Dude, where's my school?

Alex Ehmer @alexehma

Statement: Alex Ehmer is a local bay area artist and arts administrator born and raised in San Francisco CA. Alex graduated SFAI with a BFA in printmaking in 2019 and currently has a studio in the American Industrial building in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district. Alex has worked, exhibited, and curated at various art institutions and local galleries throughout their art career. Some such spaces are SFAI, Walter and Mc Bean Gallery, Burnt Oak gallery, 500 Capp Street, Fleetwood SF, Berggruen Gallery, and Mrkt Gallery. Alex’s art practice consists of intertwining various mediums of printmaking, sculpture, and performance in order to explore the complex natures involving childhood phycology, trauma, and the body and how it stores memory. In curatorial practice , Alex tries to investigate collaborative natures with galleries and various communities intertwining within the ecosystem of the Bay Area art scene. Whenever curating Alex always try and provide some aspect of open call to each exhibition in order to provide opportunities for these said communities.

Amir Nikravan @amir_nikravan

Statement: As a queer Iranian Mexican American, my exploration of sign systems arises from my complex relationship with language and identity. I view language as a visual field of signifiers, shaping the precarious nature of meaning and perception. For the past seven years, I've cultivated an evolving archive of vernacular shapes, forms, and gestures tied to languages and architectures. This journey revealed a connection to calligraphic modernism, born from colonialism's impact on native tongues and dialects, wherein artists embraced abstracted script as a form of communication. In this context, the chalkboard emerged as a potent symbol, reflecting the ongoing construction, erasure, and reconstruction of meaning in both artistic practice and life. My work, grounded in the interplay of cultural and institutional influences, seeks to give form to the complexities of communication and identity.

Barry McGee

Colby Claycomb @colby_claycomb

Claycomb received his Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and then was selected and received a grant to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Artist Residency, 2009. Claycomb lived and worked in New York City from 2010 to 2019. He then returned to the Bay Area in 2019. Most recently, he was a SECA Award Nominee in 2022 and 2024. He has exhibited his work extensively in the Bay Area and New York. Claycomb lives and works in San Francisco. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Davis in 2006. Later that year, he was selected and received a grant to attend a post-baccalaureate program at Pont-Aven School of Painting and Sculpture in Pont-Aven, France.

Statement: Colby Claycomb (Citrus Heights, CA) is a sculptor who primarily works with found objects, ceramics, and construction materials. Hovering somewhere between hope and play, anxiety and catastrophe, Claycomb reflects on the unpredictable nature of objects through sculpture, exploring purpose and redefinition. His personal experiences with materials, together with the constant desire to find balance between positivity and pessimism, drive Claycomb’s practice and manifest in a process that is both playful and physical. Claycomb’s work is a mix of craft, construction, destruction, and ready-made objects. Through sculpture, he reflects on the unpredictability of human nature, create stories, personal myths and deconstruct old ones. It is through this practice that he is able to create a purpose for himself, to keep investigating his own relationship and hope of a higher being.

Dave Carter @sweetdave__

David Dugoncevic @daviddugoncevic

Statement: My practice revolves around the investigation and inspection of past visions of the future, or worlds, that best navigate the here and now. My paintings explore the intersection and portrayal of masculinity, intimacy, nostalgia and reality through Objects, Pulp Novels, Kitsch, and Pop Culture. My work appropriates these objects, visions and myths creating new forms and narratives which highlight these fantasies and at times lives realities.

Felicita Norris @fmstarcat

Henry Fey

Izzy Dier @izzydier

Josh Hash @jhash93

Josh Hash (b. 1993) is an SFAI alumnus who maintains an art practice in Los Angeles, CA, where he was born and raised. His work, often derived from late-20th-century folklore, centers around memory, community, and representation. His heritage as a Persian/Swiss first-generation American has inspired an artistic practice that reflects on ideas of diaspora, commerce, and colloquial language — resulting in artworks that offer practical utility and tangible connections to everyday life. Studio Hash is a working pseudonym for the artist’s creative output, which spans fine art, fashion, & grass-roots community building. Explore the site to discover contemporary objects made with love from Studio City, CA ☀️!

Julia Fairbrother @heaathh

Laura Rokas @laurarokas

Statement: Laura Rokas (b. 1989, Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the fluidity of identity through class, gender and the inferred understanding of material hierarchy. Rokas uses drawing, painting, ceramics and textiles to create a dreamlike world where sinister characters and beautiful objects shift effortlessly through dimensions, at once dangerous and playful. Rokas’ dismembered avatars bounce through different mediums and moods, at times powerful and in control and others vulnerable and seeking comfort. Her images are drawn from a personal mythology that is rooted in art history, pop culture and craft, mingling flat forms with highly rendered figures. Patches, both hand sewn and vintage, adorn her works, signaling group affiliations, personal preferences and evoking 90s childhood nostalgia. Having mainly been exposed to folk art while growing up, Rokas has a deep appreciation for handmade objects and a make-do sensibility to art making. A self taught textile artist, these works meld utilitarian craft with her laborious technical fine art skills, retaliating against a culture that praises fast production and low quality over mindful expression.

