Artist Talk: After the Fire: Batik, Memory, and the Lives Trees Hold
RSVP encouraged |Pay-what-you-can
Join artist Adam de Boer for a lively, illustrated conversation with Jamestown Arts Center Executive Director Christine Cocca on the occasion of A Celebration of Trees. Rather than a traditional artist lecture, this evening will unfold as a dialogue between de Boer and Cocca, whose shared experiences as Fulbright scholars in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, provide a natural point of connection for a broader conversation about art, place, cultural exchange, and the ways landscapes shape creative practice.
Beginning with de Boer’s Reconstruction Site No. 5, currently on view in the exhibition, the conversation will consider how trees, coastlines, cityscapes, and sites of destruction and renewal can hold memory, identity, and transformation. In January 2025, the Los Angeles wildfires devastated de Boer’s neighborhood of Altadena. As the son of a firefighter, de Boer had long understood fire as part of California’s ecological and cultural reality, but experiencing the disaster so closely reshaped his relationship to the place he calls home. His ongoing Reconstruction Site series records not only destruction, but also endurance, renewal, and the intimate ways a city begins to rebuild after loss.
The discussion will also trace de Boer’s long engagement with Javanese batik, a centuries-old textile tradition that he has adapted into a hybrid painting practice. Through images, process documentation, and exchange, de Boer and Cocca will discuss molten beeswax, canting tools, staining, boiling, oil painting, and the deeper questions embedded in technique: what it means to inherit, translate, and transform a cultural form across geographies. Together, they will reflect on California and Indonesia, wildfire and memory, Dutch-Indonesian heritage, and the role of artistic practice in making sense of the places that form us.
The evening will include projected images, behind-the-scenes views of de Boer’s process, and time for audience Q&A.
About the Artist
Adam de Boer is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work combines traditional Javanese crafts, including batik and wood carving, with Western oil painting as a way to connect his artistic practice with those of his distant cultural forebears. For more than a decade, his coastal scenes, cityscapes, and architectural landscapes have explored the visual textures, cultural minglings, and socioeconomic realities of California and Indonesia. His recent work depicts the cultural hodgepodge of Los Angeles while maintaining a strong connection to his Dutch-Indonesian immigrant heritage.
De Boer received a BFA in Painting from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; Gazelli Art House, London; Plato, New York; Taymour Grahne Projects, London; The Pit, Los Angeles; Gajah Gallery, Jakarta and Singapore; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London and Hong Kong; The Hole, New York and Los Angeles; World Trade Centre, Jakarta; and Art Jog, Yogyakarta.
De Boer is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship alumnus and, in 2017, was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Java, Indonesia. His additional grants and awards include the International Art Prize presented by Winsor & Newton and Paul Smith’s Foundation, and Arts for India from the University of the Arts London.