WOW MOM

A.R. Keiner @a.r.keiner

A.R KEINER in an Interdisciplinary artist. Though much of her work is in Painting and Drawing, she maintains a Social Practice working with families in the hours, days, weeks and months after the death of a child or caregiver. Since the unexpected death of their second child in 2012, A.R. has worked hundreds of people redefining memorial traditions and tearing down expectations of what it is to be a bereaved parent. Since 2017 she’s collaborated with associates in Anesthesiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she lectures on Grief and Patient Narrative, and the intersection of Medicine, Advocacy, and Art. A.R. received an MFA in Art Practice from San Francisco State University School of Art in Spring of 2020. A.R. has presented their research at University of Chicago, Colorado College, Cal State LA, SFSU, and Stanford University. She was a 2021-2022 California Arts Council fellow. A.R. was born and raised in the unceded lands of the Deni'ina, and Tlingit people and credits this Alaskan upbringing for much of the visual vocabulary and deep ties to the natural world. In 2024 A.R. KEINER launched @TheFurtorialist, opening up a welcome levity to her practice.

Statement: Growing up in Alaska, seasons were determined by minutes of daylight gained or lost. The land behaved as a living breathing moving entity. I spent childhood avoiding wild animals, fearing clay that could liquify underfoot, and playing on the ruins of entire community brushed clean by tsunamis, fire, and earthquakes. In my lifetime I’ve seen the glaciers that carved mountains evaporate and die - and I’m only 43. It’s from this place of life, death, resilience, mourning, and joy that this work centering the avalanche emerges. The Fragments series is a conversation between two times. This fragment is torn from a series of 100 self portraits drawn in 100 days shortly after the birth of our 3rd child. The drawing serves as a ground for the painting made almost a decade later.

Ahna Serendren @ahnaserendren

Ahna Serendren was born and raised in Southern California. She holds an MFA in combined media from Hunter College in New York City, a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in English literature and creative writing from UCLA. Color, texture and experimentation with non-traditional tools and materials play a central role in Ahna’s painting practice. Her current paintings include pigments, dyes and inks made with stones, sand, clay and flowers collected from her local environment in the San Francisco Bay Area. Selected exhibitions of Ahna’s work include Rip Current at The Yard in Brooklyn, Fruits of Labor at apexart in New York City, In Flux at the Museum of Northern California Art in Chico, and the Every Woman Biennial in Los Angeles. Her work resides in private collections in New York, Los Angeles and London.

Statement: Serendren's current painting process begins with field work in nature, during which she is often accompanied by her six-year-old daughter, Eleanora. Together they collect stones from local creek beds, flowers grown in their home garden or sand and clay from the Bay Area’s wealth of open spaces. Back in the studio, Serendren creates natural pigments, inks and dyes through a process she likes to think of as part lab work, part alchemy. Drawing from research into the historical or symbolic significance of various plants and earth pigments, and their medicinal properties, Serendren’s paintings layer and play with the various metaphors and meanings given to these natural elements over time. Made with materials that are often prone to change as they age, these paintings resist stasis, reflecting the impermanent nature of experience as they gradually shift in color and fade.

Ali True

Ali True (née Naschke-Messing) is a native Californian, currently living in San Francisco. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA from California College of the Arts, with a focus in textiles. She was awarded an Affiliate Artist position at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2011-2013, was selected as an Emerging Artist by the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012, and was an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center in 2010. She has shown at the de Saisset Museum, Museum of Craft and Design (SF), Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, RedCat, Artadia, Pro Arts, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, Montalvo Arts Center, The Headlands, College of Marin, and San Francisco State University, among others.

Statement: and how does light fall into your body? from many points to many others, large and larger. (yes, she said, light lines being the same as psalms) the flow of speech, as it were, in a straight line, for a stringed instrument.

