Dead Serious

Ben Blackwell @bblackwellphoto

Ben Blackwell has been taking photographs for over 50 years and his work is in the collections of the Yale Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the International Center for Photography. From 1979 to 2011, he was the Principal Photographer at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the contract photographer for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Today, Ben is focusing on his continuing studio practice, while his commercial practice specializes on unique projects, with private clients, major museums, galleries, and publishers, nationally and internationally. Ben Blackwell holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley.

Cate White @catewhite

Self-taught beginning at age 30, White’s work became public in 2014 with the ProArts 2x2 Solos Exhibition, followed by the 2015 Tournesol Award from Headlands Center for the Arts, the Bay Area Now 8 triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and residencies including a fully-funded, year-long residency in Roswell, New Mexico, a Master Artist residency with Joan Snyder at Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Mills College Art Museum A+P+I residency, and 10 solo shows and multiple group shows in the Bay Area and beyond. While primarily a painter, White often exhibits her work in multi-media installations that include drawings, sculpture, video and books. She now splits her time between Oakland and a shack on the Mendo Coast where she hosts How Do You Paint, an unhinged, comedic and semi-instructional painting show on YouTube.

Statement: My paintings inhabit a world where personal memory, dreams, political reality, religion, banal culture, and archetypal myth have not yet been separately categorized. Images translate from one story into another, remixing contexts until they lose their fixed meanings. Horror and hilarity trade masks. The miraculous and the absurd share the same language. The sacred, psychological, traumatic, mythic, domestic, and comic all stand on equal groundless ground. Over the years, the work has delivered images of confinement and escape: caves, cells, thresholds, thrashing, illuminated openings. But the way to liberation is never clear, and running beneath the work is an undercurrent of grief—for failed transformations, lost certainties, and the perpetual distance between desire and fulfillment. The sacred and ridiculous are merged. Enlightenment appears as a spray-painted glow. The process of painting is a tightrope act between intention and accident, structure and impulse. Both order and chaos can become prisons. I am searching for a third place: moments of bewilderment, play, revelation, or recognition. Rather than offering a coherent narrative, these works invoke a raw world, unfinished and alive, where meaning is in the making.

Dance Doyle @dance_doyle

Dance Doyle is an Oakland-based multimedia artist who translates complex narratives into monumental story-driven tapestries using traditional floor looms. Raised amidst the city's visceral, late-20th-century grit, Doyle infuses this raw metropolitan edge directly into their textile work. Completely self-taught at tapestry, their highly intuitive methodology bypasses rigid blueprints; they free-weave expansive, intricate compositions guided only by a diminutive outline pinned to the loom's castle. Doyle's compelling, tactile landscapes have garnered extensive domestic and international acclaim. Their distinguished career features prestigious residencies at institutions like New York's Museum of Arts and Design, the Bemis Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, and the McColl Center. A decorated practitioner, they've secured elite fellowships from MacDowell and the Headlands Center for the Arts and have shared their unique expertise as a professor in California.

Statement: Growing up in Oakland during the 1980s and 90s, my formative years were defined by the stark vibrancy of an urban landscape characterized by both decay and resilience. I was constantly surrounded by the raw texture of street art, abandoned storefronts, the mass of pigeons, music blasting from car stereos, and the visual rhythm of busted car windows. All existed alongside the stunning, foggy bay backdrop that framed my upbringing. These elements—the profound human struggles and the stark, beautiful surroundings—became the foundational building blocks of my vision. My translations into tapestry have been consistently informed by that beautiful, potent environment, allowing me to distill the complexities of city life into something tactile. Through these woven explorations, I document the echoes of an urban history that shaped who I am today, ensuring that these fleeting memories are given lasting physical form.

David Fullarton @hughjanus

David Fullarton is a San Francisco based artist who creates mixed media drawings that combine images with text. He investigates themes that are rooted in the human condition and address the banality and absurdity of everyday existence. He uses uncompromising wit and dark humor to ruthlessly skewer contemporary neuroses. In the process he highlights the shared humanity in our individual troubles and joys.

derek hernandez @Drain_disciple

San Francisco based multi-media artist.

Edward Eng @edwardsoyeng

Edward Eng is a California native artist who specializes in ceramic sculptures that tell narratives about the dynamic relationship between humans and nature, raising awareness about the severe impacts of climate change. His sculptures take note from scientific research blended with surrealism to create conversations about the natural world and how human activity are altering the environment in more ways than imagined. He completed a B.F.A. Concentration in Spatial Art at San José State University and currently works as a teaching assistant and as an artist assistant to Lisa Heikka-Huber. His work has been featured in various spaces such as The Palo Alto Art Center, The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Transmission Gallery, Epperson Gallery and Pence Gallery.

