Latest news with #OrangeCountyMuseumofArt
Los Angeles Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Huntington Beach man using ‘homeless' moment to spread awareness
Huntington Beach artist Chapman Hamborg is still dealing with the circumstances around his viral Instagram reel in his own unique way. A neighbor called the police on Hamborg as he went on a morning walk around the neighborhood with his infant daughter last month, trying to give his wife Hannah some time to relax. His long hair was in a bun, his clothes were worn and one of his slippers had a hole in it. The neighbor thought Hamborg was homeless. A police officer did come to his home near Sowers Middle School on that Good Friday morning to investigate. 'When he explained what happened, that someone had called the cops on me thinking I was a homeless person then had followed me back to my house, I was shocked,' Hamborg said. 'I couldn't believe it at first. I was trying to laugh it off, I guess, and then he asked for my ID. I came inside, and that's when I started recording the video, when I was looking for my ID and telling my wife what was going on.' Hamborg is still carrying the youngest of his four children in a baby sling in the video, which immediately exploded in popularity. As of Friday, it had nearly two million likes and more than 32,000 comments. Hamborg, 32, is trying to turn the misunderstanding into a positive. He's selling limited edition prints of his original painting, 'Unseen Paths,' with 20% of the proceeds going to support Orange County United Way's homelessness efforts. The prints are available at Hamborg's website, The painting was made before the incident but depicts Hamborg similarly, with two of his children. He explained that the flowers in the background are actually invasive yellow mustard flowers. 'It looks like this beautiful scene, but there's kind of this darker undertone to it, at least to me personally,' he said. 'When this whole experience happened, I thought that painting and those aspects about it are even more true for unhoused families, which I was mistaken for being. The imagery and the meaning behind the painting already lined up, and I wanted to connect it to the story and the conversation that was already happening from the video around people experiencing homelessness.' A mutual friend introduced Hamborg to Becks Heyhoe-Khalil, executive director of Orange County United Way's United to End Homelessness initiative. Hamborg and Heyhoe-Khalil will be guests at an Orange County Museum of Art 'Conversations with Artists' event on June 4 at 4 p.m., hosted by Heidi Zuckerman, OCMA's chief executive and director. No registration is needed. They will also host a special livestream event titled 'Art and Advocacy: A Studio Conversation with Chapman Hamborg,' on June 21 at 9 a.m., from his Hamborg Academy of Art studio in Huntington Beach. 'Chapman's curiosity around homelessness has been something so wonderful to engage with,' Heyhoe-Khalil said. 'Getting to know Chapman and just the beautiful heart that he has and the compassion that he has, the desire to use this for the greater good, it fit beautifully with the mission we have at United to End Homelessness at United Way. It's been a really natural way to collaborate.' According to a 2023 UCI-OC poll, 71% of O.C. residents see homelessness as a 'serious problem,' with affordable housing close behind at 69%. As of March, there were 410 families experiencing homelessness in Orange County registered with its family Coordinated Entry System, Heyhoe-Khalil said. That total included 715 children, with 244 of those under the age of 5. 'They've provided all of their documentation, they've done everything that the homelessness system has asked them to do to help them get connected to housing,' she said. Things are not exactly getting easier for them. Emergency housing vouchers that have been available since 2021 are reportedly set to run out of funding next year. Additionally, President Trump has proposed cuts to federal rental assistance. 'One of the things I love about what Chapman is doing is helping open people's eyes, ask questions and challenging assumptions,' Heyhoe-Khalil said. 'Many of the people who have watched the video online have said, 'You do look like you're homeless.' The flip side of that is that they're walking past people, driving past people every day who don't look like they're experiencing homelessness but who are, and they have no idea.' Hamborg realizes the circumstances around that April morning were complicated, not black and white. He said he thinks he knows the identity of his neighbor who called the police, but he's not exactly sure. He wants to talk to her, not to scold her but partially to thank her for her vigilance. 'She's a neighbor concerned for the safety of the baby and the neighborhood, but also, it's crazy for people who are dealing with homelessness to have to deal with this kind of stuff,' he said. 'What if it was a great parent who is trying to get their baby to sleep but they happen to be unhoused? Why should the cops be called on them? Just because they're experiencing homelessness doesn't mean that the baby is in danger, or that the mom is a bad mom or the dad is a bad dad.' Hamborg said his father instilled in him compassion for the homeless. Now he's using that compassion to try and spark a bigger conversation. In his viral Instagram video, he asked, 'If you saw me would you have thought I was homeless?' About two-thirds of the more than 500,000 poll respondents have voted, 'No.' Of course, his association with the video also has to be considered. A People Magazine article has also heightened his celebrity. 'I went to the grocery store [Monday] and got stopped a few times by people asking if I was the homeless guy,' Hamborg said. 'They were very excited to meet me, which was interesting. It was funny. I'm like, 'Yeah, that's me.' 'I'm just glad that this whole conversation is taking place. It's cool to see fruit come from it already, whether it's me selling paintings and the business growing, and then people having conversations about this important topic.'
