Maija Peeples-Bright (b. 1942, Riga, Latvia) is a painter, sculptor, and key figure in the history of Northern California’s Funk Art and Nut Art Movements of the 60s and 70s. Peeples-Bright received an MFA from UC Davis in 1965 and held her first solo exhibition at the notable Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, CA that same year. She employs bountiful color, texture, and shape in her works, and her pieces often have a humorous touch. Animals, which Peeples-Bright affectionately refers to as her “beasties”, are a recurring visual motif in her work. Peeples-Bright has participated in numerous exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including Nuts and Who’s: A Candy Store Sampler, a group show at the San Jose Museum of Art and Mermaid Maija & The Island Paintings, a solo show at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles in 2023. Pieces by Bright are in the permanent collections of several museums including Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH.