By Maggie Luy

What does it mean to be remembered, and who gets to be seen?

Through textured brushwork and carved forms, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma honors labor and ancestry. That legacy continues in Edgar Fabián Frías’s layered digital collages and psychedelic video works, and in Amanda Benefiel’s stitched botanicals that navigate the space between healing and harm.

The Irvine Fine Arts Center’s latest exhibition, on view from March 7 to May 16, brings together a retrospective of O’Cadiz Moctezuma alongside contemporary artists working across multimedia and painting. In different ways, their works explore change, material experimentation, and how creative practices continue to shift across generations. 

Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma: In Process

After arriving in Southern California in the early 1960s, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma, a Mexican immigrant and skilled artist, began shaping the region’s architectural and cultural landscape. He brought both architectural expertise and a deep knowledge of Mexican history and iconography, which informed his artwork for decades. 

The exhibition, made possible by the vision of Community-based Digital Archivist & Crear Studio Gallery Director Sarah Rafael Garcia and with input from O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s daughter Pilar O’Cadiz, gives long-overdue recognition to his life and work. For O’Cadiz, this acknowledgement has always been the goal since her father’s passing in 2002.

“He was very well regarded, but he wasn’t respected. People would take credit for his work, and he wasn’t paid as he should have been. That’s why I think it’s important for people to know him and his influence in the region, both architecturally and artistically,” O’Cadiz said.

One of O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s earliest masterpieces, “The Stonebreaker”, depicts a laborer breaking stone. Thick, textured brushstrokes convey weight and movement, drawing on the Mexican muralist tradition. The piece honors the dignity of labor and reflects the immigrant experience in Southern California.

The Jaguar series shows O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s inventive approach to multimedia art. He carved relief into Masonite panels before adding colored washes, creating subtle depth and dimension. Aztec symbols, including jaguars and the goddess Coatlicue, appear alongside self-portraits, blending mythology, personal identity and cultural history into a single composition. 

“The Aztec Warriors would put on Jaguar skin like a costume. That was how they went to battle, and the most valiant among the warriors,” O’Cadiz said. “So my father would do self portraits of himself as he would put his face profile in a lot of other paintings.”

O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s career also extended into architecture. He designed schools, office buildings and housing developments across Orange County, including relief murals at Santa Ana City Hall and sculptural fountains in public spaces. He worked internationally with firms in Japan and Spain, refining his approach to form material and space. 

The current exhibit is part of a broader series at Crear Studio in Santa Ana that explores O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s life and work. Together, the series offers a full view of a career that shaped the region’s cultural memory and left a lasting mark on its architecture and public spaces. 

“I want them to feel that they’ve come to know an important contributor to the cultural landscape of Orange County, not only artistically, but in terms of the development of the region,” O’Cadiz said. “Include different groups and not only Mexican immigrants, but all people who have contributed to the advancement of this region in the historical cultural memory of the population.”

First Day of Spring is Today

The Spring exhibition, featuring Amanda Benefiel, Matthew Carter, Cheyne Ellett, Edgar Fabián Frías, Curtis Stage, and Angie Stalker, celebrates the energy and renewal of the season, emphasizing creativity as a force for growth and transformation. Reflecting on emergence and possibility, it encourages visitors to consider how art can awaken optimism, inspiring personal and collective renewal.

Among the featured artists, Edgar Fabián Frías’s large-scale photocollage mural draws on images from their childhood, career and personal archives. Layered digitally with 90 separate elements, it celebrates artistic perseverance while evoking the fragmented, overlapping nature of memory.

“It’s an homage to this dream that people have of being an artist. I know that it’s not an easy career. It does take a lot of perseverance, a lot of belief in yourself, maybe some delusion too, to imagine something that’s not possible into existence,” Frías said.

In a separate space plays Frías’s videos “A Smuggled Interdimensional Transmission” parts one and two, created in 2019. Through psychedelic visuals and layered soundscapes, it explores smuggling ideas, knowledge and culture into spaces where they are needed—an act that, while often viewed negatively, can serve as a vital “means of survival” for many communities.

Frías is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, performance, digital, and photography, recently returning to drawing and painting through digital tools like Photoshop. Rooted in their Mexican heritage, their art draws on spirituality and indigenous cosmology while exploring themes of wellness and resilience.

“We often get fed certain messages, that are really scripted, to be either easily digestible, or to invoke a certain emotion in us,” Frías said. “So, I’m hoping that people get that moment of contemplation and confusion.”

In contrast, Amanda Benefiel’s collection draws inspiration from history, particularly Catherine de Medici’s famed poison garden. Her works include a large triptych and two smaller botanicals, blending research and imagination to explore women’s relationships with flowers, healing and magic through richly layered, vibrant compositions.

The triptych, part of her Poison Garden series, rests on a black canvas as a reference to 17th-century Vanitas paintings and 1960s psychedelic posters. She combines traditional brushwork with heavy-duty boot sewing, layering pieces of canvas and stitching lines that intersect and dialogue with the paint, creating texture and depth. The smaller works, including an Azalea painting, continue her botanical exploration while encouraging viewers to recognize and connect with the plants around them. 

“I draw it out and then I paint it slightly more realistic looking because I want people to be able to identify those plants so that when they’re on a walk, they will recognize them too,” Benefiel said.

Benefiel began in Kalamazoo, Michigan, experimenting with sewing and repurposing materials inspired by her mother’s resourcefulness. She later attended Pratt Institute and earned her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, developing a style that blends painting, textile work and personal narrative.

“I always hope when somebody is standing in front of one of my paintings that they have some kind of a visceral or emotional response because that’s something that affects them,” Benefiel said. “My favorite paintings of other painters kind of affect my emotions and body. So that’s always my hope with one of my paintings.”

While the next showcase is yet to be announced, curator Virginia Arce invites visitors to consider the potential for resilience and the enduring impact of artistic voices.

“I think it’s important to remind folks of their creative potential, whether or not they consider themselves artists or not and that kind of importance of your distinct point of view,” Arce said. “The importance of the way that you’re interpreting the world, how you can create meaning and something that is distinctly yours.”

On view from March 7 to May 16