Kelly Berg was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. Berg’s paintings and mixed media sculptural works explore the ever-shifting nature of our world. Known for her compositions depicting the movement of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, and dramatic geologic formations, Berg’s works offer a new perspective within the context of contemporary landscape and the sublime.

She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and her work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums including Melissa Morgan Fine Art, The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery at Santa Monica College, The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Bakersfield Museum of Art, USC Fisher Museum of Art, Museo Ercolanense Portici, The LA International Airport, The Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. Berg’s work is part of the permanent collection of The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, and many private and corporate collections. Her work has also been featured in publications like The Los Angeles Times, Whitehot Magazine, and Artillery Magazine.

Rochelle Botello is a Los Angeles based visual artist working across mixed media, sculpture, and site-specific installations. As a sculptor, her work attempts to capture traces of her existence while her drawings, though independent of her sculptures, invoke ruminations of movement while also invoking the transformation of character and this tension between stasis and freedom. Botello is currently featured in the exhibition Free Fall at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.

Linda Bowen-Trujillo is a Los Angeles based artist whose oil pastel Drawings are works that are both about the materials themselves and how they address nature. Nature presents us with a deep mystery. The face nature presents us with in the forms of the sea, land and air has a hypnotic beauty. This hypnotic mystery along with the beauty and mystery of the physicality of the materials themselves combine to make her subjects.

Los Angeles-based artist Javier Carrillo’s work depicts close friends, family members, and his life experiences. Highlighting the artist’s ability to transition easily between oil painting and reductive linocuts, his work depicts specific realities and cultural references to life as a Mexican American, such as food which is a big part of the Latino culture. The food trucks provide food comfort to our community. “They bring back memories of my childhood in Mexico”. Carillo recounts. His work was featured in the exhibition Nuestros Ojos at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in 2017.

Pamela Carroll is a realist painter who works to portray truth. With rare perception and meticulous brushwork, her still lifes present nature’s offerings - a handful of onions, a bowl of lemons, a cluster of grapes, a collection of polished shells. Her portraits are arresting—intriguing faces full of character and depth. Yet, in an apparent contradiction Carroll also conjures illusion, striving for that jolt of intuitive response: the moment when the viewer wants to reach out and touch an object on the canvas.

Once Carroll has selected her subjects, she may spend several days constructing a still life arrangement, revealing every nuance of surface, texture, and light. A self-taught artist, her paintings have been juried into national, international, and invitational exhibitions and have garnered numerous awards. She has illustrated seven children’s books, and her working techniques have been featured in publications including Pratique des Arts. Solo exhibitions include the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the historic Carmel Art Association. In 2006, Carroll was chosen as White House Artist of the Year.

Yvonne Cavanagh, a Kern County native, is a multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in ceramics. She earned her BA in Art with an emphasis in ceramics from San Francisco State University in 2002, followed by an MA in Education from the University of La Verne in 2010. In 2018, she completed her MFA at Azusa Pacific University.

From 2008 to 2010, Cavanagh co-owned Surface Gallery, where she represented nationally emerging artists. Her dedication to the Kern County arts community was recognized in 2011 when she received the Beautiful Bakersfield Award from the Greater Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce in the Arts Individual category.

Cavanagh’s work has been exhibited widely, including her solo museum exhibition, Liminal Space, at the Bakersfield Museum of Art (September 2018 – January 2019). In the summer of 2023, she was awarded a three-week artist residency at the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Skopelos, Greece. Her exhibition, The Blue Door, was showcased at RAM Gallery in 2023 from work she created in Greece. Cavanagh currently has a piece in The Monterey Museum of Art’s inaugural Biennial Exhibition. She recently returned from a residency at StudioFaire in Nérac, France and is working on a new body of work for a solo exhibit in January of 2027 at RAM Gallery.

