By Maggie Luy Paper decor fluttered overhead as baby doll dresses and flower crowns filled the crowd. Women-owned vendors lined the walkways as festivalgoers moved through the sunlight, surrounded by bursts of color and music. That vibrant atmosphere captured the spirit of Daisy Chain Fields as Olivia Rodrigo hosted the festival on Aug. 29 at Great Park in Irvine, bringing an estimated 45,000 attendees together for a day of music, history and community. Great Park took on a new...
By Mason Fujikawa The Tipping Point is a two-story installation at the Laguna Art Museum by Einar and Jamex de la Torre. The de la Torre brothers, glassblowers by trade, are prolific mixed-media artists who have exhibited internationally for over thirty years. Born in Mexico and raised in the United States, they work between Baja and Alta California. Their distinctly playful, maximalist style refers to classical and pre-Columbian sculpture, Catholic iconography, American pop culture, and more....
By Maggie Luy Take another step and lean in. Ordinary objects reveal deeper stories than they first appear to hold. From delicate threads woven into a portrait to bold images capturing moments of social change, the 42nd Irvine Annual transforms familiar materials and experiences into unexpected forms of expression. With a focus on fragility and strength, Eunkyung Bae turns individual elements into a larger reflection of identity. Through a repurposed canvas, Emily Berl examines the...
By Maggie Luy Where does the game end, and the art begin? A basketball court is usually defined by rules and competition. In “GAME! Basketball and Contemporary Art,” that definition expands as the court becomes a surface for design and intervention. The exhibition, on view at the Great Park Gallery from May 17 to July 26, is presented in collaboration with Project Backboard and artist Katy Ann Gilmore. It brings together court installations, contemporary artworks, and documentation of...
By Chris Hoff There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with watching a technology arrive faster than the culture can metabolize it. Photographers felt it in the 1840s. Painters felt it again when Photoshop showed up. Now it’s AI’s turn, and the stakes feel somehow higher, not just because the tool is more capable, but because it’s aimed directly at the thing artists have always held as irreducibly theirs: the act of making something from nothing. To find out what working artists and...
By Mason Fujikawa Awakening at Gallery Sonder is the first exhibition in the United States by Mexican artist Moncho. Moncho takes an instinctive approach to his practice. He doesn’t sketch or even plan before painting. Instead, he draws from his subconscious, working automatically like a surrealist. His pieces are untitled, so an interpretation isn’t imposed on the viewer. The exhibition comprises two contrasting yet complementary series of abstractions: the geometric, hard-edge ABCs and the...
By Alisa Ochoa Low and Slow is on view at House of Danger Gallery, nestled in an unassuming shopping center just off the 55, beside a Circle K and below the Attic Skateshop. The space is operated by Jackie Danger, a visual artist and brand strategist who opened the gallery to create exhibition opportunities for the action-sport artists she has long admired. The exhibition features work by local artists, skaters, and friends Jason Acuña and Jose Cerda. Acuña works primarily in photography,...
By Chris Hoff I’ve been messing around with learning to play guitar for as long as I can remember. It’s been a story of starts and stops for years. In a more recent start I picked up the book How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy. I thought it might provide some inspiration. I was right. It was certainly inspiring, but not so much in the way I thought. It turned out to be one of the better explorations of the creative process that I have read. Something that can be applied across all...
By Maggie Luy What shifts when the ground beneath everyday life begins to move? Infrastructure is usually what disappears first. In “Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure," it stayed exposed. The exhibition, on view at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art from Jan. 31 to May 9, made the systems beneath Southern California’s daily routines impossible to ignore. Originally set to close May 16, the exhibition ended early as the institution underwent a major relocation. It...
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...
Rachel Adams at OCCCA/GCAC The first talk in a new curatorial lecture series brought the Chief Curator of the Bemis Center to Santa Ana and she had a lot to say about art, empathy, and saying yes. On Thursday evening, March 12th, a small crowd gathered at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art on N. Sycamore Street in Santa Ana for something new. Grand Central Art Center Director John Spiak kicked things off by announcing what he hopes will become an ongoing series: a curatorial lecture...
By Maggie Luy What do we keep, and what do we let sink? Kristina Rose Baker Installation Shot Daniela García Hamilton approaches it through hand-embroidered cultural objects set afloat in painted water. Suspended between air and a spirit realm below, Kristina Rose Baker captures it in a diver paused mid-descent. It surfaces more quietly, embedded in layered brushwork by Vonn Sumner’s vast garden scene that reflects time and memory. The Great Park Gallery’s latest exhibition, on view from...
