Maija Peeples-Bright, Beast Sunburst entHAREs the Sky, 2025.
Maija Peeples-Bright, paints a sculpture in her home studio in Rocklin, California. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Maija Peeples-Bright, Life is Just a Bowl of Terriers, 1987.
exhibition
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01.17.26 - 04.26.26

Maija Peeples-Bright: Life is Just a Bowl of Terriers

January 17–April 26, 2026

Maija Peeples-Bright is one of the few women artists associated with Northern California’s Funk Art movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. Peeples-Bright’s wildly inventive practice comprises robust compositions bustling with animals of all kinds—her “beasties” as she calls them—forming surreal, imaginative landscapes in audacious impasto. Her zoological arrangements represent alternate realities, infusing exuberance and a sense of the absurd into impossible scenarios. Highly distinctive, her textural creature patterns revel in the extreme, often taking up every inch of the canvas, multiplying her beasties into dizzying arrangements. Peeples-Bright invites us into a decadence-gone-wild world all her own. The exhibition will feature a retrospective look at Peeples-Bright’s career, from her early days of the Funk Movement to today.

EXHIBITION RECEPTION
Saturday, January 24, 2026
Free for SVMA Members | $10 for non-members

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Major Exhibition Support 
Bank of America
Dana Simpson-Stokes and Ken Stokes
Jeanne Walker Harvey

Exhibition Sponsors
Anna KneeMouse
Anna Francis

Sonoma Tourism Improvement District

 

“I make piles, lots of piles. I mean cleanliness, neatness, it’s so unimportant.”
— Maija Peeples-Bright