MATERIAL INSTINCT

Amy Ellingson @amyellingsonartist

Amy Ellingson’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and in Tokyo, Japan. She received a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College in Claremont, California, and an M.F.A. from CalArts in Valencia, California. She is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and the Artadia Grant to Individual Artists and has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her work is held in various public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crocker Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, US Embassies in Algeria and Tunisia, and the United States Department of State, Washington, DC. Her 2015 public commission, Untitled (Large Variation), is an 1,100 square-foot ceramic mosaic mural, permanently on view at the San Francisco International Airport. She recently installed a large-scale commission for Sam Houston State University in Conroe, Texas, and has been awarded a commission for a new public work for the San Diego International Airport, which will be completed in 2024. Ellingson was Associate Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2000 to 2011 and has served on the Board of Directors at Root Division, a San Francisco nonprofit arts organization, since 2011. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Amy Ellingson currently lives and works Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2018. She is a contributor to Hyperallergic, covering exhibitions in the Santa Fe region.

Statement: My work explores the intersection of contemporary digital experience and modalities of abstraction. I am fascinated by fluctuating states of technology and craft, whether established, evolving, or evanescent. I have identified primarily as a painter over the last three decades, and have combined traditional painting methodologies with computer graphic design elements since 1990. Increasingly, I use the data files associated with my painting process—raster and vector files, primarily—to create related, tangential objects, such as bronze and glazed porcelain sculptures, robotic drawings, hand-drawn graphite drawings, and Jacquard tapestries. The various manifestations of the data, in a range of media, suggest the mutable, trickle-down, and omnipresent effects of digital information. The works relay the same basic informational “code” with varying degrees of digital and material mediation. Together, they address the multiplicity of expressive possibilities within a limited system that explores the nature of formal repetition, image, and object-hood. I am interested in the incalculable effects of the rise of digital technology on both artistic production and on the experience of looking at art. My process is a conflation of traditional methodologies and new technologies, of hand-made and digitally produced, of strict protocol and strategic work-arounds, of natural and artificial, and of fast and slow. My work addresses this moment in time, in which we, as a species, are betwixt and between the analog past and a digitally immersive future.

Annie Artell @idontkissartell

Annie Artell is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. They earned their BFA in Ceramics from California College of the Arts.

Statement: Annie Artell approaches her practice as a medicinal endeavor. Artell forges fragments from their daily encounters with the world as a microcosmic way to make sense of an often nonsensical existence. Their recent work is inspired by the term “Disjecta Membra”. It is an obscure term used in archaeology that refers to the methodology of reassembling a text or artifact by piecing together its broken shards, attempting to assemble a whole by collecting its scattered fragments. Artells practice is not only a reflection of fragments made whole but also a ceremonial process of mending herself back together.

Becca Barolli @beccabarolli

Becca Barolli was born in 1988 and raised in North Granby, Connecticut. She received a BFA in photography from the University of Connecticut in 2010 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. As a graduate student she received a Cadogan scholarship from The San Francisco Foundation and SOMArts Cultural Center in 2015 and a year later was awarded the Ella King Torrey Award at graduation for creative innovation in her studio practice. Becca currently lives and works in Bethlehem, Connecticut. She has completed a residency at The Studios at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA and was the 2019 Senior Fellow at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, CA. She has exhibited work at the de Young Museum, Andrea Schwartz Gallery and Chandran Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Miranda Kuo Gallery in New York, NY and Last Projects in Los Angeles, CA. Her work is collected internationally.

Statement: I make abstract sculptures out of steel wire by using textile processes to examine obsession and control. Traditional craft techniques like weaving, braiding and knotless netting can be seen with varying degrees of tension and density to consider the differences in being open or closed off, relaxed or uptight without passing judgment on either condition. This work is very labor-intensive, fueled by a compulsive need for repetition and reverence. Structures are often comprised of obsessively repeated gestures that are dysfunctional given the intended purpose of the materials yet ambitious given the context. Using steel wire instead of conventional fibers subverts textiles as a medium and pushes the range of expectations associated with hard and soft. I explore vulnerability and dysfunctional behavior by constructing objects that reference penetrable boundaries or are in some way arbitrarily constrained. A desire for control is highlighted by the tight, inflexible forms made with the restriction of a single material. Simultaneously, there is an inherent acceptance of disorder in the lack of precision or adherence to traditional materials in craft. This dichotomy between total control and chaos is negotiated throughout the work.

