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Renee Chowdhry < Back Diary Entry By Renee Chowdhry Dear Diary, As I near the end of my high school career, I realized how swiftly time moves. I feel like I remember the first day of freshman year as vivid as the color of a pink rose, as defined as the veins on a flower petal, as distinguishable as a singular rose in a vast desert. Yet, as I am nearing the end of junior year, I feel I have no recollection of the past three years. One bright afternoon I decided to drive to my last house to see where my academic journey began. As I reached the driveway, I suddenly became overwhelmed with a surge of melancholic emotions as I realized that this was once the driveway where I first rode a bike, and now I am driving a car. Soon after, a rose I planted over ten years stood in full glory. At this moment, I was joyous of the perseverance of the rose, so I started admiring its glorified features. I noted that the soil was fertile, that it had been receiving a steady amount of water, and quite shockingly, the bush was now several inches taller than me! Though there were all these differences, I couldn’t help but realize that there were similarities too. Firstly, we both spent our childhood in the same house, and now, after all these years, we have both matured. I wanted to further connect myself to the rose bush, so I put myself in the plant’s shoes, or better said it’s “roots”. I took a more augmented look at the surroundings and came to the conclusion that the rose bush had faced many hardships. First off, roses are not native to a dry, arid desert climate; therefore, there must have been a great struggle to become a thriving bush from just a few seeds. Additionally, I noticed the wear on the roses, as only a few were in bloom. I started to connect this back to my life. I realized that though the plant’s fate was against all odds, it somehow managed to rise stronger than ever. I thought back on all the hardships I have gone through, and every time I reflect, I realize that I have become a more resilient person after. So, I guess, even though my childhood is rearing towards an end, I have blossomed into a more mature person. Previous Next

