Sac Open Studios Preview Exhibition
September 11th, 2025 - October 12th, 2025
reception: Thursday, September 11th, 2025, 6pm - 9pm
artist talk:
Come join us to celebrate the opening of the 20th Sac Open Studios! Join us on Thursday, September 11th, at Verge Center for the Arts as we kick off the 2025 Sac Open Studios Tour with the opening of the Preview Show! Meet participating Sac Open Studios artists and supporters, enjoy upbeat jams by a live DJ from Legend Has It, and grab some delicious bites from a local food truck! To keep you cool, stop by the bar and grab a refreshing beverage. Legend Has It will have something for everyone, from wine and cold beer to refreshing non-alcoholic drinks. Plus, we’ll have artist demos by Annie Peony & 90BC Pottery!
The Sac Open Studios Preview Exhibition will feature artworks from participating artists from both tour weekends. In honor of the tour’s 20TH ANNIVERSARY this year, it is being held in the Verge Gallery for an extended showing. This is a great place to find artworks you love and start planning your tour!
This year the tour consists of 265+participating artists. We recommend starting at the Kick Off Party to choose some favorites before planning your route. Many of the artworks in the exhibit are for sale, so you might also find something to add to your personal collection!
HAIL MURRAY! The Bay Area Punk Photography of Murray Bowles, 1982 – 1995
Murray Bowles
Current - August 17, 2025
reception:
artist talk:
Using the recently published, 270 page monograph as its launching point, HAIL MURRAY: Bay Area Punk Photography from 1982 – 1995, showcases the work and life of Bay Area punk photographer Murray Bowles. Though Bowles came to reside in Sacramento at the end of his life, he spent over forty years at the epicenter of what would become a definitive movement for punk music and culture. Bands like Green Day, the Dead Kennedys, Rancid, and Operation Ivy exploded onto the scene through Bowles lens. Bowles’ documentation captured a sensibility that would come to define the Bay Area aesthetic. Most importantly, Bowles existed in the Northern Californian punk community as a friend and enthusiast motivated by the sense of community the scene afforded. Most weekends found Bowles, a self-taught photographer, developing prints in his kitchen immediately following a show so that he could sell them at the next show for $.25 each or published in the seminal, volunteer run magazine Maximumrocknroll.
A collection of Bowles photographs were as likely to include the audience or a kid getting a stick ‘n poke tattoo as they were a band shot. The photographs depict scenes ranging from University quads and living rooms to iconic locations including Mabuhay Gardens and 924 Gilman. In addition to Bowles’ ability to capture crisp, perfectly exposed shots of stagedivers in low lit clubs and bars, his photos also feature young people lounging on punk house couches and backyards. Bowles’s photographs provide a context for a culture that includes not just the performers, but the friends, fans, and environments that made the scene possible. Most art exists this way but we’re not always so lucky to have an exhaustive archive of not just the performers and their recordings but of the entire moment that made it feel alive.
CLOSING RECEPTION
AUGUST 9TH 6PM
Join us Saturday, August 9th, for a talk with editor Anna Brown & Friends discussing Murray’s work and telling the secret stories of East Bay punk! Anna will present a slideshow of images detailing Murray’s process and legacy as well as describing the efforts involved in bringing the book to life.
Immediately following Anna’s talk Sac favorites The Bananas will play their first local show in two years!
This is a FREE event!
Doors open at 6pm!
The last day to view the exhibition is August 17th.
NEW EDITION: Work by Recent Verge Studio Artists
April 4 - May 11, 2025
reception: Friday, April 4, 5-8pm
artist talk:
Featuring: Amy Elkins, Serena Cole, Lyn Freeman, Jupiter Lockett, Nitheen Ramalingam, Orlando Tirado, Amy Vidra
Verge Center for the Arts is pleased to present New Edition: Work by Recent Verge Studio Artists.
New Edition showcases the work of Verge resident artists who have joined the program since our last studio survey exhibition in 2023. The work featured spans everything from gestural sculpture and narrative painting to reclaimed materials and sensual photography. Recent Verge studio artists include transplants to Sacramento, both national and international, recent MFA graduates, and existing regional artists. This exhibition is an exciting opportunity to get acquainted with new art and artists in our community.
Verge’s residency program is now in its 15th year serving close to 150 emerging and career artists. The program offers low and in some cases no cost studio space as well as access to an array of resources including a clay studio, printmaking facility, risographic printer, and figure drawing studio. Applications are accepted twice annually and are reviewed by a panel of community artists and arts professionals.
ARTIST BIOS:
AMY ELKINS – Amy Elkins is a visual artist and educator based in Berkeley and Sacramento, CA. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She works primarily in photography and installation and has spent the past fifteen years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of gender, race and identity, including how they are impacted by systems of power: prisons, the military, colonization, and hierarchies built upon social constructs. Most recently Elkins’ work pivots to include explorations of self as well as her family’s deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th generation born on Tongva/Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles area with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary.
SERENA COLE – Serena Cole received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2011 from the California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work in multiple solo exhibitions including Gallery 16 (San Francisco), Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis), and Stephanie Chefas Projects (Portland). Her work has also been exhibited widely at venues such as Dodge Gallery (New York), Roberts and Tilton (Los Angeles), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Phillips de Pury (New York). Her work has been published in The Huffington Post, Juxtapoz Magazine, KQED Arts, Comstock’s Magazine, and more. She lives and works in Sacramento, CA. She is an adjunct professor at Sierra College and American River College.
LYN FREEMAN – Lyn Freeman made a recent return to a dedicated studio practice a few years ago after originally earning her MFA from Ohio University in 1980. Freeman’s lyrical sculptures are both weightless and substantive, using playful gestural forms to occupy space.