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The landscape artist who makes her paint from pearls, crystals and volcanic dust
While in art school in London, Su Yu-Xin calculated that most painters used one of five brands of high-end oil paint, and that each brand produced only about 60 colors. 'That's really scary,' the Slade graduate said. 'It's like all the top chefs in the world shop from the same grocery store.' Determined not to be limited to the colors available on the market, Su began experimenting with making her own paints, many sourced from natural materials she collected herself. A decade later, creating her own pigments has become a central part of her work, and the histories of the materials she uses are part of each painting she creates. In her Los Angeles studio, Su now has at least 200 different pigments made from stones, minerals, shells and earth samples collected from across the American west, as well from locations around the Pacific rim. She grinds these materials into the paints she uses for her luminous, swirling landscapes, images of coastal highways in Taiwan, beaches in California, volcanic eruptions in Washington and simmering hot springs in Japan. The 33-year-old is having her first solo museum show in the US this spring, at the Orange County Museum of Art. On a recent afternoon, Su gave the Guardian a tour of her studio, in a light-filled former furniture factory in LA's arts district, and showed us her meticulously organized shelves of pigment materials. The jars of bright powders, and drawers of rocks, shells and minerals, are also a map of her influences and her adventures, which stretch around the world. There is Taiwanese sulfur, from the town where her father grew up. Azurite from Hunan, China, 'the main blue color for thousands of years used in Chinese paintings', which she contrasted to 'the famous ultramarine blue that's used in medieval western oil painting'. And then there are the more recent stones she has collected, on her trips to historic locations across the American west. Su is interested in materials that come with their own deep histories, and that has led her into an unexpected American subculture, one very different from her art school networks from the UK and Taiwan. In the US, the painter has become a 'rock hound'. Today, Su welcomes visitors to her Los Angeles studio with a brisk 'shoes off, please'. Sunlight streams through high windows on to old wooden floors, and big canvases of works in progress lean up against the walls. Su does not use paint on rectangles: her canvases are uniquely curved, and sometimes propped up against gallery walls on handcrafted stands that look like weathered wood or stones. On a studio wall next to the door, there's a massive landscape of a road winding through caverns along the seacoast. It looks, at first glance, like an image of California's Highway 1, perhaps of a beautiful stretch near Big Sur. But Su explains it's actually an image of the coastline on the opposite side of the Pacific: not the west coast of the US, but the east coast of Taiwan. Su's work is full of these kinds of mirrorings – visual and geographical connections that show the long interplay of trade and culture around the Pacific. Her tall white shelves of pigments and pigment materials are part science laboratory, part work of art in themselves. She has drawers of carefully organized rocks and crystals, and jars of ground pigments labeled with their materials, and where and the year when they were collected. Su's choice to make her own pigments is rooted in her early training in Chinese ink painting in Taiwan. Back then, when students arrived at the studio, 'you take off your shoes, and then grind your ink. And we did that every day fresh,' she said. The ink, made with animal hair glue, would go bad quickly, so it couldn't be used the next day. 'There was this kind of ritual to it.' She sees her use of color as deeply grounded in the geography of her youth – something she did not realize until her time in London, where she trained in western oil painting techniques. 'All my classmates were like, 'Your usage of your palettes is very vibrant,' Su recalled. 'If you live where I grew up, which is subtropical, you don't see so many shadows. The sun is directly hitting the ground. You see vibrant color, in food, in houses and in signage,' she said. 'And I felt that was not just a choice, not just a celebration of the form. It's actually what we see. If you are closer to the equator, you see stronger color. 'I wonder, growing up around the Pacific, if there is a type of geological DNA that's imprinted in the landscape, that people thought was stylization, but it actually wasn't – it was like a pinpoint of where you are.' Here in the American west, in contrast, 'everything's so dry and crisp', she said. '[Georgia] O'Keefe – she painted the mountains so sharp, and that's because there's no water in the air, so you get to see really far.' Su is interested in the geopolitics of color itself, and the ways that the history of geography, trade, government and empire shape the fundamental building blocks of artists' craft. In England, certain famous paint shades are inseparable from the history of empire, like JMW Turner's 'Indian Yellow', made from the urine of cows in India that were only fed mango leaves, or 'Mummy Brown', made from ground-up human remains. In Taiwan, the white paint Su used when she studied Chinese painting was made from powdered Japanese oyster shells. She would learn later that students in mainland China tended to use lead white paint, not the gofun white she always used. 