Up Green Revolution Various Artists Jeremy Kidd: The Interrupted Landscape Lynn Aldrich: Water Feature / Silver Lining Fawn Rodgers: Subject Charles Hood: Under/Water Christine Mugnolo: California Hydroscape Coleen Sterritt: Selected Works from 2010 - 2016 Ann Weber: Jewel LAGI: The Future of Energy is Here HCA: Glue Zoo Green Revolution utilizes art and environmental education as a creative catalyst for leading greener, more sustainable lives. Sponsored by Lancaster Choice Energy and sPower, the diverse artworks on display will incorporate recycled materials; addressing urban farming and gardening, sustainable design, water harvesting and renewable energy such as wind and solar power. Jeremy Kidd: The Interrupted Landscape British-born, Los Angeles based artist Jeremy Kidd approaches landscape photography innovatively, by combining sculptural elements and condensing up to 100 long exposure photographs into a single work. He believes this to be a more cohesive way of expressing a landscape pictorially to an audience. Incorporating sculptural elements invigorates the viewing experience. Through this process, Kidd explores movement and condensed time; all the while exemplifying the transcendental and the essence of place in the urban or desert landscape. “It seems unrealistic to expect a single photographic shot, a single moment in time, to convey the human experience of seeing.” - Jeremy Kidd His artwork presents a condensed vision of multiple photographs as a metaphor for repeated perceptual glances. This in turn engages the viewer by conveying an animated experience of the dynamic natural or urban infrastructure. Kidd’s current body of work explores the presence of Wind Farm Turbines whose placement interrupts the natural landscape with a beautiful array of upright forms that possess a surreal presence and scale. Combining the wind farm components with his photographic process, Kidd believes, will draw awareness to both the arts and alternative energy and bring into question their aesthetic placement. Integrating sculpture with his photographs, Kidd includes replicas of the windmills that move forward out of the images as sublime objects embracing and interacting with the viewer. The works attempt to explore our relationship to these interrupted landscapes as places for spiritual renewal and functional utility. Jeremy Kidd received his Bachelor of Fine Art and Sculpture at Du Monfort University in Leicester, England. His work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe. He has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Art LTD, Art & Text Wired Magazine and The Observer UK. He has taught at the California Institute for the Arts and Otis Parsons School of the Arts in Los Angeles. He has upcoming one person shows at Imago Gallery Palm Desert and Panorama Masdag Museum in the Netherlands. Lynn Aldrich: Water Feature / Silver Lining The art of Lynn Aldrich is inspired by landscape, light and color in nature, and aspects of various natural environments, focusing on familiar objects from the everyday world and transforming them structurally in order to create a deep sense of mystery for the viewer. The objects are deviated from function, and added to with imaginative aspects, altering their state to a greater significance, but not in a theatrical sense. The objects must remain familiar to the viewer to celebrate and question the ordinary in its new form. She creates the new objects with references to the experience of living in a culture that is fragmented and oriented toward artificiality and consumerism. The incentive for her artwork is to increase perception and wonderment while instigating powerful questions – to create a platform for both conceptual analysis and poetic reflection in the mind of the viewer. She invokes a sort of transparent alchemy that allows these ordinary objects to remain common even as they may take on a more precious value, carrying metaphorical weight or spiritual significance. Lynn Aldrich received a Bachelor degree in English Literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Bachelor of Fine Art from California State University, Northridge and a Master of Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Her work has been exhibited nationally and across Europe. Aldrich is part of the public collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2014, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Creative Arts. Fawn Rogers: Subject Fawn Rogers is a LA based contemporary artist. Rogers’ interest of entropy, anthropology and evolution come together in a deck of cards entitled Subject inspired by a produce truck driveshaft and the most fertile soil (Terra Petra) found in California. The installation creates a propositional composition of a closed system with man-made objects, nature and the by-product of biotechnology. The artist invites the viewers to watch super weeds grow from the soil under the resurfaced produce truck drive shafts where organic and inorganic compounds slowly reach chemical equilibrium through the sedimentation of time, as nature gradually re-establishes its ecological balance beyond our existence. As part of the installation Rogers invited 52 California artists to represent produce currently farmed in California as works of art on a deck of oversized playing cards through their own interpretations knowing water would be represented on the joker cards. The artists represent a vast spectrum from very established to outsider.Fawn Rogers’ wide-ranging practice reflects and challenges the interrelations between nature, structures of ideological power and various models of social constructs. Her work has been featured in ArtNET News, Forbes Magazine, The Creators Project, Italian Vogue, and the Huffington Post. Charles Hood: Under/Water “Resource allocation is always a tricky business. Who has priority if a commodity is scarce? The 400-mile-long Los Angeles Aqueduct cuts through the west end of the Antelope Valley on its journey to Los Angeles, and at full capacity, 5,000 gallons of water per second roar through its well-bolted, 12 foot diameter pipes. How much of that is allocated for local use? None. In a classic case of ‘look but don’t touch,’ the water races past us, headed for wealthier towns.” – Charles Hood Charles Hood seeks to consider the visual and political statements this engineering project makes; his photography installation surveys a generous portion of the Aqueduct itself. The documentary photos fill 30 feet of gallery wall in two parallel rows. The top half captures the stark, modernist beauty of land, pipe and sky, often creating two intense bands of abstract color. Beneath that, each panel has a mirrored twin, and in those inverted shots, the sky becomes a parallel river beneath the main Aqueduct itself—the memory or echo of the resources being taken from one landscape and delivered to another. Water’s importance in our daily lives is further explored with an immersive soundscape. The sound fills the gallery in a subtle way, and is built out of recordings of everyday household water uses (washing hands, changing the water in a fish tank) when combined into a sound experience, create an aural river to complement the visual one. Charles Hood teaches at Antelope Valley College and is a research fellow with the Center for Art Environment, Nevada Museum of Art. He also has been an artist-in-residence with Playa Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Annenberg Beach House. His tenth book, illustrated by Christine Mugnolo, won the 2016 Kenneth Patchen Innovation Fiction Award and will be released next summer. Christine Mugnolo: California Hydroscape Christine Mugnolo seeks to help residents, visitors and community groups appreciate the value of water—and the ingenuity and complexity of its delivery infrastructure—via a wall-sized, watercolor map of California’s water network showing the state’s major water resources, storage facilities and distribution systems. Layering complex data sets, this map attempts to communicate a simple, pressing concept: the huge and cumbersome discrepancy between the state’s supply and demand for water. While maps assert knowledge