JUPITER LOCKETT – Jupiter is a contemporary abstract artist, who currently resides in Sacramento, California. His work is created to make the viewer feel comfortable and uneasy at the same time. Focusing on beings who are daily ostracized, while giving light to the humanity of dark skinned people, who originate from Africa. Capturing the essence from the figures on canvas, through a child’s perspective; reminding the viewer of the innocence, that Black Americans are robbed of daily. The imagery in his paintings evokes a reminder, that no matter the form of suppression, beauty and power cannot be taken away. His goal as an artist is not to make the viewer like him, but to make them see the world through a pair of eyes that will convict the ignorance humanity has been taught. Fresh back from his artist residency in France, at Chateau d’Orquevaux, Jupiter is gearing up for his second and third residencies in September 2021, at the Imago Artist Residency in Tsarimir, Bulgaria; as well as the SkopArt Residency in Skopelos, Greece of October 2021.
NITHEEN RAMALINGAM – Nitheen is an Indian Artist currently living and working in Sacramento, California, having recently earned his MFA from UC Davis. “I was living at my home in Chennai, India during the pandemic after a gap of six years. I was observing and sketching my place in our family home. However, I was also sketching a lot in the streets, especially the traffic junctions, tea shops and fruit & flower markets in the evenings. On large sheets of paper, I have been making repeated marks and erasures using Charcoal and pastels to depict and think about the restful scenes from my home and the contrasting busy streets outside of it. I have been placing different large drawings next to each other, giving them an imposing presence. This body of work is born with a background of only spending vacations at my hometown while I was away in a different geography and linguistic region in India with a contrasting socio-political ethos (fascist politics). I am interested and curious to understand my own place with this new experience, knowledge, and time. I am trying to look at it from a new perspective, trying to understand its socio-political present and the possible future. As I am living in northern California the past six months, I find myself drawing places from back home along with the places from here, where I am finding both similarities and great differences. Depicting signages and using writing contextualizes the images talking about these two places.”
ORLANDO TIRADO – Orlando Tirado (b. 1982, El Organo, San Luis Potosí, Mexico) is a photographer and an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. His feature films include Medeas (2013), Hannah (2017), and Monica (2022), co-written with Director Andrea Pallaoro. He received the Sergei Parajanov Award for Outstanding Poetic Vision for Medeas at the Tbilisi International Film Festival. Hannah was nominated for a César for Best Foreign Film in 2018 and star Charlotte Rampling won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. Monica features Trace Lysette, Patricia Clarkson, Adriana Barraza, and Emily Browning, and will premiere in the official competition of the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
AMY VIDRA – Amy Vidra is a Sacramento-based conceptual and abstract alternative media artist challenging the narratives we are told or that we tell ourselves. Her work combines and transforms narratives of past, present, and future, connecting and integrating old and new narratives. Her work often utilizes materials of textiles, photographs, and plaster, while thread is the connector, connecting time, connecting space; stitched, embedded, metaphorically and literally holding them together. Vidra holds her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and her Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling from Southwestern College, Santa Fe. She is an art preparator and teaches art healing workshops throughout the Sacramento area.
ON VIEW: April 4 – May 11, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, April 4, 2025 | 5-8PM
DECOLONIZATION: Spencer Keeton Cunningham
January 11 - March 23, 2025
reception: Saturday, January 11th I 5-8 PM
artist talk:
DEDICATED TO RICHARD BLUECLOUD CASTANEDA
Spencer Keeton Cunningham
American Painter, Colville Tribe
Born 1983
Verge Center for the Arts is proud to present DECOLONIZATION, a solo show of work by visionary artist Spencer Keeton Cunningham. Cunningham is an enrolled member of the Colville Tribe from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Northeastern Washington. In his new work, Cunningham explores themes both autobiographical and societal in form from Decolonization and cultural archetypes to reservation life and alternate American Indian histories. In the past 22 years of his professional art career Cunningham continues to develop a unique visual language laced with humor, satire, and a tenacity to paint a vivid portrait of an ongoing colonization of North America. His work has earned him a place in the contemporary art world where he resides like a lone wolf.
With the scale of his current body of work, Cunningham’s paintings reach a mountainous 20ft tall, dwarfing the viewer with gargantuan works of art. Cunningham’s long-spanning career has led him to work with cult icons such as Buck 65 and his paintings are in the permanent collection of the SFMoMA, BAMPFA, the Crocker Art Museum amongst other museums. He has exhibited extensively internationally including museums in China, Los Angeles, New York, Japan, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In addition, Cunningham has worked locally in Sacramento on various public art projects and continues to create work in the form of large scale sculpture, paintings, books, records, films and public art in the San Francisco Bay Area where he has resided for the past 20 years, and beyond.
FROM THE ARTIST:
“This will be my most personal exhibition to date. I’m hoping the viewer can enjoy these paintings and get something from them. The exhibit will be an autobiographical journey blended together with the usual themes of my work — Indigenous rights, environmental issues, themes of animal mythology, history, archetypes, war, the future decolonization of North America and the rest of the planet, as well as some new ideas I have yet to explore in an exhibition thus far.
These paintings are a snapshot into my life and the world I’ve created up to this point with my art practice. I welcome people into that world and hopefully it’s an enjoyable experience.
The goal of the show is to help decolonize the minds of the viewers who see it; art should educate and bring up important dialogues. I choose to use humor at times in art to playfully talk about serious subject matter. It’s all about just starting a dialogue.
Hopefully this show might even inspire people to become artists themselves — because it’s not about me, or my ego, or alienating the working class person from the art world. I’d rather welcome them in and make art to help other people who are struggling.”
ON VIEW: January 11-March 23, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, January 11, 2025 | 5-9PM
With special guests: Ras K’ Dee and Nizhoni Ellenwood
with a performance by N8 the GR8 from The CUFISH