About A.M.O.S.

Artist Bio —

Amy Moon Offermann-Sims (b. 1976, Santa Cruz, CA) is a painter living and working in Santa Cruz, California. Working primarily in acrylic paint on stretched canvas, she creates mysterious, moody landscapes often populated by solitary human figures. Her work draws viewers into quiet spaces, familiar but strange.

Amy studied art at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the University of New Orleans, and at Cabrillo College. For ten years she self-published the comics zine Homesick, and her artwork has appeared on several LP album releases, reflecting her long-standing connection to independent art and music communities.

Influenced deeply by her parents, both painters, she grew up immersed in a creative community on the Santa Cruz compound where she now lives again after nearly two decades spent in other parts of the United States. Her practice is also shaped by her relationship with the earth, as well as by her experiences as the mother of two creative children, now thirteen and sixteen. These threads of place, lineage, and transformation weave through her paintings, giving them a sense of quiet intensity and grounded wonder.

Her most recent exhibitions include Mastery Work: Generations, at Santa Cruz Art League, CA (2026), Open Studios, through the Arts Council in Santa Cruz, CA (2025), Sotto Voce at Perimeter Gallery in Belfast, ME (2024), Delicate As Summers End at Minnow Arts in Santa Cruz, CA (2022), and in permanent collection at Wedding Cake House in Providence, RI (2019). Amy’s paintings and commissioned family portraits are in private collections across the United States.