Statement: My work explore the various facets of climate change, more specifically in the context of carbon emissions and how it contributes to issues such as biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, phenological mismatch and the increased frequency in natural disasters. My forms are sculpted from clay and are often representational with my own interpretation of surrealism through the juxtaposition of unrelated colors and textures that evoke the familiar and the obscure. The materiality of my forms serves as a basis for exploration but also our connection to the earth beneath our feet. My art bends the space of reality and captures the dynamic relationship between humans and nature, with each sculpture focused on a theme or specific narrative under the umbrella of climate change that is constantly evolving.

hopi breton @hopibeart

Hopi Breton is a Bay Area/Mendocino artist, and a faculty member in the Art Department at Diablo Valley College where she heads the sculpture program and manages the Jewelry program. She received a BA from Loyola University in New Orleans, and an MFA from Montana State University. She also comes from a family filled with musicians and visual artists. Hopi has a strong technical background in metal fabrication, metal casting, and moldmaking, and works in a variety of media. In addition, Hopi spent a decade creating in New Orleans which still inspires her to create large scale backpack puppets and to organize and participate in public parades. Hopi has organized and worked with students and peers to create cast iron art performances nationally.

Statement: Hopi Breton creates mixed media sculptural objects that are hybrids of figurative elements, inanimate objects, animals, and landscape. She finds poetic connections in the combination of materials and forms to spark new meanings and metaphors. Hopi considers themes of place, displacement, and spiritual well-bring connected to land and home, amid heightened emotions of collective anxiety, loss, and climate crisis. Through unexpected combinations, Hopi explores tensions of collective stresses and unearths poetic connections toward well-being and rootedness.

Jade Cohen @jadecohenart

Hi, I’m Jade! I am a genderfluid multimedia artist, musician & UC Berkeley alum, currently based in the Bay Area. I have over 10 years of experience working as a professional fine artist, digital illustrator, and muralist. I moved to the United States from South Africa when I was a teenager and making art was a grounding force in my life that helped me feel like I was home in my body while adjusting to many extreme changes, both in my environment and within myself. I am almost thirty now and have grown closer and closer to myself and the world around me through my art practice since then. Right now, I'm particularly interested in making surreal works about love, grief, and magic as a means to tether myself and the people around me to this earth and to one another. Through my life and through my art practice I hope to continue to explore different parts of my experience and a collective human experience that will hopefully provoke people to reflect on themselves and maybe even feel a little less alone.

Statement: lol

James Shefik @James_shefik_sculpture

Conceptual, multidisciplinary artist James Shefik lives in Oakland. Along with making art in his studio, he is a scenic artist and scenic foreman on movie and television sets (Sense8, Thirteen Reasons Why, Steve Jobs, Big Eyes, Milk, and The Matrix to name a few). Primarily a sculptor, Shefik creates artwork that reveals his strong concern for the environment, for the government’s tyranny of purposeful invasion of our privacy, and social political absurdity that often accompanies concentrations of power. His hummingbird installation “I’ve Not Had Enough of You” was created in 2013. It referenced a military project of surveillance conceived of during the Iraqi war in 2006. Flying hummingbirds were equipped with cameras in the era before smartphones for surveillance. I created 99 hummingbird drones, one of which transmits a delayed video signal to a monitor in the installation space.

Statement: I am naturally a sensitive, curious, pessimist. Human behavior fascinates me, and while we have many positive traits, my work tends to highlight our shortcomings, with a predominant focus on concentrations of power and absurdity. The resulting pieces tend to blur the lines between contemporary art, beauty and the political use of power, to fabricate new ways to see the world around us. I do this with common everyday objects (cars, matches, hummingbirds, chairs) , in varying dimensions, media and numbers. The object's finish is kept minimal, realistic yet obsessively detailed to hold a viewers interest and attention long enough to see multiple layers of meaning. Another aspect of the laborious quality of each piece is a rebuttal to the digital instant gratification, short attention span landscape that pervades the early 21st century.

