Fresno Art Museum exhibition reviews
The Fresno Art Museum features a robust lineup of exhibitions as part of its fall/winter season. Heather Parish recently spent some quality time with two of them: “Linda Lomahaftewa: The San Francisco Years, Paintings 1965 through 1972 and Recent Works 2008 through 2024”; and Eliana Saucedo’s “The Fruit of Life.” In these two reviews, Parish connects the lines between the shows.
Roots and Rainwater: Linda Lomahaftewa’s early explorations
There’s a wonderful sense of discovery woven through “Linda Lomahaftewa: The San Francisco Years, Paintings 1965 through 1972 and Recent Works 2008 through 2024,” now on view at the Fresno Art Museum and curated by Michele Ellis Pracy, Executive Director and Chief Curator. Named the Council of 100’s Distinguished Woman Artist for 2025, Lomahaftewa — a Hopi/Choctaw painter who’s been making art for more than sixty years — fills the museum’s Lobby and Concourse Galleries with work that’s bold, playful, haunting, and deeply rooted in the land.
Pictured at top: Detail of Lomahaftewa’s Untitled. 1965-1970. Oil and photo transfer on canvas.
The show pairs paintings from her early career, when she left Arizona for art school and teaching in San Francisco, with more recent pieces, and the contrast is fascinating. Her 1960s and ’70s work splits into almost two different worlds. On one side, there are striking geometric abstractions, all strong shapes and bold colors, hinting at Indigenous patterns and iconography. On the other, there’s a kind of x-ray curiosity: figures built from eyeballs, teeth, and hands, landscapes made from plants and farmland, even shapes that feel like organs or cells. In paintings like “Sustenance” (circa 1965-70), human and plant life layer together like puzzle pieces, forming an abstract ecosystem that feels both microscopic and cosmic.
And yet, just when you think you know what to expect, the tone shifts. Other works from the same era dissolve into fluidity — colors swirling like chocolate in milk, textures built from glue and paint drips that blur forms, as if looking through a rainy windowpane. These paintings explore not the structure of worlds, but how they merge and bleed into one another. “Unknown Spirits” (1965), a pale, almost ethereal piece, suggests a snowy mountain perched above the invisible root system that sustains it, ghostly figures hovering nearby as if they’ve never truly left. Another, the darker “Quiet Land, Warm Land” (circa 1965), drifts from night into dawn over a village. Doorways glow faintly with firelight, and a single bright window opens like a portal to another realm. Lomahaftewa herself calls these figures ghosts, not haunting the land but living within it.
Her newer work, displayed in the Concourse Gallery, carries that same dual spirit of precision and wonder. Small pieces rich with Indigenous patterns, beadwork, and symmetrical designs reveal a playfulness that’s as joyful as it is thoughtful. Even in the earliest photo-transfer pieces, there’s a tenderness — a sense of place and memory that feels almost fragile.
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What emerges from this exhibition is the portrait of an artist who’s never been afraid to experiment. Lomahaftewa’s canvases jump between order and chaos, interior and exterior, spirit and soil. And through it all, there’s a remarkable sense of curiosity.
That spirit of exploration makes the show feel very alive. Whether she’s piecing together the hidden layers of the natural world or letting colors run wild across the surface, Lomahaftewa invites us to see not just the world on the surface, but the roots, ghosts, and echoes that sustain it. Her paintings remind us that everything has an interior life: mountains, villages, even the human body itself.
“Linda Lomahaftewa” shows at the Fresno Art Museum through Jan. 11, 2026.
Fruitful Abundance: Eliana Saucedo’s Paintings Spill Over with Life
What is it about fruit and flowers that keeps artists—and art lovers—returning to them across centuries? Their connection to fertility and abundance? Their fragile, fleeting beauty? Their irresistible color? Local painter Eliana Saucedo doesn’t answer these questions directly in “The Fruit of Life”, her exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum, but she doesn’t need to. Instead, her paintings create an environment where viewers can feel those answers for themselves, lingering between the visceral and the ineffable.
Curated by Sarah Vargas, this exhibition fills the Moradian Gallery with vibrancy. Each canvas bursts forward with gleaming hues: the glistening skin of a lemon, the burnished blush of a nectarine, the rich, clustered gravity of pomegranate seeds. The realism in Saucedo’s brushwork is uncanny at first glance—one could mistake some pieces for photographs. Yet almost immediately, the images breathe into something more. In “My Mother’s Still Life” (2024), for example, detail deepens into a meditation: every leaf, peel, shadow and fold of lace opening onto the inner wonder of a dwelling place.
Many of Saucedo’s canvases hover between still life and portraiture. In her human portraits, the torsos of her mother and Frida Kahlo stand quietly before backdrops that erupt into riots of flora: cactus blooms and curling ferns brimming with tenacious energy. The suggestion is clear: the lives of these women spill into the world around them, feeding it as surely as fruit feeds the body. These aren’t just portraits; they are visual poems of feminized strength, tributes to women as sustainers of both culture and spirit.
The gallery itself pulses with vitality. Saucedo’s color and composition create a sensation of abundance, as if one has stepped into an orchard nearly ready for harvest. And yet, Vargas’s curatorial decision to place works of decay—shriveling fruit, darkening rinds—at the gallery’s center keeps the story honest. Surrounded by the bounty of life, the viewer is reminded that all ripeness turns and that entropy touches everything, whether or not its potential is fully realized. Far from a morbid note, this juxtaposition makes the living canvases on the walls feel all the more lush, urgent, and generous.
That duality between sensuality and wholesomeness, between nourishment and loss, makes “The Fruit of Life” more than an exercise in technical skill. Saucedo’s paintings channel centuries of still-life traditions, nodding to Dutch Golden Age compositions while grounding them firmly in the Central San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural and familial soil. Her homage to Kahlo ties her to a lineage of women artists who used fruit as symbol and body alike.
To sit in this gallery is to feel surrounded, almost fed, by layers of color and texture. It is one of the most pleasant spaces I’ve entered in recent months—not just beautiful, but sustaining.
“The Fruit of Life: New Paintings by Eliana Saucedo” shows at the Fresno Art Museum through Jan. 11, 2026.
Michele Ellis Pracy
Please note: the Linda Lomahaftewa exhibition is curated by Michele Ellis Pracy, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Fresno Art Museum.
Heather Parish
Apologies for the oversight; I’ve corrected the omission. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
Michele Prscy
Thank you for acknowledging FAM Curators as we work for at least a year on our concepts, selections of artworks, and scholarship before an exhibition opens. Your reviews are insightful and will encourage visits to FAM.
Steph
Thanks for the great preview/review.
I’d love to read an interview with the curators. What makes them tick?