Jimi Gleason "Landline" is now in the Laguna Art Museum Permanent Collection

Jimi gleason, Landline, 2023, silver nitrate, acrylic, canvas, 56”x80”

We're delighted to share that Jimi Gleason's Landline (2023) has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Laguna Art Museum.

At 56 × 80 inches, Landline is a striking example of Jimi's signature process: silver nitrate and acrylic on canvas, producing a surface that catches and shifts with the light so the painting is never quite the same twice. Laguna Art Museum has championed California artists for more than a century, and this acquisition places Jimi firmly within that lineage.

Museum recognition like this is a meaningful milestone in an artist's career, and we're proud to have supported Jimi's work.

Jimi gleason, Landline, 2023, silver nitrate, acrylic, canvas, 56”x80”

RADIANT TERRAINS

Among the exhibition highlights are works by Light and Space pioneers Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and Helen Pashgian; Anthony Friedkin’s photographs engaging the luminous movement of breaking waves; Stephen Hendee’s illuminated architectural environments; Lita Albuquerque’s explorations of celestial space; and Jay McCafferty’s solar-burn drawings. Together with paintings, photographs, installations and other works from the collection, the exhibition demonstrates the diverse ways artists have used light to alter, challenge and expand our understanding of the world around us.

The exhibition is curated by Tyler Stallings, a Southern California curator, writer and researcher who previously served as Chief Curator of Laguna Art Museum. Stallings has organized numerous exhibitions examining California and contemporary art and has curated several exhibitions drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.

Radiant Terrains is presented as part of Laguna Art Museum’s annual Art + Nature program, extending the initiative’s exploration of the natural environment through light, one of nature’s most fundamental and transformative elements. Throughout the exhibition, light creates connections between ocean and sky, body and landscape, scientific observation and spiritual reflection.

ABOUT LAGUNA ART MUSEUM

Laguna Art Museum exists to engage and enlighten people of all ages through art that embodies and preserves the California experience. Laguna Art Museum presents exhibitions relevant to California art and artists throughout the year and is home to the annual Art & Nature Festival celebrating the museum’s unique relationship to the environment.  In 2025, Laguna Art Museum served a record-high 21,000 people during Art + Nature. This year's festival begins on September 19, 2026 with the Radiant Terrains exhibition from the Permanent Collection, which will be on view September 19, 2026 through January 10, 2027.

Jimi Gleason’s 2025 exhibition Vapor Wave at William Turner Gallery

Jimi Gleason turns painting into a shifting register of its surroundings. Using silver nitrate and acrylic, he creates luminous surfaces that reflect, distort, and partially absorb the viewer and the gallery around them. Light glides across the painting's metallic skin, producing subtle shifts in color and tone as viewers change position. Rather than functioning as a conventional mirror, the work returns a softened, fragmented reflection, making the viewer an active participant in the painting itself.

Gleason's layered surfaces oscillate between mirror-like clarity and pearlescent opacity, never settling into a single image. His practice shares affinities with Helen Pashgian's perceptual investigations, yet where Pashgian embeds light within translucent materials, Gleason allows it to remain on the surface. Nearby, Jennifer Bolande similarly redirects attention to the act of looking itself, reminding us that perception is continually shaped by light, movement, and our own presence.

Tyler Stallings - Guest Curator - Radiant Terrains

Andy Moses: Into the Light Closing Tomorrow…

Andy Moses' mysterious and alluring paintings pose a subtle challenge: do we read them as landscapes, enveloping the eye as they do with forms both aqueous and mountainous? Or should we regard them as abstractions, pure plays of light and form, color and contour, literally bent into physical space? Moses welcomes either comprehension or both. This is art born of visual transcendence, seeking to find a bit of the glory of nature in the properties of paint.  

Moses grew up in coastal Los Angeles, mesmerized almost from birth by the brilliant vagaries of marine light. When he moved east after college, he immersed himself in the booming New York art scene of the 1980s and 1990s, launching his career and determining how to explore both subject matter and material. But on his return to Venice, he found himself immersed again in the plangent light of his youth. Ever since he has striven to invest every painting with such meditative luminosity, even building round and curved (mostly concave) surfaces to envelope the eye.  

Such perceptual manipulation may be related to the Light & Space movement (whose participants have been Moses’ neighbors his whole California life), but in its reliance on paint it evinces associations with the abstract impressionism of Mark Rothko and the color field canvases of Morris Louis. Ultimately, Moses follows in the footsteps of Claude Monet and JMW Turner, whose contemplations of urban and rural spaces were pretext to a hunt for light itself.  

This exhibition surveys Andy Moses’ work of the last two decades, evincing his increasingly expansive commitment to a kind of painting that at once displays and obscures imagery. This work forces you to decide what it is doing to you, what it is showing you, if and how it is tricking your eyes or playing to their strengths. It’s a kind of magic. 

Andy Moses: Into the Light is organized by Laguna Art Museum and curated by Peter Frank.

Images Courtesy Carl E. Smith for Laguna Art Museum

Last Chance: Moses@100 Closes This Saturday!

Tomorrow is the last day to see Moses@100, William Turner Gallery’s ongoing exhibition commemorating the centennial of artist Ed Moses. Moses was instrumental to the establishment of Los Angeles as a hub of contemporary art – in his review of Moses@100, art critic Edward Goldman writes, “It is impossible to think of the history of the Los Angeles art scene without discussing Ed Moses (1926-2018).” Come see the exhibition this weekend before it’s gone!

Ed Moses was the subject of a major retrospective at MOCA Los Angeles in 1996, and in 2014 he showed at University of California Irvine where he had taught in the seventies. On the occasion of his 2015 drawing show at LACMA of works from the 1960s and 70s, organized by Leslie Jones, director Michael Govan commented, “Ed Moses has been central to the history of art making in Los Angeles for more than half a century.” That exhibition included more than 40 drawings promised to the museum by the artist.

Moses’ work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Moses@100 Named 1 of Top 5 Things to do In August! - C Magazine

William Turner Gallery is honored that C Magazine has recognized Moses@100 as one of California’s five must-see experiences for August, and we invite visitors from Los Angeles and beyond to experience the exhibition while it remains on view.

For those who have followed Ed Moses’ work for decades, Moses@100 offers an opportunity to revisit the work of one of Los Angeles’ great artistic innovators. For those encountering Moses for the first time, the exhibition provides an introduction to an artist whose curiosity never diminished.

One hundred years after his birth, Ed Moses’ work continues to move, challenge, and surprise.

C Magazine writes: “Each month we share five unmissable things to see and do in the Golden State. You heard it here first.” The gallery is thrilled that the exhibition celebrating the art of legendary Calirfornia artist Ed Moses was considered one of the unmissable milestones of the month!