Johanna Poethig @johannapoethigsilver

Johanna Poethig is a visual, public artist and performance artist who has exhibited internationally creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She received the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award in 2021. Her multidisciplinary art practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day events, collaborative processes and scientific research. She is a story teller working in primarily in paint, ceramics, video and performance. In recent work plants, fungi and lichen take on a performative role as she explores ways to communicate forms of intelligence outside the scope of our human understanding. Her most recent public projects include the current Sonoma State Farmworker Mural re-visioning, an architectural metal relief for the San Jose Fire Department, a large-scale painting installed in Chinook Elementary School in Washington State, the restoration of her 1984 nine story landmark mural on Filipino Immigration to the United States and the 1.5 million 9 mile public art project for AC Transit. Her video and performance work includes Everywoman Biennial NYC 2026, Shapeshifters Cinema, West Oakland Sound Series, Angelica Festival in Italy, the David Ireland House/ 500 Capp Street Project, Transi(en)t Manila, “Glamorgeddon:The Spectacle” at SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco. She has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pen and Brush Gallery in NYC, The Luggage Store Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery with the Great Wall of Los Angeles project, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Boston Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, SF Galeria de la Raza, Headlands Center for the Arts, Museo ng Manila among others. She is Professor Emerita at the Visual and Public Art Department, California State University, Monterey Bay.

Statement: My work crosses the private and public realms. I have exhibited internationally and been actively creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture, community collaborations, multi-media installations and performances for over 4 decades. My public art works intervene in the urban landscape on public buildings, freeways, in parks, hospitals, jails, schools, universities, homeless shelters, and advertising venues. My paintings, sculpture, video and installations reflect my interest in form, narrative, symbol, satire, society and our colonialist consumerist culture. My work is conceptually driven but interpreted through materials that best realize these ideas. I produce and participate in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, props, cabaret, experimental music and video. This combination of direct activist work in the public sphere and the exploration of my personal interests in my individual work enables me to develop my work through a complex interrelationship of content, technique, scale, materials and social interactions. Sometimes it is the blend and many times the dissonance that inspires me. I grew up outside of the United States in the Philippines and this perspective has deeply influenced my work.

John Casey @johncaseyart

Born on Friday the 13th in Salem, Massachusetts, I started inventing creatures as soon as I was able to hold a crayon. Drawings that my mother saved from when I was only three years old reveal my obsession with the figure. The figures in these drawings show not only the distorted perceptions of a child, but my fascination with skulls, teeth, spirographic eyes, and invented body parts. My obsession with strange creatures continued throughout my youth. Monster models, dinosaurs, and horror movies on television occupied much of my time as well as drawing. I graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1988 with a BFA in Painting. At the time I was making art that focused on surreal and psychological figurative painting and drawing. A bit later I added sculpture as part of my process, and my subjects continue to reveal a surreal bent in both structure and narrative. I have shown in galleries in Boston, Portland, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, as well as international venues in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Denmark. My work is included in collections at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California, and the Artothèque de Caen in France. I moved to the Bay Area a number of years ago and currently live in Oakland, California with my wife, artist Mary Kalin-Casey.

Statement: For most of my art career I have been exploring open-ended narratives in my work. Using mostly a portrait format, I tap into my subconscious to conjure loose metaphors and symbols and weave them into compelling characters. Some of these beings represent a kind of psychological self-portrait. Others represent people (or critters) I have encountered throughout my lifetime, friends, neighbors, and generally everyday folks. Often these characters are amalgamations. These beings are not specific portraits, more like fictional impressions of various people or animals. The character’s life-story is left open to interpretation, inviting the viewer into the story-telling process. The results are what appear to be damaged or vulnerable beings, but a second look reveals complex and sensitive spirits, more like enthusiastic upstarts, rather than rejects or troublemakers.

Kathryn Kenworth @kathrynkenworth

Kathryn Kenworth makes work that explores the social, emotional, and cultural meanings embedded in everyday objects. Kathryn received a BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder CO (1989) and MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA (1999). Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally in galleries, museums, universities, parking lots and storefront windows including Southern Exposure Gallery, Kala Art Institute, Bedford Gallery and the David Brower Center as well as in France, Australia and Mexico. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the Awesome Foundation, and Théâtre à l´envers, Rennes FRANCE among others. Her residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Bundanon (Australia), Au Bout du Plongeoir (France), Foundation House, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She lives and works in Oakland, California.

