As part of her solo exhibition “As We Come Together” artists Maria Maea invites students and the LBCC community to participate in a collective learning experience through movement, palm weaving, mask making and more.

 For a complete list of workshops please view the calendar listed below. 

ARTIST-LED COMMUNITY WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

• Artist-in Residence Dates: Apr 4 – May 15, 2026 | Gallery Open: Tuesday – Friday
• Opening Reception: Tues, May 19, 2026 | 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. at LAC, K-100
• Workshop – Mask Making: Fri, April 24, 2026 |12:00 – 2:00 p.m. at LAC, K-100 
  Note: Workshops will be in the courtyard of the K-Building

WORKSHOP OVERVIEW

Maria Maea’s practice bridges land, memory, and material in a way that invites reflection and reclamation. As an artist of Samoan and Mexican descent raised in Long Beach, Maea uses palm weaving as both a sculptural technique and a gesture of ancestral storytelling. Her upcoming workshop, offers students and the LBCC community a chance to learn traditional weaving practices while engaging in collective dialogue around indigeneity, colonial erasure, and cultural continuity. Through hands-on participation, students won’t simply observe. The use of natural materials will provide them with a deeper understanding of how something as delicate as a frond can hold the strength of generations. The use of organic materials, which will eventually return to the earth, is a quiet reminder of the impermanence of all things and the resilience found in that truth.

About the artist: MARIA MAEA

Maria Maea is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, film and sound. Through her art practice, she deepens her connection to land, somatic memory, and ancestry. Her works act as a residue of her lived experience as a first generation Los Angeleno of Samoan and Mexican heritage. Using plants and repurposed found material gathered throughout Los Angeles, Maea builds film set-like sculptures that relate to storytelling & myth-making. With experience in film production, she understands the invisible labor and processes that happen behind the scenes and creates works that invite viewers into a cinematic universe of her own imagination.  She uses palm fronds foraged from the greater Los Angeles area to build these sculptures that play in the space between figurative and abstraction. These sculptures, called future ancestors, are made from concrete, rebar, collected objects and both living and dead plants. The work seeks to complicate art’s relationship with institutions around ideas of contamination and preservation. Many works structurally contain seed pods that over time will crumble to dust, however the seed will remain – making the artworks multi-generational. Maea’s greatest inspiration and collaborator is nature itself. Mythos and time also function as sculptural materials in the artist’s work, much in the same way as the plants, concrete, and rebar do. By composing pictures of family with family, Maea produces fragmentary, nonlinear narratives for herself and her relatives, which pointedly work against Western notions of both temporality and lineage.

Special Thanks To Our Sponsors

• Port of Long Beach

Additional Support by

• LBCC Foundation
• LBCC Associated Student Body

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EVENT GENERAL INFORMATION (Location|Hours|Parking)

Location: LBCC Art Gallery located at 4901 E Carson St, Long Beach, CA 90808, Building K

Gallery Hours

• Tuesday: 12pm-6pm
• Wednesdays: 11am -4pm
• Thursday: 12pm -6pm
• Friday: 12pm -6pm
• Weekends open by appointment

Parking: $2 a day in Lots C, D, and E ​