Spanning 100, year of cultural review UC Irvine's museum director Kathryn Kanjo seeks to display the unique contributions of the local artist display vision of the landscape.
UC IRVINE LANGSON ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF
ART PRESENTS
~HELLO AGAIN~
On View November 13, 2026 – April 11, 2027
Organized by Museum Director Kathryn Kanjo
Spanning More Than a Century of California Art, the First Presentation
Images: (left) Arthur F. Mathews, Ladies on the Grass, ca. 1915. Oil on canvas, 48 x 52 in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, the Buck Collection, gift of Bente and Gerald E. Buck; (middle) Andrea Bowers, Victory to the Goddess, from the series Femme Trans-Corporeal Fantasy, 2023. Acrylic on cardboard, 84 x 39 x 4 ½ in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, museum purchase. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen; (right) Pearl C. Hsiung, Tidal Wretch, 2005. Enamel on canvas, 86 x 64 in. UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, gift of Lilly and Paul Merage. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art presents Hello Again, on view November 13, 2026, through April 11, 2027, across the museum’s Special Exhibitions and Permanent Collection Pavilions. Organized by museum director Kathryn Kanjo, the exhibition is her first curatorial presentation for the museum following her appointment in February 2026.
Hello Again, the first of two major exhibitions introducing the newly integrated collections of the UCI Langson Museum, draws together works that had previously been held and shown separately. Abandoning a rigid chronology in favor of thematic fluidity, the exhibition sets the institution’s deep strengths in California art history, with a particular focus on the 1960s and 1970s, alongside contemporary work. Cross-generational dialogues collapse time, revealing how regional landscapes, domestic spaces, and urban culture remain fertile territory for material and conceptual experimentation.
“The scope of our newly merged collection captures the complexity of the region, allowing us to tell an expansive story of California’s art. There are many ‘old friends’ in the collection - artworks that have represented California art in exhibitions across the decades - set here in new conversations and contexts,” said Kathryn Kanjo, museum director. “Hello Again considers how California artists have had an abiding interest in the surreal, the mystical, and the spiritual, and in treating the landscape or the body as a vehicle for transcendence.”
About the Exhibition
Spanning more than a century of art making, Hello Again considers the many ways California artists have bypassed literal documentation to treat their physical environments as mirrors for spiritual, internal, and social realities. The exhibition unfolds thematically rather than chronologically, with every gallery pairing historical and contemporary works.
Visitors enter the exhibition to see Jessie Arms Botke’s Untitled mural (1955–1956), painted with oil and gold leaf for the east wall of the Coral Spa at The Oaks in Ojai. Nearby, Arthur F. Mathews’s Ladies on the Grass (ca. 1915) is beside Andrea Bowers’s Victory to the Goddess, from the series Femme Trans-Corporeal Fantasy (2023), more than a century later. The works set a stage for allegory and mythology while reveling in elements historically associated with femininity. Agnes Pelton’s Alchemy (1937–1939) dissolves recognizable geography into otherworldly forms, suggesting that the sublime is an inward as well as outward experience. Artists such as Louisa Chase, Pearl C. Hsiung, Hayal Pozanti, and Henrietta Shore similarly suspend natural elements - caves, waves, leaves, mountains - in a fantastical realm.
In their explorations of California’s unique light and colors, artists since the early twentieth century have distilled landscape toward abstraction. Structure and atmosphere are held in tension in Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #36 (1970), which is paired with an early decorative landscape by Gottardo Piazzoni (1903). The conceptual deployment of language generates a poetic understanding of perception and light in John Baldessari’s Voluble Luminist Painting for Max Kozloff (1968) and Jack Pierson’s FIAT LUX (2026).
From there the exhibition arrives at the everyday, in terms both prosaic and political. Mundane objects are elevated and made mysterious by their isolation, as in Mabel Hutchinson’s Cabbages & Things(1940) and Robert Bechtle’s Pink Toothbrush (1966), which treat daily activity and existence with unexpected reverence. Andy Warhol’s Mao serigraphs (1972) hang opposite works addressing the Nixon presidency, including Polly Apfelbaum’s Re:Nixon (between 1992 and 1994), a grouping timed to the Pacific Symphony’s spring performance of the opera Nixon in China. Karl Haendel’s Mapplethorpe is dead, Helms is gone, Schwarzenegger is governor (2004) extends the theme toward faces of power and the voter.
In the next gallery, artists adapt Pop and Surrealism’s fascination with everyday things to reinvent the still life as a site of intimacy and estrangement. Artists invite us to consider the line between the familiar and the uncanny, the harmless and the violent. Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) screens in this section, as well as Suzanne Lacy’s video Learn Where the Meat Comes From(1976), both depicting improbable domestic scenes. Early porcelains by Franz Bischoff (c. 1901-1905) are near Peter Voulkos’s Covered Jar (between 1951 and 1954) and Ken Price’s California Cup(1991). Joan Semmel’s Renoir Revisited (1977) and Charles Ray’s Self-portrait (1990) turn the genre toward the isolated body.
