In this edition of the artist interview, the OC Art Blog had the pleasure of asking Dakota Noot some questions about both his art and curatorial practices. Dakota Noot’s work vibrates with radiant contradiction, rural and queer, grotesque and playful, mythic and autobiographical. Growing up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and now working between Los Angeles and Orange County, Noot draws on a childhood shaped by farm life and hunting culture to conjure vibrant animal-human hybrids that subvert and...
By Tyler Stallings At the Orange County Museum of Art, two exhibitions—Su Yu-Xin: Searching the Sky for Gold and Unearthed—create a compelling juxtaposition, a dialogue of materiality, process, and elemental transformation. Both curated by Ziying Duan, OCMA’s assistant curator, the exhibitions open simultaneously, offering an exploration of the earth’s materials, albeit through vastly different yet intertwined approaches. Unearthed grounds us in the ancient and tactile traditions of ceramics,...
Exploring My Favorite Artwork at the Art Institute of Chicago! Join me as I take you on a journey to one of the most breathtaking pieces in the Art Institute of Chicago—and my favorite! In this video, I’ll share why this masterpiece resonates with me, its connection to Chicago’s vibrant art scene, and how it invites us into a meditative world of color and light. Let me know in the comments: What’s your favorite artwork at the Art Institute of Chicago?🎨✨ Don’t forget to LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and hit...
Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s Deep Roots Among Fallen Trees at Grand Central Art Center is a show that feels both urgent and elegiac, a visual essay on migration and memory that resists sentimentality while examining the deep, sometimes painful strata of movement and place. It’s the kind of exhibition that lands at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place, Santa Ana, a city shaped by migration, gentrification, and the slow churn of history underfoot. Emenaker, with a keen sense of...
By Tyler Stallings At SCAPE, Earth’s Rhythms brings together four artists whose works pulse with the energy of movement, structure, and transformation. The exhibition is anchored by Nancy Mooslin and Carol Saindon, two artists whose shared fascination with waves—both aquatic and sonic—manifests in vibrant, layered compositions that challenge perception. Their works fragment, reassemble, and reimagine water and sound, creating a visual language that is both scientific and poetic. Gail...
by Tyler Stallings The use of abstraction to probe the intangible—thought, memory, consciousness—has long fascinated artists. Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition, curated by Erin Stout at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, continues this investigation, building on her earlier exhibition The Resonant Surface: Movement, Image, and Sound in California Painting (2021) at UCI’s Institute and Museum of California Art. Where The...
In this first episode of the OC Art Blog TV, I visit Frieze Los Angeles, the high-profile international art fair known for showcasing blue-chip galleries and contemporary heavyweights, before heading to Post-Fair in Santa Monica, a new, independent alternative offering a different vision of the art world. I share insights on both events, explore standout works, and reflect on how each fair shapes conversations about contemporary art. Whether you're into the mainstream or the emerging, this...
There’s no shortage of books that take aim at the art world, but few manage to critique it without drowning in cynicism. Poor Artist: A Quest into the Art World by the two writers responsible for the The White Pube, Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente, does just that. It’s sharp and unflinching about the realities of trying to make a life in art without generational wealth, or industry connections, yet it never loses its sense of love for art itself. In an era where negativism in art...
Insights from the Anonymous Creative Futures Report “What was solid yesterday feels uncertain tomorrow.” This single phrase from the Anonymous Creative Futures Report captures the unease and shifting ground beneath contemporary artists. Seventy-five creators spanning writers, fine artists, filmmakers, musicians, and digital creators were asked to reflect on their futures in 2025. While some concerns were expected financial insecurity, algorithmic anxiety, and the looming presence of AI their...
By Tyler Stallings Chris O’Leary’s Gravity Well is a profound and poetic meditation on the unseen forces that shape our universe. Curated by Jennifer Frias, director and senior curator at the Nicholas + Lee Begovich Gallery at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), from November 2, 2024, to May 17, 2025, this multimedia exhibition brings viewers into the realm of gravitational waves—distortions in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but only directly...
