The OC Art Blog was created in 2004 as a way to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene.
Legacies Come Alive, Spring Blooms at Irvine Fine Arts Center
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...
What Does a Curator Actually Do?
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...
From Tradition to Comics: Great Park Gallery Presents New Show
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...
Interstitial: Sheng Lor at Gallery Sonder
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...
Doing It Anyway: What the 2026 Creative Futures Survey Reveals About Artists (and What It Means for OC)
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...
Do the OC Board of Supervisors Care About the Arts?
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...
The Sound of Silence: Orange County Art Institutions and the ICE Question
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...
Memory as Resistance: Art Leaders Defend Culture in Authoritarian Times
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
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...
What If Orange County Artists Thought Like Corporations (In the Best Possible Way)?
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...