Luciana Abait, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and based in Los Angeles, creates multimedia works focused on climate change, environmental fragility, and their impact on immigration. Abait’s artworks have been shown widely in the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia in solo shows in galleries, museums and international art fairs. Selected solo exhibitions include On the Verge at Hilliard Art Museum, Escape-Route at Laguna Art Museum, and A Letter to The Future at Los Angeles International Airport. In 2025, her work was included in LACMA's Getty PST exhibition, Nature on Notice: Contemporary Art and Ecology.

Abait has completed public art commissions like Vistas, a 24-foot mural for Miami-Dade Art in Public Places, and Hong Kong Windows for Swire Properties. Abait’s focus on environmental activism and her artworks have been featured in The Art Newspaper, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Aesthetica, and Stir World among others. This has led to her invitation as a Guest Speaker at the Culture Summit 2024 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Abait is the recipient of the 2016 Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship Award, the 2022 “Art Lives Here” Award by the Geffen Playhouse and the 2024 L.L. Stewart Fellowship by the Oregon State University. 

Growing up, Kevin Ayala constantly found himself drawing the things that interested him. Expressing personal interests through detailed illustration became a central focus early on, and that approach continues to shape his work today.

For the past 15 years, his practice has centered on figurative realism, leading to a strong interest in capturing people and environments with precision. He works across pen, pencil, charcoal, and more recently oils and acrylics, using each medium to refine his attention to detail and form.

In recent years, Ayala has begun incorporating more personal themes into his work. Much of his inspiration comes from his childhood growing up in a Mexican household, where he developed an appreciation for elements of everyday life such as grapes, pomegranates, and agave—forms deeply rooted in the culture he experienced. Watching his parents work in the grape fields, and later working alongside them himself, shaped a lasting connection to these subjects. Spirituality and religious symbolism were also constant influences, and these seemingly ordinary elements now inform how he interprets both the unconscious and the contemporary world around him.

Ayala’s work invites the viewer to move in close, where small, intricate brushwork creates a space that feels intimate and personal for both the artist and the viewer.

Deanna Barahona is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Southern California. Through printmaking, sculpture, and photography, she explores the aesthetics of adornment and the exchange of ephemera. Her practice investigates the intersection of her family’s geographic origins with the diasporic experience. Her work embodies a playful rebellion against traditional forms, utilizing bold, almost acidic colors while connecting to the cosmos and popular culture. Through references to architecture and symbolic elements found in Latinx homes, Barahona captures the essence of cultural integration and adaptation within the diverse landscape of Southern California.

Barahona has participated in exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Island 83 Gallery in New York City, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museo Raúl Anguiano in Guadalajara, Mexico, UCLA New Wight Gallery, Mandeville Gallery, the Bakersfield Museum of Art and the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. She has been featured in the San Diego Union-Tribune, The Runner, and The Informador MX. Barahona holds a BA in Studio Art from California State University, Bakersfield and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego.

Mary Baum is a textile artist known for her vibrant, quilt-based art that celebrates color, playfulness, and the themes of rebirth and hope. Her intricate, plant-inspired works employ appliqué, machine embroidery, and piecing techniques to explore narratives of growth and renewal.

Mary received her BFA in 2014 from Brigham Young University in Utah and went on to earn her MFA in 2017 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Maryland. Her artistic journey has led her to exhibit internationally, showcasing her work at various venues including Gallery RAM, Gallery 303 (UT), the MIA Show (CA), Alice Gallery (UT), The Wye (Berlin, Germany), Arlington Arts Center (VA), Towson University (MD), CONNERSMITH (DC), and IA&A at Hillyer (DC).

Currently, Mary is focused on expanding her exploration of textile art, continuing to create pieces that invite viewers to find inspiration and personal meaning within their vibrant, tactile designs. Her work reflects a deep commitment to transforming traditional quilting techniques into expressive, contemporary art.

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.

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.