Statement: I use everyday items such as face cream, aspirin, duct tape and sponges as points of departure to investigate how advertising, desire, consumerism, and ideas of value shape our relationships with the things that surround us. Changing context, scale, and material, transforms ordinary items in unexpected ways and encourages new perspectives on everyday life. Working in a variety of media, I choose materials for the qualities and associations they carry. Charcoal gets smudged in the process of making, leaving traces of touch on the page that personalizes mass-produced objects and shifts how we see them. Paint moves between control and unpredictability, flowing across surfaces to create tension between what is contained and what escapes. Found objects, packaging, and reused materials are combined to create new relationships between what we are encouraged to want and what we choose to keep, need, and value.

Kendra Benisano

Liat Berdugo @whatliat

Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and The Wrong Biennale (online), among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, among others, and her latest bookisThe Weaponized Camera in the Middle East (Bloomsbury/I.B.Tauris, 2021). She is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an associate professor of Art + Architecture and director of the User Experience / User Interface (UX/UI) minor at the University of San Francisco. Berdugo lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Madelyn Covey @madypants

I am a Richmond, CA based artist working primarily in painting and drawing. I was born in Sacramento, CA, and have been an East Bay resident since 2005. I received my MFA in Fine Arts from Mills College in 2012 and my BA from UC Berkeley in 2008. I currently facilitate painting and drawing at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, as well as their Saturday Youth Program.

Statement: My artwork focuses on people and how they perform aspects of their identities and inner selves. I have always loved painting portraits of my friends, community members, and pop culture obsessions, using housemates, folks dressed up at comic book conventions, celebrities, and screencaps of TV shows as subject matter. My current portraits are part of a series that reflects on domesticity and intimacy, as I evaluate my life’s trajectory through portraits of lovers, close friends, my friends’ children, and my family. Even before everyone had a cell phone with a high definition camera with them all of the time, I would carry a little point and shoot with me to document moments I found funny or intriguing. I use these photos to help capture the joy and love I find in the people in my life, and translate that into my painting practice. The found wallpaper I paint on references the domesticity of my subjects, and also allows me to build the image in relation to what already exists on the surface. Through meditating on my subjects’ features and body language, I feel connected to them, and in that way more connected to the world.

Mayetta Steier @djyetta

I create functional and sculptural ceramic pieces that speak to the inner child in all of us. My work is inspired by the boundless creativity of childhood, the cartoons and toys I loved, and the joy I found in bright colors and graphic lines. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of sacred spaces and how different communities define them. To me, joy and play are sacred. I feel a deep responsibility to cultivate joy through my work—especially in a world filled with grief. My pieces aim to blend silliness with sacredness, creating spaces where joy is both felt and shared. Connection is at the heart of being human, and my sculptural work celebrates the sweetness and kindness in our relationships. Growing up in San Francisco, I was surrounded by bold, diverse, and accessible art, which continues to influence my practice. Looking ahead, I plan to explore a broader range of emotions in my work and create large-scale public pieces that bring these ideas to life in new spaces.

Mia Rassam @miarassam

Mia Rassam is a figurative artist based in California. She is currently completing her MFA in Studio Art at San Francisco State University. Rassam graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2024 with a B.A. in Art Studio and a B.A. in Communications. Her awards include a Talent Prize in the 2026 Teravarna Portrait exhibition, an Honorable Mention in the 2025 SFVACC exhibition Surrealism, the Jeffrey Owyang Art Scholarship in 2024, a Citation for Outstanding Performance in 2024, and the UC Davis Undergraduate Studio Award in both 2023 and 2024. She currently works in the Bay Area.

Statement: Rassam is dedicated to examining how bodies are shaped within social, religious, and cultural institutions, and how gender and sexual regimes impact bodily autonomy, historical representation, and personal identity. Utilizing self-portraiture and visual citation, Rassam illuminates how art history informs contemporary understandings of gender representation and performance. Drawing from her upbringing in the Catholic Church, she deconstructs canonical Edenic imagery that perpetuates a rigid heteronormative femininity. Employing art‑historical citation, détournement, humor, autobiographical narrative, and pathos, Rassam confronts personal encounters with objectification and misogyny while making space for levity, hope, and collective solidarity.

Milo Moyer-Battick @milo.moyerbattick

Born in 1990 and raised in northern Vermont, Milo Moyer-Battick earned a BFA in printmaking from the University of Southern Maine in 2012. Along side Casey Massman, Moyer-Battick co-operated an underground music and art venue Massman Gallery from 2015-2022. He was the gallery manager at Gallery 16 from 2018 - 2023, and is currently the studio assistant to Miguel Arzabe. He lives and works in Emeryville, CA.

