UC Irvine’s Langson Orange County Museum of Art Announces Dual Exhibitions Exploring California’s Landscape, Infrastructure, and Identity at its Irvine Location

IRVINE, CA (December 2, 2025) – UC Irvine’s Langson Orange County Museum of Art (UC Irvine Langson Museum) presents two exhibitions that trace California’s transformation from the turn of the 20th century to the present, revealing how artists have engaged with the state’s evolving landscape, infrastructure, and social fabric. At Home in Sunlight: A State in Motion, 1897–1940 and Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure will be concurrently on view January 31–May 31, 2026, and invite visitors to consider how the forces of progress, place, and policy have shaped California’s modern identity.

“Artists have always played a critical role in UC Irvine’s objective to ‘enhance lives.’ Both At Home in Sunlight and Breakdown/Breakthrough consider exhibition making from an artist’s perspective and flex critical thinking through curatorial work – one in a traditional museum and one in an alternative mobile art gallery. They also both center on California, and its beautiful and sometimes messy promises of a new of life through industrialization and infrastructure,” said Alaina Claire Feldman, Co-Chief Curator & Senior Director of Curatorial Engagement, UC Irvine Langson Museum. “As our museum enters this exciting new chapter of growth, we are incredibly proud to highlight the from our collection and the scholarship of current and former UC Irvine students.”

At Home in Sunlight: A State in Motion, 1897–1940
Main Gallery

At Home in Sunlight: A State in Motion, 1897–1940, curated by UC Irvine Graduate Student Researcher SeeVa Dawne Kitslis, explores California during a period of radical growth and selfdefinition, when its cultural, industrial, and infrastructural identities were rapidly evolving. While major urban centers like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego competed to establish themselves as dominant Pacific trade hubs open to Asia, waves of artists arriving westward from Europe and the US Midwest sought to capture the state’s landscape and new way of life. Post-gold rush and early Hollywood, the transformations of the state were due not only to California’s relationship to trade, migration, and technological progress but also to land speculation and the changing promotional image of the state. The exhibition examines how artists—painting outdoors, or en plain air—charted the state’s transformation through the sweeping vistas of California Impressionism to the grounded perspectives of Regionalism, the California Watercolor School, and Social Realism.

Drawn primarily from the Buck Collection, the exhibition is organized into three sections. The first section Climate, Image, Identity explores how artists rendered California’s distinctive atmosphere and natural light as both subject and symbol. Featured works include The Mountain (c. 1923) by Clark Hobart, Santa Paula Valley (c. 1903) by Elmer Wachtel, and Succulents (c. 1930) by Henrietta Shore, alongside depictions of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition by Maren M. Froelich and Donna Schuster. Together, these works reveal how California’s climate became a foundation for its self-promotion and artistic identity.

Harbor Wars focuses on California’s ports as sites of trade, labor, and geopolitical competition. Works such as Franz A. Bischof’s Japanese Fishing Boat, San Pedro (c. 1914), Donna Schuster’s Mending the Net (1912–36), and Carl Heilborn’s Skywards from Fish Harbor, San Francisco (1935) illuminate the interplay between industrial expansion and the daily lives of those who sustained it.

Paintings by Armin Carl Hansen and Sam Hyde Harris further evoke the human and environmental stakes of California’s maritime industries.

Urban Life—Contested Space closes out the exhibition, highlighting the emergence of urban realism as artists grappled with the social and architectural consequences of modernization.

Featured works include Millard Sheets’s Family Flats (1934), Charles Payzant’s Olvera Street, and Emil J. Kosa Jr.’s Backyard Dream, alongside Eugene Wallin’s Train Crossing Trestle. These works capture the tensions of a rapidly expanding state, where beauty and inequity coexisted within the built environment.

Curator SeeVa Dawne Kitslis is an artist and has been a Graduate Student Researcher in UC Irvine Langson Museum’s Curatorial Department since 2025. They are a second-year graduate student with the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, as well as received a BFA from CalArts. Kitslis often curates as an extension of their artistic practice.

At Home in Sunlight is part of a new academic engagement initiative to train and support the curatorial work of UC Irvine graduate students in a professional museum setting. This year-long program is organized in close collaboration with staf from all museum departments. It culminates in an exhibition that draws entirely from the museum’s collection.

This exhibition is presented with the support of UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, whose commitment to research and learning helped bring this project to fruition.

Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure
Pop-up Activation: April 13–19, 2026, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre Plaza
In Focus gallery

Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure, curated by Assistant Curator Michaëla Mohrmann, expands on the themes of modernization and urban transformation by examining Southern California’s built environment through a contemporary lens. Anchored by the museum’s recent acquisition of two works by UC Irvine alumnus Ruben Ochoa, the exhibition explores how artists respond to the physical and political structures that shape public life, from freeways and concrete barriers to the systems of power they represent.

At the museum’s Irvine location, newly acquired photographs from Ochoa’s ficus series (2007) are presented alongside works by Carlos Almaraz and Pat Gomez, tracing multigenerational eforts by Chicano artists to reveal the inequities embedded in California’s urban development.

From April 13–19, 2026, Breakdown/Breakthrough extends into the public realm with Ochoa’s Class: C (2001), a transformed Chevy van turned mobile art gallery activated by UC Irvine undergraduate students at the Irvine Barclay Theatre plaza. This pop-up activation will feature works by current and former UC Irvine artists and is accompanied by a new publication by curator Michaëla Mohrmann.

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About UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art (UC Irvine Langson Museum) brings together the collections and legacies of the Orange County Museum of Art and UC Irvine’s Langson Institute and Museum of California Art under a shared mission of public access, scholarship, and cultural engagement. Open to the public with free admission, the museum stewards more than 9,000 works spanning California Impressionism through contemporary art, reflecting the region’s creative spirit and global influence. It operates across two sites: a 53,000-square-foot facility at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa and a 6,000-square-foot interim museum space in Irvine.

For more information, visit uci.edu/langson-museum.

Locations and Hours:

Costa Mesa location

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; Monday & Tuesday closed

Irvine location

18881 Von Karman Avenue, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92612

Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; Sunday & Monday closed

Please visit https://uci.edu/langson-museum/ for more information.

About the University of California, Irvine

Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation, and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and ofers 224-degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu.

Media Contact

For additional information, Emma Jacobson-Sive at EJS Media; emma@ejs-media.com