dani lopez @dani___lopez___

dani lopez is a textile artist working within weaving, embroidery, and textiles sculpture to explore queer desire, non-linear narratives, disidentifications, and femme identity. She received her MFA in Textiles from CCA. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Surface Design Journal, and Other People’s Pixels. lopez has shown at Bedford Gallery, Minnesota Street Project, Bass & Reiner, Amos Eno Gallery, Collar Works, and the Frank Ratchye Project Space. Her work was recently exhibited in Queer Threads, curated by John Chaich, at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. In 2022 she received The Money For Women Grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and a Puffin Grant for her project “3 Dykes Walk Into a Bar…”. In early 2023, lopez attended the Penland School of Craft for their winter residency on a fellowship. lopez was recently named a Lucas Visual Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center the summer of 2023.

Statement: My weavings borrow queer-coded song lyrics to hint to a knowing viewer that if you know, you know. These works are interested in how I can make weavings do things they shouldn’t. How can I structure a hole or a tear and still have a cloth that survives? Woven cloth is stronger than we realize. While the pieces often feel frenetic and slapdash, they are made slowly and thoughtfully. The energetic through line expresses the intensity of the feeling and emotion behind this work. The materials range from cheap and readily accessible to mid-range so that it reflects my socioeconomic background and means. Textiles are a site of regret and redemption for me. The physical, time-intensive processes are where I examine my regrets, and the works that emerge are an act of reimagining and redemption.

Haoyun Erin Zhao @erinzhaoart

Haoyun Erin Zhao is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, California, primarily working in painting, printmaking, and installation. Rooted in her study of Eastern and Western Philosophy, Zhao's artistic inquiry delves into the intangibility of perception, manifested through the physicality of her chosen materials. Paying particular attention to the interaction of light, color, and form, Zhao uses transparency and abstraction to emulate the ethereal and elusive nature of human consciousness. With a fascination for the intricate relationship between image-making and diverse forms of communication, Zhao derives inspiration from multi-cultural influence, linguistics, literature, symbols, nature, everyday environments, verbal, and non-verbal communication. Her work challenges conventional ways of perceiving and interpreting visual information.

Holly Wong @hollywongart

Holly Wong (b. 1971, North Miami Beach FLA) creates fiber and drawing-based installations and assemblages that explore grief, mourning and resilience. She was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in New Genres. Holly has participated in over 80 exhibitions including group shows at the de Young Museum, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Ogden Contemporary Arts, and Maui Arts & Cultural Center. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts, she has received grants from the California Arts Council (Established Artist category), the Puffin Foundation, the George Sugarman Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is represented by SLATE Contemporary Gallery in Oakland, CA, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, ELLIO Fine Art in Houston, TX, and is a member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Holly lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: "Thought Traveler" as an installation of drafting film fragments that I have sewn intensively with black thread on a sewing machine. The work serves as a metaphor for the tangled ways our brains process trauma and the ways in which we can approach wholeness by putting together the pieces both spiritually and physically. I started by taking long sections of the translucent white film and cutting into shapes similar to vines or dendrites. I then used the sewing machine to travel back and forth upon the surface, similar to a drawing line, embedding and deepening the rich thread, mirroring the process of mental rumination. I have affixed each fragment to the wall with small pins to build up a surface area or shape. They form a mass in the center of the work, similar to a spine. This work is a proxy for the body and it was deeply healing and meditative to re-build this body, similar to rebuilding my own life. My use of fiber materials in my work is a personal journey of connection and "Thought Traveler" is testament to that process.