Warren Chang is a California based fine artist, best known for his paintings depicting the fieldworkers of Monterey County. His realist paintings are reminiscent of 19th century painters, in particular Francois Millet (1814 – 1875) who also depicted scenes of peasant farmers in rural France. Chang’s paintings depict subtle narratives that celebrate the human spirit.
In addition, Chang also paints interior scenes depicting his home, studio, and classroom environments. Many of these paintings include self-portraits, where is depicted teaching or painting in his studio. He has coined the phrase “autobiographical interiors” to describe this body of work.

His work has been purchased for the permanent collections of the Monterey Museum and the Hilbert Museum of Art in Orange, California. He was honored with solo exhibitions at the Monterey Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art in Santa Clara, California in 2021. He is the subject of a 112-monograph book on his paintings published by Flesk Publications in 2012. Warren is a Signature member of the California Art Club and a Master Signature member of the Oil Painters of America. 

Nicolas Lambelet Coleman (b. 1998, Durham, North Carolina) is a Swiss-American painter who lives and works in San Francisco, California. He graduated from Duke University in 2020 with a BA in Visual Arts and Political Science.

Autobiography is central to his practice. Coleman’s paintings draw on everyday routines and pivotal moments, often incorporating self-portraiture alongside still lifes and family scenes. He uses painting as a visual language to express his place in the world, translating personal experience into a form of universal resonance.

Influenced by the domestic and physical landscapes around him, he frequently returns to the colors, patterns, and objects that define lived spaces. These references enrich his compositions with nuance and authenticity.

In spring 2024, he completed a residency at Black Rock Senegal in Dakar, founded by Kehinde Wiley. His work has been highlighted in publications such as Artnet, Artnews, Elephant Magazine, and Dazed. In May 2025, one of his paintings was acquired by the Nasher Museum of Art for their permanent collection.

Marjorie Dow is a third generation Bakersfield resident. She has grown up in a creative family including her grandmother, Eve Moore, a portrait artist by trade in town in the 1950’s. Dow, who has worked in the beauty industry for forty years, uses her paintings to render the undying beauty of everyday moments that are often overlooked. Her work is currently on display at RAM gallery in Girl on Girl.

Nancy Evans is a California-based multidisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, painting, and drawing. Her paintings and sculptural works are shaped by a lifelong engagement with the California landscape and the sublime forces of nature. Through gesture, movement, and material exploration, Evans creates abstract compositions that reflect shifting environments, translating natural rhythms and atmospheric conditions into layered visual forms.

Evans received her BFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has presented solo exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Sargents Daughters, New York, Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Gasworks, London, and Sue Spaid Fine Art, Los Angeles. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at Louis Stern Fine Arts, ArtCenter College of Design, Torrance Art Museum, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Armory Center for the Arts, San José Museum of Art, and Gallery RAM, among others.

Evans is the recipient of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as support from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives and works in Venice, California.

Rebecca Farr’s paintings explore the significance of physicality within psychological, spiritual and historical contexts. Her imagery sources mythic and religious motifs and is populated with symbolic figures that wrestle with the cultural abstractions of embodiment. Her queer feminist sorting of the historic drama of figure and the natural world is both celebratory or satirical.  Farr's paintings are intuitive. Subconscious impulses develop through bold color, line and texture and integrate impressionistic and classical techniques to forge a distinctive language that articulates her study of human desire.  Her application of color emerges from a gut response to her subject matter, resulting in a uniquely constructed palette that resonates organically with each painting.

Rebecca Farr was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Los Angeles and has exhibited locally at The Middle Room, Track 16, Five Car Garage and Klowden Mann Galleries, and in Bakersfield at The Bakersfield Museum of Art and Gallery Ram. Farr has exhibited at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle, and at multiple art fairs throughout the United States. Her recent residencies include Kaus Australis in Rotterdam, Netherlands and Les Laboratories Aubervillers in Paris, France and NADA house on Governors Island, New York.

