LAGUNA BEACH, CALIF.- Laguna Art Museum presents its 10th annual Art & Nature, a multidisciplinary exploration and celebration of art’s various engagements with the natural world. The multi-faceted event is the museum’s largest public program of the year, bringing together thousands of participants to foster a love of nature, raise environmental awareness, and discover cross-sections between science and the arts.
“This year’s 10th annual Art & Nature Festival will once again bring the community together to appreciate the intimate connection between art and nature,” said Julie Perlin Lee, Executive Director of Laguna Art Museum. “The festival celebrates the museum’s long-standing history as a cultural center, offering in-depth programming and impactful exhibitions that honor the rich history of California art.”
Rebeca Méndez returns to Art & Nature as the featured artist with her newest project The Sea Around Us, which made its debut in the museum’s historic Steele Gallery on November 5. Creating an immersive 360-degree video art installation, 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.
Presenting the first outdoor exhibition since 2020, LAM brings Kelly Berg’s Pyramidion to the City of Laguna Beach November 3-6. Pyramidion is 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.
On display in the California Gallery starting November 3 is Robert Young’s The Big One, which is thought to still hold the record as the largest painting ever created in Laguna Beach. As a resident of Laguna Beach, Young began his 9-by-15-foot painting in 1971 and continued to work on the piece throughout his life.
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.
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.
Berg received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Southern California and is included in major private and corporate collections. Berg was invited to be an artist-in-residence at the Art 1307 Cultural Institution in Naples, Italy (2019) and at Boxo Projects in Joshua Tree, CA (2021). During both artist residencies she created works in dialogue with the unique geologic features specific to those areas; Mount Vesuvius volcano and Joshua Tree National Park respectively.
An avid scuba diver and ocean lover, Robert Young worked on his magnum opus for decades adding colorful fish, pristine reef, coral and other sea life onto the canvas of his piece The Big One. The painting was displayed at Sea World, but eventually came back to Laguna Beach in 2013. Young was an artist / painter extraordinaire who lived, loved, and worked in Laguna Beach for most of his life and was one of the founders of the beloved Laguna Beach Sawdust Art Festival. It was his love for the sea that inspired much of his work as an artist. Young connected with the ocean as a young boy while playing in the surf near his family's seaside trailer at El Moro. He spent time there as a lifeguard at Scotchman's Cove and as luck would have it, he served his tour of duty as a marine in Hawaii where his interest with the ocean and its inhabitants continued to grow. As a young man, he logged hundreds of hours under the water exploring countless coves along the coast, diving for dinner at day's end, or just observing the wonders that lived beneath the surface.
