Look at all these great works of art! They were created by neighbors at Father Joe’s Villages.
Father Joe’s Health and Wellness Program includes activities that foster creativity, well-being, and personal growth. That includes making art!
The latest Painting the Town exhibition, now on view at the San Diego Central Library, celebrates this art.
Father Joe’s Villages helps those in San Diego experiencing homelessness. They provide emergency and transitional housing for adults and families with children, provide showers, laundry facilities, a public lunch line, a health center, employment and education services, and more.
Look at this beautiful art and see hope.
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Changing Terrain: Regional Artists Interpret Our Landscape opened a week ago at the San Diego History Center. The diverse works of art on display are one half of a larger regional group exhibition. The Oceanside Museum of Art is hosting the other half.
Landscapes shown to be undergoing change range from urban to rural. The artists render vastly different landscapes: from the coast to the foothills to the mountains to the desert. Some of the pieces reflect transformations made by human activity, others effected by nature. They provoke deeper thought about our environment. They can inspire a whole range of feelings.
The varied landscapes include everything from a beach boardwalk, to a 150-year old Live Oak at the Marston House, to a streetscape in Logan Heights, to a modern cell tower with ravens and crows, to a merging of ancient rock art with an abstracted landscape, to views of Anza-Borrego from a car’s mirror…
I recognized many of the local artist names–all of them distinguished. They have successfully captured the beauty, complexity, and resilience of a border region where natural and human histories continually intersect.
My photos show the extent of the exhibition. Pay a visit to the free San Diego History Center in beautiful Balboa Park and see this great art with your own eyes!
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A new exhibition has opened this month at downtown San Diego’s outdoor Courthouse Gallery!
The theme this time is Artist’s Choice. Entries were accepted from around Southern California.
There are abstracts, portraits and landscapes, but I gravitated toward painted scenes of places in and around San Diego.
If you’d like to experience some great art, walk down Broadway beside the Edward J. Schwartz Courthouse and peer through the windows from the sidewalk.
Ode to Mission Trails, Elizabeth Washburn.Sunny Day in North Park, San Diego, Olga Freedman.California Tower, Norma Herrera.Torrey Pines Del Mar, Terry Orletsky.Ramona Road, Katie Karosich.
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Who in and around San Diego hasn’t heard of the artist James Hubbell? Between his architecturally fantastic Ilan-Lael residence and studios in Santa Ysabel, to his many works of public art around the city (many of which I’ve photographed), the beloved artist has earned a special place in the heart of San Diegans.
Did you know James had a brother named Bert who was also an artist?
During my recent visit to the museum, I noticed the art of these brothers is similar in certain ways. The construction of pieces is very organic, elemental. The works seem to have been extracted from or designed by the living Earth itself. While James lived and worked in Southern California, for over fifty years Bert lived in Kokubunji, Japan near sacred Mt. Fuji.
Their art’s earthy quality seems natural and familiar–perhaps that’s why it feels so spiritual.
According to the exhibition webpage, Bert…was profoundly shaped by Japanese culture, Shinto, Animism, and Native American art. Self-described as a “primitive artist,” he worked across mediums but most prolifically in ceramic sculpture. His fantastical creatures—reminiscent of yōkai—externalize inner fears and anxieties as a means of transformation and healing… Bert, who never sold his art, left behind an estimated 28,000 individual ceramic figures as well as paintings, drawings and found object assemblages.
The exhibition, which continues through September 6, 2026, provides an interesting contrast between the work of the two brothers. In places their pieces are placed side by side. In one gallery room a wall contains the work of James, and the opposite wall contains pieces created by Bert.
One gets the impression Bert could have reached the level of renown achieved by his brother. It seems, however, that he created art just for the personal joy and satisfaction of creating art.
Like any art, you need to experience it in person. A few photographs to entice you into visiting the Oceanside Museum of Art:
The art on the left and the bottom are by artist Bert Hubbell. The pieces are displayed in contract to the watercolor on the right, by brother James Hubbell.More work by artist Bert Hubbell, including Forks and Spoon and Sunburst, circa 1963. Ceramic.Photograph of Bert Hubbell, date unknown.Ceramic by Bert Hubbell atop Wood Pedestal by James Hubbell.Bert’s Mountain of Sculpture, Bert Hubbell, 1961-1963. Various ceramics.