Amber Jean Young @amberjeanyoung

AMBER JEAN YOUNG BIO 2024 Amber Jean Young (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist in Berkeley, CA recognized for her use of vibrant colors and patterns mixed with imagery of plant and animal life across mediums. Whether painting or hand building ceramics, Young explores themes of resilience, practice of cultivating joy, and whimsy despite living in times of great loss and trauma. Recent ceramic work reimagines the traditional ceramic urn as something other than a depressing, self-serious resting place for our cremated loved ones, but instead as a vessel that reflects the vibrancy, dynamism and even silliness of our lives. Looking to art movements of the past Young is inspired by the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1980s the long history of floral and geometric patterns in quilt and textile design.

Angie Wilson @Angiewilon00

Angie Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist working in textile-based sculpture, installation, social practice, interiors, and costume design. She lives in Oakland with her beloved child.

Statement: Angie Wilson is interested in the intimacy of textiles – as protective, sheltering, comforting, and expressive. Textiles as clothing and domestic objects signify identity, hold memory, and tell stories. Angie references weaving as a powerful metaphor for interconnectivity - of the universe, our communities, our bodies, and minds. In her work, she opens space for the narrative power of textiles to illustrate the interconnectivity and interdependence of all things.

carissa potter @peopleiveloved

Carissa Potter is an artist who lives and works in Oakland, California. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010, is a founding member of Colpa Press, and is the founder of People I’ve Loved. Carissa has worked with the ICA in Boston, BAM/PFA, SFMOMA, and the De Young Museum, to name a few, and has also served as a mentor in Southern Exposure’s One-on-One Mentorship Program. I like you, I love you, Carissa’s first book, was published with Chronicle Books in 2015, and her second book, It’s Ok to Feel Things Deeply, was published in 2018. Currently, Carissa is working on If You Were Here Now, a project presenting guided videos by artists that can help people navigate life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Statement: I am interested in longing and relationships.

Cassie McGettigan @cassiemcgettigan

I am a textile artist, educator, and mom based in Bolinas, California. I have a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. In 2008, I co-founded Gravel & Gold, a design collective and shop in San Francisco. There I learned on the job how to design fabric, produce clothing, curate shows, and host workshops. After eight years in business, I wanted to study how to print fabric, so I went for an MFA in Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design and remained there to teach. I returned to California in 2021 with a daughter in tow and shifted my studio practice to sewing. This March I organized SPRINGFORM, an art show and workshop in my small town. Patchworks blazed from the rafters of an old barn; zabutons were stacked up or set out for use. I offered classes and lectures, hosted meditations and mending circles, and invited others to do the same. I listened and made a lot of tea. The open calls to sit, stitch, or talk—really just to be—together set in motion the reciprocal relationships proposed throughout my work.

Statement: After practicing meditation for over twenty years, I’ll still fix on a narrative, revel in its release, then take up another strategy, on and on. Rather than attaching to any phase, I practice looking with clarity at the whole entangled moment. Patterns operate like habits of thought in my textile work. The prints I design can feel spontaneous, but they are carefully planned statements of affinity. The patchworks I make, on the other hand, are improvised from found materials and remain provisional. Scraps of old denim, mosquito netting, or imitation batik interleave pattern redundancies with glitches and offshoots. Seams, bulges, and punctures record my labor. The new composite, like a squishy scroll, vibrates off the wall. Its connections are its strength.

Dana Hemenway @dana_t_h

Dana Hemenway is an artist based in San Francisco. Her work is rooted in the excavation and elevation of utilitarian objects to make visible what has become habituated in our built environments. Hemenway uses these functional items as materials to form traditionally fiber-based crafts–– lights and cords are woven through ceramics or the gallery wall, extension cords are transformed into macramé chains. Hemenway has had residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), ACRE (Stueben, WI), SÍM (Reykjavik, Iceland), Joya: arte + ecología (Spain), The Wassaic Project (Upstate New York) and at Recology Waste Management (San Francisco). Dana is a 2024 Eureka Fellow, Fleishhacker Foundation and the recipient of The San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and a Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant. She has a public art commission at SFO’s Terminal 1. Dana has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally, and internationally. From 2015 – 2017 Dana served as a co-director of Royal Nonesuch Gallery, an artist-run project space in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from Mills College and her BA from University of California Santa Cruz. She is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery.

