Laguna Art Museum gets city’s OK for Manfredi’s Art and Nature exhibit this fall

Laguna Art Museum will welcome Kim Manfredi as the headlining artist for its Art + Nature celebration this fall.

Art and Nature, a program that has explored the connection between artistic expression and environmental awareness, returns for a 14th year, from Nov. 1 through Nov. 9.

The museum commissioned Manfredi, an American painter known for work that moves between abstraction and representation, to bring her project, “A Flag Walk for Our Future,” as the featured outdoor installation for four days of the program, beginning Nov. 5.

Spanning an accessible, 0.7-mile stretch of Heisler Park and Main Beach Park, the installation will include four points of interest that will invite viewers to slow down and take in the landscape around them.

At each of those stops, a collection of four hand-painted and hand-gilded flags will be placed in descending height — from 18 feet to 9 feet — symbolizing surfboards stacked along the shore. The sites explore the intersection between art and space. Flag colors will change with the station and represent different times in a 24-hour period: dawn, day, dusk and night.

The proposed sites for flag displays included the Main Beach boardwalk, the Heisler Park gazebo and upper amphitheater area, and another at Diver’s Cove.

“Selecting the commissioned artist for Art + Nature is always a meaningful challenge,” Julie Perlin Lee, executive director of the museum, said in announcing the show’s featured artist. “It is an opportunity to invite audiences to engage deeply with pressing environmental issues through the lens of creativity. Kim Manfredi’s work is both poetic and materially powerful, and we look forward to the way her project will connect our community to the landscape of Laguna Beach.”

Manfredi holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees of fine arts from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Recent Southern California exhibits of hers have included “Bloom” at Patricia Sweetow Gallery and “Lady Lazarus” at Royale Projects in Los Angeles. She was also awarded the Torrance Art Museum fellowship in 2024.

The temporary public art installation was presented to the arts commission on April 27. Following the commission’s recommendation, the City Council approved the installation in a consent calendar item on June 23.

Manfredi’s “View with a Grain of Sand” will also be shown inside the museum, from Oct. 3 to Jan. 18.

In her artist statement, Manfredi said she aims for her work to “slow perception and create space for reflection.”

“I make paintings that move between abstraction and representation, using color, material, and surface to explore how social contracts mediate our experience of ourselves, each other, and the natural world,” Manfredi said. “I return repeatedly to the ideas of barrier and passageway as guiding metaphors. They are structures that both protect and restrict, separate and connect.

“Material is central to this inquiry. Texture, aerosol, and layered oil paint create surfaces that register resistance and permeability, allowing the painting itself to embody these tensions.”