Never Idle

August 31 – October 6, 2026

Reception on Saturday, September 19, from 3-5 p.m.

A group exhibition featuring Hannah Tempest Jenkins, Milford Zornes, Mowry Baden, Judy Fiskin, David Amico, Steve Comba, Amy Maloof, Sid Duenas, and Alex Heilbron

Never Idle brings together eight artists whose individual careers span more than a century of continuous art production in Claremont, California, from Hannah Tempest Jenkins’s arrival in 1905 to work made this year. Many of the artists studied or taught at the Claremont Colleges, and many have made Claremont their home for decades. Claremont has been an important hub for the arts since the early 1900s, and it continues to be part of art history through the artists, professors, and studios that keep new work moving through the city. Working across collage, lithography, painting, photography, screenprint, and interactive sculpture, the artists in this exhibition demonstrate that serious artmaking in this region hasn’t slowed since it began.

Hannah Tempest Jenkins (1854-1927), Pomona College’s first art instructor and one of the founders of the Rembrandt Club of Pomona College and Claremont, still active today, worked as an Impressionist landscape painter within the movement later documented in the Orange County Museum of Art’s Circles of Influence: Impressionism to Modernism in Southern California Art, 1910-1930. She trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Academie Julian in Paris. Her work was included in the Claremont Museum of Art’s 2008 exhibition First Generation: Art in Claremont, 1907-1957.

Milford Zornes (1908-2008), part of the California Scene Painting movement, came to study art at Pomona College in 1930, took classes with Millard Sheets at Scripps College, and later returned to teach at Pomona. He had early success with a solo show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and then with work for the P.W.A.P. federal art project. One of his works was selected to hang in the White House. He later served as an official war artist in the China-India-Burma theater and as president of the California Watercolor Society.

Mowry Baden (born 1936), a pioneer of interactive, kinaesthetic sculpture, graduated from Pomona College in 1958 and returned to teach from 1968-1972. His sculptures, built from welded aluminum and repurposed industrial devices, require a viewer’s body to complete them. It is not just about looking at the work, but rather it is about physically engaging with the work. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Judy Fiskin (born 1945), a conceptual artist working primarily in photography, graduated from Pomona College in 1966 and later taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Her small, deadpan black-and-white photographs, a format she stuck with consistently since 1976, earned her a mid-career retrospective at MOCA in 1992 and a Getty monograph, Some Aesthetic Decisions, cataloguing her complete photographic works in 2011.

David Amico (born 1951) is a painter working with abstraction who has influenced generations of painters and now serves as Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University. Since his first exhibitions at P.S.1 and Newspace Gallery in 1976, his work has earned him the Cartier Fellowship in Paris, two Pollock-Krasner grants, and the Presidential Scholar’s Distinguished Teacher Award.

Steve Comba (born 1959) has spent over four decades as a museum professional and arts leader in Claremont, where he has lived since 1984. After earning his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1986, he rose to Associate Director/Registrar of the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, a role he continues to hold. He is also a practicing studio artist whose work has been shown throughout Southern California.

Amy Maloof (born in the 1970s) received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She has made collages since she was a teenager, obscuring and recombining found images. Her wide-ranging practice also includes sculptures that border on the absurd, music performance with the bands Falcon Eddy and Hot Rock Gos(sip), and collaborative works through the publishing imprint Shrimperrecords.

Sid Duenas (born 1973) is a conceptual artist working with images and text who has made Claremont his home. He was a Field Workshop Artist-in-Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and his work has been shown at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, LAXART, and the Armory Center for the Arts.

Alex Heilbron (born 1987) is an artist working in painting, drawing, and printmaking. In her work, decoration is not just something pleasing; pattern and repetition become a way to think about femininity, rules, and control. She teaches at Scripps College, and her work has earned her a Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.

Together, these artists trace an important lineage of artmaking in Claremont, one built not only in classrooms but in studios: a working community whose collective output over more than a century has shaped Southern California’s art history as much as any single school or movement, and whose members continue to make and show new work today.