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 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:...
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....
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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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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