and authority over resources, they also function as sentimental emblems for one’s love of place. California Hydroscape straddles and navigates both operations. By turning the state 90 degrees to its side, this map pushes against two concepts implied by California’s iconic vertical status: that California is proudly self-sufficient and that water flows logically from north to south. This assemblage of hand-painted panels combines the practice of mapping with the aesthetics of painting. Together, the paper panels create a legible map of California while showing how the Colorado River, California Aqueduct, Los Angeles Aqueduct and groundwater aquifers all combine to provide water that is anywhere from three years to 10,000 years old. Saturation is used to indicate the age of the water (vibrant colors at the source and less saturated colors for the final destination). Further, this does not operate as purely an informational map, as the liquid properties of the medium are exploited to create chaotic and dynamic transitions. Liquid properties are intended to reference water’s animation and call attention to the map as an image of the lifespan of water, rather than as an objective record of cataloged data. This visceral visual language likens California to a body and its water systems to life-giving vascular operations. In this way, Mugnolo uses the sensual properties of watercolor to help create a more personal, intimate connection to California’s water systems. Christine Mugnolo is Associate Professor in the Art Department at Antelope Valley College. She received her Bachelor Degree in Art History from Princeton University, a Master Degree in Early Modern British Art from Courtauld Institute of Art in London, a Master of Fine Art concentrated in painting and printmaking from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Art in painting from Indiana University. Mugnolo has been exhibited nationally. Coleen Sterritt: Selected Works from 2010 - 2016 For close to 40 years, sculptor Coleen Sterritt has worked with a variety of materials ranging from plaster and tar, pinecones and fishing line, found furniture and studio waste. With this range of materials, she focuses on the interactions between organic and geometric forms, balance and imbalance, the intimate and remote. Sterritt explains her technique as being both immediate and studied while also abrupt and fluid. The sculptures Sterritt creates play with movement and chance; doubt, discomfort and desire, beginning sometimes in one direction and then turned upside down upon completion. She creates forms indicative of a nature to culture convergence. As a process of re-creation the material rehabilitates and reinvents itself to become rediscovered by the viewer and interact with them in a new way. She fashions a visual language both formal and evocative while exploring the many possibilities the sculpture itself can hold. All these elements combined, act as a barometer for lived experiences Sterritt hopes the viewer will find familiar as they interact with the pieces. Coleen Sterritt was born in Morris, Illinois. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Fine Art from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. She began teaching in 1983, including positions at Otis College of Art and Design, University of Southern California and Claremont Graduate University. She has been a professor and the faculty coordinator of the sculpture program at Long Beach City College since 1998. Sterritt is a recipient of residencies, grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986, Art Matters in 1994, the Roswell Art-in-Residence Program in 1994, the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Art/California Community Foundation in 1996 and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship in 2007. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Ann Weber: Site Specific Ann Weber began her artistic journey with ceramics, creating functional pottery. Inspired by her days working with Viola Frey at California College of Arts and Crafts, the scale of her artwork shifted to monumental forms. She began working with cardboard as a way to create lightweight forms, while eliminating the cumbersome process of the clay. Weber sees her abstract sculptures as metaphors for life experiences, such as the balancing act that defines life. Ultimately, Weber’s interest lies in expanding the possibilities of making beauty from a common and mundane material. She views the psychological component of her artwork as one of the most important aspects. Being between representational and abstract, Weber invites the viewers to bring their own associations to the artwork. The artwork is composed with a palette of simple circles and cylinder forms, representing the symbolic male and female forms in the natural world, and tying in architecture and art historical references to evoke memories, relationships and morality in the sculptures. When it comes to her public art, Weber casts ordinary cardboard into bronze and fiberglass, illustrating that things are not always what they appear to be. Even when cast in other materials, it is easy to see the details of the former lives of cardboard boxes and individual staples. Born in Jackson, Michigan, Ann Weber now works and resides between Emeryville and Los Angeles. She received a Bachelor of Art degree in art history from Purdue University and a Master’s of Fine Art from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Weber has been an artist in residence at the International School of Beijing, China, and Schwandorf, Germany, as well as a visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. In 2004, she was awarded the Public Art Award by Americans for the Arts. Her artwork has been chosen as part of public art and private commissions across the United States. LAGI: The Future of Energy is Here The main goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is to design and construct public art installations that have the added benefit of utility-scale renewable energy generation. Each sculpture continuously distribute sclean energy into the electrical grid, resulting in thousands of homes powered by art. Presenting the power plant as public artwork—simultaneously enhancing the environment, increasing livability, providing a venue for learning and stimulating local economic development—is a way to address a variety of issues from the perspective of the ecologically concerned artist and designer. By nature of its functional utility, the work also sets itself into many other overlapping disciplines from architecture and urban design to mechanical engineering and environmental science. This interdisciplinary result has the effect of both enhancing the level of innovation and broadening the audience for the work. The Land Art Generator Initiative utilizes the design competition model as a free and open platform to engage as many interdisciplinary teams of artists, architects, scientists, ecologists, landscape architects, and engineers around the world as possible to conceptualize aesthetic and pragmatic solutions for 21st century environmental challenges. The results of the competition are made public in exhibitions, workshops, literature, and educational materials to inspire the general public about the potential of our energy landscapes. HCA: Glue Zoo Glue Zoo combines art, design and science into a one-of-a-kind program serving multiple affordable-housing communities in the Antelope Valley. Free of cost to residents and under the guidance of on-site instructors, participants of Glue Zoo produced papier-mâché sculptures of endangered animals. Through creating life-sized versions of our planet’s disappearing species, students focused on building both engineering and design skill sets. In addition to making sculptures, students also learned about the animals being created as well as current conservation efforts and what they can do at home to help minimize their carbon footprint. Participants of the program were asked to bring in recycled newspaper, cardboard and other materials to help bring the creations to life. February 13 - April 17, 2016 Back to list

