Mildred Howard is up to something. The legendary Bay Area artist, who was born in San Francisco in 1945, has organized three concurrent exhibitions of her work on both sides of the Bay under the title Collaborating With the Muses Part One. The work comes from the last two decades, and includes sculpture, photography and performance. But this is just the start of Howard’s vision for a resurgence in an art scene she’s participated in for decades, mostly as a cornerstone.

“I was talking with a friend and saying that I should just have my own quote, unquote biennale,” Howard says. “Since I work in a variety of media I wanted to showcase that.”

Locals will likely know Howard from her many public art commissions: a wall of blue glass on the Fillmore Street Bridge, featuring a poem by Quincy Troupe celebrating San Francisco’s jazz history; a large-scale gilded frame accentuating the industrial beauty of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard; 130 saxophones trumpeting an ode to Dizzy Gillespie at San Francisco International Airport; a question mark guarding the entrance to the San Leandro Public Library.

People may also know her from Pam Uzzell’s 2018 documentary Welcome to the Neighborhood which illustrated how gentrification could threaten the livelihood of even an artist as entrenched in the Bay Area as Howard. Her mother, Mable Howard, famously sued BART in 1968, forcing underground the train line that traveled through South Berkeley, preventing the destruction of her neighborhood. Then, nearly 50 years later in 2016, Mildred Howard was priced out of her Berkeley home.

But Howard hasn’t turned her back on the Bay Area, as the now-Oakland resident’s latest run of exhibitions attest. In shows in San Francisco and Oakland she showcases not only a number of artistic approaches to her brand of conceptual art, but a constellation of influences, including literature, music and the art community itself.

Anglim/Trimble, in Dogpatch, presents The Time and Space of Now: Moving Stills, a selection of photographic prints Howard created in collaboration with Magnolia Editions, who the artist has worked with since the late 1970s. The images, printed on scraps of wallpaper, are diffuse and shadowy stills from films Howard made when she was a teenager, documenting a trip to meet her relatives in the American South, shot on an 8mm film camera. There’s also an electric toy train making rounds on an oval track, its cars bearing the names of places from Baltimore to Fruitvale and the Mission, furthering the theme of a journey.

“I was so fascinated by that camera and the possibility that I could make a movie,” Howard says. “It was the vastness of those images that got to me.”

But this possibility, like many teenage flights of fancy, was soon forgotten. In 2021, Howard discovered the films in her late mother’s alligator handbag. A bronze sculpture of that handbag, sprouting angelic wings, sits in the center of the gallery, amidst the prints. In addition to the prints, Howard collaborated with Uzzell on a short film which debuted as part of Howard’s 2022 exhibition The Time and Space of Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

Selected sculptures from that ICA San José show are on view at 500 Capp Street, the Mission District arts foundation in the former home of David Ireland, an influential conceptual artist — and Howard’s graduate advisor.

The most striking aspect of the Capp Street show is how seamlessly Howard’s work blends into the environment of Ireland’s home, filled with his own sculptural interventions. Howard’s taxidermy hen hovers above a mound of oyster shells in the living room; her frying pan with a tiny square mirror affixed to the bottom protrudes from a stool, facing an audience of empty chairs in a closet; her small plastic sculptures of a butler and maid stand on a silver serving tray placed atop the comforter in one of the bedrooms.

Just as Ireland blurred the line between his home and exhibition space, the embedded nature of Howard’s work within the house blurs the boundary between artwork and inspiration, muse and museum, artist and community.

The most wide-ranging entry in Collaborating With the Muses comes in the form of a group exhibition at Oakland’s pt.2 gallery, furthering the emphasis underlying all three shows of community as a muse. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by Howard’s influences and contemporaries Squeak Carnwath, Jay DeFeo, Viola Frey, Martha Shaw and Robert Therrien, as well as a handful of Howard’s own sculptures. These houses made from glass bottles are smaller versions of a recurring motif in the artist’s practice, luminous metaphors for the fragility of belonging and an apt reminder that home is what you make it.

The centerpiece of the show is a cream-colored Schimmel piano, set in an apparently empty room. Look closer, and you can see the musical score for Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” applied with white vinyl to the gallery’s white walls, almost imperceptible. Performances are scheduled each weekend for the exhibition’s duration, featuring renowned jazz musicians Chris Brown, Jon Jang, Allison Lovejoy and Marcus Shelby.

The 1958 song is a roomy, two-chord progression, replete with rests. French composer Claude Debussy famously said that “music is the space between the notes.” Perhaps a similar case could be made for art.

Looking at art is to experience a synthesis of intent and interpretation, something that happens “between the notes.” It is a dissolution of ego, both on the part of artist and viewer, the product of which is inherently collaborative. Selflessness is central to Howard’s project: this “quote, unquote biennale” isn’t about her, but about her place within her larger artistic community, of which the viewers themselves are key figures.

Howard hopes that the dialogue will continue for years to come and extend beyond her personal practice. Collaborating with the Muses Part One is, as the titular qualifier implies, just the start of Howard’s plan.

“I’m doing part one and part two,” Howard says. “And hopefully in two or three years, someone will do part three, and four, and so on and take off running with it. It’s been quiet too long.”

Whether or not the project continues in the future, one thing is clear: Mildred Howard’s time is now.

‘Collaborating With the Muses Part One’ is on view at Anglim/Trimble (1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco), 500 Capp Street (San Francisco) and pt.2 gallery (1523 Webster St., Oakland), through Oct. 26, 2024.

“Painting is a ritual to confront the past and heal what is broken,” Mabel Valdiviezo says in the first moments of her film, Prodigal Daughter. “It reveals layers that the camera cannot capture and obscures what we would rather forget.”

Art is present throughout the documentary. It’s Valdiviezo’s only consistent anchor as she navigates stormy and uncertain waters. As a teenager growing up mired in the political turbulence of 1980s and ’90s Peru, she made experimental videos that helped her express ideas about politics and patriarchy. At the age of 25, when Valdiviezo fled the dictatorship that had just taken over her home country, she chose San Francisco as her destination because of its reputation as a “haven for artists.” After the artist found work dancing in the strip clubs of North Beach, she channeled her feelings about female power into her collages and paintings. And as Valdiviezo struggled with family trauma and resentments, she reframed photos from her past using painted embellishments.

Prodigal Daughter captures Valdiviezo as she returns to her family in Peru after 16 years of no contact. The journey of reconnection that she goes on with her parents, brother and centenarian grandmother is a swirling mess of painful confessions, guilt, forgiveness and healing. There are moments of culture clash too, as Valdiviezo tries to process old wounds with parents who would rather keep uncomfortable truths hidden behind closed mouths and locked doors. Valdiviezo’s more Californian sensibilities are simply not understood by the people who raised her.

Hanging over the film are the impossible decisions undocumented immigrants are forced to make. Valdiviezo first opted to cease all contact with her family because she believed they misunderstood and were ashamed of her. However, it’s clear that her prolonged disconnection from them was indelibly linked to her precarious legal situation in the U.S. Without any official status, Valdiviezo was unable to leave her life in America without being barred from returning to it altogether. The journey home to Peru is only possible after marriage to her Filipino American partner earns her a green card.

Prodigal Daughter offers jumping off points to explain Peru’s turbulent political history, and the resistance that sprang up around that. More details about the country’s rebel groups — including Shining Path and Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, as well as the punk rock subtes subculture — would have been a welcome addition here. Valdiviezo is far more interested in exploring her personal history than that of her home country, however. And that’s fair enough.

A fourth act twist brings the family closer together, inspires more honesty and prompts an exploration of lineage. In the end, it’s not just Valdiviezo who finds solace in making art. Her mother came to painting later in life, once her children were grown. Her style is different from her daughter’s and pays homage to her Incan roots, incorporating traditional Indigenous illustration, as well as Nazca lines. As the two women paint side by side, their paintbrushes build a bridge that finally obscures their differences.

By the time the once-estranged daughter and mother share exhibition space at San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, it’s clear that, when it comes to Valdiviezo’s life, art is a greater healer than words, international pilgrimages and perhaps, even this wonderful film.

‘Prodigal Daughter’ premieres at the Roxie Theater on Oct. 11, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. as part of the Cine+Mas San Francisco Latino Film Festival. It will also screen at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Nov. 2 at 2 p.m.

Without question, Robert Mappelthorpe is the photographer with which poet, writer and musician Patti Smith will always most closely be associated. As his working partner, lover and lifetime confidant, Smith beautifully chronicled their relationship in the award-winning memoir Just Kids; Mappelthorpe, for his part, shot the now-iconic cover portrait for Smith’s debut album, Horses.

Meanwhile, Smith’s relationship with photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who three years after Horses shot the cover for Smith’s commercial breakthrough Easter, is the subject of another book, Before Easter After (Rizzoli; $65). Combining Goldsmith’s striking color portraits with Smith’s poetry and reflections of the era, it chronicles a secondary but no less important relationship between Smith and the camera lens.

On the heels of Smith’s appearance at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park, she and Goldsmith appear Monday in a conversation moderated by KQED contributor Emma Silvers. Along with Goldsmith’s photography and the pair’s stories of a pivotal era, the night also marks the public reopening of the Calvin Simmons Theatre, located in Oakland’s historic Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, after a renovation.

Patti Smith and Lynn Goldsmith appear in conversation on Monday, Oct. 7, at the Calvin Simmons Theatre in Oakland. Details here.

The ancient drum beats of Palestinian folk music blared at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on a recent Thursday evening. Against a backdrop of a T-Rex skeleton, a hall of joyful people danced the dabke, and Najib Joe Hakim experienced a hint of hopefulness for the first time since October last year.

Hakim is an award-winning Palestinian American documentary photographer, artist and activist based in San Francisco. His work primarily focuses on social justice. But on special occasions, he takes on fun assignments like documenting Cal Academy’s Nightlife: Falastin, an event celebrating Palestinian culture last month.

“When I was there, I felt right. I felt happy. I felt the energy of life again,” Hakim says. “People would be joyful and appreciative of being together despite the elephant in the room.”

That elephant is Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which according to its health officials has killed over 41,800 people, mostly civilians, since Oct. 7, 2023. On that day, Hamas’ attack on Israel left about 1,200 people dead, according to the Israeli government. (The medical journal The Lancet estimates that there could be as many as 186,000 deaths in Gaza because of famine, communicable diseases and other consequences of the bombardment.)

The war has taken the lives of fellow artists Hakim knows and loves.

“I know one artist who’s been killed with her two sons, and two others whose homes and studios have been destroyed,” Hakim says. “So, it’s personal.”

Hakim was born in Beirut, Lebanon to Palestinian parents who fled during the 1948 Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel. He and his parents moved to the U.S. when he was just a toddler. Hakim was raised in New York City and then Washington, D.C. He arrived in the Bay Area in 1987, when he was in his early 30s, and has been here ever since.

One of Hakim’s award-winning projects, Home Away From Home: Little Palestine by the Bay, was something he dreamt of doing since he was young. The 2014 multimedia project features photographs and audio stories of 26 Palestinians across the Bay Area. “The goal of the project was to give Palestinians a voice to tell their own stories in their own words, and to humanize their experiences,” he says.

When Israel’s war in Gaza started last October, Hakim said he went through a period of self-isolation. “For the first two months after Oct. 7, I didn’t even leave my apartment except to get food,” he reflects. “Part of the reason for that is I think most of the people out there are living in Disneyland. They don’t seem to feel what’s going on in Gaza in the same way I do.”

Over the past year, Hakim has felt angry and frustrated. “People are on the streets. People are demanding a ceasefire,” he says. “But the U.S. government doesn’t represent us. The government does not represent the interests of humanity,” he said. “I’ve always known that free speech didn’t include speech about Palestine.”

Yet Bay Area residents’ solidarity with Palestinians through protests, education and activism has felt heartening, he says.

“I think those people realize that this isn’t just about Palestine,” he says. “We are all connected. We are all somehow victims and the result of the imperial world.”

In another one of Hakim’s projects, Palestine Diary, he shares photos and stories from his visit to Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank in the late ’70s, when he was in his early 20s. “I rediscovered them recently and I thought, ‘Wow, these are my pictures,’” he says.