Kacy Jung @kacy_jung

Kacy Jung, who immigrated to the US from Taiwan, was halfway through a Ph.D. in biomedical science when she decided to walk out of the laboratory to pursue her lifetime dream of being an artist. Since then, through photography, photo sculpture, and field study, she continuously investigates the ways in which culture is shaped by capitalism and explores the idea of existentialism within the late capitalist era. The subject intertwines with the manipulative nature of the capitalist system, the anxiety of being part of the disappearing middle class, and her immigrant experience in the USA. Kacy is an acceptant of the Harlan Jackson Diversity Scholarship from the San Francisco Art Institute, Ox-Bow School of Art Long Form Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts Affiliate Artist Program, as well as a studio artist at Root Division. Kacy’s works have been featured in publications such as USA Today, Cultured Magazine, Forbes, and Inquire. Her works are also shown at the SOMArts, Berkeley Art Museum, De Young Museum in San Francisco, Hastings College in Nebraska, and multiple galleries or private collections in the UK, USA, and Taiwan. Kacy has an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Most recently, Jung is a nominee for the 2023 SECA Art Award at SFMOMA. She currently works and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA.

Statement: Through a combination of journalism (field study) and a fine art approach (photography, printable fabric, and photo-based sculpture), I investigate the harmful social norms that result from the manipulative nature of capitalist thinking and existentialism in our modern capitalist era. The subject intertwines with my immigration experiences in the USA, my career change into art, and the pressure of being part of the disappearing middle class.  I use my fabric to represent the negotiation between individuals and society. With the combination of digital photography, mesh-like printable fabric, and plaster, I create a novel visual language that represents this distorted eco-political system and reflects the downside of specialization and alienation on a personal level.

Katie Curry @katieleighcurry

Statement: I view my work as rebellion. Rebellion against the preconceived notions of signified identities; namely, what it means to be a woman. Saturated, acidic colors serve both to combat our grayed-out social structures while celebrating the possibilities and nuances of female empowerment. The gridded and rectangular format are representations of historical and dogmatic norms within art and society. Thus, the conventionally rectangular format which adheres to “the grid” is completely deconstructed and reimagined through often interdisciplinary, shaped works. More recent textile works are completed using traditional sewing and quilting methods-both engaging a repetitively slow process that conjure a meditative space as they bridge the past and present.

Kieu Tran @studiokieu

Kieu Tran is a first-generation Vietnamese American artist based in Oakland, CA. Formerly a full-time software engineer with an art history degree from UCLA, she transitioned to a full-time artist in 2021. What started as creating functional works on the pottery wheel later progressed into a practice more focused on blurring the lines between abstract and figurative. She has explored ceramic, stone, wood and bronze. Kieu's biomorphic ceramic sculptures serve as a mode of self-care, learning, and asserting her identity as a first-generation Asian American woman. Her work, aiming to give form to the human soul, explores themes of identity fluidity, societal pressures, and the universal human need for love and connection. Tran has exhibited at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Art Miami, Art Market SF, and various Bay Area galleries. Featured in Interior Design Magazine, Surface Magazine, Sight Unseen, EST Living, and Design Anthology Asia, her art resides in private collections worldwide.

Statement: I sculpt sensuous, biomorphic forms that strive to give form to the human soul. As a first-generation Vietnamese American woman, I delve into my personal history, extracting emotions that surpass the specificity of my experience. These sculptures, while inspired by my cultural and individual identity, transcend into meditations on universal emotions, emphasizing the interconnectedness of our shared human experience. What captivates me about clay is its perpetual transformation on the journey to its final form, making it a poetic conduit for expressing the complexities of our human experience. It’s a material that allows a profound, wordless conversation akin to the soul. Clay is also an interesting material because it holds memory. Like people, clay bears the imprints of external forces that shape and mold it, encapsulating memories that define its essence. This shared transformative quality is why clay is my preferred medium for artistic expression. The sculptures serve as psychological self-portraits, capturing moments frozen in time. Utilizing traditional coil, pinch, and slab building techniques, I deliberately construct them hollow, infusing each coil with a tangible record of my movements, time, memories, and emotions. Inflating the sculpture's cavity with my emotions and thoughts, I subsequently close it, releasing a tangible embodiment of my inner world. This medium and technique, crucial to my process, allows for introspective learning, enabling me to understand myself, my origins, and my current journey in a detached, non-judgmental manner. I excavate my history and inner world to hold a mirror for others to do the same.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren @kiradominguezhultgren

