Huntington Beach Art Center examines portraits of all types with ‘Personal Data’
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What is a portrait?
Is it only a face portrayed on canvas or can it be something more abstract?
Many of the artists featured at the current Huntington Beach Art Center exhibit certainly believe the latter.
“Personal Data: What Is A Portrait?” runs through Nov. 8 and is the center’s big fall show coinciding with its 30th anniversary.
“I was really intrigued with the idea that human beings are wired to recognize a human face in the first weeks of our lives,” said Dan Faltz, the center’s senior cultural arts supervisor.
He added viewers tend to look at animals and inanimate objects in anthropomorphic terms.
“When we look at something that’s not a traditional portrait, like something that’s abstract or something that’s a sculpture, are we looking for that human thing?” he posited. “Are we trying to make order out of that artistic chaos? Also, do we create portraits from our memories?”
The portraits by 28 artists are constructed from a variety of mediums: family portraits, portraits of a culture, portraits of shared experience.
Jackie Castillo, a Los Angeles-based artist, has a pile of bricks for her piece, “On The Avenues, All I Have Wished For Will Be.” On top of the bricks are double-negative exposure photographs that she said were created in Anaheim, her hometown, and where her parents still live.
Castillo, who studied photography at Orange Coast College, also spends time documenting working-class Southern California neighborhoods.
“What I think is meaningful to me about that photograph is that it’s a photograph that merges two views of working-class homes that are next to each other,” Castillo said. “It really sort of suggests a little rise of a foundation, but also I think a metaphorical rise of an ambition. I think a lot about the hope for stability, joy and material and psychological betterment of the working class, that’s sort of what my practice is based in.
“This photograph really became a portrait of that yearning, and that joy that comes from what imaging what could be, as it is reflected in the built environment.”
Another very visible piece as one enters the exhibit is “M/other,” by Kendalle Getty. It features a human head but also qualities from other creatures.
“Is this mother a fierce protector or is this mother a monster?” Faltz said.
The exhibit’s curator, Steve Galindo, said that “Personal Data” was at least partially born from Felix González-Torres’ “candy works,” which feature large piles of candy. Audience members are invited to take pieces of the candy and the work will hence evolve throughout the show. Those pieces are meant to reflect the gradual depletion of Gonzáles-Torres’ partner, Ross Laycock, who eventually died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991.
Many of the pieces in “Personal Data” are also personal.
“The genres are mixing,” Galindo said. “It’s not so black and white anymore. What’s exciting is to have memory in these objects, and seeing a melding of genres to create new bodies of work, to expand in essence the genre of portraiture but also just art in general.”
Well-known street artist Ricky Sencion, better known as “Little Ricky,” contributed a pair of works featuring characters as anthropomorphic sheep.
“He’s re-imagining himself and the people around him as sheep, which I think is really interesting,” Faltz said.
The Little Ricky portraits do well to highlight a theme of the exhibit, which is challenging perceptions of how we see ourselves and others through art.
“Our identities are really formed by a multitude of things,” Castillo said. “Not just what we look like, but where we grew up, our material realities. Our class really kind of creates a structure for who we get to be in the world, and I think a lot of the work touches on that.”
Faltz said the center will continue to feature plenty of community exhibits, but “Personal Data” is a large-scale, contemporary show that also serves a purpose.
“We wanted to remind the county that you can go to Huntington Beach Art Center just like you can go to [Orange County Museum of Art], or the Kleefeld or the Bowers [Museum],” he said. “We can have large-scale art here as well.”
An artist discussion is scheduled for 1 p.m. on Nov. 8. .
The center’s gallery hours are noon to 8 p.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, noon to 6 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays.
Updates
10:21 a.m. Oct. 10, 2025: This article has been updated with a new date for the exhibit’s artist discussion.