'The Chinese painting in Taiwan has this huge influence by Japan because they colonized us for 50 years,' she said. '[The pigments] are all white, but if you look into the DNA of it, it tells you more than artists want to tell you.' The United States, where Su has lived for two years, is a more challenging place to collect natural painting materials than other countries. In Shanghai, she would simply take her backpack and a trowel to a local park in the evening, and fill it with dirt to make into pigment. But in the US, she said, much of the land is private, and national parks don't allow digging for rocks and minerals. Americans can also be aggressive in protecting their private property. 'So I have to figure out what's the zone that I can do what I do, and not get shot,' Su said. On land that falls under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, 'you're allowed to collect 25 pounds a day in one spot, which is plenty', Su said. But much of her stone harvesting ends up being from a patchwork of privately owned mines across the west, which allow visitors to dig up a small quantity of stones for a flat fee. Most of these mines have websites, and she can set up a visit over email. The mine owners tend to be interesting characters, she said. She met a 70-year-old man who owns a blueberry azurite mine and lives in a cabin he built on his own land. Another mine owner took her and her partner camping up on the remote ridge where his mine is located. He works there many days a year, mining rare minerals by hand. To research where to go, Su has joined gem and mineral enthusiast societies, gone on group expeditions and learned from retired geologists, many of whom have worked for mining companies for decades. She and her partner are usually the only Asian people on these adventures, Su said. But the quirky characters she has met across the west also defy simple stereotypes. The people who stake a claim and own small private mines tend to be college-educated, she said, since it takes a lot of geologic knowledge to understand where to mine. One of the most historically resonant California mines she's visited is the Pala Chief mine near San Diego, which she believes was a source of the California tourmaline that Tiffany & Co sold to China's Empress Dowager Cixi, who amassed a large collection of the gems. Cixi 'believed like Chinese people generally believe that tourmaline, this mineral, has the power of purifying and then getting rid of the bad energy', Su said. The empress, who ruled during the final years of the Qing dynasty, faced huge geopolitical pressures, Su said, and she channeled some of that struggle into an obsessive collection of gems and minerals. Today, it's possible to pay a fee and visit the Pala Chief mine to collect a day's worth of tourmaline and other minerals, which Su has done. She brings a pick and a bucket, and a mine representative accompanies her into the mine. The Pala Chief tourmaline she obtained is of relatively low quality, compared with the rare watermelon tourmaline Tiffany sold to Empress Cixi. But for Su, the San Diego tourmaline still carries the intertwined Pacific history of California mining, the last imperial dynasty of China, and the Chinese belief in the spiritual properties of gems and crystals that she sees as influencing the popularity of crystals in California today. The way that Su works these historically significant pigments into her art is not always literal. The tourmaline did not become, for instance, a portrait of Empress Cixi, or an illustration of the mine itself. Instead, Su ground the Pala Chief tourmaline into powder and used it to paint the ocean on a massive landscape of the California coastline called Bone Caves. It's a soothing image of waves and bone-like shells, with the Pacific Ocean as the connector between so many different eras and empires. The white pigment in the painting, she said, is made from bleached coral, 'the coral skeletons created through global warming'. Other times, though, Su makes more straightforward connections. A recent painting of an ongoing underground fire in a Utah coal seam uses paint made from coal, sulfur and also from cinnabar, another 'toxic fiery material' that people in imperial China had used to create a medicine they hoped would make them immortal, but that instead poisoned them. Su has also repeatedly painted Mount Saint Helens, an active volcano in the Pacific north-west. One of the pigments that she uses is helenite, pieces of green glass made by humans from the volcanic dust from Mount Saint Helens' eruptions. Helenite, first created by accident, has become a popular material for jewellery and souvenirs. Su buys bags of it and grinds it up. 'I love this commodification,' she said. 'Because if you look at it under a microscope, it's glass. But through marketing and different crystallization formation, it became something much more valuable. And now it's powder again.' Some of her materials are soft enough to be ground and mixed by hand in the studio. Others require the use of a big, noisy machine, the kind used to grind materials for ceramic glazes. The transformation from raw rock to paint often requires many steps. Dirt has to be sifted out and and the material purified. A chunk of Chinese azurite, for instance, has greens, blues and yellows mixed together, which Su first has to carefully separate out. One of her favorite natural materials from California is mica. 'After you grind it, it becomes a shimmer that people use in eyeshadow. There's something very gentle about it. If you're applying makeup, or you're coloring things, it's an act of care, and making things better. And the mica itself is also so flaky – it's not aggressive.' But she also often paints with sulfur, a pigment with a more dangerous edge. 