The captions accompanying the photos are excerpts from a journal he kept at the time. “When I read the journal recently, it felt like letters that I had written to my future self were just delivered,” he wrote on his website.

In one entry in Palestine Diary, he shares an excerpt from his journal. “I never felt so at home anywhere as I do here,” it reads. “Every breath feels like a charge of energy. Life here for me is as natural as waking up in the morning. I walk to the Old City and get some warm knafeh and freshly squeezed carrot juice as if I’ve done it my whole life.”

When thinking about his role as a Palestinian American artist as the war rages on, he hopes he can continue to make art that shares the joy of his people. “I’m trying to spread the beauty,” he says, “of Palestinian culture and people.”

It felt appropriate to visit a show titled Call of the Void during an unrelenting heat wave. A deep, dark, cool nothingness was all my reptile brain desired as I walked down an unshaded stretch of Market Street.

While there wasn’t any physical relief inside 1599fdT (now relocated from Chinatown to 1912 Market Street), at least there was a kind of mental escape in the form of Laura Rokas and Erik Bender’s lime-hued show. This has been an important year for a certain slimy shade, but Rokas and Bender’s take on the color is less brat, more lime Jell-O, with flashes of green-as-otherworldly threat from 1979’s Alien.

Their work is a study in contrasts, and yet both artists exhibit an eye-catching attention to their surfaces. Rokas’ paintings on canvas, linen and paper employ an almost photorealist approach to found images. Bender is the abstractionist of the pair, with dark, very vertical paintings ruptured by organic slices of green.

As is often the case with art first seen on a screen, I was completely thrown by the scale of the work in Call of the Void. Some of Rokas’ framed paintings on paper are jewel-like: small, concentrated renderings of a dated Jell-O dish and a woman bent backward, exposing her throat. They’re eerie, compelling in their beautifully rendered detail, but their size somewhat conceals their power. By contrast, there’s no missing the impact of Coup de Fouet (“whiplash” in French), a portrait of a leather-clad dominatrix from the haughty lips down.

Fittingly, this 36-by-32-inch painting exerts an assured dominance over the show, even opposite Bender’s six-foot-tall stunner Soulbreaker. Rendered in cool gray-blues that capture the sheen of the figure’s jacket, Coup de Fouet is held taut by the curve of a switch. Such tension characterizes Rokas’ work throughout: a freeze frame of a cyclist’s padded rear end; a sleek bike brake waiting to be squeezed; a Jell-O dish sure to quiver as soon as it’s set upon the table.

Bender’s acrylic and oil paintings on canvas (and sometimes carved plaster) trade detail for layers and textures. Where Rokas’ greens seem to come from the oversaturated ink of ’70s printed matter, Bender uses the hue as a sickly warning color — too toxic to signal anything but “beware.” With loose brushwork, he conjures green plant shapes out of dark backgrounds, or gestures delicately at the fine filaments of a twisting, portal-like spiderweb.

In Circadia, his strongest contribution to the show, black and olive paint washes over another warning color: safety orange. A ghostly, sanded-down silhouette at the painting’s center is almost figurative — an orchid turned into a specter.

The call of the void is an intrusive, self-destructive thought. What if I jumped? What if I swerved? But the void is also the blank canvas, the empty work table, the clean expanse of a white gallery wall. While certain variables are shared between the artists in this show (both Bender and Rokas make paintings, both have leaned toward the chartreuse end of the spectrum), Call of the Void is more about the very different approaches the two have towards delightfully unsettling their viewers.

‘Call of the Void’ is on view at 1599fdT (1912 Market St., San Francisco) through Nov. 9, 2024.

When she thinks back to her childhood in Gaza in the late ’90s, Lara Aburamadan recalls spending her days hanging out and enjoying food with her family on sandy beaches, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea during hot, humid summers.

“Gaza is a small place. To drive from north to south it takes 25 minutes, and from west to east, 15 minutes,” she says. “It’s a small city, probably the size of San Francisco.”

Now based in Berkeley, Aburamadan is a visual artist, independent journalist and photographer. She is also the founder of Refugee Eye, an art studio on Valencia Street in San Francisco.

When she picked up a camera 10 years ago, those beaches and daily life in Gaza City became some of her first subjects. “I wanted to show the beauty of Gaza,” she says.

Yet life in a war-torn region made capturing beauty a privilege. The killings of her people back home motivated her to use her art and journalism skills for social change.

Aburamadan’s photos have been published in Time Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera and more. She has also written for The Atlantic and The New York Times.

In her 2012 piece for The New York Times, “Trapped in Gaza,” she recounts her visit to a film festival. Suddenly, an organizer interrupted the program to warn the audience of impending Israeli strikes, urging everyone to go home for safety. Aburamadan, her mother and young siblings listened to the sounds of bombs from inside their home for the next 48 hours.

“And all the while, we hear bombs. Bombs that bear autumn’s scent and winter’s chill. Bombs that batter. Bombs that kill. I still have waking nightmares of the bombs that tore through our sky nearly four years ago, when a classmate, Maha, lost her mother in an Israeli strike,” she wrote.

2014 marked another deadly year in Gaza, when the Israeli military killed 2,200 Palestinians, over half of whom were civilians according to a United Nations report. Aburamadan and her then-husband live-streamed the shelling from their 11th-floor apartment, sharing with the world what mainstream media wouldn’t.

“The point of our work, which we posted on Twitter and Facebook, was to make it more difficult for people around the world to say, ‘I didn’t know,’” she wrote in The Atlantic in 2015.

“The sound of Israeli drones incessantly hovering overhead is terrifying, but the bombs — and their promise to bring either an explosion or death — are worse,” she wrote.

Aburamadan and her then-husband moved to the U.S. as asylum seekers when they were both 24 years old. When she first arrived in the Bay Area in 2017, she struggled to connect and feel at home.

“I didn’t know people, I didn’t have friends or community,” she says.

In time, she eventually accepted this new phase in her life. “I’m a refugee in this new place. It’s okay not to find the familiarity now,” she told herself.

Her current work explores the social and political narratives of refugees and marginalized communities. Through Refugee Eye, she creates a space for refugee artists and photographers from all around the world to share their stories.

“I wanted to embrace my perspective as a refugee,” she says.

Earlier this year, she curated an exhibition at Refugee Eye called Gaza: Between Life and Loss, featuring photographs and illustrations by Palestinian artists, including work by popular Gaza street photographer Suhail Nassar and illustrator Bayan Abu Nahla.

“It’s been a beautiful journey to learn more about the art scene here in the Bay Area and connect with different refugee artists around the world,” Aburamadan reflects.

Having lived through multiple bombardments of Gaza, the war that began in October last year didn’t surprise Aburamadan. But it felt different this time. “In the first few months, my mind was constantly on Gaza,” she says.

“It was super stressful,” she adds. “My people are being killed everyday.”

Seeing protests and Palestinian flags in the streets of the Bay Area has made her feel less alone. But despite these efforts, she is disappointed that, after a year, nothing has changed.

“Protests have called for a ceasefire, but the bombing continues every day,” she says. “It’s even getting worse.”

Through her work, Aburamadan hopes to continue showing the world a different side of Gaza. “I want people to see Gaza as a beautiful place with genuinely kind people who don’t want wars and just want peace,” she says.

“I want my art to reflect who we are as a collective, proving that we exist and that we’re amazing.”

A world-famous artist in her era, and widely known as both an artistic and a social revolutionary, the American impressionist Mary Cassatt is too often absented from exhibitions in favor of impressionism’s leading men: the familiar Monet, Degas, Renoir and Cézanne. There are likely many reasons for this, sexism being one, and impressionism’s reputation as a movement of French painters being another. A third could be Cassatt’s subject matter — images of domesticity, children and motherhood — which even today are seen as female interests rather than subjects of artistic glory.

Curious then, as a new exhibition at the Legion of Honor underscores repeatedly, that Cassatt’s subject matter was seen as radical during her lifetime, and was a large part of her immense fame as an artist. Mary Cassatt at Work collects 99 paintings, drawings and prints by the artist and attempts to make a case for Cassatt as an industrious spirit who paid witness to the unseen labor of women. Undoubtedly she did, although I am not sure that this framing best does justice to the works collected in this show. Rather than addressing the economic value of so-called women’s work, Mary Cassatt at Work more compellingly engages the concentrated emotions behind that labor.

As the exhibition notes, Cassatt owed her career to the impressionists. The group offered her mentorship at a time when female artists were rarely supported — even Cassatt’s father, the prosperous banker Robert Simpson Cassatt, insisted that her artistic ventures be self-financed. Impressionism was a good place for a determined woman like Cassatt; its members strove to be egalitarian, involving women to a large degree and granting them a level of prominence absent in other artistic movements of the time.

Cassatt felt truly “independent” within impressionism, even if she had to carefully navigate social mores in order to expand notions of how women and girls could be portrayed in art. Part of her novel approach was to depict women actively shaping their own lives, rather than as static receptacles for the male gaze, like the nude figures in Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia. At the Legion of Honor, the opening galley prominently displays Cassatt’s sizable work In the Loge (1878), a clarion call to audiences that this is a show addressing the female gaze.

The painting fills its frame with an imposing female operagoer hungrily eying the stage through binoculars — her magnificence and authority dwarf a male audience member in the background who strains to ogle, coming off as comically puny. The show’s second gallery quickly follows this up with Driving (1881), which depicts a woman astutely taking the reins of a Parisian carriage, the coachman relegated to an afterthought in the back seat.

It is hard to imagine how unusual such work would have been in the late 19th century, so consider that these paintings were made 40 years before American women like Cassatt were permitted to vote, and at a time when women were widely disallowed from owning property by law. These images were also far more forward-thinking in their depiction of feminine authority than even the art of the other leading female impressionist, Berthe Morisot. As commentators have noted, Cassatt did not lack for courage, and even at times exhibited a recklessness with regards to her career and the subjects she pursued as an artist.

There were considerable consequences for Cassatt’s artistic choices. Her 1878 masterpiece Little Girl in a Blue Armchair was rejected from the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris — an enormous celebration visited by some 13 million people — for the crime of depicting a young girl at ease in an armchair. (Cassatt would later write that she was “furious” at the rejection.)

Tastemakers at the time were particularly affronted by the fact that the girl’s petticoats were visible and in disarray — lord have mercy. The work is now seen as a milestone for its sumptuous blues and daring composition, and for granting its young subject a previously unseen level of autonomy.

Less discussed but perhaps equally daring is Françoise in a Round-Backed Chair, Reading (c. 1909), found guarding the entrance to the exhibition’s final room. It shows a girl looking restless, eyes peering not into the book or toward the viewer but rather off and away, an expression of torpor on her face. A small but crucial difference distances this portrait from so many images of girls: she has agency. Françoise seems poised on the brink of adolescence, already tiring of the limitations inherent to the life offered to her. She looks as though she is in search of something more compelling to engage her attention.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair sits prominently in a gallery devoted to children and childcare, subjects Cassatt knew intimately, in spite of never having any children of her own. This is possibly Cassatt’s most important theme — The New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik has called her “the first to grasp the modern condition of mother and child,” going on to declare that “she discovered, or recorded, a new emotion in the world, the nearly adulterous, exhausting love with which middle-class women have come to address their babies.”

This emotion is visible in works like The Bath (1890–1891) and A Goodnight Hug (1880), the latter of which jolts the viewer like a bolt of lightning, evoking an astonishingly powerful moment of love between a mother and the child she embraces. Zigzagging streaks of mint and burgundy pastel form columns in the background, drawing the eye to the hug and describing the charged atmosphere of that physical connection. It’s easily one of the most striking images in the show, both for its use of abstraction and for the intense emotions it brings to life in the bodies of those who view it.

The show’s final gallery further refines the theme of childcare to focus on the “modern Madonna,” a series of images of mothers and children that hark back to medieval images of the Madonna and baby Christ. Cassatt drew on Botticelli’s Madonnas for her artistic inspiration, and following the Italian master, the works in this gallery show motherhood to an exacting, anatomical level of precision.

