Jon Serl: As One, As Many

We are excited to announce our new exhibition, Jon Serl: As One, As Many, in our Mezzanine Gallery.  A former vaudeville performer, Hollywood voice actor, and gardener who reinvented himself as a painter after World War II, Jon Serl (1894–1993) spent decades in California pursuing an artistic life, particularly in San Juan Capistrano and Lake Elsinore.

In 1981, the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art) organized Psychological Paintings: The Personal Vision of Jon Serl, the artist’s first museum exhibition. Forty-five years later, Jon Serl: As One, As Many goes back in time to the beginning of Serl’s artistic journey, tracing his transformation from depicting the external world of rural Southern California to conjuring an interior landscape shaped by perception, imagination, and memory, evolving alongside the shifting cultural and social currents of the twentieth century.

Jon Serl: As One, As Many is organized by Ziying Duan, Assistant Curator.