LCAD Gallery partners with Art Division, a vibrant L.A. program, to bring head-turning exhibition to Laguna

by Theresa Keegan 
Stu News Laguna
September 12, 2025

The latest colorful, jam-packed show at the Laguna College of Art + Design’s Gallery is, appropriately, turning heads.
Heads, which is offering a public curator talk on Saturday, Sept. 13 at 11 a.m. is an exhibition that defies expectations. After all, how exciting could it be to look at a bunch of images just from the neck up? In reality, the show is revealing, thought-provoking and very powerful.
“There’s nothing more empathetic than the human head,” said Dan McCleary, who curated the show with Luis Serrano. “Everyone responds to it.”
In fact, the two well-known California artists found inspiration for this show from Head On/The Modern Portrait, a 1991 show curated by Chuck Close for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Each had seen the traveling show when it was in Marina Del Rey. Its impact was recalled when discussing themes for a new show at Art Division, a Los Angeles school they are involved with. They decided to recreate a similar show. And added in the goal to make it a traveling exhibition, hence how it has arrived in Laguna Beach.
“It’s a testimony to the collaborative nature of Luis and I,” said McCleary. “Neither alone would undertake this effort.”... Continue Reading

Art Division celebrates 15 years

by Kristopher Gee
Spectrum News
​May 8, 2025

Dan McCleary founded the Art Division, a community-based arts program, in 2010 to provide in-depth services to young adults aged 18-27.
​Art Division was founded to give young artists the professional training and academic support they need to succeed and transition into four-year colleges and successful careers. 
The campus has an extensive art library, painting and print-making studios and a gallery, and has gained the support of professional artists who donate their time as guest lecturers.

The Los Angeles LGBT Center & Gochis Galleries announce collaboration with Art Division
Timothy Michael
The Pride
October 1-15, 2021

The Los Angeles LGBT Center's Advocate & Gochis Galleries announced a collaboration with Art Division. Art Division is a community organization dedicated to training young adults interested in studying visual arts. Los Angeles LGBT Center's Advocate & Gochis Galleries And Art Division Present "Art Division: The First Decade" Featuring Works By Art Division Students Past And Present which opened on Thursday, September 23. The new online exhibition ART DIVISION: THE FIRST DECADE spotlights the remarkable work of students past and present and went live at Noon FT Thursday, September 23, and can be viewed  lalgbtcenter.org/gallery.
Founded m 2010 by Dan McCleary, Art Division distinguishes itself by providing in-depth services to young adults aged 18-26 in the Rampart District of Los Angeles, an at-risk population within one of Los Angeles' most densely populated and under-served communities. As the Director of Art Programs for Heart of Los Angeles, an after-school program for youth up to 18 years old, McCleary realized that when his most talented and committed students aged out of the program, they lost access to community-based arts programs. Art Division was founded to give these young artists the professional training and academic support they need to succeed and transition into four- year colleges and successful careers,
"One goal of our ongoing series of virtual exhibits is to highlight the work of up-and-coming artists who often have limited opportunities for showing their work," says the Center's Director of Cultural Arts Jon Imparato. "Art Division is at the forefront of developing young artists and getting exposure for them. It's an honor to collaborate with them and bring this outstanding work to our community." Art Division has a permanent base in its Art Library near MacArthur Park. Its extended campus consists of painting and print-making studios, all located within walking distance of the library. 

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Art lecture aims to paint immigrants in a positive light
Isabella Cano
The Poly Post
October 13, 2020

“Art, Immigration, and Resistance” was both the title and main theme of the fine art focused virtual lecture hosted by Cal Poly Pomona professor Alvaro Huerta and the Los Angeles based non-profit organization Art Division on Oct. 8. The webinar explored the many obstacles encountered by the Latinx community and ways to combat discriminatory views against immigrants in the United States.
Throughout the lecture, Huerta, an associate professor in urban planning and ethnic and women’s studies, utilized paintings by his brother Salomon Huerta and photographs to discuss the history of immigrants as he recollected his experiences growing up in East Los Angeles as a Mexican American in an immigrant family... Continue Reading

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A Library Full of Life
Anthony Sauer
The Red Gate Will Open Again -- art in midst of quarantine
May 2020

CLiCK HERE for FULL article

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Stories of Diaspora
Christina Campodonico
The Argonaut
December 23, 2019