Donald Bradford is a contemporary narrative painter whose work explores transformation, resilience, and the layered narratives of identity through richly constructed visual forms. Working across painting and mixed media, his practice engages storytelling as a collaborative experience, where the dialogue between artist and audience brings forth new perspectives and emotional resonance.

Central to Bradford’s work is his Lazarus series, a body of work that draws inspiration from the biblical story of resurrection as a metaphor for personal and collective renewal. In these works, Bradford examines the idea of rising again—whether from hardship, loss, or historical erasure—creating compositions that feel both introspective and expansive. Through layered surfaces, gestural mark-making, and symbolic imagery, the Lazarus works evoke cycles of decay and regeneration, inviting viewers to reflect on the enduring capacity for transformation.

Bradford was born and raised in Yuma, Arizona, and received his BFA from the University of Arizona and his MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently based in Oakland, California, where he maintains a full-time studio practice.

Through his work, Bradford offers a meditation on persistence and renewal. His paintings do not present fixed narratives, but instead open space for reflection—encouraging viewers to consider their own experiences of change, survival, and the possibility of becoming anew.

Javier Carrillo is a Chicano artist from Michoacán, Mexico, who immigrated to the United States at the age of seven. His work centers on lived experience, using scale, religious symbolism, and personal iconography to examine cultural identity, memory, and belonging. Carrillo’s practice frequently depict close friends, family members, and moments drawn directly from his daily life, grounding his practice in community and personal history.

Rooted in the neighborhoods of Midtown Los Angeles, his work transforms ordinary scenes into powerful narratives of resilience and survival. His compositions often reflect the emotional weight carried by immigrant communities, where moments of intimacy exist alongside tension, vigilance, and uncertainty. Through this lens, Carrillo honors the strength required to build and sustain family, identity, and connection in the face of instability.

Many of his works pay tribute to the working class, including street vendors, laborers, and loved ones, emphasizing dignity, devotion, and perseverance. By elevating these figures at a monumental scale, Carrillo asserts their visibility and humanity, offering both resistance and remembrance.

A former student of Dan McCleary’s Art Division in Los Angeles, Carrillo now serves as the organization’s Exhibitions and Operations Manager and teaches printmaking. He has exhibited at institutions including the Bakersfield Museum of Art and the Mexican Consulate General of Los Angeles. His work is held in collections such as the USC Fisher Museum of Art and the collection of Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

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.

Joe Castle is a contemporary artist and sculptor whose work explores myth, archetype, and the enduring narratives that shape human experience. Working primarily in bronze, as well as drawing, painting, and mixed media, Castle creates figures and forms that operate as vessels for storytelling, bridging the personal and the universal.

Central to his practice is the belief that myth offers a framework through which individuals can understand their own lives. His work draws on archetypal imagery and the human figure to reflect themes of journey, transformation, and resilience. By engaging these timeless narratives, Castle invites viewers to see themselves within the work, fostering a sense of connection that extends beyond individual experience.

Castle’s artistic path began with an early interest in making and the physicality of objects, eventually leading him to sculpture as a primary mode of expression. He further developed his practice through classical training, including an apprenticeship with artist Myron Barnstone, where he refined his technical rigor and visual language.

Over time, his work has evolved through distinct series, each reflecting shifts in environment and perspective—from explorations of relationships and the human form to works inspired by landscape, memory, and observation. His more recent practice expands into drawing, printmaking, and painting, continuing his investigation into the human condition.

Through his work, Castle seeks to create spaces of reflection where viewers can engage with larger questions of meaning, identity, and shared experience.

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.

In his painting “Separator Plate”, Greg Colson explores the micro and macro, depicting an automotive part as an abstract shape spanning two panels.  Colson states that “the configuration of holes in the metal plate is, at once, mysterious and specific - suggesting a galaxy or nebula in the painting, but guiding fluid between the transmission and the engine in an automobile.”

