The second artist I want to share from our visit to the Oceanside Museum of art is Faiya Fredman.

At age 93, La Jolla artist Faiya Fredman well deserves being called the matriarch of San Diego's contemporary art scene, which is how Mark-Elliott Lugo, who curated this new exhibition, refers to her. The show features 70 of her notable works from the past 20 years, including large-scale steel sculptures, watercolors, lenticular prints, and mixed-media pieces, many of them created especially for this exhibit.


Since 1951, when she graduated from UCLA's Visual Arts Department, Fredman has been experimenting with a wide range of materials and techniques. "The Steel Goddess" refers to her continuing high level of fearless exploration as well as the steel goddess figures she began creating in the 1990s, inspired by her travels in Greece and Turkey and her lifelong fascination with ancient civilizations. I like this woman!


I wish you could see the magic of this artwork, part of the Botanicals series. It was made using a very cool technique called lenticular printing, a multi-step process used to produce printed images with the illusion of depth or the ability to change as the image is viewed from different angles. WOW.
I love being surprised. Our visit to the Oceanside Museum of Art was a pleasant surprised indeed.