Upcoming Exhibitions

Catherine and Robert Palmer Gallery

Día de las Madres: Mother's Day Pop-Up Exhibition

May 8–10, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9, 12–8 PM

Every year around Mother's Day, the Athenaeum Art Center (AAC) opens its doors to the community for a festive, bilingual pop-up exhibition that honors mothers and maternal figures across cultures. Drawing on the traditions of Día de las Madres, rooted in Mexican cultural heritage and the spirit of the broader Mother's Day weekend, this annual event brings together local artists, families, and neighbors for an afternoon and evening of art, music, craft demonstrations, and connection. 

The exhibition showcases artwork submitted by community members and local artists, all responding to themes of motherhood. 

Past events have featured paintings, sculptures, prints, mixed-media works, and "fridge art,” embracing every level of artistic experience. The event culminates in an opening reception with live mariachi music, printmaking demonstrations, and opportunities to meet the artists. 

The AAC's Mother's Day pop-up is a community celebration rooted in place, in Barrio Logan, and in the stories that mothers carry and pass on. It is bilingual at its core, welcoming Spanish- and English-speaking visitors alike, and free and open to the public.

This event is generously supported by the ResMed Foundation. 

We invite artists of all backgrounds and experience levels to submit work for our annual Día de las Madres pop-up exhibition. This exhibition celebrates maternal figures and their lived experiences across cultures, generations, and languages. 

Theme: What does it mean to mother? What is maternal love and how is it expressed? We want to see art that thinks through these questions. Bilingual, bicultural, and border-crossing perspectives are especially encouraged. 

Questions? Email lmartinez@ljathenaeum.org 

Key Dates 

Submission deadline: April 22 
Artist notification: April 24 
Artwork drop-off: April 28–May 2 
Exhibition opening reception: May 9, 12–8 PM 
Exhibition days: May 8–10 
Artwork pickup: May 11–26 

Catherine and Robert Palmer Gallery

21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition

May 16–July 3, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 16, 5–8 PM

The Athenaeum Art Center is excited to present the 21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition, featuring new work by five exceptional graduate and upper-division undergraduate students from the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University. Since 2002, the SDSU Art Council has recognized outstanding emerging artists with scholarships and the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Athenaeum, one of San Diego's most cherished cultural institutions. 

This year's five recipients gather under a quietly urgent shared theme: the body as a site of history, resistance, and reinvention. Whether mapping chronic pain onto the indifferent American medical system, excavating the layered textures of immigrant memory, or refusing the limits imposed by colonial and binary thinking, these artists use their diverse practices to insist on visibility—for their communities, their experiences, and themselves. 

Andrea Mendoza is a Mexican American painter and metalsmith whose oil paintings draw on the vibrant color traditions of Mexican art and her indigenous heritage. Working through a feminist lens, she reclaims narrative space for overlooked communities, presenting cultural identity with power and pride, and extending the canvas itself into wearable jewelry through metalsmithing. Tina Mardan, an Iranian American interdisciplinary artist, works across photography, painting, drawing, and installation to explore how memory, displacement, and the domestic environment shape a person's sense of belonging. Her layered compositions find the political embedded in the everyday. Todd Bradley is a San Diego–based mixed-media artist whose C7 Series confronts chronic pain, neurodivergence, and American cultural mythology head-on, using collaged medical imagery, book pages, X-rays, and embroidery thread to transform vulnerability into visual power. Ana Saad works in clay and fiber to investigate queerness, gender performance, and communal existence, distorting the natural world into something liminal and uncanny where trees and manufactured spikes carry the weight of growth, defense, and becoming. Isa Ybarra, a mixed-media painter and printmaker, channels Chicanx muralism, skate culture, and DIY activism into works that critique the racial, bodily, and gendered borders born of colonization, creating visibility for the queer Latinx community while challenging the systems that constrain it. 

Together, these five artists make the case that art is not merely aesthetic; it is an act of presence and of claiming space.