Statement: Moyer-Battick makes paintings of a wide spectrum of images, using watered down transparent layers of acrylic on unprimed canvas. Craft, humor, non-meaning, and conceptual spontaneity are present.

mittie Cuetara @mittiecuetara

Mittie Cuetara is an Oakland artist working in acrylics and mixed media. She has a BFA from the Boston Museum School and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland. She has shown in juried shows across California. Her paintings and sculpture use humor and a feminist perspective to explore the imperfection of lived-in lives, the nests and paths that humans create for themselves. .

Statement: As a non-native Californian, my paintings process feelings of displacement and longing for connection. Old houses, old furniture, my subjects are often prosaic but carry connection to community and the weight of history. I’m interested in how certain light and shadows can activate and build a sense of time. I work in acrylic because it’s fast and I can feel a sense of connection from the visual to my body when I move the paint around. I also use paper mache and recycled cardboard to express an idea that needs dimension. My work emphasizes commonality, using humor and the beauty of the mundane to highlight our shared experience as humans, in the face of massive commercialism and relentless sowing of divisiveness.

morgann nieto @morgannnieto

Morgann Nieto is a visual artist based in Oakland, California. Her sculptural practice is concerned with how objects describe the precarity, infirmity, and interdependence of living systems. Working with repurposed refuse, hobbyist electronics, and organic materials, her pieces reframe automation through slowness, fragility, and an embrace of inherent needfulness and inevitable disrepair. She received a BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA from San Francisco State University. Her work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Root Division, Your Mood Projects, Berkeley Art Center, and 500 Capp St in San Francisco, and can be seen in various bedrooms, basements, and vacant lots across the eastern seaboard.

Noah Gavrich @nogsgrog

Rebecca Herman @artgroupc

Rebecca Herman and Mark Shoffner are long-term collaborators working in sculpture, textiles, paper, performance, and installation. Our project-based work is often made in response to conflicts and perceived dangers that surround us–whether environmental dangers, human conflict, or political strife. Over the past nine years we have frequently worked with hand-dyed and patterned textiles to create temporary public art installations, mixed media sculptures, and wearable art that reflect on tensions in society. Rebecca and Mark’s large-scale textiles were exhibited at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and other textile works were included in the “45th Anniversary Exhibition: New Directions” at San José Museum of Quilts and Textiles and “Pulp: Book & Paper Arts” at Sebastopol Center for the Arts. We have created outdoor installations for Golden Gate Park; McCarren Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn; and Evergreen House, Baltimore, among other outdoor exhibitions and art festivals. In New York, our work was the subject of a two-part solo exhibition at Black & White Gallery in Brooklyn. Artist residencies include Kala Art Insitute, Berkeley; Venezia Contemporanea, Italy; Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio, Japan; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York; and San José Museum of Quilts & Textiles, during which time we were the subject of a feature interview in Content magazine. Rebecca was Resident Artist at the San Francisco Public Library through ProjectArt in 2019-20. Mark has been a Teaching Artist through SFArtsEd, specializing in bookmaking, since 2022.

Statement: The Redacted Portrait Gallery features aspiring autocrats from countries around the world. Through cryptic portrayals of contemporary political leaders, we imagine how specific infamous figures may be remembered in the future, whether reviled or venerated. In this series of portraits, the veneer of sophistication is counterbalanced by the absurdity of the disembodied noses–a reference to Nikolai Gogol’s satirical short story "The Nose," in which an petty official wakes up without his nose, which he then follows through the street in an attempt to reclaim his dignity. The specific dictators referenced in this series remain unnamed, although the lush textiles, embellishments and rich sheen of the materials suggest a ridiculous attempt at fabulousness and glory--or a discount holy relic.

Susanna Conaway @feralstudio.stainedglass

Susanna Conaway is the owner of Feral Studio, a stained glass studio in Berkeley, CA where she builds residential commissions, teaches classes and makes art. She is a Professional Member of the Stained Glass Association of America, and a member of the American Glass Guild. Conaway is an editor and contributing writer for the Glass Quarterly, where she writes about Contemporary Glass artists from around the world. In 2023 she was accepted as an artist in residence at Greywood Arts in Ireland and was featured in Glass Art Magazine. In 2019 she was the recipient of the SGAA award for artistry in glass, and in 2018 received a James Whitney Scholarship through the American Glass Guild. She received best in Show at Urban Glass in Brooklyn, NY in 2008. In 2007 she was featured on the DIY T.V. Network, Craft Lab where she demonstrated building a stained glass panel.

