Understanding California’s Latest Slang Terms
Title: Exploring “Public Texts”: A Visual Language of California
California, a state known for its cultural richness and diversity, resists easy categorization in both language and art. Yet, with the exhibition Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language, curator Alex Lukas offers a compelling narrative that maps the nuanced ways Californians communicate through text and image. On view at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the exhibit creatively illuminates how typography, signage, graffiti, protest art, and ephemera collectively form a “visual language” unique to the Golden State.
Plurality of Voices in California’s Art
Rather than attempting to distill a single, cohesive aesthetic for such a vast and varied region, Lukas chooses to embrace multiplicity. California, as a home to nearly 40 million people, hosts a mosaic of styles that reflect its layered social, political, and urban histories. Public Texts unites works by artists from diverse backgrounds and eras to showcase how text-based visual art becomes a form of storytelling, identity expression, and cultural critique.
Iconic and Everyday Inspirations
One of the exhibition’s major triumphs is its ability to highlight both the extraordinary and the mundane. North and South California’s differing cultural textures come into play through iconographies such as Emory Douglas’s artwork from the Black Panther Newspaper (1967–1980), which powerfully conveys political resistance through bold forms and limited palettes, and airbrushed murals reminiscent of lowrider aesthetics and working-class signage in “Paradise” (2024) by Ozzie Juarez.
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s “Injured?: I” (2024) reflects Southern California’s visual clutter—painted advertisements for law firms and billboards illustrated with kitschy caricatures—all reimagined in oil and enamel as both satire and homage. Meanwhile, Glen Rubsamen’s “Sorry, Wrong Number” (2023) encapsulates the fading allure of suburban strip malls bathed in smog-tinted sunlight, with the “Food 4 Less” sign doubling as both visual anchor and poetic signpost.
Heritage in Print: Colby Poster Company and Beyond
California has long been fertile ground for print culture, and the exhibit pays homage to this through dedicated space for historical silkscreen practices. A vitrine celebrating the legacy of the Colby Poster Company offers visually explosive prints that once announced underground parties and community gatherings in fluorescent gradients. Contemporary artists like Eve Fowler build on this legacy. Her letterpress work, “This Always Comes to That” (2011–12), employs Colby-style hues to explore feminist language and repetition.
Fowler’s reference to text as a dynamic and political material continues a long Californian tradition of integrating words into art, notably embodied in the work of John Baldessari. His iconic “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” (1971) is a standout in the show—a lithographic mantra that prompts reflection on the nature of creativity within educational systems and the art world itself.
Text in Three Dimensions
While most of the works in Public Texts exist in print or paint, sculpture proves itself an equally effective text medium. In “Siéntese Señora” (2024) by Georgina Treviño, Spanish-language fonts become a physical structure—part bench and part jewelry—in stainless steel. This metamorphosis transforms something as simple as a directive (“Sit down, ma’am”) into a multilayered commentary on culture, gender, and street style.
Anchoring the exhibition’s physical crescendo is Ana Teresa Fernández’s “SHHH” (2023), a large-scale mirror installation that enlists light, typography, and reflection to confront the viewer with silence—perhaps the loudest gesture within the space.
Art as Living Language
The exhibition’s final portion features responsive artworks from university students, whose projects line display shelves and walls in riso-printed messages and objects. Produced as part of a class exercise, these pieces speak not only to the themes of the collected works but to the ongoing evolution of California’s visual dialects. Their presence signals a participatory and ever-changing language within the state’s art ecosystem.
Conclusion: A Collective Vernacular
Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language offers more than a collection of typography-based art; it serves as a living archive of how people in California communicate across generations, geographies, and media. From the slick posters of Hollywood to the graffiti of East LA, from the protest art of political revolutionaries to the commercial kitsch of strip malls, the exhibition affirms that the Golden State’s visual language is as vast, layered, and expressive as its population.
As the state continues evolving, so too will its dialects—scribbled on walls, printed on paper, airbrushed on chrome, and shaped in steel. Lukas’s curation doesn’t prescribe a singular definition of what Californian art is, but instead extends