With autumn only a few weeks away, it’s a good time to rediscover Cal State Long Beach’s Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum.
After closing over the summer to put in new installations, the space will reopen on Sept. 9 with three new exhibitions that approach contemporary art from different directions.
The museum’s fall lineup includes Carol Anne McChrystal’s “Export Quality,” Jacqueline Valenzuela’s “In Practice of Return” and Peter Carr’s “This Is How We Will All Be Saved,” giving visitors three distinct reasons to make a trip to campus this semester.
The exhibitions will remain on view through Dec. 10.
Admission to the museum is free, making it one of Long Beach’s more accessible places to encounter contemporary art.
Leading the fall lineup is McChrystal’s exhibit, which will occupy the museum’s Main Gallery.
“Export Quality” offers an opportunity to encounter the work of an artist whose practice is being given the museum’s largest exhibition space, with a title suggestive of ideas surrounding production, circulation and the ways objects move through the world.
In the Community Gallery and Glenn Court, Valenzuela’s “In Practice of Return” takes a different conceptual route. The idea of “return” is the exhibit’s organizing framework, suggesting questions of memory, place, history and revisiting.
These conceptual ideas carry particular weight in our contemporary time, when history seems to be repeating and repeating and repeating.
Then there is Carr’s exhibit, “This Is How We Will All Be Saved,” a smaller-scale exhibition installed in the museum’s Mini Gallery.
Even the title has a certain provocative quality, promising an exhibition that engages with ideas of salvation, collective fate or perhaps the grand promises people make about how the future might be fixed.
These three exhibitions are a useful reminder of what makes the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, 1250 N Bellflower Blvd., interesting as a Long Beach arts destination: the facility uses its spaces to put different artists, ideas and approaches to contemporary art into conversation.
For Long Beach residents who haven’t visited recently — or who haven’t participated in a great conversation in a long while — this fall reopening is a particularly good excuse to stop by the Kleefeld.
A public opening celebration is scheduled to take place from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 17, with music, entertainment, refreshments and art activities.
For more information, go to csulb.edu.
Punk tribute
Enjoy the rebellious, expansive spirit of punk rock at Alex’s Bar on Sunday, Aug. 23, with “Long Beach City Rockers: A Celebration of Joe Strummer & The Clash.”
Few bands made punk rock feel as expansive as The Clash. The British group could be furious and political one minute — and danceable the next.
Pennywise will be among the bands performing at Alex’s Bar on Sunday, Aug. 23, for “Long Beach City Rockers: A Celebration of Joe Strummer & The Clash.” Pennywise frontman Jim Lindberg performs at the BeachLife Festival in Redondo Beach, on Friday, May 2, 2025. (File photo by Michael Hixon/SCNG)
Alex’s Bar will host a tribute to these vibes at 2 p.m. Sunday, with the show assembled by the same artists behind the venue’s Bowie Night.
The timing is especially fitting: Joe Strummer, cofounder of The Clash, was born Aug. 21, 1952, making the event a belated birthday bash for one of punk’s most influential voices.
The afternoon will feature musicians from across Southern California’s punk and alternative scene, including members of Cowboy & Indian, The Adolescents, Pennywise, Manic Hispanic, The Crowd, The Decline, The Cineramas, CH3 and Sweet & Tender Hooligans.
DJs Polyester and Master Droog will also spin vinyl between sets.
Alex’s Bar, 2913 E Anaheim St., has long been a home for punk, alternative and underground music in our city, with its calendar regularly mixing local bands, touring acts, themed nights and tribute shows.
For more info about this punk rock birthday party, go to link.dice.fm/q164ab05c27b?pid=KAMPQZ6O.
‘Flesh, Memory, Becoming’
Does the body remember what the mind cannot?
That question sits at the center of “Flesh, Memory, Becoming,” a new exhibition at Long Beach City College that has brought together four Southern California artists whose work examines the complicated territory between physical form and inner experience.
On view at the LBCC Art Gallery until early next month, the exhibition features the works of Anna Azarov, Bianca Berrios, David Julia Castro and Hannah Justesen.
While their approaches and mediums differ, all four artists use the body as a way into questions of identity, emotion and self-perception.
The exhibition description frames their practices as an attempt to translate intangible emotional states into visual language, asking viewers to engage with the work on something deeper than a purely observational level.
Take Long Beach artist Azarov as an example. For her, the human body becomes a kind of emotional landscape.
Working primarily in photography and painting, Azarov is interested in giving physical form to feelings and psychological states that can be difficult to articulate in words. Gesture, movement and color become essential to her vocabulary, allowing the “body” to become a vehicle through which emotion can be understood.
Berrios, based in Huntington Beach, approaches similar questions through self-portraiture. Her work focuses on self-perception and identity, particularly the uncomfortable distance between the person we imagine ourselves to be and the person we actually see.
Painting becomes an act of observation — but also one of acceptance.
For Long Beach artist Castro, the key is in what he describes as the human body’s “discord and confusion.” He uses moments of unease to give visual form to the queer and the unstable.
Finally, there’s Justesen, another Long Beach artist, but one whose mixed-media practice combines painting, fiber arts and elements of sculpture. Her work explores womanhood and her relationship to the physical body, while also examining the ways our society influences self-identity.
Together, the four artists of “Flesh, Memory, Becoming” offer different perspectives on a shared idea: that inhabiting a body is an experience as psychological and social as it is physical.
The exhibition is on view at the LBCC Art Gallery, 4901 E. Carson St., Building K, through Sept. 3. An artist talk featuring the participating artists is scheduled to take place from 5 to 7 p.m. Sept. 3.
The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, with Friday and Saturday hours available by appointment.
For more information, go to lbcc.edu/arts/flesh-memory-becoming.