Teaching Practice

Aaron Gach/Center for Tactical Magic @tacticalmagic1

"Aaron Gach Bio - CCA 2025: Inspired by studies with a private investigator, a magician, and a ninja, Aaron Gach co-founded the Center for Tactical Magic in 2000 as a collaborative authoring framework dedicated to the coalescence of art, magic, and creative tactics for encouraging positive social change. Although the collaborations take many different forms, the work is largely the result of creative partnerships with a wide array of individuals and organizations, including hypnotists, biologists, witches, engineers, activists, nurses, intelligence officers, journalists, radical ecologists, a bank robber, street vendors, community organizers, and many others. His work has been presented by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Hayward Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Vigo, Spain; Deutsches Theater, Berlin; Creative Time, NY; a major public commission for the City of Toronto, and plenty of back alleys, byways, and crevices. In print, his work and writing have been featured by the New York Times, MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, Art Papers, Frieze, DAMN Magazine, Maximum Rocknroll and others. In addition to having taught at UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and The Alternative Art School, he has been teaching for over 17 years at California College of the Arts in more than 7 different programs throughout the college. Currently, he is the interim Co-Chair of Interdisciplinary 3D Fine Arts at CCA, and he is teaching in the Graduate Fine Arts, Game Arts, and Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio programs. "

Statement: "Linking & Unlinking' is a single-channel video initially designed for a 30ft video billboard in New York City. The video combines 3 different source materials: found footage demonstrating how to pick a pair of handcuffs; found footage of professional and amateur magicians performing the classic magic trick, ""the linking rings"" (a.k.a. ""ninja rings""); and, a rolling text of ""Know Your Rights"" information from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Combining practical know-how, legal guidance, and a magical performance, 'Linking & Unlinking' simultaneously - and somewhat paradoxically - serves as a public service announcement, a DIY course in self-liberation, and a fascination with the competing illusions of liberty and law."

Adam Shiverdecker @adam.shiv

Adam Shiverdecker is an artist and educator living in Oakland, California. He has held multiple artist residencies, including The Archie Bray Foundation, Greenwich House Pottery, and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. His work has been shown widely, including recent exhibitions at American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, Everson Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Mindy Solomon Gallery, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Side Gallery (Barcelona). Adam is Professor of Spatial Art at San José State University.

Alex Echevarria @a.j.echevarria

Alex Echevarria is a Pennsylvania born painter and educator who recently relocated from Los Angeles to Oakland. He is currently a professor at Laney College teaching in the 2D area, including painting, drawing, and printmaking. Alex earned an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a BS in Art Education and BFA in Painting from Kutztown University. His work has been exhibited nationally at museums and galleries, including the Philip & Muriel Berman Museum at Ursinus College, and the Woodmere Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. His paintings have been written about and featured in various publications including the Philadelphia Inquirer and New American Paintings. He has taught at numerous colleges and universities including Laney College, Tyler School of Art, Widener University, California State University Long Beach, and Otis College of Art and Design.

Alexander Hanson

Amy Elkins @thisisamyelkins

"Amy Elkins is a visual artist and educator based in the Bay Area. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts and her MFA from Stanford University. She works primarily in photography and installation and has spent the past 15+ years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of gender, race and identity, including how they are impacted by systems of power: prisons, the military, colonization, and hierarchies built upon social constructs. Most recently Elkins' work pivots to explore her family's deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th-generation born on Tongva/Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles area with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary. Elkins has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally, including at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA; South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend IN; MSU Broad Museum in Lansing, MI; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; North Carolina Museum of Art and more. Her photographs have been published in Dear Dave, EyeMazing, Financial Times, Harpers, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, New York Times, New Yorker and Vice among many others. She was recently awarded a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and Kala Media Arts Fellowship. Past awards include the Aperture Portfolio Prize, Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, Cadogan Award and more."

Statement: "In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 erupted and mandatory shelter-in-place orders went into effect. I found myself stuck in a 340-sq-ft apartment in a neighborhood emptying by the day. Two weeks into isolation, I turned the camera on myself. At first, I tried to shield as much of my body and face as possible. My masks, armor and props ranged from common household items—potholders, tinfoil, dish towels, bedsheets, and toilet paper— to more telling evidence of the unusual consumption that resulted from being stuck indoors indefinitely— Amazon packaging, takeout bags and trash leftover from groceries purchased while wearing rubber gloves and sterilized in whatever way was possible before consuming them. I printed these images as negatives and then as cyanotypes, a simple nineteenth-century photographic process that was feasible due to the basic materials I had on hand—an office printer, transparency film, and a package of pretreated cyanotype sheets. I rinsed them in water in a large salad bowl I was hastily sent home with when the world shut down and varying shades of blue portraits emerged. In total, I made these self-portraits for 377 consecutive days. A marathon of making with whatever lay on hand to quell my anxious body and pass the time. The days, weeks, and months in between feel like a fever dream—frayed and flickering in multitudes of blue. Every year since, I assign my students to create photographs entirely out of foraged goods. An exercise in finding inspiration, materials and creativity everywhere/anywhere."

Asma Kazmi @asmakazmi

"Asma Kazmi is a new media artist and a professor of art at UC Berkeley. She creates art installations that blend physical and virtual spaces and objects. Using transgressive curatorial tactics, she combines visual and textual fragments from historical manuscripts, photographs, and archival material, and she mixes them with her own critical fabulation to tell stories about colonial and indigenous technologies, global flows of people and commodities, and interspecies entanglements. Asma Kazmi’s selected exhibitions include: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich; Gray Area, San Francisco; Goethe Institute, San Francisco; Galerie Cité internationale des arts, Paris, France; Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco; the Espacio Laraña, University of Seville, Spain; the Commons Gallery, University of Hawaii in Honolulu; Faraar Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Queens Museum of Art, NY; H&R Block Space, Kansas City; The Guild Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Gallery 210, University of Missouri St Louis; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago. "

Statement: Beyond the Seas Blue is a series of speculative digital prints that reimagine the Sar-i Sang lapis lazuli mine in northern Afghanistan as an experimental subterranean museum. Drawing on fabulism, the project symbolically returns dispersed lapis-based artifacts—both Western and non-Western—to their geological origin. In doing so, it traces the deep history, vitality, and knowledge embedded in this semi-precious stone, while also intervening in museological conventions that have long upheld extractive and colonial practices.

