OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, JUNE 6 from 7-10PM |
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Antonio Palomo, Taken From EARTH - detail, (2026), Courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center. |
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ANTONIO PALOMO TAKEN FROM EARTH GCAC Project Wall June 6 through November 8, 2026
Opening Reception Saturday, June 6 7 - 10PM
Taken From EARTH reflects on the rocket’s double meaning as one of humanity’s most powerful inventions. As a child, the artist saw rockets as symbols of wonder, discovery, and the desire to reach beyond the known world. Over time, that awe became complicated by the misuse and growing normalization of rockets and related technologies as instruments of destruction. This installation brings together oversized collaged figures of a family and their dog with monumental rocket forms to examine the relationship between human life and human invention. The figures are composed of imagery drawn from everyday interests, suggesting that technology is never separate from us: it is shaped by our values, desires, fears, and choices. Here, the rocket stands as both promise and warning. It can carry us beyond Earth toward exploration and imagination, but it can also pull us away from compassion and conscience through war and violence. The larger rockets evoke humanity’s reach toward an imagined future, while the smaller rockets point to the present-day reality of how similar technologies are so often used. At its core, the work asks viewers to consider what we are beginning to accept as normal. It is not a rejection of progress, but a call to reflect on what is lost when tools meant to expand human possibility are used in ways that diminish our humanity. As far as we know, life began here on Earth. As we look toward the Moon, Mars, and beyond, we are also reminded how fragile, and rare, life may be in the vastness of the cosmos. The farther we investigate space, the more we confront the possibility that survival beyond Earth may require profound changes in how we live, what we value, and even what we become. The space probe Voyager 1 has crossed beyond the heliosphere; we have learned to sequence DNA; and we continue to deepen our understanding of the quantum realm. These milestones underscore the scale of human potential. The artist’s hope is that the same intelligence—human and artificial—that enables us to dream beyond this world can also help us mature into beings capable of protecting life rather than destroying it: not only our own species, but all Earth-bound life. In that sense, Taken From EARTH is both a reflection and a warning: as we prepare to send humans to worlds beyond our own, we must also ask whether we are leaving behind the humanity that gives that journey meaning. Humanity’s future is bright—if we choose it. ABOUT THE ARTIST Antonio Palomo, also known as AG (All Good), was born in Usulután, El Salvador and currently resides in Orange County, CA. He began drawing in third grade and discovered his love for art in junior high school under the guidance of a dedicated art teacher who introduced him to art history, design, and foundational visual principles. Her influence helped shape his early creative path, culminating in a National Philanthropist Art Poster Contest win and the display of his work at Los Angeles City Hall. After stepping away from art for many years, Palomo returned to his practice in 2019 following the death of his father. That loss became a moment of reawakening in both his life and creative work. Working across acrylics, oils, airbrush, and digital immersive 3D forms, he draws inspiration from nature, personal pain, and artists such as Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh. His work explores memory, symbolism, emotion, and the layered complexity of human experience. His artist name, AG (All Good), reflects a personal philosophy of transforming adversity into resilience, meaning, and creative purpose.
EXHIBITION DETAILS |
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SAVE THE DATE SATURDAY, JUNE 27 @ 10AM THE LOST CHAMPION - ACTIVATION #1 |
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Ben Kinsley, The Lost Champion, State Champion Jacaranda Mimosifolia, Santa Ana, CA. Image courtesy of Nick Araya and UFEI website. |
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SAVE THE DATE THE LOST CHAMPION - EXPLORING Ben Kinsley with arborists Rhonda Wood and Humberto Mojica activation one of a five-part series Saturday, June 27 | 10:00 AM–12:00 PM Meeting Location: Grand Central Art Center (GCAC), Lobby This is a free program and includes walking. Please wear comfortable shoes and bring water.