Celebrate the Lunar New Year with Papercutting Craft Lorraine Bubar Throughout Spring 2025, Elyze Cliford Interpretive Center hosted a series of workshops with papercut artist Lorraine Bubar in celebration of the Lunar New Year and her artist residency. Lorraine Bubar, whose intricate papercuts are inspired by nature and the tradition of papercutting found in cultures around the world, shared her techniques and artistic process with the community. Workshops included an introduction to papercutting to celebrate the Year of the Wood Snake, a “Knowing Notan” workshop exploring the balance of light and dark in design, and a final “Pop Up Preserve” session encouraging participants to capture the wildlife and plants of the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve through pop-up paper techniques. Participants learned hands-on skills while gaining insight into Lorraine’s creative inspirations and the role of papercutting in cultural and environmental storytelling. Workshop 1 Workshop 2 Workshop 3 Desert Cuts Lorraine Bubar July 12, 2025 - December 14, 2025 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. Learn More

< Back Ellen Friedlander Ellen Friedlander’s photography captures life’s imperfections and fleeting moments through bold, complex imagery. Influenced by over a decade in Hong Kong, her work combines in-camera and post-processing techniques, showcasing her technical expertise and fascination with human presence. From the bustling streets of major cities to intimate portraits, artist Ellen Friedlander’s photography offers a rich tapestry of perspectives. Her artistic practice employs a variety of in-camera and post-processing techniques to reveal a style that is bold, complex, and fueled by a fascination with life's imperfections and fleeting moments. After receiving her Master of Arts in Mass Communcations, Friedlander spent more than a decade raising her family in Hong Kong, a city that deeply influenced her street photography and established her professional technical photographic repertoire. Human presence is key to Friedlander’s work. She believes that a portrait consists of elements beyond a simple objective photograph of a subject. This belief is reflected in the ethereal and intimate visuals contained in her work. Layered long exposures help to create a visually rich and textured quality to her images that seem to transcend any temporal bounds. To Friedlander, this process unlocks the hidden depths of a subject that lies beyond their external façade, allowing an individual’s energy and aura to present themselves within their portrait. Previous Next

Branching Out < Back Previous Terry Holzgreen Branching Out Straying away from traditional notions of woodworking, cabinetmaker and self-taught artist Terry Holzgreen, creates both functional and sculptural wooden works. His works are a visual compilation of the uniqueness and variety of lumber. Wood fragments from different tree species are arranged into a multitude of shapes, turning into a collage of texture, form, and natural wood color. Pieces and fragments are sourced from both scraps and found material. These assemblages are presented in various formats: cubes, spheres, vessels, wall works, each retaining this pieced-together quality. Holzgreen’s process derives from his background in carpentry and a fluke idea in which he created a small hollow cube and then attached thin cuts of wood pieces into a grid pattern along the cube’s surface. Holzgreen sees the reuse of these fragments and materials as a way of refining and showcasing the natural beauty of the material. This idea of improvisation and experimentation still resonates in his practice today. Next

Special Projects What's in a Landscape? Southbound Northbound Count Me In Antelope Valley Walls™ Green MOAH Skytower Park Murals

back to list Lauren YS Lauren YS is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work is influenced by multiple stages of focus, both geographically and in practice. With dynamic bouts in academics, literature and writing, teaching, illustration, and animation leading up to her arrival in the urban art sphere, the influences of these phases of her own career add up to a robust style of murals and fine art. Lauren's work is influenced by dreams, mythology, death, comics, love, sex, psychedelia, animation and her Asian-American heritage.

