During the 2024 – 2025 season the Carnegie Arts Center hosted the CAC Animated Film Series. The series opened with its first screening, WALL-E, in September 2024. It was followed by a different movie every other month through May 2025: The Nightmare Before Christmas in November, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in January, The Iron Giant in March, and Turning Red in May. Each film was accompanied by a free, themed art activity.

In September 2025, the CAC accepted entries for the Central Valley Animators Film Festival, a competition for regional artists to submit their own animated short films.  Entries in categories for artists 17 and under and artists 18+ were accepted and a total of $500 was awarded in prize money. The juror for the film festival was Modesto based graphic designer and animator Brittney Nunes, brittneynunes.com.

Winners of the CAC Central Valley Animators Film Festival

Artists 17 and under:

1^st Place- Splat, Carstyn Antolak

2^nd Place- Video Games, Carstyn Antolak

Artist 18+:

1^st Place- Creatures in My House, Ilena Finocchi

2^nd Place- Unfortunate, Janessa Martinez

3^rd Place- Fame, Janessa Martinez

Honorable Mention- Untitled, Melanie Espinoza

Artists 17 and Under

Splat, Carstyn Antolak

Video Games, Carstyn Antolak

Artists 18+

Untitled, Melanie Espinoza

Creatures in My House, Ilena Finocchi

Fame, Janessa Martinez

Unfortunate, Janessa Martinez

The CAC Animation Film Series and Central Valley Animators Film Fest were funded by the City of Turlock Community Events & Activities Fund.

The Turlock West Side Story Mural Project will produce two murals created for Turlock's West Side neighborhood. The murals will be designed and executed under the direction of artist and UC Merced faculty member Richard Gomez. Richard has worked on numerous public art projects throughout California and abroad. As a native of Turlock, the cultural traditions of the community he knows so well form a core focus in his art.

The first mural in the project is Chicano Downtown located at 132 S. First Street. The design includes references to icons of Mexican/Mexican-American/Latinx culture. Richard's family owned the Mexican Kitchen restaurant that at one time occupied this building. The image of the warrior at the center of the composition is drawn from a painting that decorated the interior of the family restaurant. The female figure at the left of the mural appears as if a memory of generations past. When looking at the mural, the 1964 Chevy Impala appears in our present (the foreground), and everything else begins to fade into the background that includes a sunset over distant Central Valley hills. Richard's memories of family, neighborhood, and community inform everything about the mural's design.

The second mural in the project will be painted inside the Carnegie Arts Center's Ferrari Gallery in January 2024 as a collaboration between Richard and students from Turlock's Roselawn High School. This temporary mural will be on view from February 13 – May 18, 2024, featured in an exhibition surveying Richard's career as an artist. The community and history of the West Side are essential to the fabric of Turlock's past, present and future. We are fortunate to be able to look back on Turlock through the artist's experiences and memories, and we will look forward to what today's young people help him create.

Thanks go to the artist's talented assistants on this project:
Perla Cerna and Daniel "Thore" Munoz.

Funding for the murals in the Turlock West Side Story project came through a grant funded by the California Arts Council's California Creative Corps program, aimed at providing jobs and economic recovery for artists in a variety of disciplines.  Locally, the grants are managed by the Heartland Creative Corps, a collaborative effort joining the Arts Councils of Merced, Stanislaus, and Tuolumne Counites, and administered by United Way of Merced County.

Photos by Stephanie Baker Photography