The OC Art Blog had a chance to ask Unveil Gallery co-founder Lorraine Han some questions about their space and program. Located in an office park in Irvine. Unveil Gallery is a contemporary art gallery co-founded by Lorraine and Dan Yang. Their mission is a diverse platform that focuses on contemporary art, women, and community culture. Unveil aims to provide a space for young or emerging artists who are bold in their creativity and willing to explore new artistic languages. Committed to...
Desert X announced a return to the Coachella Valley from March 8 to May 11, 2025, once again transforming the desert into a vast, open-air exhibition of contemporary art. This year’s exhibition features eleven international artists, whose works engage with the themes of Indigenous futurism, design activism, colonial power asymmetries, and the impact of humanity on the land Desert X 2025 installation view of Agnes Denes The Living Pyramid at Sunnylands Center &Gardens, photo by Lance...
Marlene' Dusek, Healing your heart and healing sóoval with kúut (Marlene’managing sumac gathering area, an essential plant relative for weaving) Photo by Kim Avalos. In the wake of the devastating wildfires that have ravaged Southern California, the Fowler Museum’s new exhibition, Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art, arrives at a complex cultural and emotional moment. With its focus on Indigenous fire stewardship and cultural burning practices, the exhibition treads a...
The OC Art Blog sat down (virtually) with Orange County based multidisciplinary artist Alisa Ochoa in advance of her show with painter Huang Zhen that opens at Unveil Gallery on September 7th. Ochoa’s rich work of bold colors and poetic language applied to all areas of visual expression, including sculpture, painting, and video has been recognized with residencies at Hunter College Ceramic Department, Penland School of Craft, and Kala Art Institute, and with exhibitions nationwide. Her artwork...
Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty currently at the Beall Center for Art + Technology By Chris Hoff Since the emergence of cybernetics through people like Norbert Weiner, Gregory Bateson and others from the cold war avant-garde, and with the establishment of the systemic approach that tracked the relations between machine, man, and society. Artists have been interested in incorporating the language, tools, and metaphors of systems, prediction, and cybernetics into their work. These...
Carolyn Saylor Your recent sculptural series, This is Not the End, reflects deep spiritual themes and addresses the anxieties stemming from apocalyptic events. Could you share more about the inspiration behind this series and how your personal experiences shaped these creations? 2020 marked by the COVID-19 pandemic was filled with so much public and private suffering. Right in the middle of it, tragedy hit my own family — a massive heart attack for my dad. I was thrust into a state of turmoil...
Martin Creed: Work No. 3868 Half the air in a given space Orange County Museum of Art Newport Beach, CA By Chris Hoff Recently I was listening to the Art Angle podcast interview of Joshua Citarella, facilitator of the burgeoning online platform Do Not Research. In this wide-ranging conversation Citarella forecasts a total atomization of the art world where everything resembles Tik Tok and predicts the fall of institutions and museums. He argues that this fall of institutions will be brought...
By Liz Goldner Gina Herrera’s artwork is a reflection of her journey into self-knowledge and realization about the world around her. She aspires to help save our planet; and she does so by employing in her work natural materials, including branches, rocks, cocoons and nests. These elements, along with colorful cast-off fabric scraps, plastics, buttons, ribbons, jewelry, domestic tools and military medallions, are affixed to frameworks, made of rebar or reinforced steel, which mirror human...
Prior to his upcoming show opening at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles, titled My Little Narrative, at the Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery from October 3rd to November 11th. The OC Art Blog had the opportunity to meet with Walpa D'Mark who's self-reflective paintings use figuration and abstraction, historical and popular references that intersect between Nicaraguan and American history and politics. D'Mark has exhibited throughout L.A., including at Track 16, Mark Moore Gallery,...
Through January 15, 2024 By Liz Goldner Magnificent screen prints, many infused with electric color and Chicano symbolism, are featured in Laguna Art Museum’s Self-Help Graphics exhibition. All 78 prints by 78 artists in the show are owned by the museum. Looking back, 50 years ago, Franciscan nun Sister Karen Boccalero, along with Mexican-born, local artists Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez and others, recognized that U.S. born Latinos, especially L.A. based Chicano artists were not being...
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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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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