Event Calendar

Sunset Center is excited to announce an exhibition by local multimedia artist and arts educator Johanna Keefe, entitled Paradiso Perduto (Lost Paradise), to run from November 3rd, 2025 to January 5th, 2026. This exhibition is part of our Education & Outreach program and showcases five emerging and established local artists or collectives through rotating exhibits in the Marjorie Evans Gallery. Join us as we welcome Johanna with a FREE public reception in the gallery on Friday, November 21st, from 5-7pm.

Johanna Keefe, born in 1982 in Wilmette, Illinois, is a working artist in a wide range of aesthetic and material strategies, with a focus on ceramic vessels. Drawing from a variety of source materials and influences, Joh plays interchangeably with the sacred and the profane. Cited influences include Meissen, Gucci, Taoism, shipwrecks, Albert Hoffman, tulip-mania, Northern Renaissance painting, entomology, 90's pop culture, and historical shipping trade routes.

Paradiso Perduto is a special collection of Joh's artworks in three parts. The first part is a foundational collection of photographs and sculptural works from the artist; the second part is a new series of digitally altered photographs taken from still lifes of the artist's works; and the third part is a sample of the new Big Sur Acidware Collection from 2024-2025.

The Acidware 2025 collection is an investigation into the history of contemporary decorative arts and California's revolutionary 1970's counterculture. Inspired by early porcelain patterns like Flora Danica and Meissen's Klinger bug series, each piece is handmade with the utmost care and finest materials. Adorned with custom imagery from historical LSD blotter paper and entomological illustrations, these artworks implicate themselves as more than just pottery. Joh carefully creates each individual design and makes the artworks with skilled precision, inserting them into the cannon of luxury porcelain, the decolonization of craft, and the creation and use of art as a joyful powerful functioning critique.

Joh's work remains playful as it illuminates the beauty and brutality embedded in the banalities of art history, luxury, and contemporary US culture. In her work, she vacillates between the domination and the decline, the relic and the collectible, the pristine and the defaced.

Joh's work is heavily influenced by her travels, studies, and time living in Europe, especially Italy. Paradiso Perduto is not only the title of the controversial poem by Milton, but a beloved old haunt in Venice, Italy. She received her BFA from KCAI, and an MFA from USF. She currently lives and works on the Monterey Bay and is the professor of Ceramics at Hartnell College in Salinas, California.

Located in the North Wing of Sunset Center, the Marjorie Evans Gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Friday from 10 AM to 4 PM, as well as during all public performances and events.