Looking at works like Baby John Nursing (c. 1908), Mother and Child (1905), or Maternal Caress (1896), one garners a sense of the powerful attention that mothers lavish on their young children. They are moments of intense privacy and intimacy in which the women in them seem to forget that they are the objectified sex, instead assuming a subjectivity of their own.

It’s the agency and independence of Cassatt’s subjects, be they young or old, that resonates for a modern viewer of Mary Cassatt at Work. Most compelling to me was not so much the labor being performed but how Cassatt evokes the emotional and perceptual intensity with which it was done. It’s this celebration of a female subjectivity in a world dominated by men that makes these works so lasting and resonant, and that speaks to the real value of labor that is still so often unaccounted for and trivialized. In Mary Cassatt at Work these intangibles are made real enough to feel, visible enough to examine.

‘Mary Cassatt at Work’ is on view at the Legion of Honor (100 34th Ave., San Francisco) through Jan. 26, 2025.

Inside Berggruen Gallery, at the opening of his first solo show in San Francisco since 2015, Barry McGee stood against the front wall, surrounded by a crush of 20 people. The gallery’s lights dimmed for closing time, but its large crowd stayed put: art renegades with skateboards, backpacks, sketchbooks and denim jackets, drinking Modelo and smoking blunts outside, and then another, far smaller contingent of obviously wealthy art-world people.

This is not a new dichotomy for Barry McGee. A globally known artist shown in major museums and biennials all over the world, McGee has retained the artistic approach that made him a key figure in the Mission School. His style has immediacy, and constancy; as a holdover from his graffiti days, he still prefers to work under pressure.

It’s a pivotal time for McGee. Having left the gallery Ratio 3 — now closed — and separated from his wife, he’s immersed himself in working, often until 4 a.m. “It’s one of my favorite places to go, and just get lost and in the work somehow,” he told me. “With this new independence, I have to ground myself every now and then, and know when to stop, or to go outside and breathe.”

At this moment, which, at age 58, he calls “a rebirth,” it was the right time to get McGee’s thoughts on the San Francisco underground, his unease at success in the art world, the current graffiti landscape and what his art practice looks like these days.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s been almost 10 years since your last big gallery show here in San Francisco. Why has it been so long?

I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve done things in other places, like Los Angeles. The San Francisco gallery scene has done the shift where young galleries are artist-run spaces now, and there’s John Berggruen and maybe two or three others that are true San Francisco galleries, that are still kind of putting along.

Someone had dropped out of a slot at John Berggruen, and I could tell they were anxious to have it filled. And somehow, in the art circuit, people know I can do something within two weeks. I’m like the go-to when someone drops out. So it was about two and a half weeks, a quick turnaround.

Over 20 years ago, John and I had done a project. So it seemed like the right fit, and a nice time to do it.

I was really impressed by just how much work is in this show. What made this show so robust? Have you felt more productive lately?

I like making artwork. It’s what I do. And it comes pretty easy to me. I like the pressure, obviously. If someone needs something done within a week, or better yet, like three days, I can usually get something assembled pretty quickly.

I want to get your thoughts on the current state of the art scene here in San Francisco. Rents are insanely unaffordable. SFAI has closed, and the only other art school here is struggling. And the underground, from which you sprung, is still alive, but, I think, nowhere near as strong. Are you worried about the future for artists in San Francisco?

I used to be worried more, but I feel like the underground art scene is maybe the strongest I’ve ever seen it, right now. It feels diverse, and completely detached from the system that’s in place for artists. Even the nonprofits that I grew up on, like New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, the Luggage Store — from art school, you’d get handed fairly softly to these nonprofits to show your work, or to help you develop your work, or write grants. But now it feels like that’s completely eliminated.

So from what I’ve seen, it’s just kids just having shows in garages, or in any space they can find. It feels good in the best way possible, like it’s not for the commerce. I mean, it’s always good to sell something, or for someone to love something enough to buy it. But it feels like it’s coming from a really honest place that I haven’t seen for a long time.

It sounds like what you’re saying is, even in what was considered underground circles in the ’90s, there was an apparatus through smaller nonprofits to be in the system. And now people are saying, “We’re going to do our own thing, we don’t need you.”

Yeah, I come from the generation where there were still NEA grants. Like, you could write grants, and a lot of times you could get them. And now that’s not there anymore.

I see shows that are as good as any gallery at, like, Adobe Books, or garages in Daly City. I think artists always know how to get the work out there. When the system’s not in place, or if they never grew up with the system, the kids will just do it naturally. They’ll find the place for it. They’ll do it outdoors if they have to. Some of the best shows I’ve seen were in outdoor abandoned spaces, where they just do it for one night and bands play.

I think it’s going to be a great couple of years coming up. And in my honest opinion, it feels like nothing I’ve seen before. Which is always a good thing in the arts.

I walked to your opening past YBCA and SFMOMA, these giant institutions that have been criticized for being more about money than about presenting Bay Area art. And it was great to walk down the block and turn the corner, and see so many people spilling out on the sidewalk, and be like, “Yes! Look at this happening, in such close proximity!”

Yeah, that was nice. I mean, I think I understand the dilemma they’re in. They can’t be as spontaneous. Their decisions are like five years out that they’re making. So the art can be completely stale by the time it’s on the wall, or it’s not what kids are into. That’s how it was when I used to go to the museum, even when it was on Van Ness, in the old building. There was nothing that ever spoke to me, or connected. There’s fantastic museums in this country, but I feel like San Francisco’s a little bit still in New York or whatever the latest fashion is with artists.

You mean adhering to national trends rather than having a finger on the pulse of the Bay Area?

I feel like the Oakland Museum does a much better job being in touch and in tune with the community. I think SFMOMA’s gotten a lot better. But I don’t know. I’m not running that place. I know they’re trying.

At your opening, you were surrounded, filling sketchbooks and drawing on skateboards for fans and friends. And just 10 feet away was a price list that ranges from $6,000 to $250,000. I wondered: Do any of your old friends or people from the early Mission scene give you a hard time for essentially being too successful?

They should, for sure. I mean, I’ve had mild success. I’m aware of it. I know John Berggruen is a blue chip gallery. I know that they sell work that’s much more expensive, and historically sits in art history in a much cleaner way than my work would. So that’s part of the fun of it.

You mean people talking shit about your success is part of the fun of it?

No, there’s truth to that! I mean, the idea of success in America is a very, very peculiar thing. I’m super uncomfortable with it. I know what I need to get by, and to make everything happen to keep my studio afloat. I wish I had a little more success — it would make things easier at this age — but it is what it is.

Obviously you have to sell stuff to keep afloat, but success to me is not being a pig about it, and not screwing people over to get ahead. All the principles that were instilled in me at a younger age.

You’re one of the few visual artists I’ve talked to who seems conflicted about it. It’s refreshing that you acknowledge that tension.

The idea of success in America is just insane. It’s like a successful war somewhere, you know, “a successful operation.” That idea is disgusting to me. I’m into the whole community rising up, ideally, in a perfect world. That’s what happened with graffiti. It started with a few thousand kids, and now it feels like 100,000 kids, worldwide, that are interested in having something to say, and doing it on their terms, for better or for worse. I’m not a big advocate for everything that’s out there, but it’s grown in this way that’s both beautiful and scary at the same time.

Why do you say it’s scary?

Sometimes I look at it and I’m just like, “This is insane, how kids are hanging off of buildings and rappelling off of upper decks of bridges just to get their name out there.” It’s daunting. That’s what you have to do today to get recognized. I mean, this is coming from someone that doesn’t even do graffiti anymore, but I still look at it all the time, and I’m still enamored by it. But you have to be rappelling off a building or hanging off a ledge, and making your final piece look like you’re not twitching or shaking.

You mentioned lifting up the community, and it made me think of the act of giving over space in your exhibition to others, in the downstairs room, which seems to be a tradition for you. Why do you do that? Why do you say, “I’m going to cram this with hundreds of small framed works and photos by my friends?”

As I get older, a solo show is the epitome of the things that I don’t like in art. It doesn’t feel right to command that much space, or to have your name on that much square footage. My favorite shows are always group shows, or shows in a community center or bookstore, where it just looks good. And that’s one of the few things you can control in art, while you’re alive, is how you want your art to look. I like the way it looks when you have all that different visual energy in one room, sitting next to each other. I hate to say it in this way, but it feels healing to have that much visual information in a room. It feels warm, and inclusive. It feels the opposite of how the upstairs feels, with all the white walls and space, and the formula of selling artwork.

Is there a particular piece down there that you were especially happy to include?

John was kind enough to let us pull any of the artwork that he had in his inventory, which included these amazing Philip Gustons from the ’60s. There’s a Kiki Smith, who, when I was in art school, she was the blue chip artist at the time. And then there’s some Robert Crumbs in there that are two-sided, which I probably took out of a sketchbook, that are sitting next to some of my degenerate art friends. When I have the opportunity, it’s amazing to be able to put the work together like that, when it doesn’t belong, and when physically, it can’t happen in any other situation.

I like it as a sort of egalitarian equalizer. You have R. Crumb right next to Bozo Texino, you know? And, like, what really is the difference?

There’s no difference. They all hang equally in my world. I’ve studied line my entire life, and I like the Bozo Texino line just as much as Philip Guston’s. It’s just that one’s on a freight train, and one’s sitting in the vault of a museum for years and years, without people being able to see it.

There’s a story a lot of people have heard about you, about quietly slipping your art into the piles of amateur art at thrift stores around the Mission, so people who stumble upon it can buy it for, like, 50¢. Do you still do that at all?

I don’t do that anymore. But I do work under aliases, which is fun, to do something similar, under aliases. Where you just leave stuff, or have a cafe show — that style, where it feels more detached from myself.

Detached from Barry McGee, the personal brand that you probably never wanted to be a personal brand?

I definitely don’t want to be a personal brand, but yeah, it feels detached from that, which I like. That’s what graffiti is still good for. I like that you can still write a political statement about something, or about a shitty situation, along a wall, and nobody really knows who did it. Which I feel is one of the last great things. It’s amazing what a 99¢ can of spray paint can achieve still.

There’s someone close in my neighborhood in the Mission, an old anarchist type, that spray paints on bedsheets, ties shoes on the bottom and throws it over the freeway overpass. They get the message out there for the traffic coming into the city. And it looks good, it gets their point across, it gets you to think, and it sits there for a couple days before the city workers take it down. I like that crude, old-fashioned approach. It’s built into the DNA of San Francisco, a little bit. People in the Bay Area know how to get their point across, to get their dissatisfaction across in efficient ways. It’s better and faster than the internet, I feel like.

It seems like you’re in a prolific stage — what’s next for you?

Probably some things that you wouldn’t know that I did, for sure. I feel like I’m an activist in that way. And I’m mad that I still am, at 58. Because from 17 ’til now, it’s been nonstop protests with very little change. I understand change takes a long time, but there’s nothing that I could gauge in my lifetime that was just like, “Wow, that worked. That changed something.” Which makes me think that history just completely repeats itself, and so you have to do it constantly.

‘​​Barry McGee: Old Mystified’ is on view through Nov. 7, 2024, at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. Details here.

The employees of NIAD Art Center, a Richmond studio serving artists with disabilities, announced Tuesday morning that they will form a union.

NIAD Unidad will be affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 57, Cultural Workers United, a union representing museum, library and zoo workers. AFSCME Council 57 also represents workers at sister studios Creative Growth in Oakland and Creativity Explored in San Francisco, both of which unionized this year.

After NIAD workers delivered a letter of intent to executive director Amanda Eicher Tuesday morning, the organization’s board executive committee voted unanimously to recognize NIAD Unidad.

“We look forward to working with NIAD’s union as the process unfolds,” Eicher wrote in an email to KQED.

Worker priorities outlined in the letter include a living wage; an independent human resources department; the ability to build a “viable, long-term career” at NIAD; transparency; and the right to form a union without retaliation. The majority of 35 eligible staff members have signed a union card, according to studio facilitator Kate Laster.

“All of us cherish the longevity of NIAD artists’ careers and we are committed to their overall well-being,” the letter reads. “We recognize the importance of stability and continuity of care, and we want to work alongside these artists for the long haul. To do this, we believe that a union is necessary to foster a work environment that allows staff to build sustainable careers at NIAD.”

