Four Projects, Two Exhibitions, One Wrist. Fall 2026
- Kristine Schomaker
- 21 hours ago
- 6 min read
It has been a full summer. Broken wrist, two September exhibitions, new work taking shape in the studio, and somehow also curating two shows this fall. I am one-handed and moving slower than usual but I am not stopping.
Here is everything that is coming up.
Beautiful Parts
Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Little Tokyo
Opens September 12, 2026
Something new is happening in the studio and I want you to see it first.
I have been invited to be part of Beautiful Parts, an exhibition at JACCC curated by Meher McArthur, centered on kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, making the breaks the most beautiful part of the whole object.
My contribution is a mirror installation. Four panels, each one representing a face of the space my body occupies — front, back, and both sides — as if I were standing inside a box fitted exactly to my size. 63" tall. 24¾" front to back. 17½" side to side. 84½" across. Baroque gold wallpaper covers each panel. Salon-style mirrors in gold frames hang on top, all different sizes, from the floor up. Every mirror reflects a different fragment of whoever is standing in front of it.
I have spent most of my life unable to look at myself in a mirror without judgment. This installation is my practice of doing it differently. One part at a time. Without rushing to the verdict.
You walk up and see yourself — not all at once but in pieces. Your face in one frame. Your shoulder in another. Your hands. The parts you usually rush past or avoid, each one held in gold and given time.
Kintsugi teaches that the broken places, repaired with gold, become the most beautiful part of the whole object. The gold here is the frame itself. The gold is the act of looking. The gold is deciding — just for this moment — that what you see is worth it.
You don't have to believe it yet. You just have to look.
JACCC, 244 S. San Pedro Street, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. Opening September 12.
The Gracie Kendal Project and More
Brand Library, Glendale
Opens September 26, 2026
I am showing four bodies of work at the Brand as part of Artifacts from an Unborn Empire, curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic. A show asking what civilizations leave behind and who gets to tell the story.
The Gracie Kendal Project
Gracie Kendal is my avatar in Second Life. I created her in 2006 and she has been with me ever since. She is more confident than I am. Bolder. Flirtier. She walks into a room like she owns it. My physical self and my virtual self in constant conversation with each other for almost twenty years. Two versions of the same person, both real, both telling part of the story. Gracie is a persona in the tradition of Cindy Sherman and Lynn Hershman Leeson's Roberta Breitmore. A mask that reveals rather than conceals. She is not an escape from who I am. She is a way of seeing who I could be.
1000+ Avatars — Video Documentation
What started as 100 portraits to illustrate the idea of online anonymity became documentation of over 2,000 avatars and the lives lived within Second Life at a particular and unrepeatable moment in virtual history. These subjects are neither simulacra nor characters in a game. They are individual people — complete and complex identities with defined social roles, desires, fears, and creative visions. Lizards and robots and warriors and dancers and artists and philosophers. People who stepped into a virtual world and were fearless enough to be exactly who they wanted to be. They deserve to be in the record too.
Archive of Becoming
Cut paintings on wood and canvas, mixed media wall installationWorks from 1996 to present
To deconstruct is not to destroy. It is to look honestly at what something is made of and decide what it becomes next.
These works span thirty years of painting. All of it cut. All of it released from its original frame, its fixed meaning, its insistence on remaining what it once was. The cutting began as compulsion. It became meditation. It evolved into methodology. Fragments from 1996 to the present expanding out from the doorway — paintings from my twenties in conversation with work from my fifties. Colors, textures, and marks made during different versions of myself, freed to create new relationships and new meanings. This is not nostalgia. This is archaeology.
At the heart of the installation are the Keys to Everything. Eleven fragments on each keyring, hung together like secrets you finally have permission to unlock. Each cluster holds pieces of different works, different times, different versions of myself. Not about opening doors. About cutting up what is behind them.