Kira Dominguez Hultgren (b. 1980, she/they) is a U.S.-based artist, weaver, and educator. They studied postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and studio arts and visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts. Their research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, re-storying material culture, and weaving as a performative critique of the visual. Dominguez Hultgren weaves with the material afterlife of a so-called multiracial family: Chicanx-Indigenous-Indian-Hollywood Hawaiian-Brown-Black. Instead of being passed down, weaving and textile processes are brought up, resurrected from family stories and fabrics. Dominguez Hultgren builds looms to weave into the frayed edges of lost language, culture, traditions, and lives that were deliberately cut-off in past generations. Her looms – whether digital jacquard, backstrap, floor, post – materialize this present absence often as largescale checkboxes and X-marks. Questions about cultural appropriation and codeswitching, exoticism, and performing cultural misrecognitions occupy their practice. Dominguez Hultgren has exhibited their work broadly including shows at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NYC, Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. Their work has received critical attention including reviews in the New York Times and Architectural Digest; and is in the de Young Museum’s permanent collection. Residencies include Basque BioDesign Center in Spain, Gensler, Facebook, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Upcoming exhibitions include the Museum of Arts and Design and a public art installation with the City of Berkeley. Dominguez Hultgren is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They are a 2024 United States Artists Fellow.

Statement: I weave with substitutional and supplementary warp structures. One yarn gets cut away; another takes its place. One strand gets hidden, pushed to the back so another can become visible. In my studio practice, weaving and the loom act as a code-switching device between anachronistic technologies, elusive identities, speculative histories, and illusory desires. I enter backstrap, studio jacquard, industrial jacquard, floor, table, vertical post, and frame looms as wombs, sites of longing and expulsion. Material that is untouchable in the day-to-day hums awake on the loom, in my hands. I find myself arms-deep in my mother, patting into shape masses of the unsaid, unrealized birth, death, and desire that she holds in her body. Skeleton looms stretch the fabric, supporting and disfiguring multistory folds of “the joy and the pain of finding each other, of realizing how long we’ve done without” (Mirtha Quintanales, I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance, 1980). I see my role as the weaver and daughter between generational silences, between racialized skin and gendered bodies. To borrow the term from Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, mine is a practice of visionary daughtering, of tugging at, teasing, and folding history into the present.

Lulu Thrower @luluthrowerstudio

Statement: Lulu Thrower is a sociologist, artist, mother, student and teacher living and working in Pacifica, California.

Makiko Harris @makikoharris

Mel Prest @mel_prest_k

Mel Prest is an American abstract artist whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships. Her work has been exhibited internationally including: The Drawing Center, New York; The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Durham; IS Projects, Leiden; Saturation Point, London; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo. Prest’s first solo museum show: Mel Prest: The Golden Hour, was held at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon and featured a catalogue essay by John Yau. Prest has been awarded residencies at The MH deYoung Museum; The Ragdale Foundation; The Sam and Adele Golden Artist Foundation; Willapa Bay AIR; The Wassaic Project; and Vermont Studio Center. Her work is held in collections at Apple; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Crocker Museum of Art; Google; Kaiser Permanente; Marin General Hospital; The Mills College Art Museum, The Schneider Museum of Art; among others. She is represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX and K.Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco, CA. Prest received her BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Mills College in Oakland. Mel is an advisory board member of Root Division, a non-profit arts organization in San Francisco and served as a board member from 2012-2014. Prest served on the advisory board of The Art Monastery Project, Calvi della Umbria and Labro, Italy from 2007-2010 and on the artist advisory board of Trestle Gallery in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York from 2012-2021. As an independent curator, Prest has organized shows from Amsterdam to Zagreb. She is a founding member of Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial gallery initiative in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Mel Prest lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: Informed by the interplay of color phenomena in nature – mirages, iridescence, the diffusion of light at the golden hour before sunset and twilight – I paint works that explore color theory and invite an embodied response. Color transmits sensations that are subjective and synesthetic, conjuring a taste, a touch, a scent, a rhythm. I use fluorescent, metallic, or phosphorescent paint and mica that flickers, glows or is shadowed in changing light conditions to create a dynamic encounter in and with my work. With a limited number of colors composed as a dense series of unruled and overlapping lines, the works appear as a handwoven mesh vibrating above the surface of the canvas; a soft geometry of shifting space.

