British artist Natasha Caruana joins the OC Art Blog to talk about her ongoing exploration of intimacy, secrecy, and the rituals of modern relationships. Known for projects like Married Man and Fairytale for Sale, Caruana’s work blurs the line between truth and performance, private life and public display. In this conversation, she discusses the evolution of her practice, the influence of technology on connection and identity, and the ethics of participation in art. We also dive into her...
Join me for a walk through one of the world’s most influential contemporary art fairs, Frieze London 2025. From blue-chip booths to experimental installations, Frieze offers a snapshot of what artists, collectors, and institutions are thinking about right now. If you’re into contemporary art, criticism, and the shifting landscape of creative culture, hit subscribe and join me for more art fair coverage, studio visits, and critical reflections from the field....
In a landmark move for the region’s cultural landscape, UC Irvine has officially completed its acquisition of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), forging a new unified entity under the name UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. UC Irvine News A Fusion of Mission & Legacy This merger unites two distinguished institutions in Southern California under a shared vision of public access, creative scholarship, and community engagement. The new name acknowledges OCMA’s legacy while...
Installation view of Obsesiones/Obsessions at Golden West College Art Gallery. Photo by Tyler Stallings By Tyler Stallings Walking into Obsesiones/Obsessions at Golden West College Art Gallery feels both timely and uncanny. Timely, because the exhibition is staged during Hispanic Heritage Month, when colleges and civic institutions across the country present programming meant to honor Latinx culture. This exhibition, curated by artist Tony Pinto, his first, is less about checking...
By Tyler Stallings Brennan Roach, Garden of Earthly Absurdities, 2017-2025,paper, pencil, pen, acrylic, oil on triptych wood panel, 55 x 102 inches. Photo by Tyler Stallings.] Brennan Roach’s Visual Morphology, his first solo exhibition in twelve years, is less a return than an accumulation. Thirty works spanning more than a decade hang at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA), each piece another link in a chain of restless inquiry. The surprise is not that Roach has been...
By Chris Hoff This week I attended a screening of "Out of The Picture" at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles. The documentary "Out of The Picture" chronicles the decline of arts criticism over a several year period culminating during COVID years. The movie, featuring many of the more prominent art critics, documents the accelerated change in arts writing over the last several years. A story we are all quite familiar with now. Except for a short mention of some...
By Chris Hoff Back in 2024, when Jeffrey Gibson represented the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale, then US Secretary of State Tony Blinken touted Gibson’s work as cultural diplomacy, stating optimistically that Gibson’s art “can get people to see each other’s humanity, build a sense of common purpose [and] change the minds of those who misunderstand us.” The State Department’s framing of Gibson’s work as cultural diplomacy underscored a particular national redemptive narrative—that...
By Tyler Stallings Installation view from opening reception at Laguna Art Museum with the artist, Marnie Weber, in front of The Doll House. Photo by Tyler Stallings. Marnie Weber invites viewers into an uncanny fairy-tale realm in The Doll House (2002), a place where fantasy is rendered with exquisite detail and emotional depth—and where absence hums as loudly as presence. On view at the Laguna Art Museum through September 1, this recent acquisition, marks a rare Southern California...
By Tyler Stallings Installation view, Hank Willis Thomas’s A person is more important than anything else…, 2019. Image courtesy of Pace Gallery. Hank Willis Thomas’s A person is more important than anything else… is a searing five-channel video installation that demands not only to be watched but to be witnessed. Presented in near-total darkness at Grand Central Art Center, curated by GCAC director/senior curator, John Spiak, the piece is powered by the resonance of James...
By Bela Chauhan Titled Desperate, Scared, But Social, OCMA’s 2025 Biennial exhibition sets out to center the emotional, cultural, and inherently political richness of late adolescence—specifically through the lens of teenage girlhood and the many that connect to it. There is a concrete intention within the rhetoric of the exhibition that hinges importance on the idea of community cultivation being a priority in our globally tumultuous times, and that is explored through the networks branching...
