Persian Carpets: Talk, Short Film & Family Art Activities

As part of Maryam Bayat: Unrolling Paradise, this free public program offers a welcoming introduction to the art and history of Persian carpets through film, conversation, and hands-on making. Families and visitors of all ages are invited to explore the journey of a Persian carpet, from design and wool preparation to dyeing and weaving, and to learn more about the skill, tradition, and imagination carried in each work.

The program features a short educational talk alongside screenings of two animated films by acclaimed Iranian artist and animator Noureddin Zarrinkelk, The Little Prince and the Magic Carpet and Amir Hamzeh.

Hands-on art activities for families and children will round out the afternoon, creating an inviting space to learn, watch, and make together in connection with the exhibition.

This program is free and open to the public.

Join sound healer and movement practitioner Noriko Whitfield for an immersive session exploring the connection between body, mind, and art. Through guided sound meditation and gentle movement, participants will engage in practices that support emotional balance, nervous system regulation, and self-awareness.

With over 16 years of experience in sound therapy and energy healing, Whitfield creates a calming environment that invites reflection and inner stillness. This session is open to all levels. No prior experience is needed. 

Please dress comfortably and bring a yoga mat. A pillow and sweater or blanket are also recommended.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will become creators of their own amoxtli. Join artist José Hugo Sánchez as he opens a door into the ancient cultures of the Maya, Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec, and explore how their visual traditions can be brought into conversation with contemporary aesthetics.

Participants will create a singular amoxtli, or painted book, of their own through cutting, pasting, printing, painting, and experimentation. Sánchez will guide participants in converting their visions, dreams, and memories into works of art while igniting their flor y canto — their artistic spark.

The workshop will also include the creation of a collective mural. Participants will learn how to juxtapose techniques and styles from different periods of Mesoamerica with images from contemporary popular culture, including DC and Marvel heroes, anime, cartoons, films, magazines, advertisements, and other media.

Come prepared to have fun. The practices you learn will be enjoyable and imaginative, but also focused and intense. They require attention, curiosity, and a willingness to experiment with materials and your own imagination.

What to Bring

Participants are encouraged to bring:

• Old posters and magazines of all kinds, including fashion, music, comics, anime, advertisements, or other printed materials
  

• Three objects that are special or magical to you
  

Please note: these objects may be inked and printed during the workshop. The ink is water-based, and the objects will be washed, cleaned, and returned to you at the end.

The workshop on this date, July 19, is designed for adult participants.

For the version of this workshop designed for youth, please see the event page for July 18.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will become creators of their own amoxtli. Join artist José Hugo Sánchez as he opens a door into the ancient cultures of the Maya, Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec, and explore how their visual traditions can be brought into conversation with contemporary aesthetics.

Participants will create a singular amoxtli, or painted book, of their own through cutting, pasting, printing, painting, and experimentation. Sánchez will guide participants in converting their visions, dreams, and memories into works of art while igniting their flor y canto — their artistic spark.

The workshop will also include the creation of a collective mural. Participants will learn how to juxtapose techniques and styles from different periods of Mesoamerica with images from contemporary popular culture, including DC and Marvel heroes, anime, cartoons, films, magazines, advertisements, and other media.

Come prepared to have fun. The practices you learn will be enjoyable and imaginative, but also focused and intense. They require attention, curiosity, and a willingness to experiment with materials and your own imagination.

What to Bring

Participants are encouraged to bring:

• Old posters and magazines of all kinds, including fashion, music, comics, anime, advertisements, or other printed materials
  

• Three objects that are special or magical to you
  

Please note: these objects may be inked and printed during the workshop. The ink is water-based, and the objects will be washed, cleaned, and returned to you at the end.

This workshop is designed for youth 13 -17

Join sound healer and movement practitioner Noriko Whitfield for an immersive session exploring the connection between body, mind, and art. Through guided sound meditation and gentle movement, participants will engage in practices that support emotional balance, nervous system regulation, and self-awareness.

