Welcome to the Virtual Art Gallery
Julie Cohn - June 1 - June 30
To view the current online exhibit at the Virtual Art Gallery, click here.
Lamorinda Arts Council invites you to view the work of featured artist Julie Cohn. Julie's watercolor paintings explore themes of growth, healing, and connection to nature. Through vibrant colors, expressive florals, and layered compositions, her work invites viewers to reflect on the beauty, resilience, and transformation found both in the natural world and within ourselves
Kiley Ames | November 3, 2025 - November 30, 2025
Lamorinda Arts Council invites you to view the work of featured artist Kiley Ames in the Virtual Gallery. Kiley Ames lives and works in Los Angeles and Oakland, CA. She received her BA in History from UCLA, a BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Ames has been awarded residencies in Beijing and Shanghai as well as Leipzig, Germany. She is the recipient of multiple grants including the Barbara Deming Memorial Grant, Leslie T. and Frances U. Posey Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Inglewood Artist Grant, Not Real Artist Grant, Take Action Grant, and Los Angeles Metro Recipient. She speaks about her artwork below:
Much of my work is formed by my ongoing exploration of fragments and fragmentation—the isolated and incomplete parts that make up a whole. Whether personal or collective, editing, rewriting, or omitting fragments from history has lasting consequences that continue to unfold and reshape perception. What was lived and what is imagined blur together, creating a space of psychological uncertainty. For me, painting is a way of working within this ambiguity exploring how experience, memory, and perception intertwine and how identity is continually remade through them.
Memory plays a central role. It is reconstructive and never a perfect archive. By editing fragments, we construct self-images that may not match objective truth yet still sustain our identity. At the collective level, cultures rewrite history by elevating certain fragments, suppressing others, and reinterpreting the past. When I work with fragments in painting, I want to make this visible: that every sense of wholeness is, in fact, a construction. It’s the act of piecing together—the tension between fracture and unity—that makes coherence possible. Dense flecks of color explore fragments of memory, experience, uncertainty and the reshaping of perception itself.
My paintings do not seek resolution. Rather, they inhabit a reality without beginning or end—defined not by wholeness, but by interaction, collision, and connection. Every sense of wholeness is, in fact, a construction. It’s the act of piecing together, the tension between fracture and unity that makes coherence possible.
September 7, 2025 - November 2, 2025 Online Exhibit
Lamorinda Arts Council invites you to view the work of featured artist Doug Heine in the Virtual Gallery. Three of his public art works are featured in Orinda, “Full Circle” in Library Plaza, “Butterflies” in Community Park and “Fruit of the Aluminum” in Wilder.” Heine’s time spent at UC Berkeley running the metal shop, working in the Art Department and the Lawrence Berkeley physics lab has served him well. Now at 90 he just has fun creating.
May 4, 2025 - June 1, 2025 Online Exhibit
Lamorinda Arts Council invites you to view the ceramic art of featured artist Olga Larner in the Virtual Wilder Gallery from May 4 to June 1. Larner is a multidisciplinary designer turned ceramic artist and teacher with a background in design. “I like discovering new techniques to bring out texture and organic elements of clay,” said Larner. You will notice a variety of surface treatments and shapes in the 20 vessels she is showing including fractallike beading in her glazes. An active member in the local art scene, Larner, an Orinda resident, chaired the Lamorinda Art Council’s High School Visual Art Competition in March for the third year in a row. Her favorite artist for painting and mixed media is Robert Rauschenberg.
April 7, 2025 - May 4, 2025 Online Exhibit
Yusuf Ssali
The Virtual Art Gallery features Ugandan artist Yusuf Ssali.
Yusuf Ssali’s paintings and mixed media works are inspired by the riches of African culture. His work includes abstraction, images of women, animals, landscape, and more recently, urban cityscapes around the Bay Area.
Aside from the riches of Africa, Ssali’s work addresses the challenges the continent faces in the current day. His portraits present regal African women cloaked in richly patterned, traditional fabrics that amplify their power and beauty, in reaction to the pervasive patriarchal culture of his youth. With faces and postures that demand respect, the women are united by Ssali’s striking use of color and design.
As a child, Ssali was captivated by the elephants, lions, exotic birds and large game animals that were never more than a short drive away. He grew up painting native animals in plein air, joining millennia of African artists who have included depictions of familiar animals as subject matter. As a young artist he was aware of a tragic elephant massacre by poachers in Nairobi. His work now focuses on the plight of these iconic animals, giving voice to their majesty, intelligence, beauty and migrations.
Ssali began painting landscapes of his new homeland when he first experienced the architecture of cities out- side of Africa. Unlike the circular, radiating communities of his home in Uganda, western cities are linear and square, connected through the colors and lights that emanate through thousands of windows after dark.
In his abstract paintings Ssali concentrates on the balance between intentionality and spontaneity, incorporating patterns, leather, tree bark and found objects that literally leap off the canvas in brilliant color.
Yusuf Ssali was born in Kampala, Uganda. He earned an MFA in Industrial Fine Arts and Design at Makerere University. He has exhibited in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, France, Belgium, Holland, New York, Boston, Seattle, Washington DC, and the San Francisco Bay area. He emigrated to the United States in 2017 to pursue his artistic career.
His abstract work concentrates on the balance between intention and instinct, incorporating organic and found objects that seem to leap off the canvas in brilliant colors. In his words "I gravitate towards abstraction to create visual language that transcends cultural boundaries."
Ssali is Executive Director of Kisa Foundation USA, a 501(c)(3) charity founded in 2010. The Foundation sponsors Uganda Art Consortium. Members of the Consortium donate 50% of their sales to Kisa Foundation to finance charitable projects in Uganda including Namungoona Children’s Art Center and Mulago Hospital Art Therapy Program. Several well-known Uganda artists are members of the Consortium, including Mathias Tusiime, Kaspa Kasambeko, Hassan Mukiibi, Chaz Mbabazi and James Nsamba.
