San Diego Artist Incubator Comes

About this event

Dear Tomorrow hosts the North County presentation of a countywide interdisciplinary arts program on November 6

OCEANSIDE, Calif. – Five San Diego County artists working across painting, dance, performance, sound, installation, technology, and storytelling will bring their work together at Dear Tomorrow in Oceanside on Friday, November 6, 2026, as part of the second round of the San Diego Artist Incubator (SDAI 2).

The Oceanside presentation at Dear Tomorrow, 216 S. Tremont St., Oceanside, CA 92054, is one of five public presentations taking place across San Diego County from October through December. The program brings together five artists with distinctly different practices and challenges them to adapt their work collaboratively for five different venues and audiences.

Participating artists are Miki Vale, Miguel Galvan, Joe Cantrell, Cathy Carey, and Alexandra Carter.

The cohort spans an unusually broad range of disciplines. Vale works across Hip Hop, theatre, sound, performance, writing, and community-based storytelling. Galvan brings contemporary dance, hip-hop, street dance, and ensemble movement. Cantrell works with sound, media, installation, performance, visual art, and discarded electronics. Carey is a Contemporary Color Expressionist painter whose work explores ecology, perception, creativity, and connection. Carter combines figurative painting, installation, image transfer, mixed media, and translucent materials.

Rather than presenting the same exhibition at each location, SDAI 2 encourages the artists to reconsider how their work changes in relationship to the space, the audience, and one another.

A Historic Oceanside House Enters a New Chapter

The setting for the Oceanside presentation adds another layer to the collaboration. Dear Tomorrow occupies the historic C.B. Bishop Residence, built in 1908, making the house approximately 118 years old. Today the property is being reimagined as a Community Art House, bringing artists, workshops, residencies, gatherings and creative activity into one of downtown Oceanside’s surviving historic homes.

As part of Dear Tomorrow’s ongoing renewal of the property, the garden is also becoming part of that creative vision, with plans incorporating pollinator-friendly planting and garden themes. That creates a natural connection with Oceanside artist Cathy Carey’s Systems of Awareness, in which pollinators are recurring symbols of movement, relationship, interdependence and the ways individual actions contribute to a larger living system.

Carey’s paintings draw upon Southern California landscapes and ecosystems, using bees, butterflies, flowers, pathways, spirals and shifting light as visual metaphors for connection and exchange.

“What we choose to see shapes the world we live in,” Carey says, describing the central idea behind the series.

For the Dear Tomorrow presentation, the relationship between Carey’s paintings and the evolving garden allows ideas within the artwork to extend beyond the walls of the exhibition. Pollinators become both image and living presence, connecting art, habitat, creativity and community.

Carey will also share pollinator seed packets featuring imagery from her paintings, inviting visitors to take part of the project home and create new habitat in their own gardens. The gesture reflects one of the central ideas running through her work: creativity grows through relationship, and every participant matters.

The connection is especially fitting within the larger SDAI 2 collaboration. Just as a healthy ecosystem depends upon relationships among many different organisms, the Artist Incubator brings together five artists whose individual practices contribute to something none of them would create alone.

The smaller scale and historic character of Dear Tomorrow also offers an opportunity for a more intimate version of the five-artist collaboration, with greater emphasis on conversation, storytelling and connections among the artists, the house, the garden and the surrounding Oceanside community.

For Carey, bringing the project to Oceanside has particular significance. She is an Oceanside-based professional artist and Chair of the Oceanside Museum of Art Artist Alliance Planning Council. The Dear Tomorrow presentation brings the countywide program into the North County community where she lives, works and has been actively involved in supporting other artists.

SDAI Round 2 begins with The Woo / All For Logan during the Barrio Art Crawl on October 10, followed by San Diego Made: LIVE! at the Factory Underground on October 17 from 6–9 p.m. After the November 6 Oceanside presentation at Dear Tomorrow from 5pm to 9pm, the cohort continues to Bread & Salt on November 14 from 11 a.m.–8 p.m., before concluding at Gray Area / The Soap Factory on December 11.

EVENT INFORMATION

San Diego Artist Incubator Round 2 at Dear Tomorrow

Friday, November 6, 2026

Dear Tomorrow

216 S. Tremont St.

Oceanside, CA 92054

Event time 5 - 9PM

Participating artists:

Miki Vale

Miguel Galvan

Joe Cantrell

Cathy Carey

Alexandra Carter

The San Diego Artist Incubator Round 2 is funded, in part, by The City of San Diego and the California Arts Council.

MEDIA CONTACT

Cathy Carey

Contemporary Color Expressionist Painter

www.artstudiosandiego.com

cathy@artstudiosandiego.com

760-877-0869

Cutline: Soul of the Night 48” 60” oil by Cathy Carey