The Lost Champion.is a public, place-based project by artist Ben Kinsleythat memorializes the loss of a national champion tree (Brown-Woolly Fig - Ficus drupacea) that was cut down in Santa Ana, by listening to what remains. A state or national champion tree is the largest known individual of a specific species, determined through a standardized point system based on height, trunk circumference, and average crown spread. These trees are typically identified through public nomination and maintained in official registers—such as American Forests’ National Champion Tree Program and state-level counterparts like the UFEI California Big Trees Registry—to encourage conservation and appreciation of our largest and most extraordinary trees. At the heart of The Lost Champion is a series of five guided walking experiences through Santa Ana’s “urban forest,” each offering a different lens for engaging with trees as living beings, civic landmarks, and carriers of ecological and cultural memory. The walks are themed Exploring, Measuring, Living With, Listening, and Remembering, and include guided observation, shared conversation, and opportunities for field recording and collective attention. Together, these experiences invite participants to consider how we encounter, document, and care for the trees that shape our everyday environments—and what it means to notice what is present, what is changing, and what has been lost. Through guided walks, field recording, and collective attention to sites across Santa Ana that are currently home to state and national champion trees, The Lost Champion explores the urban forest as a living ecosystem and listening as a form of memory, care, and witness. The project will culminate with activation #5 at the site of the former national champion tree, incorporating field recordings Ben captured prior to its removal. The remaining four activations in the series are currently in development—stay tuned to our email announcements. Dates and details will be released soon. The Lost Champion is a project led by artist Ben Kinsley, with residency support provided by The Segerstrom Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. ABOUT ACTIVATION #1 GUIDES Rhonda Wood is President, co-owner, and consulting arborist at Woodworks Tree Preservation, Inc., and an ISA Certified Arborist, ISA Certified Tree Climber, and ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualified professional (WE-5071AT), with Prescription Pruning credentials. She began her career as a gardener at Disneyland in 1997, became a Topiary Engineer, and in 1999 advanced to certified arborist and climber, helping care for more than 16,000 trees. Over a distinguished tenure at the Disneyland Resort, she served as Tree Assessor, Arborist Manager, and Horticulture Planner, and spent her final decade there as the resort’s first Urban Forester. Rhonda also teaches UCLA Extension’s “Study of Trees” course and is deeply engaged in the profession through leadership and service, including roles with the Western Chapter ISA, the ANSI A300 Committee, tree worker evaluation, post-fire inspection volunteering, and judging regional and national tree climbing championships. Humberto Mojica is Vice President, co-owner, and consulting arborist at Woodworks Tree Preservation, Inc., and an ISA Certified Arborist, ISA Certified Tree Climber, and ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualified professional (WE-9670AT), with Prescription Pruning credentials. He spent a decade with Armstrong Growers before joining Disneyland as a gardener in 1997, where he led landscape crews and became a Horticulture Manager in 2003. After studying arboriculture, Humberto became a Certified Arborist and Tree Worker and went on to serve as Arborist Manager for 10 years, helping care for more than 16,000 trees before retiring from the Disneyland Resort in 2023. He also practices woodworking as an artist, preserving wood to carry forward the legacy of trees, and contributes to the field through service including the WCISA Spanish Committee (Arboleros), post-fire tree inspection volunteering, tree worker evaluation, and judging regional and national tree climbing championships. Ben Kinsley is an interdisciplinary artist working in sound, video, and social/contextual practice, known for projects that range from choreographing a neighborhood intervention into Google Street View and directing surprise performances inside strangers’ homes to staging a royal protest, collecting put-down jokes from around the world, and hosting a lecture series in an aspen grove. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Queens Museum (NYC), Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Mattress Factory Museum (Pittsburgh), Katonah Museum of Art (NY), Green on Red Gallery (Dublin), Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (Florence), La Galería de Comercio (Mexico City), Catalyst Arts (Belfast), and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (Karlsruhe), and he has held residencies at Skowhegan, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Skaftfell Art Center (Iceland), Askeaton Contemporary Arts (Ireland), and Platform (Finland). His projects have been featured by NPR, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, Artforum.com, Wired.com, Rhizome.org, and Hyperallergic, among others. Since 2019, Kinsley has collaborated with Riitta Ikonen and Jessica Langley on award-winning mushroom costumes for the Telluride Mushroom Festival—featured in the mockumentary Fest in Show and the film Fantastic Fungi, and highlighted by outlets including Vogue and National Geographic. He is Associate Professor and Co-Director of Visual Art in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and a co-founder of The Yard.
PROJECT DETAILS |
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CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS / PROJECTS |
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CARLOS VIANI NEXT OF KIN extended through June 7, 2026
Ino Moxo: “And this, which is nothing, is everything” César Calvo, The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon
When artist Carlos Viani’s father disappeared in Lima, Peru, in 1978, he left behind a green raincoat, discarded photographs, and a human skull he had exhumed decades earlier. This disappearance launched a four-decade search for answers, culminating in 2015 when Carlos received an email from a coroner in Orange County, California, informing him of his father’s death. In Next of Kin, Carlos uses a transdisciplinary approach—combining archival research, forensic methods, photography, video performance, installations, and a photo book—to explore the tension between fact and fiction, trace and memory. Against the backdrop of loss and diaspora, the project delves into his father’s secret life and reflects the universal enigma of estranged fathers and their lasting impact across cultures and histories.
