Munzón Gallery is pleased to announce Lainey Atwood’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The Birds Still Remember, opening Friday, February 21, from 6–9 PM and on view through March 9, 2025.

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Lainey Atwood’s paintings celebrate Southern California’s native landscapes. In this series, she explores the region’s seasonal blooms, abstracting their beauty while honoring their cyclical nature. Her layered use of watercolor, oil paint, and collaged canvas evokes the terrain’s texture and geological time, engaging memory and sensation.

Atwood paints on-site in Southern California’s remaining estuary habitats, including DeForest Park, Jack Dunster Marine Reserve, Colorado Lagoon, Willow Springs, and Bolsa Chica Wetlands. Growing up near the San Gabriel River and Los Cerritos Wetlands—sacred land known as Puvungna—she developed a deep spiritual connection to the land.

Her work serves as a portal to experience nature, highlighting the resilience of native plants and endangered species in the face of habitat loss and climate change. Birds play a central role, symbolizing the spiritual world, natural cycles, and ecological rhythms. Despite urban sprawl and diverted waterways, birds remain messengers of the land’s enduring memory.

About the Artist
Lainey Atwood (b. 1994, Long Beach, CA) is a Long Beach-based artist with a BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. Her work explores the symbiotic relationship between nature and wildlife in the greater Los Angeles area, inspired in part by cultivating a native garden at home. Through immersive paintings, she fosters a sensorial dialogue with the earth, emphasizing nature’s rhythms and the need to restore our connection with the environment.

Atwood was awarded the Linda Day Scholarship and has exhibited at numerous galleries, including the CSU Chancellor’s Office, Max L. Gatov West Gallery at CSULB, Shoebox Gallery, Greenly Gallery, Flux Gallery, and the Icehouse Arts Complex, where she currently maintains her studio.