Artists
Venice has been home to many artists whose creativity has shaped the neighborhood’s identity and spirit. Venice Open Studios continues this tradition by fostering connection, collaboration, and community, ensuring that art remains at the heart of Venice Beach’s cultural life.
Sandrine Rose Abessera
Sandrine Rose Abessera‘s practice is intuitive, layering fragments of ephemera, photographs, and daily life into assemblages rephotographed on wood, linen, and canvas. Rooted in memory and symbolism, her works function as visual essays—rebuses of coded imagery evoking personal and collective narratives. Inspired since childhood by art museums in Paris, she now creates in Los Angeles, balancing intimacy with monumentality.
Ned Evans
Born in Burbank, California in 1950, with an MFA from UC Irvine in 1973, Ned Evans has lived in Venice, California since the early 1970s. Working primarily in painting in acrylic and mixed media on canvas, he has also spent years exploring photography, collage, and mixed media sculptural reliefs. He has shown throughout the United States and Europe. While his work is unquestionably influenced by the southern California landscape, the contours and colors of the sea, surf, and shore, ultimately and inevitably, he is re-constructing and building edifices and foundations, on top of which exist the nuances of illusion and light.
Born in Santa Monica in 1976, Alejandro Gehry graduated in 1998 with a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also a teacher of illustration and painting at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. Gehry has primarily worked in oils on a large-scale. Honing in on his skills and aesthetic development, he finds himself pushing against societal boundaries. Gehry currently lives and works in Venice.
Linda Jacobson
Linda Jacobson, a Los Angeles-born painter based in Venice, CA since the 90’s, makes lyrical abstracted landscapes inspired by mysticism, shamanism, and meditation. She also incorporates Jungian psychology and dreamwork. Her flowing, light-filled paintings embody the poetic movement of life and the essential energy of nature. Exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous collections, Jacobson has taught at Otis College of Art, UCLA Extension and leads transformative art workshops worldwide and locally.
Patrick Johnston
Patrick Johnston discovered ceramics in kindergarten, when clay scraps first squished between his fingers and lit a lifelong passion. That spark carried him through a RISD degree and into a career creating custom designs for restaurants and hotels. Today, he shares that joy at Venice Beach’s Temple of Mediclaytion, teaching wheel-throwing classes five nights a week.
Charles George Martone
Charles Martone is a woodworker drawn to the creative process where art meets tools, techniques, textures and problem solving. His work ranges from furniture to abstract sculptures. Balancing multiple types of projects he is able to surf between precise furniture and the abstract flow of a sculpture. Each piece becomes a tactile exploration between grain, weight and joinery, transforming wood into flow with a unique expressions of form.
Growing up in Colorado, John Mooney first worked in the glass medium at Pomona College, Claremont, California (BA Philosophy '86). He indulged his interests in art classes along with a glass blowing class. The path led to Venice. Apprenticeship for a year, then 10 years full time assisting/blowing glass (Venice/Santa Monica/Inglewood). John founded Moonlight Glass on Hampton Drive, 1996. Since building/turning the glass furnace on he's been improving his craft, exploring ideas, teaching glass class and selling creations in stores /galleries with multiple commissions over the years
Elizabeth Orleans
Elizabeth Orleans, BFA Tulane and MFA CCA, has created hand-built ceramic installations and sculptures in her Venice beach studio since 2008. Elizabeth is interested in breaking boundaries by creating architectural interventions. Her work explores memory, time, growth, and connections while transforming spaces into whimsical worlds. She also teaches Ceramic Social, a weekly class that invites the community to create together.
Kayla Witt is a Czech-Canadian painter based in Los Angeles, recognized for her spiritually reflective and symbolically vivid oil paintings. She engages the viewer on a quest to find purpose, physical and spiritual well-being, and self-actualization. Windows, storefronts, and symbols of wellness culture are frequent motifs for the artist, who transforms them into surreal meditations on the marketing of pain and healing. With an interest in Jungian psychology, folk tales, and mythology, Witt transforms the genre of still-life into one that is full of movement, theatricality, and narrative.
Arcane Space
ARCANE Space opened in the hub of LA’s Venice Beach in October 2017. Founded by Morleigh Steinberg and Frally Hynes, ARCANE Space presents the work of a wide range of artists – both those of note and those who may not yet have had the opportunity to exhibit. A portion of proceeds benefits local charities.