'It's one of the brightest natural yellows that I can get, so I love using it,' Su said of the flammable material that reeks of rotten eggs. 'And every time I use it, it's like the studio smells so funny. The painting smells so funny. And it's kind of combustible, too.' Su has ground up pearls to make white paint, and even used diamond powder, the kind sold to polish metal. The diamond powder is probably 'the most expensive' material she has used: a few grams cost about $50, though she also uses silver and copper. Her pigment collection includes a meteorite that her friend gave her, and pale pigments made from cowrie shells, which were once used as currency. On her travels, Su has made it through customs in the airports with some very weird materials in her bag. One of the strangest in recent memories is a collection of plastic water bottles filled with mineral-infused water from the different Japanese baths she visited. However, her most precious pigments are not the most expensive ones, but the most difficult to obtain, like the sequence of pastel colors ground from shells she picked up on the beach in Taiwan – shells that she has realized are becoming increasingly rare. Other paint sources have more playful histories: one of her favorite sources of California dirt for earth-based pigments is on the San Andreas fault near Palm Springs, close to where one of the Star Wars movies was filmed. Su used this earth to demonstrate how she makes her paints, pouring out the cleaned and purified California dirt on to the glass-topped cart she uses to mix her pigments, then adding in walnut oil. 'You add the oil in gradually – look, the color just became much more intense,' she said, grinding the powder and the oil together. 'You have to have oil wrap around every single particle so the painting will age well.' Using natural materials as pigments can create issues for a painting over time, Su says. Colors can fade, or even change, from exposure to sunlight or from oxidation. But unlike the artists who see their work as a way to preserve images of youth and beauty from inevitable decay, Su is curious, even open, to the ways the environment may affect her paintings over time. 'When I think what happens to paintings nowadays – you don't know, 300 years later, what's in the air,' she said. 'It's really interesting: climate change and paint. What will happen there?' 'I don't know why I like that,' she said. 'It's something bigger than you, you know?' The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian's coverage is editorially independent.
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Heidi Zuckerman to step down from Orange County Museum of Art's exec role
Heidi Zuckerman — who helmed the transition of the Orange County Museum of Art from a regional exhibition space to a capstone institution in Costa Mesa's Segerstrom Center for the Arts — announced this week she will step down as chief executive in December. The Laguna Beach resident plans to focus on HZ Inc., a media platform she created in 2019 and through which she has created 166 installments of the podcast 'About Art,' probing the insight, minds and lives of makers and curators of art. 'I have the highest degree of respect for the institution and am its biggest cheerleader,' Zuckerman said of OCMA in an interview Thursday, adding that she will offer her assistance as the board conducts a search for her successor. 'I am staying in the community and will continue to support museums however I can.' Her decision comes as she nears the end of a five-year contract with the nonprofit organization that, in 2021, brought her to Orange County following an earlier stint as head of the Aspen Art Museum, where she led a similar architectural transformation seven years earlier. Officials broke the news in a release Wednesday, praising Zuckerman as a trailblazer who significantly contributed a 'legacy of institutional growth, impactful exhibitions, free access to art and community engagement that has solidified the museum's position as a premier cultural destination.' 'Her dedication to bringing world-class exhibitions and thought-provoking programming to our community has elevated OCMA to unprecedented heights,' David Emmes II, chair of the museum's board of trustees said. 'Though it is always bittersweet when someone decides to embark on a new chapter, we are excited to witness the great strides Heidi will continue to make in expanding access to the arts.' Since the 53,000-square-foot museum, designed by Morphosis Architects under Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne, opened to the public in October 2022, the site has welcomed more than 500,000 visitors and has vowed to offer free admission for its first 10 years there, thanks to a donation from Newport Beach's Lugano Diamonds. Zuckerman, who has long advocated for expanding public access to the arts, says she has been heartened to see the public's embrace of the museum, not only as a place where people can have transformative experiences with art, but as an important community gathering space. 'From the very beginning, I've said everyone is welcome, and I think we've done a great job of making people feel welcome here,' she said, describing the museum as a place where people can draw inspiration, find solace or connect with others. 'This is really one of the few places in contemporary society where people who have different values, different practices and approaches can literally rub shoulders with each other.'
