ARTLANDS REACH
REGIONAL ECO-ARTS COMMUNITY HUB
REACH is an environmentally focused artist-in-residency program which provides programming to the communities in Redlands, CA and in the Morongo Basin area of the California high desert. In 2026, the program is hosting four, work-only, artist residencies in each area (eight total). Each resident artist/writer is providing two community workshops that will be free for the public to attend on the 2nd Thursday and last Saturday of each month in both locations. The 2026 program will go from March until June.
In Redlands, the new REACH community garden was installed at Sylvan Park, directly across the street from the University of Redlands in Redlands, CA which will be the home of our Inland Empire-based residency programming and public events. The garden bosts a California native garden, an edible garden with low maintenance perennials and climate appropriate fruit trees, and a pop-up workshop space for art sessions. Gardens will have native plants that can be used for pigments and fiber, as well as edible and medicinal plants. An artist work studio for our resident artist is being hosted on the University of Redlands campus.
In the Morongo Basin, our programming and events are being hosted at the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve in Morongo Valley, CA. Our artists will work in studio space provided through our collaboration with the new Nosotros space in Yucca Valley, CA.
The program will also be producing:
A Culminating Exhibition/Event at the University of Redlands Art Gallery - Peppers Art Center
Small edition (200) of a print publication of visual and literary work produced over the course of the project
Documentary video showing the evolution of the project
REACH has been championed since 2020 by artist Danielle Giudici Wallis and through a partnership with The Artlands received an Arts in Local Parks planning grant from Parks California to complete the planning stages of the project in 2024. In 2025, it was awarded a project implementation grant from Parks California to build out the program and community garden.
Meet Our 2026 Artists-In-Residence
REDLANDS Artists-in-residence
Loriann Hernandez, Elle Seven, is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator with an M.A. in Museum Exhibition Design and over eighteen years of experience in community engagement. As the Founder and Visual Director of Urban Canvas she directs groundbreaking exhibitions and mentors emerging artists, bridging the gap between professional galleries and underserved communities. She remains dedicated to creating space for voices that are historically underrepresented in the museum landscape.
Her work is deeply rooted in social advocacy and the preservation of Tribal knowledge. Loriann has worked extensively with Native American communities, notably through her leadership on the Apache Passion Project and her participation in the National Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museum Conference. This commitment was exemplified when she became the only roller skater to roll to the front lines with the Lakota Sioux during the pipeline protests.
Internationally recognized, she has served as a cultural agent in Berlin and curated projects at the Dak'Art Biennale. Through her organization Critical Medicine, she champions "skating as medicine" and inclusive mobility. Her practice is deeply informed by her heritage, with family roots in the Inland Empire and Orange County regions dating back to the 1890s
Zaida Ruby Lagunas is a Mexican-American artist educator and photographer from the Inland Empire. Her background lies at the intersection of the arts and social justice, primarily focused on experimenting with ways to advocate for/with underrepresented groups in the arts through community-based art education and social engagement. Her projects are informed by critical approaches to visual culture, art education, and curating, specifically focusing on how art can be used as a tool to preserve the narratives of historically excluded groups and foster connections among communities.
She has her B.A. from UC Santa Barbara in History of Art and Architecture, and recently studied in the Nordic Master in Visual Studies and Art Education program at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland where she explored Nordic approaches to arts education. Previously, she has worked at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and has interned with the Brooklyn Museum, and The Medici Archive in Florence Italy, where she assisted with justice-oriented researched to address representational gaps in art history.
She currently works as a Youth Ambassador with EnviroVoters, where she is exploring how she can use art to educate communities in the IE on local prevalent environmental justice issues and encourage youth to become agents of change.”
Andrew K. Thompson is a photographic artist and educator based in California’s Inland Empire. His work has been exhibited at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Riverside Art Museum, California Museum of Photography, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Gallery 1/1, and Klotz Gallery.
His work has been reviewed in LA Weekly by Shana Nys Dambrot, KCET Artbound by Larissa Nickel, and Artillery Magazine by Colin Westerbeck. Thompson’s photographs have been featured in BACK TO BASICS: Extended Recipes for Ecological Photochemistry (2025), published by The Sustainable Darkroom; on the AIPADphoto Instagram page; in the exhibition catalog In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California – 1950 to the Present (2019), published by Inlandia Institute; and in The Hand, issue nineteen (2018).
In 2018, Thompson co-founded The Little Gallery of San Bernardino, an artist-run, community-based space supporting contemporary artists from San Bernardino and the greater Inland Empire.