Michelle Mansour @michellemansourstudio

Michelle Mansour is an artist, educator, and curator as well as the current Executive Director of Root Division, a visual arts non-profit in SF. Her work as been shown in a variety of non-profit and commercial venues such as The deYoung Museum, Bedford Gallery, Southern Exposure, Morris Graves Museum, and Minnesota Street Project, including solo exhibitions at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, RB Stevenson Gallery (La Jolla), Berkeley Art Center, and Latham Square via ProArts. Mansour has work in a variety of collections including Nordstroms, Kaiser Permanente, Hilton Hotels, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, and the El Camino Hospital, and is the recipient of an Honorary Fellowship and multiple residencies from Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She received her MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, and has participated in lectures and panels with the SF Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, The Lab, SFAI, CCA, and USF among others.

Statement: The focus of my work is the interior space of the mind and related ontological meditations.Through the lens of perception, fluctuating between the minuscule and the grandiose, we find fear and wonder of the unknown, the invisible, and the uncontrollable. My process includes layering translucent washes of color and building up a symmetrical system of intersecting strands of cells. Exponentially repetitive, cyclical, and meditative, my paintings explore the tensions and balance between the scientific and the spiritual.

michelle yi martin @m_yimartin

Michelle Yi Martin is a self-taught weaver, born in Seoul, South Korea, and based in San Francisco, California. Yi Martin has been an educator of the humanities, interdisciplinary art, and progressive education for over 20 years. She has developed an art practice in this intersection of history, human engagement, craft, experimentation, and fine art.

Statement: As a Korean-American immigrant woman, I have always lived in the “in-between” space where the threads of one’s identity converge. This intersection is a balancing act—and although never fully achieved, the act defines me. I simultaneously hold the past, the unknown, and collective dreams; and sometimes, I am lucky enough to translate it through my work. My practice and choice of materials is an expression where conventional language fails. Fiber speaks to me, because it holds deep wisdom from deep time. I wonder if my ancestors held horsehair, wool, ramie, and silk in their hands as I do, or if they also saw the face of the cosmos in their weavings. The past holds possibilities for now.

Mookie Margolis @thebabamook

Mookie Margolis is a San Francisco artist working in textiles and painting. Their work transforms materials like rejected yarn and acrylic paint into a new form that is simultaneously personal and universal. Margolis attended their freshman and sophomore year at San Francisco Art Institute, where they were the recipient of the President’s Scholarship. This merit scholarship was awarded to only two students per year. After the closure of SFAI, Margolis transferred to the California College of the Arts. They were awarded the CCA’s Faculty Honors Scholarship Award, the Craft Forward Scholarship, the Goldenberg Scholarship, and the Lucille Knutson Leslie Scholarship based on outstanding creative ability and academic achievement.

Statement: My name is Mookie Margolis. I’m a non-binary person born and raised in San Francisco. I strive to dive deeper into my inner dialog between connection and disconnection by creating new metaphorical self-portraits of capsules, asexual planarian forms, and amphibious structures through sculpting, textiles, and painting. Through this conversation with myself, I want to transform existence from awareness to spiritual bliss. I knit the rectangular forms with a mashup of torn-up fabric yarn and delicate wool and cotton threads. The three voids in between are made of wool and silk noil. I paint all the shapes with synthetic dyes. I crochet ovals and apply layers of acrylic paint on top to create a hard surface. Crocheting fibers together represents a way of reflecting on my inner dialog to better connect with people. In contrast, the layers of paint I apply into the connecting fibers of the soft shapes created a hard shell that heightens my awareness of the destructive act of freezing the self to avoid emotional injury.

Rachelle Reichert @rachelle_reichert

Rachelle Reichert lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Artwork and research are included in many public and private collections, including the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archive, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Library, Meta, Google and Adobe. Her work has been reviewed and published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Make: Magazine, California Home and Design, and New American Paintings. Select exhibitions include the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Center for Contemporary Art at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, German Consulate in New York City, and Mills College Art Museum. Her artwork has been presented at the California Climate Change Symposium, San Francisco State of the Estuary Conference, and the American Geophysical Union Meeting. Rachelle earned her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA and a BFA from Boston University.