In an interview, lead studio facilitator Liam Golden, who has worked at NIAD for over a decade, said that he and his colleagues have a good relationship with leadership. Unionizing, he said, is an extension of the progressive values that guide NIAD’s workplace culture.

“We just felt that it was time to take the step to show that art workers and progressive studios are essential members of communities,” said Golden, “and should be supported and feel like their workspaces are ones that have accountability, respect and also longevity.”

Longevity is important for workers like studio facilitator and community programs assistant Ocean Escalanti, who has worked at NIAD for three years. She says that while there’s a core group of staffers who’ve been at NIAD for 10 years or longer, other employees have left because of the current pay rate and challenges of the job. In addition to assisting artists on their creative projects, many NIAD employees do care work such as helping artists with mobility issues during meal times and restroom breaks.

“It can be very emotionally and physically demanding,” she said. “I think a lot of folks might find that, to do [our] work at our given pay rate and benefits, it’s harder to function in this way for a long period of time.”

NIAD, Creative Growth and Creativity Explored were founded by artist Florence Ludins-Katz and psychologist Elias Katz in the 1970s and ’80s. Since, dozens of like-minded progressive art studios have opened around the nation. The three Bay Area studios share a mission but operate independently of one another, save for occasional collaborations like the recent SFMOMA exhibition Art Knows No Bounds.

“The Bay Area is where it all got started,” said Golden. “So I think it’s important [for us] to be leaders not only for our local community, but for other national and international progressive art studios.”

For Creativity Explored union member Brittnyana Pierro, unionizing is “an opportunity for us to build a rapport that we haven’t had before.”

Now that AFSCME Council 57 will soon represent workers at all three Bay Area studios, NIAD staffers say they hope for more collaboration to address the unique challenges of their field. Workers at Oakland Museum of California also joined AFSCME Council 57 this year, joining a wave of unionization efforts nationwide.

“We just see a really big need for this stuff right now,” said Escalanti. “And it seems like it’s kind of catching a lot of cool uptick in how artists are able to have equal pay and a livable wage.”

One of the great joys of visiting museum exhibitions, especially retrospectives, is the possibility of discovering something new about an artist you think you know well. (An uncharacteristic plexiglass sculpture in an Andy Warhol show was particularly destabilizing for me.)

Even more thrilling is taking a chance on an artist you’ve never heard of — and getting your socks knocked off.

I have a feeling I’m not going to be the only one having their first encounter with Tamara de Lempicka, whose incredible life story (and savvy self-marketing) could overshadow the work of a less assured artist. At the de Young, her first American museum retrospective is a stylish, persuasive argument for her rightful place in interwar art history, as well as a fascinating look at how her glamorous career ended. Turns out it’s possible for someone who once defined modernity to fall out of step with their own time.

The chronologically arranged show begins with Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, the artist’s first of many identities. Born in 1894 to Polish parents who converted from Judaism to Christianity before her birth, she enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, including frequent trips to France and Italy. In 1916, in Saint Petersburg, she married Tadeusz Lempicki, a Polish lawyer with ties to aristocratic Russian families. Unlike many in their circle, they initially stayed put during the 1917 revolution, but after Tadeusz was imprisoned by the Soviet secret police, Lempicka and their daughter Kizette fled for Paris, eventually securing his release.

It was only in Paris that de Lempicka began her artistic career, in part out of financial necessity. She quickly surpassed her tutors. At the de Young, her early still lifes, life drawings and studies of renaissance art are made of fluid graphite lines — foundational compositional elements that bring an angular grace to her oil paintings. Her drawings of sculptures, especially, hint at her tendency to render flesh as a mass of cold, idealized forms. Eyes are cloudy or glassy, like the blank, convex surfaces of polished marble.

1920s Paris was a heady time for de Lempicka, who soon established herself in artistic and expat circles and exhibited in numerous salons. She also did a lot of cocaine, frequented clubs and bordellos, took valerian to fall asleep, had affairs, and painted while listening to Wagner at full volume. (In 1927, seemingly fed up, Tadeusz left on a business trip to Poland and did not return.)

de Lempicka developed a unique amalgamation of renaissance, neoclassicist, cubist and avant-garde styles. The timing was right. In 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris, mainstreamed the Art Deco aesthetic: luxury and glamour paired with a belief in technological progress. Many of de Lempicka’s portraits of modern aristocracy depict her sitters against backgrounds of prismatic grays that later give way to towering skyscrapers.

Even some of her most organic shapes, like a girl’s ringlets, end up looking like the curled shavings of machined metal, so extreme are her transitions from light to dark. de Lempicka’s paintings pack high drama into tight compositions, and the de Young has appropriately lit and spaced some of the show’s most stunning paintings into vignettes of their own.

Despite her singular painting style, de Lempicka had plenty of muses and places from which she routinely borrowed imagery. Of the former, Kizette was one (introduced throughout her life as de Lempicka’s sister); her neighbor and lover Ira Perrot was another. Illustrated wall text makes it easy to compare renaissance paintings or classical sculpture with de Lempicka’s own takes on these sources. Helen Dryden, the most famous and well-paid fashion illustrator of the time, was obviously a role model.

de Lempicka’s women are stony, impeccably dressed, twisted into dynamic poses and — when nude — sensuously rendered. In a section of the show devoted to her sapphic nudes, La belle Rafaëla (1927) depicts a woman lost in her own pleasure, her body a smooth expanse of curves and shadows.

Blame World War II and her relocation to the United States, blame her depression and a turn toward religious imagery, but de Lempicka’s work was never quite the same after she left Paris in 1939. Her final assumed identity was that of a high-flying, party-throwing “baroness with a brush.” She married Baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh in 1934, a collector whose mistress she painted in the late ’20s and soon replaced.

American critics praised her “flawless technique,” the visual art equivalent of saying a writer is “good on a sentence level” (skilled, but ultimately, not great). Even so, the final rooms of the de Young’s exhibition come as a shock. The colors are off, her deep shadows go missing and the subject matter is all over the place. At the Opera (1941) looks like it was made by someone else: the garish portrait of a frilly-dressed woman is a far cry from the languid, androgynous coolness of Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush (1929).

Country still lifes, paintings of peasants — none of it sticks. After the war, she posed for fashion photographer Willy Maywald in her Parisian apartment, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Clearly, she was no longer au courant.

Somewhere between countries, identities and world wars, de Lempicka lost touch with the fickle currents of the art world. By the 1960s, after several failed attempts to reestablish her career, she retreated into the society pages of Houston and New York. But before she died in 1980, she did experience a rediscovery of sorts. As interest in Art Deco grew, her work was included in shows chronicling the ’20s and ’30s. The first scholarly publication on her work came out a few months after her death. Ever the diva, she decreed that her ashes be scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl.

Despite the sleekness and sensuality of her strongest work, there’s no tidy way to tell de Lempicka’s story (a recent Broadway musical tried and failed), which may be part of the reason why she wasn’t part of my art historical education. I, and I’m sure many others, missed out. As curators Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori diligently demonstrate, she was a rigorous and inventive artist, worthy of both this show and the substantial catalog that accompanies it.

While efforts like this push her name closer to the international renown she always sought, the most immediate use of this show is as a master class in self-fashioning. Anyone seeking a lesson in louche disinterest — and the poses that best convey a sense of unattainable cool — need look no further than de Lempicka’s modern women.

‘Tamara de Lempicka’ is on view at the de Young Museum through Feb. 9, 2025.

In Allegedly the worst is behind us, a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, the 12 included artists, many of them living and working in the Bay Area, use their art as an archive of family or community history. Rather than gathering text or statistics, their work portrays the individuals and places involved, to affecting and poignant results.

Allegedly includes textiles, paintings, installations and video, all addressing family lineage. In Arleene Correa Valencia’s 25 Estrellas: Sueños Para MiHija / 25 Stars: Dreams For My Daughter, an American flag creates a portrait of a young man holding his daughter. In May and Mik Gaspay’s sculptural quilt, Enrile House, the mother and son collaborators reimagine a former home in the Philippines. And in Razan AlSalah’s short video your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba we hear a woman’s voice as she wanders the streets of Haifa via Google Maps, looking for her former home and her son.

The pieces reek of desire — both to heal the past and to bring about a brighter future. They range in tone from devastating to hopeful; all invite the viewer to join in those emotions. The title of the exhibition, curated by the ICA San José’s Zoë Latzer, comes from the first line of a poem by Amanda Gorman, “Ship’s Manifest,” about trying to move on from trauma by dealing with it, rather than ignoring it.

One line of the poem displayed as wall text in the gallery reads “For what is a record but a reckoning?”

Tricia Rainwater’s a kanomi: my kin/my family is certainly calling for a reckoning. Rainwater’s mobiles, made of cloth strips with metal jingles at the ends, represent missing Indigenous girls and women. Visitors are encouraged to walk through the sculptures, turning the record into an experience rather than just an observation.

Rainwater has also hung posters of 39 missing women on the gallery wall. What’s particularly powerful about this installation is the way the posters pull the women out of a faceless mass of horrible statistics. Personal details on the posters, including what the women were last seen wearing, underscore that these are individuals, and something terrible happened to one woman, then another, and then another.

Like Rainwater’s installation, Trina Robinson’s Liberation Through Redaction also asks for attention to be paid. Reaching back, she has intervened in the archive to restore dignity to her enslaved ancestor. Robinson’s presentation is formal, with a rammed earth pedestal surrounded by dried pampas grass and goldenrod. On top of the pedestal, she has replicated a will that states when her great-great-great grandfather would be freed. Robinson has crossed out all references to her ancestor’s enslavement, so that only “the man … Martin … free” is left.

Paola de la Calle’s work similarly honors a family member — this one known to her, but gone too soon. Her beautiful, dreamy textile, Tio Jaime (Portrait of A Banana Farmer), contains both personal and cultural markers. It’s a portrait of her uncle, who died of cancer possibly caused by pesticides sprayed on banana crops in Colombia. Text on the portrait reads “anoche sone con un mundo donde estabas aqui,” translated as “last night I dreamed of a world where you were here.”

The second line of Gorman’s poem, “Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow,” suggests a pivot from the past toward the future. That’s where Oakland artist Demetri Broxton is looking in his piece A Star is Born, small boxing gloves covered with shells, mirrors and beads that reference his Creole and Filipino heritage. In the accompanying wall text, Broxton writes that his message here is lighthearted: “All of us are stars and living our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

It’s a delicate balance — acknowledging the past, but also our distance from it — that Shirin Towfiq skillfully achieves in her video installation, My Mother Came in the Rain. The work stems from photo albums her family lost when they fled Iran during the 1979 revolution. Through an improbable series of events involving an unrelated Towfiq making an estate sale purchase, the images were reunited with her family 40 years later.

Towfiq had no memories of seeing her mother smile when she was growing up, but in the albums, her mother is a joyful teenager. The video she presents in Allegedly contains those images, along with footage of the family dancing when they arrived in Germany after leaving Iran.

Towfiq has created a comfortable viewing zone at the ICA San José, with a shelf of cardamom tea and Persian sweets mounted above handmade beanbag chairs. The video projects onto a textile collage rather than a plain white wall, interrupting the images and echoing the gaps in family history.

Pieces like this, and the show as a whole, drive home how effective art can be in conveying a broader spectrum of human experience. With the purposeful glitches in her video, Towfiq evokes her family’s fractured history in a way words cannot. Similarly, a news report about missing Indigenous women could never be as personally affecting as walking through Rainwater’s installation. These artworks of Allegedly the worst is behind us are now part of an alternate record, carried within each viewer, even if the reckonings they seek haven’t yet arrived.

‘Allegedly the worst is behind us’ is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José (560 South First St., San José) through Feb. 23, 2025.

On Tuesday night in Oakland, about 70 artists — mostly in their 20s and 30s, with some as old as 80 — filed into a small storefront near Fruitvale BART. In attendance were Stanford students who had participated in the pro-Palestinian campus encampment, protest drummers, political poets, documentary filmmakers, muralists and choreographers. Emory Douglas, graphic artist for the Black Panther Party, joined the gathering too.