EXHIBITION DETAILS |
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JOSEPH PERAGINE PASS THE AMMUNITION through July 12, 2026 Pass The Ammunition uses the visual language of animation to examine how violence is normalized, circulated, and sustained through systems that can feel impersonal, routine, and “built in.” Especially urgent amid today’s escalating tensions, the work is not a response to a single event but a lens on the broader machinery of conflict—how militarized responses become default, how rhetoric hardens into policy, and how geographic, political, or emotional distance can make consequences feel abstract. It asks viewers to consider what is being “passed” along—objects, responsibility, fear, power—and where agency resides within these cycles; through animation’s transformation and exaggeration, Peragine makes the familiar strange again, creating space to reflect on complicity, escalation, and the relentless repetition through which a tool becomes a symbol, then a habit, then a culture.
EXHIBITION DETAILS |
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JUNE ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE |
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MISTY CHOI
Misty Choi (b. 1993, Seoul) explores disorientation, adaptation, and the unstable relationship between bodies and the environments they inhabit. Through performative sculpture, installation, and social practice, she transforms everyday systems and gestures into unfamiliar encounters that destabilize normative ways of moving, behaving, and relating to space. Her ongoing project CuppyBreak (2023–ongoing) consists of broken, misshapen, or dysfunctional cups activated through interactive performance. By serving drinks in unstable vessels designed to spill, fail, or interrupt habitual use, Choi invites participants to navigate discomfort, adaptation, and relational tension. During the residency, she will be using the GCAC Project Gallery as an open studio to develop a new series of cups informed by adaptive bodies, psychological relationships, and unstable spatial systems, culminating in a participatory café project in collaboration with Artists Village Café and a conceptual installation at the Grand Central Art Center.
ARTIST WEBSITE |
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GREGORY SALE
For the month of June, artist Gregory Sale will return to GCAC for a residency supporting ongoing research and development for a major new project. During past visits, he built meaningful connections with our communities; this June, he will deepen those relationships as the themes of the project come into focus. We’re excited to welcome him back. Gregory Sale is a socially engaged artist who creates large-scale, often long-term public projects in collaboration with individuals, communities, and institutions, using collective artistic experiences to address social challenges—particularly those connected to mass incarceration and the complexities of justice, democracy, and care. His recent work includes the Future IDs Art & Justice Leadership Cohort (2020–present) and projects that reframe reentry narratives, including Future IDs at Alcatraz (2018–19), developed with core collaborators in partnership with the National Park Service, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and 20 community organizations, and Rap Sheet to Resume (2015–16) with the Urban Justice Center (New York). His work has been supported by Creative Capital, A Blade of Grass/David Rockefeller Fund, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among others. Based in Phoenix and Los Angeles, he is an Associate Professor of Intermedia and Public Practice in the School of Art at Arizona State University.
ARTIST WEBSITE |
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NOW BE HERE ANNIVERSARY & NOW LET'S TALK |
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NOW BE HERE ANNIVERSARY & NOW LET’S TALK
Sunday, May 31st, 2026, 9 am - 3 pm at Occidental College 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles, California 90041
GCAC is honored to be a coalition partner for this incredible lineup of panels and community conversations, a free breakfast, complimentary refreshments, and a full day to connect with the Southern California artist community. You won’t want to miss it—now’s the time to register. In 2016, 733 women and non-binary artists gathered in downtown Los Angeles to make a collective statement of presence—creating the largest known group photograph of artists in LA. Ten years later, this iconic image will be restaged once again. If you missed it ten years ago, here’s your chance to join us. If you were there, we’d love to see you again.
The schedule and further details can be found on the project website. Now Let’s Talk, Los Angeles is organized by Now Be Here and OXY ARTS in collaboration with a coalition of 50+ regional arts organizations, and made possible by Artlogic, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, ArtConverge, East West Bank, and the Claremont Graduate University Art Department, with thanks to Fulcrum Arts.
RSVP HERE |
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YOUR GENEROUS DONATIONS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER!
HELP MAKE OUR 2026 PROGRAMS AND RESIDENCIES POSSIBLE |
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GCAC's current exhibition season and artists-in-residence are supported in part through the generosity of the following: |
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Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center is dedicated to fostering innovative artistic practice and meaningful community engagement. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, artist residencies, and dynamic exhibitions, GCAC serves as a catalyst for cultural dialogue and creative exploration. By amplifying deverse voices and embracing experimental approaches, the center seeks to inspire, educate, and connect communities within and beyond Southern California.
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