Festival Visual Artist

Each season, Music@Menlo invites a distinguished visual artist to exhibit a selection of their work throughout the festival and showcases their work in the festival’s publications. The 2025 visual artist is Mark Chen. Mark centers his practice on photography. He invents and repurposes tools as he pushes media boundaries, devising new processes that make possible the executions of his concepts. For his latest series, Pilgrimage of Light, which explores the mysterious coexistence of the universe, earth, and people, Mark travels to hard-to-reach wilderness to project galactic images, altering landscapes while photographing them. The production of this series received a boost from his residency at Grand Canyon National Park in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, Pilgrimage of Light will be shown in International Art and Science Museum, Texas, and featured in National Geographic Magazine’s March 2025 issue.

Past Visual Artists

2024: Antony Squizzato
2023: Gabriel Schama
2022: Simon Bull
2021: Donald Sultan
2019: Klari Reis
2018: Gonzalo Fonseca
2017: Enrico Giannini / Lilian Finckel
2016: Andrei Petrov
2015: Katia Setzer
2014: Tracey Adams
2013: Sebastian Spreng
2012: Eric J. Heller
2011: John Morra
2010: Alex S. MacLean
2009: Theo Noll
2008: Doug Glovaski
2007: Gustavo Ramos Rivera
2006: Younhee Paik
2005: Caio Fonseca
2004: Darren Waterston
2003: Robert Kelly