Thursday, October 22, 2026

Murals of La Jolla and the Athenaeum present Lizzie Zelter, with a special presentation of her career, process, recent projects, and 2026 mural Southeast Exchange for Murals of La Jolla. The reception begins at 6 p.m., followed by an artist talk at 6:30 p.m.

On Thursday, October 22, 2026, Lizzie Zelter will give an artist talk at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. Presented by Murals of La Jolla and the Athenaeum, the evening begins with a reception at 6 PM, followed by the talk at 6:30 PM. Zelter will discuss her career, recent projects, and 2026 mural, Southeast Exchange, for Murals of La Jolla.

Lizzie Zelter’s mural, Southeast Exchange, is a reimagined retail landscape brimming with visual echoes and shifting perspectives. Exploring the artist’s interest in repetition, boundaries, and illusion, Southeast Exchange depicts E & E Trading, a large discount store in Brownsville, Texas. During a grant-funded trip along the U.S.-Mexico border, Zelter noted the city’s parallels to San Diego. On the southeast-facing wall of 7540 Fay Avenue, she creates an urban collage linking opposite corners of the southern border. Drawing from the diversity and density of objects in E & E Trading, Zelter adeptly incorporates this abundant inventory into her idiosyncratic painterly language.

Southeast Exchange’s composition is based on an architectural detail Zelter noticed in the store: a series of hanging mirrored panels breaking up the store’s reflected interior into choppy segments. Her close cropping of these vertical fragments creates a concave effect, wherein the central zone of the painting portrays the deepest aisles. Stacked on cluttered shelves, recognizable merchandise and unnameable forms are painted using a range of mark-making techniques. Perpendicular to Fay Avenue, the mural reverses the conventional left-to-right read of horizontal painting by positioning an exit sign where viewers first approach the image. Through these strategies, Zelter transforms a commercial interior into an unsettled perceptual maze, inviting the viewer to navigate an environment ripe for deep looking.

Zelter’s mural marks a milestone for Murals of La Jolla, inaugurating the project’s Emerging Artist Program. The site will continue to serve as a dedicated platform for future emerging artists, providing an ongoing space for new voices in public art.

Zelter’s practice examines how human-made environments are constructed and perceived. Engaging scale and perspective, she reimagines the outside world through experiments in pattern, form, and surface. Zelter draws attention to the peculiarities of domestic, commercial, and bureaucratic spaces to investigate their social functions. Born in New York City in 1996, she received her BA in literature from Duke University in 2018 and went on to receive her MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2022.

Zelter is the founder and curator of Two Rooms, an artist-run gallery and project space dedicated to fostering experimentation and critical engagement across the San Diego–Tijuana binational region. Her work has been featured in fine art institutions, including solo shows at Columbia University; Sala de Espera, Tijuana BC, Mexico; and Encarte Gallery, Mexico City. Additionally, she has participated in group exhibitions at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, California; Quint Gallery, San Diego, California; and Jane Lombard Gallery at Untitled Art Fair, Miami, Florida. Zelter has been the recipient of grants and fellowships, including Creative Communities San Diego, Columbia University Dean’s Project Grant, and the Duke Engage Independent Grant. Zelter lives and works in San Diego and New York.

Mural Members and Makers will receive an email to RSVP for the lecture.

JOAN & IRWIN JACOBS
MUSIC ROOM
Athenaeum Music & Arts Library
1008 Wall Street
La Jolla, CA 92037

CLICK HERE FOR DIRECTIONS

LECTURE BEGINS AT 6:30 PM.
RECEPTION AT 6:00 PM.

INDIVIDUAL TICKETS:
Free

Saturday, June 13, 2026

Please join us for an artist talk with the SDSU Art Council Scholarship Recipients. They will share a special presentation on their exhibition, 21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition, and discuss how the work connects to their practices and creative processes.

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. 

The artist talk will be held in person at the Athenaeum Art Center, Logan Heights. There are no physical tickets for this event. Your name will be on an attendee list at the front door. Doors open at 4:30 p.m. Seating is first come, first served.

ATHENAEUM ART CENTER
1955 Julian Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113

CLICK HERE FOR DIRECTIONS

TALK BEGINS AT 5:00 PM.
DOORS OPEN AT 4:30 PM.

INDIVIDUAL TICKETS:
Free

Banner image: SDSU Art Council Scholarship Recipients at the 2026 opening reception