Francis’s practice explores the contrast of culture and landscape between his dual background of Japan and Southern California, a phenomenon eventually developing techniques that employ special materials that create optical interference effects. Depending on the viewer’s position, angle, and the time of day, colors shift and emerge, producing a visual experience that cannot be fully captured through images on a screen. The perceptual fluctuations that arise between light, color, and shadow extend from morning to dusk and through the changing seasons, drawing viewers into natural rhythms. While resonating with post-minimalism and the California Light and Space movement, Francis’s paintings also embody an Eastern sensibility rooted in Zen and natural philosophy. Though physically static, these works function as perceptual fields that open onto planetary, and even cosmic scales of time.

Major exhibitions include DIC Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (Chiba, 2012), Sezon Museum of Modern Art (Nagano, 2018), Martin Museum of Art (Texas, 2019), GINZA MAISON HERMÈS Le Forum (Tokyo, 2023), Chigasaki City Museum of Art (Kanagawa, 2024).
Public collections include JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, Banco de Espana, Frederick R. Weiseman Art Foundation, Mori Art Collection

Public installations include LAX, Anders Hotel Tokyo, BLUE FRONT SHIBAURA, Tokyo

James Gobel is a contemporary visual artist that splits his time between San Francisco and Los Angeles. For over twenty years, Gobel developed a unique painting practice without employing paint. Instead, the artist used felt, yarn, and fabric meticulously cut and pieced together to create sensuous compositions of friends and acquaintances. In recent years, Gobel has shifted away from this media to embrace found materials, such as vintage ledger paper, to create perplexing, visually playful pieces. At first glance, the loops, scribbles, and patterns are all seemingly abstract; however, more sustained looking reveals recognizable figures within the chaotic welter of his doodles.

Starting with ink and enamel drawings on nineteenth-century ledger paper, Gobel dips the paper in beeswax and hand cuts the drawing, removing negative space. The drawings are then carefully affixed to an oiled linen canvas using dress pins. The canvas acts as a frame for the weblike paper cutouts that stack and layer in dense vascular compositions. With titles like Tickled Pig, From a Pond We Grow, and That's How True Love Creates its Beautiful Agony, they gently allude to a Philip Guston–like shift between abstraction and cartoonish figuration. James Gobel earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1996, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1999, from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pamela Smith Hudson is a Los Angeles-based artist whose abstract practice investigates the relationships between space, time, memory, and material through layered, materially driven surfaces. Informed by printmaking and working across painting, encaustic, and mixed media, she constructs spatial fields through processes of accumulation, compression, and erosion, in which layered materials record duration and transformation.

Smith Hudson’s work was featured in Charting the Terrain, a two-person exhibition at the California African American Museum in 2018, and is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum.

Her practice explores how material layering can evoke scale, interval, and a cosmological sense of space within abstraction. Sun Ra is a hybrid work that combines print-based marks with layered painting on a clay panel. The title references the musician Sun Ra, whose cosmic approach to sound reflects my interest in rhythm, energy, and expanding spatial fields
Smith Hudson is represented by Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.

"I wanted to make drawings that mimic coloring books and coloring sheets to detail the feeling of what I saw growing up. I never found children’s books or television shows that reflected my cultural experience or identity. These drawings challenge the viewer’s perception (beckoning them to color) and are images that don’t always reflect their experiences. I made images of Barbie in a chi pao (Chinese dress), how boys should act and how girls should act in patriarchal cultures, and references to plastic surgery that aim to make Asians look more western (white)." - Phung Huynh

Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose practice includes drawing, painting, public art, and community engagement. Her work explores cultural perception and representation. Huynh challenges beauty standards by constructing images of the Asian female body vis-à-vis plastic surgery to unpack how contemporary cosmetic surgery can whitewash cultural and racial identity. Her drawings and prints on pink donut boxes explores the complexities of assimilation and cultural negotiation among Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who have resettled in the United States, while a recent series of drawings and prints examine the repatriation of Buddhist sculptures stolen from Cambodia.