With over 16 years of experience in sound therapy and energy healing, Whitfield creates a calming environment that invites reflection and inner stillness. This session is open to all levels. No prior experience is needed. 

Please dress comfortably and bring a yoga mat. A pillow and sweater or blanket are also recommended.

Air-Dry Clay Handbuilding Workshop with Ellie Fonseca

Find your flow through touch and texture in this calming, hands-on workshop. No experience necessary—just bring your curiosity. Materials provided.

About the Instructor

With a passion for ceramics and hands-on creativity, Ellie Fonseca has been guiding students through the art of clay in Orange County and now San Diego. Specializing in hand-building, she brings dedicated experience from teaching workshops for local community and non-profit organizations. Her approach emphasizes mindfulness, sensory awareness, and artistic exploration, ensuring that every participant feels connected to the craft and empowered to create. Through engaging demonstrations and personalized guidance, Ellie Fonseca enjoys fostering a welcoming environment where creativity flourishes and clay transforms into art.  

In this lecture, artist José Hugo Sánchez presents ideas surrounding his solo exhibition Amoxtlis at the California Center for the Arts Museum, a body of print-based works that draw from Mesoamerican histories, anthropological research, and contemporary image-making. Developed through site-based research in Mexico and the U.S.–Mexico border region, the works combine carving, engraving, and hand-printing techniques to produce layered visual narratives.

Opportunity for Q&A to follow.

Free and open to the public.

Join artist Maryam Bayat for a hands-on workshop exploring decoupage and surface design through the transformation of recycled glass wine bottles into decorative objects. Drawing inspiration from the Persian-inspired motifs and materials featured in Maryam Bayat: Unrolling Paradise, participants will work with patterned papers, layering techniques, and decorative applications to create their own finished piece.

Throughout the workshop, Bayat will introduce participants to the process of decoupage while discussing the relationship between ornament, interior design, and reuse within her artistic practice. The workshop also considers how everyday materials can be reimagined through craft and design.

Open to adults and youth ages 12 and up, this workshop is suitable for all skill levels. All materials are provided, and participants will leave with a completed work to take home.

Presented in collaboration with Persian Place.

Registration: $55 per participant

Design & Furniture: From Past to Present

Discover the evolution of Persian decorative arts, furniture, and interior design—from tradition to contemporary styles with Maryam Bayat and Nicholas Bijan Pourfard.

Join sound healer and movement practitioner Noriko Whitfield for an immersive session exploring the connection between body, mind, and art. Through guided sound meditation and gentle movement, participants will engage in practices that support emotional balance, nervous system regulation, and self-awareness.

With over 16 years of experience in sound therapy and energy healing, Whitfield creates a calming environment that invites reflection and inner stillness. This session is open to all levels. No prior experience is needed. 

Please dress comfortably and bring a yoga mat. A pillow and sweater or blanket are also recommended.

Join artist Maryam Bayat for a hands-on painting workshop inspired by the Cypress tree, a recurring symbol in Persian art, poetry, and garden design. Participants will paint on pre-cut Cypress tree forms using acrylic paint and surface treatments drawn from the motifs and visual language of Maryam Bayat: Unrolling Paradise.

Bayat will guide participants through painting techniques and sanding processes that create layered textures and a weathered finish. Along the way, participants will learn more about the cultural significance of the Cypress tree and its presence within Persian visual traditions.

This workshop is open to adults, families, and youth ages 10 and up. No prior experience is needed, all materials are provided, and participants will leave with a finished artwork to take home.

Presented in collaboration with Persian Place.

Registration: $40 per participant

Air-Dry Clay Handbuilding Workshop with Ellie Fonseca

Find your flow through touch and texture in this calming, hands-on workshop. No experience necessary—just bring your curiosity. Materials provided.

