Growing Up is continuing its look at Cabrillo Gallery as more than a place to see art. For parents, it can also be a place to introduce young people to the people who make it, teach it and keep making it themselves.
Cabrillo opens its fall exhibition season with Influencers: Art & Photography Faculty and Staff Exhibition, running now through Sept. 18. The reception is Saturday, Sept. 12, from 3-5pm, with an artists’ talk at 3:30pm.
Meet The People Behind The Art
The exhibition brings together work by current instructors and staff from Cabrillo’s Art Studio, Art Photography and Art History programs, along with retired full-time faculty. These are people who usually spend their working days helping students find their own ideas and develop the skills to express them. Here, students and visitors get to see what the teachers themselves make.
That makes the reception an especially good outing for a young photographer or artist. A teenager already carrying a camera everywhere can see that photography does not begin and end with the phone in a pocket. Cabrillo’s Art Photography program ranges from darkroom photography and alternative processes to digital photography, studio lighting and video.
But the invitation is just as open to the kid who has not found a creative outlet yet.
Cabrillo’s visual arts world extends well beyond photography, with courses in everything from drawing and ceramics to digital fabrication. Sometimes discovering an art form is simply a matter of seeing somebody else doing something you had never thought of doing yourself.
And an artists’ talk offers something a photograph in a book cannot. Young visitors can hear working artists talk about why they made something, how they made it and what happened between the original idea and the finished work.
One work Cabrillo is previewing from the exhibition is Sean Peeler’s Smile You’re on Camera, a photographic image made with the old wet-plate collodion process on a mirror. For a young photographer raised in the instant world of phone cameras, the process is an eye-opener.
Introduced in 1851, wet-plate photography required the photographer to coat a plate with collodion, a syrupy solution containing cellulose nitrate, then immerse it in silver nitrate to make it light-sensitive. The plate went into the camera and had to be exposed and developed while the chemicals were still wet. There was no snapping a picture and checking the screen. Camera, chemistry and timing all had to work together, often within minutes. It is a good reminder that photography began not only as an art of seeing, but as a hands-on craft of making an image.
Take A Look Around…
For middle school and high school students who have never been to Cabrillo, make the exhibition part of a walk around campus. The Gallery is in Room 1002 on the first floor of the Library Building, near the center of upper campus. Parking in Structures A/B is free during receptions.
A young person who may someday attend Cabrillo can see the campus without an admissions pitch or a formal tour. Just go look around.
And Come Back.
Influencers is only the first of three Cabrillo Gallery exhibitions this fall.
LatinXperiencia 2026: La Resiliencia follows Sept. 28 through Oct. 27. The annual series features LatinX artists and is designed to encourage cross-cultural connections and conversation. This year’s exhibition invites artists from around the country, working in any medium, to explore the idea of resilience. Juror Alyssarhaye Graciano is visual arts curator at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose and a practicing textile artist. Its reception is Sept. 26, with a curator’s talk at 3:30pm.
The semester closes with 12 x 12 (x 12): An Open Invitational, Nov. 9 through Dec. 4, with a reception Nov. 14. The annual open invitational offers another change of pace and another reason for young visitors to see how differently artists can answer the same basic invitation: create art, any art, in a 12 inch frame.
For a young visitor, that changing lineup may be part of the lesson. An art gallery is not a room devoted to one definition of “art.” Come back a few weeks later and the room and the ideas inside it can be completely different. Your gallery visits could inspire a future professional artist, or just a kid wanting to make art and look at the world more closely. That alone can be life changing.
