They are animals familiar to all Californians: a cougar, a coyote, a dolphin, hummingbirds and butterflies, represented in a way you have never seen before. The smiling, glowing-eyed creatures float before a constellation of multicolored dots swimming in a sea of cerulean blue.
The pattern was created by Yukari Sakura, 34, one of several made for The Times by neurodivergent artists like her.
“Butterflies are one of my favorite animals. I like their wings; They make me smile,” said Sakura, who is Japanese American and draws inspiration from anime and Asian folk tales. “The hummingbirds are also very cute, and they remind me of Disney's 'Pocahontas'.”
Each year, the Los Angeles Times partners with independent illustrators who create unique prints and patterns that our readers can use as backgrounds for computers and cell phones. Print subscribers and those who purchase a physical copy of The Times on newsstands will also be able to explore the designs as prints on wrapping paper.
For this year's prints, The Times partnered with Creativity Explored, a nonprofit in San Francisco that supports a neurodiverse community of artists with developmental disabilities. The organization was founded in 1983 by Florence and Elias Katz, an artist and psychologist, who at the time were inspired by the nationwide deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities.
Sakura has honed her unique style, a mix of realist and surreal, and influenced by artists such as Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, Monet and Picasso, with the support of Creativity Explored over the past 12 years.
“Creativity Explored was founded on the belief that our artists are inherently capable and have something to offer the world that we must help facilitate,” said Linda Johnson, executive director of the nonprofit organization. “Our goal is to support their art and their lives as creative people, but also help them thrive within a community where they can be who they are.”
The mission of Creativity Explored is deeply personal for Patrick Hruby, an art director at The Times who led the 2023 wrapping paper project. Hruby's sister, Bee, is autistic.
“He is one of the most incredible people I know, with an incredibly rich inner life, tastes, preferences and curiosities,” Hruby said. “I'm very lucky to have a sister with autism and I want more people to know and love the work of neurodiverse people.”
“Art is art,” states the title of Creativity Explored's new work table book that shows the work of its artists. But the opportunities for art to be platformed and appreciated are not distributed equally.
“In general, people with developmental disabilities struggle with a lack of employment opportunities and a lack of agency opportunities in their own lives,” Hruby said. “Choices big and small – where to live, how to travel, who to spend time with, having money to spend on items beyond basic needs – are choices that many of us take for granted and are often seen as very limited for many disabled people. ”
Creativity Explored aims to enrich the agency of its artists by promoting and selling their work. The artists receive half of the profits.
I asked Sakura, who is autistic, how it feels to have her work shared in the LA Times.
“I feel very proud of myself,” she said. “My art is a perfect way to support people with disabilities.”
We hope you enjoy these artists' inventive designs as much as we do.
Laron Bickerstaff
Laron Bickerstaff creates radiant portraits and stream-of-consciousness text-based artworks. Bickerstaff communicates using American Sign Language and is deeply aware of the visual characteristics of the language. For The Times, he depicted a skater scene with his cheerful color-block style. See
more of Bickerstaff's work.
Download Laron's wallpaper here
Download Laron's phone wallpaper here
yukari sakura
Yukari Sakura is a book of wisdom on your favorite topics. Passionate about protecting endangered animals and the environment, her original painting for The Times focuses on a selection of animals native to Los Angeles, rendered with special attention to detail. See more of Sakura's work.
Download Yukari wallpaper here
Download Yukari's phone wallpaper here
Elana Cooper
Elana Cooper is primarily known for her striking, large-scale floral silhouettes, inspired by California's botanical abundance. Cooper paints with bold strokes, the background one color and the subject a contrasting color, giving her representative work an abstract quality. Elana Cooper's first solo exhibition opens on January 11, 2024 at Creativity Explored gallery. See more of Cooper's work.
Download Elana wallpaper here
Download Elana's phone wallpaper here
Taneya Lovelace
Taneya Lovelace creates dramatic abstract mixed media works, layering rich colors and organic shapes to build complex compositions with lots of visual movement. Lovelace is a determined and concentrated artist, painting in meditative periods, usually color by color. See more of Lovelace's work.
Download Taneya's wallpaper here
Download Taneya's phone wallpaper here
calvin snow
Calvin Snow's art is reminiscent of 1960s psychedelic album art, or the screens that flickered at the Fillmore during a Grateful Dead show. His work has a precise but fluid geometry and an intense electricity of color. See more of Snow's work.
Download Calvin's wallpaper here
Download Calvin's phone wallpaper here
Irene Rivas
Irene Rivas is dedicated to a solid and varied artistic practice. Rivas prefers bright, saturated colors both in her colored pencil work and in her collages. For her article in The Times, she arranged thousands of confetti-sized squares of paper one by one to form the colorful fill, lines and texture of a field of flowers. See more of Rivas's work.
Download Irene's wallpaper here
Download Irene's phone wallpaper here
Camille Holvoet
Camille Holvoet's artwork is deceptively sweet. Her autobiographical practice tends to draw on life's anxieties and forbidden desires. Holvoet's process is an endless discovery, in which the pressures of the past are relieved by the joy of the creative process. She repeatedly draws her sacred objects with oil pastels: desserts, ferris wheels, and crossed eyes. SFMOMA recently acquired works by Holvoet for its permanent collection. See more of Holvoet's work.
Download Camille's wallpaper here
Download Camille's phone wallpaper here
Andrew Li
A true product of his native Shanghai, Andrew Li's most frequent subjects are cities in motion. Li's quick and deliberate process mimics how the eye reads the urban environment. He latches onto certain details and summarizes others, making sense of all the dizzying activity on a busy street. See more of Li's work.
Download Andrew's wallpaper here
Download Andrew's phone wallpaper here
