Opening on Friday night, the Manhattan Beach Art Center presents “Are You Seeing What I’m Seeing?”— an exhibition that investigates the generative relationship between written language and visual expression. Co-curated with Bondo Wyszpolski and Bernard Fallon, the project brings together 34 artists, each creating new work in response to a brief textual prompt drawn from themes including nature, mythology, animals, seascapes, urban environments, and more.

The exhibition aims to explore how artists navigate the movement from text to image: how words can evoke atmosphere, narrative, or emotional resonance, and how individual perception shapes distinct interpretive trajectories. 

Co-curator Wyszpolski - who has chronicled the creative life of the South Bay for more than three decades - crafted and distributed the written prompts, inviting artists to translate his language into visual form. These concise descriptions act as catalysts, akin to stage directions or conceptual cues, sparking interpretation rather than prescribing outcome.

Although all artists began with similarly structured prompts, the resulting works diverge widely, revealing the multiplicity of visual reasoning that a single phrase can inspire. The prompts serve not as instructions but as points of departure, allowing room for intuition, experimentation, and conceptual play. Artists responded to the prompts through a range of media, reflecting both the artist’s practice and the internal image or sensation elicited by the text. Taken together, these works form a study in creative heterogeneity, demonstrating how minimal language can generate expansive and unexpected visual possibilities.