Image: Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach
Laguna Art Museum has announced the projects for its 14th annual 'Art + Nature' celebration, with American painter Kim Manfredi leading the 2026 edition through a participatory outdoor work and a related indoor exhibition. The museum says 'Art + Nature 2026' will feature 'A Flag Walk for Our Future' from November 5–9, 2026, and 'View with a Grain of Sand' from October 3, 2026–January 18, 2027.
The museum describes 'Art + Nature' as an annual initiative devoted to the exchange between artistic expression and environmental awareness. For 2026, the celebration week runs November 1–9, with outdoor art, free events and curated activities for all ages. Laguna Art Museum also notes that the project continues a longer legacy of programming that uses public space, landscape and participation to connect visitors with contemporary art.
According to the museum’s project page, 'A Flag Walk for Our Future' is a participatory project conceived by Manfredi and presented in collaboration with Laguna Art Museum. The work engages visitors with the natural environment while reflecting on how shared social agreements shape experience of place. It builds on research developed during Manfredi’s residency at BoxoPROJECTS in Joshua Tree and considers social agreements as evolving structures that balance access and care. The project specifically references waterfront paths and wheelchair-accessible trails as examples of how movement through public space is guided.
Installed along a 0.7-mile accessible path in Heisler Park, the work will use clusters of hand-painted and hand-gilded flags as visual markers along the walk. Each grouping of four flags represents a time of day—Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night—and is arranged in descending heights inspired by stacked surfboards along the shore. The flags are described as shifting in tone from marine-layer greys and bright midday color to rosy dusk hues and deep nocturnal tones, with abstract symbols drawn from Manfredi’s painting vocabulary, including air, water, leaf, web, cloud, glint and light.
Inside the museum, 'View with a Grain of Sand' extends those ideas through painting and abstraction. The museum says the exhibition translates natural phenomena into painting and, together with the outdoor work, proposes a shift in perception toward a more attentive relationship with the world. The artist statement on the site says Manfredi’s work moves between abstraction and representation, using color, material and surface to explore how social contracts mediate experience of ourselves, each other and the natural world.
The project page also gives a concise biography of Manfredi. It identifies her as an American painter whose material-forward paintings are informed by art history, climate and place. She earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1988 and returned there for an MFA in painting in 2009, studying under Grace Hartigan and Joyce Kozloff. The museum notes residencies at BoxoPROJECTS, RUC, the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA and Maryland Art Place, as well as recent solo exhibitions including 'Bloom' at Patricia Sweetow Gallery and 'Lady Lazarus' at Royale Projects, both in Los Angeles.
Laguna Art Museum’s current exhibitions page also places the 2026 'Art + Nature' announcement alongside its exhibition program for the year. The museum lists 'Andy Moses: Into the Light' through September 20, 2026, 'Frank Cuprien: For the Love of the Sea' through September 7, 2026, 'Latest and Greatest: New Work at Laguna Art Museum' as ongoing, and 'Now on Record: Selections by the Collection Inventory Team' and 'Untitled: Seeing Without Saying' through July 12, 2026. The museum additionally lists a related public program, 'Jean Stern Presents: William Wendt,' scheduled for July 12, 2026 from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m., in which curator and art historian Jean Stern will lead an illustrated lecture on the German-born American landscape painter William Wendt.