About the Instructor

With a passion for ceramics and hands-on creativity, Ellie Fonseca has been guiding students through the art of clay in Orange County and now San Diego. Specializing in hand-building, she brings dedicated experience from teaching workshops for local community and non-profit organizations. Her approach emphasizes mindfulness, sensory awareness, and artistic exploration, ensuring that every participant feels connected to the craft and empowered to create. Through engaging demonstrations and personalized guidance, Ellie Fonseca enjoys fostering a welcoming environment where creativity flourishes and clay transforms into art.  

Air-Dry Clay Handbuilding Workshop with Ellie Fonseca

Find your flow through touch and texture in this calming, hands-on workshop. No experience necessary—just bring your curiosity. Materials provided.

About the Instructor

With a passion for ceramics and hands-on creativity, Ellie Fonseca has been guiding students through the art of clay in Orange County and now San Diego. Specializing in hand-building, she brings dedicated experience from teaching workshops for local community and non-profit organizations. Her approach emphasizes mindfulness, sensory awareness, and artistic exploration, ensuring that every participant feels connected to the craft and empowered to create. Through engaging demonstrations and personalized guidance, Ellie Fonseca enjoys fostering a welcoming environment where creativity flourishes and clay transforms into art.  

Join sound healer and movement practitioner Noriko Whitfield for an immersive session exploring the connection between body, mind, and art. Through guided sound meditation and gentle movement, participants will engage in practices that support emotional balance, nervous system regulation, and self-awareness.

With over 16 years of experience in sound therapy and energy healing, Whitfield creates a calming environment that invites reflection and inner stillness. This session is open to all levels. No prior experience is needed. 

Please dress comfortably and bring a yoga mat. A pillow and sweater or blanket are also recommended.

Persian Garden & Home — In Stitches with Maryam Bayat and Marty Ornish
Join artists Maryam Bayat and Marty Ornish for a hands-on workshop exploring stitching as a way to reflect on memory, place, and the idea of home. Inspired by the imagery of Persian gardens and domestic spaces, participants will experiment with simple embroidery and textile techniques to create small stitched compositions where gardens bloom in thread and each mark carries a personal story.

Registration fee: $40. All materials are included.

Shadow Drawing & Painting workshop in celebration of World Art Day

Led by Maryam Bayat and Shirin Aghdaie

This workshop encourages participants to explore creativity through observation and hands-on making. The session begins with a garden walk, during which participants observe the unique patterns created as light filters through leaves and branches. They will sketch these forms and then use natural materials to trace and develop them into their own compositions, then using color to complete their work.

Registration fee: $40 | Payable upon arrival

All materials will be provided. No prior experience necessary.

Join us as we celebrate the closing weekend of Designing the Infinite: Virtual Worldbuilding in Art & Gaming with an artist market, drop-in workshop, and a conversation with exhibiting artist Victor Castaneda H on Saturday, April 11, from 2:00 - 5:00 PM at the California Center for the Arts Museum.

Drawing from global cosmologies and contemporary digital practices, Designing the Infinite explores the perspectives of twelve artists from across the world building virtual environments through gaming technology to reimagine the cycles of creation, balance, and renewal that shape our realities.

2:30 - 3:00 PM: Join us in the gallery for a conversation with exhibiting artist Victor Castaneda H and learn more about his virtual reality installation, Eternal Ether. Audience Q&A to follow.

2:00 - 5:00 PM:  Throughout the afternoon, spend time in the galleries with an artist market, a drop-in pixel cross-stitch workshop, and a live vinyl DJ set by Andrew Nguyen. 

Don't miss your last chance to check out the exhibition, along with Kayla Mattes: Reboot > Reweave > Repeat and Lightwall, closing April 12th.

Air-Dry Clay Handbuilding Workshop with Ellie Fonseca

Find your flow through touch and texture in this calming, hands-on workshop. No experience necessary—just bring your curiosity. Materials provided.