Beril Or @berilor

Beril Or is a visual artist, educator, and curator from Türkiye, based in Oakland, California. Her interdisciplinary works explore time, memory, and healing through rest, moving between comfort and disturbance. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and projects such as CIAM, Marin MOCA, Your Mood Projects, /Slash/room/, SOMArts, Root Division, Berkeley Art Center, Palo Alto Art Center, ICASF, SOEX, Galeri Nev, Zilberman Gallery, Mamut Art Projects 5, and 38. Akbank Contemporary Artists. She received the State Sculpture Award in Turkey in 2009 and the Cadogan Contemporary Art Award in 2019, Sher-Right Award 2021 among others. She is a co-founder of a three-person curatorial collective, MUZ, dedicated to supporting emerging artists. She holds an MFA in Art Practice from San Francisco State University and a BFA in Sculpture from Hacettepe University.

Statement: "In my art practice, I challenge how time is commodified in capitalist societies, proposing that rest, stillness, and quiet moments have value beyond constant productivity. When I moved from Türkiye to the U.S., I was struck by how much pressure people feel to stay productive, even on weekends and holidays. This contrast made me think more about rest as a quiet form of resistance, both political and emotional. I explore how our personal and shared memories shift over time and how they are shaped by the systems surrounding us. I question how time intersects with memory and how capitalist structures manipulate time, tying it to efficiency and output. Historically, the clocks we use today were developed to measure labor, tied to the exploitation of enslaved people; this still continues to shape how we think about time. Through my practice, I disrupt these inherited systems, seeking alternative ways to mark time that aren’t based on control or productivity. I reclaim time not as a commodity, but as something we move with, rather than against. My work asks how we might see time differently, not as something to manage, but as something structured by systems, and therefore possible to restructure. "

Brett Amory @brettamory

Statement: Brett Amory is an interdisciplinary artist whose multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the intersection of quotidian and habitual engagements with the everyday world. Working primarily in painting and installation, he explores unnoticed moments and how digital technology reshapes them. His work extends the familiar into the unfamiliar, investigating the authenticity of life in a digitally-mediated environment. Through his art, Amory navigates the complex relationship between the physical and digital, highlighting both the connection and disconnection inherent in contemporary life. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and de Young Museum, San Francisco. Brett Amory earned a MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the Academy of Arts University. He lives and works in Oakland California. Brett Amory's interdisciplinary art practice investigates the interstices between the ordinary and the unfamiliar. His work captures glimpses of visual perception prior to interpretation. Exploring overlooked routine moments, Amory reveals the transformation of daily experience in the digital age. His art contemplates how pervasive technology alters one's sense of mundane activities like waiting, commuting, or washing dishes. Amory's visual language prompts inquiries about the authenticity of lived experience in a digitally mediated world. His isolated figures resonate with a renewed poignancy - evoking both the social fragmentation and the yearning for meaningful connection wrought by endless digital distraction. Ultimately, his thought-provoking art reveals the nuanced influence of artificial intelligence and virtual identities on our tangible, human realities. Amory's work navigates the complex entanglement of the physical and digital in contemporary life.

Brody Reiman @_brody__r

Carla Fisher Schwartz @carla_f_S

Carla Fisher Schwartz is a visual artist and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her studio practice investigates the relationship between the mapped image and contemporary notions of exploration, virtuality, and the simulated environment through print media, sculpture and video installation. Her art has been exhibited at venues including the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), the Contemporary Print Media Research Center at UC Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA), and Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA). Recent residencies include Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE) and Terrain Residency (Springfield, IL). Fisher Schwartz received her MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded the Bell Cramer Award in Printmaking, and her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an Assistant Professor of Pictorial Art specializing in Digital and Hybrid Processes in the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University.

Statement: "My practice investigates the conceptual implications of the digital landscape, specifically, how virtual environments frame our experience of the physical world. I am particularly interested in moments when these technological representations falter or reveal their constructed nature, such as glitches in Google Street View, lost texture files from video games, or invented geographies embedded in satellite maps. Through print media, sculptural objects and installation, I raise questions about the virtual experience of the world, exposing not only the technological frameworks that generate these representations, but also the human desires and limitations that underlie them. Working with a combination of traditional and digital image-making methods, my work frequently translates fragments of digital environments into material form. The act of physically rendering digital artifacts - whether as printed installations, paper sculptures or layered works on paper - underscores both the fragility of digital space and its persistent influence on how we perceive and imagine the landscape. A current project engages with the practice of “texture archaeology”: the obsessive search for source images and digital assets used to build game environments and other 3D-modeled worlds. My recent installation, cobble_stone.png, draws from a missing image file of a cobblestone texture widely used in 1990s video games and later pursued in a lengthy online hunt. By materially interpreting these digital fragments, the project reflects on our collective impulse to decode and reconstruct digital memory. "

Chris Finley @the_crooked_yolk

"Chris Finley, 1971, Carmel, California Lives and works in Petaluma, California. Finley's work has been included in national and international Museum exhibitions including, 01.01.01: Art in Technological Times, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Game Show, MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA; 2002 Orange County Museum of Art Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Twisted. Urban and Visionary Landscapes in Contemporary Painting, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Just Past: The Contemporary in MOCA's Permanent Collection, 1975-1996, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Defining The Nineties, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Orange County Museum. Finley’s exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, Teme Celeste, Art Issues, Forbes, Art and Auction, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. His work is included in the book “Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting”, by Bob Nikas. PHAIDON publishing. He received a Pollock/ Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010 and was awarded a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2003. He received the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999. He is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. "

Statement: My pencil drawings are balanced between beauty and horror. Each one functions like a salad of mixed parts, some known and some unknowable: reptile, mammal, insect, and the fades and mullets of male fashion models. Each part is painstakingly rendered, integrated mark by mark into one creature. While these drawings have all the literal pieces of figuration, they are more deeply rooted in abstraction and surrealism, allowing the viewer to bring their own visceral reactions to the finished drawing.

christopher cobillas-ottinger @fac3_4_rad10

christopher cobillas-ottinger (he/him) is an artist and educator currently residing in oakland, ca. he earned his mfa in visual arts from washington university in st. louis and his ba at columbia college chicago in film/video directing. cobillas-ottinger's artistic interests include moving image, sound, analog media, interactive media, media theory + history. his art has been exhibited internationally, at galleries + institutions such as the mildred lane kemper art museum, laumeier sculpture park, the museum london in ontario, canada, ucla's cnsi gallery in collaboration with patricia olynyk, acre projects in chicago, and the chicago artists coalition. he has taught moving image, digital art, and sound at such institutions as the school of the art institute of chicago, the kentucky college of art + design, and san josé state university. he is currently assistant professor of digital media art and program director of art + art history at saint mary's college of california. when he is not teaching or making art, christopher enjoys cooking, playing music, and rigorously maintaining his entirely monochromatic wardrobe.

