May 2

May 2 Arts Spring 2025

Grand Opening

Cat Craig x Marie McKenzie Art Space | June 14, Opening Party 6 PM to 9 PM
***960 E Ojai Ave, Suite 107 (backside of Firebird Plaza)***

In a serendipitous chain of events earlier this year, artists Marie McKenzie and Cat Craig of Sunrise Via Lola Art came together around a shared vision: to create a community-centered space that nurtures creativity, wellness, and connection in Ojai.

McKenzie, an Ojai-based painter known for her ocean-inspired works, and Craig, a digital landscape and oil painting artist, have been longtime friends and champions of each other’s creative journeys. In February, McKenzie felt called to expand beyond her nature-filled barn studio on the East End, seeking more space for making prints and larger-scale paintings. She had an intuitive sense to reach out to her friend, Auriel Entrekin of Maraya Interior Design. By chance, an available space had just opened up next door to the design studio.

After visiting the space, McKenzie stated “I felt a strong pull to call Cat. As it happened, her and her husband, Shea, had been considering a move away from Ojai—but the day I reached out was the very day they decided to stay, feeling there was still more for them here.”

McKenzie and Craig are thrilled to introduce their community creative haven: a welcoming space for workshops, retreats, women’s circles, guest artist events, and more.

Saturday, June 14th ○ 10 AM – 5 PM: Downtown Ojai Studio Artists Tour (Second Saturday)

A Scarecrow’s Archive

SPORE SPACE | ELIZABETH HERRING & HAILEY LOMAN
***221 East Matilija Street*** | June 6 to July 12 | Opening June 6, 5 - 8 PM

One way ashore, a thousand channels
—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

There was an isolation and loneliness to the scarecrows. You never see two together. They’re always alone, doing some important, solitary job for the person who made them.
—PumpkinRot

Elizabeth Herring created two scarecrows out of thrifted clothing and pantyhose, accompanied by a traveler’s journal for their fantasy vacation. The scarecrow’s “important solitary” job is in the eye of the beholder, as is the archivist’s time spent cataloguing. Why might we ingest, describe, and share single art objects with others? What can our ephemera tell us about our messy and contradictory lives?

Spore Space will be hosting special open hours during the Ojai Music Festival on Saturday and Sunday, June 7th and 8th, from 2-5 PM.

Seven Decades

OJAI VALLEY MUSEUM | KAREN K LEWIS
***130 West Ojai Avenue*** | June 19 to August 3 | Opening June 20

Best known for her large-scale oil paintings and evocative still life, Karen K Lewis has been a fixture of Ojai’s art community since 1990. This upcoming retrospective at the Ojai Valley Museum traces the arc of her prolific career, from her early days in New York’s SoHo scene (where The New Yorker took note), to her decades of work capturing California's landscapes in oils and prints. A former president of the Ojai Studio Artists and a favorite of collectors from here to Japan, Lewis continues to expand her practice with forays into printmaking and international workshops. This is a rare chance to see the full scope of her work in one place.

Horizon Object

CAROLYN GLASOE BAILEY | STEPHANIE WASHBURN
***248 South Montgomery Street*** | June 5 - July 25 | Opening June 7, 5 - 7 PM

From CGBF:

Air, the most diaphanous of elements, skims the edges of a body unseen, unheard, and impossible to grasp, eluding sensory perception and any thought of threat. It reveals itself, but only with distance, as sky. Timothy Morton describes the climate crisis as a hyperobject, something so vast and abstract it overwhelms the mind's ability to process. There is a material problem. Integrating drawing, photography, video, and sound, the work included in this exhibition reaches for what is so untouchable. Sky drawn on rock. A blade cuts through the clouds. Wind billowing in and out of a shredded skyscape in fading light at dusk. Coup d’Oeil (Boreas) explores a related process in the video with a sound collaboration by Rebecca Comerford. The video presents a Janus view of wind entering and exiting the frame. Comerford, a mezzo soprano, navigates a single breath through the turbulent atmosphere with moments of almost indistinguishable resonance. Animating sky and body and back again, air shape shifts its way through wild and embodied forms, and roils our ever more deluded construct of nature as other to a human subject.

This exhibit is in conjunction with the Ojai Music Festival.

Three Works

CANVAS + PAPER | GROUP SHOW
***311 N. Montgomery Street*** | April 24 - June 22

In this intimate grouping, three artists, Cornelis Kick, Louis Valtat, and William Scott, approach the floral still life across time and temperament. From Kick’s meticulously rendered 17th-century bouquet to Valtat’s bold, expressive tulips and Scott’s restrained modernist study in blue, these paintings reveal how a familiar subject can be endlessly reimagined. Anchored in tradition, yet radically different in tone, each work invites a slower kind of looking.

Painted Seasons

SANTA PAULA ART MUSEUM | ANNE WARD
***123 North 10th Street, Santa Paula*** | March 15 - July 6

From SPAM:

Anne Ward is obsessed with light and pattern and color. Two years ago, Ward began thinking a lot about impermanence in the midst of so much change and also about the things that make her feel calm and uplifted. As a gardener, she finds the seasons and what is blooming at a particular time to be profoundly reassuring. The garden helps her to reconcile change and embrace the “season of now.” “Painted Seasons” represents various seasons of life, from old family photos to the greens of early spring and the energy of summer. Ward’s great hope is that her paintings function like a window that, when opened, can allow people to notice the “ordinary” in a different way and hopefully feel some of the energy of optimism with which she painted them.