Current Exhibitions

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Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition 

Main Gallery, February 13 – May 8, 2025 

Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition considers the use of abstraction to investigate the nature of thought, experience, and the senses. Exploring abstraction as a language that spans lived experience, scientific inquiry, and diverse epistemological frameworks, Inner Vision examines a range of abstract representations of cognition and sensation including emotional states, dreams, hallucinations, mystical experience, and neurological phenomena. While their visual dialects vary, each artist investigates the complexities of inner perception and sensation. Some works offer critical perspectives on cultural signifiers to convey belief systems. Others examine altered states of consciousness through abstracted scientific models. Still others investigate the ways color and form activate personal and collective memory. Many of the works explore and engage perceptual awareness. Together, they demonstrate the potential of abstraction to understand and communicate the full spectrum of lived experience. 

Featured artists: Bhakti Baxter, Terri Friedman, Rema Ghuloum, Dennis Koch, Robin Mitchell, Bridget Mullen, Angeline Rivas, Adee Roberson, Barbara Rossi, and Vian Sora 

Bruce Conner: Lithographs 

Main Gallery Corridor, February 13 – May 8, 2025 

With this group of lithograph prints, artist Bruce Conner (1933-2008) reproduced a series of highly detailed but fading images he originally created using felt-tip pens. The nine prints on display explore the act of perception by prompting prolonged, up-close viewing. The meticulous black and white compositions recall mandala forms as well as microscopic imagery. The selected prints on view are part of the Museum’s permanent collection. 

Jodie Mack: Glistening Thrills 

Mini Gallery, February 13 – May 8, 2025 

Jodie Mack’s handmade collage films blend techniques of abstraction and optical science to create richly layered perceptual tapestries. Glistening Thrills is an approximately 9-minute audiovisual film set to play on a loop for the duration of the exhibition. The gallery setting facilitates an immersive experience that builds upon the themes of the Main Gallery exhibition, Inner Vision: Abstraction and Cognition. 

Brittany Mojo: A Vocabulary of Objects 

Community Gallery, February 13 – May 8, 2025 

Brittany Mojo: A Vocabulary of Objects offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s studio practice. The exhibition features dozens of hand-molded ceramic pieces—among them dog bones, kitchen spoons, birds, bottles, eggs, and throwing dice—which the artist sculpts while conceptualizing and building a larger piece. Mojo describes the small objects as “little memory palaces” that accumulate in her studio, taking on new meanings and associations over time. Rooted in personal memory and nostalgia, Mojo’s diaristic vocabulary of objects speaks to the idiomatic relationships we form with our surroundings. A large stoneware piece, Plumb Bob (2025), anchors the installation. 

Brittany Mojo received a BFA in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach in 2013. 

 

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Laurie Steelink: A Love Supreme 

Notes to Future Selves: A Community Engagement Project 

Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Gallery, Ongoing 

Notes to Future Selves: A Community Engagement Project is a participatory exhibition that invites the community to create artwork in response to the prompt: What do you want the future of your community to look like? Participants are given the option to display their artwork in the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Gallery for the duration of the exhibition.  

Inspired by the Museum’s 50th anniversary in 2024 and this year’s 75th anniversary of California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), Notes to Future Selves embraces these milestones as a powerful moment for collective reflection. The exhibition celebrates the CSULB community’s diversity of voices, perspectives, experiences, and visions for the future.

Notes to Future Selves will be updated weekly as artwork submissions are received from the community.

Learn how to participate in the exhibition.

In conjunction with Notes to Future Selves, a section of the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Gallery features selections from the Museum’s permanent collection that engage introspective practices, such as recording everyday events, experiences, or observations in a sketchbook or journal or expressing one’s thoughts and feelings through personal iconography. Featured artists include Hannelore Baron, Carolyn Kleefeld, Joyce Treiman, and Beth Van Hoesen.   

Selections from the Permanent Collection  

Archives Room, Ongoing 

A selection of artwork from Kleefeld Contemporary's permanent collection is displayed in the Archives Room on an ongoing basis. 

The Archives Room is available to reserve for research requests. To make a reservation, please fill out a request at least two weeks in advance.  

Reserve the Archives Room. 

INSIGHTS 2025