Carnegie Art Museum

The Carnegie Building, and the Art Museum it houses, are vital to the visual arts and education and its Oxnard population of over 190,000 and to the general County population The Museum annually offers changing exhibits intended to give the public access to a broad diversity of California Art, or art influential to the California art scene. The majority of exhibits feature contemporary artists working in all styles of art from traditional to non-objective. The Museum's annual slate of quarterly exhibits combines up to 8 national or regional shows, traveling exhibits, local artist exhibits, and/or exhibits from the permanent collection. Past Exhibits have included Arte y Cultura, Joyce Treiman, American Woodblock Prints from the Syracuse Art Collection, Picasso's Posters from the El Paso Museum of Art, and Documenting China from the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibits Service, Going Global and Surf-Inspired. Due to limited gallery space, the Museum's permanent collection is displayed as mini-exhibits, showing a sampling of artworks, and rotate with the current exhibit.

Suzanne Bellah, directs and curates the Carnegie Art Museum, a facility of the City of Oxnard. In that position over the past decade, she has emphasized arts education and building an all inclusive permanent museum collection of California Art including expanding its core of representational, contemporary, and Latino of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Among her proudest accomplishments are acquiring outstanding works for the collection by: Peter Adams, Robert Engel, Susan Stinshmulen-Amend, Richard Amend, Jane Gottlieb, Linda Vallejo, Frank Romero, Gronk, John Valadez, Jose Lozano, Alexey Steele, Dan Pinkham, Dolores Pederson, Benjamin Messick, Millard Sheets, Bobbie Moline-Kramer, Suzanne Jackson, Andy Schuessler, Scott McClaine, Jeff Soijka, Roger Weik, Robert Werling, and many other remarkable artists.

Suzanne Bellah was awarded a Bachelor of Arts, Classics and Cultural Anthropology in 1977 summa cum laude from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master of Arts in Classical Art and Archaeology in 1979 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At the University of Michigan, she also achieved a Certificate of Museum Practice in 1982 under the Graduate Studies Program of the Art Department. Awarded an NEA scholarship through the University of Michigan Museum Practices Program, Bellah completed museum internships at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Council for the Advancement of Student Education in Washington, D.C. from 1982-84. During the late 1980s-early 1990s, she was registrar for the summer archaeological excavations conducted by the Walters Art Museum at Kourion, Cyprus. She has curated and installed over 170 exhibitions to date.

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