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I hadn’t walked this way through Sherman Heights in a long while. Look what I found!
Another cool San Diego Padres mural painted on the side of Universal Radiator at 20th Street and Imperial Avenue!
This one features images of Padres legends Goose Gossage, Dave Winfield, Benito Santiago and Tony Gwynn.
I saw an older, equally cool mural years ago on the same wall. View those photos here. That artwork was painted by DYSE ONE AND HASLR. The one I spied today was created by the same artists, plus SHARK.
As I walked by, DYSE himself came out of the building. He informed me he’d be painting a new mural on this wall very soon!
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I saw this today and thought you might enjoy it, too!
Healthcare workers as superheroes has been painted on an electrical box in San Diego’s Grantville neighborhood. You can find the fun street art at an intersection near Kaiser Zion Medical Center.
Spider-Man is swinging along holding Boba Fett, apparently taking him to the hospital emergency room!
Did the web-slinging Marvel superhero rescue Boba Fett from the sarlacc? Does that explain the Star Wars bounty hunter’s survival?
We rise by helping others…
Thank you healthcare workers!
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At the front desk of the Timken Museum of Art, I learned some visitors really love the museum’s current exhibition Drift, while others hate it. I’m not entirely sure what my own reaction is.
Drift was created by the Timken’s summer artist in residence Margaret Noble. As the exhibition webpage explains: Drift brings together sculpture, sound, and moving images to explore the ways in which space and perception are experienced. Drawing inspiration from François Boucher’s Lovers in a Park (1758), Noble reinterprets Rococo ideals by introducing motion and layered context through reverse glass animation, revealing and disrupting the painting’s serene, ornamental narrative.
During the unsettling video, thick black paint creeps into the frame of Lovers in a Park in unexpected ways. Black birds (crows?) fly through the Rococo painting, as does a drone. A robot, a sinister masked face, ants and a rat appear. Tiny human figures tumble into consuming blackness. The intruding images tend not to be pleasant. The video feels subversive, juvenile, but not entirely so. To me, the effect is mostly experimental and weird.
Does the artist mean to say contemporary thinking is dark and cynical, and opposed to the Rococo ideals of pure beauty and love? Contemporary art often seems that way.
Perhaps the creepiest part of the video was when the two lovers became slowly covered by a big black blob. From it a claw-like hand emerged, reaching toward the passing peasant girl. (Reminding me of the black symbiote in Spider-Man!)
In the Timken Museum’s atrium, people can use black cut-out shapes to create their own altered Lovers in a Park. The figures visitors are provided with are less creepy and include butterflies, dragonflies and dogs.
What does it say about the artist’s intentions and broader human nature–that the video is very different from what museum visitors can happily assemble?
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This might be the most fun interactive art exhibition you’ll experience all year! It’s showing for one more week at the Oceanside Museum of Art, and it’s titled Aaron Kramer: Sense of Wonder.
Do you love crazy, clever, fun-loving inventions? Upstairs at the museum you’ll find loads of them! Playful artist Aaron Kramer likes to tinker and make mechanical wonders using found objects.
Visitors to the Oceanside Museum of Art can turn cranks and press buttons that activate wacky kinetic creations. Wires, old springs, bottles and tin cans, cardboard, odd pieces of wood, broken things–magically become spinning whirligigs, dipping hummingbirds, dancing figures . . . even contraptions that trace images on paper!
I’ve always loved these sort of whimsical creations. Remember that scene near the beginning of the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang–that crazy, elaborate Rube Goldberg-style contraption that automatically made breakfast? These small works of art are just as fun!
If you’re young at heart, you’ll be pressing every button and turning every crank! Through August 23, 2026, that is, when this super cool exhibition wraps up.
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It’s been well over a year since I visited the Artist Alley in downtown Oceanside. I walked through it again today!
Look what my camera found!
Most of this art must be fairly new, because it was painted in places where earlier murals existed.
(The two murals just inside the entrance of the multi-suite building that opens into the alley might have been there a long time–I don’t know. My first four photos are of those.)
I love how the artwork changes in the alley over time. Every time I walk through it I discover new creations!
Oceanside’s very cool, very magical Artist Alley can be entered directly south of the city library and civic center. Simply cross Pier View Way and you’ll find it!
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