Holly Tempo

Holly Tempo, who received an MFA from the Claremont Graduate University, is known for her paintings and site-specific works. With an active professional career that spans over three decades, the artist has shown at a variety of venues in Southern California and internationally. Tempo served as a painting faculty in the Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art & Design for 16 years before embarking on a freelance career in 2017. A long-time resident of Inglewood, the artist relocated to Viseu, Portugal in 2021. She is a 2019-20 COLA Master Artist fellow and a 2012 recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2017, the artist was selected by the City of Inglewood to do a collaborative public artwork as part of the Inglewood Growing Artists Performed Projects (I-GAPP) Program. She serves on the IOS board.

The artist comments: "I am a painter who engages with dysfunctional spaces in society and uses the language of abstraction to process my experience. My work explores terrains—those seen as well as lived—that we visit and/or occupy, and attempts to reconcile a reality that is both intolerable and customary. I examine geography, cultural history, psychological trauma, and social anger by wedding aspects of the formal language of painting with tropes and decorative motifs that represent visited environments. I am interested in creating a hybridized, visual language by smashing appropriated formalist gestures against content gleaned from my situational relationship to the sites I explore in my daily wanderings."