Colson has presented over 40 solo exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.  His art is held in permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;  Museum of Modern Art, New York;  Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;  the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy;  and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

Sydney Croskery is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work explores the intersections of abstraction, language, and lived experience. Her paintings are both materially and conceptually rigorous, emerging through a process that combines detailed action painting with writing. This dual approach allows Croskery to connect the physical intensity of mark-making with the emotional, political, and often absurd realities of contemporary life.

Her work navigates the highs and lows of the painting process, translating moments of tension, humor, overwhelm, and reflection into layered compositions. Titles and accompanying texts play a critical role, extending the paintings beyond the visual and linking the personal to broader societal conditions. Together, these elements form a kind of visual and textual record—one that captures the complexity and contradictions of the present moment.

Croskery has presented solo exhibitions at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Craig Krull Gallery, boxoProjects, and Citrus College Art Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Over the Influence, Monte Vista Projects, Baik Art, Charlie James Gallery, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her performance work has been presented at the Getty Museum, Jack Tilton Gallery, the Deitch Art Parade, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2018, Croskery continues to expand her practice across painting, text, and performance, creating work that reflects the urgency, humor, and complexity of contemporary experience.

Ann Diener is a Los Angeles–based artist whose drawing and installation practice investigates the layered and often contested histories of place. Working primarily through drawing, Diener creates large-scale, multi-layered compositions that trace the intersections of land, memory, culture, and time. Her work often incorporates maps, charts, and printed materials, examining how urban and natural environments are shaped, controlled, and reimagined through social and political forces.

Rooted in a process of accumulation and research, Diener’s drawings function as complex visual archives. Lines, fragments, and embedded imagery unfold across expansive surfaces, inviting viewers to consider not only geographic space, but the anthropological and emotional dimensions that define it. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include lithographs and tapestries, further extending the language of drawing into new material and spatial forms.

Diener received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UCSB, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, as well as galleries such as Edward Cella Art and Architecture and Hosfelt Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in publications including the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Through her practice, Diener creates spaces for reflection on how histories are constructed, remembered, and inscribed onto the landscapes we inhabit.

Marjorie Dow is a Bakersfield-based artist whose work reflects a deep engagement with landscape, memory, and the quiet rhythms of everyday life in California’s Central Valley. Rooted in observation, her practice often draws from the surrounding environment—its open spaces, shifting light, and agricultural forms—translating these elements into compositions that balance representation and abstraction.

Working primarily in painting, Dow is attentive to color, atmosphere, and the subtleties of place. Her work captures not only the physical characteristics of the landscape, but also its emotional resonance, offering moments of stillness and reflection. Through layered surfaces and careful mark-making, she creates images that feel both immediate and contemplative.

Dow’s practice is grounded in a longstanding connection to the Bakersfield community, and her work contributes to a broader understanding of the region’s visual and cultural identity. By focusing on familiar environments and lived experience, she invites viewers to reconsider the landscapes they may take for granted, revealing the complexity and beauty embedded within them.

Through her work, Dow offers a quiet meditation on place—one that honors the relationship between environment, memory, and the passage of time.

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 California-based artist whose work explores identity, perception, and cultural memory through a dynamic language of abstraction. Known for his richly layered paintings, Ida draws inspiration from the visual density and energy of the city—its architecture, movement, and overlapping histories—translating these influences into compositions that feel both structured and fluid.

Working primarily in painting and mixed media, Ida builds his surfaces through an intuitive process of accumulation and revision. His city-inspired works aim to capture the feeling of place, examining the relationships formed within a city between its many divergent forms and structures. Through abstraction, he expresses the complexity, diversity, and beauty of urban environments, while also reflecting on the passage of time as cities experience cycles of decay and renewal. His compositions move through layers of erosion and revelation, suggesting that identity—like the city itself—is something uncovered gradually.

Ida’s path into the art world was shaped in part by his connection to Sam Francis, whose influence and artistic legacy helped open a space for exploration and experimentation early in his career. This foundation informed Ida’s commitment to process and his belief in painting as a site of discovery.