As Israel’s U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza continues, these creatives gathered at the Oakland Liberation Center, an education and event space run by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, for the first exploratory Bay Area meeting of Artists Against Apartheid. The goal of Artists Against Apartheid, a loose national coalition, is to use creative work to shift dehumanizing narratives about Palestinians, and support their resistance against oppression.

Curator and arts educator Nora Boyd, one of the volunteers behind the event, kicked off the evening by sharing her observations about the structure of the art world, and how it supports the interests of the ultra-wealthy.

“Like many of you, I’ve been involved in the struggle for Palestinian liberation for years,” she said. “And I think a lot of us have felt this: We just want to connect the inspiring and fulfilling work that we do in the arts with the justice, urgency and absolute rightness of this struggle. … We have these voices as artists, but we don’t have the spaces to use them for what we want.”

Boyd shared some background information about how Artists Against Apartheid began. Last year, at an activist hub in New York called The People’s Forum, artists penned an open letter pledging to use their work to support Palestinians, who “face brutal and humiliating conditions” that have “earned Israel the designation as an apartheid state by human rights organizations across the globe,” the letter reads.

Over 15,000 artists — including celebrities like Kehlani, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Lil Yachty — have since signed the letter, and nine regional chapters of the group have formed in Los Angeles, Chicago and other U.S. cities.

A musician and organizer from Palestinian Youth Movement, who identified themself as Salma T., spoke to the group about how creative work in the West is treated as a product for consumption, and often viewed as separate from social movements.

Art is “the quickest way to reach people because you take these complex ideas, these political analyses, these big positions, and you are synthesizing in a way that makes people feel,” said Salma. “And that’s a really, really powerful thing. … I’m really proud and excited to be part of the inception of this space here in the Bay for us to organize together.”

The artists then grabbed snacks, colored pencils and construction paper and split into groups of five to eight people. Prompts appeared on the projector, and people of different ages, ethnicities and artistic disciplines discussed how the witnessing of mass killings of Palestinian civilians has shifted the way they view their role as artists.

Indeed, Artists Against Apartheid met during a devastating week of news from Gaza. On Monday, an Israeli airstrike hit a tent camp at a hospital where displaced Gazans were sheltering, and footage spread on social media of four people burning alive. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis, according to the Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 42,000 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Recently, reports have surfaced of mass starvation and stray dogs eating decomposing bodies in the streets of Gaza.

“It’s been over a year since Oct. 7, but this genocide has been happening for many, many years,” said jo “love/speak” cruz of the hip-hop collective Audiopharmacy. “As someone who comes from a place that has experienced colonization itself, the Philippines, I feel like [it’s important to] not only to raise awareness, but to really activate our communities to push policies and elect people that are really going to understand that it is through this liberation of Palestine that we’re all going to be able to be free.”

Emory Douglas, who served as the Black Panthers’ Minister of Culture, read to the group from his Political Artist Manifesto, a collection of 12 guidelines he wrote for young artists. His advice included to “create art of social concerns that even a child can understand” and “be prepared if necessary to defend and explain what you communicate in your art.”

Douglas was one of 50 artists and organizers who recently debuted a collaborative mural connecting social struggles in Oakland to those of Gaza and the West Bank. In an interview, he said that in the past year, he’s ramped up work commenting on the Palestinian struggle. “The focal point being ‘made in America’ in relationship to the bombs and everything that’s happening,” he said.

Looking out approvingly onto the young people engrossed in animated discussions, Douglas added, “They continue to be inspired to be informed, enlightened. And they’ll figure it out as they evolve.”

As breakout groups wrapped up, artists shared out to the larger group. Some talked about ideas for art protests, while others strategized around sharing skills. Organizers laid out plans to meet monthly and invited attendees to join a Telegram group chat.

“Being in a warm, supportive, multigenerational space dedicated to learning and to liberation, truly, I could just feel the optimism,” said a Stanford student, who asked that her name be withheld due to disciplinary action she is facing at her university for participating in the protest encampment. “As a student, I just felt like there’s so much knowledge and experience around me.”

It’s difficult to suppress a dazed smile as the elevators open on the seventh floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The sensory bombardment is immediate: speakers play the sounds of a cheering crowd; split-flap displays clatter above; a giant image of 1985 Bay to Breakers runners surrounds an arched entryway; and white stripes peel off in different directions across the gallery’s wood floor.

The effect is multipurpose gym, funhouse, cacophony. In other words: museum show as stadium experience. Get in the Game, SFMOMA’s largest-ever exhibition, contains over 200 artworks and design objects spread across the length of a football field. Paintings and photographs hang beside surfboards and tennis rackets. Notable sports moments loop jumbotron-style on overhead screens. Visitors can even play select artworks, like Gabriel Orozco’s elegant but very difficult four-sided “ping pond table” or noted prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s ultralong foosball setup.

Organized thematically into five zones that address fandom, inherent drama, boundary-breaking, less organized sports and “the dark side,” the show revels in bold accent colors and curves, courtesy of exhibition design by fuseproject and One Hat One Hand. Even the intro text invites a kind of free-for-all viewing experience, giving visitors permission to zigzag around, “searching out your favorite sport or the artworks that most interest you.”

There’s plenty of beautiful work in the show, along with truly interesting displays of how athletic gear has evolved over time. But Get in the Game may be difficult for those used to a quiet, contemplative art experience. This is not an art show so much as it is a sports show with art in it. It feels like the kind of blockbuster exhibition Yerba Buena Center for the Arts might have put on in its early years, or that the Oakland Museum of California Art might stage today.

Which is not to say it’s not a rewarding visiting experience. Get in the Game contains, even for the sports-averse, something for everyone. My personal highlights — Emma Amos’ dynamic textile Hurdlers I, David Hammons’ exquisite Basketball Chandelier, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 90-minute Zidane video or any of Ernie Barnes’ exquisite paintings of bodies in motion — will not be everyone’s favorites. Another visitor might be equally thrilled to see Nikes or what I can only assume are rare trading cards of Joe Montana and LeBron James.

There’s a breeziness to the entire undertaking that is refreshing to see in a museum that has struggled to connect with larger audiences. SFMOMA is taking a big chance with this show, and clearly hopes that going all in for sports will bring audiences all in to SFMOMA. But that breeziness also means that some of the substance, backstory and art historical significance of the artwork is subsumed by more generalized object descriptions — or simply not mentioned at all.

It’s a missed opportunity, I believe, to show a vitrine of Cary Leibowitz’s snarky, queer sports paraphernalia and not write anything — at all! — about the artist’s practice, the complicated past and present of queerness in sports, or the power of self-effacing humor. Another miss: showing Buck Ellison’s large-scale photograph Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990, a golfing scene that oozes preppy privilege, without explaining that this is a group of models posed to depict white, wealthy society. (Also, he grew up in Marin, we of all audiences should get access to this context.)

Maybe the curators of Get in the Game (the museum’s Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher and Katy Siegel, and independent curator Seph Rodney) didn’t want to burden viewers with too much heaviness among the game playing. But then the gallery’s fifth and final zone (depending on how you zigzag, of course) lays that idea to rest.

The “Mind and Body” section, is the literal dark side of sports (walls are painted black, the bright colors banished). We see depictions of the intense pressure to succeed, the life-altering injuries and even deaths that sports can bring about.

Here, a small acrylic painting by Rosalyn Drexler is one of the most powerful pieces in the exhibition. Six orange-tinted images on a black background show a sequence of stills as if on a television screen: the fatal 1962 boxing match between Benny Paret and Emile Griffith. After 29 consecutive punches, Paret fell into a coma and died 10 days later.

It’s the scale of Death of Benny “Kid” Paret that is so devastating. In a show filled with stadium-sized ideas, Drexler’s canvas is as tiny — a bite-sized piece of sports trivia — as a human life should never be.

Tonally, it’s difficult to reconcile works from this zone (which includes Savanah Leaf’s completely unexplained sci-fi-tinged videos) with the more buoyant, celebratory pieces in the rest of the show. Acknowledging the darkness is a choice that every fan will have to make at some point. And at Get in the Game, it’s darkness and critique that yield some of the most rewarding viewing experiences.

‘Get in the Game’ is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Oct. 19, 2024–Feb. 18, 2025.

In a surprise announcement, Headlands Center for the Arts has named Louisa Gloger as the next executive director of the 42-year-old Marin artist-in-residence program. Gloger, who is currently executive director of the Bolinas Museum, will begin her new role on Nov. 1.

Prior to today, Headlands had not announced the job opening. Gloger told KQED the Headlands board sought her out for the role. At the Bolinas Museum, board members will step into temporary full-time roles while they launch a search for their next executive director.

Current Headlands Executive Director Mari Robles has held the position for nearly four years; she was hired after an international search in 2020. The nonprofit thanked Robles for the “passion, commitment and heart” she brought to the organization.

Robles confirmed that she is staying in the Bay Area. “We faced a lot, including COVID closures and a changing arts landscape, but I’m very proud of my time at Headlands,” she told KQED. “I think Louisa’s an amazing leader and I’m excited to see what her chapter will look like.”

Robles’ tenure was marked by the creation of two new fellowship programs, a rebrand and new funding sources, but also by layoffs and fundraising shortfalls. In February 2024, Headlands laid off five full-time staff members in a move Robles referred to as “cocooning.” There are currently 13 staff members listed on the organization’s website.

“It’s been a difficult year, but I feel like we have been working together,” Robles said. “We are in the midst of our fall cohort of residents. We have continued to put on exhibitions like the one we did with Simone [Bailey], so I think the whole staff feels very proud about what what we’ve been able to present even with the slimmed-down staffing model.”

Gloger acknowledged that the landscape is tough for nonprofits right now, citing the closure of the San Francisco Arts Institute and California College of the Arts’ recent layoffs. “This year, whether it’s the election or the insecurity of people with what’s happening in our world, fundraising really has shrunken back,” she said.

But Gloger is optimistic that she has the leadership and fundraising experience to bring stability to Headlands, after nearly three yearsat the Bolinas Museum. While there, she curated the notable shows Helina Metaferia: All Put Together and Arleene Correa Valencia: Llévanos Contigo / Take us with you, grew the museum’s permanent collection and increased staff numbers. Gloger also currently serves on the board of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

In December 2023, Headlands signed a new 30-year lease with the National Parks Service, which owns the campus of former military buildings, now converted into studios and residences. That agreement includes significant financial requirements to maintain and repair the buildings the art center occupies. In 2023, Headlands’ operating budget was $5.2 million, up from $4.1 million in 2022. Robles told KQED in February that approximately 40% of these added expenses came from the unexpected cost of lead remediation in the studio building; they also repainted the gym last year. Both represented deferred maintenance on the campus.

“I’m looking to come in and be thoughtful and pragmatic,” Gloger told KQED. “I want to make sure that artists are our priority. Our priority is not going to be fixing up buildings. We’re going to be really focusing on programs. We’re going to be focusing on community engagements.”

Gloger says she’s good at raising money for things she wholeheartedly believes in. “I have dedicated my life to the arts,” she explained. “We’re all part of this, and we need to contribute if we want to keep the artistic spirit and ethos of the Bay Area alive.”

Headlands Center for the Arts will host its fall open studios on Sunday, Oct. 27, 12–5 p.m.

Looking back at the past four years is not necessarily something I’m ready to do, and yet it’s exactly what the latest exhibition at Kadist demands. For Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, curators Lindsay Albert, Joseph del Pesco and Jo-ey Tang have attempted to collate artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the cultural shifts it brought into focus.

Good art is often celebrated for its timelessness, but this exhibition turns that idea on its head. Here we are tasked with time traveling back to the very recent past. A bowl of individually wrapped KN-95 masks on the front desk of the gallery helps usher in that transition.

Makeshift Memorials is purposefully positioned against the impending U.S. presidential election, and the larger social context we are living through. In order to meet the moment effectively, the work (selected from the Kadist collection) must both represent our time and add to the continuum of art history. This is a tall order for any show. Here, visually and emotionally demanding paintings, videos, sculptures, photos, weavings and drawings hang side by side — competing for space and attention.