Aili SchmeltzCairn 24Informed by the environmental, philosophical, and architectural histories of the American West, artist Aili Schmeltz creates sculptures and wall-hung works that combine painting, collage, embroidery, and ceramics. Her practice stems from a fascination of the desert landscape, research into feminist history, and an examination of the politics and utopian ideology associated to the development, destruction, and conservation of the West. < Back Aili Schmeltz, Cairn 24 Detail Aili Schmeltz, Cairn 24 Detail Aili Schmeltz, Cairn 24 Studio Angle Aili Schmeltz, Cairn 24 Detail 1/7 Aili Schmeltz Cairn 24 Informed by the environmental, philosophical, and architectural histories of the American West, artist Aili Schmeltz creates sculptures and wall-hung works that combine painting, collage, embroidery, and ceramics. Her practice stems from a fascination of the desert landscape, research into feminist history, and an examination of the politics and utopian ideology associated to the development, destruction, and conservation of the West. Schmeltz’s Cairn sculpture series employs architectural structural elements from Brutalist, Utopic, and Modernist traditions and echo the igneous rock and native plants of California’s Mojave Desert. The sculptures are a culmination of simplified and abstracted architectural motifs combined with the rough and weathered textures of earthenware. These elements are stacked and notched together, intertwining the architectural ideas of optimism with an awareness of the raw and unrefined elements that provide the material make-up of the work, creating objects that appear as hybrid futuristic relics. Previous Next

back to list Hot Tea Eric Rieger, a.k.a. HOTTEA, is a public installation artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota who creates work of a playful, graphic and ephemeral nature. He typically utilizes a single medium in his work – yarn – not only because of the intrinsic cultural value of yarn, but also because of the range and flexibility that this unique material gives him as an artist.

2023 < View Public Art Projects Nancy Baker Cahill's Lifelines 2023 Permanent Art Project Lifelines by Nancy Baker Cahill is an animated, monumental, augmented reality (AR) installation of ecological imagination. Geolocated in the Prime Desert Woodland Preserve (PDWP), a protected, historic desert in California’s Antelope Valley, Lifelines appears as three colossal Joshua trees surrounded by a ghostly murmuration of birds. Rich with wildlife and home to many species of insects, reptiles, mammals, and birds, this fragile ecosystem remains imperiled. The ongoing precarity offers an opportunity to reframe our interdependent relationship with this natural ecosystem and modes of planetary knowledge erased or ignored by the progress of modernity. The Antelope Valley, like so many other regions, bears witness to a somber past. This history subtly reminds us of the challenges and narratives that have shaped this land over the years. Human appetites for exponential growth and advancement have caused enormous harm: ecological, historical, and cultural. Lifelines underscores the majesty of Joshua trees in the form of towering, breathing trees that rhythmically expand and contract. They have been rendered digitally with glowing interiors, glimpsed with each exhale, to imply a mythic grandeur. By scaling the trees to colossal proportions, Baker Cahill challenges human exceptionalism. AR as a medium allows viewers to re-embed the human experience in nature without harming local flora and fauna, and to embrace new modes of perceiving. Unlike other forms of land art, AR is distinct in its ability to be both present and absent, to reveal what otherwise goes unseen, unheard, and unimagined. An elegiac melody, which weaves together five native bird songs, ambient desert sounds, and breathing, plays throughout the experience—at once celebratory, melancholy, and resilient. Bird songs are essential to Lifelines not just because of the plurality of songs heard today, but because of the traditional “Bird Songs” of the region’s First Peoples, social and funeral songs that tell migration stories, shared memories, and histories. To move through the PDWP is to encounter its enduring planetary intelligence, above and below ground. It offers a rare glimpse into how a protected desert ecosystem might thrive when treated with care and respect. Lifelines invites new considerations for its troubled past, imperiled present, and modes of inherited knowledge, which present the possibility of regenerative futures here and beyond. Lifelines , 2023 Nancy Baker Cahill Soundscape by Anna Luisa Petrisko Production by Shaking Earth Digital Located at Prime Desert Woodland Preserve 43201 35th St W, Lancaster, CA 93536

back to list Sasha Swedlund 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.

Joshua the Jackrabbit is MOAH's ARTS FOR YOUTH ambassador! Joshua will let you know about all the young artist programs coming up at MOAH and MOAH:CEDAR. Joshua loves to share his favorite facts about art and run scavenger hunts! Come along on his art adventures by following him on Instagram! Young Artist Workshops Share Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Copy Link Link Copied What's New? Have you seen my new Youtube channel? Joshua the Jackrabbit here! Visit my creative and cool Kids Youtube channel to check out a NEW video tutorial every week! Each tutorial video corresponds to the current free craft kit handed out every first Thursday of the month from 11 AM - 6 PM. If you would like to be notified about our video updates be sure to subscribe! For more videos check out the Youtube Link! Purchase your own Joshua in The Vault Store Joshua on Youtube Kids Purchase Now @JoshuaJackrabbit