While Spring has called many Southern Californians out to nearby scrublands to observe Superblooms, we can stay right here in Santa Ana and find a world of color and beauty thanks to our vibrant arts community. But we can't just sit back and appreciate the arts, we have to support them and this month brings several exciting opportunities to engage local artists in community projects that give them visibility and enshrine them as part of our local arts legacy.

The Santa Ana Artists Village is home to dozens of galleries, artist studios, arts institutions and arts events like the monthly DTSA First Saturday Artwalk. If you've ever walked the Promenade or adjoining streets, you may have noticed around 40 street pole banners demarcating the area. Dowtown Santa Ana is refreshing these giant outdoor banners and local artists have the opportunity to submit their work to be on display outdoors. Please visit the Artists Village Banners Project for details and to submti your design. If you have questions, please contact the project curator, Andrea Harris.

The Painter’s Room is proud to present “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled”, an exhibition of
paintings and drawings by Katelynn Mills + Child Workshop. Engaging with a highly generative
mode of creating, Katelynn Mills has applied her systems theory, The Cybernetics of Painting, to
her studio practice and approach to education. For this show, Somewhere I Have Never
Traveled,” she takes images from the history of painting, and runs it through a system of
organization in which the picture is divided into ~50 to 70 cells. That system is then run through
a second ‘system’: children. Children contribute a strong element of indeterminacy and chance
due to their wildly different interpretations of color and scale as they work on their respective
cells. The final paintings, which take 1-3 months to complete by a workshop of 5-13 year-olds,
are then assembled after many hours of mystery and happy confusion. Adding a sort of
feedback loop to this exhibition, Mills will also be showing select closely observed drawings of
her kindergartner’s paintings as well as other works made outside the workshop which have
influenced, and been influenced, by the workshop pieces.

​Though the theory behind this project takes on a hard, critical edge, the viewer may not readily
perceive it upon first viewing. It is through the poetic nature and “serious play” of the process of
making these paintings that the ‘child-magic’ within each of us may be activated. Further, this
project speaks to the significance of trusting in the unpredictability of the creative process. It
requires an abundance of Good Faith for such young students to blindly follow the Teacher’s
instruction: work very hard and accurately on a strange, abstract composition for months on end
without any real perception of what all that focus will amount to. Similarly, it takes a great leap of
faith for an instructor to lead a group of over 100 children in such a state of organized chaos.
This project reveals the joy and beauty of traveling beyond the pre-determined.