Bryan Ida is a Los Angeles-based painter whose work conveys delicate spatial relationships of light and color. He achieves these through an intricate process of layering transparent pigment, a mixture of acrylic paint and polyurethane on wood panels, then sanding and painting them repeatedly. Bryan’s story of becoming an artist is a fascinating one. Raised in Palo Alto his family was neighbors with the owners of the Smith Andersen Gallery which represented renowned abstract expressionist Sam Francis. Bryan and their neighbor’s children were close friends, and when Sam Francis came to town with his kids, they would all play together and eventually became lifelong friends. Ida was recently featured in the Bakersfield Museum of Art exhibitions Circle of Sam Francis: Experimenting in California and his first retrospective Bryan Ida: Life of Change.

In 1991, The Umbrellas by Christo opened simultaneously in Japan and California, transforming two distant landscapes into sites of monumental, temporary beauty. An hour north of Los Angeles, 1,760 yellow umbrellas stretched across the hills of Fort Tejon Ranch, each standing 20 feet tall and 28 feet in diameter. Though immense in scale, the umbrellas appeared almost delicate against the vast terrain, blooming like brilliant flowers across the California landscape.

Born and raised in Bakersfield, just 45 miles north of the installation, Louis Jacinto experienced the project through both geographic closeness and personal memory. Using photographs he captured of The Umbrellas in 1991 alongside images of Bakersfield taken between 1984 and 2011, Jacinto created a reimagined tribute for the project’s 10th anniversary. His work blends documentation and reflection, connecting global land art to the intimate terrain of his hometown.

Jacinto began photographing in Los Angeles in 1975 and is widely recognized for his iconic images of the late 1970s Punk Rock scene. His work has been exhibited at institutions including LACMA, MOCA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Williams College Museum of Art. In 2020, he was named a Cultural Trailblazer by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Jorge A. Jimenez Jr. is an LA-based artist born and raised in Oceanside, California. Coming from a family of Mexican immigrants, he uses his experience as a Mexican American as the foundation of his practice. Raised in the in-between, between a Mexican household and American pop culture. His work reflects the hybridity of that lived experience.

Jimenez often creates objects traditionally associated with ofrendas, reimagining them not as memorials for the deceased, but as vessels that hold the values, struggles, and love of those closest to him. These works function as symbolic autobiographies, documenting personal history without relying on literal portraiture. Instead, they are stylized forms shaped by Mexican traditions and Western visual language, merging cultural memory with contemporary identity.

Andrea Johnson's life-long involvement with art and nature has manifested itself in jewel-like, intricately detailed watercolors and acrylics with themes of flora, fauna and atmospheric phenomena.  From 1976 to 1981 Andrea lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan, where she first discovered her deep attraction to flora and fauna in the landscape.   In 1997 Andrea joined her fellow artist and mother, Barbara Johnson, as a juried Artist Member of the Carmel Art Association. 

Andrea has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows at CAA and the Winfield Gallery in Carmel, Monterey Museum of Art, College of Marin, Fresno Museum of Art, UC Santa Cruz and Tokyo American Club.

In her symmetrical paintings, Emily Joyce (born 1976, Arlington Heights, IL) explores hidden systems of nature, the built world, and the cosmos. Her paintings are composed of modular and interlocking hexagons, triangles, and concentric circles interspersed by the occasional lily or gilded text. Informed by her early career as a decorative painter, Joyce utilizes faux-bois, gold leafing, spatter painting, stenciling, rag-rolling, and marbelizing, sometimes all in one composition. Containing each technique to its own shape, Joyce creates an unfolding pattern and off-beat rhythm wherein these decorative finishes function as sophisticated painting solutions rather than tromp-l’oeil trickery.
 
Joyce earned a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design (1998) and participated in the Core Artist Residency program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1999-2001). Joyce's work is included in many public and private collections, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS, and the Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND.
 
Joyce lives and works in Claremont, CA.

Alex Kosich is a 25 year resident of Stallion Springs, where when he is not working as an architect, enjoys oil painting, indoors and outdoors. He is particularly drawn to the shapes and colors found in nature locally, especially when dramatically illuminated. Local favorite areas to paint are Red Rock State Park, Jawbone Canyon, Cummings Valley, Stallion Springs and even his own back yard. He is actively involved with the local Tehachapi Plein Air Painters group, who do weekly paint outs.