Fred Brashear Jr. is a multiracial, multidisciplinary, photo-based artist whose work explores the deep connections between environmental degradation and social injustice. Using climate change as both subject and lens, he examines how the exploitation of land reflects the historical and ongoing marginalization of communities of color. His practice highlights the links between ecological collapse and social inequity, framing environmental justice as inseparable from racial and social justice.
Through research-driven, materially engaged photographic processes, Brashear investigates questions of land use, stewardship, and sustainability, while also using photography as a means of processing personal histories of trauma and loss. His work invites viewers to consider how systems of extraction, both environmental and human, are maintained through policy, power, and erasure, and to imagine what more equitable futures might look like.
Brashear’s photography has been exhibited internationally and throughout the United States, including in London, Rome, New York, and Los Angeles. In addition to his studio practice, he is a dedicated educator and scholar. He is the Chair of the Photography Department at the University of La Verne, where he mentors emerging artists and emphasizes critical engagement with the social, political, and ecological responsibilities of image-making.
MORONGO BASIN ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENce
Adriana Lopez-Ospina is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer based in the Coachella Valley. Her practice centers on fiber-based sculpture, installation, and community storytelling, with a focus on themes of environment, migration, memory, and intergenerational knowledge. Rooted in her Colombian heritage, Lopez-Ospina's work explores the intersections of traditional craft and contemporary art, often incorporating natural fibers and experimental textile techniques.
Aidan Koch is an artist and graphic novelist based in the Mojave Desert on unceded Serrano land. Koch's work uses modes of ecological story-telling to explore loving and fraught relationships between humans, non-human animals, and landscapes. She is the author of several graphic novels including Xeric Award winning, The Blonde Woman (2012), After Nothing Comes (2016) and Stone Blue Sky (2021); with short works featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Best American Comics 2014, and MoMA PS1 GNY series. Her most recent book, Spiral and Other Stories was named one of the best graphic novels of 2024 by the Guardian and Washington Post. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, South Bend Museum of Art, and Queens University Belfast, among others. Koch's ongoing projects, Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations and Environmental Comics, act as pedagogical and collaborative extensions of her ecological inquiries.
Kristen Jean Wheatley is an artist from rural Southwest Virginia working with activity, circulation, and endurance. An interest in visual art led her to Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received her degree in Craft and Material Studies. While studying, Kristen was awarded a Dean’s Research Grant and scholarships to attend Penland School of Craft and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Her work has been shown at the Anderson, Compound YV, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Lazy Eye Gallery, and through the Yucca Valley Public Art Program. In 2024, she was awarded a Visual Artist Residency at Vermont Studio Center. Kristen currently lives in 29 Palms.
Jillian Sandell is an artist and educator living in Joshua Tree. In 2016, at the age of 50, a health crisis nudged open a creative door that has evolved into her art practice in drawing, printmaking, watercolor, zines, mixed-media, and collaborative community projects. Her work starts with her own experience in time and place: of cancer treatment and its aftermath, of living in the desert, of the natural world she observes everyday, of grief and love. Part of her art practice is walking alone each morning along the same route, observing small changes – in the plants, the sky, the animal tracks on the dirt roads, and in herself. These moments of variation within familiar daily routines are critical because they create the conditions of possibility for new ways of seeing and being. Her work invites people to slow down and notice each leaf, each rock, each step, as a way to remember we can always begin again. Jillian is an active member of the Morongo Basin art community, and has shown her work in galleries, community spaces, and zine fests around the US southwest. She currently hosts the weekly drop-in “Creative Cafe” at Joshua Tree Retreat Center.
REACH Community Garden at Sylvan Park in Redlands
The following is a list of proposed uses of the space:
Free, accessible, environmentally focused arts programming
Provide paid opportunities for local artists from all disciplines/mediums
Increase awareness of local environmental issues and encourage sustainable practices through free public workshops (composting, irrigation, plant propagation, etc)
Create opportunities for cultural exchange and dialogue– place to find common ground!
Honor and celebrate the cultural heritage of the Serrano and Cahuilla people, the original and ongoing stewards of the land.
Artists garden of plants that can be used for dyes, weaving, and other creative endeavors
Community vegetable garden beds to expand upon existing city program provide horticulture activities
Native plant garden
Sign up to volunteer & be involved
“Plantas” mural by Al Marcano was commissioned and painted to raise awareness and engage the community about REACH in May of 2025. It is located at Viva La Boba in downtown Redlands.
