sign painter specializes in a traditional and permanent art form that has left a mark on the storefronts of businesses throughout the city.

Artist Bordalo II. Artur Bordalo uses the artist name Bordalo II. The public space would become the chosen stage for his explorations of color and scale and the platform where he gradually transformed his habits and channeled his experiences in the construction and development of his artistic work. The excessive production and consumption of stuff, which results in the continuous production of “garbage” and consequently in the destruction of the Planet, are the central themes of his production. This “garbage” assumes itself as the unusual and unique raw material that Bordalo uses in the construction of small and large scale pieces that he has spread around the world

Artist James Jean is a Taiwanese American visual artist, known for both his commercial work and fine art gallery work. He is known in the American comics industry as a cover artist for various books published by DC Comics, as well as for his work for Prada, ESPN, and Atlantic Records. His work, which has been collected in numerous volumes, has been compared by The New York Times to that of Maxfield Parrish.

Artists Olga Lah and Spenser Little. Olga Lah creates large-scale, site-specific installations that explore ideas on transcendence and existence. Her work has been exhibited extensively including at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Los Angeles International Airport. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, KCET Artbound and Los Angeles Magazine. Spenser Little is a self-taught artist who has been bending wire for the last 15 years. He likes to make most of his designs out of one continuous wire strand, incorporating abstract and realistic images, kinetic sculpture, and sometimes snippets of text. His work has been shown in fine art galleries, music festivals, such as Kaaboo, Ripley’s Believe or Not, NPR, National Geographic, Vogue Italia, and he is the co-founder of local artist collective, the Cohort collective.

Artist Tom Fruin is known for working with plexiglass, steel, plastic, and scrap materials, and takes on urban objects such as houses, billboards, and flags, elevating their form to emblematic status and architectural scale. Fruin collects sign shop offcuts and brightly-hued plexiglass pieces throughout Chinatown, which he then weaves into striated grids. Illuminated from within and constructed in municipal locales, Fruin’s works dim to their own internal rhythms, becoming beacons of color and temples of light that dot skylines and community parks around the world, such as his re-interpretations of now-iconic Brooklyn Water Towers. His work is a part of many international museums and collections, most notably The Hanck Collection at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany; the Richard J. Massey Foundation for Arts and Sciences in New York, NY; and the Buenos Aires Design Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.