Quick Take
“Made in Santa Cruz: Why Art Matters” is a new video series, published every other Sunday, exploring the artists who shape Santa Cruz County's creative landscape. Each episode offers a peek into an artist's practice, the places and experiences that inform their work, and the ways creativity helps us see our community differently. The series begins with multidisciplinary artist Abi Mustapha.
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In Santa Cruz County, artists are as much a part of the landscape as the redwoods and the sea.
Some announce themselves in murals, galleries and stages. Others work quietly, tucked into backyard studios, garages and spare rooms, making things you’ll never see unless you know where to look.
Santa Cruz County is rumored to have more artists per capita than most cities in America — and once you start looking, it’s easy to believe. This year’s Open Studios, put on by Arts Council Santa Cruz County from Oct. 3 through Oct. 18) will have more than 350 artists, 70 of them new this year.
And those are just the ones who applied – and made the cut.
Art doesn’t just decorate a place. It marks our experience and refracts it, helping us see the familiar differently. It asks us to slow down, to notice, to imagine. What does it really mean to look? And what might we discover if we did?
At a time when headlines can make the world feel dizzying, art offers another rhythm. Artists remind us that imagination is something we can practice, and that living in a community of makers matters — not because art helps us escape the world, but because it helps us meet it with more insight, more empathy.
Our new video series, “Made in Santa Cruz: Why Art Matters,” offers a glimpse of the people shaping the creative life of Santa Cruz County. It will appear every other Sunday.
We hope these stories introduce you to the remarkable artists who live among us, inspire you to look more closely at the world around you, and remind you that communities and people flourish when imagination has room to grow.
It’s also an invitation to find the artist that’s inside you, too.
Every place has a way of seeing. Here, we offer you Santa Cruz through the lens of our artists.
Today’s featured artist
Name: Abi Mustapha
Medium: graphite, charcoal, oil and acrylic paint, ceramics, digital design, block printing, illustration, murals, and flower crownsoil, charcoal, linocut, murals, illustration
Years in Santa Cruz: 14
Studio location: Seabright attached studio
Abi Mustapha’s short list of favorite art or activities that inspire her to make art
- Reading science fiction, fantasy and historical fictions (usually with a strong female lead)
- Tarot cards, meditating
- Watching documentaries
- Perusing Book Shop Santa Cruz
- Attending Santa Cruz Clay’s community art parties
- Taking a Santa Cruz Clay ceramics class
- Trying out adult group voice- taught by Genoa Brown at Everyone’s Music School
- First Friday – finding new artists and venues
- Spending time in the redwoods talking to the tree faces
- Sitting in really nice grass
- (I’ve always wanted to take a workshop at Annieglass.)
Her recommendations for art/artists in Santa Cruz County
- Sea walls mural walk
- Rachel Barnes
- Taylor Reinhold
- Trianna Feruza
- Allegra Maurischat
- All of the classic old Victorian houses. They are major art to me.
