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 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 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 Baker captures it in a diver paused mid-descent. It surfaces more quietly, embedded in layered brushwork by Vonn Sumner’s vast garden scene that reflects time and memory. The Great Park Gallery’s latest exhibition, on view from...
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:...
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 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...
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 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...
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,...
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...
The OC Art Blog sat down with some of the leadership of Orange County based nonprofit Community Engagement to discuss their programming and support of local artists. In this wide ranging interview we discuss their new pop-up gallery, The Art Space OC, on Third Street in Downtown Santa Ana. Their grants program that includes grants for local artists who have been historically excluded from the mainstream art world. And their next show featuring William Camargo, a local photographer telling...
Q: I'm an introverted artist and it seems that the art world awards extroversion. Meaning people that are out all the time at openings and artist talks networking are more successful. How can I move from being introverted to extroverted? My career depends on it! Dear Fellow Traveler, Want to know a secret? I’m terrified of public speaking. The pounding heart, the drunk-dizzy-sweating-profusely kind of afraid that grips me in a vice and paralyzes me. Eventually, I somehow pull from the...
By Mat Gleason Growing up on the county line revealed little difference between Orange County and Los Angeles County but illustrated the frisson of borders nonetheless. There was a place called “The Ditch” which was an open sewage channel that stunk but had great dirt hills to ride bikes. Located just beyond the fence in the back of Buena Park’s Big Tee Golf Course, was it in Orange County or Los Angeles County? When La Mirada residents rose up to complain of the stench, L.A. County said,...
Q: With COVID and all, I have felt stuck for a year now. What can I do to get unstuck? Dear Fellow Traveler, The word stuck typically brings images to my mind of being five years old, venturing out into a deliciously dirty, mostly dried-up creek behind my house—and in my quest for fun not noticing nighttime raindrops had created a form of muck, which snatched a flip flop from my foot, swallowing it whole. Ah, well I’ll abandon it there, I’ll be barefoot and free! What’s the point in...
Have you ever had a moment where you felt connected to an animal? Where you looked deep into its eyes and felt a sort of mutual understanding? Like, you exist with them and not just near them? Have you ever felt an internal pull toward a special crystal or rock formation? Has the color of a fire or a sunset reached into your soul and just stopped you dead in your tracks for a moment? Artist Cody Jimenez has the uncanny ability of catching those moments, among other extraordinary instances and...
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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