David Kimball Anderson is a Santa Cruz based sculptor whose sculptures manipulate a range of materials such as steel, fiberglass, bronze, aluminum, and wood to create objects that appear simultaneously delicate and heavy, industrial, and exquisite. His intention is to convey and share the beauty in precious and mundane objects, both natural and manmade, and arrangements of same. He specifically draws inspiration from Bakersfield and the Central Valley, often frequenting the local B&B Surplus Metals to purchase steel for his work. He was the sole recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Anderson’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in the Fall of 2025 titled, Bakersfield Standards.

Kelly Berg is a painter and mixed media sculptural artist, based Los Angeles, California whose practice explores 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. The integration of geometric forms in her compositions and the reoccurring imagery of pyramids emerging from dark rifts in the earth create a visual framework that symbolizes a convergence of the human and natural worlds. She was the outdoor featured artist for Art & Nature 2022 at the Laguna Art Museum, and created an interactive installation Pyramidion, featuring seven large-scale reflective pyramid sculptures placed in the landscape of Laguna Beach. Berg’s work will be featured in the solo exhibition, Illuminated Earth, in Winter of 2025 at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.

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.

Kayla Bryant was the Featured Artist in the Bakersfield Museum of Art’s 2022 Via Arte Italian Street Painting Festival. Bryant has participated in the event since 2013 when she was a junior at Frontier High working with the student group. In her practice as a painter, Bryant renders her subject with fine lines and mark-making with high contrast and shading that aim for realism.

J. Carino is a Riverside, California-based figurative mixed-media artist. Influenced by many decorative arts, his paintings and drawings explore ideas of queerness, identity, sensuality, and nature through richly patterned, colored, and layered figures and flora. His work depicts monumental nude, queer figures in landscapes that are both idyllic and tinged with danger. Wrestling with ideas of traditional fertility and queer intimacy, J. Carino explores how the creation of our sense of self relates to the natural world. Carino will participate in the group show, Resonantly Me: A Queer Artist’s Invitational, this summer at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.

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.

Born and raised in Southern California, Pamela Carroll embraces the traditional techniques of Realism and painting from life. Her artwork is inspired by the early Dutch and Spanish masters as well as contemporary realist painters. Her work focuses on showcasing the beauty and inherent truth in everyday objects. Carroll’s work will be in the solo exhibition The Beauty Inherent at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in the summer of 2025.

Yvonne Cavanagh, a native of Kern County, is a multi-disciplinary artist engaged in ceramics, drawing, and collage. Exploring diverse artistic mediums, she delved into printing while in residency in Skopelos, Greece, producing monoprints inspired by indigenous plants. Opting for a blue palette, a homage to the omnipresent hues of the Grecian landscape, particularly the interplay of ocean and sky. Yvonne’s solo museum exhibition Liminal Space, was held during Bakersfield Museum of Art’s Winter 2018 exhibition season. She recently exhibited her work at RAM gallery. Yvonne teaches ceramics at Bakersfield High School and Bakersfield College.

Vikki Cruz, a Bakersfield native, works primarily from direct observation, exploring the beauty in everyday objects. She paints with a simple and delicate hand and focuses on the intricacies of household objects. Formerly a curator at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Cruz owned her own gallery before becoming an exhibition coordinator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work is currently on display at RAM gallery in Girl on Girl.

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.

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.

David Ligare is a representational painter of landscape, figurative, and still life works based in Carmel, California. Celebrated as one of California’s most prominent contemporary realist painters utilizing the formal principles of Greco-Roman art and Classical history painting, David Ligare’s art began as a celebration of nature and evolved into an examination of life through landscape. For over forty years, Ligare has masterfully integrated eternal ideals, contemporary sensibilities, and gracefully balanced imagery that seeks to resurrect the deep satisfactions that man has always sought and found from aesthetics and novelty. In 2015, The Crocker Art Museum presented a major retrospective of Ligare’s work in California Classicist. Ligare’s work has been featured in two solo exhibitions at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the most recent being Forms of Influence. He will also be featured in the group show, Resonantly Me: A Queer Artist’s Invitational, this summer.

Cesar Martinez is a self-taught artist living and working in Porterville, California. He has been painting for about three years drawing from inspirations such as human anatomy, cave paintings, iconography, literature, and music. He works diligently to develop a visual language that is universally understandable and approachable while still speaking about hard topics and pressing world issues. His work has been shown at Bird Dog Arts, Arts Visalia, and Porterville Art Association. Martinez will be featured at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in his first solo exhibition, Drink Cultura, this Fall.

Alisyn Palla is a sculptor and owner of Meraki Metal Works in Bakersfield, California. Her work can recently be found at Frugatti’s, the locally owned, newly relocated Italian restaurant in west Bakersfield. Her contribution to the popular eatery consisted of metal grapevines, an installation that deftly separates two spaces at the eatery. Palla has also completed several private commissions. Her next public commissions are for the City of Wasco: welding scores of metal roses for one of three public park sculptures, and a kaleidoscope of migratory butterflies and a stand of human-sized flowers. Palla will be featured in the group show, Resonantly Me: A Queer Artist’s Invitational, this summer.

