Area Meeting, the dynamic gathering of artists, creators, and community members, will meet again on Tuesday, June 9th at Art & Soul Gallery. In honor of Pride Month, the June Area Meeting will host a panel discussion entitled: Queering Art on the Central Coast. This program presented by the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative welcomes guest Moderator Lyra Ramirez Purugganan, MFA UC Santa Barbara. Area Meeting is designed as a rallying point for local creatives offering an invigorating evening of artistic presentations, lively discussions, and thoughtful feedback—plus a table of curated snacks that bring people together in the spirit of collaboration and inspiration.

The Panelists
The three panelists, Lucy Bell, MFA, Parker Graham, BFA, and Charlie Hodes, MFA Candidate, all hail from the UCSB Fine Arts Department and will present slides of their work and engage in a discussion addressing topics like, “What is the responsibility of the artist in a time of genocide?” What is the role of queer art in institutions? What does this look like in Santa Barbara? What does Santa Barbara need to support queer artists?

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Lucy Bell is a California based artist working with painted images, text, and social practice. Bell draws from interests in quotidian practices of labor, service, and devotion through queering images, and text. They work within blurred areas, sometimes literally blurring text and image, other times in consideration of mystery. Bell also works in collaborative and social practices cultivating spaces for recontextualizing congregation, intimacy and community. They have shown in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara. Their work has been published out of London, New York City, and San Diego. Bell received their MFA from UC Santa Barbara loves maritime museums. 

Parker Graham (b. 2002, Livermore, CA) is a mixed media artist currently based out of Ventura, California. He is a recent graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara departmental art honors program, and has continued to show work in the Santa Barbara area since. He has most recently shown work at the annual Transgender Day of Visibility art show, put on by SBTAN. His work explores queerness, intimacy, and desire through a range of mediums including textiles, ceramic, metal, and oil paint.

Charlie Hodes (they/them) is a queer artist from Orange County, California, and a first year MFA student at UCSB. They received their B.A. in painting from Saint Mary’s College of California and are currently working in installation and performance. Their current practice explores memory-conscious materiality and the transposition of the queer body onto/into natural and built spaces in time, wherein lingerings of the body’s intuitive somatic response are documented digitally and gesturally.
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Moderator lyra ramirez purugganan (she/they), is an interdisciplinary artist born in Manila, Philippines and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She received a BFA in printmaking from The Ohio State University in 2021 and a MFA at UC Santa Barbara in 2024. Influenced by craft and materials, queer culture, and their bicultural upbringing between the Philippines and the American heartland, lyra dissects material connections and symbolic history through lace-making, metalwork, and ceramics. She has exhibited at OSU Urban Arts Space, 934 Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, UCSB Architecture, Design, and Art Museum, IA&A Hillyer in Washington DC, Stoveworks in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and more. Recently, lyra is a co-recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Center artist project grant and established 266 Collective: a grassroots organization aiming to provide opportunities and education for underrepresented and emerging artists in Central Ohio.