Introducing ENCORE 2026 Featured Artists: Rebecca Molayem and David Palmer
Meet the two Featured Artists of La Quinta Art Celebration ENCORE 2026: painter Rebecca Molayem, whose work appears on this year’s event poster, and painter David Palmer, who created the artwork for the event t-shirts. Both join 153 jury-selected artists exhibiting original work at the La Quinta Civic Center this November.
Rebecca Molayem
Featured Poster Artist — “Desert Reunion”
Booth Number: 333
Category: Painting
Rebecca Molayem is an expressionist artist known for her distinctive, whimsical, bold and captivating style. Her paintings are built through layers of vivid color and energetic brushstrokes, while her sculptures explore similar ideas through form, volume and gesture. Moving between the two mediums, she allows each practice to inform the other: the dimensional qualities of her sculptures shape the way she approaches the canvas, while the color and movement of her paintings find new life in three-dimensional form.
Her paintings are populated by voluptuous, exaggerated figures with expressive body language, alongside landscapes, florals and inviting interiors. Her subjects range from coastal scenes filled with bathing beauties and couples dancing and enjoying nightlife, to intimate rooms that seem to pull the viewer inward. The results are conversational, mysterious and joyful, capturing the sweet, fleeting moments of everyday life.
Rebecca graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1984 and spent 15 years working as a graphic artist and illustrator. While building her career and raising a family she began sculpting in clay, and in 1999 found a way to bring the dimensional qualities and expressive forms of those sculptures onto canvas — creating the visual language that has become her signature. In 2009 she established the Rebecca Molayem Gallery in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, where she has exhibited the work of numerous mid-career and emerging artists alongside her own. Today her expanded Gallery and Studio on S. Fairfax Avenue serves as an interactive creative space for exhibitions, events, workshops and classes.
From Rebecca: “I express feelings of happiness and joy through my paintings and believe my work is a source of strong compassion, opening doors to exhilarating journeys through color and composition.”
David Palmer
Featured T-Shirt Artist
Booth Number: 501
Category: Painting
David Palmer’s paintings combine the vocabulary of Pop Art with a classical sensibility. Their surfaces reveal patches of underlying color, reminiscent of aging frescoes and peeling billboards.
Palmer’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and in Europe, and appears in numerous public and private collections. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, an Artist’s Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and a residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. He has also created digital effects for more than a dozen feature films, including The Polar Express, Spider-Man 3 and the first Harry Potter movie. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
From David: “My paintings are inspired by dreams, childhood memories, nature and contemporary culture. When I start a painting, I don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s finished. I like to discover the image as I work on it. I start with an idea, but at some point the painting takes on a life of its own, and it leads me to a place I couldn’t have predicted. It’s like having a conversation, or taking a walk in a new neighborhood.”
Experience Amazing Art
La Quinta Art Celebration ENCORE 2026
Nov 12 - 15, 2026, La Quinta Civic Center
