Ablin Gallery
October 1, 2026 - April 25, 2027

Colors of the Aura is the world premiere of 22 vibrant portraits created by artist Juanita Donahoo in collaboration with psychic, alternative healer, and Theosophical Society leader Dora van Gelder Kunz. Using airbrush, drawing, and an elaborate color chart, Donahoo translated the colors and forms Kunz perceived in her subjects’ auras into ethereal images of individuals ranging from infancy to old age. Created during the 1930s, these remarkable works exist at the intersection of art and metaphysical exploration, using color and abstraction to visualize personality, energy, and emotion while offering a fascinating glimpse into an often overlooked artistic legacy.

The portraits were never shown publicly because Van Gelder Kunz did not feel society was ready to understand a visual study of the personal aura in the 1930s.

This collection was discovered by BMoA’s executive Director and chief curator, Gilbert Vicario, and Susan Aberth, Ph. D., the Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, New York, while on a research visit to the archives of the Theosophical Society of America in Wheaton, Illinois.

Dezember Gallery
October 1, 2026 – February 7, 2027

Las Californias presents the work of internationally acclaimed Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, whose poetic black-and-white images explore identity, culture, community, and place. Spanning East Los Angeles, California, to Tijuana, Baja California, the exhibition brings together photographs from Iturbide’s White Fence series alongside images examining life and movement across the borderlands. Also featured is her 1991 portrait of labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in Kern County. Together, these photographs reveal interconnected cultural landscapes shaped by friendship, migration, labor, resistance, aspiration, and memory, offering a meditation on the complex and enduring meanings of belonging and home. 

Cunningham Gallery
October 1, 2026 - April 25, 2027

Layers of the City explores the city as an accumulation of people, histories, structures, and memories, continually built, inhabited, and transformed. Bringing together artists working across photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and multimedia, the exhibition looks beyond the familiar urban landscape to reveal the lived experiences that give it meaning. Through stories of migration and labor, family and community, cultural expression, movement, and belonging, the works consider how neighborhoods become archives of personal and collective memory. Together, they reveal the city as something collectively lived, shaped by those who build it, navigate it, remember it, challenge it, and call it home. 

Blue Ribbon Circle Gallery
October 1, 2026 – January 3, 2027 

Collecting Paradise considers the many ways paradise can be imagined, experienced, and remembered. Through landscapes, portraits, abstraction, and scenes of everyday life, the exhibition brings together artists who envision places of beauty, belonging, resilience, and hope. From California’s natural and built environments to more personal expressions of memory, identity, and emotion, these works reveal paradise as both a place and an evolving idea. From the Bakersfield Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection, Collecting Paradise explores how our definitions of paradise are shaped, challenged, preserved, and continually reimagined over time. 

Lazzerini Gallery 
May 28, 2026 – January 3, 2027

Unspoken Ordinary brings together LGBTQ+ artists from the Bakersfield Museum of Art’s permanent collection whose work examines identity, visibility, and lived experience. Through familiar imagery—figures, everyday objects, domestic scenes, and coded visual symbols—these works reveal how the ordinary can carry deeper layers of memory, desire, resilience, and personal history. Whether through acts of reclamation, subtle references, or intimate narratives, each artist transforms commonplace visual language into a space for reflection and recognition. Together, these selected works underscore the profound significance embedded within the familiar and the many ways identity is shaped through both visible and unspoken experience.

March 25, 2026 - March 6, 2027

Seventy Years of Inspiration: The Story of the Bakersfield Museum of Art traces the museum’s evolution from its founding in 1956 as the Cunningham Memorial Art Gallery to its role today as a regional cultural anchor. Through archival photographs, exhibition histories, and key moments in the museum’s growth, this visual history exhibition celebrates seven decades of creativity, community engagement, and artistic advocacy. It honors the artists, supporters, and audiences who have shaped BMoA’s legacy while looking toward its future as a place of inspiration and connection.