Painting · Drawing · Mixed Media

Shizu Saldamando

Born in 1978 in San Francisco's Mission District to parents of Mexican-American and Japanese-American descent, Shizu Saldamando is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose mixed-media portraiture stands among the most culturally layered and politically resonant work being produced in the city today. Raised at the crossroads of Chicano aesthetics, punk culture, and the cholo movements of the Mission District — and shaped by the knowledge that her mother's family were survivors of the World War II Japanese American internment camps — Saldamando developed an artistic voice that is at once intimate and historically charged.

She earned her BA from UCLA's School of Arts and Architecture and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her practice centers on portraiture of friends, peers, and community members from Los Angeles' Latinx, queer, punk, and activist scenes — rendered across an extraordinary range of materials including Washi paper, origami paper, ballpoint pen on napkins (arte paño), wood panels, bedsheets, gold foil, and stickers. Each work is a meticulous act of homage, challenging hierarchical social and artistic norms while honoring everyday people too often overlooked by institutional culture.

Saldamando has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Venice Biennale, among many others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, MoCA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Painting · Mixed Media

GERMS (Jaime Zacarias)

Jaime “Germs” Zacarias is a Los Angeles-based Chicano artist whose vibrant, surreal paintings blend Chicano heritage, LA subculture, and pop surrealist imagery into a visual language entirely his own. His canvases pulse with three-dimensional characters, protruding tentacles, and stylized Luchador masks — layered with playful hidden details including LA Dodgers logos, eyeballs, and religious iconography such as the Virgin Mary.

Drawing inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Chicano art pioneer Gilbert “Magú” Luján — a founding member of the groundbreaking collective Los Four — Zacarias credits Magú as a key mentor who taught him to embrace creativity, challenge norms, and approach art with energy and irreverence. His recent body of work, titled Fasho, invites viewers into a shared agreement to see familiar icons through his fearless imaginative lens. His work has been exhibited at the Fullerton Museum Center and La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and featured on PBS SoCal's Artbound.

Printmaking · Mixed Media

Poli Marichal

Poli Marichal is a Puerto Rican printmaker, founding member of the Los Angeles-based Los de Abajo Printmaking Collective, and founder of Poli Marichal Studio. Her expressive prints incorporate organic shapes and symbols that synthesize personal inquiry with urgent socio-political concerns — work that is at once visually lyrical and deeply rooted in the lived realities of her community.

Following Hurricane María in 2017, Marichal returned to Puerto Rico where she established a workshop and turned her practice toward themes of survival and reconstruction — including her series Sobrevivientes (Survivors), created using PVC, the material now used to build hurricane-resistant housing on the island. She is also a member of the Centro Para el Grabado y Las Artes Del Libro in Puerto Rico. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, Italy, Japan, Romania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, Cuba, and Spain.

Painting · Printmaking · Multidisciplinary

Antonio Escalante

Antonio Escalante is a multifaceted artist based in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, who has exhibited professionally since 1994. His practice spans painting, printmaking, theater, television, and independent film — a breadth that reflects both his restless creative intelligence and his deep engagement with the cultural borderlands between Mexico and the United States.

A founding member of the Los de Abajo printmaking group at Self Help Graphics in Los Angeles and Colectivo PRAD in Tijuana, Escalante has exhibited widely across Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Notable exhibitions include Corazones de Aztlán at Self Help Graphics (2003), Mujeres de Juárez at the Nevada State Museum (2004), and Tijuana Cruda at the Municipal Art Gallery of Los Angeles (2006).

Painting · Sculpture · Mixed Media

Oscar Magallanes

Oscar Magallanes is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and mixed media. Born and raised in a Mexican-American barrio east of downtown Los Angeles, his work is deeply informed by the cultural and social landscape of that upbringing — drawing on cultural iconography, the folkloric, and the visual language of propaganda to create work that is at once intimate and monumental.

Introduced to the professional art world through the Ryman Arts program at Otis College, Magallanes went on to complete his BA at UCLA (2017) and his MFA at the University of California, San Diego (2021). In 2016, he co-founded the 3B Collective, which has since created permanent site-specific public art for UCLA, UCSD, the Museo Infantil Oaxaca, and institutions across California. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the McNay Museum, among others.

Printmaking · Graphic Design · Mixed Media

Daniel Gonzales

Daniel Gonzales is a printmaker and graphic designer from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, whose practice is rooted in the preservation of narrative, history, and community memory. His early childhood was shared between Mexico and the United States — an experience that shaped the strong social justice currents running through all of his work. Using the time-honored techniques of relief printmaking and letterpress, Gonzales creates work that is simultaneously archival and urgently contemporary.

After six years working on over 35 group mural projects through a free public art program, Gonzales pursued formal studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts and later completed his degree at UCLA's Design Media Arts program with Latin Honors. He has since maintained a print and design studio in Highland Park. His public art includes the artwork for the Metro Expo Line La Cienega Station, titled Engraved in Memory. His work is housed in the collections of the Mexican Museum of Chicago, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Carnegie Museum.

Painting · Mixed Media

Velma Gay

Velma Gay is a Los Angeles-based emerging artist working in mixed media painting. Her canvases are large in scale and larger in presence — bold, immersive works that command attention and invite prolonged engagement. Gay's practice reflects the energy and experimentation of an artist in active discovery, bringing a fearless approach to material and form that distinguished her among the artists selected for this exhibition.

Graffiti · Street Art · Illustration

RASK Opticon

RASK Opticon is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist whose work moves fluidly between street art, muralism, illustration, and tattoo design. Known internationally for his tattooed pin-up girl series — a body of work that captured global attention for its intricate detail and singular aesthetic — RASK has also left a significant visual mark across the walls of Los Angeles through murals that blend graphic boldness with obsessive craftsmanship.

His influences span video games, cartoons, anime, and graffiti culture, a lineage that informs the playful yet exacting visual language across his portfolio. Featured in Lowrider Arte Magazine and Skin Deep Magazine, and the winner of Game Show Network's Skin Wars: Fresh Paint, RASK brings to every medium what he describes as a “distortion of life” — a refusal to accept the ordinary surface of things.

Photography

Baron Norris

Baron Norris is a Long Beach-based photographer whose practice encompasses tabletop, food, product, portrait, headshot, and event photography. With a keen eye for composition and light, Norris brings precision and warmth to both commercial and fine art contexts — elevating his subjects whether he is working in an intimate portrait session or documenting the energy of a live event.

Relief Printmaking

Justin Kempton

Justin Kempton is the creator of WritersMugs, a celebrated series of hand-carved relief print portraits depicting great thinkers, authors, writers, and philosophers. Begun in the late summer of 2003, the series has grown into a living library of over 200 portraits — each image carved by hand into linoleum, vinyl, or wood, inked with Kempton's own homemade ink, and pressed onto high-quality rice paper in limited editions of 20 prints per block.

The process is as deliberate as it is poetic: once 20 pressings have been made, each block is either preserved, sold, or destroyed — lending every print a quiet significance, the knowledge that it belongs to a small and finite community of objects. WritersMugs is at once a personal archive and a public act of cultural homage, positioning literature and intellectual life as worthy subjects for the visual arts.

Painting · Oil

Daniel Ortega Flores

Daniel Ortega Flores is a Los Angeles-based painter working primarily in oils. His canvases draw from the rich visual traditions of Mexican folklore and the raw energy of punk music — two cultural forces that, in his hands, become surprisingly natural companions. Both resist erasure. Both insist on being seen and heard on their own terms. Ortega Flores channels that shared defiance into paintings that are rooted in heritage yet alive with contemporary urgency.