Discipline: Visual Art – installation

Mark Dean Veca

Discipline: Visual Art – installation
Region: Altadena, CA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1998, 2019

Mark Veca creates paintings, drawings, and large-scale installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs. He is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and incite a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical, humorous, aggressive, or sexual imagery with both frenzy and pattern-like precision, his works often recall a modernized type of toile painting. Veca was named Honoree of the fall 2008 Jennifer Howard Coleman Distinguished Lectureship and Residency at Otis College of Art and Design. In 2006, he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Amongst his many honors, Veca has thrice received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting and has carried out artist residencies for institutions such as the Bronx Museum, MacDowell, and Villa Montalvo.

At MacDowell in 2019, he made a series of new paintings for upcoming exhibitions at California State University, Northridge and The Lancaster Museum of Art and History. His installation "Passaggio di Pop" is on view indefinitely at The Crocker Art Museum as part of the 2018 John S. Knudsen Prize. Veca is currently at work on a major public art commission for a new LA Metro train station opening in 2023.

Studios

Firth

Mark Dean Veca worked in the Firth studio.

Originally a working barn perched atop the namesake hill of Hillcrest Farm, this building was converted to serve the arts in 1956. A grand set of windows was installed to make the large interior suitable for visual artists, bringing in abundant natural light from the north. The addition of a screened porch and accessible entrance ramp…

Learn more