Born and raised in Central California, Alex graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a Bachelor of Architecture degree. As a licensed architect he has pursued a 42 year career as a designer with multi-discipline architectural and planning offices in the Los Angeles area. He has 15 years' experience teaching in the architectural departments of several Los Angeles area schools including Woodbury University in Burbank and East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park.

In 1991 he started his own consulting business focusing on specialty design and architectural illustration/imaging services. Please visit www.alexkosich.com for a detailed look at his work. Clients Include many international architectural and theme park corporations. Most recently he completed work on an expansion at Shanghai Disneyland themed on the animated movie "Zootopia".

Aleo Landeta is a trans and mixed-race artist based in Oakland whose practice spans drawing, painting, installation, and public programming. Their work is held in the permanent collection of the Bakersfield Museum of Art and has been exhibited at Jonathan Carver Moore and the Albuquerque Museum. Landeta holds an MFA from MICA and has received support from the SoEx Alternative Exposure Grant (2025) and the King Artist Residency (2024).

In this series, Landeta explores the relationships between queer and trans bodies and the systems of power that shape them. Working in solitude, they move and dance through the studio, allowing the body to generate its own language of resistance, grief, intimacy, and joy. These movements are first captured as gestural charcoal drawings, then translated into cyanotype prints—transforming ephemeral gesture into permanent archive.

The cyanotype process deepens this inquiry: its blueprints map presence and absence, light and shadow, while its signature blue evokes both melancholy and possibility. Together, the layers of charcoal and cyanotype hold the accumulated weight of LGBTQI+ history—struggle, violence, and liberation embodied in mark and memory. These works offer both witness and celebration, insisting on the complex humanity of bodies that refuse to be contained.

Marvin Lipofsky (September 1, 1938 – January 15, 2016) was an American glass artist. He was one of the six students that Studio Glass founder Harvey Littleton instructed in a program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in fall 1962 and spring 1963. He was a central figure in the dissemination of the American Studio Glass Movement, introducing it to California through his tenure as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of Arts and Crafts.

In 1970, Marvin Lipofsky started a practice of traveling to glass factories around the world to learn from and collaborate with glass masters. He always sought to infuse the works he made with local culture, primarily through symbolic color. Czech Flowers is an example of this process. Lipofsky would conceive of the work, choose colors, mold-blow, and hot work the glass while abroad. After returning home, he would finish the piece (in this case: cut, sandblast and acid polish the glass)  using various coldworking techniques.

Matt Magee is an American contemporary artist who is best known for his minimal, and geometric paintings, sculptures, prints, assemblages, murals and photographs.  Over a career span of more than four decades, Magee has experimented with abstract compositions that have been informed by personal history, numerology, and language. Magee's father, a geologist and archaeologist, took him on trips through the Southwest where he collected small objects along the way that later informed his artistic practice. As a young adult he worked on a seismic truck in Laredo, TX and recorded vibrations sent into the earth to determine underlying geologic formations.

Memo (2026) is a prime example of the way he recycles a variety of found and collected materials such as detergent bottles and aluminum cans. These are used to create abstract compositions that explore language symbolically with an emphasis on repetition and reiteration and nods to art historical precedents. Matt was born in Paris, France in 1961 and has lived in Tripoli, Libya and London, England. In 1984, he moved to Brooklyn to attend Pratt Institute for an MFA. He also served as the chief photo archivist for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York for over 20 years.  He currently lives and works in Phoenix, AZ.

Kim Manfredi is an American painter whose work moves fluidly between abstraction and representation. Her material-forward paintings are informed by art history,  climate, and place. She earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1988 and returned to complete her MFA in painting in 2009, studying under Grace Hartigan and Joyce Kozloff.

Early in her career, Manfredi was represented by C. Grimaldis Gallery and has held residencies at RUC, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA, and Maryland Art Place. Recent solo exhibitions include Bloom at Patricia Sweetow Gallery and Lady Lazarus at Royale Projects, both in Los Angeles. She was also featured in Tutto a Tempo at the Camus Museum in Breno, Italy.