Oaxaca and Los Angeles are 2,000 miles apart, but stories of migration have made these cities inseparable. That’s the idea behind the Annenberg Community Beach House’s “Memories of Diaspora: Narratives of Los Angeles” exhibit, which places artwork by first-generation Los Angeles artists alongside works created in Oaxaca.
Participating local artists are affiliated with Art Division, a nonprofit based in the Rampart District that offers visual arts programming to young adults who’ve aged out of youth-serving art programs. The exhibit sprang out of Art Division’s ongoing collaborations and exchanges with artists in Oaxaca. Art Division hosts artists from Oaxaca to teach workshops and sends students to teach or take classes in Oaxaca as well, which creates “a rapport between the artist and the students,” explains Art Division Assistant Director Dagmar Brown... Continue Reading

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Art Division: The Dedication of Dan McCleary
Genie Davis
Art and Cake
October 4, 2019

Founded by artist and teacher Dan McCleary in 2010, Art Division serves young adults ages 18 to 26, and is a hyper-local organization, focused on assisting underserved and at-risk students in the MacArthur Park area. That’s both the location of the organization and McCleary’s long-term residence in Los Angeles for over thirty years.
The organization is an educational and artistic beacon, a non-profit arts program that includes a 10,000-book library, and both painting and printmaking studios, which can also be used as an exhibition space. McCleary hosts at least two major shows each year.
McCleary’s dedication to providing an educational program started earlier than his organization’s founding: he was previously Director of Art Programs and an instructor at Heart of Los Angeles, a program that served kids ages 6 to 18. He felt there was a severe dearth of programs for art makers in the next age group up, and sought to offer a diverse series of offerings to rectify that in his home area. Classes offered by the program include figure drawing, painting, public speaking, career planning, creative writing, mural making, and art history. Students can not only make art here, they hold exhibitions... Continue Reading

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Art Division, el espíritu de Toledo en el mundo
Rocío Flores
Oaxaca Media
September 18, 2019

OAXACA, Oax. El legado del artista oaxaqueño Francisco Toledo (1940-2019) va más allá de los recintos culturales que pudo aportar a Oaxaca. El gran trabajo que hizo 一 coinciden artistas 一 fue adaptarse a los cambios que han habido en el mundo, sin perder la identidad de un pueblo.
“Aunque el maestro actuaba de manera local, pensaba universalmente”,  considera el artista Luis Serrano, de origen ecuatoriano, nacionalizado estadounidense.
Dan McCleary coincide, él es un artista estadounidense, fundador y director ejecutivo de una escuela de arte en la que buscó recuperar la esencia del pintor oaxaqueño al retomar la forma de cómo ayudar a una comunidad, esa labor fue el ejemplo y fuente de inspiración para el proyecto que desarrolla en Art Division, en Los Ángeles, California... Continue Reading

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Art Division
Artists Magazine Staff
​Artists Magazine
Fall 2018

Artists Magazine recently had the pleasure of visiting Art Division, a nonprofit arts program in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Founder Dan McCleary has lived in the area for more than 30 years. “It’s a densely populated, incredibly poetic neighborhood a mile west of Downtown Los Angeles,” he says. The campus comprises a library, a gallery, a painting studio and a printmaking studio. Serving young adults aged 18 to 26, the program offers classes ranging from painting and figure drawing to public speaking, career coaching and cooking. Continue Reading

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Turning Bus Shelters Into Art Showcases
Steve Weingarten
1 Voice / Una Voz
Summer 2018

Victor Reyes works as a prep chef at a local middle school Monday through Friday, but answers to a higher calling. “Art motivates me to get up every day.“ Reyes was the first to step up when Metro, the countywide mass transit agency. and JC Decaux Co., the world’s largest producer of bus shelters, approached Art Division in Westlake about decorating some stops along 6th Street. Reyes used hummingbirds, the sun and the moon to illustrate an ancient Guatemalan love story, and Nick Arciero, Alex OtisWoods and Luis Mateo helped him complete the project at Alvarado. Other faculty and students from Art Division, a training program for young artists alongside MacArthur Park, also transformed stops at Grandview, Virgil and Westmoreland streets.Decaux provided and maintains more than 2,000 bus shelters across L.A. through a public private partnership managed by Street Services.

