PRESS RELEASE: Summer 2026 Exhibition Season at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History

Eugene Rodriguez, Los Punks Barrocos, 2025, oil and wax on linen on panel. Courtesy of the Artist.

LANCASTER, CA. APRIL 8, 2026 — The Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) is pleased to announce its Summer 2026 exhibition season, inclusive of four solo exhibitions by artists Eva Aguila, Eugene Rodriguez, Edwin Vasquez, and Marcus Zúñiga. The season will also feature the debut of Emanations: Light, Growth, and Renewal in the Lancaster Museum of Art and History Collection, an exhibition that highlights a selection of artworks from MOAH’s permanent collection that capture emergence and reflect themes of luminosity, radiance, and resurgence. The Summer 2026 exhibition season will run from Saturday, May 16, 2026, through Sunday, August 30, 2026. Emanations will be on view through Spring 2027. An opening celebration for the season will be held at MOAH on Saturday, May 16, 2026, from 12–4pm. 

MOAH's Main Gallery features the solo exhibition Velvet Notes: Conversando con Pedro Guzmán by San Francisco-based artist Eugene Rodriguez. Critically renowned for early films like Straight, No Chaser (1995), the exhibition debuts Rodriguez’s latest film, The Great Masquerade (2026), a meditation on artistic creativity amid growing commodification and commercialization in the age of artificial intelligence. Through his alter egos—RudeE Warhol, an eccentric band manager, and Pedro Guzmán, a journalist and television personality—Rodriguez interrogates how images shape identity while asking who gets to be seen, heard, and remembered when everything is simultaneously performance and product. The film is accompanied by videos, sculpture, and multimedia works from his larger Cracked Velvet Project series, which follows a fictional Chicano band called The Cracked Velvets. 

Marcus Zúñiga: cosmovisión, on display in MOAH’s South Gallery, presents recent sculptural installations by Los Angeles-based artist Marcus Zúñiga that feature mica—a silicate mineral that naturally separates into thin, light-transmitting translucent layers—as their central component. Shown together for the first time, these installations reveal Zúñiga’s meticulous experimentation with a fragile material considered sacred by the artist and many Mesoamerican cultures. Inspired by the use of mica in Teotihuacan's underground chambers to simulate starlight, each installation is a meditation on forms that divine our location in the cosmos, connect the ethereal and earthly, and propose spiritual healing and ancestral remembrance as needed responses to our many contemporary crises. The sculptural installations will be exhibited alongside new photographs that capture the celestial passage of time and a site-specific installation in MOAH’s Jewel Box. 

Eva Aguila: The Foundation of the Harvest / El Cimiento de la Cosecha, exhibited in the Ralph and Virginia Bozigian Family Gallery, presents work by Los Angeles-based artist Eva Aguila. The exhibition examines the United States’ enduring extraction of Mexican migrant labor through artwork that draws from the Los Angeles based artist’s family's multigenerational experience, tracing a direct line from the Bracero Program to today's H-2A visa system. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an expanded version of Aguila’s Building Home (2023-2026) installation, which recreates her late grandfather's red living room in Michoacán, Mexico, and features a video interview with her cousin Ivan—a current H-2A visa holder who picks apples in Washington State. Through installation, family photographs, found objects, archival materials, and video testimony, the exhibition honors both her family's resilience in transforming harsh working conditions into generational wealth and the activism of organizers like Aguila’s uncle Jorge Campos Aguiñiga who fought for laborers' rights. 

Edwin Vasquez: The Starborn Fragments presents an installation inclusive of painting, sculpture, and poetry by Edwin Vasquez, an Antelope Valley-based artist. These works are inspired by the imagined contents of the lost Mayan codices and all of the science, culture, and mythology that may have been included in them. While borrowing from Mayan iconography that survived colonization, Vasquez adds to this vocabulary through new work that speaks to themes of cultural identity, spirituality, and ecological responsibility. For Vasquez, the artwork, especially a new series of clay masks, poetically honors the sophisticated astronomical traditions largely lost when Spanish colonizers destroyed Mayan codices. Vasquez reclaims this lost history and reimagines the stories and artifacts of this lineage through an installation that portrays the Maya as eternal mappers of the universe, offering viewers a meditation on the resilience of cultural traditions. The Starborn Fragments will be hosted in MOAH's Mark and Hillarie Moore Family Trust Gallery. 

Beginning in Summer 2026, Emanations: Light, Growth, and Renewal in the Lancaster Museum of Art and History Collection will be on view in MOAH’s Joseph Stello Family Gallery. Emanations features a dynamic range of artworks that span diverse media and approaches, including paintings that radiate light, photography that glows, sculpture that undulates, and works on paper depicting various forms of growth. From ethereal explorations of color and transparency inspired by the Light and Space movement to bold prints that pulse with energy, each piece captures an emergence, in both literal and metaphorical means, offering artistic interpretations of illumination and transformation. The exhibition features work by Nuri Amanatullah, Clovis Blackwell, Gisela Colon, Alex Couwenberg, Ayin Es, Matthew Finley, Carla Jay Harris, Eric Johnson, Dion Johnson, Thomas Pathe, Ruth Pastine, Sheila Pinkel, Gustavo Rimada, Robert Von Sternberg, Eric Zammitt, and Norman Zammitt.  

The Lancaster Museum of Art and History is dedicated to strengthening awareness, enhancing accessibility, and igniting the appreciation of art, history, and culture in the Antelope Valley through dynamic exhibitions, innovative educational programs, creative community engagement, and a vibrant collection that celebrates the richness of the region. MOAH is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 11 AM to 4 PM, with extended hours on Thursday until 8 PM through November 1st. MOAH is located at 665 W. Lancaster BLVD on the corner of Lancaster BLVD and Ehrlich Avenue. For more information, please call the museum at (661) 723-6250 or visit: www.lancastermoah.org.