The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego is thrilled to name the artists of NextGen 2024. This year’s exhibition of work by newly-graduated artists will run from July 13 to September 1, 2024 at ICA San Diego / Central located in San Diego’s famous Balboa Park. 

The annual exhibition, juried by a panel of art-world professionals, celebrates emerging artistic voices and highlights the innovative work being produced across the San Diego and Baja California region. Through NextGen, ICA San Diego provides local emerging artists with both exhibition opportunities and professional development, while highlighting the strength of our creative community.

This year’s artists are:

• Deanna Barahona, MFA, University of California, San Diego
• Santiago Diaz, BFA, University of San Diego
• celeste hernández, Centro de la Imagen, Tijuana BC
• JAX, MFA, University of California, San Diego
• Marinta Skupin, MFA, San Diego State University
• Chanell Stone, MFA, University of California, San Diego
• Nathan Storey, MFA, University of California, San Diego

Deanna Barahona is a first-generation multidisciplinary artist from Southern California working in text, photography, installation, and sculpture. Barahona examines subcultures that emerge in Southern California’s integration process through the use of  materials that reference architecture, adornments, and symbols within the homes of the Latin American diaspora. She will participate in a group exhibition at Museo Raúl Anguiano in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the summer of 2024 and a solo exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2025. 

Santiago Diaz uses processes of photography, drawing and sculpture to explore our surroundings focusing on architectural spaces and hyper construction. He uses his camera intuitively in response to the rhythms of modern society,capturing the peripheral vision of a city dweller in bleary bits and fragments. 

celeste hernández is a trans, non-binary Mexican artist who lives and works in Tijuana, Baja California. She uses her family archive, photomontage, and analogue photography to document the act of longing. Through her practice, she witnesses the people and social realities of the border region and explores the intersection between intimacy and memory. hernández’s work has been exhibited at the State Center for the Arts Tijuana, The San Francisco Center for the Book, and The Hill Street Country Club. Her work is included in public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, UCLA, and the Library of Congress. 

JAX is an interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles. In her practice, she utilizes synthetic braiding hair as a medium to create installations that incorporate her performances. Functioning as sets and stages, these environments serve as both subject and background for her video, sculpture, and printmaking practices.

Marinta Skupin is a Prebys-endowed scholar and MFA candidate at San Diego State University’s School of Art and Design. Prior to returning to the studio full-time, she had a long museum career, most recently as Curator of Education at Laguna Art Museum. She works in a variety of media and often combines imagery, references to scientific data, and language in order to probe multiple ways of knowing and of expressing the world. 

Chanell Stone is an artist living and working in Southern California. In her practice, Blackness emerges as a complex nexus, intersecting as both a geographical site and tangible material deeply rooted within the fabric of the American landscape. Stone wields her body as the primary medium, serving as a bridge between personal experiences and broader collective narratives of the Black diaspora. Her efforts are often expressed through photography, film and written word. 

Nathan Storey is an interdisciplinary artist who splits his time between Southern California and Colorado working in photography, performance, and printmaking. Storey’s work traces the relationship between printed matter and queer desire, memory, liberation, loss, and collectivity.

We are so grateful to this year’s jury: José Carlos Diaz, Susan Brotman Deputy Director for Art, Seattle Art Museum; Courtenay Finn, Chief Curator, Orange County Museum of Art; and Selene Preciado, Curator and Director of Programs, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.)

Applications have closed.