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Dan McCleary's paintings:Life at its peak beauty, but then what?
Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2018

Mortality is a subtle subtext in Dan McCleary’s ravishing exhibition of recent paintings, drawings and etchings, some hand-colored with pastels and watercolors. The tone is profoundly civilized and searching. Forty-four works, most of modest size and all but four from the last two years, are at Craig Krull Gallery. As usual, McCleary looks and looks hard. Here the focus is on people and simple still lives — portrait busts, casual arrangements of cut flowers in unpretentious glass vases and plain table tops with one or a few pieces of fruit. Oranges and kumquats glow like small suns. One pear stands at attention, another stretches out and reclines. A lemon and a persimmon cozy up to one another, a small but vivid yellow sphere nestled within the irregular contour of a radiant, asymmetrically shaped red-orange globe...Continue Reading

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Nuestro Mundo
Linda Chiavaroli
Verso:The Blog of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
November 29, 2017

To complement the exhibition “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” The Huntington engaged young Angeleno artists, ages 18 to 26, to look at Latin America from their own viewpoints. Their paintings, prints, textiles, and mixed-media works comprise “Nuestro Mundo” (“Our World”), on view in the Brody Botanical Center, weekends only, through January 8, 2018.
“‘Visual Voyages’ ends with Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859,” says “Nuestro Mundo” curator Robert Hori, the gardens cultural curator and program director at The Huntington. “‘Nuestro Mundo’ brings that exhibition up to date through current work.”
All the “Nuestro Mundo” artists are mentored by Art Division, a nonprofit organization that trains and supports Los Angeles youth from underserved communities who are pursuing careers in the visual arts. About a year ago, “Visual Voyages” co-curator Catherine Hess connected with longtime friend Dan McCleary, founder and director of Art Division...Continue Reading

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The Feisty Marriage of Art & Politics
Edward Goldman
Huffington Post
March 21, 2017

The political discourse and drama of the last few months has been –– to put it politely –– unprecedented. Someday, hopefully, we will be able to make sense of it. With so many walls separating and dividing us ideologically, as well as physically, we need more than ever the wisdom and guidance of art to help us understand and evaluate the world we live in. 

With that, you can probably guess my reaction to the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Of course, politicians should be afraid of a confrontation with strong, politically charged works of art. While politicians talk and talk, artists create powerful artworks worth a thousand words...Continue Reading

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LA Youth Arts Non-Profit Centers Around Vibrant Art Library
Julia Travers
Urban Scrawl
January 10, 2017

Many organizations have a physical and/or conceptual hub or center that they build themselves up around. For LA 501 (c)3 non-profit organization Art Division, this hub, foundation, and permanent base is their art library. The library currently contains between 8,000 to 10,000 books and resources and is still growing—they frequently get calls from people who have art book collections that need to find a new home.
Art Division serves the Mac Arthur Park neighborhood, whose residents are largely of Latino ethnicity and the Rampart District of Los Angeles. This is an area with a dense population and a low comparable amount of community services available and the Art Division site characterizes the youth there as “at-risk” within an “underserved community.” Artist, art teacher, and non-profit education professional Dan McCleary founded Art Division in 2010 along with Maria Galicia, Javier Carrillo, and Emmanuel Galvez and they gained their non-profit status in 2011. Continue Reading

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How an Art Library Is Changing Lives in L.A.
Isaac Kaplan
Artsy
December 28, 2016

In 2004, Dan McCleary’s mother passed away. “My parents were avid book readers and collectors of art books,” the artist told me. “So instead of buying flowers, I told everyone to buy me books.”

That was the early genesis for a library of art books that grew to become the core of Art Division, an L.A. nonprofit space that provides free art education to underserved young adults in the city’s MacArthur Park neighborhood. As word spread that McCleary was collecting books, more donations came in from friends and fellow artists. “Chris Burden heard about it, got in touch with me and said his mother had just passed away, and did I want her books?” McCleary recalls. “He had amazing art books from his mother’s library. That was one of the big donations right at the beginning.” Today, Art Division boasts an impressive collection of over 8,000 books. And it’s still growing...Continue Reading

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Church. Museum. Art & Spirit.
Edward Goldman
KCRW
March 8, 2016

Driving through our City of Angels, I'm often tempted to stop and check out impressive-looking churches. Upon entrance, some of them turn out to be rather disappointing. Others surprise with their architecture and stained glass windows, and occasionally with their artwork. For years, I've been visiting First Congregational Church of Los Angeles near MacArthur Park. It's difficult not to be impressed with its Gothic Revival architecture, but what I particularly like is its 20,000-pipe organ, the largest organ of any church in the nation. There are regular concerts there that are attended by a number of people, including many non-believers like myself. But today, I want to talk about an art exhibition, Art & Spirit, recently installed inside of the Church's Shatto Chapel. The exhibition includes a surprising range of artworks, from etchings by Rembrandt and Dürer, to contemporary works by Ed Ruscha, Sister Corita Kent, and John Nava...Continue Reading

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‘Art and Spirit’ at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
John Seed - Professor of Art and Art History, Mt. San Jacinto College
Huffington Post
February 23, 2016

