Born in Camden, N.J., in 1971 and raised in Newark, Thomas was raised by a single mother who worked as a social worker. “A creative and visual person,” Thomas says, her mother loved fashion — she modeled in the 1970s — and had a deep art appreciation that motivated her to enroll Thomas and her brother in after-school art programs.
The women she aspires to capture in her work, she says, are strong yet vulnerable, have prowess, charisma and fortitude. Women that persevere and are strong-willed. Women like her mother. When Rebeca Méndez was 12, her parents gave her a giant wall in their home to paint what she pleased. “The responsibility I felt was enormous, and it was really nerve-racking,” she says.
Born in 1962 and raised in Coyoacán, in southern Mexico City, Méndez spent much of her childhood searching for archaeological sites in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula with her family, camping in the wild for up to a month.
“And I went crazy,” she recalls excitedly. “That’s when I thought, ‘I want to be an artist.’” She returned to ArtCenter for an MFA while working full-time as the school’s design director, helping to produce more than 300 projects annually. By the time she graduated, her career was booming.She married in 1985 but divorced four years later and was struck with an acute need to “purify myself,” she says. “I didn’t know how to cleanse myself, so I started looking at how my body cleans itself.
When Méndez was approached to design a couple of art pieces for the future Crenshaw/LAX Line, she was thinking about the transit system as a great “equalizer” and about time. About the way people use subways and rails when they are “rushing from one place to another” and how “most of the time, you go into your work and you don’t come out sometimes until it’s dark.”
Or, as Méndez put it: “No matter who you are, where you live, what is your social strata, you see the same [sky].”Artist Jaime Scholnick in her East L.A. studio. She is among the artists whose work will appear at stations along the Crenshaw/LAX Line, set to open next year. Scholnick’s work begins with photographs taken by Sally Coates between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Leimert Park Village and capture the dawn to midnight hours of the area.
In a 2015 installation at CB1 Gallery, artist Jaime Scholnick used ink to manipulate photographs of the 2014 Israeli bombings of Gaza, abstracting the images -- and their difficult content -- in the process.
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