Upon entering the gallery visitors are confronted with an unconventional and slightly disruptive exhibition design. Highlighter-yellow sheets of A4 paper hang from the ceiling off wooden sticks, secured with torn pieces of brown packing tape. Caption details for the artworks on display are printed in bold black letters. Above each caption is an undecodable indexing system.

For example, if you want to learn more about Moyra Davey’s photographic series Visitor (2022), you are directed by the wall label to find “o5x” in the exhibition’s printed booklet (or the accompanying digital version via QR code). This mix of letters and numbers was randomly generated by the exhibition designer. It’s inventive, but visually overpowers the already crowded room. Over 40 artists share the small space.

And yet, attempting to navigate the exhibition through this unfamiliar system is actually quite effective. It replicates the confusion and bewilderment of the pandemic, when we became accustomed to looking to makeshift signs for guidance on how to behave (wear a mask, stand six feet apart, etc.). Like those COVID-era signs, the information connected to Kadist’s labels can be crucial.

Under “b5a,” the booklet reveals insight on Sherrill Roland’s hard-edged minimalist wall sculpture that adds depth and poignancy to the piece. In the curator’s text on the work we learn of Roland’s wrongful incarceration, and that the Kool-Aid-tinted geometric steel forms are the traced outlines of cinder blocks from his prison cell.

So-called “anchor works” are installed across the three sections of the show. In the second room, a series of 21 videos project one after another on a single hanging screen, turning off at intervals to make space for a 10-minute sound and mixed media sculpture by Joe Namy, Half Blue (2019). This is the room’s anchor: red and blue flashing lights from the top of a police car, positioned on the floor in front of the screen. As they flash, a mix of sounds plays, including news broadcasts covering the murder of the artist’s cousin, Khalid Jabara.

Jabara and Heather Heyer’s murders led to the NO HATE Act, passed by Congress in 2021. Namy’s piece is solemn in its directness. The LED light bar lies prone on the floor, its wires exposed, nearly abstract when not in use. When it plays it saturates the surrounding art in emergency-coded light.

Jamel Robinson’s sculpture I Walked The Longest Mile To Get To Nowhere Still (2022), anchors the third room. This raw assemblage of ready-mades refers to the origins of slavery in America and the devaluation of Black and brown life. The backrest of a simple wooden chair is adorned with shiny copper pennies, and a clumped mass of white rice is glued to the seat from which long nails protrude unevenly. A limp ladder of rusted chains and a pair of army boots lead up to the chair’s legs on the floor. The piece benefits from its scrappiness and lack of polish, even if every signifier is meant to be taken rather literally.

Makeshift Memorials offers an incredibly diverse range of global artworks, made mostly over the last four years, all chronicling weighty, devastating topics. And although each piece supports the curatorial premise in some way, formally they didn’t seem to relate to one other — despite a shared seriousness and the strength of their individual parts.

Attempting to distill something as broad and recent as the impact of the pandemic onto a few walls is a formidable task. Even an exhibition with limitless space couldn’t fully represent that experience. Instead, here we have a poetic churn of works that address the issues at hand piecemeal: violence, marginalization, illness, isolation, grief. I came away from the show emotionally drained, but with a heightened sensitivity to the breadth of vulnerability that connects and defines human life.

‘Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions’ is on view at Kadist (3295 20th St., San Francisco) through Feb. 15 2025. A concurrent exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston is on view through March 9, 2025.

Since 1966, each fall, families have been cozying up on the couch to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the classic animated television special with a heartwarming story of hope for a spooky season miracle. So it’s only fitting that Santa Rosa’s Schulz Museum, dedicated to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, would get a great pumpkin of its own.

On the museum’s upcoming free admission day on Sunday, Oct. 27, visitors can check out the museum’s new, massive 2,301-pound pumpkin, on display in its courtyard, before heading in to see the exhibition Peanuts Evolution: The 1960s, which features several original Great Pumpkin comic strips. (The real-life pumpkin outside recently placed second at the National Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Wheatland, California.)

On Sunday, the Great Pumpkin television special will also screen every half hour in the museum’s theater. Peanuts fans looking to watch it at home can stream it on Apple TV+.

The Schulz Museum has several other exhibitions on view, including Here Come the Beagle Scouts and Bravo, Snoopy! Peanuts and Pawpet Theater, about the Peanuts crew’s outdoor and artistic adventures. On Oct. 28, Halloween programming continues with stories, crafts, trick-or-treating and activities for kids ages 1–5 and their caregivers.

Nearly two dozen artists showed up at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday in matching shirts and sailor hats, determined to make a splash to save their creative home at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Crying SOS — Save Our Studios — the artists from what was once the largest creative community in the country have a simple request: to fix the roofs over their heads.

Even though the Superfund site has been grappling with the downstream effects of radioactive contamination for decades, the artist collective recently celebrated their 40-year anniversary at the shipyard. More than 200 working artists maintain studios at the nearly 500-acre site, and thousands of visitors pour through the area during the shipyard’s open studios, taking in the fresh air, glittering views and a gantry crane taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Up for vote was an amendment to push out the construction and financing timeline of the Bayview-Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan by 30 years. Also proposed was the transfer of more than 2 million square feet of office and research space from the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard to Candlestick Point, given the ongoing delays associated with the toxic cleanup of the shipyard.

While there are separate plans for the shipyard and Candlestick Point, the two are considered one project under the purview of the developer FivePoint — even as the areas of land, and the communities invested in them, face very different realities.

‘An extremely complicated situation’

Key to the maintenance conundrum for the artists is the complex tangle of associations tied to the shipyard: the U.S. Navy owns the land but leases it to the City of San Francisco, which in turn subleases it to FivePoint (tasked with rehabilitating the property) — who rents the buildings to a group of artist master tenants.

The Commission on Community Investment and Infrastructure (OCII), a successor agency to the city’s controversial Redevelopment Agency, also has oversight over the area’s development.

“It’s an extremely complicated situation,” said Barbara Ockel, the president of the nonprofit Shipyard Trust for the Arts (STAR) that represents the artist collective. “And it leads to a lot of finger pointing.”

The contract with FivePoint contains language stating the master tenants are responsible for maintenance of their buildings, but with rents still at their 1980s rates, there’s not enough funds for major repairs.

“And so the debate starts, where does maintenance end and where does capital improvement begin?” Ockel said. “Everybody would agree that if you have to pay a million dollars for a new roof, that’s not maintenance — that’s an investment.”

Master tenant Julian Billotte could be found on a recent Thursday re-gilding pre-1906 mirrors from the Flood Mansion for their new home at the San Mateo Historical Society. Without the space and low rents of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, his and many other artists’ work could not continue. He oversees the maintenance of Building 116 on Parcel B but said the rents have only allowed him to make small patches to the roofs when much more substantial repairs are required.

“Nobody’s ever had the rent raised no matter how long they’ve been here,” Billotte said. “Over 25 years, we’ve got people paying what they paid when they got here and we’re committed to maintaining that.” For now, he uses plastic bins along the roofs’ seams to catch water and encourages artists to use tarps to protect their work.

While Billotte said Tuesday during public comment that OCII has made a verbal promise to repair the roof, the artists want an assurance in writing. OCII did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

The artists are seeking more than a weathertight workspace — they want the guarantee they can remain on Parcel B in perpetuity. “We need stability,” Kollmeyer said. “And the assurance we can stay out here.” Kollmeyer and other artists are lobbying for an update to the 25-year-old development plan to include a provision ensuring the parcel remains an ongoing campus for the arts.

Frustrating delays for Bayview residents

Additional changes to the redevelopment plan could derail much-needed and community-supported construction on Candlestick Point (also under FivePoint’s jurisdiction and connected to the future of the shipyard). A written protest of the current plan sent to the Board of Supervisors — not by the shipyard artists — delayed a vote on Tuesday. A final decision on amending the timeline and allocation was pushed to the next full Board of Supervisors meeting on Oct. 29.

While the artists want to preserve the buildings on Parcel B of the shipyard, Bayview residents surrounding Candlestick Park are aching for development after decades of delays. “When it comes to the African American community, it never happens,” said Rev. Arelious Walker during public comment. Another speaker, urging forward progress, invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

Pastors, parents, laborers and small-business owners from the Bayview community mostly spoke out in support of the Candlestick Point development, which will employ local contractors, create thousands of jobs and build over 7,200 new homes.

“I’m excited and sad at the same time,” said one speaker, her voice thick with tears. “There’s only 2 or 3% of us left in the city,” she continued, referring to the Black community that has historically been on the losing end of redevelopment. “And we’ve accepted broken promises again and again.”

The artists have also been issued promises, only to watch their creative home stymied by the discovery of radioactive contamination, alleged criminal fraud by engineering firm Tetra Tech and a failed effort to construct a new building of studios on Parcel A. The artists remain on month-to-month rental agreements with the constant fear their spaces may be demolished or repurposed.

“They are talking about erasing us,” said artist Leila Mansur. “Stop breaking our hearts, San Francisco.”

“It will be hard to use this land for other things, so why not protect the artists?” Kollmeyer said. “It could be such a win-win for everyone.”

Richmond artist Marlon Mullen’s colorful, stylized paintings have caught the eye of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which recently announced it will host his first solo museum show. Projects: Marlon Mullen will premiere on Dec. 14, 2024 and remain on view in the museum’s free, street-level Projects gallery through April 20, 2025.

Born in Richmond in 1963, Mullen is self-taught and has worked at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center since 1985. The studio supports artists with developmental disabilities, and shares a mission with sister studios Creative Growth in Oakland and Creativity Explored in San Francisco. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art selected Mullen as a prestigious SECA awardee in 2019; SFMOMA has also acquired several of Mullen’s works for its collection.

Much of Mullen’s recent paintings take inspiration from the art magazines in NIAD’s library. Riffing on their covers, his art about art invites a sense of curiosity and play with its bright colors, surprising details and freehand lettering.

“He’s committed to the work of painting, thinking about what it is and what it can be, and to an exploration of abstraction that’s deep and resonant,” said NIAD Executive Director Amanda Eicher in an interview with Artnet. “Like many artists, he’s translating pop culture into form and texture and layers in a way that’s extraordinarily sophisticated.”

Mullen’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Atlanta Contemporary, among many other galleries and museums. His MoMA solo show will feature the debut of a new work based on the museum’s 2008 publication, Van Gogh: The Starry Night.

For many San Franciscans, myself included, Marin is a mysterious, majestic place with hidden pockets of culture and community, all nestled in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais. But there’s a rich history of accomplished artists in the area — and a generation on the rise. The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, with a new exhibition space in San Rafael, is aiming to bring North Bay art front and center.

MarinMOCA San Rafael is a satellite location of the Novato museum, which has programmed exhibitions and housed artists’ studios at the former military base of Hamilton Field for nearly two decades, mostly with volunteer labor. The San Rafael space is, for now, just a gallery, on the ground floor of an office building the museum quickly designated as an unmissable art space by painting the façade bright pink. If all goes to plan, San Rafael’s burgeoning Downtown Arts District will likely become MarinMOCA’s full-time home.

“[The museum] has made many attempts to renegotiate its lease with the city of Novato, but at this point we’re realizing that, in terms of our public facing mission, another location is probably better,” says recently appointed MarinMOCA Director Jodi Roberts.

Programming will continue in both locations through at least the end of this year. The museum’s lease in the San Rafael location is good through October 2025, at which point Roberts hopes to have found a larger, permanent home. The museum will remain free and continue its artist membership program after the move. While Roberts’s sights are set on increasing MarinMOCA’s cultural impact, local artists are the key to doing so.

“There are so many artists who have had meaningful, productive periods in the North Bay,” Roberts says. “We want to put those stories out there and develop the history of how the North Bay has been a real touchstone for artists throughout the Bay Area.”

MarinMOCA San Rafael’s inaugural exhibition, Opening the Mountain circles a lineage of North Bay artists. Marin’s history of affordability, its natural spaces and proximity to San Francisco, have inspired multiple generations of artists to make their home there. This range of ages and backgrounds is reflected in the exhibition, from the artists included to the curators behind it. Veteran curator Natasha Boas and recent college graduate Asha McGee selected a refreshing mix of 23 decorated and rising artists for the show, including Adeline Kent, Chris Johanson, Saif Azzuz and Daisy Sheff, all with some connection to Marin.

