Exhibitions
Gallery Hours:
Thursday - Monday 11am - 4pm
Visit our gallery to see exhibitions of the work of local and visiting artists alike.
Good Mother
‘I used to believe it was impossible for me to become a mother and artist. Despite how much I desire both life experiences, my art practice demands a certain level of devotion, and I imagine raising a child requires that, on top of the million things one urgently learns in order to keep another being alive, full, happy, and loved.
Since moving to Mendocino I have had the chance to witness closely working mothers who are also artists. Some include the children in their art making, others take fragments of time alone to create, a quiet hour in the studio until one of the kids comes barging in asking about dinner. My mother's medium is the garden, and I was lucky enough to grow up running around community gardens, learning to plant seeds, feeding chickens the greens from our carrots, hands stained from grazing fresh strawberries.
Coming from a landscaping background, my mother threw herself in the gardening community in Santa Clara when we first immigrated to the US from Singapore. I imagine watering the soil and seeing what grows was her way of getting to know a land completely foreign to her. Communing with those who are interested in California native flowers, absorbing English vocabulary centering horticulture, her relationship with tending the land shaped her transition into an immigrant mother. I learned about new textures, smells, tastes, and how we take care of our more than human world through picking borage flowers, coming home with a basket full of ripe yellow cherry tomatoes, nibbling on nasturtiums.
To this day, the smell of sweet peas beats any bouquet of grocery store flowers, reminding me of my mother's care for the land, for her practice, for me.’
-Rino Kodama
Pride on the Coast
The Mendocino Art Center is thrilled to host Pride on the Coast again this June. LGBTQ+ and Two-Spirit artists are encouraged to submit up to
3 pieces of art to our open call by May 30th.
Key Dates
Deadline to enter: May 30th
Artwork drop-off: June 6th-7th
Exhibition opens: June 13th
Photo credit: Amanda Jasnowski Pascual, Photograph of Carmen Goodyear and her wife Laurie York, 2017.
Nymphs
NYMPHS is a solo exhibition by hamsa fae, reclaiming the nude for negotiating transgendered otherness. Presenting as a three channel moving-image installation, the artist stages eco-performances between Big Island, Mount Shasta, and the Rio Serpis, all known to be earth’s nexuses for spiritual metamorphosis.
Within Greco-Roman mythology and later 19th century painting, the nymph often appeared as an erotic objectification of the landscape itself. The artist queers the framework of the nymph by meditating the feminized form alongside vulnerable environmental sites. Through natural prosthetics, she destabilizes biological legibility as an act of returning the body to land.
hamsa fae (b. 1993, Los Angeles) is a Vietnamese American artist working across expanded performance and moving-image installation. As an internet-native rooted in a decade of land-based animist practice, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Through durational bodily transformation and self-documentation, she observes how gendered bodies are consumed and mediated within economies of feminized desire.
Emerging from the political and spiritual mundanity of trans womanhood, her work mobilizes nudity as an ancestral and digital technology of return. From natural landscapes in the Californias to livestreaming platforms, her site-responsive performances activate environments as co-performers. Audiences are invited to kneel, speak, recline, or gather in collective ritual acts that confront the historical erasure of third gender peoples while collapsing the distinction between witness, voyeur, and co-author.
Her multimedia installations extend these performances into speculative altars and ecological afterlives. Combining organic materials and assembled GIFs, she constructs immersive environments that destabilize binaries between nature and interface. Her work reveals how networked systems reshape intimacy and spectacle while eroding embodied relationships to earth and one another.
Her work has been presented across experimental and institutional spaces throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. She has delivered talks at the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Her writing has been published and featured in diaCritics, Transgender Law Center, and the Yale School of the Environment. She is the Founder and Director of the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship in Southern California, supporting the development and visibility of queer AAPI artists