Emma Spertus

Emma Spertus is an artist who makes sculptures and site specific installations. Recent exhibitions include "Helping Heads" at Personal Space gallery in Vallejo, and a site specific installation titled "Sentence Model" for the Kala Windows in Berkeley. She has been the recipient of residencies at Chalk Hill and Winslow House Project. Emma has completed a diverse range of community-minded art projects, including co-founding Real Time & Space, which offers affordable artist studios to 17 artists in Oakland Ca. A graduate of the MFA program at Hunter College, Emma has exhibited her work at White Columns, Dorsky Gallery, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Lab, NIAD Art Center, and other venues. Emma lives and works in the Bay Area.

Statement: Emma Spertus creates sculptures and architectural interventions, which bring attention to two- and three-dimensional space in humorous or unexpected ways. Her work focuses on questions around the vacancy, materiality, resource use, language, and display. She use wood, metal, paper, cardboard, fabric and found elements like building facades to create large portals and small studies for empty storefronts.

Ilana Crispi @ilanacrispi

Ilana Crispi is a San Francisco based artist, mother, and teacher, with an interdisciplinary practice incorporating ceramic arts with local histories and geologies. She has mined urban soil for gold, shared it with neighbors, sculpted it into ceramics, and built ephemeral monuments in the landscape. Her site-specific installations invite engagement and investigate ideas of power, access, and perception and the ways in which we experience our environments. Crispi has been the resident artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, Montalvo Arts Center, the de Young Museum and Can Serrat. She has shown at museums, galleries, and alternative sites in the USA, Mexico, Spain, Portugal and China. She has curated shows in San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo and Barcelona. Crispi is Associate Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.

Statement: I explore the stories of place and how the physical world around us, the land, holds stories and reflects both change and permanence. Geologic change inches along. Changes in our society, in the demographics of our neighborhoods is much more rapid. I have done projects using the local soils of different neighborhoods to explore histories and question value and ownership and to produce shared experiences – sometimes embracing the absurd by inviting neighbors to mine for gold from the soil under my apartment using a sluice box set up in the street. My background with ceramics started as a child, sculpting from mud, and this is something I’m returning to now with my child. I am creating collaborations with my son. Prioritizing play and experimentation and exploration has allowed for new possibilities.

Jen Garrido @https://www.instagram.com/_jengarrido_/

Jen Garrido was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She received her BFA in Painting from Sonoma State University and her MFA in Studio Art at Mills College in Oakland, CA. In 2008, Jen identified, created and named her alter-art ego, Jenny Pennywood. For the last decade, Jen has been the artist behind Jenny Pennywood, a bustling, small batch, hyper-locally produced textile line that focuses on home goods and wearables. The studios for both her painting practice and her small business are located a few minutes away from her house and she spends endless amounts of time multitasking between the two. Jen resides in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband, 2 daughters and their cat named Pickles.

Statement: Jen Garrido creates paintings that reflect internal dialogue, natural forms, and the materials she works with. She attunes to a study of self that guides her through feeling lost, found, and lost again. Formal elements are inspired by nature—they excavate, uncover, and unearth. And she attunes to her relationship with the medium of the paint or drawing materials, projecting images and forms from a play between her inner landscape and the outside world onto the surface of the canvas. Palette emerges from feeling rather than preconception. Garrido’s paintings are meditations on the various parts of her identity. Her process is unstructured but results in the possibility of a structure, building something of a dictionary, or reference book, of the shapes she finds along the way. They are symptoms of an exploration of how shapes might relate to each other, repeating, climbing, leaning, and piling. Weighing ambiguity with representation, a desire for decoration, adding, subtracting, abstracting and transforming, she gradually arrives at a final composition. A Los Angeles native, Garrido currently lives and works in San Francisco. In addition to being a painter, Jen Garrido is the artist behind Jenny Pennwood, her alter-art-ego and small-batch textile-based line of home goods and wearables. Ultimately, the bodies of work are in conversation with each other and are driven by the principle of a blissful alliance between all colors.