“Both know this place well enough that they are able to pinpoint a historical moment and understand how that resonates,” Roberts says of the curators.

Many of the young artists come from McGee’s social circle.

“I’ve seen their art grow over the years,” she says. “I grew up seeing my dad [the artist Barry McGee] do shows and always bringing in his community and friends, which influenced me a lot. The idea of bringing everybody up with you and also paying homage to how much your community has affected your work or your life.”

For Boas, the show expands beyond geographical location to encompass that sense of art historical genealogy.

“I really don’t see this as a Marin show,” she says. “All the artists in the show have much larger audiences and geography is not the focal point — it is, rather, the jumping off point. It’s really about a certain kind of art-making, exhibition-making and kind of representation and practice that is tied to a generative community.”

The theme of intergenerational relationships is present throughout.

Anabel de Vries’s suite of black-and-white photographs of maternal care hang opposite Stella Kudritzki pictures of a group of young girls playing and posing for the camera. Alice Shaw’s riffs on Chinese brush painting — photographic prints of flowers on gold leaf — hang beside her mother Martha Shaw’s diffuse landscape paintings. Another direct mother-daughter relationship is present in the inclusion of stylized landscape paintings by McGee’s late mother, Margaret Kilgallen.

Still, the landscape shines as a strong inspiration throughout the show. A pair of Adaline Kent drawings, showing charcoal infinity symbols cascading into waterfalls, flank a Untitled (Mountain Meadow) (all 1944), uniquely colorful and figurative for Kent’s typical drawing style. The artist, who was a mainstay of the interwar San Francisco art scene, spent most of her spare time in the nature of the North Bay. She also had generational ties — the city of Kentfield is named after her family.

Nick Gorham and July Guzman’s more recent oil paintings offer abstract, deeply felt interpretations of the land, evoking a recognizable feeling of the sublime in West Marin’s natural environment. And Ashwini Bhat’s abstract ceramic sculpture, a twisted vessel form, Self Portrait as California Landscape says it all: the landscape is as much a place we inhabit as something that inhabits us.

The exhibition shares its title with a book about a Zen ritual walk around Mount Tamalpais undertaken by Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen in 1965. The show feels like a similar ambulation of the region; it’s a roving survey of all the vantages and vistas the place had to offer, and an opportunity for introspection on that legacy.

For McGee, both the sense of community, and of place, relate to the future as much as to the past and present.

“I think the Bay Area is ripe for the taking right now,” McGee says. “We’re at a point that feels very pivotal. Are we going to pick this community up and say, ‘We’re all together in this and we’re going to restore the Bay Area to what it used to be?’”

Opening the Mountain answers McGee’s question with a resounding yes. At least from the Marin artists. But will the rest of the Bay Area take note of the rumblings from beneath the mountain?

“It’s time for Marin to take its place as a cultural hotspot,” Roberts says. “It’s been that historically, it just hasn’t been recognized — and that’s the role that a cultural institution can play.”

‘Opening the Mountain’ is on view at MarinMOCA San Rafael (1210 Fifth Ave., San Rafael), through Dec. 21, 2024.

There are only a handful of punk logos that have stood the test of time, and they’re almost universally recognized: Black Flag’s bars, Misfits’ Crimson Ghost and Crass’ anti-authority cross.

The last was designed by David King, a British experimental artist, graphic designer and musician. He moved from England to New York City in 1977, before relocating to San Francisco three years later. Here, he made art and zines, performed in bands (including Brain Rust) and attended the San Francisco Art Institute. King died in 2019 at the age of 71, but left a wealth of subversive, era-defining work behind him.

A selection of that work is currently on display at the San Francisco Center for the Book. David King Publications 1977-2019 focuses on the artist’s zine work and, to a lesser degree, his show flyers. King’s work, as curated by Luca Antonucci and Matt Borruso, is consistently imposing, provocative and caustically humorous. Many of his designs also clearly reflect the moment each piece was made. His 1980s work, in particular, makes a mockery of the leaders of the day, including Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II. (One doctored image of the Queen kicking a baby into a manhole is as funny as it is jarring.)

There is, of course, a Crass component within the exhibit. Original stencils hang starkly in frames. One comic book-style panel has the band logo projected into the night sky, like the Bat Signal. Sitting tantalizingly in a display case is even a copy of Christ’s Reality Asylum, the 1977 pamphlet written by Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud that inspired the very first use of the now-legendary anti-authority symbol.

Other ephemera from King’s life includes home photos (of himself, Crass singer Steve Ignorant and a series of masked figures) and book covers designed by the artist, including the sci-fi paperback Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. There are a couple of curious collages too — one now-ironic piece titled 21st Century Lower Manhattan, depicts the New York skyline awash with World Trade Center towers. (A demonstration that even the sharpest social critics can’t predict everything.)

King was prolific to a point that only the hugest of exhibitions could ever capture the breadth of what he created in his lifetime. David King Publications 1977-2019 can only act as a sort of tasting menu — but oh, what a delicious introduction it is.

‘David King Publications 1977-2019’ is on display now through Dec. 22, 2024 at San Francisco Center for the Book (375 Rhode Island Street). The exhibition’s opening party is on Oct. 25, 2024 at 6 p.m.

An accompanying book, ‘David King Publications 1977–2019’ will be available in November via Colpa Press and San Francisco Center for the Book.

Every morning, when Léonie Guyer enters her studio, she tries to trick herself.

“Before I cross the threshold,” she says excitedly, her face animated by the thought, “I try to trick myself into thinking that I’ve never been there before. So, when I first see the work inside, I don’t think of it as my work. It’s just the work, and every time I’m seeing it, it’s the first time.”

Guyer’s paintings require tremendous sensitivity before they can come into existence. The shapes that she captures in her works feel preexistent, more like forms she’s been patiently waiting to encounter than representations or expressions of inner thoughts.

Three and Three and One, Guyer’s show at House of Seiko, is made up of three watercolors, three paintings on marble and a modest wall drawing painted on-site. The last feels the most alive, perhaps because its simple ovular shape is rendered in dappled shades of crimson. The gentle painting, semi-opaque against the gallery’s wall, seems to pull texture up into its body, drawing out the qualities of wood still preserved beneath the white paint.

Material histories

There is a bravery to the simplicity of Guyer’s paintings. Each appears to use only a single color; the strokes she makes on her chosen “canvases” are humble in size. The three watercolors on display, gray with oscillating warm and cold tones, enclose diluted expanses of color in tenuous outlines. Their boundaries are both discrete and gentle, vaguely reminiscent of a shark sack, the semi-translucent rectangular capsule that provides a shell for a shark’s embryo. In one watercolor, the form comes to a sharp horn on the side.

Her compositions are intimately bound with the material on which she paints. The paper for the watercolors, for example, lived in her studio for 21 years before she felt ready to mark it. During those years, the material wasn’t forgotten, but acted as an ever-present companion, occupying its place in the room as a silent collaborator. As if speaking about an old friend, Guyer happily recounts first encountering the double weight Indian jute paper at the art store New York Central in the early 2000s. With admiration, she describes the traditional process of shaping and drying it.

Histories like these are nestled into Guyer’s practice. And San Francisco, Guyer’s home of nearly 50 years, is foundational to her deceptively minimalist pieces. Since moving from Long Island to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Guyer has been a stalwart Bay Area community member.

‘Lines like writing’

While she adamantly identifies as a painter, poetry plays a central role for the artist. She’s often provided a visual counterpart to the work poets do with words: freeing the image from the burden of narrative. In 2011, she collaborated with Bill Berkson, matching drawings to his monograph Not An Exit, put out by Jungle Garden Press.

At House of Seiko, the works on marble, monochromatic paintings crisp against the stone’s mottled grays, can be understood in relation to another community close to Guyer’s heart. Though made in 2024, the marble pieces remind me of Gift, a 2006 site-based exhibition in which Guyer painted her signature forms on the top floor of a Shaker building, the historic 1829 Brethren’s Workshop in New Lebanon, New York.

Guyer first encountered Shaker gift drawings at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, during a sweeping group show they’d hung salon-style. The gift drawing was high, high on the wall and semi-obscured by its position. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she recalls, “the lines look like writing. I could hardly tell what it looked like, but I felt the radiation off the page. It was humming.”

When she inquired about the piece, the gallery assistant demurred, chancing that the origins were totally unknown. As this was well before the internet, the encounter lived inside the artist’s mind for a long time, tenured in memory, until New York City’s Drawing Center mounted Heavenly Visions, a show of gift drawings and gift songs, in 2001.

Years after that, the artist Sarah Cain, a student of Guyer’s at SFAI, recognized the images in a lecture and connected Guyer with the Shaker Museum, where Cain’s mother coincidentally worked. The experience with the Shaker aesthetic became so important to her practice that when the Wattis Institute mounted form in the realm of, a 2018 exhibition of Guyer’s work, they even procured a few actual gift drawings for an introductory vitrine.

The decorative, handmade gift drawings present language more for its aesthetic qualities than for its meaning. They remind me of how talking is so often less about communicating than keeping someone company. Easy, meaningless chatter does the difficult work of assuring someone “Yes, I am here, I am with you. I’m listening.” The Shaker gift drawings are like that: illustrations of small talk replete in its generosity.

Guyer’s paintings don’t talk, but they do populate space emphatically enough to offer a kind of companionship. The Susan Howe poems included in a booklet made for the House of Seiko show seem to vibrate in agreement.

Ancient symbols

Another touchstone for the artist is the Mycenean figurines of ancient Greece. These relics’ simple shapes adhere to a few stylistic properties. The Mycenean bird goddess, for example, always has a long stem and a small squat face that sits above a flattened ceramic circle gesturing at wings.

There’s one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Guyer visits often, sometimes using her recent status as a Guggenheim Fellow to access the exhibition in the off-hours. Its body is striped with simple brown paint, and defined by bowing curvature that leaves a trace of the hands that molded its shape, lending the ceramic an organic, living quality.

Much like her own work, the Mycenean bird goddesses feel symbolic; they adhere to their own secret shorthand. Both her work and the figurines jump out of time, essential and audacious, refusing to be pinned to any specific context. Instead, they feel constantly at home in the present, almost already familiar to the viewer.

“Form has a meaning — but it is a meaning entirely its own,” writes the 20th-century art historian Henri Focillon in The Life of Forms in Art, a foundational text for Guyer that shines a specific light on her practice.

Bodies of pure, essential feeling

The artist’s oblique, careful paintings turn simple shapes into bodies of pure, essential feeling. Her forms share a consistent style, patterned by their own hidden rules. I offer these considerations of gift drawings and Mycenean figures as just one way to look through Guyer’s works at the interior logic of the universe from which they spring.

The imagist poet H.D. says we must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision. We must begin with the sympathy of thought. This intimacy feels alive in Guyer’s work. Each piece is nonrepresentational, it does not point away, or towards something else, but instead pulls the viewer inwards — towards itself, closer.

The vitality of Guyer’s work resists interpretation. In this way, her paintings offer the viewer a new encounter, every time.

‘Three and Three and One’ is on view at House of Seiko (3109 22nd St., San Francisco).

Despite appearing like a fairly straightforward Vallejo storefront, a few clues hint at Personal Space’s mutability. There’s even a “sign,” if you could call it that, mounted to the edge of the building. For the duration Slipper, it’s a halftone-dotted black-and-white image of something involving a hand.

Distortion is a perfect visual announcement for the current show, curated by the art space’s founder and director, Lisa Rybovich Crallé. Since Personal Space opened in July 2023, Crallé and guest curators have organized eight group shows, bringing together local, national and international artists, commissioning writing and editions, and hosting some of the best-attended openings in recent Bay Area history.

If these presentations have shared a hallmark, it’s an embrace of texture and material experimentation. Any given exhibition might contain paintings, yes, but there’s also a possibility of objects cast in oozy resin hanging on the gallery walls. The most recognizable objects in Slipper are a pair of framed drawings, but what they depict … well, that’s up for interpretation.

