At Home in Sunlight, A State in Motion

Second-year M.F.A. student brings an artist-researcher lens to yearlong curatorial initiative at UCI Langson Museum

In 1932, Barse Miller's Apparition Over Los Angeles was barred from display at the Los Angeles Museum, now known to many as LACMA. Deemed “too controversial,” the painting depicted evangelical radio star Sister Aimee McPherson in a Lady Godiva manner, floating above the Angelus Temple in Echo Park, money-bag clouds surrounding her, highlighting corruption in the city of Angels. Later, it would find a wall to hang from at the California Art Club, and then disappear from public view. The painting with a rich institutional history quietly made its way into the Gerald Buck Collection at the UCI Langson Orange County Museum of Art, where it had not been publicly exhibited since, until SeeVa Dawne Kitslis went looking for it. Curator and M.F.A. '27 student Kitslis began researching California's industrial past, not looking for the California most people know. They were looking for the one that often gets left out. 

At Home in Sunlight: A State in Motion, 1897–1940 is on view through May 9 at the UC Irvine Langson Museum Interim Gallery in Irvine. Drawing entirely from the museum's permanent Gerald Buck Collection, the exhibition covers four decades of California art, from California Impressionism and Regionalism to Social Realism, tracing the state's rapid modernization through the eyes of the artists who witnessed it firsthand.

"I wanted to set the record straight about the reality of Southern California during that time period compared to the myths of California as a paradise," said Kitslis, a second-year M.F.A. student in the Department of Art at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

Kitslis rooted the exhibition's framework in urban historian Norman Klein's The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, which identifies the myths that civic boosters used to sculpt California's identity and drive its population boom, from its sunshine, oranges, and promise of prosperity. For Kitslis, an artist from North Carolina who has called California home for more than 15 years, those myths carry personal weight.

"When you're a newcomer, you notice things about California that are different from back east or Middle America," said Kitslis. "I think of the myth of the climate. It’s something that I keep thinking about over and over again as we have seen detrimental landslides, fires and earthquakes."

The show is organized into three sections. The first part acknowledges California's mythology of promise. The next two dig into the social and industrial realities of a rapidly developing region, its fishing industry, shipbuilding, railroads and displaced communities. A lithograph of the Bunker Hill neighborhood in L.A. by Barse Miller depicts the daily life of working-class Mexican, indigenous, Filipino, Korean and Chinese immigrants in a neighborhood later cleared in the name of urban renewal. Nearly 8,000 people were displaced in that process.

"Paintings in the show do such a good job telling this story about the things that are erased, the things that we're forgetting, the things that maybe we should try to remember more about," Kitslis said.

For Kitslis, curating and making work are not separate endeavors. They prefer the word "work" over "practice," a distinction that speaks to how central research is to everything they make.

"I believe that knowledge is a form of artistic inquiry," Kitslis said. "That's always the center of where I'm going with all my projects."

That approach has taken them from Glasgow, where they assembled a sub-collection of artist books on political resistance, to CalArts, where they built a fictional gallery space from the architects' original plans. At UCI's Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve's Piñon Desert Library, they curated a library specifically for artists working in landscape. Each project begins the same way, with an archive, a collection and a container of existing knowledge that allows for new ideas to branch outward.

Kitslis is the first M.F.A. student in the Department of Art to take on the student curatorial role at the UC Irvine Langson Museum, a distinction that reflects an academic engagement initiative bringing graduate students into hands-on curatorial experience within a professional museum setting. The year-long program culminates in an exhibition drawn from the museum's permanent collection.

The role and art collection connect Kitslis to an esteemed group within the UCI art department. "I feel honored to be curating in the same collection as our department chair," they said, referring to Kevin Appel's exhibition First Glimpse, which also drew from the Buck Collection and was the inaugural exhibition at the UC Irvine Langson back in 2018.

Appel sees the exhibition as a model for what the collection can do. "At Home in Sunlight traces a moment when California was being actively imagined and built, through landscape, through labor, through the pressures of growth," he said. "SeeVa brought sensitivity to that complexity, finding a way to let the work speak to a shifting sense of place. It speaks to how the collection can be activated to tell new, timely stories about California and its evolving identity."

Kitslis hopes each visitor leaves with something harder to define than a historical argument: a willingness to slow down. "Not as a performance, but as an intentional, genuine pause to stand before the works and listen for what memory asks to be kept.”

At Home in Sunlight: A State in Motion, 1897–1940 is on view through May 9, 2026, at the UC Irvine Langson Museum Interim Gallery, 18881 Von Karman Ave., Irvine. To learn more about the exhibition, visit imca.uci.edu.