Kari Orvik @kariorviktintypes

Kari Orvik is a photo-based artist and educator. Her work has shown at the SFO Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, Hosfelt Gallery, SF Camerawork, and is in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum. She was an artist in residence at Recology SF, Rayko Photo Center, and a graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has taught photography at Bay Area schools including Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute, City College of SF, UC Berkeley, and operates a tintype portrait studio in San Francisco's Outer Mission.

Statement: The backdrop of loss, transition, and remembrance are always present in my work. Across multiple photographic formats, I explore our changing urban and natural environments through the lens of what we hold onto, what we let go of, and where we place value - acknowledging what is present and what is simultaneously absent, sometimes through the photographic properties of positive and negative. The First Two Weeks includes images I was compelled to take within the first bewildering weeks after my son was born, as I tried to make sense of the simultaneous presences and absences in my life.

Klea McKenna @klea_mckenna

Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, The Mead Museum of Art and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Klea is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE, an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and the late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy books in 2023.

Statement: In Rainbow Bruise I collapse several techniques I’ve developed over the last decade to create a hybrid approach to image-making at the intersection of photography, printmaking and painting. I misuse my medium by embossing photographic paper in an etching press then I cast raking light across its uneven surface. These works are then layered with painting and intaglio printing. While this work moves further from traditional photography, it still embraces its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s complicated history with detail and truth. I use these methods to depict semi-abstract, figurative beings with a confounding blend of concrete evidence and speculative fantasy. They are composed of a vocabulary of symbolic feminine forms: breasts, weighty curves and wombs; shapes that are derived from everyday materials like consumer packaging and unfolded cardboard boxes which creates an aesthetic that blends archeological artifacts with the die-cut curves of mass production.

Laura Plageman @lauraplageman

Laura Plageman creates complex photographic works that challenge traditional landscape representation. Using techniques like digital compositing, physical manipulation of printed photographs, and iterative rephotography, she explores themes of time, perspective, and environmental change. Her work reflects on human impact and our multifaceted relationship to the landscape. Plageman earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Houston Center for Photography, and the Bolinas Museum. It has been featured in publications like Harper's Magazine and WIRED, and is included in the permanent collection of LACMA. Laura lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Statement: Crumpling a piece of paper transforms a flat surface into a landscape of ridges and valleys. This simple act reveals hidden dimensions, turning two dimensions into three, simplicity into complexity. I apply this principle to my photographic work. Starting with my own landscape photographs, I modify the images through various physical interventions, from crumpling prints to layering materials. I then photograph these altered forms, creating new iterations that exist between image and object. This process of transformation reveals unexpected textures and perspectives within familiar scenes. Each manipulation uncovers new ways of seeing, offering fresh interpretations of both photographs and the landscapes they represent. These transformed images serve as meditations on impermanence, challenging our notions of photographic truth and exploring the dynamic relationship between humanity and nature—how we shape our environment and how it, in turn, shapes us.

Lauren Stevenson @BanditandElle

Statement: As a photographer and ethnographer, Lauren “Elle” Stevenson focuses her lens on moments that serve as portals, taking us from one way of being to another. For more than two decades, she has documented the practice of performing artists who intentionally create these kinds of portals in their work to spark change and build community. Her photographs bear witness to the ways their performances move us to see, feel, and understand the world in new ways. They also illuminate seldom-seen moments in the creative process through which artists forge these transformative possibilities. With a lens trained on creative practice, Elle’s photographs also explore the contexts in which she is most intentionally creating her experience of the world. This has primarily included traveling when she finds she is most awake to the potential of even the smallest in-between moments. More recently, as a mother, she has begun to explore creativity in parenting and the complete presence that is required to immerse with her children in play.

Lee Materazzi @leematerazzi

Lee Materazzi (born Fairfax, VA) from Miami, FL now living in San Francisco, CA. In 2005 she received her BFA from Central St. Martins in London. Materazzi uses her body as a medium alongside color and texture, at times responding to remnants of material or work left by her children in the studio. Her compositions are off-kilter and investigate autonomy — rejecting acceptable social norms that regulate the human body. Materazzi’s works are considered sculpturally, but exist only temporarily. She documents what she creates with medium format photography to preserve it. Her work has been shown internationally and is a part of numerous public art collections including The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, The Sagamore Collection, the Scholl Collection at World Class Boxing and The Perez Art Museum where she was Included in “My Body My Rules”.

