“If you had told me 30 years ago I would be a professional photographer, I’d be professionally working with dogs, I would have laughed,” Halbert says. “Now that I’m here, this is the only place I should be.”

If you have been to Sacramento in the past few decades, there is a good chance you have encountered artwork by Stephanie Taylor.

Belonging to two places and not quite fitting into either is a familiar feeling for many first-generation Americans.

Julie Clements worked for 15 years as a veterinarian technician in Alaska, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the San Francisco Zoo before moving to Sacramento to be a full-time ceramic fine artist.

Because of some bold moves on his part and the exposure and connectivity that social media provides, Brandon Gastinell has transitioned from doing street art to work for major film studios and musicians.

Wever-Glen says he wants to stoke a sense of wonder in his viewers, often with surreal results — “kind of like a dreamscape.”

The charming effect of the forest finds its way into her ceramic sculpture, along with her greatest inspirations, her two children, ages 11 and 7, and her formative years being surrounded by the urban environment in Southern California. 

Natalie McKeever creates fine-art digital video, abstract and without narrative, with analog collages that are digitally manipulated to put the viewer in a meditative state.

Angela Tannehill considers herself lucky. Although the Elk Grove-based graphic designer of more than 26 years earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts, she only began working as an artist a few years ago, and now her mixed-media work is drawing the attention of private art collectors, art consultants and public-art project organizers.

Jeff Musser was an artistic child who went on to graduate from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 with his bachelor’s degree in graphic design. He then spent two years at an ad agency in Chicago managing creative for McDonald’s Happy Meals. Despite a respectable salary, Musser was anything but happy.