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Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center (ECIC) 43201 35th St W, Lancaster, CA 93536 Open Saturday and Sunday | 10 AM - 4 PM Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Holidays **Prime Desert Woodland Preserve Open Daily | Sunrise - Sunset primedesert@cityoflancasterca.gov (661) 723-6230 Closed for Maintenance - January 2026 Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center and the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve are currently closed for ongoing maintenance in January 2026. Join our mailing list to be notified of our re-opening. The Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center was first established in 1992 through efforts from the community, Lancaster City Council, and Elizabeth “Elyze” Clifford, an environmentalist that rallied to preserve the unique desert landscape. MOAH redesigned the space and now manages all the outreach and programming for Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center. The Center is nestled within the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve, which spans more than 120 acres with over three miles of trails. This center allows patrons to connect with plants and animals living in the Mojave Desert region. The Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center also provides educational opportunities through its immersive location that includes special nature presentations and tours, free kid’s crafts, and community events. Crafts at ECIC Request a Tour On View at ECIC Lorraine Bubar: Desert Cuts Artist Lorraine Bubar spent six months exploring the preserve, creating colorful hand-cut paper artworks inspired by our local desert wildlife and landscapes. Desert Cuts captures the magic of metamorphosis, movement, and Mojave life through prints of these intricate “paintings with paper.” Learn More > View The Self Guided Tour Read the self-guided tour and enjoy the Elyz e Clifford Interpretive Center, with a tour guide at your finger tips. Learn More > View the Trail Map See PDWP's trails and geography from a bird's eye perspective. Learn More > ECIC + PDWP Exhibitions Prime Desert Woodland Kestrel Nest Box Re ad more about this project with American Kestrel Partnership. Learn More > Visiting one of our museums? Let us help you plan your trip!

Ongoing < View Public Art Projects Anthony James: "Portals" Ongoing 2025 Artist Anthony James’s 24” Cube (Brushed Stainless Steel) (2022), 24” Icosahedron (Brushed Stainless Steel) (2022), and 24” Tetrahedron (Brushed Stainless Steel) (2022) are examples of his Portals series, in which he constructs three-dimensional, geometric sculptures whose interiors contain a seemingly vast, fractal matrix of infinite space. Through stainless steel, glass, and LED lights, the sculptures evoke the aesthetics of Minimalism and Formalism, whose ideals favor geometric abstraction and emphasize the importance of form, as well as the Light and Space art movement, which focuses on the power of emptiness and intangible structure. Central to the works in Portals are the use of Platonic and Archimedean solids, employing these forms as a means of connecting with their philosophical and scientific importance. As a result, James’ work is an amalgamation of these principles, creating an environment that transports viewers into an endless cosmic world confined in a finite space. These artworks have been generously donated by Anthony James. Anthony James is a British American artist based in Los Angeles. He graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in 1998, where he studied painting. James’ work has been exhibited at galleries and art fairs across the globe, including Saatchi Gallery, Opera Gallery, HOFA Gallery (House of Fine Art), and Art Basel. In 2023, James became the first visual artist to exhibit on all seven continents, after installing a Portals sculpture at White Desert in Antarctica.

< Back Debra Scacco Misplaced Rain Artist and curator, Debra Scacco, questions how value is prioritized. Common threads of mapping and storytelling are present throughout her artistic practice. Working closely with cartographers, historians, activists, and scientists, Scacco studies the lines that direct everyday life, including boundaries drawn by policy, infrastructure, and societal perception. Debra Scacco’s research-based practice spans the creation of studio works, installations, public art, curating, teaching, writing, community engagement and oral history. She is dedicated to lateralizing knowledge to challenge hierarchies and historic structures of power. Rooted in her own experiences of immigration, Scacco re-envisions the visible and invisible lines that seek to establish boundaries of access and understanding. Previous Next

back to list MOUF Mouf is a prolific mural artist in the urban art scene in Austin, Texas. He’s mentored and supported many of the city’s younger artists, while traveling internationally to spray paint his art. In his early years, he was always interested in using spray paint to create something on any surface. He has always considered himself creative and a little bit of a trouble maker. The way he got started was like most that are a part of the art form. Every time he was in a city, he’d notice the contrast of grey and colorless buildings, to the vibrant burst of colors in the shape of letters or characters.

