Laguna Art Museum presents Kim Manfredi’s first solo museum exhibition
Laguna Art Museum (LAM) will open Kim Manfredi: View with a Grain of Sand, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition tomorrow, October 3. Manfredi, LAM’s 2026 Art + Nature commissioned artist, explores perception, landscape and humanity’s relationship to the natural world in paintings on view through January 18, 2027.
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Photo by JenMarie Landig
2026 Art + Nature commissioned artist Kim Manfredi
Now in its 14th year, Art + Nature is a several-day program of commissioned artworks, public projects, talks, walks and partnerships that brings art, community and environmental reflection beyond the museum’s walls. The exhibition leads to Manfredi’s outdoor installation, A Flag Walk for Our Future in November.
Manfredi transforms direct observations of elemental phenomena into an abstract visual language. Layers of color, drips, bleeds and oversprays evoke the vitality and unpredictability of nature, while fragmentation within the compositions reflects humanity’s imprint on the environment and creates moments of visual play.
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Courtesy of LAM
Art + Nature 2025 Ana Teresa Fernández, “SOS” installation
The exhibition takes its title from Wisława Szymborska’s poem View with a Grain of Sand, which reflects on humanity’s place within a vast world and challenges the illusion that people exist separately from the natural environment. Like poetry, Manfredi’s paintings use an incomplete and metaphorical language to encourage new ways of seeing. Visitors are invited to look closely and discover shifting symbols, light, surface and new connections to the landscape beyond.
“Kim Manfredi’s paintings reward time, attention and curiosity,” said Julie Perlin Lee, executive director of Laguna Art Museum. “We are proud to present her first solo museum exhibition because this work gives visitors a meaningful way to think about landscape, perception and their own relationship to the natural world.”
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Courtesy of LAM
2023 Christopher Cichocki, “Rising Inversion” installation for Art + Nature
“I make paintings that move between abstraction and representation, using color, material and surface to explore how social contracts mediate our experience of ourselves, each other and the natural world,” said Manfredi.
A Flag Walk for Our Future, Manfredi’s commissioned project for Laguna Art Museum’s 2026 Art + Nature will be presented on November 5-9 along a 0.7-mile accessible path in Heisler Park. The participatory installation engages visitors with the natural environment while considering how shared social agreements shape the ways people move through and experience public space.
Together, View with a Grain of Sand and A Flag Walk for Our Future create complementary indoor and outdoor experiences. Inside the museum, Manfredi translates natural phenomena into abstraction through painting; outside, wind, sunlight, landscape and the movement of visitors become active elements of the work.
Art + Nature Celebration Week takes place November 1-9, as part of Laguna Art Museum’s annual Art + Nature program.
For more information on Kim Manfredi, visit www.kimmanfredi.com.
For additional information on LAM, visit www.lagunaartmuseum.org.
Laguna Art Museum is located at 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach.
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Closed Mondays, except Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President’s Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth and Labor Day. Closed on the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