Statement: Rachelle Reichert is a visual artist and art educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Reichert is interested in the materials that shape our world and their connection to greater cosmic forces. Through her research-based practice, she creates artworks out of and inspired by natural industrial materials like salt, lithium and graphite while exploring the specific sites in which the material has been extracted. She researches extraction sites from above, through satellite imagery such as Google Earth, Landsat images, and private earth-imaging software, and from below, collecting salt from the San Francisco Bay, and visiting new sites of lithium extraction in the American West. The result of this visual research is photo realistic drawings of extraction zones, mixed media works on panel, photography, artist books, and sculptures that reveal ongoing and future forms of land-use. Her artworks seek to retrieve a disembodied view of the shared planet to create personal understanding of the human impact on the earth.

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.

Rebekah Goldstein @rebekahgoldstein

Rebekah Goldstein ( born San Jose, CA ,1982) creates paintings which are built on layering, reworking, and redefining the composition until the piece develops it’s own internal logic. Goldstein has recently had solo exhibitions at Denny Gallery in New York, NY, Rosenbaum Contemporary in Boca Raton, FL and Cult Aimee Friberg in San Francisco, CA. Her work is part of the permanent collection of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the Fidelity Collection, Google, as well as many notable private collections. Goldstein’s work has been featured in Art Forum, Art Plugged, Square Cylinder, and New American Paintings. She has been awarded residencies at the Sam and Adele Golden Center for the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Goldstein received an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012 and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2004. Goldstein currently lives and works in San Francisco.

Statement: I create paintings that raise questions for which there are not straightforward answers. “What am I looking at? What angle am I looking at it from? What is its scale? How is it holding itself together?” While these questions may seem formal, they are metaphors for how we look at the world around us, how we feel in our bodies, and how we orient ourselves to a given environment. My process is built on obsessively layering, reworking and redefining the composition. While painting, I am always building on what has come before, even if it ultimately becomes covered up. Visual shifts in perspective are often created by my own shifted perspective when I come back to the studio with fresh eyes and rework the paintings imagery. In this way the painting becomes a compressed image built up over time with its own internal logic.

Shara Mays @sharamays

Shara Mays (b. Princeville, NC) received her BFA from George Washington University and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Mays creates large-scale paintings which take the shape and form of both landscape and intuitive figuration. Her works are performances of subconscious motions and are in constant conversation with the natural world. Her art practice represents an evolution of narrative, from a focus on literal, southern landscapes, and family struggles, to chasing freedom through the act of gestural abstraction. Select solo shows include Color Sanctuary at Marrow Gallery, San Francisco (2023); Overgrown at Mehari Sequar, Washington, DC (2023); and Everywhere at Chandran Gallery, San Francisco (2022). Select group shows include Arcadia and Elsewhere at James Cohan Gallery, New York (forthcoming); Dialogues: A Convergence of Color and Form at Hunter Dunbar Projects, New York (2024); Considering Female Abstractions at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023); Creative Gatherings at the International African American Museum, Charleston (2023); and Bloodchild at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco (2022). Residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, Meta Open Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is included in both public and private collections, including the International African American Museum, the Green Family Art Foundation, and Art in Embassies.

Statement: My new series of paintings depict landscapes with an abundance of color and repetitive brushstrokes. Through a disruption of the conventional notion of a landscape, I explore both the beauty and the tumult of the natural world as a contemplation of identity and selfhood. As an African-American woman living in the United States, I grapple with the multifaceted impact of my identity and how I navigate and exist within American society. It is a persistent challenge to tolerate a world that fails to acknowledge the richness of experience and heritage. These works were initially sparked by a vintage family photograph from the 1950s, capturing my father as a young child in North Carolina. The image portrays him being held by an elder cousin, flanked by two other cousins. Southern thickets of bushes envelop them all. Despite the era's reality for Black children, particularly young Black boys, I find solace in this family photo because it conjures feelings of safety and of a sanctuary. My studio serves as a place of refuge from the outside world. These paintings pay homage to that feeling, envisioning a place of safety and liberation. In my art, color is not merely a visual element but a symbol of the social construct of identity in society. The vibrancy and juxtaposition of colors in my paintings represent the complexity of human identity, challenging traditional notions of hegemony. My brushstrokes are meditations on transcendence and reincarnation, inviting viewers to explore the power of art as a means to transcend societal boundaries and find rebirth in the act of creation. I strive to leave marks of movement, of struggle, and of history on the canvas. The gestural brushstrokes capture a rhythm of my thoughts and emotions, allowing viewers to feel a connection to each piece and the process that created it. My works thus become not just static canvases, but living records of my presence here and now.

