Pitzer College Hosts Residency for Artists Affected by Eaton Fire

With support from a $20,000 grant from the Pepper Family Foundation, Pitzer College is hosting a summer residency with artists affected by the Eaton Fire in Altadena in January. The Pitzer College Art Galleries and Art Field Group welcomed four artists on June 23 for an eight-week program.

These artists have access to resources at The Claremont Colleges Library, the Harvey Mudd College Makerspace, Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (the Hive), and the studio space at Pitzer.

Learn more about the 2025 summer artists-in-residence:

Bridget Batch

Through photography, installation, and video, Bridget Batch pursues questions regarding alternate planes of consciousness and the nature of existence. She makes meditative artworks exploring our sense of connection in a world defined by modernization, consumption culture, and environmental transformation.

Visit Batch’s website.

Ruby Neri

Ruby Neri draws upon twentieth-century West Coast traditions as well as a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes. She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between; this places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. Over the last twenty years, Neri has also been one of the leading figures in the return to ceramics as a contemporary artmaking medium. The vessels that have dominated her production during this period evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Her use of sprayed glazes, meanwhile, links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.

Visit Neri’s artist page from David Kordansky Gallery.

Follow Ruby Neri on Instagram.

Brooke Schneider

Brooke Schneider has a small studio based in Pasadena, CA (formerly located in Altadena). Schneider’s work celebrates the unique signature of handmade, small batch art and lends a timelessness and rustic luxury to both functional and artistic pieces. All work is thrown on the wheel or made by hand by Schneider.

Visit Schneider’s website.

Delbar Shahbaz

Delbar Shahbaz deftly deploys sources in her works (sculpture, painting, installation, video, and drawing) that reflect on her role as a woman, artist, immigrant, and teacher. Shahbaz is exploring self-identity as a fluid multidimensional concept, defined by social and cultural context. As a new immigrant woman, she examines body image, beauty perception, and female identity through the lens of different cultures. Shahbaz borrows from a wide range of influences, from ancient fertility totems to unknown female outsiders’ writings, to create a world of fantasy where her lovable and loathsome creatures mirror their identities through textured corporeal forms glamorized by their material construction. Her works depict both beauty and brutality of the body, driving the viewer to touch, fondle, and play with them.

Visit Shabaz’s website.