Statement: The excavation of the past has been a persistent touchstone in my research and practice as an artist, particularly through the lens of Media Archaeology. I am drawn to obscure histories, idiosyncratic technologies, and the notion that things-in-themselves are often more complex than we presume them to be. I typically employ a variety of media forms, including moving image, photography, installation, sound, and interactive media, to establish a poetic dialogue between past and present. I frequently hybridize digital and analog processes and would describe my process of making as alchemical in nature (although, “failed scientist” would be equally appropriate). The subject of my work ranges from interrogations of the mediums of moving image and photography, the history of media technology and cinema, and explorations of perception with a sci-fi twist. Regardless of the specific subject, it is ever my goal to create work that raises questions concerning our shared relationship to media and technology. By examining our collective media past, it is possible that we might make some sense of our media present as we navigate its potential future.

Christopher Davison @https://www.instagram.com/monsieurdavison/

"Christopher Davison earned his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. After spending much of the past two decades in Philadelphia and New York, he now lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums across the United States and Europe, including Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York, Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, and V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. As drawing is very near and dear to his professional practice as an artist, it is one of his favorite subject to teach and share his enthusiasm for. Over the course of his 15-year teaching career, he has taught a wide range of courses, including drawing, painting, printmaking, and design, at institutions such as Tyler School of Art, Moore College of Art and Design, Drexel University, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has also served as a visiting artist at Columbia University School of the Arts, University of the Arts, and California College of the Arts. His work can be seen on his website at https://christopherdavison.com/ and on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/monsieurdavison/"

Statement: The visual language of my work is influenced by early 20th Century Art & Illustration, Medieval European Art, Indian and Persian Miniatures, and in general, the Decorative Arts of the Ancient World including Greek Vase Painting, Etruscan Tomb Painting, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The specific content of my paintings and drawings is derived from an intuitive, process-based approach, where signs and symbols slowly emerge out of an initial burst of chaotic mark-making. It is only through making the work that it becomes known. Trusting the mystery of the creative act itself overlaps with my interest in mysticism and mystical states of consciousness. In this way, the act of making art shares much with the path of traditional Yoga in the East. It is through the pure act of creation that we “yoke” ourselves to a higher consciousness and experience something beyond ourselves. The writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy, Jane Ellen Harrison, Joseph Campbell, William James, Eckhart Tolle, Wassily Kandinsky and others, have played a role in shaping my perspective on the fundamentally spiritual nature of the creative process.

Christopher Woodcock @christopher.woodcock

Christopher Woodcock was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of the University of California Davis Master of Fine Arts program and the San Francisco Art Institute. His work investigates the way that physical landscapes and species can shape cultural imagination. He is a recipient of several awards including the University of California Office of the President Mathias Grant, the Valentine Eastern Sierra Grant, the David Robertson Residency Fellowship in the Arts, and a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts award His work is shown in museums and galleries nationally and internationally and is held in many private and public collections.

Statement: "The images in this series are portraits of Yucca Brevifollia, more commonly known as the Joshua tree, a symbol of the Mojave Desert of South Eastern California. The Joshua tree portraits expand on my interest in the way that physical landscapes and species can shape cultural imagination. The presence of Joshua trees evoke the spirit and mystery of the Mojave Desert. To the Mormon pioneers who named them at the midpoint of their long journey from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, the appearance of these desert trees with upraised branches was a welcome sight; conjuring the prophet Joshua, beckoning them to the promised land. Approaching each Joshua tree as an individual character, I wanted to create a series of portraits that reflect the range of forms of these strange and gnarled oddities and their unique environmental in adaptations and ongoing transformation through fire. Photographing this series at night allowed me to collapse the panoramic space of the daytime desert, and to selectively isolate each tree against the dark curtain of night. I painted each figure with a series of strobe flashes giving each tree a sense of dimension and possession of human morphology. Dancing, swaying, and bending with arms outstretched into the currents of the wind, it is hard to fathom that these guardians of the vast open space between Los Angeles and Las Vegas are at a tipping point; that in fact they may disappear into the void of night. "

Eric Hongisto @erichongisto

"Eric Hongisto lives and works in the SF Bay Area. He is Professor of Fine Arts and Chair of the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. He received his MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Yale University School of Art, 1999, and his BFA in Painting from the Maine College of Art, 1997. Awards include a Graves Award in the Humanities, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship in Installation and a New York Foundation of the Arts, Painting Fellowship. He has participated in numerous Residency programs, such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Dieu Donne Papermill, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Lower Eastside Printshop. Exhibitions of his work have been shown at the deCordova Museum, Museum of the Rockies, Queens Museum, Bates Museum of Art, Drawing Center, and the Boston Center of the Arts."

Statement: " Color theory and social science inspired art research are the backbone of my studio analog practice. Current investigations continue with large scale watercolor experiments on canvas. These wall based works have compositions and shapes that are derived from backyard skateboarding pools, ultimately finding historical connections back to Finnish Architect, Alvar Aalto’s original kidney shaped pool at Villa Mairea. Subsequent connections from my skateboarding hobby have brought this project closer to home, with witnessing climate change fueled wildfires burning down suburban homes, and leaving the concrete swimming pools as memorials to our changing landscape. Additional field research into the flora and fauna of California forests, and publishing forays with digital photography, have widened my attempts to bear witness to the accelerating climate crisis with projects to showcase forest, water and fire ecologies. "

Gaby Wolodarski @gabywolodarski and @wolodarsque

Gaby Wolodarski is an artist, teacher, and tattooer who lives in California. Her painting and installation work uses a mix of humor, abstraction, figuration, and trompe l’oeil to probe fictions and contingencies of the contemporary human psyche, foregrounding ways in which the visible world is subject to pressures from our language-oriented brains.