Statement: When visiting her studio it wasn't the mess that struck me as extraordinary but the size of the chairs. Materazzi shares her studio with her two young daughters, Mia, 12 and Brook, 9. In conversation, she consistently refers to the studio as ours. The tone with which she says this is important. It’s not said as generous platitude. It's a matter of fact. Their drawings and sculptures migrate in and out of Materazzi’s camera frame. Other times, their discarded or in-progress experiments inform the sculptures and sets Materazzi builds for her documented performances. Their uninhibited presence fills the otherwise silent space of tedium that takes place between the inception of a good idea and its execution. Where one’s work ends and the other’s begins isn’t obvious. Mess, play, success, and failure commingle throughout their inadvertent collaborations. In her portraits, Materazzi objectifies not just her body, but the precarity of its nature. Nipples, noses, knees, the small people she grew inside of her and the messes they’ve made on the ground are neither daft nor holy but both, simultaneously, in equal measure. Spanning the gamut from erotic to abject, the photographs and sculptures on view overlap with experiences of parenthood, divorce, the pandemic, the cultural amnesia that followed, and a standard sense of dailiness. Shared among them is a sense of urgency, a sensation that feels big and small at the same time—the way a paper cut throbs.

Lindsay Rothwell @lindsay_rothwell

Lindsay Rothwell (b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work investigates memory and place using the architectural model as a container for human memory, and merging gaming software and 3D-modeling tools with art and architectural history. Rothwell received a BA in Studio Art from UCLA in 1998 and an MFA from Mills College in 2019. She has exhibited work at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; St Joseph’s Art Society, San Francisco; the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art; Gallery 120710, Berkeley; and more. She is the author of the 20th-century chapter of 30,000 Years of Art (Phaidon Press), and has taught at CSU East Bay, Mills College at Northeastern University, The British Library, and CCA. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the City of San Francisco.

Statement: Lindsay Rothwell 16’6” 2019 3D Model, Digital Video with sound 8:08 minutes Using the language and tools of architecture, 16’6” explores the embedded memories held within a space, and uses the architectural model as a container for human memory. Considering the house as an extension of the self, Rothwell uses the planes of the room to destabilize the normative authority of single-point perspective, and to unpack the layers of memory and culture embedded in our walls. In the Middle Ages, English landowners divided their lands with 16’6” rods. Sixteen and a half feet designated the space one serf was expected to work. 1000 years later in Victorian London, thousands of terraced houses were built for the working and middle classes. Each house was 16’6” wide. These buildings still stand.

Maggie Preston @maggieprestonstudio

Maggie Preston is a photo-based artist who lives & works in Berkeley. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts. Preston is also a neurodivergent mother, educator, swimmer, and forever-learner.

Statement: Visual artist Maggie Preston bends various photographic processes, exploring temporal shifts in the medium and personal identity. She weaves digital photography with analog actions, like hand-cutting and darkroom photography, into her process. Preston works and reworks old artwork and personal ephemera, creating process-based photographic compositions that are also accumulations of time. In other works, the accretion occurs through digital layering and other editing techniques. Much of her recent work is based on an exquisitely personal shift in her life- that of becoming a mother. The photographs in Prehistory are created as a kind of collaboration between mother and child. Preston explores her toddler son’s earliest attempt of image-making, abstract markings drawn on paper. She meticulously cuts his scribbles out of the paper, and photographs these ephemeral forms. The pigment prints explore a young child’s pre-representational marks, and at the same time, these black & white abstractions portray the artist-mother clawing her way back to her creative practice after the hiatus of early motherhood.

