An artist-run gallery in the heart of the Sacramento Valley.
Annual shows, occasional hours.
Salmon Bend Art Studios is an artist-run gallery in the heart of the Sacramento River Valley. It is open to the public for a few weekends per year during its annual Winter Show.
Converted from a prune drying barn by artist Gabe Babcock in 2019, the gallery space is the loading bay where horse-drawn carts once unloaded boxes of prunes for processing. The steel tracks that transported pallets of prunes to the dryer are still a part of the adjoining sculpture studio and woodshop.
About the gallery:
Across the yard from the gallery stands the Tea House.
It was originally built in the 1940’s by Bill Halsey (inventor of the Halsey Prune Harvester, the first mechanical tree shaker) for Akiji Yoshimura and his family.
Akiji Yoshimura served the U.S. military as a Japanese-American interpreter during WWII. While he served, his wife Hezi Yoshimura was forcibly incarcerated at the Tule Lake Internment Camp simply because of her Japanese heritage. When Akiji returned home to Colusa after the war, he and Hezi were barred from buying a house west of Tenth Street, motivating Bill Halsey to offer them a home.
In 2018, Bill’s nephew Warren Halsey hired Gabe Babcock to renovate and re-imagine the orchard house. Inspired by the deep canyons of the Sierras and piles of scavenged redwood, the house evolved into a Japanese Tea House.
About the Tea House:
About the Artists:
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Gabe Babcock is a contemplative sculpture artist working with stone, wood, and ceramics. His pieces are material explorations of the natural world.
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Roberta Monte James is a fiber artist who uses piecework to abstract her vision and sensibility of her subjects. She draws inspiration from her surroundings, attempting to capture the simplicity, beauty and vulnerability of her Northern California home.
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LK James is an artist living in Colusa, CA. Her interest in drawing, materials, and language is expressed through the disciplines of printmaking and ceramics. Flora, fauna, and every-day objects are her main subject matter.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the San Francisco Center for the Book (CA), Tiny Town Gallery in Tuscan (AZ), Land Gallery in Portland (OR), and elsewhere. Her children’s picturebook, The Full House and The Empty House, is published by Chicago Review Press.
She studied English literature at Portland State University (2010) and received an MFA in Applied Craft + Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art (2018).
Thank you to the Halsey Family — Warren and Laurie, and their daughter Kim — who have made all of this possible with their generous creative vision for this land.
And thank you to our families, who have supported us in this work.
