Blinky the Friendly Hen was memorialized Saturday by Los Angeles performance artist and curator Jeffrey Vallance on the occasion of the artist’s walk through of the Cal State Northridge gallery exhibition “Blinky the Friendly Hen: 40th Anniversary Exhibition.” Vallance, a 2004 Guggenheim fellow whose "Relics and Reliquaries" was exhibited at CSUF Grand Central Art Center in downtown Santa Ana in 2007, purchased Blinky the Friendly Hen in the frozen poultry section of a Ralphs supermarket on...
Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Kyoto, Japan during peak fall season. As I understand it the last two weeks of November are the prime time in Kyoto to visit temples, explore zen gardens, and take in the sight's and sounds of this unique city, while the local foliage burns red, yellow and orange. In between visits to the many breathtaking temples and gardens, we found some time to take an art break and check out the fairly new contemporary art museum in Kyoto, the Forever Museum of...
Saturday night I made it to the opening of Re:Balance at the Irvine Arts Center. All around a great show but the stand out in the show was the work of Ching Ching Chen. I wanted to write something more detailed here but for the sake of transparency, I bought a piece from the show. That's how much I liked the work. As I was standing in front of one of the pieces from the Letting Go series, I overheard a couple behind me discussing the work. The woman said the work wanted to make her cry. I...
As I was watching the Price of Everything last night on HBO, the latest documentary to examine the white hot contemporary art market, I found myself one more time, in fascination with the art world. I love these sorts of documentaries, probably not for the reason the producers would hope for, because I imagine they would want me to walk away from this sort of project with a bit of amused skepticism, or exuberant cynicism. However, after this show was over, I was once again inspired, hopeful,...
This Saturday night a special show, curated by Jim Ellsberry and Suzanne Walsh, opens at the HB Art Center. Color Vision brings together scientifically and culturally engaging aspects of how we perceive and utilize color. Featuring a group of contemporary artists who use color not only as a medium, but as an element of their message. Presented in three dynamic groupings: The Architecture of Color, Color Theory, and The Practical Applications of Color. Don't miss it!
Typographic street artist and designer Peter Greco has spent his entire adult life learning the mastery of communication through language and lettering. His artwork celebrates the centuries old tradition of the art of calligraphy and the fascinating world of typography while paying homage to the many different cultures that have kept this tradition alive. He has shown all over the country, but based out of Los Angeles and teaching at Art Center College of Design, his artwork rarely makes it...
The worlds of rock music and fine art have long traded personnel back and forth, from John Lennon dropping out of art school to make music as one of the Beatles to Captain Beefheart dropping out of music to make paintings as Don Van Vliet. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, whose solo show at the Akron Museum of Art just ended, is a more recent exemplar of the creative spirit who is able to walk in both worlds. Several more examples can be seen in the exhibition “Rhythm” at Irvine’s Great Park, which...
When I first visited DAX gallery for its opening in 2013 owner Alex Amador had big plans for the Costa Mesa space that would bring fine urban art to Orange County. Over the past few years, in part due to how hard it can be to maintain a gallery, DAX has shuffled around some of its original aspirations. I was curious to see what the gallery was up to when I met with curator Alec Van Sealund for the August 13th opening of No Name. Van Sealund joined DAX in 2015 and explained the gallery...
Mark Zuckerberg by Ray Turner 6:45 p.m., Costa Mesa Mark Zuckerberg, having done as much as anyone who isn’t Steve Jobs to push us all headlong into the digital age (whether we wanted it or not) now tastes the revenge of the analog world in a show of paintings at Coastline Gallery. Curated by David Michael Lee, Like MARK features the Facebook founder’s face as portrayed by the likes of F. Scott Hess, Julio Labra and Bradford J. Salamon. “Revenge” may be overstating it a bit, but Hess’ portrait...
4:30 p.m., Venice Los de Abajo is a Southern California printmaking collective whose members strive to keep alive the Latin American tradition of printmaking while also experimenting with new techniques and individual expression. Their show "Division: Reflections and Shadows" at SPARC in Venice, Calif., an Art Deco former police station, is socially-engaged in a way uniquely appropriate to the coming Trumpocalypse, as in Yvette Mangual's Flight, inspired by the Caltrans immigrant crossing...