Beginning on February 27th the Shatto Chapel of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles will be displaying the works of 69 artists in a themed exhibition titled Art & Spirit “I’m so pleased to open the doors of First Church as wide as we can as we invite everyone in the city of Los Angeles to explore that fascinating intersection where Art meets the Spirit.” says First Church’s Senior Minister, Dr. R. Scott Colglazier, who, along with Joan Agajanian Quinn, first conceived the idea of Art & Spirit as a theme for the show. “Not only are we creating this opportunity for the public, but our connection with Art Division has allowed us to tap some of our city’s new artists to respond to this theme in their own unique way...Continue Reading

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What Happens When You Feature Secular Art in Sacred Space
Kimberly Winston
Sojourners
April 13, 2016

To walk into First Congregational Church of Los Angeles on a Sunday morning is to see all the trappings of the mainline Protestant denominations pundits say are dying for lack of innovation, of relevance, of connection to the world outside church walls.

There’s the robed pastor and choir, the 20,000-pipe organ playing the expected Bach interlude, the white-draped Communion table set with silver goblets, the well-thumbed pew Bibles, and the paper church bulletin being used as a fan by a couple of overly warm parishioners.

But step into the hall next to the main sanctuary and it’s a different story. There, the church has been transformed from 1930s Gothic-style cathedral to 21st-century art gallery, with painting, etchings, photographs, drawings, collages, and prints by artists as renowned as Rembrandt van Rijn and Albrecht Durer and as obscure as the Latino neighborhood’s young men and women, hanging side by side.

Titled “Art & Spirit,” the show features 85 works by 69 artists that showcase what is sacred to each of them. So renderings of the stations of the cross hang next to a cross composed of brain scans, and the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs above an acrylic painting of a single upholstered chair...Continue Reading

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Jack Black, Patron of the Arts
L.J. Williamson
LA Weekly
October 21, 2014

We know actor Jack Black for his "best band in the world" bluster as half of Tenacious D, and for his on-screen persona: a heavy metal pothead. But Black also happens to be a patron of the arts. Or just stuff that he thinks is cool. Black and his wife, Tanya Haden, have helped fanned the flames of small, select handful of projects including Art Division, an organization run by Dan McCleary, who teaches painting to young people in the Rampart district; and a short animated film about a hot air balloon explorer...Continue Reading

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Review: Paintings reveal teacher-students dynamic at Craig Krull
Christopher Knight - Los Angeles Times Art Critic
Los Angeles Times
March 28, 2013

Dan McCleary is one of the finest figure painters working today. Since 2010 he has also directed Art Division, an after school arts program for young adults. Now he is showing with Javier Carrillo and Emmanuel Galvez, talented former students at Art Division. Their recent paintings begin with a stylistic clarity and precision familiar from their teacher's example, while wholly transforming his precedent in distinctive ways ...Continue Reading

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Art Library Launched
Richard Guzmán
Los Angeles Downtown News
July 25, 2013

For years veteran Los Angeles artist Dan McCleary has been a mentor to young aspiring artists through his Art Division program, which teaches art to underserved youth. He’s also been an avid collector.  His collection includes work from masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso and it spans multiple genres, from sculpture and photography to painting and illustration. But what he’s collected isn’t hanging on the wall of some gallery or museum. Instead, it’s all neatly stacked on plain woodenartis shelves in a simple room less than a block from MacArthur Park ...Continue Reading

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Dan McCleary: The Mentor
John Seed - Professor of Art and Art History, Mt. San Jacinto College
Huffington Post
March 8, 2013

Veteran Los Angeles artist Dan McCleary is used to having his paintings — which exude measured clarity and a sense of calm — compared to those of Renaissance masters, especially to those of Piero della Francesca. As it turns out, McCleary is like a Renaissance artist in another way as well: he has been serving as a mentor to two young artists, Javier Carrillo and Emmanuel Galvez, whose works will be shown alongside his at the Craig Krull Gallery from March 9 through April 13. McCleary’s dedication to identifying, encouraging and educating a new generation of visual artists with traditional skills ...Continue Reading

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Tapestry Adds Twist to Ronald Tutor Campus Center
Cristy Lytal
USC News
July 29, 2011

USC’s busy master’s and Ph.D. students might see something familiar in the new “Head Spin” tapestry hanging in the Graduate Student Lounge at the Ronald Tutor Campus Center. Javier Carillo’s tapestry of a hip-hop dancer spinning on his head is an image “everybody can identify with,” according to artist John Nava, who served as a mentor for the project. “Metaphorically, everybody feels like their whole lives are spent spinning on their heads trying to get things done, so it works on a double level. Probably those graduate students who are madly studying in that lounge can relate ...Continue Reading