Radical Joy looks at joy not just as a feeling, but as something we choose and create. It grows from strength, healing, and resistance. Even during hard or complicated times, joy can show up through creativity, connection, and self-expression.

This exhibition is part of Ogden Contemporary Arts’ Artist Factory program, which brings Teaching Artists and students together in an active, shared experience. The featured Teaching Artists – Alix Twiggs Wright, Bianca Velasquez, Andrew Rice, and Liz Rhodes – each worked in a specific community location: Youth Impact, Utah Neighborhood Connection, the YCC Family Crisis Center, and the OCA Artist Factory Studio.

Each Teaching Artist led workshops based on their own art practice, helping students explore materials, ideas, and their own stories. The artwork in this show is not copied; it is a response. Each piece shows curiosity, identity, and imagination, shaped through learning and experimentation. The work of our Teaching Artists and students is shown together, highlighting how ideas grow and change across generations.

The Teaching Artists’ own work reflects different paths to joy. Alix Twiggs Wright explores joy through motherhood and collaboration, transforming her child’s drawings into a wearable piece about care and imagination. Bianca Velasquezuses beadwork to build a self-portrait, embracing both calm and chaos as part of identity. Andrew Rice reconfigures fragments from vintage comic books into collages that explore lost futures, using image-making as a way to resist disillusionment and insist on new possibilities for meaning and joy. Liz Rhodes uses collage to explore the joyful chaos of motherhood, where destruction and creation exist simultaneously, transforming everyday moments into acts of radical joy.

Throughout the exhibition, joy appears in many ways: through working together, accepting mistakes, celebrating identity, and continuing to create. These works show that joy can be built, shared, and sustained, even during uncertain times.

Radical Joy reflects OCA’s commitment to being welcoming and inclusive. By breaking down barriers between artists, audiences, and art, the exhibition encourages visitors to think about their own ability to create joy.

Made possible by: Weber County R.A.M.P., George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Utah Arts & Museums, Ogden City Arts, Utah Office of Tourism, and Rocky Mountain Power Foundation.