Statement: My work is about attention span, babies, canaries, description, extracts, filters, grouping, hums, importance, jelly, kerning, looming, motion sensors, nerves, order, parity, qwerty, respite, smallness, stillness, tact, understanding, vanity, the West, xenophobias, yeses and zeros.

Greg Niemeyer @gregniemeyer

Greg Niemeyer is a data artist and Professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. He's the former director and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He started out with studies in Classics and Photography in Switzerland and switched to new media when he moved to the Bay Area in 1992. He received his MFA from Stanford University in New Genres in 1997. Since childhood, Niemeyer was fascinated with making mirrors, and he still makes mirrors: media which allow us to see things from a new point of view, a point of view that is not our own, revealing both things we want to see and things we don't want to see. We need such mirrors, he maintains, to make better decisions about our lives in context with other humans and with the fragile environments we depend on. Niemeyer exhibited around the world at ZKM, SFMOMA, San Jose, Amsterdam, Cairo, Zurich, New York and received grants from the MacArthur Foundation, NEA, Intel, Pro Helvetia and many others. Notable works include icecorwalk.org, Tsar Bell, Oxygen Flute, Network Paradox, Quantopia and the most recent Water Panoramas.

Statement: Greg Niemeyer presents his most recent endeavor, "Sacramento River Paradox". He states that globally, overcapitalized regions extract more than their fair share of resources from undercapitalized regions. Water, the most vital resource after air, is no exception. Most residents in these regions go to bed thirsty every night, only to face a new fight for water in the morning. Conversely, most residents in overcapitalized regions need only take minimal notice of where their seemingly inexhaustible water supply comes from (so far). With the "Sacramento River Paradox" Niemeyer seeks to direct our attention to the awesome Sacramento River, which quenches the thirst of 1/3 of all California residents, grows their food, and washes their bodies. In a set of three images, Niemeyer visualizes the river's flow and water level throughout the Winter 2023 season. Flow and level are the result of snowmelt, temperature, wind and rainfall, connecting the most remote regions of California with the most densely populated urban centers. The images show this data through novel data visualizations. The left image in the triptych shows an AI forecast, the right image shows actual measurements, and the middle image shows the difference between the two. These nuanced representations of what we think will be and what actually is direct our attention to the life of the Sacramento River, the vital resource in our midst. He intends for the images to serve as a portal of respect and gratitude for what lifelines the Sacramento River throws us every day. Only solid respect for local resources can inform equal respect for similar resources in other regions around the world.

Joe Ferriso @joeferriso

Joe Ferriso grew up in a Dominican, Honduran, and Italian household in Long Island, NY, in the 80s and 90s. His childhood was impacted by his indoctrination in a fundamentalist Christian doomsday cult. Making art during church services and skateboarding after school set the stage for making art with a sense of optimism. His artworks are made from recycled and found materials and are primarily concerned with how color relationships impact perception. Ferriso moved to the Bay Area in 2009 and is a graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA 2003) and Stanford University (MFA 2018). He lives with his wife, two young children, and a dog in Sebastopol, CA.

Statement: Working in The Bay Area has greatly impacted my decisions in the studio. While living in San Francisco, Oakland, The Sea Ranch, and now Sebastopol, I have been inspired by friends, neighbors, and the materials I’ve come across. Construction waste, driftwood, and leftover house paint are the starting points of my labor. I take immense pleasure in physically combining these castaway materials into solid compositions; when painting their surfaces, I also consider color's ability to create space and establish connections. The sheer energy of color motivates my actions. Color is not an object, and emotion is not an object. However, both can be bound into an object. Like a vine to a lattice, the color enmeshes with the object and changes it. The pieces I am currently experimenting with explore changing light conditions and are activated by audience engagement.

Kelley O'Leary @kelley__oleary

Kelley O’Leary (b. Quincy, Massachusetts) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Richmond, CA. Working across imagemaking, sculpture, video, and installation, she explores the relationships between media infrastructure, images and cosmic material bodies. Interested in speculative methods, she engages with both made and found artifacts that reflect the ways networked technologies mediate perception and restructure temporalities. She is co-curator of Living Room Light Exchange, a new media art salon based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kelley received her MFA from the University of California, Davis in 2022.

Kerri Conlon @kerriconlonstudio

"Kerri Conlon is an artist and educator living and working in San Francisco, CA. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. Her practice explores the intersections of construction—both architectural and cultural—investigating how identity and space are shaped by structures that are at once physical and ideological. Working with craft and architectural materials, Conlon creates large-scale sculptural installations that fuse the ornamental with the structural. Her work uses tactile processes to examine how we inhabit, uphold, and challenge the frameworks that shape our lives—whether built, inherited, or imagined. She has exhibited nationally, with recent solo exhibitions including Upholding at Bass and Reiner in San Francisco, CA, and Throughway at Cube Space Gallery in Berkeley, CA. Her work has also been shown in New York, NY; Providence, RI; and Ferguson, MO. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2023) and the Fannie B. Pardee Prize for Excellence in Sculpture (2019). In addition to her studio practice, Conlon has worked in academic shop spaces since 2007, teaching students the conceptual and technical skills necessary to translate ideas into physical form. She believes that making is a way of knowing and fosters agency in students through hands-on engagement with materials and processes. She is currently a Lecturer in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University. She is the co-founder of Hunt Projects, a shared studio space in San Francisco that provides artists with private studios and a communal wood and metal shop for material exploration and dialogue. She continues to expand the impact of her work through immersive installations and a growing interest in public sculpture, using art to challenge and reimagine the built environment."

