Alex Donis gave a Visiting Artist Lecture at the Arts Research Center on April 28, 2020.
Alex Donis is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work examines and redefines the boundaries set within religion, politics, race, and sexuality. Interested in toppling societies’ conventional attitudes, his work is often influenced by a tri-cultural (Pop, Latino, and Queer) experience. He has worked extensively in a variety of media including painting, installation, photography, video, and works on paper.
He was born in 1964 in Chicago, IL and was educated at a Catholic school in East Los Angeles, an east-coast prep school in Massachusetts, and a military academy on the southern coast of Guatemala. He received his undergraduate degree at California State University, Long Beach and his graduate degree from Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles.
His work has been at the heart of several controversial incidents that have stirred national debates regarding censorship in the arts. He has participated in hundreds of national and international individual and group exhibitions, most notably: “Made in California: Art, Image & Identity 1900-2000” at the LA County Museum of Art, “Potentially Harmful: the Art of American Censorship” at Georgia College and State University in Atlanta, GA and The 10th Biennale of Havana, in Havana, Cuba. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Art in America, Flash Art, Artpapers, ArtForum, ArtNews ,the New York Times, and Art and Queer Culture published by Phaidon Press.
He was a 2005 Alpert Award Nominee in the Visual Arts and has been the recipient of the Durfee Foundation’s Arts Completion Grant and the California Community Foundation Individual Artist Grant. Donis has been awarded residencies at the Brandywine Institute, Philadelphia, Artspace, Sydney, Australia, and the18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. He was the guest curator for “Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement” which was part of the 2011 J. Paul Getty Museum initiative “Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980.” His work is in the permanent collection of the LA County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Blanton Museum of Art, at the University of Texas, Austin.