When the World is Beautifully Strange

June 26 – November 9, 2025

Visitors can explore eight works installed on the grounds of Montalvo from 8 am to sunset. An additional thirteen works will be on view inside the Cottage Gallery, Thursday through Sunday from 11 am to 3 pm, or by appointment.

What if we are each beautiful, even if we are strange? In this moment, when the world feels chaotic, when the truth seems distorted, and we face policies that seek to divide and diminish us, we need art more than ever. At its best, art moves us to wonder and see the world through a different lens, imagining the possibilities of what can be. Art challenges us to test boundaries and search for wisdom. Art can also encourage us to self-define and validate our existence. When the World is Beautifully Strange features twelve contemporary artists who work with clay – stretching the properties of this earth-bound medium to create fearless new forms that will intentionally draw viewers into their worlds with humor, play, and even strange motifs.

Curators of the exhibition: Kelly Sicat, Director of the Lucas Artists Program, and Judy Dennis, Assistant Curator and Program Manager.

What if we are each beautiful, even if we are strange? In this moment, when the world feels chaotic, when the truth seems distorted, and we face policies that seek to divide and diminish us, we need art more than ever. At its best, art moves us to wonder and see the world through a different lens, imagining the possibilities of what can be. Art challenges us to test boundaries and search for wisdom. Art can also encourage us to self-define and validate our existence. When the World is Beautifully Strange features twelve contemporary artists who work with clay – stretching the properties of this earth-bound medium to create fearless new forms that will intentionally draw viewers into their worlds with humor, play, and even strange motifs.

Embracing the surreal, Woody de Othello, Linda Nguyen Lopez, and Cathy Lu bring inanimate objects to life to encourage us to bend our minds. Purposely distorting and warping everyday objects, Othello teasingly suggests that we may be so deeply buried in our daily concerns that we can’t truly see or hear each other. His cheeky titles often underscore his message to slow down, be present, take time to listen to each other, and be chill. Othello’s clay maquette for seeing both sides (2025) will be on view, along with the life-size bronze that was recently generously gifted to Montalvo by the Lipman Family Foundation.

Lopez resists the notion that objects are inanimate by imbuing them with color, texture, and a tactile presence that invites interaction and wonderment. Her favorite motifs, dust furries, are marvels of technique and form, bringing home the point that beauty is often overlooked in the mundane. Lopez’s clay sculptures suggest that different creatures can coexist in harmony with each other.

Cathy Lu’s Peach 7 (Nails) and Untitled (Peach Incense Holder) are the very embodiment of the strange and unexpected. As symbols of longevity and fertility, peaches are revered in Chinese culture, but what does it represent when the flesh of this fruit is embedded with nails, or studded with seed pods and sticks of incense? Does its strangeness draw a deeper look?

Leaning into humor and play, artists Timna Naim, Nathan Lynch, Niki Ford, and Wanxin Zhang construct works that invite social interaction and dialogue in real-time. Naim created five pillars of play where visitors may add their own idiosyncratic pieces to this ever-expanding sculpture.

Lynch’s ceramic water fountain is a bravura installation with a tongue-in-cheek title, A Place for Meeting Strangers (2025). It invites everyone – friends as well as strangers – to drink together. Lynch received the Lucas Artist Program’s 2025 Marcus Commissioning Prize to create this site-specific work for the exhibition. Its sensuous form traces back to the artist’s teacher and mentor, Kenneth Price, who is well-known for his abstract, curvilinear ceramic sculptures.

Ford’s whimsical and colorful figure on a raised pedestal encourages dialogues about non-conforming bodies and identities, while Zhang’s joyous self-portrait, Color Face (2013), part of Montalvo’s permanent collection, draws the gaze by combining seemingly disparate Eastern and Western influences into a unified composition. Zhang claims his authentic self as a California artist by evoking the painted faces of traditional Chinese opera characters in a manner that reflects the artistic influences of Robert Arneson, Nathan Olivera, and Stephen de Staebler. In this playful ceramic bust, Zhang makes the point that everyone has the right to self-definition.

Defying gravity and challenging the sculptural possibilities of clay, Annabeth Rosen and Linda Sormin each create dreamlike alternate realities. Rosen’s abstract assemblages, Part 11 and Part 12 (2013-2018), utilize newly created materials as well as remnants, broken pieces, and leftover clay to create compositions that are even more compelling and resilient. These are lessons that might also be extrapolated and applied to strengthen our social fabric. At the other end of the spectrum, Sormin’s ethereal sculptures defy the earthbound properties of clay. Are we fascinated by it because it is fragile, or because it reminds us of our own fragility?

Transforming nature’s forms to create wonder about what lies beneath the surface,artists Ashwini Bhat, Elisa D’Arrigo, and Kristi Chan excavate universal mysteries in search of wisdom. Inspired by termite mounds, sophisticated structures that are worshipped as sacred shrines throughout Southeast Asia, Bhat’s AGNIJA, Born of Fire (2023), models an architecture created collectively to generate dialogues about culture, community, climate change, and species mutuality. D’Arrigo and Chan favor biomorphic forms in their work. D’Arrigo uses these forms to express states of mind, while Chan is intrigued by organisms’ evolution to survive and even thrive in threatening environments. In her work, she mines the ecosystem for answers to the question of how can we achieve the strength necessary to protect ourselves, yet remain vulnerable and open, capable of giving and receiving love?

Socrates said, “Wisdom begins with wonder.” The strangeness of art at first glance may charm. If we are open and curious, art has the ability to transport us to other places limited only by our imaginations, to inspire us to dream without boundaries, and quite possibly, to change the trajectories of our lives. With this exhibition, we aim to encourage you, dear viewers, to consider different worlds – ones in which we are each beautiful in our own individual and strange ways.

Curators of the exhibition: Kelly Sicat, Director of the Lucas Artists Program, and Judy Dennis, Assistant Curator and Program Manager.

Media resources: explore our comprehensive Press Kit.

Related Programming:

Montalvo Funk, a FREE COMMUNITY FESTIVAL celebrating the exhibition, will take place on Friday, July 18^th, from 6 pm to 10 pm, at Montalvo Arts Center. This community event will feature music, dancing, live performances and artist engagements. Food trucks and a no-host bar will be available on site.

NOTE: All parking will be at West Valley College with a free shuttle to and from Montalvo.