Cruise Control Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Bailey Rios, opening January 10th, 3–6 PM. Rooted in lived experience between Antioch and Walnut Creek, Rios’ work moves through questions of class, race, access, and the quiet forces that shape opportunity. What begins as a personal story opens outward—toward systems inherited, resisted, and reimagined.

Rios’ practice is deeply informed by family history and the fractures left by displacement and erasure. As a Black, Indigenous, Mexican, African American, and French artist, he approaches painting and sculpture as tools for self-study and recovery—working through oral histories, ancestral gaps, and the long shadow of assimilation. His materials stay expressive and loose, privileging rhythm, intuition, and feeling over polish or certainty.

Recurring motifs—religious iconography, music, fragmented figures, desert landscapes—surface as both inquiry and release. Christianity appears not as devotion, but as a visual language imposed and reworked. Guitars, gestures, and broken forms echo ideas of sound, memory, and loss, while the incomplete body becomes a stand-in for histories interrupted but not erased.

Now living on the Central Coast, Rios brings this evolving body of work to Cruise Control Contemporary as an offering: reflective, unresolved, and honest. This exhibition holds space for complexity—for identity as something felt, carried, and continually made sense of. Join us January 10th, from 3–6 PM, to spend time with the work and the stories it insists on telling.