Balancing control and spontaneity, Ida’s work invites viewers into layered visual environments that echo both the complexity of urban life and the deeply personal nature of lived experience.

Aazam Irilian is a Los Angeles-based abstract artist whose layered, translucent paintings explore invisible dimensions and unseen worlds. Drawing from ancient mystical traditions where light has long been understood as a traveler between worlds, her work bridges spiritual wisdom and quantum concepts of parallel universes and multiple realities. Each painting becomes a portal — geometric planes and translucent veils revealing the luminous architecture that exists beyond immediate perception.

A Kipaipai Fellow since 2020, she is a three-time grant recipient of the Quick Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI), with residencies at the Dorland Foundation, ShoeboxLA, and Château d'Orquevaux in France.

Her work is held in private collections across the United States, France, and Iran. Solo exhibitions include "Beyond the Veil: Luminous Realms," Antelope Valley College Art Gallery (2025), "Preserved Memories," Gallery 825, Los Angeles (2024), and "Stillness in Chaos," Poway Center for the Performing Arts (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Artist Alliance Biennial, Oceanside Museum of Art (2025), and ColorStraction, Sasse Museum of Art (2025).

Currently expanding into curatorial practice, Irilian is sole curator of "Voices Beyond Boundaries," Sasse Museum of Art (2026). Forthcoming: solo at MOAH, Lancaster (2027)

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.

Larry Jason is a Bakersfield-based artist whose work transforms everyday imagery into bold, visually striking compositions. Drawing from his own photography—capturing signs, buildings, automobiles, portraits, and clothing—Jason reinterprets familiar subjects through a distinctive process that merges silkscreen and painting. By enlarging photographic images, transferring them onto screens, and printing them onto canvas before painting over the surface, he creates works that balance mechanical reproduction with the hand of the artist.

Jason’s work is rooted in the visual language of daily life, elevating ordinary scenes into moments of reflection and recognition. Influenced by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, his practice engages ideas of repetition, image-making, and popular culture while maintaining a personal connection to place and memory.

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and raised in California, Jason developed an early interest in art that evolved through formal study, earning a BA from California State University, Northridge and an MA from California State University, Bakersfield. His work has been exhibited widely across California, including at the Bakersfield Museum of Art and galleries in Santa Monica, Long Beach, Pasadena, and beyond.

Through his process-driven approach, Jason invites viewers to reconsider the visual culture of their surroundings. His work captures the familiarity of everyday life while revealing the layered relationships between image, memory, and perception.

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.

David Kimball Anderson is a sculptor whose multidisciplinary practice spans more than five decades, shaped by personal experience, spiritual inquiry, and a deep connection to place. A lifelong Californian, Anderson’s early exposure to the Southern California art scene—alongside formative studies at the San Francisco Art Institute with artists such as Bruce Conner, Manuel Neri, and Wally Hedrick—helped establish a foundation rooted in experimentation and material exploration. Working primarily in steel and industrial materials, Anderson creates meditative, site-responsive sculptures that move between the symbolic and the utilitarian. His work often draws from a wide range of influences, including Americana, travel, memory, and spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Hopi ceremony. These elements are translated into forms that evoke both personal reflection and broader cultural narratives. In recent years, Anderson’s work has been deeply informed by the landscapes and labor of California’s Central Valley, particularly Bakersfield. Incorporating industrial textures and references to agricultural infrastructure, his sculptures engage with the region’s visual language while exploring themes of endurance, transformation, and place. Anderson’s practice also includes drawing and photography, often presented alongside his sculptures to deepen viewer engagement and contextualize his process. He was awarded the SECA Art Award by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1973 and participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1975. He lives and works in Santa Cruz, California.

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.

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.

Michael Novotny is a California-based artist and retired production designer for film and television, whose work reflects a lifelong engagement with visual storytelling, composition, and environment. Drawing from decades of experience designing cinematic spaces, Novotny brings a strong sense of atmosphere and structure to his studio practice.

