Minna Väisänen is making animations with Grok. At 56, they're exploring what happens when digital tools tear down old gatekeeping. You don't need to beg a production house for gear anymore—you just open a laptop and build your own world. The speed and access are wild. And yes, for women especially, that shift mattered. The old art structures were rigged—"genius" was a word reserved for men with handlers and mistresses. Digital tools let women skip the permission stage. You ca

Carmen Dominguez is working with gift tissue as transparencies. At 56, they're doing more woven paper art, experimenting with combining traditional home crafts with abstract imagery. They're exploring the themes of reconciling historical alienation with contemporary reality. They're influenced by absurdist humor—DADA, found art, art brut, home crafting, and graffiti. They must call themselves "entry-level" but they have 20 years of creating art at home. Self-taught. Southern

At 75, Cindy Zimmerman is developing a workshop on making artist books for Banned Books Week at San Diego Central Library. They're also working on Mobile Monument, rolling activist art for protests, parades, and exhibitions, amplifying words purged during the first weeks of the Trump administration. They're more clear now that they decide what to do based on the guidance of their inner voice. What's actually hard about being an artist at this point in their life?  Too little

Up to a year ago, E.M. Miller's medium was food. Now it's raw canvas. At 50, he's a former actor turned musician turned chef turned artist standing at yet another fucking crossroads and deciding if he continues down this rabbit hole of art or not. How's his work different now than it was before 50?  A weaker person or perhaps a lesser experienced person would say the unknown, but he's used to not asking those kinds of questions. What's actually hard about being an artist at t

foto credit Susanna Andreini Susanna Andreini works with the invisible realms—concrete with Elemental Beings. At 60, the stunning results of her recent paintings, the absolutely unexpected colors, motifs, and expression touched her in a very deep way and encouraged her to explore this way of artistic expression even deeper. She's exploring her connection to the Elemental Beings, offering them her canvas as their stage. They dance on it, try out different forms, sometimes as l

Penny Cagney photo by R.R. Jones 2024 At 69, Penny Cagney is working with a new device created by a group of scientists at Arizona State University, including Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek and Prof. Nathan Newman. The technology is called the HyLighter, and it uses 13 programmable monochromatic light beams to simulate how color is perceived across different species and visual systems. She's exploring the science of color and vision, creating oil paintings designed specifically

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” ~ Paul Gauguin "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."  ~Frida Kahlo   NOTE: This essay is about Tony Pinto’s brilliantly conceived and curated “Self/not Selfie” exhibition currently at the Golden West College Gallery. As its name indicates, the exhibition focuses on artists’ private images of themselves (i.e., self-portraits)—not on contemporary Smartphone photographs

Softness as a weapon. That's the fire. Juniper Sikora, Experiment Artist, working with activated biofilm, 60cm x 90cm, 2025, Photo credit: artist At 54, Juniper Sikora is obsessed with bioplastics, oysters, memory foam faces—materials that hold memory, resilience, and fragility all at once. She's embedding frequency, RFID, and AI into sensory works that whisper rather than shout, but still change the room they enter. It's that delicious tension between tenderness and power th

Behind My Camera: 8x10: 2018 At 70, Kimberly-Ann is converting beaded necklaces into bracelets. She's also just finished entries for two simultaneous shows, and next on her radar is another Call & Response bookmaking project and a local art fair. Her work is eclectic and varied. She works in leather, semi-precious beads, on gourds, with many different types of paint, paper, and found objects, as well as photography. She's been creating art in one form or another since she can