Statement: Susanna Conaway is an American artist working in glass. Largely inspired by humor, Conaway embraces contradictions, and explores concepts of beauty and power, in pursuit of shifting entrenched perspectives. She plays with transforming the mundane into works of grandeur. Because stained glass conjures preconceived ideas and is rooted in a long history, Conaway’s work has an element of the unexpected as she distorts tradition to examine contemporary ideas.

Theresa Giammattei @t.giammattei.art

Theresa Giammattei is a painter and mixed media artist living and working in Los Gatos, CA. She received a BFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and more recently began exploring printmaking and ceramics. She is a Board Member of the Northern California Women's Caucus for Art (NCWCA) and a former President and Board Member of The Art Docents of Los Gatos.

Statement: Tools are a central motif in my art, rooted in a childhood spent building forts and freely roaming the woods of upstate New York and the Berkshires. The simple physicality of holding a tool gave me a profound sense of agency and the realization that I could physically transform my surroundings. These objects became almost like talismans to me. Tools grant us the fundamental ability to create, alter, and even repair the world we inhabit. Through my work, I want to explore a broader question: what small adjustments can we make to reshape our environment, our mindsets, and our way of living?

Thomas Lewis @im_linkedin

Multi media artist living and working in San Francisco.

Statement: My work is rooted in the south and has strong ties to my home state of North Carolina.

Tim Lahan @timlahan

Tim Lahan is an Oakland, California-based artist whose work explores the tension between the natural world and the rigid, often oppressive structures of modern society. Lahan splits his time between commercial illustration for major clients like Nike, Apple, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and his personal studio practice focused on painting, drawing, and self-publishing.

Tom Franco @tom__franco

THOMAS FRANCO BIO & ARTIST STATEMENT - 2026 Tom's main profession is as a fine art sculptor and painter. His work is described as found objects, folk-art, collaborative, California funk, and ceramics. His process and approach to art making is diverse and layered. He often begins with found materials that are chosen for their shapes, colors, and the stories that come with them. Most things are anthropomorphized and become characters in an ongoing story of people and creatures living their lives in a parallel world to ours. Peppered with mystery, villains, and natural phenomenon, the mood is magical, filled with wonder, and an overarching calm understanding that everything is going to be alright. As sculptural objects there is a flip flop between the physicality of the work and the fantastical depictions of the human spirit. With a group of 6+ collaborating artists, Tom and friends function more like a musical band that tours around the United States and other countries to put on art shows, public art activations, and teach. They make short films of these adventures called The U.S. Bus Art Tour. Since 2004, Tom finds inspiration from directing a constellation of community spaces called the Firehouse Art Collective, including art studios, galleries, live-events, cafes, co-housing, and classrooms. This includes activations in the cities of Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, Alameda, Reno, and soon to be Los Angeles and Palo Alto. With his wife Iris Torres they formed Firehouse Films in 2015 to develop movies and documentary projects. A documentary covering the California ceramic movement from the 60's to today is called No Rules In Clay. Tom and Iris live with their 3 year old son and two dogs in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.

Statement: See Above Bio and Artist Statement

Vince Montague @vincemontague

I'm an artist and writer living in Northern California. I wrote a book about clay and grief, CRACKED POT (Latah Books, 2024), and a chapbook of poems NEXT DOOR (Bottlecap Press 2025). I had a solo show at Hugomento, INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS (2024), and UTOPIAN POTS at Epperson Gallery, 2022.

Statement: "It is not down on any map; true places never are.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale Essays are literary whales: elusive and enigmatic. The form of writing, the beauty of an idea, should never be contained to within a single line or a square paragraph box. The ideas in Whale Essays are meant to be felt, not read. I believe that reading doesn't have to be conscripted or predetermined. In fact, sometimes I believe you just need to perceive beyond words.

yi yang @yiyang____

yi yang 杨一 is a conceptual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Statement: My practice explores how systems of law, technology, social norms, and institutional authority enter intimate and everyday life. I often place myself within a system’s terms, following its rules long enough for attachments, obligations, and contradictions to emerge. What happens when a formal agreement becomes a personal commitment? What can a system recognize, and what remains outside its terms? Working across sound, image, text, installation, and performance, I give these questions concrete forms and allow their consequences to unfold over time. My work attends to the distance between what governing systems can account for and what a person lives through.

Zachary Hart Baker @https://www.instagram.com/______hart______/?hl=en

Jonathan Bachrach @bachrach.arts