Art gallery needs students help to create interactive exhibition 

The art gallery at Long Beach City College needs students’ help in creating an art exhibition that is as interactive as it is meaningful.

The exhibition invites students to take part in workshops this week where they can participate in cast makings of their faces and hands, learn how to palm weave, and record their voices sharing their reflections on society. 

These art pieces that people create, will be brought together to become the “As We Come Together” exhibition, which will be in artist Maria Maea’s art style. 

The Long Beach raised artist works across sculpture and installation while incorporating natural elements into her pieces to honor her Mexican and Samoan roots. She uses natural and found materials to explore themes of land, ancestry and cultural continuity. 

Students can stop by LAC’s art gallery in K-100 on Tuesday through Friday anytime from 11 a.m to 5 p.m. to contribute to this art project which will explore identity, ancestry and community. Friday is the last day to participate and the exhibition will open on May 19. 

Focusing on Maea’s art style as she is the director of this art project, her art is tied to her personal history.

Her connection to LBCC is also generational, her artistic practice was partially initiated through her parents, who are LBCC alumni, shaping her early relationship to the campus and its different creative avenues. 

“I think of Long Beach City as kind of this place where my family really gained some mobility in different ways, in their own practices, and their own lives,” Maea said. 

She continued, “My mom got to learn a ton about floral design. My father went to the mechanic program… this third space is really entrenched with my own personal history.”

Palm weaving is a central aspect of her art and is a technique that she shared with students that came in and participated in the open workshops at LBCC. Weaving connects her sculptures to ancestral traditions. 

“It’s like, one of the first tools we made were baskets. It helped us carry our things and our food and our water and our babies. And like, this kind of pattern making is present in every culture across the globe,” Maea said. 

^{Cast molds of students’ hands lay at LBCC’s art gallery, they will be used in artist Maria Maea’s exhibition “As We Come Together.” The exhibition is a collaborative project that will take the work of students to form an art piece that explores identity, community and cultural continuity. (Chloe Hall)}

Palm weaving and casting are the most significant elements of the exhibition. 

Social injustices and student voices were used as the catalyst for many of the art work being featured in the exhibition.

“Maria was an artist that I had in my mind because she’s a native of Long Beach. She’s also of Samoan and Mexican ancestry so her work I’ve always admired because it’s also a lot about resistance, and she uses a lot of non-traditional materials,” said gallery manager Karla Aguiniga. 

The exhibition also includes a library station, a table with books dedicated to Pacific Islander culture, expanding the project’s educational component and grounding it in cultural context.

The reading area offers visitors a chance to engage with texts that inform and deepen the themes present throughout the artwork, particularly those connected to ancestry, identity and diaspora.

“The books were from the MANA English coordinator Kamish Sullivan… So there’s like a few books that she made a whole reading list for learning more about Pacific Islander culture,” Aguiniga said. 

She also detailed  the thought process behind the theme of this month’s exhibition, it’s a part of the Asian American Pacific Islander month events. 

Connected through Aguiniga, Maea details how she got into connection with the art gallery in preparation for the exhibition and how they collaborated to create the concept of the show and its meaning. 

“Karla and I have a kind of long standing relationship, because of her early shows at the Mexican consulate….she was very aware that Long Beach was my hometown and that I have, you know, an affinity for it,” Maea said. 

Maea mentioned how they started talking about the project in 2024 and they conceptualized it in 2025. 

While palm weaving, using an under and over technique, Maea detailed that the exhibition’s concept was inspired by the social climate in 2025, when protests against ICE raids broke out in California. 

^{A cast mold of a students’ face lays at LBCC’s art gallery, it was submitted into artist Maria Maea’s “As We Come Together” exhibition, which will open on May 19. (Chloe Hall)}

“..2025 for many, like Los Angelenos and people from Southern California was just like a really challenging year, like the fires happened really early on. A lot of our art community lost homes, and like a lot of people, we knew … were kind of in a strange place with that. And then ICE was really present. So we were really kind of wondering what students were processing, that became a huge part of the conversation,” Maea said. 

Maea emphasized that in her thought process she wanted to incorporate young people inspired by the sense of solidarity and action that was present in past protests and movements. 

“There was also just the culture of protesting and young people like taking up that space of like, we’re not going to accept it. Or these are the things that we’re hoping for felt really present over the last decades of our lives,” Maea said. 

Maea’s sister, Eve Diaz, also worked beside her throughout the exhibition as a collaborator and project manager. Diaz helped coordinate the community-based element of the exhibition and offered a perspective grounded in connecting the project to a younger audience.

Diaz explained that many young people are feeling increasingly activated and engaged with issues surrounding identity, culture and social change. 

She explained that the exhibition aims to channel that into a space that is inclusionary and participatory where students can express themselves and connect through art. 

“I think in the past like two years, a lot of things have been changing around the world… a lot of young people feel cheated out of a just society or a society that they thought they had a choice in,” Diaz said. 

Diaz said the exhibition is intended to channel those feelings into a space where students can create, reflect and connect with one another. 

“Building communities where everybody can contribute and everyone feels included and secure and safe with one another. But then also coming here, it’s very similar in that way with the student body, working with Club d’Art, working with the student workers here, and just meeting with all these people, different students at the workshops. It is very much like everyone does want community and everybody is so willing to be that for each other,” Diaz said.

A key part of that participation is integrated within the visual and auditory aspect of the exhibition to align with a makeshift cityscape.

Using a hill-like structure and rebar to support what’s ultimately going to be the creation of bodies using the casts and palm leaves, Maea described the vision for the exhibition.

“The structure was kind of as if you’re going up a hill, if you’ve ever been to a protest in downtown LA, sort of emulating that. And that’s also why this grid was sort of like the city as if you’re going to protest,” said Aguiniga. 

^{A cast mold of a students’ face lays at LBCC’s art gallery, it was submitted into artist Maria Maea’s “As We Come Together” exhibition, which will open on May 19. (Chloe Hall)}

Students are encouraged to film themselves in their neighborhoods and submit voice memos to reflect on “the moment,” sharing how students feel about the current social and cultural climate, issues that they’d like to see change, or are hopeful for. 

Maea shared her sentiment of what she wants student participants to walk away with once opening night comes around. 

“I want people to feel that level of ownership and satisfaction that they participated in a real way…All the energy that went into it was sincere and wholehearted. Wanting ownership of and like taking pride in the work that they have done because having this kind of pride in things that you create, inspires you to create more,” Maea said. 

The “As We Come Together” exhibition will open with a reception on May 19 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at LBCC’s art gallery located in LAC’s K-100.