In 2024, Manfredi was awarded the Torrance Art Museum Fellowship and attended the Cycladic Arts Residency in Paros, Greece. Her painting Sillmangreen was acquired by the Palm Springs Art Museum for its permanent collection.

She is currently preparing an exhibition of her Greek paintings and sculpture at the Torrance Art Museum in summer 2026, and is developing a solo exhibition and public commission for the Laguna Art Museum opening fall 2026.

Zära Monet is a Los Angeles–based exhibiting artist and professor. She earned her BA from UCLA and her MFA from LCAD. Her work has been featured in LA Weekly, Huffington Post, Manifest, Artillery, and Beautiful Bizarre, and she is represented by Billis Williams Gallery.

Her paintings merge the sensibility of Old Master portraiture with contemporary imagery, creating compositions that shift between the majestic and the uncanny. Drawing from cross-disciplinary aesthetics, her work weaves personal narrative with broader explorations of human psychology and socio-sexual empowerment. Through meticulous control of figure and space, she directs and challenges the viewer’s gaze. Posed subjects, non-naturalistic color palettes, and ambiguous spatial relationships culminate in an atmosphere that feels deliberately constructed—at once mysterious, theatrical, and compelling.

Robin Raznick is a Los Angeles based artist whose paintings and ceramic sculpture are informed by the collision of the natural world with human presence, as only manifest in Southern California. She works in a heavy impasto and color infused painting style to create vivid and immersive scenes; they speak of the human interface between nature’s bounty, with its myriad life forms, and the built environment. The scale, intensity of color, and energetic brushwork communicate as resonant engagement with the natural world. Her paintings and clay sculptures teem with an undeniable life force that insists upon survival and co-existence.

Utilizing nature as her muse, Raznick’s paintings and sculptures can be described as narrative, abstracted representation. She holds multiple degrees in fine art including MA in Art at Northwestern State Univ. Louisiana, multiple BFA’s from California College of the Arts, and Design Institute of San Diego, as well as a Post Baccalaureate in Arts Education from San Francisco State Univ. She is a credentialed mentor educator who has maintained a parallel career as an arts educator and has taught Studio Arts, Art History, and Criticism, participated in numerous global artists residencies, and exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at Oceanside Museum of Art, Kellogg Univ. Gallery Cal Poly Pomona, Brand Gallery, Glendale, Miami Basel, L Street Gallery, San Diego, and Melissa Morgan Fine Art, Palm Desert.

Charlie Rugg creates paintings rooted in atmosphere, tension, and disciplined internal order. Working fluidly between abstraction and representation, he constructs images that feel structured yet unsettled, composed yet quietly shifting.
His abstract works unfold through layered color, texture, and calibrated spatial relationships. Forms appear and recede within dense fields, suggesting systems that approach coherence without fully resolving. In works that reference the visible world, figures and environments occupy similarly charged spaces, where narrative remains present but incomplete.

Rugg approaches painting as a way of reestablishing context. In a period shaped by rapid technological acceleration and fractured realities, his work reflects a sustained search for orientation within instability. Structure, atmosphere, and presence coexist with quiet intensity, holding tension without forcing clarity.

Art Sherwyn's forty years of experience as an artist and an esteemed educator in Bakersfield, California have shaped an eclectic career. His work continues to push artistic boundaries through his creative impulses. Everything he does is centered around a core philosophy that focuses on the transformative power of education and the value of art in each person's life. His 2021 solo Bakersfield Museum of Art exhibition Uncommon Perspectives marked his fourth exhibition at BMoA .