Working primarily in watercolor, Novotny creates landscapes that capture the subtle shifts of light, color, and mood found in the natural environment. His paintings are rooted in observation, often inspired by the terrain surrounding his studio in Stallion Springs. Through layered washes and controlled yet fluid mark-making, he evokes a sense of place that is both immediate and contemplative.

His background in production design informs his approach to composition, where each element is thoughtfully arranged to guide the viewer’s experience. These works often feel cinematic in their framing—quiet, expansive, and attentive to the passage of time.

At the core of Novotny’s practice is an interest in translating environment into emotion. His watercolor landscapes invite close looking, offering moments of stillness and reflection that connect the viewer to both the physical landscape and a more personal sense of place.

Vojislav Radovanović is a Yugoslavian-born, Serbian artist, curator, and producer based in Los Angeles since 2017. Born in 1982, his practice is deeply informed by his experience of political unrest in ex-Yugoslavia. As a non-medium-specific artist, he works across painting, video, and performance to explore themes of environmentalism, mental health, and LGBTQ+ identity.
His work frequently features recurring motifs of birds and wild plants, particularly weeds, which serve as metaphors for resilience, migration, and human endurance. These symbols offer a poetic reflection on the cycles of survival and the fragile relationship between humans and nature.
Radovanović earned his Bachelor’s degree in 2005 from the University of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he transitioned from traditional training to a multimedia art program. Alongside his art, he established a successful career in television, serving as an anchor, director, and editor for Radio Television of Serbia (RTS). Since moving to California, his work has been exhibited at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, the Torrance Art Museum, and Bakersfield Museum of Art. He is also the co-founder of L.A. Art Documents and was an artist-in-residence at MOAH through the Mellon Foundation.

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 is a Bakersfield-based artist whose work reflects a deep engagement with the landscapes, histories, and visual culture of California’s Central Valley. Rooted in observation and personal experience, his practice often draws from the region’s expansive terrain, agricultural presence, and built environment, translating these elements into compositions that balance representation and interpretation.

Working across painting and drawing, Sherwyn explores the interplay of light, space, and structure, capturing both the physical and atmospheric qualities of place. His work often focuses on scenes that might otherwise go unnoticed—edges of town, industrial forms, or quiet rural spaces—revealing their underlying rhythm and visual complexity.

Sherwyn’s approach is grounded in a sensitivity to material and process. Through layered surfaces and careful mark-making, he creates work that invites sustained looking, where subtle shifts in color and form unfold over time. His paintings carry a sense of stillness, offering moments of reflection within the familiarity of everyday surroundings.

As a longtime member of the Bakersfield arts community, Sherwyn’s work contributes to a broader visual record of the region. Through his practice, he offers a contemplative exploration of place—one that honors the relationship between environment, memory, and the lived experience of the Central Valley.

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. 

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). 

Jerrin Wagstaff (b. 1979, Salt Lake City, UT) is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work examines the construction of American identity through the lens of landscape. His recent series, American Mythology, explores how images of the American West—particularly those shaped by 19th-century Romantic painters such as Albert Bierstadt—continue to influence contemporary perceptions of nationhood, spectacle, and desire. Drawing from both historical and contemporary sources, Wagstaff combines handmade and digital processes to deconstruct and reassemble imagery into paintings and collages that exist between the real and the imagined. His work reflects the ways visual culture is now mediated through screens and devices, where landscapes are not only experienced but curated, manipulated, and consumed. Through vibrant, saturated color, abstraction, and shifting perspectives, Wagstaff creates immersive environments that both attract and destabilize the viewer. His landscapes embrace contradiction—at once expansive and flat, beautiful and threatening, familiar and strange—inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to place and the myths embedded within it. Wagstaff received his BFA from Brigham Young University and his MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Modern West and Another Year in LA, and has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings and Artillery Magazine. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

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.