This exhibit was scheduled November 18, 2023-March 10, 2024.


The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art continues its forward-thinking goal of bringing art and artists from outside the Central Coast and sharing their perspectives that reflect different geographies, cultures, and values.

In that vein, the newest exhibit in the Gray Wing by Alisa Sikelianos-Carter provides abstract prints using web- and catalogue-sourced imagery of Black hair. Sikelianos-Carter envisions a “cosmically bountiful world that celebrates and pays homage to ancestral majesty, power and aesthetics.”

Sikelianos-Carter, a New York mixed media artist, uses images which have been magnified to the point of becoming an abstraction, thus giving the viewer a sense of the ethereal, or what she refers to as “an immersive world that cultivates a feeling of expansive infinity.”

Many of the pieces give an almost organic feeling, similar to viewing crystals forming in nature or unusual fungi growing into a myriad of shapes and forms. Viewers need to truly stop and take the time to observe each piece and reflect on what it means to them personally and how they fit into the universe. Each piece provides viewers with the sense of being a magnificent—albeit tiny—grain of what makes up the cosmos and our world.

In Space and Splendor: A Topography of Wildness” is being shown through March 10, 2024. You may want to visit the artist’s website for more in-depth information.

:: Toni Pruett Bouman

By Toni Pruett Bouman

Toni Pruett Bouman is a true California Girl who needs regular contact with the Pacific Ocean. Raised in San Diego, she migrated to Los Angeles to attend design school and become a fashion designer. Quickly discovering she wasn’t cut out for mass-produced clothing, she changed course and began a 35-year career as a real estate broker. Wanting a slower pace, she and her artist husband moved to the Central Coast 30 years ago. While enjoying real estate, Bouman’s true passion is textiles. She now specializes in Japanese Shibori and other ethnic textile techniques, creating hand-painted silk wearable art under the name Slo Silkworks (now on Etsy). Her work has been displayed at the SLO Museum of Art and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. Active in the SLO arts community, she is a past president of the SLO County Arts Council, and has written articles for SLO Journal Plus on arts and fine craft.