Local artists Alyssa Arney and Liz Flynn are very aware of the superficial nature of Southern California, where beauty is valued over health, and the constant presence of advertising is louder, brighter, and more attractive than honesty. Finding their way, separately, toward fiber arts, was an important journey for each artist, but finding their way toward each other, and creating an open dialogue with their community, other women, and internally, has fueled their artwork and their...
The Orange Coast Review is Orange Coast College's literary journal. The current issue (which I art directed) contains sixteen pages of art from mostly local artists working in various media, including works by Bradford Salamon, Lindsay Buchman, Pamela Diaz Martinez, Nguyen Ly and Riley Waite, who is represented by two pieces from his Playing With Fire series of portraits of young heroin addicts drawn with candle soot on paper. The cover painting by Fatima Jamil combines traditional realism...
“SUCCESSIONS” OPENING: April 2, 2016 Jamie Brooks Fine Art 2967 Randolph Avenue Unit C, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 949-929-4143 What is better than an artist’s fresh, brand new, and stimulating paintings? It is seeing David Michael Lee’s 15 year retrospective “Successions”. In this expanse of time, Lee, through his daring and personal exploration of accepted painterly elements, broadens our understanding of artistic possibilities. From graduate school to the present, the groupings of work encompass...
Red, by John Logan, is a play about the business of being an artist — the commissions, the professional jealousies, the rivalries between generations and the physical and mental act of putting paint to canvas. Originally staged in London in 2009 and now at South Coast Repertory through February 21, the play features Mark Harelik as the painter Mark Rothko — at the height of his success in 1958, newly commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant at Manhattan's...
Lindsay Buchman is an interdisciplinary artist working between Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Her practice explores positions of instability and disintegration through works on paper, installation, artist books, and photo-based approaches. Captivated by shared experience, she investigates interpersonal relationships while pivoting between text and image. Buchman is primarily focused on the implication of memory, and the dissonance between language and communication. Recent projects include: the...
Trace Mendoza creates hypnotic work that makes you feel inspired, inquisitive and strangely euphoric. A seemingly schizophrenic fixation with cultural iconography, his Southern California homeland, psychedelic design, deconstructivism, and unlikely pairings, OC artist Trace Mendoza finds strange and fascinating narratives in his creations that are just as fantastical and weird as the artist himself. With an overtone of whimsy, Mendoza’s artworks combine the darkness of the unknown...
Written by: Roberta Carasso The selection of work by artists – Arno Kortschot, Connie Goldman, and Gary Petersen – is a look into the dimensions artists develop to express formal and spatial ideas – fully dimensional, the suggestion of dimension, and the illusion of dimensionality on a flat canvas. Also, because the art is intermixed, one artist’s work hung near another artist’s work, the viewer is given an additional opportunity to contemplate far more spatial and formal possibilities had the...
By Roberta Carasso Artists deal with human issue just like everyone else, except, being visually-minded, they make their thoughts accessible to all who can appreciate their meaning. Katie Stubblefield is drawn to that moment when things shift, the cliff hangers of life when events suddenly are no longer the same. Working with various artistic disciplines, her metaphors embrace imagery inversion from methods of horizontal and vertical processes. The final canvas captures a movement with no...
Mark Landis is a curious little man, aged 60 years but looking much older, with a high-pitched, mumbly voice, pronounced ears and a residual wisp of hair at the top of his head. Known to dress up at times as a Jesuit priest, he would surely be played by John Malkovich in the movie of his life, but for the fact that his life lacks the requisite drama for a Hollywood biopic. As it happens, Landis plays himself in the documentary Art and Craft — seen in movie theaters in 2014 and premiering...
By Richard Chang Irvine resident Tim Schwab dons a few different hats. During business hours, he’s director of design and installation at Laguna Art Museum. When he’s not on the clock, he does freelance graphic design for several local companies and makes ceramic art. Trained as a bronze sculptor, Schwab now finds his passion creating artistic pottery. The BFA graduate of Laguna College of Art + Design is showcasing his recent clay creations in a show with painter David Michael Lee at F+...
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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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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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