By Mason Fujikawa | Feb 13, 2026 Interstitial at Gallery Sonder is the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Sheng Lor. Lor, a Hmong American, learned to embroider at a young age and began her career as a weaver. She has since shifted to a conceptual approach and translated her skills to more contemporary media. This exhibition comprises two series: Thread Drawings and Dressed Looms. Working in illustration and sculpture has allowed Lor to bring her work into a fine art context...
Metalabel's second annual Anonymous Creative Futures survey just dropped, and it reads like a dispatch from the creative frontlines. Over 300 artists and creative workers across disciplines and geographies were promised anonymity and asked to be brutally honest about what it means to make art right now. The result is a portrait of creative practice at a moment of profound transformation, and profound anxiety. The timing feels urgent. We're watching the creative class navigate a perfect storm:...
Orange County is home to Pacific Symphony, Segerstrom Center, South Coast Rep, Laguna Art Museum, the Bowers, a thriving gallery scene in Santa Ana, and hundreds of independent arts organizations serving millions of residents. The creative economy here generates enormous returns. ArtsOC estimated the arts community suffered over $121 million in losses during the pandemic alone, which tells you something about the scale of what’s at stake. So you’d think the County of Orange would have a...
Where Are Our Museums When Communities Need Them? Last Friday, major art institutions across Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Science Museum of Minnesota, Museum of Russian Art, and others, closed their doors in solidarity with a statewide general strike protesting ICE operations. Thousands gathered in subzero temperatures to demand accountability after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Macklin Good on January 7. The week before, ICE...
JANM Symposium on Democracy, January 23, 2026 At the Japanese American National Museum's symposium "Echoes of History: Inspiring Civic Action and Building Democracy," a panel of cultural leaders gathered to discuss an increasingly urgent question: What is the role of art and culture when authoritarianism threatens democratic freedoms? The conversation, moderated by Tyler Green of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, brought together Rafael Gonzalez of Grand Performances, filmmaker and UCLA professor...
Grand Central Art Center Awarded Prestigious Warhol Foundation Grant. As part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Fall 2025 grant cycle, Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana has been selected alongside 56 other arts organizations nationwide to receive support in this major round of funding aimed at strengthening contemporary visual arts institutions and programs. This recognition highlights GCAC’s ongoing commitment to supporting experimental artistic practice, community...
Notes on Yancey Strickler, Metalabel, and the Future of Collective Creative Power There's a quiet but growing subculture of artists, organizers, and creative misfits who are experimenting with a strange question: What if artists borrowed the structure and scale of corporations, not the soulless parts, but the coordination, the shared identity, the ability to move culture with intention? Yancey Strickler of Metalabel has been one of the most compelling thinkers in this space. A co-founder of...
Join Chris Hoff of the OC Art Blog as he navigates the visual overload of Art Basel Paris, where thousands of works compete for attention in a spectacle of color, concept, and commerce. Amid the noise, he searches for, and finds, a piece that stops him in his tracks. In this short walkthrough, Chris reflects on what it means to encounter art that speaks through the chaos, reminding us why we keep showing up to fairs like this: to find something real, surprising, and alive....
The OC Art Blog was created in 2004 as a way to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene.
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By Maggie Luy Paper decor fluttered overhead as baby doll dresses and flower crowns filled the crowd. Women-owned vendors lined the walkways as festivalgoers moved through the sunlight, surrounded by bursts of color and music. That vibrant atmosphere captured...
By Mason Fujikawa The Tipping Point is a two-story installation at the Laguna Art Museum by Einar and Jamex de la Torre. The de la Torre brothers, glassblowers by trade, are prolific mixed-media artists who have exhibited internationally for over thirty years. Born in...
By Maggie Luy Take another step and lean in. Ordinary objects reveal deeper stories than they first appear to hold. From delicate threads woven into a portrait to bold images capturing moments of social change, the 42nd Irvine Annual transforms familiar...
By Maggie Luy Where does the game end, and the art begin? A basketball court is usually defined by rules and competition. In “GAME! Basketball and Contemporary Art,” that definition expands as the court becomes a surface for design and intervention. The...
By Chris Hoff There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with watching a technology arrive faster than the culture can metabolize it. Photographers felt it in the 1840s. Painters felt it again when Photoshop showed up. Now it’s AI’s turn, and the stakes feel...
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