Exhibition: 2022 CPA Artist Grant Recipients
Featuring work by Sarah Christianson, Kei Ito, and Krista Svalbonas
Exhibition on view: February 18 – March 26, 2023
Walk-through with artists: February 18, 3:00 – 4:00pm
Opening reception to follow from 4:00 – 6:00pm

Please visit the gallery to see the exhibition by our 2022 CPA Artist Grant recipients. Sarah Christianson, Kei Ito, and Krista Svalbonas are presenting work developed during the past year with funds from our artist grant program. CPA is honored and excited to support these photographic artists. We’ll be accepting applications for the 2023 grants from January 8-March 8. Submissions open in the new year.

  Sarah Christianson, Oakland, CA
Sarah Christianson (b. 1982) grew up on a four-generation family farm in the heart of eastern North Dakota’s Red River Valley (an hour north of Fargo). Immersed in that vast expanse of the Great Plains, she developed a strong affinity for its landscape. This connection to place has had a profound effect on her work: despite moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009, she continues to document the subtleties and nuances of the Midwestern landscape and experience through long-term projects.

Christianson earned an MFA in photography from the University of Minnesota in 2009. Since 2011, she has been an adjunct photography instructor at City College of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in the collections of Duke University, the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, and several institutions in the Midwest. She has received grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Christianson’s first book, Homeplace (Daylight Books 2013), documents the history and uncertain future of her family’s farm by interweaving her images with old snapshots and historical documents selected from her personal archive. Her ongoing project, When the Landscape is Quiet Again, examines the oil boom occurring in western North Dakota. Throughout her work, she uses her personal experiences and connection to the land to evoke a strong sense of place, history, and time. To see more of Sarah’s work, please visit her website. >  
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Kei Ito, Baltimore, MD
Kei Ito is a visual artist working primarily with camera-less photography and installation art who is currently teaching at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology followed by his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Ito’s work addresses issues of deep intergenerational loss and connections as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography. Ito’s work, fundamentally rooted in the trauma and legacy passed down from his late grandfather – a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage through examining the past, current trajectories, and visualizing the invisible such as radiation, memory and life/death.

By excavating and uncovering hidden histories connected to his own, Ito utilizes his generational past to use as a case study for contemporary and future events. Many of Ito’s artworks transforms both art and non-art spaces into temporal monuments that became platforms for the audience to explore social issues and the memorials dedicated to the losses suffered from the consequences of those issues. Within these intertwined pasts, Ito shines a light on power and its relationship to larger global issues that often led to and result in both war and peace alike.

Ito has participated in a number of Artist in Residence programs nationwide including the Studio at MASS MoCA(2021), the Denis Roussel Fellowship at the Center for Fine Art Photography (2021), and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2019). His internationally recognized solo and group exhibitions can be read in reviews and articles published by the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, BmoreArt, ArtMaze Magazine, and BBC Culture & Art. His works are included in major institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Norton Museum of Art, Chroma at California Institute of Integral Studies, Candela Collection, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art . To see more of Kei’s work, please visit his website. >
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Krista Svalbonas, Philadelphia, PA
Krista Svalbonas holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Interdisciplinary studies. Her work has been displayed in a number of exhibitions including at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Klompching Gallery and ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. Her work has been collected by the Cesis Art Museum in Latvia, the Woodmere Art museum in Philadelphia, Gregg Museum of Art & Design in North Carolina, as well as a number of private collections. Recent awards include a Baumanis Creative Projects Grant (2020), Rhonda Wilson Award (2017), Puffin Foundation Grant (2016) and a Bemis Fellowship (2015) among others. In 2022, Svalbonas will exhibit solo exhibitions of her Displacement series at the Copenhagen photo festival and the Linnamuuseum in Tallinn Estonia. She is an associate professor of photography at St. Joseph’s University. She lives and works in Philadelphia. To see more of Krista’s work, please visit her website. >
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