SD Union-Tribune: 2026 Spring Arts Preview: The top visual art exhibitions we’re excited about this season

Michael Rocha of the San Diego Union-Tribune highlights Space 4 Art’s current exhibition, The Medium is the Message, and gives a sneak peek about our next two exhibitions in the works:

Space 4 Art: “The Medium Is the Message,” “Instructions for Unrest: Art Against Complacency” and “The Color of Silence”

It’ll be a busy spring for Space 4 Art, which kicks off the season with “The Medium Is the Message,” a group exhibition curated by Material Projects DTLA and hosted at Art Produce gallery in North Park. Inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book “The Medium Is the Massage,” the exhibition is curated by Los Angeles-based artists Andie Ryan Round and John Dewey. Jennifer de Poyen, Space 4 Art’s executive director, says the exhibition — which opened March 6 — is part of a yearlong effort to provide the community with “essential and incredibly diverse arts programming.” The curators say it “explores how meaning in visual art emerges through the relationship between material and content, and centers visual art as a site where artists manipulate medium and message to challenge perception and expectation.” An artist panel discussion will be held March 18 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

When “The Medium Is the Message” closes, another exhibit will open at Art Produce, where Space 4 Art has a year-long residency: “Instructions for Unrest: Art Against Complacency,” curated by local arts leader and educator Alessandra Moctezuma, professor of fine art at San Diego Mesa College and director of the college’s art gallery. Opening April 18, Moctezuma says it will shine “a light on artists who have raised their voices against injustice and brings together artworks from various perspectives that speak to social justice locally, nationally and across the world.”

A third show, opening June 4, is “The Color of Silence,” curated by artist Francisco “Eme” Morales, gallery director at The Front Arte & Cultura in San Ysidro. The exhibition, closing July 1, “explores the contradictions and relationships between silence, noise, emptiness and saturation, and includes visual artists as well as sound performances and multimedia interventions,” Morales says.

Free. Space 4 Art at Art Produce, 3139 University Ave., North Park. Space 4 Art is also producing a series of artist panels, workshops and performances this spring. sdspace4art.org

To read Rocha’s full article highlighting many other San Diego exhibitions this spring, click here.