Artist Profiles
Timeless Creations
At 90, Sacramento artist Gerald “Jerry” Walburg approaches his work with the curiosity and persistence of someone who sees no reason to stop.
Last month, I wrote about the remarkable East Sac home and garden Jerry shaped over decades. He oversees a collection of houses, studios, sculpture gardens and gallery spaces that blur boundaries between art, architecture and landscape.
The surroundings reveal how Walburg sees the world: carefully composed, deeply personal, always evolving.
Essential Simplicity
For Susan Poirier, the artistic journey toward minimalist abstraction is about uncovering what matters.
Born in Boston and shaped by a childhood of travel, Poirier spent much of her professional life as a critical-care nurse and educator. Now she maintains a disciplined routine, often spending days working in her home-based Carmichael studio surrounded by canvases in various stages of development.
Sky’s The Limit
Some artists spend a lifetime searching for a signature subject. Sue Torngren found hers just by looking up.
The Sacramento painter is captivated by California’s skies—the clouds, the light, the drama. Sky became the defining narrative in her paintings, inviting viewers to savor moments that often go unnoticed.
When I first visited the artist in her Land Park studio a decade ago, she was producing close-up, vividly colored images of succulents in large-scale oil paintings. I featured several on Inside covers.
Passion For Pottery
Clay bowls, cups, vessels and vases crowd open shelving. Some of the ceramic pieces are finished with swirling earth-toned glazes. Others await their turn in a kiln.
Buckets of home-mixed glazes line one wall from top to bottom. Ceramicist tools and art supplies fill plastic bins. Pottery wheels sit side by side, adjacent to long high-top working tables.
23C Studio is a ceramic arts cooperative tucked away in a warehouse at 23rd and C streets in Midtown. The space is dusty and rustic, open to the weather, no air conditioning and limited heating. But the studio is fully equipped for wheel throwing and hand building, creating and collaborating.
Well Together
Well Together Community artist honors Spanish-speaking elders By Cathryn Rakich August 2026 They are the Manitos, Spanish-speaking elders who laugh together, cry together, share their pasts and embrace their futures. Their stories should be recounted, recorded and...
Creative Tension
At age 80, Sacramento artist Suzanne Adan still delights in unsettling people gently, mischievously and with wit and humor.
Her retrospective exhibition, “I’m No Spring Chicken,” through Oct. 11 at the Crocker Art Museum, celebrates a career that spans five decades and establishes Adan as one of the region’s most important artists.
The exhibition features more than 100 paintings, prints, drawings and ceramic sculptures that reveal a personal, visual language shaped by childhood memories, dark humor, vintage Americana and sly social commentary.