Melanie Piech @melaniepiech_art

Melanie was born in Los Angeles, California, and practiced law for 14 years, most of that time as a plaintiff’s class action lawyer, learning firsthand how greed and power, both public and private, disrupt fairness and justice. After stepping away to have a child, she returned to school to study sculpture. She spent 10 years part-time at SFAI, graduating in 2018, and now works out of a SOMA warehouse. She has always been a maker. Her art has recently been displayed at Heron Arts, the Hera Gallery, and Metal Haus, as well as through ArtSpan. Two of her larger sculptures are permanently installed in California and Colorado.

Statement: When very young, rightly or wrongly, I came to understand that society values men over women. That meant that I felt like an outsider to society. I took this to be a challenge to beat men at their own games. Success meant mastering things that society thought only men could do or should be doing. This was true when I started practicing law. Seventy-five percent of California litigators were male. When I transitioned to sculpture, it was important to me to master techniques that had been traditionally thought of as male, so mainly metalworking and technology. Thus, my work is feminist in my choice of technique, as it challenges societal notions of a woman's place in the world. In addition, due to my outsider mentality, my art often tries to amplify the voices of those who are not typically heard.

Miguel Novelo @xmiguelnovelo

Novelo, focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic movies ☄️, technoshammanic installations 👻, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses🫠. Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. Currently a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.

Statement: My art is technoshamanic, combining emerging technologies and indigenous knowledge—translating matter/energy/ghost/machine into access to the non-human perspective. I make systems/rituals/myths. I embrace mistranslations, uncertainty, simulations, and novelty. I depict systems, ins and outs. I create scenarios in which avatars and characters reimagine our perception of the world. Preach, listen, and invoke change. I utilize world-building, emerging media, and humor to generate myth, dialogue, and experience. I long for status-quo earthquakes, work with the unexpected, dance with data, feel ecological grief, and become non-human. In my work, I make machines that allow me to move like a bat, be judged by a pelican, and confess to an asteroid. Using humor, serious play, and absurd interactions as communication tools, I invite the audience to engage in non-human perspectives and speculative futures through nonsense possibilities. I ask the audience to multi-state sights, to challenge static perspectives. I practice interdisciplinary, research-based art through time-based new media, generative digital art, game engines, expanded cinema, participatory performance, interactive sculptures, and poetry. I focus on the intersection of geopolitical and cybernetic spaces—creating bridges between characters, landscape, and experience. My work is inspired by eco-horror storytelling/video game development, biofeedback user interfaces / object-oriented ontologies, geology studies, animal communication, and computer science. I want to become an active shaker in media ecology, create my own language, and make machines that give us access to alternative realities; I strive to make living art, an ever-changing, never-done process.

Mo Skye @moskyeart

Ocean Escalanti @oldisthegrave

Statement: Ocean Escalanti (she/her) is an Indigenous visual artist residing in Oakland, CA. Her practice focuses on the human/nature symbiosis and the use of natural dyeing as slow and deliberate creation. She has facilitated dye workshops in the Bay Area and vends her self-published printed works on the West Coast and beyond.

Oliver Hawk @oliverhawk

Rebecca Kaufman @rebecca___kaufman

Rebecca Kaufman is a San Francisco Bay Area visual artist and independent curator working in painting, textiles, and printmaking. Her work is a material exploration of intangible visual phenomena. She earned an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, where she was the recipient of a 2015-2017 Graduate Fellowship Award and a 2016 Cadogan Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Kaufman was featured in the Pacific Coast Issue No. 133 of New American Paintings and has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco and Fourth Wall Gallery in Oakland. She has shown in recent group exhibitions at Ladies’ Room (Los Angeles), Hashimoto Contemporary (SF), and Charlotte Russell Contemporary (Raleigh). In 2023, Kaufman received the Sheridan Prize for Art in the Women Artists category. Her work is included in private and public collections across the United States. Rebecca lives and works in West Oakland.

Statement: I make sight specific work. Everything in my field of vision, both seen and unseen, finds its way in. Employing elements of risk and the illusion of control, I construct disrupted optical field compositions unlike the pristine surfaces of first-generation Op Artists of the 1960s. I labor in their wake and in the tradition of centuries of women’s work - both historically relegated as “decorative”. My body, my tool for making, is both a site and a sight of contention. And so, I paint and I draw and I sew and I repeat myself to make tangible immaterial visual phenomena.

Taravat Talepasand

Taylor Meier

Josh Hash @jhash93

Josh Hash (b. 1993) is an SFAI alumnus who maintains an art practice in Los Angeles, CA, where he was born and raised. His work, often derived from late-20th-century folklore, centers around memory, community, and representation. His heritage as a Persian/Swiss first-generation American has inspired an artistic practice that reflects on ideas of diaspora, commerce, and colloquial language — resulting in artworks that offer practical utility and tangible connections to everyday life. Studio Hash is a working pseudonym for the artist’s creative output, which spans fine art, fashion, & grass-roots community building. Explore the site to discover contemporary objects made with love from Studio City, CA ☀️!