James Hartley
Arts Contributor · 2025-01-08 · 7 min read
The museum's landmark new show explores the painters who made Laguna famous — and the living artists who carry their legacy into the present.
Laguna Beach has always been a painter's town. The light here — coastal, shifting, impossible to fully capture — has been pulling artists to this stretch of cliffside for well over a century. The Laguna Art Museum is the keeper of that legacy, and its new exhibition, California Light: Then & Now, is the most ambitious show it has mounted in years.
Curated by Dr. Elena Vasquez, the exhibition brings together over sixty works — spanning from the early California Impressionists of the 1910s to a cohort of eight emerging artists currently based in Laguna. The result is a conversation across time about what light means to those who are devoted to seeing it clearly.
The Historical Foundation
The show opens with six paintings by members of the Laguna Beach Art Association, founded in 1918 — the oldest art association on the West Coast. Edgar Payne's sweeping coastal landscapes are here, as is a rarely exhibited series of beach studies by Anna Hills. These works establish the grammar of what we might call the Laguna visual language: generous skies, warm stone, the relentless blue of the Pacific.
The Living Artists
The exhibition doesn't treat the historical work as a shrine so much as a launching pad. Each of the eight contemporary artists was asked to respond — not illustrate, but genuinely respond — to specific works in the historical collection. The dialogue that results is sometimes surprising, sometimes moving, and occasionally funny.
The Impressionists were obsessed with light because they were trying to capture something that kept moving. We're still doing that. We'll always be doing that.
Local painter Caroline Mead's contribution — a series of large oil paintings depicting the Laguna coastline at various states of the fog — is the emotional centerpiece of the contemporary half of the show. Her technique borrows from the Tonalist tradition while feeling entirely contemporary.
What to See and When
The exhibition runs through the end of September. Thursday evenings offer extended hours until 8pm, and the museum hosts a curator walkthrough on the first Saturday of each month at 11am. Both are free with admission.
- General admission: $15 adults, $12 seniors, free under 12
- First Thursdays: free admission 5–8pm
- Parking: use the structure on Park Avenue — the museum validates