Statement: "My large-scale sculptural installations examine how identity, culture, and place are constructed within pervasive power structures, where autonomy is often an illusion. Using materials that range from steel and concrete to textiles and cordage, I explore the liminal spaces between the interior and exterior, the body and built environment, structure and façade, carving out space for both vulnerability and possibility. My early works subvert monuments of power—like triumphal arches—by rendering them at human scale with soft materials, challenging their associations with authority. Over time, I’ve moved away from historically inscribed architectural symbols to envision new forms of collective inspiration—shifting toward more flexible modes of construction. My recent work explores ambulatory architecture—collapsible, adaptable structures that respond to the paradox between our desire for security and the instability of contemporary life. Inspired by shelters like tents and umbrellas, these works can move with us, reflecting both fragility and resilience. Influenced by speculative fiction writers, like Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, I see art as a tool for envisioning alternate futures and structures of care. My work imagines what forms of growth and support structures can emerge in the face of systemic collapse. "

Lorena Molina @beingmoli

"Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University. She’s also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists. She received an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BFA from California State University, Fullerton. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Diversity of Views Fellowship, the Christopher Cardozo Fellowship, two Truth and Reconciliation grants from ArtsWave, The Idea Fund, the ARTPACE International Residency, SF Camerawork Forecast 2025, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship.Her work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, The Kemper Museum, the Southeast Museum of Photography, The Carnegie (Covington, KY), Vox Populi, Assembly Projects, Art League Houston, The Moody Center, the FSU Museum of Fine Arts, EXPO Chicago, The Armory Show, the Berkeley Art Center, SFAC Galleries, The Rubin Center, the Beijing Film Academy, and throughout the piazzas of Florence, Italy. "

Statement: "Through photography, video, fermentation, ecologies, sound, textiles, and ancestral rituals, I build environments that invite difficult conversations, collective imagining, and radical belonging. My practice interrogates who gets to belong, who is erased, and what it means to return when return isn’t impossible. I see the margins not as spaces of lack, but as fertile ground for dreaming, healing, and survival. At the core of my work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed groups face in constructing place and establishing a sense of belonging.. My work is driven by a deep sense of displacement experienced after a 12 year old civil war forced my family and I to immigrate to the United States. Most of my work stems from a need to find and build community in a way that it’s both tender, accountable, challenging through difficult conversations that makes everybody involved actively question their position and privileges in society. In my practice, I create installations, performances, and participatory spaces that confront the afterlives of colonialism and migration, not from a distance, but through the intimacy of the body, our homes, and the land. My work embraces the entanglement of grief and joy, resistance and care, memory and future, because I believe they often coexist. The materials I use: corn, beans, coffee, carry deep political, historical, and cultural significance across Latin America. Coffee, in particular, reveals how agriculture has been tied to labor exploitation and land dispossession, and how these violences remain entangled with U.S. imperialism and forced migration. "

Mark Murrmann @ickibod

Mark Murrmann is Photo Director for Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones magazine, where he oversees and assigns all photography for the magazine and website. He came to Mother Jones in 2007, having previously been a freelance photojournalist, music writer and an editor of iconic punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll. In addition, he teaches photography at City College of San Francisco. Mark remains an active photographer and educator who regularly self-publishes photozines.

Statement: "This piece was made during a press conference on the steps of the San Francisco Chronicle, in which a woman, Deborah Perez, claimed that her father was the Zodiac Killer. Drawing heavy press coverage, the more interesting image seemed to be of the press scrum than of Ms. Perez. This is an example of an image I ask students to make for an assignment called, “From Breaking News to Long Form: Documentary Style Photography.” At this point we have discussed the differences and similarities between photojournalism and documentary work, this assignment is designed to push them to start seeing the difference as they’re making photos. I ask them to contextualize the subject through environmental details, human relationships, and visual cues that provide insight into broader social or cultural themes. The goal is to slow down so they can explore context, atmosphere, and visual layers that help viewers understand the “why” and “what it means” behind an event or scene. "

Michael Ryan @mic_ol_ryan

"Born in 1972 in Roanoke VA Lives and works in Davis, CA 1994 BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA 2007 MFA from San Francisco State University Teaches Painting and Drawing at University of California Davis & Skyline College "

Statement: Ryan’s practice engages the expansive range of manufacturing by-products and packaging, and how these vessels and cavities inform and transform our natural and architectural environments. Working with a mixture of traditional media as well as architectural building materials, Ryan concocts compositions and forms contextualizing the spaces and environments we inhabit through the residue of ritual. Sculpted objects echo the historical artifacts fused with excavations of geological surveying. Imagery challenges the scope of depth perception through a mixture of trompe l'oeil and children’s pop-up books.

Mores McWreath @moresmcwreath

Mores McWreath has a BFA from the Cooper Union, an MFA from the University of Southern California, and he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and LMCC Workspace Program. Exhibitions include the New Museum, CUE Art Foundation, and M+B Gallery. Group shows include The Kitchen, ICA Philadelphia, and Art in General. His videos have been screened at Anthology Film Archives, EMAF Osnabrück, and the Taiwan International Video Exhibition. He currently teaches at UC Berkeley.

Statement: My work explores the gap between our inner lives and the structures society offers for self-expression. I’m especially interested in what gets lost or distorted in that translation. As technology evolves, I adapt my tools—right now I’m working with AI-generated text, images, audio, and video. I often approach these materials through humor and the abject, using them to surface what’s awkward, messy, or unsettling beneath polished interfaces. I’m drawn to moments where the technology fails or glitches, because those failures can reveal something more human—more vulnerable or absurd. For me, these cracks open up new ways of thinking about who we are and how we communicate, not just as individuals, but as a species.

Nathan Haenlen @nathanhaenlein

Nathan Haenlein is a Professor of Art at Sonoma State University, where he has taught since 2003. He specializes in printmaking, drawing, and painting, offering courses ranging from foundational 2-D studies to advanced studio practices in lithography, etching, and digital printmaking. His teaching has been recognized with the Thomas Jefferson Award for Teaching Excellence, reflecting a deep commitment to mentorship and artistic development. Haenlein earned his MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa, with minors in Painting and Drawing, and his BFA in Printmaking and Painting from the University of Toledo. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Occasional Things Gallery (Santa Rosa), The Ridderhoff Martin Gallery (Fredericksburg, VA), Inde/Jacobs Gallery (Marfa, TX), and The Drawing Center (New York, NY). He has also participated in international exhibitions in Lithuania, Croatia, and Belarus, with works held in collections such as the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Lithuanian Graphic Center. In addition to his teaching and studio practice, Haenlein has curated exhibitions at Sonoma State University and contributed essays and artwork to publications including *Shifter Magazine* and *Printeresting.org*. He has been an invited lecturer and visiting artist at institutions such as Bucknell University, College for Creative Studies, and the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale. Haenlein’s creative practice explores intersections of printmaking, drawing, painting and contemporary visual culture, consistently engaging audiences through thoughtful experimentation and material rigor.

