BAKERSFIELD, CA.- The Bakersfield Museum of Art opened two new exhibitions this season. Together, these exhibitions engage deeply with the concepts of place, memory, and transformation.

Ann Diener: The Invented Land offers an immersive exploration of transformation in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where land, water, and human ambition are inseparably linked. Rooted in Diener’s heritage as a fourth-generation descendant of a California farming family, Diener weaves drawing, sculpture, and installation into layered visual systems that reflect irrigation, infrastructure, and environmental change. An expansion of earlier iterations of her work, this presentation introduces new works inspired by the Kern River, examining its vital role in shaping the region’s ecology, industry, and cultural memory. Maps, diagrams, and organic forms trace cycles of cultivation, extraction, and renewal, revealing place as an ever-evolving construction shaped by memory, labor, and invention. With meticulously layered surfaces that integrate architectural schematics, botanical imagery, and historical cartography, Diener constructs dreamlike, archival landscapes that function as both critique and homage.

Ali Vaughan’s The Afterlife of Rivers and Fields presents a poetic meditation on landscape as a living record of memory, emotion, and time. Born and raised in Bakersfield, Vaughan draws from the Central Valley’s shifting terrains to create layered abstractions that echo rivers, fields, and sedimented histories. Through process-driven mark making, deeply informed by observation and intuition, her work reflects cycles of loss and renewal, revealing place as something continually shaped and reshaped by human presence and natural change. The Afterlife of Rivers and Fields invites reflection on how we shape our environments and how, in turn, they shape us.

Curator of exhibitions and collections Victor Gonzales connected these exhibitions through their ties to our terrain. “Both artists engage deeply with place, memory, and transformation—asking how environments bear traces of human presence, time, and change,” says Gonzales. “Where Diener frequently uses maps, diagrams, architectural references, and layered media to evoke systems of water use, land reclamation, and environmental change, Vaughan abstracts and distills landscape into gesture, texture, and color. Audiences can move from the visible systems of terrain and policy to the felt experience of land, memory, and transformation.”