Marisha Farnsworth @marishafarnsworth

Marisha Farnsworth is an artist and architect who creates site works and community projects at the intersection of ecology and technology. Her work ranges in scale—from drawings to large architectural installations and has involved the participation of hundreds of people and multiple species. Farnsworth is co-founder of Future Forests, an arts and research organization based out of the Sagehen Creek UC Berkeley Field Station in the Sierra Nevadas. She has exhibited her work at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in the Venice Biennale and has work in the collection at the Nevada Museum of Art. Marisha received her BA at Cooper Union and a Master of Architecture at UC Berkeley. Born in San Francisco she remains committed to the Bay Area where she shepherds the arts and craft community O2AA Artisans Aggregate in West Oakland.

Statement: Becoming a mother has prompted me to reevaluate the scale and materiality of my artistic practice. Wielding a chainsaw with a toddler in tow is simply impractical. As I transition from large-scale installations to more intimate studio-based work, I am exploring new ways for my sculptural medium—wood—to take shape in two-dimensional forms. The traditional methods of burning and grinding wood to create pigments have led me to delve into handcrafted art materials. By utilizing ground wood, bone, uni shells, rabbit skin, and egg yolk, I create works that engage in a meaningful dialogue with their materiality. These pigment studies are displayed on experimental paper made from linen rags retted by earthworms, celebrating the transformative journey of materials in a fully compostable artwork.

Rachel Kaye @ray_ray_kaye

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.

Rene Smith @renesmithstudio

Rene Smith is an Oakland based painter. Her studio is located in downtown Berkeley. She has shown her work in New York, the Bay Area, and Thailand. She has an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a BA from Bennington College in Vermont.

Statement: Rene Smith's current series shapeshifters shifts between abstraction and representation. It explores time and memory and how that can be encapsulated through painting.

Sabrina Gschwandtner @filmquilts

Sabrina Gschwandtner's hybrid work in film, video, photography, textiles and installation has been included in exhibitions worldwide including “Crafting America,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; “40 Under 40,” Smithsonian American Art Museum; “Power of Making,” Victoria and Albert Museum; the 4th Bucharest Biennale in Romania; “Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories," MFA Boston; “alt_quilts," American Folk Art Museum, and “Luminous Flux 2.0: new + historic works from the digital art frontier,” Thoma Foundation Art House, NM, among others. She recently received a three channel video commission from LACMA, a billboard video commission from the City of West Hollywood, a 2020 Money for Women/Deming Award, and a 2019 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, the Museum of Arts and Design, and MacDowell. Her work is in the permanent collections of LACMA; Walker Art Center; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Getty Research Institute; the RISD Museum; the Toledo Museum, the Mint Museum; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art; the International Quilt Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public collections.

Statement: I work with quilting, a medium passed down by my maternal ancestors, from whom I learned how to create art from carefully saved scraps. I use undervalued and overlooked films as fabric and sew them together into new narratives. My sewing is a mending of history that foregrounds disregarded stories and spotlights hidden labor. I connect areas of cultural production that have institutionally been kept divided - art, film, and handcraft - in order to claim space for myself and others who have been left out of dominant narratives. My B&W, 35 mm film quilt and photography series utilizes film footage created by women cinema pioneers whose work from the late 1800s - early 1900s is woefully under-recognized. I re-print footage from their films, sourced from archives around the world, onto black and white 35 mm film stock, and then cut and sew the footage into configurations based on quilt motifs that are shown backlit by LED panels.

Stacey Beach @stacey_beach

Stacey Beach is a California artist who’s quilted textile works celebrate the marginalized traditions of textile, decorative and folk arts and their inextricable association with the maternal, the domestic and the feminine. Beach holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and her work has been exhibited at Uprise Art, Marin MoCA, Marrow Gallery, Kala Institute, California College of the Arts, and Kent State, among others. A series of prints based on her ink drawings are currently available through Design within Reach x Uprise NY collaboration. She has been selected for residency at Kala Institute and has been shortlisted for the Hopper Prize twice.

Statement: Female figures and floral motifs are central images in my quilted fabric works that celebrate the traditions of textile, decorative and folk arts and their inextricable association with the maternal, the domestic and the feminine. Through mining personal narrative, including surf culture, motherhood, upstate NY, and folk art, I explore ideas of decoration as subject.

