Working Craft

A Rohrig @ajrohrig

Alexis Reiko Yonan @alexisreikoyonan, @reikoceramics

Armaan Mumtaz @armaanmumtaz

Brandt Hewitt @medium__small

Cecilia Mignon @ceciliamignon

Statement: In an interdisciplinary practice, I seek out a quiet transformation of information in multiple and often layered ways. The buildable compositions I work with in alternative printmaking and photo processes explore the vastness of minutiae and the pliable way memory can build dreamlike landscapes. I am stripping away photography as a single captured moment and inserting it as a buildable ingredient to a chorus of timelines, while also maintaining the way a simple polaroid picture encapsulates the preciousness and the inception point of where memory and dream begin to overlap in a stilled moment unobscured. Cecilia Mignon (born Portland, OR 1991) is an interdisciplinary photo-based artist living and working in Oakland, CA. Their work uses photography and alternative processes and mixed media to explore temporality, softness and poetic space.

Christopher Martin @chrispymartin

Christopher Renfro @280project

Dave Carter @sweetdave__

David Benzler @david.benzler.studio

Drew Grasso @modestpressing

Emma Logan @emmalogan.art

Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa @wulffvnky

Haley Summerfield @haleysummerfield

Statement: Haley Summerfield is a ceramic sculptor and printmaker based in San Francisco, California with a background in public art. She holds a BFA from Southern Oregon University (2018) and an MFA from San Francisco University (2022). Her ceramic sculptures explore themes around the nature of disability, ableism, and chronic pain. She is interested in disassembling her personal narratives and reconstructing it as one that layers fantasy, abstraction, and objects to better understand the body. She then uses those stories and symbols to reflect on the tension between the body being both a host for disease and a site for pleasure.

Jeffrey Sincich @jeffreysincich

John Lindsey @thegreathighway

JP McNicholas @jpmcnicholas

Julia Kerley @earthtriplet

Julia Kerley (Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who primarily makes ceramic sculptures and installations. Working in the modality of clay is a uniquely formative experience for herself and the earth she graciously works with–an experience rife with transmutation and alchemy. She constructs heavily textured, modular ceramic sculptures based on historic, often religious or ritualistic, references. The resulting objects represent experiments in the invention of self and the complexity of an identity shaped by memory.

Statement: Through this queering of the boundary where self ends and object begins, she re-creates these ritual objects in service of a re-imagined history–one rich in multiplicity of gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. The objects thereafter embark on their journey of selfhood, somewhere suspended between life and death, objecthood and selfhood, now positioned in the empowerment of their history. Each work also contains an element of performance. The interaction between artwork and audience extends the meaning of the work beyond the artist, and situates these glitched historic vessels within other people and into the occasion of now. Kerley’s Capture study unfolds and expands non-linearly; structure and outcome co-evolve through her contingent thinking and activity. She analyzes CAPTCHAs' philosophical, technological, and socio-political implications within a digital and textile matrix. Ideas of control, labor, security, and identity surround the basis of the work in relation to matrixial theory and Glitch Feminism, creating a handwoven topographical textile aimed at understanding the expansiveness of the cyber and physical world.

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. "

Lauren D'Amato @spooky_orbison

Statement: I find that my current artistic motivation stems from my desire to learn more about the painters, businesses, and histories of the signs around me. As a second generation sign-painter and pinstriper I am always looking back towards these lineages of painting to further my own ability. Through observation of my surroundings, a coded language of blue collar labor and technical ability presents itself to me. Painting is a chance for me to create new memories that relate these histories to my present moment, and to see that these traditions of handmade modes of production, which have inspired me so greatly, move forward.

Lucas Terranova @rug_stain

Lulu Thrower @luluthrowerstudio

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

Megan McGuinn @megan_mcguinn

Meryl Pataky @merylpataky

Michelle "Meng" Nguyen @allthingsmeng

Ocean Escalanti @oldisthegrave

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

Reniel Del Rosario @adrenieline

Statement: Reniel Del Rosario creates ceramics that playfully recreate or re-imagine familiar objects. From cakes to cigarettes to burial jars, these hand-built objects are made in multiples and are full of imprints and inconsistencies. These objects are then gathered and put into a huddled crowd or in socially interactive installations in public—mimicking consumer establishments, both highlighting the abundance of the objects as an antithesis for the love of the mass-produced. These objects each carry the histories of the goods they mimic whether it’s making forgeries of luxury objects, selling art as if it was a consumer object, or recreating lost artifacts in a contemporary setting.

Rico Duenas @Doingbigthingslittle

Ryan Harrison

Statement: Craft requires the hand of the maker. Evidence of labor, or knowledge applied. This knowledge that forms craft has been passed down through labor for thousands of years. In my work, i draw on the craft of textiles and printmaking to create tapestries of printed imagery. The images i work with are a combination of my own drawings and found fabrics. Imagery is applied to textiles either through screen or woodblock printing. My work is about quiet moments, the gap between the houses, the view out a small window in the back. These banal moments where beauty exist are often overlooked for the spectacle of grander vistas. My work seeks the beauty of the lived environment, the chipping paint and the beer bottle left on the window sill in the sun. The places where we can be ourselves, at ease. To me, beauty is not in the spectacular, but in the quiet moment of conversation between us and our world. Ryan Harrison is a professional printmaker working in Oakland, CA. He graduated from SFAI in 2017, and currently works for Cloth Edition Print Shop and Oakland artist Sandy Walker.

Ryan Whelan @nowbecomesthen

Sarah Smith @Sswans

Sonny Smith

Torin Brandborg @torinstudio

Victor Saucedo @nomorewhitewomen2

Statement: Victor Saucedo explores their relationship with White American history and society through their experimentation with bodies, ceramics and digital collage. Taking inspiration from their own visceral family encounters, Saucedo builds on as a multidisciplinary artist, reclaiming imprints from historical documents, internet culture and pornography. Saucedo’s confrontational style aims for audiences to reflect on their shared experiences or never even realizing their prejudice and lack of empathy (although unraveled in their volatile reactions)

ZH Leonard @zzzzzzoya

Oliver Hawk @oliverhawk