2023 < View Public Art Projects Joseph O'Connell's Superbloom! 2023 Permanent Art Project Superbloom! is a captivating public art piece that combines the vibrant colors of the wildflowers found in Lancaster's desert landscapes with the city's renowned aerospace industry. Inspired by the resilience, healing, and growth of both our natural environment and our own human population, this art installation celebrates the spectacle of wildflower blooms, known as ”superblooms,” that occasionally grace the region. The art piece features a collection of brilliant-colored disks, carefully arranged on sturdy aluminum stalks held together with bolts and rivets reminiscent of the aerospace industry. The varying heights of the disks symbolize not only the organic growth of wildflowers but also the continuous progress and development of the community. Superbloom! serves as a visual reminder of the coexistence between nature's beauty and human ingenuity, inviting viewers to reflect on what a superbloom in the human realm would look like.

back to list MamaWisdom and Sasha Swedlund Born on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Nikila is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, designer, and performer inspired by an earth-based wisdom of Roots and Culture. Mother and community organizer, her work as an advocate for youth, indigenous, and environmental rights has played an influential role within shaping her foundation as a "Cultural Community Artist". Born into Pacific Islander, First Nations, and European lineages, to the raw street smarts of the Bay Area’s inner cities, it has been the cultural richness, as well as the systemic issues of her background, that have led Nikila to explore the arts as a foundation for educational reform and decolonization. In turn, she has helped develop youth arts curriculum and programs for a number of organizations. As a painter and muralist, her art weaves underlying stories, traditions, and elements of the sacred indigenous with modern influences of the urban underground, and is guided by a maternal connection to the natural wisdom of the Earth; Thus birthing the art alias "MamaWisdom". Sasha Swedlund is an artist and designer specializing in painting, textiles, and fashion. Her love for art started as a kid after she took a strong interest in calligraphy and hand lettering. As a teenager, she started working as a mural apprentice and then moved to Southern California to study Fine Art at CalArts. During her time there, she perfected her painting skills in various mediums ranging from acrylics and oils to mixed mediums, surface treatments, and fabric manipulation. She then studied abroad at Parsons In Paris and learned about digital printing on fabrics, batik, and other surface treatments. After her undergrad, she worked professionally as a sign artist specializing in freehand lettering and illustration for almost a decade until returning to school to attend FIDM in textile design. While at FIDM she was selected for the school's specialty classes like Mimaki and Chairing Styles. She was most recently selected for the Debut Program (Advanced Fashion Design) reserved for the premier students of the school, to create and produce a small collection from concept to runway.

< Back Serena JV Elston Ancient Futurism Artist Serena JV Elston is a transdisciplinary sculptor contemplating the body and its relationship to structures of power like patriarchy, capitalism, and gender. Her research-based practice explores ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through a post-colonial lens — a historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism. Elston critiques the institutional preservation of Western civilization. At its core, her practice asks if an institution has the power to disable a body, does the body have the power to disable an institution? Grappling with the identity of disability, she depicts figures in various stages of decomposition and incompleteness. Elston’s work seeks to make visible the precarious materiality of structures to reveal them as inherently temporal. Institutions are not independent from the mortal bodies that serve them. In this way individual acts of maintenance of structures of power become political. ‘Disability’, rather than ‘wellbeing’, is deemed as a colonial determination of labor potential and worth. This idea is designed to diminish our humanity in institutional settings. Elston’s art reflects on the fragility of the bodies we inhabit and rely upon. Previous Next

