Laguna Art Museum Opens “Radiant Terrains” From Its Permanent Collection

Laguna Art Museum opened "Radiant Terrains: Elements of Light in Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection" on Sept. 19, launching this year’s Art + Nature program. The exhibition runs through Jan. 10, 2027 and is drawn entirely from the museum’s own holdings.

Rather than surveying a single movement, the show traces how generations of artists have returned to light as a subject, medium and metaphor. Works on view span painting, photography, sculpture and installation, from the 1960s to the present, examining how artists have used light to alter, challenge and expand perceptions of the world.

The museum's Cliff Drive entrance, where Radiant Terrains draws on a century of California art.

Patrick Pelster, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Source

The Light and Space movement anchors the exhibition. Works by pioneers Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and Helen Pashgian are among the highlights, alongside Anthony Friedkin’s photographs of breaking waves, Stephen Hendee’s illuminated architectural environments, Lita Albuquerque’s explorations of celestial space and Jay McCafferty’s solar-burn drawings.

Jimi Gleason’s paintings turn the medium into a register of their surroundings. Using silver nitrate and acrylic, Gleason creates luminous surfaces that reflect, distort and partially absorb the viewer and the gallery, producing subtle shifts in color and tone as viewers change position.

The full roster includes 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, according to the museum’s listings.

The Heisler Park coastline beside the Laguna Art Museum, the landscape its California art has celebrated for a century.

NorbertNagel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Source

The exhibition is curated by Tyler Stallings, a Southern California curator, writer and researcher who previously served as chief curator of Laguna Art Museum and has organized several exhibitions drawn from the permanent collection.

Radiant Terrains is presented as part of the museum’s annual Art + Nature program, which explores the natural environment through light. The museum says its 2025 Art + Nature edition served a record 21,000 people, setting a high bar for the new season. The de la Torre Brothers’ installation "The Tipping Point" is also on view at the museum.

Programming around the show includes an artist panel featuring exhibiting artists Sandow Birk, Rena Small, Anthony Friedkin and Jimi Gleason, according to the museum’s event listings, giving visitors a chance to hear how the makers think about light as material. For a museum whose mission is California art, an exhibition built from its own collection on the defining Southern California subject, light, reads as both a statement of identity and a gift to winter visitors. It runs through the holidays and into the new year.