PRESS RELEASE – TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2026
As Indivisible Arts tightens its focus on youth consciousness, the Collective advances under the leadership of Not Shockboxx and the Hermosa and Free Foundation.
HERMOSA BEACH, CA—The South Bay Artist Collective, the 100-plus-artist community at the heart of nonprofit Indivisible Arts’ founding mission, is entering a new era of creative momentum, expanding beyond Resin, the creative laboratory that serves as ground zero for the Indivisible Arts movement. Beginning September 2026, the Collective is being advanced through the leadership of the Not Shockboxx Gallery team—Jessica Accamando, Ashley Tull, and Carin O’Hara—bringing Not Shockboxx’s and Resin’s missions together as a creative force within the Cypress Arts District.
The Collective’s roots trace back to 2016, when Rafael McMaster founded the Hermosa Beach Artist Collective alongside Resin to address a simple gap: Hermosa Beach had no galleries and no art teacher in its elementary schools. The Collective’s founding artists—Dan Gardner, Drica Lobo, Emily Brantley, Josh Barnes, Kevin Gilligan, Michael Harrington, Sabrina Armitage, Wendy Stillman, and Rafael McMaster—became the creative backbone of that early vision. By 2018, this group of artists and photographers broadened their reach to serve all of the South Bay, growing into the South Bay Artist Collective and welcoming artists and photographers from across the region.
The Collective’s mission—selflessness and service, not individual reputation or self-promotion—took clearer shape during this time, along with its guiding purpose: growing culture, empowering voices, unifying community, and inspiring connection. Around that underlying ethos grew a community of artists supporting one another’s creative practice in service of something greater than themselves across the fields of visual arts, music arts, movement arts, healing/spiritual arts, interactive arts, and performance arts.
None of this would have been possible without McMaster’s vision and drive in building Hermosa Beach’s art scene from the ground up—recognized in 2023 when he was named Hermosa Beach’s Person of the Year—nor without the artists who leaned in alongside him, showing up year after year to grow it. What the Collective has become is the product of a decade of hard work, generosity, and quiet dedication from a community that chose to invest in each other before recognition, resources, or infrastructure existed to support them.
That foundation carried the Collective into its next chapter of growth. In 2021, McMaster renamed his nonprofit Indivisible Arts, with the Collective continuing on as one of its founding programs. As Indivisible Arts has grown, so has its mission. In the years following the pandemic, amid a deepening youth mental health crisis, the organization’s core focus shifted toward serving young people through its FundaMental Life Tools curriculum. Today, that work is scaling further through the launch of a new ecosystem of platforms designed to deliver mindful awareness and mental wellness tools to young people across the country, including the Aware Minds Project and Stream of Consciousness, and McMaster is turning his full attention there.
“Resin is excited to form a unified front with Not Shockboxx to support the evolution of the South Bay Artist Collective and the South Bay art scene, overall,” said McMaster. “With their combination of vision, creativity, and proven leadership, I can think of no one better to carry this forward. With Cypress Avenue’s creative hubs standing united in support of South Bay artists, the vibrant local art scene will continue to evolve.”
“This is not about changing what came before. It is about protecting it and giving it room to grow,” said Accamando, on behalf of the Not Shockboxx team. “The South Bay Artist Collective already has something powerful: artists who believe in showing up for one another. Our job is to bring continued care, organization, and opportunity to that community while keeping artists firmly at the center.”
Indivisible Arts and Resin remain closely connected to the Collective’s next chapter. Resin will continue to host Collective exhibitions, community events, and youth programming, and McMaster, Resin, and Indivisible Arts remain permanently recognized as founding pillars of the Collective’s history. The Hermosa and Free Foundation will provide the nonprofit and financial structure for the program going forward.
The Collective will continue as an artist-forward community for adults living and working in the South Bay, with networking gatherings, collective exhibitions, panels, excursions, resource sharing, and other opportunities designed to build genuine connections among artists. Membership details and a new enrollment portal are ready now for existing and new members to transition at notshockboxx.com. Water & Wood, one of the Collective’s best-known exhibitions, will return on January 17, 2027.
About the South Bay Artist Collective
The South Bay Artist Collective began in 2016 as the Hermosa Beach Artist Collective, founded by Rafael McMaster in response to the need for greater arts infrastructure and connection in Hermosa Beach. It later expanded across the South Bay and became the adult artist community now known as the South Bay Artist Collective. In September 2026, the Collective will enter its next chapter as a program of the Hermosa and Free Foundation, operated by the Not Shockboxx Art Gallery team.
About Not Shockboxx Art Gallery and the Hermosa and Free Foundation
Not Shockboxx is an artist-forward contemporary gallery in Hermosa Beach’s Cypress Arts District. Known for ambitious exhibitions, unconventional ideas, and a strong commitment to working artists, the gallery creates space for art that is thoughtful, strange, urgent, beautiful, and difficult to ignore. Through its work under the Hermosa and Free Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding access to the arts and creating opportunities for connection, creativity, and cultural participation, Not Shockboxx supports exhibitions, artist programs, educational experiences, and community events that help artists thrive and make the arts a more visible and vital part of the South Bay.
About Indivisible Arts & Resin Art Gallery
Indivisible Arts is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit serving young people across Los Angeles County with mental wellness and emotional resilience tools taught through creativity and consciousness. Its FundaMental Life Tools program serves youth ages 7–27, strengthening inner resources for resilience, recovery, and reawakening. Resin, the organization’s creative lab and studio, served as an early home for South Bay artists and continues to support Indivisible Arts’ mission of using creativity as a gateway to consciousness and connection.
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Media Contacts
Not Shockboxx Art Gallery│Jessica Accamando│hello@studiohermosa.com
Indivisible Arts│Rafael McMaster│rafael@indivisiblearts.org
Indivisible Arts│Allisson Griesedieck│allisson@indivisiblearts.org