< Back Osceola Refetoff Osceola Refetoff is a Canadian American visual artist and photojournalist renowned for his experimental use of infrared and pinhole photography to explore humanity's connection to the physical world. His work blends photojournalism and fine art, producing hyper-realistic yet surreal images. Osceola Refetoff is a Canadian American visual artist and photojournalist known for his experimental and innovative use of infrared and pinhole photography to document humanity’s ongoing relationship to the physical world. Across parallel careers in photojournalism and fine art, his diverse series are characterized by a hyper-realistic yet nuanced clarity, often yielding surreal, even dreamlike images. A graduate of New York University’s Master of Fine Arts Film Program, Refetoff’s motion picture background informs a distinctly cinematic approach to constructing engaging visual narratives that explore both time and space. Key to this practice is the artist’s old-school commitment to capturing his scenes “in-camera,” using archaic lens filters and handmade pinhole attachments that do not alter reality but instead offer new ways to see it. This foundationally realist approach combined with the magic of historical and alternative photographic processes yields a prismatic array of images that transform the external world into something both unchanged and extraordinary. Previous Next

Artist Lorraine Bubar explored the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve during a six-month period in 2025 as part of the Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center (ECIC) Artist-in-Residence program. In that time, she created beautiful papercut artworks inspired by the Mojave Desert landscape. Her colorful, layered paper pieces capture the unique plants, animals, and natural beauty of this special urban desert oasis. The work on view in her exhibition at ECIC are print reproductions of these cut paper works she created through a technique that she sees as painting with paper. These intricate designs weave together themes of metamorphosis, movement, and the hierarchies of desert life. Her artwork celebrates the amazing ecosystems found right here in our local preserve. During her residency, Bubar also taught community workshops, sharing her love of art and nature with visitors. Artwork provided by Lorraine Bubar Elyze Clifford Interpretive Center: 43201 35th St W, Lancaster, CA 93536 << Back to PDWP & ECIC page

Galia LinnVessels and GuardiansSurrounded by archeological sites and spaces in war-torn Israel, Galia Linn gained inspiration from ancient and contemporary relics from past and present civilizations. She reacts to these relics and stories through her sculptures, paintings, and site-responsive installations. < Back Galia Linn, Stone Guardian Galia Linn, Studio Shot Galia Linn, Ancient Vessels of the Divine Galia Linn, Stone Guardian 1/6 Galia Linn Vessels and Guardians Surrounded by archeological sites and spaces in war-torn Israel, Galia Linn gained inspiration from ancient and contemporary relics from past and present civilizations. She reacts to these relics and stories through her sculptures, paintings, and site-responsive installations. Linn creates imperfect vessels used to relay the elemental tensions between the material she works with and the stories and relics that emerge. Through the cracks, fissures, ruptures, and fractures within Linn’s ceramics, metalworks, paintings, and installations, she imbues an aged aesthetic that references layers of Middle Eastern history. For Linn, the imperfect nature of her works is meant to show the vulnerability of humankind and the grandeur and form allude to the interior strength and resilience. Brokenness should be embraced as the objects come to symbolize perseverance and healing, where there is no separation between the vessels she creates and her physical body. Previous Next

< Back Earth Signals North Gallery Eli McMullen Through ethereal environments and abstracted forms, artist Eli McMullen creates scenes that morph reality into dreamscapes. Rendered in acrylic, McMullen’s paintings converge themes of spirituality, nature, and metaphysical energy. The liminal space between the real and the imaginary is central to his work. Light seems to shimmer from thin air, dappling the forests and structures that fill his compositions, resulting in an otherworldly depiction of an organic and familiar environment. Through this work, McMullen channels his own perception of creativity; one that is rooted in realism but eventually wanders into another dimension. To him, this process mimics the act of painting itself, noting that it is an experimental endeavor that bridges one’s internal consciousness with their surroundings. IMAGE CREDIT: Eli McMullen, Kismet Gateway (detail), Acrylic on cradled wood panel, 2025 Courtesy of Thinkspace Projects Previous Next