An Enduring Gift for The Arts

A version of this article was published in the Winter 2026 issue of Santa Cruz Vibes Magazine. Header photo: "Brussel Sprouts on Jensen Road" by Maria Isabel LeBlanc.

It’s a warm October afternoon and Christian Rex van Minnen is holding an impromptu lesson on classical color mixing with a small group of visitors at his art studio. Donning a paint-speckled chore coat, work boots, and Gucci frames, van Minnen explains a centuries-old technique used by Old Masters painters like Leonardo Da Vinci and Rembrandt, and his adaptation of it for his work.

But this isn’t a scene from Les Beaux-Art de Paris or another prestigious art institution; this is happening in Santa Cruz at the Old Wrigley building.

Van Minnen is a 2024-25 Rydell Visual Arts Fellow and he’s getting ready for an upcoming exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) alongside three other artists. On this day, he’s invited members of the judging panel working to select the next cohort for a glimpse at his process.

The Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship program at Community Foundation Santa Cruz County supports local visual artists and arts organizations. It’s been made possible thanks to a loving gift to the Santa Cruz arts community from the late Roy and Frances Rydell who left their Bonny Doon home—the old Oceanview School—to the Foundation.

The Rydells understood that artists help humanity process our collective experience; helping us heal, connect, rebuild, and nurture community. In 1985, they started the Rydell Visual Arts Fund as a permanent resource for visual artists. Following their passing in 2000, the proceeds of their estate turned the fund into an endowment which now, through the Foundation’s careful stewardship, has grown to over $2.5 million, and will carry on their legacy of uplifting the arts community—forever.

Every two years, individual Fellowships of $20,000 get awarded to four selected visual artists.

The 2024-25 Rydell cohort is carrying on the legacy of the Rydells, supporting a local community of groundbreaking visual artists and their art.

A Coastal Reconnection

Christian Rex van Minnen felt disconnected from the coastal beauty of his earliest memories. Born in Rhode Island, he recalls wading through tidepools as a child and developing a deep appreciation for nature. But he moved away young, and his artistic path led him to busy cities, eventually landing in Brooklyn.

Ready for a slower pace, he took the advice of Kajahl—a former Rydell Fellow and Santa Cruz native—and moved to Santa Cruz, the perfect place for a coastal reconnection.

“Not being in the hive of New York City—there’s a lot lost there,” he says. “Now my free time is spent more in nature than in galleries, which is great.”

Van Minnen’s Surrealist oil paintings carry an “attraction-repulsion” quality, blending Dutch Master–style color techniques with dark visceral forms and bright, surreal “gummy” elements. Living in Santa Cruz helped him re-engage with nature, and the coastal ecosystem now shapes his work.

“The intensity and cycles of nature—that’s the feeling I’m trying to put forward. Feeling ecstatic about being alive within nature and community and getting that here in Santa Cruz.”

Inspired by the Rydells, van Minnen also gives back by teaching locals his color-mixing method. “I don’t have the resources to award a Fellowship—maybe someday. But I want to share this method and maybe help make Santa Cruz an unexpected painting hub. Why not?"

Just Beyond Reach

Through her multimedia art, Shirin Towfiq’s work looks for a thread between her life as a second-generation Iranian refugee and the homeland her family left behind. By using elements like tapestry, photography, and painting, she explores historical memory by reimagining narratives of the past and setting them in the present day. Much of her work evokes an ethereal, ghostly quality, representing something just out of reach.

Towfiq achieves these qualities through an innovative mixed media approach and trial and error in her studio.

“Practice is always about experimentation. That’s part of why I love making art. Having monetary support from an institution to do that just makes it that much easier to experiment without having the stress of where the funding will come from and what the result will be.”

The Rydell Fellowships are meant for exactly that: to let artists pursue their creative work without requirement to complete any specific projects. The range of disciplines supported reflects the eclectic Santa Cruz arts community.

Having their work exhibited at the MAH gives artists like Towfiq the space to unfurl their creativity while strengthening community partnerships through the arts.

“The partnership with the Community Foundation is a model for how philanthropy and cultural institutions can work together to keep art alive and accessible,” says MAH Executive Director Ginger Schulik Porcella. This is the MAH’s eighth year hosting the exhibit.

Towfiq is currently expanding one of her works to be a thirteen-by-thirteen-foot installation using gauze fabric. As she prepares for the exhibit, the inspiration keeps growing as well.

“I feel like I have a breakthrough every day.”

Seeing, Not Looking

After years of driving by the artichoke fields of North Monterey, Maria Isabel LeBlanc decided to stop one day and finally see just what she had been looking at as she passed. The misty fields drew her in but was her desire to connect with her Elkhorn School students and their families that led her to start photographing the empty fields, then the people who work them.

Her resulting photography project, “De La Luz”, captures solitary landscapes and serene faces in black and white, and has made her feel closer to her community. But this meant taking risks and getting out of her comfort zone.

“To set up in front of someone and have to take a portrait and really interact with that person is a whole different ballgame and I took that step. We spent hours, and we became better friends, they're very intimate portraits,” Le Blanc says.

The Fellowship has given her a chance to do a full exhibition for the first time and help her realize a long-held vision.

“Sometimes you send in submissions and maybe one will get selected. So, to have all these photographs up in an exhibition is like a dream come true.”

From the Curb to the Museum

For Louise Leong, art and community can be one and the same. She creates interior life drawings to stir conversation, sometimes inspired by everyday things like a neighborhood free pile or by people venting about their retail work experiences. Other times she makes art for community organizers and causes she supports.

Leong is deeply rooted in the Santa Cruz arts community, both as an exhibitions manager for UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and as part of the Little Giant Collective. But the Rydell has given her the opportunity to try something unique and create an installation of free objects she’d found over the years, surrounded by enlargements of her paintings.

“I'm having an experience with people, which is what drives my drawing and my painting so it's kind of feeding back into itself. I'm manufacturing the experience from which I typically draw from,” Leong says.

Leong’s installation is not only meant to create more community stories, but the process of bringing piles of found objects to the MAH for the installation is itself a participatory experience.

“Having the experience with the MAH team and them just hopping on board, it just kind of just grew from there. It's like, from the curb to the museum.”

Twenty Years of Rydell

Since 2006, the Rydell Fellowship has awarded over $800,000 to more than forty artists Twenty years later, the endowment has become one of the greater Bay Area’s preeminent arts fellowships.

Community Foundation CEO Susan True believes the Rydell fellowship will continue to foster a relationship between artists and the community.

“The combination of the funding and the exhibition helps advance the professionalism of local artists, giving them a platform to show their work in their hometown’s art hub. It also invites our community to experience the incredible creativity happening right here.”

Wayne Palmer and Roy Rydell were both involved with the Art Forum at the MAH years ago and helped curate and fundraise for the museum. Palmer believes the Fellowship is what the Rydells had envisioned their legacy to be.

“They were passionate supporters of the arts throughout their lives; they lived it every day. They were bright, talented and wonderful people and each was an extraordinary gift to our community.”