Statement: My work is grounded in the language of drawing, painting and now sculpture. These disciplines provide both material resistance and endless opportunities for experimentation. I am interested in how images accumulate, overlap, and erode—how marks, shapes, and fragments can carry memory and meaning forward while also revealing their instability. Much of my practice involves working with repetition and variation, exploring how a single gesture or motif can generate multiple possibilities. In this way, the studio functions as a site of testing and reconfiguration, where each piece is both a conclusion and a beginning. I often embrace accidents and irregularities, allowing the unexpected to shape the final image and remind us that control is always partial. As both artist and educator, I am committed to sustaining a dialogue between tradition and innovation. Teaching informs my practice by keeping me engaged with fundamental questions: What does it mean to make a mark? How do we translate experience into form? In navigating these questions, I continue to explore the tension between material process and the elusive, shifting nature of meaning.

Nathan Kosta @nnnaaathan

Nathan Kosta is a visual artist, educator, and photographic technology researcher. His work explores issues relating to surveillance capitalism, photographic image recognition, machine learning, and land use. He currently teaches photography at San Francisco State University.

Statement: Lighted Vanity Mirrors is comprised entirely of collected review videos uploaded to Amazon.com by customers, demonstrating the products they have purchased within their homes. It is part of a series investigating how acts of self-surveillance, combined with automated image recognition, have enabled the rapid expansion of surveillance capitalism. In this video, each mirror acts as both a light source and a reflector, the purchased product itself reveals the private space of the home through the public space of Amazon product pages. The mirrors extend the act of self-surveillance, enabling customers to submit visual data of their private spaces to Amazon, where the videos are automatically analyzed for any additional data that can be used to encourage further purchasing, such as other products in the background.

Sarah Christianson @sarah.christianson

I am an artist and educator in Oakland, CA, but I grew up on a four-generation family farm in eastern North Dakota (an hour north of Fargo). Immersed in that vast expanse of the Great Plains, I developed a strong affinity for this landscape and its stories. This connection to place has had a profound effect on my work: despite moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009, I continue to document the subtleties and nuances of the Midwestern landscape and experience. My long-term photographic projects and artist books revolve around home and family and often incorporate materials from my family’s archive. Throughout my work, I use my personal experiences and connection to the land to evoke a strong sense of place, history, and time.

Statement: "Elegy (for you & the cottonwoods) This limited edition artist book honors my Grandma Margaret and a heritage grove of cottonwood trees that was first planted on our land in North Dakota between 1878-1887. When my grandmother died in 2017, my parents were released from an unspoken obligation to her: to keep the farm the same. The following year, they cleared a 10-acre grove of cottonwoods to grow crops there instead. Although the trees had lived a long time, like Grandma, their longevity was cold comfort as I grieved for these missing touchstones in my life. I wasn’t able to be with my grandmother when she died, so I felt as if I couldn’t fail the cottonwoods. I had to be there to witness their passing, to honor their legacy, to wish them farewell. On July 30, 2018, I photographed the final eight trees as they crashed to earth. I promised the cottonwoods that they would be used well—the same pledge that medieval Chinese woodsmen made to trees they harvested. Elegy (for you & the cottonwoods) is the result of my promise. This handmade artist book combines my photographs of the trees being felled with relief prints made directly from the cottonwoods and portraits of my grandmother. "

Sean McFarland @seanmcfarland_

Sean earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BS from Humboldt State University. Exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Visual Studies Workshop; San Francisco Camerawork; White Columns; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; George Eastman Museum; Aperture; Bay Area Now 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Milwaukee Museum of Art. Permanent collections include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; National Gallery of Art; George Eastman Museum; City and County of San Francisco; and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Awards include the SECA - SFMOMA, Eureka Fellowship, Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. Sean lives in San Francisco and is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. He is represented by Casemore Gallery, San Francisco.

Statement: My work examines records of experience, time, landscape, and spirituality. Working from a self-generated archive, I continuously revisit site, image, and object. Materials such as silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes, drawings, desert sage dust, and glass are combined to make photographs, collage, and sculpture. The resulting works are a meditation on place, phenomena, what it means to be present and how we remember.

Sena Clara Creston @sena_clara_creston

"Sena Clara Creston is an artist and educator originally from New York City and currently teaching photography and media arts at Sonoma State University. Creston creates photographs and uses repurposed materials to construct electronic, kinetic, and interactive installations. Her work focuses on the impact light, movement, and materials have on art; reflecting on alternative associations with what is considered natural in an increasingly mediated world. "

Statement: Fortitude is a series of images of impromptu driftwood huts. The huts project security and fantasy, offset by precarious construction of dilapidated materials in an eroding landscape to create a sense of unease for environmental uncertainty. Fortitude displays the collective history of driftwood from familiar natural and manipulated sources, in a revolving collaboration between trees, ocean, sand, wind, weather, and strangers. Fortitude is a portmanteau of fort and attitude, and a word describing the resilience required to seek and sustain shelter and safety on this entropic planet. There is a secondary sad secret allusion to the fortitude required to keep building secure structures as they continuously get taken away. Soon after the huts get built, occupied, and enjoyed; they inevitably fall from tempestuous weather, rising tides, shifting sand, eroding coast, and the poaching of one hut’s wood for another. Fortitude displays the (un)natural and (de)constructive lives of large trees in this liminal landscape between where we were, where we are, and where we are going; inviting viewers to experience, empathize, and engage with their role in the imminent. These images of trees as (in)secure structures in a visibly deteriorating environment communicate their need to be protected to provide protection.

Sergio De La Torre @sanctuarycityproject

Sergio De La Torre is an artist that has been researching and documenting projects related to housing, labor and immigration. This practice strives to investigate how art can enter the public realm in a way that can connect wide ranges of people and neighborhoods in a variety of communities. De La Torre is a Full Professor at the Art + Architecture Department at the University of San Francisco.

