Next / Now 2026

Artwork by Michael Eckerman

Artwork by Lance Sims

On View: Friday, June 12 - Friday, July 3, 2026

First Friday Reception: July 3, 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm

This exhibition is designed to showcase the ways in which art can connect families and can be passed down through generations. For this three-week exhibition, we’ll be showcasing the work of two local families: the Eckerman family and the Offermann-Sims family.

Exhibiting Artists: Michael Eckerman, Ea Eckerman, Rosie Eckerman, Mary Offermann, Lance Sims, & Amy Moon Offermann-Sims.

Mary Offermann

Artist Bio:

Mary Offermann has worked in ceramics, lino-cut prints, watercolor, and collage. For the past thirty years her primary medium has been dry pastel on sanded paper.  Fascinated by the meeting of human endeavor and the natural landscape, she has painted the villages, orchards, and fields of La Montagne Noire in the south of France. She now lives year-round in Santa Cruz, California and has begun painting a series of coastal mountains’ meeting with ocean, sky, and sometimes tilled land. You will find trees as major subjects in both her French and California pieces. Offermann is largely self-taught. Notably, she took a ten-day workshop with Wayne Thiebaud in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1991. She also briefly studied ceramics at Moore College of Art under Ken Vavrek. Her work has been shown in galleries in Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, San Juan Bautista, and Big Sur in California, and in Castelnaudary and Revel in France. Offermann has shown her art at Santa Cruz County’s annual Open Studios for all but one of its forty years.  Her work is also found in private collections in California, Washington, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, and in France, England, Ireland, and Switzerland.

Artist Statement:

When I first visited small villages in France, the older women would ask me, “are you a believer?”  I would answer, “I’m a seeker.”

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Gaugin nailed the asking of it; each of us finds our own answer.

What is the act of seeing? How is my perception translated into what I present to you? How is it that this body of mine manifests a painting for you to see?

The light through my eyes (without which I would not see) stimulates cells in my brain and moves through all of human history coded in the coils of my body, passing through my lived experience and my memories.  Chemicals which lead to mood changes determine what I’ve chosen to paint. And somehow this light, translated by motor energy moves my hand as I seek to combine what I see with what I think and feel. 

Transformation. Light energy to physical energy and back to light. The candle burning. The woodstove. This brief flame of life.

I find the play of light and dark more interesting these days. My landscapes look to eternity and to mortality. The California mountains with the charred skeletons of trees are sometimes  in the backgound; sometimes it’s the Pacific Ocean, looking at sky and infinity. In between am I, wondering and loving the privilege of being alive and well, here and now.

Amy Moon Offermann-Sims

Artist Bio:

Amy Moon Offermann-Sims (b. 1976, Santa Cruz, CA) is a painter living and working in Santa Cruz, California. Working primarily in acrylic paint on stretched canvas, she creates mysterious, moody landscapes often populated by solitary human figures. Her work draws viewers into quiet spaces—familiar but strange—where the natural world becomes a vessel for emotional undercurrents.

Offermann-Sims studied art at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the University of New Orleans, and at Cabrillo College. For ten years she self-published the comics zine Homesick, and her artwork has appeared on several LP album releases, reflecting her long-standing connection to independent art and music communities.

Influenced deeply by her parents—both painters—she grew up immersed in a creative community on the Santa Cruz compound where she now lives again after nearly two decades spent in other parts of the United States. Her practice is also shaped by a spiritual relationship with the earth, as well as by her experiences as the mother of two creative children, now twelve and fifteen. These threads of place, lineage, and transformation weave through her paintings, giving them a sense of quiet intensity and grounded wonder.

Artist Statement:

Growing up with parents who are both artists, I remember being at gallery openings and visiting the art museums in San Francisco from a very young age. 

The idea that one must find their own creative expression was taken for granted. My mom wrote folk songs on the dulcimer and made linoleum block prints about her dreams. My dad was always pulling out a sketchbook, drawing friends and family, or a scenic view or an architectural detail. We were thought to respect their time in their respective studios, my mom had a sign saying “DO NOT DISTURB “ hanging on her studio door.

There was always a ream of white paper and fresh packs of colored markers at the kitchen table. We didn’t have a television and spent hours in the evenings and weekends drawing with each other, and playing drawing games such as exquisite corpse.

My work centers on my perception of the relationships between nature, water, light, shadow, and reflection. These shifting forces create the emotional field of my paintings. I am drawn to the strangeness of everyday moments in the natural world—and I use these details to explore the mystery that binds us to the earth.

My process begins with visual observation. I photograph scenes that catch my eye, then return to the images that make me feel a glimpse of awe. Working in watercolor pencils and acrylics on canvas, I build each painting over months, slowly layering thin washes with thicker strokes. This slow, layered approach allows the image to emerge gradually and with depth and dimension.

I am motivated by a deep reverence for our planet, and by a desire to seek and create weird beauty as a way of bringing pleasure and meaning into the struggles of daily life. My work is, at its core, an act of honoring the earth—its shifting, its rhythms, and its vast capacity to support life.

I want viewers to feel a sense of wonder when standing before my paintings, an awareness of the elements that shape our surroundings. Environmental protection and a deep sense of belonging to the natural world inform my practice.

Michael Eckerman

Artist Statement:

In the summer of 1970 I found myself it the woods of Quebec, Eastern Canada, helping a friend build a small cabin. I had volunteered to do the stonework, which included some foundation work and a fireplace. I had minimal experience with stonework but I figured how hard could it be… one stone on two, then two stones on one, etc.. It was actually fun.  I moved on and other stone projects began to happen and I learned as I went. I studied other stone construction techniques  and, through boredom more than anything else, began to use my imagination to enhance what I was building, whether it was fireplaces, landscapes, hardscape, walls, anything and everything. Over the next 55 years I would travel the planet and would always find people that needed stonework…in Australia, NZ, Portugal, the UK, Canada, Mexico, Tahiti, the Hawaiian Islands, all parts of the U.S., but mainly in my hometown of Santa Cruz and the surrounding mountains and beaches.  

As I aged I got away from the multi-ton large projects and would sculp with stones in my studio.. mainly the canine form {dogs}, but also cats and other subjects, trying to get feelings and expressions from stones. 

Two of my 4 children, Ea and Rosie, became artists as they figured their lives out, and eventually the 3 of us joined up and would participate together in the Santa Cruz Arts Council Open Studios program.

The Offerman-Sims lived close by to our family in Santa Cruz and we gradually became friends over the years, with our kids sometimes attending the same schools as their kids. Maybe we weren’t the closest of friends during those busy, child-raising years, but we had lots of respect for each other and for the art that we all produced.  Recently I was able to sculp a tortoise for them out of stones at their home in Santa Cruz, and then traveled to their other lovely home in the French countryside to help them sort out some stonework problems and take a look at that corner of the world.

About the Artists