One of the most popular shows at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts is the “Junior Art Exhibition,” featuring 400 art pieces by 200 Orange County students from kindergarten through grade 12. The show reveals the vast variety of artistic influences that students draw...
Millard Sheets’ glass mural Pleasures Along the Beach (1969) adorns the façade of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Its brightly colored California scene, portraying sunbathers, birds and sailboats, beckons visitors to the newly...
“Before You Now” features work by 56 artists who employ photography, prints, drawings, installations and video to depict themselves, their identities and, especially, their artistic perspectives. Rather than creating traditional self-portraits, these symbolic,...
"Material Recovery" combines printmaking with assemblage, collage and sculpture to illustrate the iconography of the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, along with images suggesting the waste left there by the shipping industry. The exhibition of 81 pieces by 31...
In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation,...
The quality and diversity of the work of Yolanda González—a painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramic sculptor—makes a solo installation of her work long overdue. This current exhibition, with nearly a 100 pieces from the career of the 59-year-old LA–based Chicana...
Luis Garza was a dedicated artist and visionary who helped advance Chicano culture and activism in the 1960s and 70s through his compassionate photos. Born in 1943 in the South Bronx, he moved to Los Angeles in 1965, searching for a lifestyle more amenable to his...
In Laguna Art Museum’s 10 years of mounting its annual Art & Nature installations, a consistent theme has been the preservation of our planet. In this year’s version, the museum celebrates the beauty of nature while artfully addressing environmentalism and...
Diego Rivera’s artistic oeuvre is so connected to our collective unconscious that touring this exhibition of 150 paintings, frescoes and drawings, feels like a homecoming. The show also includes film projections of murals that the artist created in Mexico and the US...
The artist Bradford Salamon embraces his entire life in his artwork, from his childhood and teenage years—watching cartoons and films, surfing in SoCal, playing in bands, and engaging with friends—to the present. These experiences and influences are recollected and...
Considering the breadth of the work of Judy Baca—a muralist, painter, sculptor and art activist—a comprehensive installation of her work is long past due. The current exhibition contains approximately 120 pieces from the 40-plus-year oeuvre of the LA Chicana artist....
I met Mark Chamberlain in March 2003, a few days after the onset of the Iraq War. I visited a gallery in Laguna Beach to write a review of his recent work chronicling the potential horrors of that war. Mark had been mounting politically charged installations for...
When I first saw Marie Thibeault’s hybrid landscapes that merge abstraction with representational figures, I was struck by her bold use of color and unusual iconography, in which organic and industrial shapes are combined, many inspired by the Port of Los Angeles near...
Lita Albuquerque’s Auric Field paintings have graced museums and galleries throughout the Southland and beyond since 1998. With each meditative piece featuring a black background, surrounding a gold or silver-leafed circle, which itself has a blue aura, the effect...
The sweep and scope of the Laguna Art Museum’s extensive Tony DeLap retrospective encompass several remarkable elements, including the artist’s large hybrid constructions, which feature unusual juxtapositions of shapes and materials, and his curved standing and...
Years before the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA” was initiated, the Museum of Latin American Art was exploring Latin and Latino culture. Its previous 2011–12 PST, “Mex/L.A. ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930–1985,” explored the relationship between...
If you’re all Nutcrackered out even before Christmas arrives, Sugar Plum Fairy may be the perfect tonic. Sandra Tsing Loh, as actor, writer and comedienne, mines her pre-teen years growing up in the San Fernando Valley. She relates the story of being the younger,...
From the moment the stage lights go up for The Monster Builder, the audience is caught in a whirlwind of over-the-top sophisticated banter, much of it addressing architecture. The first scene reveals an ultra modern glass house with inhabitants, Gregor, the...
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