Statement: The Sanctuary City Project is a collaborative artistic initiative led by artists Sergio De La Torre and Chris Treggiari, focusing on issues of immigration, sanctuary policies, and the experiences of immigrant communities in the United States. Through public interventions, participatory installations, workshops, and printmaking, the project engages with communities to amplify immigrant voices, foster dialogue, and challenge anti-immigrant narratives. By incorporating historical research, contemporary activism, and community storytelling, The Sanctuary City Project creates spaces for reflection and civic engagement, emphasizing the role of art in social justice movements.

Shao-Feng Hsu @shaofenghsu

"Shao-Feng Hsu is a visual artist whose practice revolves around the intricate interactions between humans and aquatic environments. He earned his MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2022, receiving the Dennis Leon and Christin Nelson Scholarship. He holds a One-Year Certificate in Creative Practices from the International Center of Photography (CP‘19) and received the Rita K. Hillman Excellence Award. In 2020, Shao-Feng co-founded 'Cademy and Fotodemic. Hsu is the recipient of Jury’s Choice Award of Forecast 2023 at San Francisco Camerawork, Photolucida Top 50 of Critical Mass 2023, and participation in the International Juried Exhibition 2023 at the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel. He was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2022–2023), awarded a Yaddo residency in 2024, and is a 2024–2026 Unseen California Artist in Residence at UC Santa Cruz in partnership with the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History. Hsu work has been exhibited globally, with showcases at Kyotagraphie in Kyoto, Root Division, The Lab, Right Window, and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, as well as Galeria Beta in Bogota. Publications and features include The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, SF Chronicle, Photograph Magazine, Lenscratch, 48 Hills, +KGP Books, and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. He has taught and lectured at institutions such as CCA, CalArts, Stanford, and ICP. He is currently a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College."

Statement: "Artist Statement Living near the intersection of water and land in my homeland of Taiwan sparked my curiosity with questioning, researching, and creating work centered around water. As a child, I swam to improve my asthma, leading to a long-standing physical relationship with water. As a Taiwanese native, I also underwent compulsory military service in the Kinmen Islands, which were once the frontline of the Chinese Civil War. Living within military infrastructure on that coastline has deepened my understanding of the complexities where land meets water—a theme that resonates with the location and history of the Bay Area. For me, places where the tide comes and goes are also where history is revealed, and creativity unfolds. Water, and my obsession with it—as an air-breathing mammal, as a native of an island nation, and as a veteran of a coastal military—has become a metaphor for the boundaries of life and how we overcome them. I create experiential, photo-based work that focuses on water and the aquatic environment. Using both analog and digital methods of image-making, along with archival images, my work seeks to shift perspectives on how water is traditionally perceived and understood."

Shirin Towfiq @https://www.instagram.com/shirintowfiq/

"Shirin Towfiq, is an Iranian-American artist whose work addresses cultural memory, family histories, legacies of trauma, transnational migration, and translation. Towfiq completed her Bachelor of Arts in Art Practice from the University of California Berkeley in 2016 and a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2020. In recent years, Towfiq has presented solo-exhibitions at The Mingei Museum, San Diego, CA; 1078 gallery, Chico, CA; City Gallery, San Diego, CA; and has been included in group exhibitions at Four Freedoms Park, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; The De Young Museum; Minnesota Street Project; SOMArts; San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery; c3artspace, Melbourne, Australia. She has won various awards, such as the Rydell Award in 2024 and the Murphy award in 2020."

Statement: "Looking For A Sign is an assemblage of tea bags stitched together conveying memories, events, and visions of the future. Gathered from a daily ritual of tea-drinking, it constitutes a personal tasseography. Gold threads reference Persian folklore of magic carpets, suggesting journeys across space and time. The translucent quality of the tapestry evokes a window, a portal, or a gestational period.  "

Susanne Cockrell

"Susanne Cockrell is an artist and educator who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her social and documentary projects consider the ways people live into specific places over time, amplifying the emergent choreography of landscape, shared experience, and participatory actions in shaping collective and civic life. Her practice and teaching over the last 20 years has explored the interdisciplinary medium of social practice, often situated in public or social contexts in which participants become collaborators in the construction or manifestation of the work. Fieldfaring Projects, in collaboration with Ted Purves from 2002-2017, asked questions about systems of critical exchange, collectivity and farming in the urban landscape through the lens of informal social economies and rural aesthetics. Early research in experimental dance and choreography, environmental studies, and eastern philosophy continue to shape her craft with an attention to ephemeral encounters and poetics of daily life. She is Professor of Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her projects have received support from the Center for Cultural Innovation SF, Center for Sustainable Creativity, Czech Republic, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts SF, SF Cinematheque, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Creative Work Fund SF and Creative Capital Foundation NYC. She has an MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in Film, Video, Performance. She studied Environmental Studies and Anthropology at the University of Vermont before receiving her BA from Burlington College in Dance/Movement and Transpersonal Psychology. ​"

Statement: " Social and public art projects operate laterally and slowly, with the intention to shape social movements or public flows, local or regional issues often flying under the radar of the dominant art world. Long term and process driven engagement is a strength and not always punctuated by traditional forms of exhibition. What gets “made” and what is “presented” as “outcomes” is often less critical or important than the conversation and process of research - how we articulate issues and troubles and make them conscious to ourselves and others. We reimagine what public and communal life can be when we expand our understanding and experience of public to include ancestral flows, ecological systems, and the forces that are shaping global transitions. In times of ecological crises and deep social and political fracture, generative resistance and collective actions by artist and many others offer different stories for alternative futures that nourish resilience and new vocabularies for ways of being with and for each other. My teaching practice asks how a class is a learning site? Can co-creation methods of production facilitate deeper conversations and knowledge transfer? I usually design courses wherein students build a vocabulary for actions in contextual situations to experiment intervening in social and public realms. We situate art practice alongside the current landscape of social and ecological ruptures and collectively figure out how to infuse justice, ethical actions and reciprocity into project development and critique. "

Terry Berlier @berlierthanyou

Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with queerness and ecologies. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia including the Marc Chagall National Museum in France, Museum of Old and New Art in Australia, Babel Gallery in Norway, Contemporary Art + Spirits in Osaka, Japan, EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Creative Work Fund Grant, Stanford Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the California Council for the Humanities California Stories Fund, the Millay Colony for Artists in New York, and the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in the Art in America, BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, published in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ University of California Press, and ‘Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and The Artworks it Inspired’. Her sound sculptures can be heard on Earthly Records “A Kind Of Ache” with Sarah Hennies and The Living Earth Show. Berlier is a Professor of Art, by Courtesy Professor of Music, Director of the Sculpture Lab, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University since 2007. Berlier has served on the Recology Artist in Residence Advisory Board since 2012 following her residency there.