By Tyler Stallings Wendy Park, 90’s Compton Swap Meet, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 144 in. Photo by Tyler Stallings, courtesy of Various Small Fires. Wendy Park’s Of Our Own, currently on view at Various Small Fires in Tustin, translates personal and collective memory into a visual language that is both formal and affectionate, conceptual and accessible. In this suite of seven acrylic paintings, Park resurrects the atmospheres of Korean-American swap meets, household rituals, and urban...
Nadya Tolokonnikova (of Pussy Riot) takes over MOCA's WAREHOUSE with POLICE STATE an unapologetic, immersive indictment of authoritarianism, surveillance, and carceral control. This isn’t just art, it’s resistance. https://youtube.com/shorts/puliuz7bUhM?feature=share
By Tyler Stallings Walking into Amy Adler’s exhibition Nice Girl at the Orange County Museum of Art, curated by Heidi Zuckerman, OCMA’s CEO and Director, you immediately notice the cinematic arrangement of twenty-one identically sized paintings. They line the curved wall, evenly spaced, like frames from an analog film strip. Adler first came to prominence in the 1990s through a distinct process. She drew intricate representations from photographs, photographed these drawings, then...
By Chris Hoff, OC Art Blog The recent announcement that UC Irvine will take over operations of the Orange County Museum of Art marks a major shift in the region’s cultural landscape. According to the Orange County Business Journal, this move is being framed as a strategic partnership but for those of us who have followed the local art scene closely, the news raises as many questions as it answers. On the surface, it’s a significant step: a major university assuming control of the county’s only...
The OC Art Blog was thrilled to interview Alkaid Ramirez, a rising voice in lens-based and archival art whose work resonates deeply across Orange County. Rooted in his upbringing in Anaheim, Ramirez’s photographs and installations are more than visual documents, they’re acts of resistance, memory, and community building. From early influences at Humboldt State to formative mentorship under artist William Camargo, Ramirez has cultivated a practice that centers the lived realities of...
The OC Art Blog was thrilled to sit down with Jennifer Frias, the dynamic Director and Curator of the College of the Arts Galleries at Cal State Fullerton. At the intersection of pedagogy, place, and practice, Frias is quietly reshaping the curatorial landscape of Orange County. Her community-rooted, interdisciplinary ethos foregrounds mentorship, collaboration, and critical dialogue. With a career shaped by institutions like UCR ARTS and the California Museum of Photography, and...
Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and Director of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), will step down at the end of 2025, marking a significant leadership transition for one of Southern California’s most ambitious contemporary art institutions.Since arriving in early 2021, Zuckerman has been a driving force behind OCMA’s evolution, most notably overseeing the museum’s move into its striking new home at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa. The $94 million building, designed by Morphosis...
By Tyler StallingsAt the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, the mundane elevator is transformed into a liminal chamber of longing in To Be Among Friends, a collaboration between artist and sound designer Joshua-Michéle Ross and typographic textile artist Hope Meng, and curated by GCAC Director/Senior curator, John Spiak. As part of a continuation from Ross’s earlier virtual performance The Adjacent Possible, this immersive installation is both a time capsule and a collective exhale. Over a...
By Tyler StallingsCelebrating its 45th anniversary, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA) affirms its status as a bastion of experimental, socially engaged, and community-rooted art, showcasing over 70 former and current OCCCA artists. OCCCA’s 45th Anniversary Exhibition isn’t just a commemorative exhibition; it’s a living, breathing snapshot of OCCCA’s enduring ethos—raw, collaborative, and ready to confront the most pressing issues of our time, with climate change literally...
By Tyler StallingsFor decades, Carole Caroompas relentlessly pursued a vision that fused punk aesthetics, feminist critique, and literary excavation. With her passing in 2022, the full extent of her artistic reach is only beginning to be reckoned with. Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour, now on view at Laguna Art Museum, is the first focused institutional exhibition of this late-career body of work, and it arrives with the quiet force of a long-overdue acknowledgment. Guest curated by...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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