Art & Nature Festival brings art and the community together in celebration of our history and future.
The event serves a number of purposes: to provide a festival of art and ideas for the community; to inspire artists; to find and develop connections between art and science; to raise awareness of environmental issues; and to celebrate Laguna Beach as a center for the appreciation of art and nature.
The theme of Art & Nature speaks particularly to the identity of Laguna Beach, which for over a hundred years has fostered art, the love of nature, and environmental awareness.
In 1929, when the Laguna Beach Art Association built a gallery to show and sell their work, they chose a commanding location on the coastline, close to the natural wonders they loved to paint. The present museum occupies the same site. There could be no more appropriate venue in which to explore the art-nature connection.
Creating an immersive 360-degree video art installation, Rebeca Méndez’s The Sea Around Us will transport viewers to an area of the Pacific Ocean located 30 miles from the Laguna Beach Coast, portraying the ocean as a fully animated body as well as a place of deep interconnectedness for all living things. Using scientific footage, the video shifts to thousands of oozing barrels of DDT on the seafloor being sampled by robotic arms. This hidden ecological calamity is revealed in conjunction with imagery that inspires awe and strengthens the bond between sea and viewer, inspiring the courage to face environmental wrongdoing, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating transgressions against our natural resources. Learn more about The Sea Around Us at this link.
Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer and chair of the Design Media Arts department at UCLA, where she is also director of the CounterForce Lab. Her research and practice investigate design and media art in public spaces, critical approaches to public identities and landscape and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. In addition to her many great permanent public commissions, including two for the Metro Art Crenshaw/LAX project and three for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Méndez’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections. Among them are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca in Mexico, the El Paso Museum of Art and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. From 2017 through 2019 she served as selecting committee member for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award.
An interactive sculptural experience inviting contemplation of the layered history and unique geology of Laguna Beach. Beginning at the museum, participants will journey to several sites through the local park and beaches, encountering pyramids of various sizes and colors that reflect the ever-shifting nature of the landscape. The temporality of the installation parallels much of the earth’s landscapes that shift and change due to weather, geology and the effects of climate change. Learn more about Pyramidion at this link.
Kelly Berg is a Los Angeles based artist who creates paintings and mixed media sculptural works that explore the ever-shifting nature of our world. Known for her compositions depicting the movement of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions and dramatic geologic formations, Berg’s works offer a new perspective within the context of contemporary landscape and the sublime. The integration of geometric forms within her compositions and the reoccurring imagery of pyramids emerging from dark rifts in the earth create a visual framework that symbolizes a convergence of the human and natural worlds.
From Mission-Blue.org: National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence Dr. Sylvia A. Earle, called Her Deepness by The New Yorker and The New York Times, Living Legend by the Library of Congress, and first Hero for the Planet by Time Magazine, is an oceanographer, explorer, author and lecturer with experience as a field research scientist, government official, and director for corporate and non-profit organizations including the Kerr McGee Corporation, Dresser Industries, Oryx Energy, the Aspen Institute, the Conservation Fund, American Rivers, Mote Marine Laboratory, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Rutgers Institute for Marine Science, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, and Ocean Futures.
Laguna Beach artist Robert Young began his magnum opus in 1971. The enormous 9’ x 15’ painting was a work in progress throughout Young’s life. An avid scuba diver and ocean lover, Young added colorful fish, pristine reef, coral and other sea life onto his canvas over decades. The painting was displayed at Sea World but eventually came back to Laguna Beach where it is thought to still hold record as the largest painting ever created in the city. Learn more about The Big One at this link.
Laguna Art Museum is stoked to present Five Summer Stories: The Exhibition on the occasion of the iconic surf film’s 50th anniversary. Created in 1972 as a love poem to the sport of surfing, the film quickly was named the most important surf movie ever made exceeding the wildest expectations of filmmakers Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman. Original artifacts showing how the film was made will be displayed alongside ephemera from the attendance-breaking theatrical release, surf boards, film footage and imagery epitomizing the positive force that comes from riding the waves. Learn more about Five Summer Stories: The Exhibition at this link.
The Art & Nature Family Festival is an event for all ages. Laguna Art Museum partners with local organizations whose missions focus on art, climate, science, animal welfare, and environmental education to present fun and enriching hands-on activities and educational stations throughout the museum.
For more details on the Opening Week Schedule, click here.
307 Cliff Drive at North Coast Hwy.
Laguna Beach,
California
92651