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Current Exhibitions

Against Monoculture

Main Gallery, September 12 – December 12, 2024

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Exploring intersections of art and activism, Against Monoculture offers a creative lens through which to examine the structural causes and consequences of food inequality. Bringing together artists whose practices foreground the role of food in community, struggle, and survival, the exhibition considers the ways food is a direct link to land, culture, and identity, and how cultivating, preparing, and sharing food are fundamental creative acts.

Phung Huynh: Pink Donut Boxes 

Main Gallery Corridor, September 12 – December 12, 2024

Phung Huynh: Pink Donut Boxes explores the lived experiences of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees resettled in Southern California, home to one of the largest Southeast Asian refugee populations in the world. In these works, Huynh transforms the pink donut box—a cultural icon in Southern California—into a powerful signifier of survival, resilience, and collective memory, using it as a backdrop to delicate portraits of the artist, her parents, and other members of the refugee community. Phung Huynh: Pink Donut Boxes is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Against Monoculture, which explores intersections of art and activism in relation to food justice. 

John Schacht: Queer Expression

Mini Gallery, September 12 – December 12, 2024

John Schacht: Queer Expression highlights a set of idiosyncratic works on paper by self-taught artist John Schacht (1938-2009). Known for his uniquely expressive paintings and drawings that blur the line between abstraction and representation, the set of drawings on display in this exhibition exemplify Schacht’s audacious expressivity and individualized way of seeing the world. The works on view in this exhibition are part of the Museum’s permanent collection thanks to a generous gift from Kohler Foundation and Jane Wenger. 

Al Held, West End

Glenn Court, September 12 – December 12, 2024

Al Held (1928-2005) was a second-generation abstract expressionist painter primarily known for his hard-edge abstractions. Held went through several stylistic changes throughout his career, from experimenting with thick pigment and gestural brushstrokes to painting strictly in black and white. The colorful geometric style of West End, painted in 1985, reflects Held’s exploration of light, color, and perspective during the latter part of his artistic practice. West End is part of the Museum’s permanent collection. This is the first time West End has been exhibited at the Museum since it was featured in Al Held: The Evolution of Style in 2008. 

Dulce Soledad Ibarra: los pobres comen tan rico 

Community Gallery, September 12 – December 12, 2024

In los pobres comen tan rico (the poor eat so richly) artist and activist Dulce Soledad Ibarra draws connections between access to affordable, culturally appropriate foods and food vending culture in Southern California. Using Mexican market bags, or bolsotes, Ibarra creates embroidered wearable aprons featuring beans, tomatoes, corn, and nopales. One bolsote features a multicolored umbrella, or sombra, signifying the enduring but threatened presence of this cultural icon within the Southern California landscape.  

A portion of this exhibition is presented in the Museum’s front vestibule, which the artist has temporarily transformed into a greenhouse for growing the plants featured in the apron paintings: beans, tomatoes, corn, and nopales. 

Walasse Ting, 1¢ Life 

Prints and Drawings Room, September 12 – December 12, 2024

1¢ Life (1964) is a collaborative book project by Chinese-American visual artist and poet Walasse Ting (1929-2010). The book combines written works by Ting with artwork by various artists associated with Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, including Sam Francis (who edited the book), Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, among others. Ting’s witty wordplay and biting sense of humor is evident throughout the book, as is 1960s experimentation and iconoclasm. The book includes thirty-one folios, which will be on display with weekly rotations over the course of fall 2024 and spring 2025 semesters. 1¢ Life is part of the Museum’s permanent collection.  

Reservations are available for visitor exhibition viewing sessions in the David Campagna Prints and Drawings Room. To make a reservation to view this exhibition, please fill out a request at least two weeks in advance. .

Sister Mary Corita: Serigraphs

Prints and Drawings Hallway, September 12 - December 12, 2024

Sister Mary Corita (1918-1986), also known as Corita Kent, was an artist and educator who specialized in printmaking. She was also a former nun, having joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart as a teenager. Known for her exuberant creativity and innovative printmaking techniques, as well as her progressive politics, Kent’s serigraphs (another word for screenprints) often combined bold graphics with social justice messages. 

In the set of prints on view in this exhibition, Kent pairs text and image to capture and hold the viewer’s attention. The prints reference lyrics from popular songs and poetry that convey the impassioned spirit of the 1960s. Kent created these prints the year before she took a leave of absence from the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, moving from California to Boston and never returning to the order. These prints are part of the Museum’s permanent collection.

Farm Workers: Photographs from the Collection and 

The Black Panther, selections 

Archives Room, September 12 – December 12, 2024

Ongoing Exhibitions

Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld: Cosmic Connections 

Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Gallery, February 13 - December 12, 2024

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Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld: Cosmic Connections is the third exhibition of the artist’s work drawn from the Museum’s collection. Drawn from multiple series of work, this exhibition includes several of the artist’s large abstract paintings and related drawings made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the artist increasingly identified as a poet and visual artist, she began to create abstract, gestural works referencing the landscape and the cosmos. Two bodies of work, Cosmic Connections and Landscape Abstractions, reflect Kleefeld’s deepening understanding of her position within what she calls “the flow.” Recognizing herself as a creative being within a larger natural universe, Kleefeld’s work from this period expresses her continuing exploration of spiritual movements and consciousness-expansive practices.