Born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in Tucson, multidisciplinary artist Laurie Steelink identifies as Akimel O’otham and is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. Her mixed media sculpture Rabbit emerges from the portal in Spirit Cave (2020) is constructed from small and minuscule slivers of repurposed paintings. Steelink’s process mimics the shapeshifter reimagining and reinterpreting forms, infusing earlier works with new meaning and significance, a visual cut-up transformation. The Shapeshifter (or Trickster) serves as a disrupter of norms, teacher, and catalyst for change. Rabbit emerges from the portal in Spirit Cave considers relationality and embraces multiplicity and the unknown.

She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She served as the archivist for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in New York and was director of Track 16 Gallery in west Los Angeles from 2002 to 2016. In 2012, Steelink founded Cornelius Projects, an exhibition space in San Pedro, CA that she named after her father. 

Eric Theodore is a California-based figurative painter who presents the male body as poetic form. His luminous oil paintings and charcoal drawings, often inspired by his experience in the sport of diving, depict male figures in suspended, contemplative moments, balancing strength and vulnerability.

Born in East Tennessee, Theodore studied representational drawing and painting at Centre College in Kentucky before earning his MFA in Painting from Laguna College of Art + Design in 2024, where he received the Trustee’s Choice Award and became the school’s first postgraduate Artist-in-Residence. His academic foundation and teaching experience inform a practice grounded in close observation, refined draftsmanship, and emotional subtlety.

Theodore explores sensuality and introspection through light, gesture, and atmosphere. He draws influence from master artists such as Michelangelo, Paul Cadmus, and Thomas Eakins. By training with the Mission Viejo Nadadores, he engages directly with his subject matter, adding layers to his exploration of weightlessness and liminal space, offering an up-close view of the athletic male form.

His work has been exhibited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Laguna Art Museum, and the Oceanside Museum of Art, among other galleries across the United States. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Laguna College of Art + Design, and Centre College.

Awoken is drawing of a man being awoken from a dream or perhaps a nightmare. Is he relieved to be awoken, or is the reality of his present something he fears awaking to?

Evolution is a self-portrait representing rapid change and self-transformation. My body rotates downward, from black and white into a world of color, from drawing into painting, from lonely uncertainty into acceptance. This painting represents my journey coming out, and is the second part of my triptych Diving Metamorphosis.

Marc Trujillo is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Los Angeles. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art. In 2001, Marc received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and in 2008 he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Marc primarily paints the purgatory of American urban and suburban landscapes such as gas stations, shopping malls, big chain stores, and restaurants, the figure plays a vital role in his work, and the paintings are constructed so that the viewer is the primary figure.

Marc has had many shows on both coasts in the U.S. including Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York, Chis Winfield Gallery in Carmel, and Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica. His work is in numerous public and private collections including the Long Beach Museum, The Crocker Art Museum, The Monterey Museum of Art, Bakersfield Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of Art, and The Hilbert Museum of California Art.

Jacqueline Valenzuela is a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores cultural memory, identity, and speculative futures through visual storytelling. Working across installation, photography, sculpture, and mixed media, she constructs narrative environments that examine how personal and collective histories shape contemporary experience. Drawing from archival research, family histories, and subcultural aesthetics, her practice investigates the role of nostalgia, mythmaking, and memory in the formation of cultural identity.

Valenzuela received her BFA from California State University, Long Beach, graduating Summa Cum Laude, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been recognized through several fellowships and honors, including the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship and the Clifton Webb Scholarship.

Through staged imagery and immersive installations, Valenzuela often centers women within imagined or reconfigured cultural landscapes, exploring themes of resilience, inheritance, and transformation. By blending speculative elements with personal references and historical fragments, her work considers how alternative futures might emerge through reinterpretations of the past.

Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ali Vaughan is an artist based in Richmond, California. She was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, and received dual BA degrees in Art Practice and Art History from Stanford University in 2019. She regularly works between mediums of oil painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through processed-based abstraction, her work examines notions of place and identity.

Vaughan’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries, among them the de Young Museum, San Francisco (CA); Bakersfield Museum of Art (CA); Porch Gallery, Carpinteria (CA); Coulter Gallery, Stanford (CA); Radio28 Gallery, Mexico City (MXMX); Bridge Gallery, Richmond (CA); Kala Art Gallery, Berkeley (CA); Art Cake, Brooklyn (NY); and Gallery RAM, Bakersfield (CA). 