Rotem Reshef is a painter and installation artist based in New York and Tel Aviv. Her work of recent years creates poetic, political, and social commentary via immersive installations and paintings that relate to society's effect on our public and private habitats. Themes of healing and ecofeminism, physical and mental environments, and the viewer's participatory viewing as an act of reimagining a familiar landscape are among the leading topics she explores in her practice. Reshef uses vegetation she collects in urban surroundings and imprints it onto her canvases. By that, she is commenting on hidden tensions between what is thrown out of society's consumption cycle and what's considered "beautiful" or "necessary." Through her art, Reshef gives a second chance and another life cycle to what has been forgotten, under-appreciated, or on the verge of disappearance. During a visit to Bakersfield in 2021 she was immediately drawn to Panorama Vista, a park devoted to regenerating native plant life. On the opposite side of that oasis were miles and miles of land dotted with oil pumps. The contrast of these two landscapes was striking to her. Her 2023 Bakersfield Museum of Art exhibition Vista summarizes an intensive time Reshef spent during the prior summer working in a temporary studio in Bakersfield.

Marshall Sharpe, a resident of Bakersfield, California, teaches painting and drawing courses at Bakersfield College as an Associate Professor. His creative work focuses on ancestry, identity, and transience. Outside of his regular practice, he frequently takes the time to reconnect with nature, allowing the organic qualities of the earth to inspire him in new ways to approach his techniques. Sharpe will be featured in the group show Resonantly Me: A Queer Artist’s Invitational this summer.

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 .

Eric Theodore is an emerging figurative artist based in Laguna Beach. He will receive his MFA from Laguna College of Art + Design this May and is currently exhibiting at the Laguna Art Musuem. He has extensively studied the human figure and classical painting techniques. Circadian Rhythms shows a male figure at rest. Detailed and sensitively rendered, showing a softer side of the male figure. “I’m narcoleptic, and this drawing touches on the fleeting in-between of wakefulness and sleep,” recalls Theodore. Theodore will be featured in the group show Resonantly Me: A Queer Artist’s Invitational this summer.

Kieu Tran is a first-generation Vietnamese American artist based in Oakland, California. She creates elegant, sensuous, biomorphic ceramic sculptures that exist somewhere between the abstract and figurative. She considers her sculptures an effort that gives form to the soul and reminds us of our shared humanity. Tran exhibited her work at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in the duo exhibition Personal Archaeology in the fall of 2023.

Marc Trujillo is a Los Angeles-based painter. 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. His paintings are fundamentally synthetic in nature and represent not only the experience of direct observation but also an appreciation and awareness of paintings and painters of the past. Trujillo exhibited his work in 2017 and 2019 at the Bakersfield Museum of Art as exhibited in Urban Ubiquity and One Night in California: Contemporary Nocturnes. His work is also part of the BMoA's permanent collection.

Jacqueline Valenzuela is a multidisciplinary artist based in East L.A. whose work centers on her experiences as a woman within the Chicano low-riding world. Her paintings commonly combine portraits of specific women, within the urban backdrop of murals that are often seen in Latinx communities that focus on religion and social issues. Her work draws inspiration from two crucial elements, the urban landscape that these cars cruise through and the graffiti that defaces murals throughout the cityscape. Valenzuela will exhibit her work this Fall at the Bakersfield Musuem of Art in her solo exhibition titled Con Safos Con Fuerzas.

Ali Vaughan is an artist born in Bakersfield, CA, based in Richmond, CA, and works between sculpture, drawing, and painting. Her work investigates affinities between memory and geology through the lens of the body, landscape, and industry. The work attempts to collapse the worlds of the internal (body, mind, self) and external (landscape, architecture, industry) through the transfiguration of material. Vaughan has shown her work in several group exhibitions, including at RAM gallery.

A self-taught artist from Seoul, South Korea, Jun Yang has been based in San Francisco for the last 14 years. His paintings, murals, and textile sculptures draw inspiration from his own experience, the city's rich cultural diversity and its supportive queer community. He combines his art with activism, reflecting his own journey, and advocates for LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights by celebrating the inclusivity and solidarity he has found in San Francisco while exposing ongoing struggles. Yang exhibited his work in his first solo museum exhibition, Blooming Journeys, at the Bakersfield Museum of Art and he will also be included in the group show Resonantly Me: A Queer Artist’s Invitational this summer.

Erica Zamora is a ceramicist based in Bakersfield, California. She draws inspiration from her grandmother’s utilitarian work made in Sinaloa, Mexico. However, Zamora's artwork is sculptural; she allows the material and gravity to dictate the forms. Her hand-built sculptures boast an array of earthy tones, capturing the essence of natural forms with their undulating curves and jagged crests. Zamora participated in the group show Excavations at RAM gallery last year.