Collecting Paradise: Works from BMoA's Collection

October 1, 2026 - January 3, 2027

The Exhibit

Drawn from Bakersfield Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection, Collecting Paradise considers the many ways paradise can be imagined, experienced, and remembered. For generations, artists have looked to California and the world around them as sources of beauty, possibility, belonging, and reinvention. Yet paradise is never a singular or fixed idea. It can exist in a sweeping landscape, the familiarity of home, an everyday object, a moment shared with others, or within our own memories and emotions.

Through landscapes, portraits, abstraction, and scenes of everyday life, Collecting Paradise examines how artists have envisioned places of beauty, belonging, resilience, and hope. The exhibition invites viewers to consider not only what paradise looks like, but how it is experienced, remembered, challenged, and continually reimagined.

Spanning generations and artistic approaches, the exhibition brings together works by artists including Roland Petersen, Eyvind Earle, Astrid Preston, Jo Ann Callis, Karen Carson, Julius Shulman, Marc Trujillo, Suhas Bhujbal, Bryan Ida, Kieu Tran, Kelly Berg, Sydney Croskery, and others. Their works move between California’s coastlines, agricultural and natural landscapes, architecture, intimate portraits, domestic spaces, still lifes, and more abstract expressions of color, spirituality, and emotion.

Collecting Paradise also considers what it means to collect. Museums preserve artworks and the histories they carry, just as individuals hold onto places, experiences, and memories that shape their understanding of paradise. Seen together, these works reveal paradise as something both shared and deeply personal, shaped by what we value, what we preserve, and what we carry forward.

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