Join us at monca for a celebratory opening reception for the three new exhibitions on Friday, March 20th from 6-8PM. All opening receptions are free and open to the public. Drinks will be available for purchase at the bar. Get your friends together for a fun evening out at the museum!
All three exhibitions will be on view at the museum from Thursday, March 19 to Sunday, May 3rd.
The 4th Annual Foster Care Museum will be held at the Museum of Northern California Art from Thursday, March 19th through Sunday, May 3rd, 2026. This exhibition is dedicated to sharing the unique foster care experience and celebrates foster youth’s resilience, talents, and perseverance. Through their stories, art, and artifacts, foster youth invite the community to see life through the lens of those who have experienced the foster care system. Please join us to support the creative expression of local foster youth and their talents.
Utilizing the same power a museum has that legitimizes art to the public, the art on display can validate the experiences of marginalized identities, such as foster youth. For the population represented in the exhibition, it provides visibility and a sense of belonging in spaces like museums, which also supports contemporary museum practice by equitizing museum spaces.
The Foster Youth Museum (originally subtitled “Lost Childhoods”) was first displayed at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art History in 2017. This exhibition was groundbreaking in that the museum partnered with organizations, current, and former foster youth to co-curate the exhibition. The Butte County Foster Care Museum is an adaptation of the original exhibition. This is an innovative approach as the museum shares power and authority with the subject of the exhibition in order to preserve the authentic voice.
Small Wonders is a juried art exhibition featuring work inspired by the beauty, mystery, and significance of the microscopic, the miniature, and the overlooked. This exhibition offers an opportunity to magnify the unnoticed and reveal worlds within worlds. Artists were encouraged to explore scale, detail, and viewpoint. Join us in remembering that even the tiniest details can hold vast meaning. Pieces of many mediums will be featured in this exhibition, positing how each artist interprets the idea of smallness and wonder differently. Visiting the Small Wonders exhibition will have you looking closer, much closer…
Chico State University Assistant Professor, Nicole Kilian, is proud to present Biology student artwork in the exhibition titled, Uninvited Guests. During their study of parasite biology, students created artistic depictions of microscopic cell structures. Kilian’s students’ work raises awareness of parasitic relationships in nature. The exhibition title, Uninvited Guests, recalls the Ancient Greek word, “parasitos,” meaning an uninvited guest who could remain and eat with everyone else if they flattered the host or entertained the other guests. The parasites featured in the exhibition exist in California and affect the ecosystems we all live in! Today, parasites are not the gracious “guests” of Ancient Greece, but rather organisms that live off others without giving anything in return. Thank you to all of the CSU, Chico faculty and students who put this educational exhibition together after months of hard work and research.
If you can’t make it to the opening reception, make sure to visit during the museum’s open hours, Thursday - Sunday, 11AM-5PM.