Statement: I became fascinated by the way a Möbius loop (a form which rejects binaries) can embody ‘desire lines’, marks left on the ground when one veers from the normative path, as a queer ecological phenomena. This non-orientable form is laborious to construct through wood: cutting, laminating, joining, sanding, embracing failure, and rerouting as the forms evolved, causing the Möbius to flip at a certain point. Gender, joinery, and ecology are combined in an incongruous way.

Tim Hyde @timhyde_info

"Tim Hyde works in the expanded field of photography, treating the camera as an architectural tool that both analyzes and constructs space. His photographs and videos examine how built environments and their inhabitants shape each other, approaching architecture not as static backdrop but as psychological and temporal medium. From filming bus passengers through the architectural frame of night windows to negotiating silent territories with a keeper in a former KGB building in Kiev, Hyde positions the camera as a tool for spatial analysis and reconstruction. Projects like The Memory Palace—seeing Los Angeles through an insomniac's waking dream—or Invisible City—echoing Calvino's malleable cities rebuilt around each visitor's projections—reveal architecture as something continuously performed rather than fixed. Hyde approaches photography as spatial thinking, where framing becomes a way of building. His practice treats images as sites rather than surfaces, generating structures for dialogue and frameworks for translation between different modes of knowledge. Hyde's work has been featured at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ar/ge Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano; Sculpture Center NYC; the de Young Museum; Neuberger Museum of Art; the Busan Biennale; Rose Museum at Brandeis University; and is held in collections including Pier 24 Photography and the Albright Knox Museum. His permanent installations with Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and commissions from Thomas Phifer Architects extend these investigations into built form. Based in Oakland, California."

Whitney Vangrin @whitneyvangrin

"Whitney Vangrin is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, and installation. Her work merges film, ritual, and folk traditions to create immersive experiences that explore vulnerability and adaptation. She holds an MFA from UC Davis and has exhibited at MoMA PS1, Swiss Institute, ICA London, and ICA Philadelphia. Vangrin co-founded 1:1 in NYC and is the founder of Night Tea, a series of relationship-focused gatherings featuring fermentation-inspired menus, non-alcoholic drink traditions, and opportunities for artists and patrons to connect in spaces of cultural renewal. "

Statement: "I am an artist working across performance, video, painting, and sculpture. I draw inspiration from film, ritual, folk traditions, and alchemical allegories. My performances—equal parts physical and psychological—question perceptions of authenticity, creating works that hinge between reality and simulation. At the core of my practice is an exploration of lived experience, rejecting passivity while fostering empathy, introspection, and presence for both performer and audience. I seek to provoke, awaken, and connect, offering emotional yet alluring entry points into subject matter that is both fatalistic and hopeful. I work with varied materials such as dough, seaweed, ferments, blown glass, latex tubing, and replicas of the body. These, alongside my engagement with fermentation, act as metaphors for cycles of dismemberment, incubation, and regeneration. Fermentation, as both process and symbol, connects the human body to broader ecosystems of transformation and adaptation. Through this lens, I explore inter-species symbiosis and the preservation of cultural heritage. I cultivate works that encourage resilience, mindfulness, and adaptability. By merging synthetic and organic elements, I highlight tensions between natural processes and human intervention, raising questions about identity, agency, and the limits of control. With a multidisciplinary approach, I celebrate the dynamism of experience to inspire curiosity and compassion, ultimately opening space for reflection, restoration, and reimagined ways of connecting with the world and one another. "

Yulia Pinkusevich @yuliapink

Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkiv, Ukraine (USSR). Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern block as refugees, immigrating to New York City. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Yulia has exhibited nationally and internationally including site-specific projects executed in Paris, France, London UK and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Yulia’s art is in the public collection of the deYoung Museum, Stanford University, Facebook HQ, Google HQ and the City of Albuquerque amongst others. She has been awarded fellowships from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Gray Area Arts Foundation, Wildlands, Lucid Arts Foundation, Autodesk Pier 9, Recology (San Francisco Dump), Cite des Arts International (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts Vashon AIR amongst others. Yulia has lectured at Stanford University and is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the College of Art Media and Design and Mills College of Northeastern University in Oakland California, she lives and creates works on unceeded Ohlone territory.

Statement: Yulia Pinkusevich is a visual artist working primarily in drawing, painting and installation. She creates projects and large-scale environments that consider our ecological and social systems. Her work observes land and environment critically, focusing on the psychology of architecture while exploring both the physical and psychological environments sentient beings inhabit. Using art as a vehicle to merge the physical and psychological parallels, she believes the structures that surround us can define and influence our actions, paths and thoughts. The work becomes a search for innate inner truth. Her background itself is rooted in change. Born and raised in the USSR at a time of great political upheaval and uncertainty. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern bloc as refugees, immigrating to New York City. She later relocated to California first to attend college and later graduate school, continuing to reside in the Bay Area. Her work stems from her identity as an immigrant of Siberian & Ukrainian roots. Her art explores dualities and the complex relationships between her blended identity and home countries. Formally, the work is engaged with the direct experience of the viewer through perspectival illusion and spatial perception that play with the subconscious and cognitive understanding of space. By breaking logical perspectives she creates illusions of impossible spaces, non-places or utopias that shift the viewpoint to the panoptic.

Joshua Moreno @stopjoshgo

I was born and raised in Watsonville, California. In 2011, I graduated from the University of California San Diego with a BFA in art practice, and in 2022 I graduated from Stanford University with an MFA in studio art. Since 2012, I have been working in art education, teaching courses in art history, filmmaking, and art. Presently, I am teaching art courses at Stanford and San Jose State University.

Statement: In my work, I examine the overlapping relationship between the natural and human-made environment and highlight patterns and systems of efficiency that exist within them. Through installation, drawing, and film, I re-evaluate the everyday spaces and objects that surround us, with added attention to elemental phenomena.