About the Instructor

With a passion for ceramics and hands-on creativity, Ellie Fonseca has been guiding students through the art of clay in Orange County and now San Diego. Specializing in hand-building, she brings dedicated experience from teaching workshops for local community and non-profit organizations. Her approach emphasizes mindfulness, sensory awareness, and artistic exploration, ensuring that every participant feels connected to the craft and empowered to create. Through engaging demonstrations and personalized guidance, Ellie Fonseca enjoys fostering a welcoming environment where creativity flourishes and clay transforms into art.  

Join sound healer and movement practitioner Noriko Whitfield for an immersive session exploring the connection between body, mind, and art. Through guided sound meditation and gentle movement, participants will engage in practices that support emotional balance, nervous system regulation, and self-awareness.

With over 16 years of experience in sound therapy and energy healing, Whitfield creates a calming environment that invites reflection and inner stillness. This session is open to all levels. No prior experience is needed. 

Please dress comfortably and bring a yoga mat. A pillow and sweater or blanket are also recommended.

The California Center for the Arts, Escondido, in collaboration with Persian Place, presents Nowruz – Persian New Year, marking the arrival of spring and the beginning of the new year in Persian culture. Observed for more than 3,000 years across diverse regions and communities, Nowruz remains a time of renewal, reflection, and connection.

This gathering reflects a shared commitment to honoring cultural traditions that continue to hold deep meaning for our local community. While many Persian organizations across the United States have paused public programs in response to the current situation in Iran, the Center and Persian Place believe it is important to sustain spaces where heritage, artistic expression, and community can be experienced together.

The afternoon will feature live performances, a Women’s Artisan Market, arts and crafts, a kids exhibition, food, music, and free admission to the public opening of the new exhibition, Maryam Bayat: Unrolling Paradise.

This event is free and open to all.

Event sponsored by Cosmic Solar & Roofing.

Open Studio: Helena Westra

Helena Westra is a San Diego–based sculptor and interdisciplinary artist who works with clay, soil, and other natural and found materials to create objects, installations, and performances grounded in land-based practices. Drawing on her mixed ancestry and interests in craft and storytelling, her work considers belonging, ancestral connection, and the cyclical relationship between land and body. Westra’s practice approaches making as a way of holding memory and reimagining what it means to belong. In 2025, she was awarded the Windgate–Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft to support international research into ancestral craft traditions across Okinawa, Mallorca, Friesland, and the Philippines, which she will extend into her residency at the Museum.

During her time in the studio, Westra will be developing a project that will be presented as part of the 2025–26 In Studio Artist Residency exhibition, opening June 5, 2026.

Open Studio: Helena Westra

Thursdays | 11:00 AM — 3:00 PM

Helena Westra is a San Diego–based sculptor and interdisciplinary artist who works with clay, soil, and other natural and found materials to create objects, installations, and performances grounded in land-based practices. Drawing on her mixed ancestry and interests in craft and storytelling, her work considers belonging, ancestral connection, and the cyclical relationship between land and body. Westra’s practice approaches making as a way of holding memory and reimagining what it means to belong. In 2025, she was awarded the Windgate–Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft to support international research into ancestral craft traditions across Okinawa, Mallorca, Friesland, and the Philippines, which she will extend into her residency at the Museum.

Visit Westra’s studio in the Museum galleries on Thursdays between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM to learn more about her process.

During her time in the studio, Westra will be developing a project that will be presented as part of the 2025–26 In Studio Artist Residency exhibition, opening June 5, 2026.

Public Tour | No Gods, No Mods, No Masters: Cyberfeminist Perspectives in Designing the Infinite

Saturday, February 28 | 12:00 PM | Included with Admission

This short tour, designed as an introduction to Designing the Infinite: Virtual Worldbuilding in Art & Gaming, brings together cyberfeminist perspectives and historical allegory to explore how worldbuilding has long been used to critique authority, desire, and social order. Centered on Black Room and Angela’s Flood by Cassie McQuater, considered alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1515), the tour examines how moral and cultural values are encoded within video game worlds.

