Layers of the City

October 1, 2026 - April 25, 2027

Sponsored by City of Bakersfield, Robert Raskind Charitable Foundation, California Resources Corporation, Arts Council of Kern, and Chris Lowe

The Exhibit | Images | Events

The Exhibit

Layers of the City examines the city as an accumulation of people, histories, structures, and memories, continually built, inhabited, transformed, and reimagined. Bringing together artists working across photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and multimedia, the exhibition looks beyond the familiar image of the urban landscape to consider the forces that give it meaning. Migration and labor, family and community, movement and belonging, cultural expression, and the rhythms of everyday life emerge as interconnected layers of the urban experience.

Throughout the exhibition, streets, sidewalks, storefronts, homes, parks, cars, signs, and construction sites become more than elements of the built environment. They carry evidence of the people who have occupied them and the communities that have made them their own. Neighborhoods become archives of personal and collective memory, while everyday objects and spaces reveal stories of labor, migration, cultural identity, celebration, resistance, and connection.

Cities are also places of continual change. Development, displacement, gentrification, migration, and new technologies reshape both the physical landscape and the communities within it. As neighborhoods evolve, histories may be preserved, obscured, or erased, raising questions about who is able to remain, whose stories are made visible, and what is carried forward.

Taking its title from Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere’s Layers of the City, the exhibition approaches the city as a layered composition where past and present coexist. Together, these works consider the city as something collectively lived: shaped by those who build it, work within it, move through it, remember it, challenge it, and call it home.

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