Graciela Iturbide: Las Californias
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. 

Layers of the City
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. 

Collecting Paradise: Works from BMoA’s Collection
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. 

Juanita Donahoo: Colors of the Aura
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. Working with airbrush, drawing, and an elaborate color chart, Donahoo translated the colors and forms Kunz perceived within 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.