Born in Princeton, NJ in 1975, Beth Davila Waldman pursued her career in the arts initially at Wellesley College where she earned a BA with degrees in art history and studio art. She continued her education at the San Francisco Art Institute with a second degree in sculpture where she was awarded the 2004 Harold E. Weiner Memorial Sculpture Award. Since, Waldman has been awarded residencies by Art in Residence, 18th Street Art Center, Kala Art Institute, Playa Institute, and Edition/Basel as well as participated in annual projects at Djerassi Art Residency.

Waldman’s work has been featured in art fairs in Hong Kong, Mexico City, San Francisco, and Berlin. Her work has been featured in the De Young Museum’s OPEN Exhibition in 2020 & 2023 in addition to the Museum of Northern California in 2024.

In 2025, Waldman launched the publication of her first catalog covering 25 years of her art which is now part of SFMOMA's Library and Archives with the support of SFMOMA curator Shana Lopes, whose essay is included in the publication. This year, she was a 2026 SFMOMA SECA Award Nominee. Waldman maintains studios in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stephen Winters (b. 1982) is a painter and sculptor based in Bakersfield, California. Living close to the Kern River on Okihi, Winters is interested in our symbiotic relationship with nature. Whether through pastoral, figurative paintings, gestural drawings, or non-objective metal sculptures that suggest the peaks and valleys of a mountain range, his work reflects his passion for the environment. Through each medium, Winters invites us to delve into the profound interconnectedness of all living beings.

Winters received his BFA from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, where he studied painting and sculpture. While working in Chicago, Winters was an apprentice to sculptor Evan Lewis in 2010 and artist/designer Brian Kerrigan in 2012. In 2009, Winters's work was featured at Lollapalooza.

Winters is crucial in leading the White Wolf Wellness Foundation at Okihi. This non-profit organization provides yoga, meditation, sound baths, outdoor recreation, and educational classes for the Bakersfield community. In 2022, Winters was awarded a California Arts Council Grant for a public installation on the property. 

Shingo Yamazaki’s paintings examine diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and the shifting meanings of home. Influenced by his upbringing in Hawaiʻi and his current home in Los Angeles, his work reflects on what it means to live between cultures, and how belonging can feel both familiar and foreign. As a Japanese and Korean American, his practice is shaped in part by his family’s Zainichi history, referring to Koreans who migrated to Japan through labor and displacement during the period of Japanese occupation, and remained across generations. His work considers what is preserved, what is hidden, and what becomes difficult to access within family histories shaped by silence, assimilation, and invisibility.

Yamazaki's practice navigates diasporic experiences of in-betweenness, where presence and absence coexist through thinly veiled transparencies that obscure visibility, reflecting the pressure many immigrant families feel to remain unnoticed. His paintings often center interior spaces and everyday routines, drawing from memories both real and reimagined. Time spent in his parents’ Japanese restaurant, which functioned as a formative home, recurs as a site where people gathered, worked, and intersected.

Across his work, family members, friends, sentimental objects, and traditions appear as markers of cultural exchange, reflecting how identities evolve as they move through time, place, and belonging.

Jun Yang (he/they) is a queer Korean multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Born in Seoul, Yang’s migration across Europe to the Bay Area was shaped by social isolation and a search for safety. Yang developed a self-directed practice rooted in survival, trauma recovery, and self-reclamation.

Working across painting, murals, ceramics, and soft sculpture, Yang situates queer bodies within natural landscapes. Scarred, tattooed, hairy, and tender skin textures resist binary gender norms while reflecting layered immigrant identities. His signature exaggerated, interlocking limbs embody both the awkwardness of displacement and the sustaining force of chosen family.

Yang has been nominated for the SECA Art Award (SFMOMA) and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, The Asian Art museum, and is a two-time recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Visual Art Grant (2023, 2025). His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo presentations and museum group exhibitions.