YoloArts is thrilled to announce this year's 2026 Art Farm Juror is Bryan Valenzuela.
In its 19th year, YoloArts’ Art Farm community festival celebrates the farmlands of Yolo County and the artworks they inspire. The annual event celebrates the culmination of the Art & Ag Project’s farm visits where a dialogue is cultivated between artists, farmers, and the community by inviting farmers to open their land to local artists, providing unique opportunities to capture private landscapes that would otherwise remain inaccessible and unseen.
Each month, artists visit a different farm where they can meet the farm owners, paint en plein air, or take photographs. Each Fall, artists are invited to exhibit their agriculturally–inspired artwork during the Art Farm exhibition. Artists can contribute their artwork to the Art Harvest and submit their artwork for consideration to the Juried Silent Auction.
“We are honored to have Bryan Valenzuela as the Art Farm Juror this year. His murals, public artwork in the region, and recent commission for the Woodland Aquatics Center will lead to a Juried Exhibition selected through a Yolo County inspired and informed lens. I am excited to see his final selection of work and which artists in our region he is drawn to!” - Jenna Harris, Artist Engagement Director, YoloArts
Art Harvest artwork will be collected by Art Farm Sponsors and Shovel Ticket holders at the event on October 17, and selected Juried Silent Auction artworks will be available through online bidding between September 17 and October 17.
About the Juror
Northern California artist Bryan Valenzuela has spent the last couple decades aiming to perfect a unique drawing technique involving the atomization of the figure by carving out shape, shadow and light with handwritten text.
Paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and fragments are used simultaneously as both the form and content of each piece. Words varying in size from the minuscule and unreadable, to large and bold are used in a manner similar to crosshatching and stippling. Though virtually unnoticeable from afar, once the viewer steps closer to each work they are engulfed in a barrage of words intermingled with other mixed media elements such as acrylic paint, gel transfer, gold leaf, and collage.
In 2016 Valenzuela ventured into the public art sphere, garnering a $350,000 commission from the City of Sacramento. In October of that year, he completed a large suspended sculpture consisting of over 400 blown glass spheres in an abstract, aquarelle version of the American and Sacramento river confluence.
The following year saw Valenzuela complete his first ever mural for the Wide Open Walls festival. Other mural commissions have followed in its wake including permanent works in San Francisco, Chicago, Napa, Washington D.C. and Sacramento, as well as temporary works in New Orleans and New York.
He has won First Place at the Crocker Kingsley Biennial, Best in Show at the California State Fair Fine Art Exhibition, received the Leff Davis Grant for Emerging Artists, and exhibited nationally in many group shows, most notably for Scope at Miami Art Basel and Moniker in London. In 2025, Valenzuela’s work was acquired by the Crocker Art Museum becoming a part of their permanent collection.
Please read Bryan’s Artist Statement below and visit his website, https://www.bryanvalenzuela.com/, to learn more about his work.
We use language as an instrument to describe the world around us; to help convey an understanding of that world and formulate a bond through its expression. It helps us communicate our perceptions, our thoughts, our dreams. Yet however much we have defined the exterior and interior landscapes of our reality with its nuances, it has also helped define us, shaping us in a reciprocal relationship. Experiences become deeper with stories told about it. Emotions become richer in collaboration with narratives that expand them and allow them to bloom. Memories take on new life the more we weave a web of words around them. I take this relationship as the foundation of all my work, using a handwritten text drawing technique to carve shape, shadow, and light from ideas, from moments, from metaphors. All my work presents a visual chronicle in this manner, using mixed media drawings, paintings, and large scale murals that encapsulate a mood of metamorphosis, of histories hidden in detail.
Art Farm the exhibition will be on view at The Barn Gallery Sept 17 - Oct 17, 2026. Regular open hours of The Barn Gallery are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 12-5 p.m. and Saturdays from 12-3 p.m.
Art Farm the community festival will be on Saturday, October 17, 2026 from 2-5:30 pm at the Gibson House.
Images:
1- Bryan Valenzuela in his Studio
2- MULTITUDES CONVERGE, Public Art Commission - Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission - Golden 1 Center - Sacramento, CA, 22' X 36' X 55', Glass, Stainless Steel, Silicone, 2016
3- Memento Mori - joan didion tribute, Commissioned Outdoor Mural - Canon - Sacramento, CA 14’ X 40’, Acrylic Marker, Acrylic Paint, Gold Leaf on Concrete Wall 2023
4- Memento Mori Detail, joan didion tribute, Commissioned Outdoor Mural - Canon - Sacramento, CA 14’ X 40’, Acrylic Marker, Acrylic Paint, Gold Leaf on Concrete Wall 2023