Tana Quincy Arcega @quincy.tana

Born in Nebraska in 1977, Tana Quincy Arcega obtained a BFA from the University of Nebraska and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her mouth paintings were featured in Her Living magazine in the story, “Overcoming Obstacles". She was a recipient of the Resilient Artist Project fostering mental health and faith with Fuller Seminary, and a finalist for the Sustainable Arts Grant for parents. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her solo exhibitions include Re.riddle Gallery, CounterPulse, Red Poppy Art House, Incline Gallery in San Francisco, Bemis Underground in Omaha, Foundry Art Center in St. Louis, and Gene Space in Shanghai, China among others. She lives in San Francisco and is represented by Re.riddle Gallery.

Statement: My painting practice explores the immanent qualities of materials, rooting me downward. A coinciding contemplative practice probes upward towards transcendence. At the coalescence of these is a centeredness on compassion, healing, and able-ness. Though classically trained as a figurative oil painter, physical limitations prompted the use of alternative materials and mark-making approaches. Strangely, these limitations have greatly expanded my practice. I explore processes such as mouth painting, sewing, and extrusion painting using all kinds of media including building materials and industrial textiles. My visual themes always self-reference to give value and attention to the innate qualities of my humble materials which range from polyethylene drawer liner to wood glue. The verisimilitude of figurative painting plays out here in notions of mimicry and material rhymes. At its essence, my work challenges viewers to see the invisible qualities of the divine in our everyday surroundings.

Vanessa Woods @vanessa_woods_studio

Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art. Since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her artwork and films have been exhibited throughout the United States including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards including a Center for Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Her work has been published in The New York Times and Harpers, among others. Woods lives in Pacifica, CA with artist Josh Smith and their three children.

Statement: Vestiges (2017–), is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, sculpture, and 16mm films to interrogate the malleability of motherhood and its profound connections to boundaries and mortality. In the project, I investigate the tensions of motherhood while acknowledging its paradoxes. I show a body turned inside out and remade through my children’s bodies. I explore the extraordinary fact that the maternal body and mind are physically and biologically remade through the process of becoming a mother. I also examine the conflicts that live within maternal experience; the need to simultaneously hold on and let go of my children, to extend my body to them and reclaim it for myself, and the physical experience of being both embodied and disembodied. The work in Vestiges is highly iterative, it shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed, rebuilt, and adapting. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble. The range of visual strategies and the hybrid approach to image-making in Vestiges suggests that motherhood contains multitudes. Mothers move in tandem with their children, adapting to their evolving needs as they change and grow. At each stage of motherhood, the role of the maternal body, the mind, and the mother adapt. Vestiges illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience and pluralizes it, showcasing how maternal perspective can reshape current discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.

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.

Klea McKenna @klea_mckenna

Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, The Mead Museum of Art and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Klea is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE, an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and the late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy books in 2023.

Statement: In Rainbow Bruise I collapse several techniques I’ve developed over the last decade to create a hybrid approach to image-making at the intersection of photography, printmaking and painting. I misuse my medium by embossing photographic paper in an etching press then I cast raking light across its uneven surface. These works are then layered with painting and intaglio printing. While this work moves further from traditional photography, it still embraces its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s complicated history with detail and truth. I use these methods to depict semi-abstract, figurative beings with a confounding blend of concrete evidence and speculative fantasy. They are composed of a vocabulary of symbolic feminine forms: breasts, weighty curves and wombs; shapes that are derived from everyday materials like consumer packaging and unfolded cardboard boxes which creates an aesthetic that blends archeological artifacts with the die-cut curves of mass production.

Angie Wilson @Angiewilon00

Angie Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist working in textile-based sculpture, installation, social practice, interiors, and costume design. She lives in Oakland with her beloved child.

Statement: Angie Wilson is interested in the intimacy of textiles – as protective, sheltering, comforting, and expressive. Textiles as clothing and domestic objects signify identity, hold memory, and tell stories. Angie references weaving as a powerful metaphor for interconnectivity - of the universe, our communities, our bodies, and minds. In her work, she opens space for the narrative power of textiles to illustrate the interconnectivity and interdependence of all things.

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.