BONUS CONTENT…We intended for this site to be up several months ago. This exhibition has passed, but we love Lana and the story, so we thought we’d publish it anyway. Better late than never.
Inside Lana Licata Manzo’s “Unraveling Into Bloom” at the Riverside Art Museum
By Ken Crawford
The Frog Fort puts Manzo’s grand scale whimsy on full display.
Walk into the Powell and DeVean galleries at the Riverside Art Museum and you will not find Lana Licata Manzo's art hung on the walls. The walls are hers.
The proof stands near the entrance: a large sculpture of a frog, legs spread wide enough to walk through, painted in electric pinks and yellows. Manzo imagined it as a small gallery inside the gallery, a place to show more work. She built it at home and never set it up. On the second day of her residency she raised it to full height.
It was her daughter who showed her what it actually was. The 3-year-old, uneasy around the residency's crowds, would slip inside with her toys and hide while her mother worked. Manzo started taking her own breaks in the frog.
"It's not a gallery, it's a fort," she said.
Manzo was born in Placentia and lives in Riverside with her husband and daughter. She is the Riverside Art Museum's 2026 U.S. Bank Artist in Residence. She spent April and May working in the galleries while visitors watched, then opened "Unraveling Into Bloom" in June. The show runs through Aug. 30 and spans sculpture, painting and the craft mediums that have defined her practice since her years at California College of the Arts: weaving, basketmaking, beading.
A fort is the first piece of property a child gets to own and design. It gets built from a sheet, some chairs, whatever is on hand. Manzo's daughter built one at home the same day the frog went up at the museum, and has treated her mother's sculpture the same way ever since.
Lana Licata Manzo’s “Unraveling Into Bloom” at the Riverside Art Museum
"She would always be playing in the fort, hiding, but she'd have all her toys in there," Manzo said. "I was like, dang, this is a safe place."
That instinct, claiming a space by making it yours rather than asking permission to be in it, runs through the whole show. Walls are painted. Objects are nailed into the floorboards. An archway has been built through. Nothing here reads as work placed carefully in a room that belongs to someone else.
"This room is what I do," she said.
Her palette reads like Lisa Frank pushed through a loom. The electric colors are there, and the menagerie of frogs and bright creatures, but the hard plastic gloss of that 1990s fantasy has been traded for yarn, fur and shag. Lisa Frank made a world you could only look at. Manzo makes one soft enough to hug.
The materials come from dollar stores, thrift shops and found objects. She calls the process scavenging. Whatever yarn turns up becomes the next piece. She mixes more epoxy than a project needs so she can pour small extra pieces from whatever is lying around, often things her daughter was playing with. She calls it scrappiness, not philosophy, though she knows what it pushes against. She attended California College of the Arts after it dropped "Craft" from its name.
None of the whimsy should be mistaken for carelessness. The materials arrive cheap, but nothing about that diminishes the output. The mosaic at the gallery's entrance alone took a few months, several times longer than her residency in the room itself. Softness here is a finished surface, not a shortcut.
"Not everything is meant to be in a museum or gallery," she said. "But I'm a little rebellious in myself now. I want to make a pillow, and it's going to be in a nice spot, in a museum, next to some nice thing that someone did."
Ask her for a guiding influence and she offers Snoop Dogg. Not the music, the ethos: work hard, have fun, try anything.
It took about a month before the gallery felt like hers. She remembers walking in on the first day and doubting she could pull it off. By the end of the residency the room had been claimed, not just filled.
Capital S, so fresh, N, double O, P
A child's first fort is never built in a room of their own. It goes up in somebody else's house, out of whatever is available, and it works because the child stops asking whether they are allowed. Manzo has scaled that instinct up to the size of a gallery. The frog is the most literal version, a structure you can step inside, but it is also a model of the whole show. She was given walls. She built a fort in them, and kept going until the room became one.
"Unraveling Into Bloom" runs through Aug. 30 at the Riverside Art Museum.
