Upcoming Exhibitions
Creative Connections and PAUSD Youth Art-- Belonging: Centering Voice and Story
May 2-24, 2026
Ceramic Flowers from Costaño School of the Arts, Kinders (left to right): Jazlyn, Jennifer, Alexander, Britani, and Veronica
Creative Connections is the culminating exhibition of the Palo Alto Art Center’s artist-in-the-schools program, which brings multidisciplinary, arts-integrated lessons to K-5 students in Ravenswood City School District and East Palo Alto Charter School. Youth Art celebrates the imaginative and evolving spirit of PAUSD’s K-12 art students. Instructors feature work that demonstrates accomplishment and innovation in the classroom in a variety of ways.
Zara D., Untitled, Mixed Media, including personal photos, collage and yarn, 12th Grade, Palo Alto High School
Thrown, Stamped, Stacked, and Poured: Ceramic Installation and Performance
June 20-August 23, 2026
Anh Lee, Cocoon, 2020, Porcelain, glaze, electric metal tubing, string, 8 x 4 ft., Courtesy of the artist and Morgann Trumbull Projects
This exhibition showcases contemporary approaches to ceramic art through performance and installation in clay by a selection of artists from the region and country. Artists’ exploration of installation has grown in recent years, but one could argue that unfired clay was used in “installation” and “performance art” as early as the Ice Age. Many contemporary clay installation and performance works employ traditional ceramic techniques, including hand building, slabs, extrusions, molds, and wheel-throwing—in innovative ways for novel and compelling results. Artists included in the exhibition leverage the uniquely malleable and expressive potential of clay to create works that address identity, history, and environment. This exhibition is guest curated by ceramic artist and educator John Toki.
These exhibitions are presented in conjunction with Handwork. Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026 is a national Semiquincentennial collaboration showcasing the importance of the handmade and celebrating the diversity of craft that defines America.
Live the moment light:
Solée Darrell, Terri Friedman, Corita Kent, Angelica Trimble-Yanu
September 19-December 13, 2026
Soleé Darrell, Men carried to their destiny by stars, 2024, Dye on silk velvet, 68 x 50 in., Courtesy of pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA
Live the moment light brings together four artists who use abstraction as vital languages for navigating grief, joy, pain, and resilience. Across screenprint, weaving, and painting, Corita Kent, Terri Friedman, Angelica Trimble-Yanu, and Soleé Darrell each push their mediums in experimental ways. What connects them is a commitment to process as a site of discovery: a way to transform personal experience into shared meaning. The exhibition celebrates art that leans into uncertainty and play, showing how abstraction can hold the weight of lived emotion while opening onto collective transformation. Guest curated by Christine Koppes.
Big Feelings
January 23-April 11, 2027
Nathan Oliveira, one of the central figures of the Bay Area Figurative movement and an integral member of the Palo Alto artistic community, is best known for his singular abstracted and attenuated figures placed in ambiguous void-like spaces, isolated and solitary. Big Feelings explores the intentionality and impact of Oliveira’s use and treatment of figuration as an expression of his state of mind and mental health. In dark periods of his life, Oliveira embraced the expressionistic power of darkness, his figures emerging from shadow, while in times of joy, he utilized warm, rich color palettes and exultant poses that lift and embrace his subjects.
Placing works by Bay Area contemporaries and successors from the 1960s through today in dialogue with Oliveira’s deep bodies of work across media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, Big Feelings seeks to excavate Bay Area art’ expressionistic history, looking at artists’ emotional and psychological well-being as a driving motivator behind their artmaking. Through a close examination of Oliveira’s work from the 1960s through 2010, including his extensive work in lithography, monotype, and etching, variously paired and in conversation with works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Koak, and Gregory Rick, the exhibition provides avenues of exploration into amplified emotion. While addressing complex feelings of solitude, aloneness, unhappiness, and existential contemplation, the exhibition also delves into moments of elation, joy, and the ecstatic, looking carefully at the artists’ formal and expressionistic decisions as sources of communication. This exhibition is guest curated by Morgann Trumbull.