Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship

In 1985, Roy and Frances Rydell established the Roy and Frances Rydell Visual Arts Fund to promote local visual artists and arts organizations. Following their passing, their estate was bequeathed to the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, with the proceeds of the sale helping to grow the fund to its current level of over $2 million.

Now in its 20^th year, the fellowship program continues to honor the wishes and intent of the Rydells and has awarded $600,000 directly to local artists.

Opening at the MAH, we're proud to be showcasing the 2024-2025 Rydell Visual Arts Fund recipients María Isabel LeBlanc, Shirin Towfiq, Louise Leong, and Christian Rex Van Minnen. The exhibition celebrates the creativity of Santa Cruz County while honoring the legacy of Roy and Frances Rydell.

About the Artists:

Christian Rex van Minnen was born in Providence, RI in 1980 and currently lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA. He received a BA from Regis University, Denver, in 2002. His oil paintings have been exhibited worldwide and are in prominent public and private collections throughout the world.

“I am pleased to submit my most recent oil paintings completed here in Santa Cruz and exhibited globally over the past 5 years. Our family has grown here, we have all fallen deeply in love with the ocean, the tide pools, the forests, and our community. This work lies within a nexus of schools and traditions that include surrealism, Old Master’s techniques of oil painting, and spirituality. This work reflects ongoing conceptual and formal interests, and like the alchemy that surrealistic painting is, describes an internal mirroring of these processes happening within my own heart and soul. The scale of works, and their complexity has increased significantly since moving to Santa Cruz. I am drawn to contrasts of all types, and to seeing them in harmony together. These strange harmonies of light and dark, ecstatic joy and grief, meaning and absurdity, is what I am seeking to reconcile within myself, through painting.”

Louise Leong is a cultural worker, printmaker, and illustrator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates work that draws attention to things that are overlooked, inspiring levity and connection through nostalgia and humor. In 2018 she co-founded Little Giant Collective, a printmaking studio and community hub in downtown Santa Cruz. Her work has been exhibited at Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Incline Gallery, Silver Sprocket, Legion Projects (San Francisco), Radius Gallery, R. Blitzer Gallery (Santa Cruz, CA), Pajaro Valley Arts (Watsonville, CA), and internationally in Macau at Fundação Rui Cunha. Along with maintaining an art practice, Louise is Head of Exhibitions at the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAS). She has taught artmaking workshops for UCSC Porter College and community organizations, and for the Prison Arts Project in the Santa Cruz County Jail through the William James Association. She holds a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz in Studio Art and Education.

María Isabel LeBlanc was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a first-generation American and the daughter of Colombian and Cuban parents. Her practice explores her relationship with the landscape—both as a documentarian and as a humanist. Focusing on California’s Central Coast, her projects examine how the land serves as a marker of time and history. Her current project, De la Luz, documents her ongoing exploration of the agricultural region south of Santa Cruz, just off Highway 1. The series was photographed on film, primarily using a 4x5 view camera. María Isabel works as a sole craftsman, overseeing every step of her process—from exposing the negative to creating the final silver gelatin print. She holds a BA and an M.Ed. from the University of Georgia, Athens, and pursued photographic studies at the Atlanta College of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at Light Art Space, Sparks Gallery, Stonehenge Gallery, the Center for Photographic Art, and Atlanta Legal Aid. Her photographs have been featured in Lenscratch, Analog Forever Magazine, PDN Photo, and Rfotofolio.

Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. She focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and reflecting on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality. “My work begins with stories, whether they are stories my family has told me of their life in Iran and their journey to the present day, or stories I imagine what their past might have been like. To turn these stories into artworks, I think through their material attachments, the ways they are connected to photographs, moments of domestic life, like drinking tea or imagery of Persian rugs. I manipulate these materials in a similar way that these stories and memories are told to me, fragmented and remixed.”

Presented by the Rydell Visual Arts Fund at Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County