A Life in the Arts: The CSUN Virginia Orndorff Artist-in-Residence Program

A Life in the Arts: The CSUN Virginia Orndorff Artist-in-Residence Program Shows Students What an Artistic Career Looks Like 

California State University, Northridge has a mission to show students what kinds of careers they can build out of things they might only imagine. Take art, for instance. Some of us might have difficulty imagining making a living as an artist, even with passion and experience.

Enter CSUN’s Virginia A. Orndorff Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program. Coordinated by Samantha Fields — a professor of Art and Design in the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communications — and CSUN Art Galleries Director Holly Jerger, the residency is in its second year of a three-year pilot. (Fields was Department Chair when the program started and is currently on sabbatical.) Literally springing from a conversation between Fields and Senior Director for Development Michael C. Ryan, it’s a 15-week residency created and endowed by Chris and Virginia Orndorff to help CSUN students become professional artists by showing them what a career in the arts can look like. The program is also in honor of Virginia (‘00) who has a passion for visual arts, one that her family discouraged her from pursuing, so she majored in Marketing at CSUN. Virginia continued her art photography in her spare time, and in 2014 finally began her career as a full-time photographer.

The program’s inaugural session was Spring 2025, and the Kalli Art Collective, a family collective based in Boyle Heights, was chosen for the first residency. An anonymous panel of Los Angeles-based artists and curators nominates artists they believe will provide CSUN students an exciting, comprehensive and engaging experience. The prospects are invited to apply, and then a CSUN faculty committee decides who would be the best for the student community.

“That’s how we selected Kalli Arte,” Fields explains. “First of all, they’re a collective, which is something we liked. And they bust all the myths about the art world, like you can’t be married, you can’t have children, that having a family will make you unable to be a working artist, which is all nonsense. The collective’s unique integration of personal life and professional practice introduced our students to a career model that is honest, grounded, sustainable and rooted in systems of support

“The students responded really well to it, they got it,” Fields says. For the first year of the program, Fields says the committee looked for artists working with two-dimensional media — Kalli Arte are primarily print-makers, but they also work with installation, painting, sculpture, and community activism. “So, they were able to tie in everything they do and could serve huge swaths of the department.”

The Kalli Arte Collective was created by Adriana Carranza and Alfonso Aceves and their four children. Fields says the students also appreciated that the couple took a non-traditional path to the art world — they didn’t attend art school, and started out as vendors, selling prints and stickers at farmers’ markets and fairs. “It validated a lot of the students’ own creative experiences, and showed them that small sales, at affordable prices, can sustain a family.” Chances are you’ve seen the Collective’s work around Los Angeles.

One important aspect of the program is that students can work for the artists, experiencing a valuable apprenticeship. For instance, they learned Exhibition Development and Design from Dr. Mario Ontiveros, who worked closely with his students on the show that was the culmination of the session. “They did everything,” Fields says, “from working with the artists to develop the theme, to writing for the show and creating the catalog; they were interviewing, photographing and hanging art. It was a fully collaborative and immersive experience.”

The theme of the first residency was “Our Sun Will Rise,” which honored ancestral traditions and celebrated the couple’s first grandchild, while reflecting on the current political climate. “We are a Hispanic-serving institution,” Fields explains, “And our community is affected. Their sense of well-being and safety was challenged. Sometimes when things get hard, people stop working. But my point of view is that making art is always an act of resistance against any sort of injustice. So, they worked constantly, and Ariana and Alfonso gave students a message of hope: Our Sun Will Rise. Their resilience and modeling of how to be an artist was deeply impactful.”

The Exhibition

“Our Sun Will Rise” was also the title of the culminating exhibition, held at the CSUN West Gallery in May 2025. More than 1,700 visited throughout its run. The exhibition served as a powerful testament to art's ability to heal and connect people, providing a space for dialogue and reflection.
Feedback from the program indicated that it helped students think outside the box in terms of how to build a career as a creative person, and some were even inspired to start their own collective and/or start a vending business. The fact that the workshops and classes are easily viewed through the windows of the Gallery added to the real-life appeal.

Virginia A. Orndorff Artist-in-Resident

 

The Next Resident

Bruce Yonemoto is the second Artist in Residence. Yonemoto is a multimedia artist based in Southern California who explores film and video, and the intersection of music, art and commerce. In a word, he will be challenging students to question everything.

Many of his works from the mid-1970s into the 1980s were done in collaboration with his brother Norman, who died in 2014. Yonemoto will be in-residence for the 2026 spring semester and — as did the Kalli Arte Collective — will be working out of the studio near the entrance of the CSUN Art Galleries. The room has windows that allow passersby to see the artist at work and that are equipped with blinds, so artists can lower them if they do not want to be disturbed

Yonemoto’s pieces have included topics such as the Japanese internment camps. He has been internationally exhibited — including at the Pompidou Center in Paris — and honored with grants and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and others. Yonemoto is working on a collaboration with performance artist Karen Finely and just finished a semester as a professor at UC Irvine. Hundreds of students of many different levels will be engaged in the current session, from Art100 to Dr. Ontiveros’ exhibition class, to Candace Greathouse’s advanced video class, “This is an example of how we weave these artists into the curriculum,” Fields explains.

Faculty and students across mediums in the department have been working with Yonemoto on a project inspired by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s childhood game of role-playing the comic strip Flash Gordon. The piece deals with race, identity, gender and sexuality, “topics our students very much care about,” Fields emphasizes. “He works to bring representation to into the discourse in really creative and innovative ways, ways that I think will appeal our students and inspire their work,” Fields says. “The content of his work is profound. Some of the work that he’s made deals with found footage and imagery, putting them together in this kind of postmodern pastiche method. He was an early sample artist, and I think that’s really interesting to our students. It is such a wonderful opportunity to work and learn from an artist of his caliber.”

Yonemoto moved into his studio in late January and has been actively engaged with students and faculty since then, according to Department of Art & Design Chair Joe Bautista. “He has brought visiting writers and artists into the Exhibition Design course, and he has met with our MA and MFA students to offer thoughtful feedback and insight into their creative work.” And as work on the exhibition continues, the collaboration gets even more exciting, says Bautista. “One of the works is exceptionally tall, and we needed a large, controlled environment to properly document it. Our collaboration with the College of Engineering and Computer Science and the support of Dean Toutanji, allowed us to utilize the High Bay Experimentation Lab for a critical photoshoot.”

The Orndorff Artist-in–Residence program is the ultimate collaboration, Fields concludes. “Holly Jerger was integral to the program’s development. She had the idea to use the Gallery Store as the studio and coordinating an alliance with LACMA to nominate the first residents. And when Mario involved his Exhibition Design class, students were able to learn the nuts and bolts of putting a show together, working with the artists.”

Bautista agrees: “While students develop skills and craft their creativity in the classroom, they also need real-world experiences that extend beyond it. An artist-in-residence program allows them to see how those skills are applied in practice. Building an exhibition with a practicing well-known artist from the ground up, and witnessing the full arc of the process, is the kind of experiential learning our students need as they prepare to enter a range of creative fields.”

The Orndorffs have been so pleased with the AIR program that they have already committed to continuing it beyond the three-year pilot, according to Michael Ryan — great news for CSUN students.

The exhibition opens on May 2 at 3:00 p.m. in the West Gallery and coincides with the reception for the CSUN MA and MFA thesis exhibition.