Reliquaries
Glass jar sculptures
Each jar is a reliquary. Not for saints. For a life. My life. The ordinary, complicated, accumulating evidence of what it means to be a person in a body that the world keeps trying to define for me.
A jar holding my father's military medals and patches. A jar of my hair from the first time I shaved my head. A jar of Christmas ornaments compressed from three large plastic bins into three glass containers. A jar of jewelry. A jar of spiritual objects. A jar of magnets from places I have been. Concert tickets, buttons, keys, flash drives. Objects that stored things, opened things, marked things, proved things.
These jars are my answer to what civilizations leave behind. A civilization of one. Built from fifty two years of trying to figure out what to keep and what to let go.
This is not nostalgia. This is evidence.
Brand Library and Art Center, 1601 W. Mountain Street, Glendale. Opening September 26.
Under One Roof — Two Shows at Coastline Art Gallery
1515 Monrovia Avenue, Newport BeachAugust 26 through November 6, 2026Public receptions: Saturday September 19 and Saturday October 24, both 5-7pm
This fall I am curating two shows through Shoebox Arts as part of Under One Roof, a boutique art fair bringing ten Southern California galleries and art spaces together at Coastline Art Gallery. The other spaces include Thinkspace Projects, SCAPE, Skidmore Contemporary Art, John Doe Gallery, M. Hanks Gallery, Royale Projects, 515 Bendix, Chemers Gallery, and Sue Greenwood Fine Arts.
Let Me Eat Cake: No Regrets
August 26 through September 27
This is the fourth iteration of my Let Me Eat Cake series and it is the most personal one yet. It comes out of my own complicated history with food — how food becomes comfort, control, celebration, and shame, sometimes all at once, sometimes in the same bite. Dessert felt like the most universal way in. Everyone has a cake memory.
For this round I am curating 90 twelve by twelve inch pieces installed floor to ceiling, wall to wall, in a grid. It is going to feel like a wall of cake.
Perceive You 3.0
Installs early October, opens October 24, runs through November 6
Perceive You is a figurative self-portrait exhibition I have curated twice before. This is round three. We are living in an age where we curate our public persona constantly — our profile pictures, what we post, how we dress. This show turns the mirror back on the artist and asks: who are you, really, underneath the curated version? A platform for empowerment, for owning who you are, for being authentic no matter what body shape, size, color, gender, or ability you have.
Both shows follow the same 12x12 grid format so together they will fill the wall space at Coastline for the full run of Under One Roof.
Coastline Art Gallery is open Wednesday through Friday 11am to 4pm, or by appointment. I would love to see you at one of the receptions.
From the Shoebox Arts Substack
I spent the whole weekend at NOMAD and TRYST at Del Amo Crossing a few weeks ago and came home completely restored. Five and a half hours on my feet, Lyft both ways because I did not want to talk myself out of going, and it was worth every bit of it.
I wrote about what that weekend gave me — why showing up matters even when you are tired, why eyeballs are eyeballs and every new audience is a real audience, why community is not a strategy but the thing itself. And why the art world is more alive than the headlines want you to believe.
NOMAD is a three day non-commercial pop-up showcasing 140 plus Southern California artists. Not a gallery show. Not a juried exhibition with winners and losers. A giant gathering. TRYST is the world's largest international art fair dedicated exclusively to artist-run spaces, collectives, and independent organizations. Shoebox is exactly the kind of organization TRYST was built for. I went as a visitor this year because I know my bandwidth. There will be a time for participating. This year the right thing was to be in the room as a human being who loves art.
Read the full piece on the Shoebox Arts Substack. And if you are not subscribed yet, I would love to have you there.
New Work in Progress
In the studio, slowly and one-handed, new work is taking shape. Work about judgment. Work about death. Work about connection and the distance between people and what lives in that distance.
I am not ready to share all of it yet. But I can feel it coming.
More soon.
@kristineschomaker
Just know you are an amazing human. That is all, had to say it. I am motivated after reading this and cannot wait to see some of these shows. :)