Steph Kudisch @steph_kudisch

Steph Kudisch is a trans genderfluid artist whose work uses mutated intertidal aesthetics and personal storytelling to dwell in in-betweens. They were born with unilateral microtia and aural atresia, and are profoundly deaf in their undeveloped left ear. In recent sound sculptures Kudisch explores the complex implications and impacts of “deformity”. They work as a teaching artist on Ohlone land in the San Francisco Bay Area. Focusing in screenprint, analog + digital sound, and ceramics, Kudisch received their MFA as well as the Isaac M. Walter Sculpture Prize from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. Kudisch was selected for the San Francisco Center for the Book's 2022 Small Plates Project cohort, during which they created an edition of screenprinted books titled "to take part in taking apart", honing in on queer crip collectivism & imagination, overlapping ecotones, and a refusal of climate nihilism.

Statement: "my material makes me up" is a sound sculpture celebrating my trans sensuality, the indescribable power and immense relief of arriving at a sense of reverence & the ability to savor being in my body. It is dwelling in the indeterminate beauty of self-determination, in a kneading metamorphosis. I am malleable. The sounds that emerge from within the sculpture are formed from layers of my voice breaking, twisting, & humming recorded before and throughout my first 5 months of testosterone injections. Sometimes I feel that sound erodes me like water. How long does it take for canyons to form, particles rearranged? Abraded by the rush of soft living waters, this is my voice mutating. I am dog-eared like a book, and mutation is an embrace. Sometimes I am a pause, but I will keep trying to read every page. It often feels like too much to kvell in this beautiful absurdity while also holding knowledge and pain and rage about the past years’ many immense horrors. The attacks on trans self-determination & bodily autonomy are compounding and escalating every day. My access to hrt & top surgery has empowered me to become more myself in my 30’s than I’ve felt ever before, in symbiosis with more parts of myself. I know that we can and must delve deeper into the direct action & tactics of those who came before us, and continue to build upon their work in our own ways. There is so much to do, collectively and individually– change is god.

Stephanie Robison @squishystone

The sculpture of Stephanie Robison plays with multiple oppositional relationships. Her latest series of work combines traditional stone carving and the process of needle felting wool. By merging incongruous materials such as wool and marble, she works to synthesize and fuse hard and soft, organic, and geometric, natural and architectural, handmade and the uniform industrial. Focusing on materiality and color with this new work, Robison creates charming, often humorous, or awkward forms referencing aspects of the body, relationships, and the environment. Originally from Oregon, Robison currently resides in California teaching sculpture and serving as Art Department Chair at the City College of San Francisco. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Oregon. Robison is currently represented by Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, California, Foster White Gallery in Seattle, Washington and an affiliated artist with Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Robison’s work has been exhibited at Kouri & Corrao in New Mexico, Foster/White Gallery, Whatcom Museum and Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, Robischon Gallery in Colorado, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and Greater Denton Arts Council in Texas, Marrow Gallery, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in California, Peter Robertson Gallery in Alberta Canada, Yeiser Art Center in Kentucky, and Site:Brooklyn Gallery in New York.

Statement: Sculpture for me is about tangibility and transformation. Being able to manipulate materials with my hands, transforming it into something else, is an intimate and magical process. The new series of pieces combine traditional stone carving and the process of needle felting wool. The physicality of the process and the labor-intensive demands of these materials allows for a focused, slowing down and becomes a mediation on what is happening around and within me. I’m responding to the materials and finding the forms through action and reaction. Each piece is an investigation of form, texture, and color.

Makiko Harris @makikoharris

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.