Open Studio: Helena Westra

Thursdays | 11:00 AM — 3:00 PM

Helena Westra is a San Diego–based sculptor and interdisciplinary artist who works with clay, soil, and other natural and found materials to create objects, installations, and performances grounded in land-based practices. Drawing on her mixed ancestry and interests in craft and storytelling, her work considers belonging, ancestral connection, and the cyclical relationship between land and body. Westra’s practice approaches making as a way of holding memory and reimagining what it means to belong. In 2025, she was awarded the Windgate–Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft to support international research into ancestral craft traditions across Okinawa, Mallorca, Friesland, and the Philippines, which she will extend into her residency at the Museum.

Visit Westra’s studio in the Museum galleries on Thursdays between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM to learn more about her process.

During her time in the studio, Westra will be developing a project that will be presented as part of the 2025–26 In Studio Artist Residency exhibition, opening June 5, 2026.

Air-Dry Clay Handbuilding Workshop with Ellie Fonseca

Find your flow through touch and texture in this calming, hands-on workshop. No experience necessary—just bring your curiosity. Materials provided.

About the Instructor

With a passion for ceramics and hands-on creativity, Ellie Fonseca has been guiding students through the art of clay in Orange County and now San Diego. Specializing in hand-building, she brings dedicated experience from teaching workshops for local community and non-profit organizations. Her approach emphasizes mindfulness, sensory awareness, and artistic exploration, ensuring that every participant feels connected to the craft and empowered to create. Through engaging demonstrations and personalized guidance, Ellie Fonseca enjoys fostering a welcoming environment where creativity flourishes and clay transforms into art.  

Join sound healer and movement practitioner Noriko Whitfield for an immersive session exploring the connection between body, mind, and art. Through guided sound meditation and gentle movement, participants will engage in practices that support emotional balance, nervous system regulation, and self-awareness.

With over 16 years of experience in sound therapy and energy healing, Whitfield creates a calming environment that invites reflection and inner stillness. This session is open to all levels. No prior experience is needed. 

Please dress comfortably and bring a yoga mat. A pillow and sweater or blanket are also recommended.

Public Tour | Choose Your Player: Digital Identity in Designing the Infinite

Saturday, February 21 | 12:00 PM | Included with Admission

This short tour, designed as an introduction to Designing the Infinite: Virtual Worldbuilding in Art & Gaming, builds on the exhibition’s cosmological framework, focusing on how individuals move through and shape digital worlds. Through avatars and virtual bodies, it examines identity, agency, and how power is shaped through participation and self-representation.

Every second Saturday of the month, the Museum offers pay-what-you-can admission for all. Visitors are invited to explore the galleries and participate in free drop-in art activities, artist-led workshops, talks, art demonstrations, and/or tours throughout the galleries and the Community Art Lab.

Join us between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM for a trinket tray making experience!
Participants will learn how to design and decorate their own unique trinket trays using air-dry clay.

No prior experience needed. All materials provided.

Open Studio: Helena Westra

Thursdays | 11:00 AM — 3:00 PM

Helena Westra is a San Diego–based sculptor and interdisciplinary artist who works with clay, soil, and other natural and found materials to create objects, installations, and performances grounded in land-based practices. Drawing on her mixed ancestry and interests in craft and storytelling, her work considers belonging, ancestral connection, and the cyclical relationship between land and body. Westra’s practice approaches making as a way of holding memory and reimagining what it means to belong. In 2025, she was awarded the Windgate–Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft to support international research into ancestral craft traditions across Okinawa, Mallorca, Friesland, and the Philippines, which she will extend into her residency at the Museum.

Visit Westra’s studio in the Museum galleries on Thursdays between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM to learn more about her process.

During her time in the studio, Westra will be developing a project that will be presented as part of the 2025–26 In Studio Artist Residency exhibition, opening June 5, 2026.