Assemblage and collage run throughout, offering a tactile exploration of California’s cultural and social memories. One gallery gathers the cut, pasted, and juxtaposed: Robert Rauschenberg’s Furnished (1996), Amanda Ross-Ho’s New Seizure 2 (2008), Roy De Forest’s Drifting Down the Mississippi, #2 (1961), and Jess’s One Way (1955) and Sent on the VIIth Wave (1979).
In the 1960s especially, assemblage allowed for political commentary, including condemnation of Cold War tensions. Ed Bereal’s American Beauty (1965) distorts the potency of military graphics in a hybrid object that seems part appliance, part reliquary, while Edward Keinholz and Nancy Reddin Keinholz’s sculpture gathers symbolic remnants of a mournful postwar society. Made decades later, Rodney McMillian’s painted assemblage unnerves by suggesting that violence lurks within the American landscape.
In the final gallery, the body appears indirectly. For Jim Dine and Tony Berlant, empty garments act as uncanny surrogates for absent bodies. A figure in Joan Brown’s work refuses to adopt a classical pose, preferring to behave realistically, awkwardly. John Mason’s Vertical Sculpture, Blonde (1961) is paired with Llyn Foulkes’s Leonard’s Rock (1969), two works whose contours suggest ancient statues as well as mountainous terrain, returning the exhibition to the landscape where it began.
In its eclectic expanse, Hello Again reveals how California artists have returned to the region’s diverse topography and everyday environments as fuel for internal expression, social commentary, and material innovation, creating a complex portrait of place.
Featured artists: Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Martha Alf, Carlos Almaraz, John Altoon, Polly Apfelbaum, Robert Arneson, Ruth Asawa, John Baldessari, Romare Bearden, Robert Bechtle, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Bereal, Tony Berlant, Ben Berlin, Wallace Berman, Franz Bischoff, Jessie Arms Botke, Andrea Bowers, Joan Brown, Roger Brown, Conrad Buff, Karen Carson, Carolina Caycedo, Vija Celmins, Enrique Chagoya, Norman Chamberlain, Louisa Chase, Judy Chicago, Bruce Conner, Alonzo Davis, Ron Davis, Jay DeFeo, Roy De Forest, Niki De Saint Phalle, Richard Diebenkorn, Jim Dine, Robert Dowd, Manny Farber, Llyn Foulkes, Michael Frimkess, Jack Goldstein, Joe Goode, Karl Haendel, George Herms, Pearl C. Hsiung, Mabel Hutchinson, Jess, Ynez Johnston, Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Suzanne Lacy, Glenn Ligon, Helen Lundeberg, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, Narsiso Martinez, John Mason, Arthur F. Mathews, Rodney McMillian, Knud Merrild, Ron Miyashiro, Kristen Morgin, Yoshitomo Nara, Agnes Pelton, Gottardo Piazzoni, Jack Pierson, Hayal Pozanti, Ken Price, Noah Purifoy, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Philip Rich, Frank Romero, Martha Rosler, Amanda Ross-Ho, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, Lawrence Schiller, Joan Semmel, Peter Shelton, Henrietta Shore, Alexis Smith, Therman Statom, George Stoll, Ed Templeton, Robert Therrien, Wayne Thiebaud, DeWain Valentine, Peter Voulkos, Gordon Wagner, Andy Warhol, Mary Weatherford, William Wendt, Beatrice Wood, Takako Yamaguchi, Amir Zaki, Norman Zammitt
Hello Again is organized by Kathryn Kanjo, museum director, with support from Julia Pelletier, graduate student researcher. This exhibition is supported by Presenting Sponsor Visionaries in Art.
Public Opening
November 14, 2026, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Celebrate the opening of our fall 2026 exhibitions, including Hello Again and Tokio Ueyama: The Hollows Between Mountains, with a free, all-ages, all-day event. Enjoy tours, hands-on art making, live music, and special refreshments for purchase at our Fueling Station. Check https://langson.uci.edu/calendar/ for the full schedule of activities.
About UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art
UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art is grounded in a mission of public access, scholarship, and cultural engagement. Anchored by a leading public research university, the museum brings together multiple artistic legacies to tell a fuller story of California and its global connections. Stewarding more than nine thousand works, from California Impressionism to contemporary art, the collection reflects the region’s history of innovation, migration, and exchange, with global touchpoints that situate California within a broader cultural context. As part of UC Irvine, it serves as a bridge between academic research and public life, connecting faculty, students, and the community through exhibitions, programs, and new scholarship. Located on the Segerstrom Center for the Arts campus in Costa Mesa, the 53,000-square-foot museum is an open, accessible space for discovery, inviting visitors to encounter both the familiar and the unexpected. For more information, visit langson.uci.edu.
Location and Hours
Segerstrom Center for the Arts campus
3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; Monday & Tuesday closed
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 offers 224 degree programs. It is 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 uci.edu.
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