In the past few weeks the days have been short, the temperature cold and the skies gray. But amidst these frigid winter blues, the Des Moines Art Center has become a little sunnier.

The newest exhibit, “California Dreamin’: Some Sun, Some Fun, and a Couple of Puns,” features 14 artists, offering Iowans a taste of 1960s-80s Californian art, characteristic by its bright colors and less-than-formal attitude.

The West Coast pieces are of specific interest to Patricia Hickson, gallery manager and associate curator of the center.

Hickson, who lived in California for 10 years, says creating an exhibit for the art was easier than expected.

“When I came to work here at the Des Moines Art Center a year ago, it was immediately apparent to me that they had a very strong selection of California art in their collection,” she says.

“That was due to the fact that three of the past directors spent some significant time living and working in California themselves.”

With her intimate experience of the Golden State, Hickson says the pieces in the collection offered her a sense of nostalgia.

“I lived in Los Angeles, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and so all these artists are like old friends to me,” she says.

In similar respects, Hickson says the artists would find their own inspiration in places and things specifically Californian, creating a recognizable feel to much of the art.

“I just really love the idea that these artists responded to these surfaces they saw in Los Angeles,” she says. “Surf boards that were made from these resins and had really slick, sleek surfaces, and hot rods, with how they have this shiny, light quality.”

Throughout much of the exhibit, artists used punning phrases such as “nasal officer” in their pieces as an attempt to strike humor with observers.

Hickson says that much of the informality of California art in the 1960s and ’70s was because of societal response to artists’ work.

“California art wasn’t taken seriously for so long that a lot of these artists created work that was tongue-in-cheek,” she says. “They didn’t feel like they had to live under these New York standards of high art.”

Though the show is meant to entertain and inform, Hickson says she hopes that displaying the gallery will help to get people out of the winter doldrums.

“I had thought about doing the California show in the winter to lift people’s spirits by showing them this kind of fun and sunshine-inspired art to kind of warm them up out of the winter chill,” she says.