Image: Sharon Ellis, Eye (detail), 1992, alkyd on canvas, 24 x 24 in., collection of Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, gift of Phyllis and John Kleinberg, 2017.008.002
Laguna Art Museum will open ‘Radiant Terrains: Elements of Light in Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection’ on September 19, bringing together work from the 1960s to the present that treats light as both material and subject. The exhibition will remain on view through January 10, 2027, at the museum in Laguna Beach, California.
Drawn entirely from Laguna Art Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition includes sculpture, painting, photography and installation. Rather than tracing a single movement, it is organized around visual conversations in which light appears as atmosphere, physical energy, optical illusion, environmental condition, technological signal and metaphor.
The exhibition’s works examine how light alters the perception of matter and space. According to the museum, artists use industrial plastics, resin, pigment, metallic surfaces, photography, lenticular imagery and transmitted light to address landscape, memory and the cosmos, as well as questions of perception, technology, mythology and cultural memory.
‘Radiant Terrains’ places those investigations within a specifically Southern Californian context. The region’s atmosphere has attracted artists from the plein-air painters and early Laguna Beach art colony, who sought to capture luminous skies and the coastline, to artists associated with the Light and Space movement and later practitioners working in photography, environmental art, installation and new media. The museum describes the exhibition not as a survey of one style, but as an account of how successive generations have returned to light as a defining artistic subject in the region.
The exhibition features Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Sandow Birk, Jennifer Bolande, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Sharon Ellis, Anthony Friedkin, Jimi Gleason, Stephen Hendee, Craig Kauffman, Jay McCafferty, Eric Orr, Helen Pashgian, Ilene Segalove, Rena Small, George Stone and Chris Wilder. Highlights listed by the museum include works by Light and Space pioneers Alexander, Kauffman and Pashgian; Anthony Friedkin’s photographs of breaking waves; Stephen Hendee’s illuminated architectural environments; Albuquerque’s celestial meditations; and McCafferty’s solar-burn drawings.
Organized by Laguna Art Museum and curated by Tyler Stallings, the exhibition is presented as part of the institution’s annual Art + Nature program. Its galleries connect ocean and sky, body and landscape, scientific inquiry and spiritual contemplation through the changing effects of light. Stallings previously served as the museum’s chief curator from 1999 to 2006 and has also held leadership and curatorial positions at the University of California, Riverside’s California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts, and Orange Coast College’s Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion.
Founded by local artists in 1918, Laguna Art Museum has collected and exhibited California art for more than a century. The museum, located at 307 Cliff Drive, is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; ‘Radiant Terrains’ runs from September 19, 2026, through January 10, 2027.