In a show about slipperiness, a certain amount of horizontality is expected. Suitably, Erik Frydenborg’s Nonnnecenonnn, the first piece to greet visitors’ eyes, is a stretched-out sculpture of basswood, acrylic and sand. Curves and painted hatch marks hint at Frydenborg’s source material, an archive of infographics and diagrams from a bygone era. What at first glance looks like digital skew is, up close, delightfully tangible, with a rough texture running down the sculpture’s black-painted sides.

The horizon line continues with Elina Vainio’s And stones only breathe once, a flat oblong of sand on the gallery’s floor that contains delicate lines of weighted cord camouflaged within it. From the corner through Frydenborg’s piece, a clear line of sight to Kari Cholnoky’s wall-mounted paper-pulp sculptures: spiky objects made ominous by fluorescent red paint and the attachment of tiny, menacing images.

When we encounter indecipherable things, or, as Slipper artist Albert Herter puts it, objects “that cannot be fully accounted for,” multiple pathways emerge. We can cocoon ourselves against intrusion, which Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Sound Blanket No. 10 (psychically) welcomes us to do. The massive “fur” coat, made of hand-felted wool and human and synthetic hair, is a looming note of verticality in this very horizontal front room.

We can strain for comprehension, suggested by Catalina Ouyang’s trio of elegantly carved stone ears. Or, a third option: lean into the dissonance and chaos, captured by Herter’s William T. Wiley-esque drawings of two figures pontificating in a frenetic landscape.

Sitting with the weirdness is the modus operandi of the exhibition’s second room, a smaller presentation of work by sculptor and video artist David Bayus, ceramic installations by Ximaps Dong and a second photographic print from Lemia Monet Bodden, also responsible for the exterior “sign.”

In a mix of live action and computer generated imagery, Bayus’ Sessions 1 & 2 begins with a robotic voice asking a pair of filthy arms, “Tell me, why did you create this? What does it mean to you?” A 27-minute video spins out from there, full of meticulously rendered machinery, unsettling sound bites, cowboy iconography and the artist posed as a grimy caveman, subject to an unknown scientific experiment.

Dong’s combination of ceramics, green plastic netting and steel bars fit right alongside this fleshy yet machine vision of the future. Despite its cheerful title, Caught The Catches, Yay looks like something straight out of David Cronengberg’s eXistenZ (a horror film that features a mutant fish farm and plenty of bony gristle).

In a moment of mass uncertainty (I write this on Nov. 5, as Americans cast their ballots), Slipper reminds us that uncertainty is now a constant state. The artworks included may have achieved a relatively fixed form, but they are momentary pauses in a chain of events: captured distortions that produce a rippling effect, a frisson, on their subsequent audiences. When everything is slippery and everything is mutable (including, unfortunately, facts), some combination of cocooning, hard listening and sitting with the disquiet will be the only way through.

‘Slipper’ is on view at Personal Space (1505 Tennessee St., Vallejo) through Nov. 24, 2024.

The NBA season is in full swing, and with a 7-1 record, the Golden State Warriors are balling.

As the Bay Area prepares to host the NBA All-Star game in February, and with the WNBA’s latest expansion team the Golden State Valkyries set to debut in May, it’s a good time to be a local hoops fan.

That is, unless you’re a big Klay Thompson fan. But don’t worry. After his sign-and-trade deal this past off-season, the beloved former Golden State Warriors shooting guard makes his return to the Bay as a member of the Dallas Mavericks to play the Warriors on Nov. 12.

Amidst the mixed emotions, there’s no denying that Captain Klay played a huge part in the Dubs dynasty that brought about four championship titles over the past decade.

To recognize that fact ahead of the splash brother reunion, Oakland’s SoleSpace — a sneaker store and creative lab — hosts a weekend-long art tribute to Klay Thompson called Klay Area.

Co-coordinated by SoleSpace owner Jeff Perlstein and artist Jonathan Chan, the event will feature visual art pieces paying homage to Thompson, who holds the NBA record for points scored in a single quarter (37) and the most three-pointers made in a game (14).

Works from Kaitlyn Joe-Johnson, Shomari Smith, Jason Wong, Ray Yuen, Joel Rebello and more will be on display inside of the building on 9th Street in Old Oakland. Bright illustrations, creative remixes of images from popular culture and a dig at Klay’s comedic time in China are among the pieces included.

‘Klay Area,’ an all-ages exhibition, opens Friday, Nov. 8, and runs through Saturday and Sunday. Entry is donation-based. For more details check SoleSpace’s Instagram. 

There’s no way to sugar-coat it: here in the Bay Area this week, a lot of people are holed up, feeling despair at another Trump presidency and doomscrolling on their phones.

Some of the more introverted among us prefer to stay home, and that’s fine. But man, there is no feeling so refreshing as getting outside and being among others, many of whom are probably feeling just the same as you.

Here’s a quick list of 25 outdoor events, concerts, exhibitions and more, all offering company or community, and all happening this weekend.

Take a Hike
Not to be all “touch grass,” but c’mon, you already know that going on a hike is helpful for anxiety. Call up that friend you haven’t seen in a while and consult our guide 12 Bay Area Hikes and Nature Spots for Escaping the Election This Week.

Opening Nov. 7, 6–8 p.m.: Troy Lamarr Chew II at Altman Siegel
The former Bay Area artist returns with a solo show of portraits that depict people as glassy, translucent outlines (à la The Secret World of Alex Mack), underscoring their “invisibility” in contemporary society.

Grab a slice at the new Golden Boy Pizza
Everyone’s favorite San Francisco square slice shop just opened a brand new location. Golden Boy’s long-awaited Sunset location is slinging the same crunchy-bottomed, idiosyncratic pizzas that have been locally beloved since 1978, for takeout only. (Or you can, of course, always opt to head back to the North Beach original.)

Opening Nov. 8: ‘The Piano Lesson’
Based on the recent Broadway production, this film version of August Wilson’s award-winning play should be excellent. With a cast including Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington, it’s been getting good reviews.

Opening Nov. 8: ‘Heretic’
There are those of us who can turn our brains off by watching Hugh Grant being dashing in rom-coms like Notting Hill, and there are those of us who would rather see him cardigan-clad, chilling and chattering about religion in this new horror from A24. Heretic will keep your nerves and brain in high gear for its unnerving entirety.

Nov. 8–10: Klay Thompson Art Show at SoleSpace in Oakland
The great Splash Brother makes his return to the Bay Area this weekend in — sigh — a Mavericks uniform. Before he plays against his former team, this sneaker shop and creative space hosts an art show dedicated to the beloved ex-Warriors player.

‘David King Publications 1977–2019’ at San Francisco Center for the Book
Best known for designing the logo for punk band Crass, artist David King also illustrated zines and flyers, many of which make up this exhibit. In her review, Rae Alexandra said it “can only act as a sort of tasting menu — but oh, what a delicious introduction it is.”

Buy a whole Malaysian durian at Liu Shang Pin
Because surely there’s someone in your life who would feel comforted by some ripe, pungent tropical fruit. And if so, this new durian shop in Richmond is the swankiest spot to get your stink on.

Opening Nov. 8: ‘Born of the Bear Dance: Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California’ at the Oakland Museum of California
This show of photographs by Dugan Aguilar (just a fraction of the museum’s recently acquired collection of the late artist’s personal archive) documents the vibrancy of Native life in the state between 1982 to 2018.

Nov. 8: Oakland Symphony’s ‘Two Black Churches + Carmina Burana’ at the Paramount Theatre
New music director Kedrick Armstrong leads the Oakland Symphony in his second program, featuring two pieces from living composer Shawn Okpebholo. (A post-election note, presented without comment: one of the first sections of Orff’s Carmina Burana is titled “I lament the wounds that fortune deals.”)

Nov. 8: Chinatown Night Market
Friday nights in San Francisco Chinatown are never as packed and lively as they are during this monthly night market — and this edition will be the last market of the year. Come early to avoid the longest lines, and enjoy the dim sum and boba stands, cultural performances and fun, family-friendly atmosphere. (5:30–9 p.m. on Grant Avenue, b/w Sacramento and Jackson)

Nov. 9: Cereal Cinema at Oakland’s New Parkway
Nostalgia is comforting, so mentally travel back to your childhood (and take your own kids with you, if you have them) to Cereal Cinema. The New Parkway Theater’s Saturday morning screening of classic cartoons is accompanied by — what else? — all-you-can-eat cereal. The retro fun starts at 10:30 a.m.

Visit a brand new museum: MarinMOCA San Rafael
In this expansion beyond their Novato home base, MarinMOCA has curated an inaugural, intergenerational show that celebrates the exceptional art made in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais.

Nov. 9: ‘Dahomey’ opens at the Roxie, San Francisco
Mati Diop’s followup to her narrative film Atlantics follows 26 statues and cultural objects on their repatriation journey from France to Benin. Our film critic calls it an “unexpectedly inspiring documentary” that “movingly captures the immediacy of art in contemporary life.”

Nov. 9, 12–4 p.m.: Chinatown Ross Alley Zine Festival, San Francisco
Check out work by 10 local publishers and 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence Hotam Press (all the way from Vancouver) in this afternoon-long event filled with art, zines, books and other cultural goodies.

Nov. 9: Afrolicious at the Golden Gate Park Bandshell, San Francisco
Afrolicious always brings a dance party, and Saturday should be no exception in this, the final concert in the SF Live series. The Golden Gate Park bandshell sits right between the de Young and the California Academy of Sciences — two places to consider visiting to make a day of it. Los Calderones open.

Nov. 9: White Crate Anniversary Party at El Rio, San Francisco
Picking up where the Bay Bridged left off, White Crate is a music site covering Bay Area indie music and beyond. Their fourth anniversary party at El Rio features bands Sour Widows, Tony Jay, Pocket Full of Crumbs and Margot James.

Nov. 9: ‘HUQ: I Seek No Favor’ at San Francisco’s Root Division
If solidarity is what you seek this weekend, consider joining Root Division on Saturday for the opening reception of this exhibit that brings together more than 100 artists and writers to collectively respond to the impact of 2022’s Dobbs decision on reproductive rights. ‘Huq’ is an Urdu/Arabic word that means both ‘rights’ and ‘truth.’

Nov. 9–10: San Francisco International Hip-Hop Dance Fest
Forget breakdancing in the Olympics. As part of San Francisco Hip-Hop Month, this three-day fest brings dance troupes from all over the world together to battle for cash prizes.

Nov. 9–10: Lydia Lunch’s ‘Verbal Burlesque’ at the Great American Music Hall in SF and the Ivy Room in Albany
On any given day, Lydia Lunch’s provocative observations about herself, her life and the world around her are primed to provide solid distractions. This weekend she’s upping the ante with two spoken word sets of exclusively raunchy material. Lunch will perform a matinee show in San Francisco on Saturday and another in Albany on Sunday.

Nov. 10–11: Sunami at the San Jose Civic Auditorium and Berkeley’s 924 Gilman
Sometimes you just gotta get mad. Enter Sunami, one of the Bay Area’s best and most aggressive hardcore bands, known for their crowd’s insane pits. If slamming your body against hundreds of others is your preferred method of catharsis, this is the show for you.

Nov. 10, 11 a.m.–3 p.m.: ‘Slipper’ at Personal Space, Vallejo
The artist-run space packs plenty of art viewing into its small footprint, bringing together a group of artists who make objects that slip between registers: flesh and machine, digital and handmade, 2D and 3D. Also: a giant “fur” coat made, in part, from human hair!

Nov. 11: The Sound Healing Symphony at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
If you need to simply chill out this weekend — but among others — the Sound Healing Symphony uses gongs, crystal bowls, vibraphone and didgeridoo to help attendees at scenic Grace Cathedral “go beyond the veil in a celebration of unity.”

Nov. 11: Blood Incantation at Cornerstone, Berkeley
How did this proggy metal band behind the landmark album Hidden History of the Human Race kick things up a notch this year? With an even more complex, dizzying outing, Absolute Elsewhere: a collision of death metal and krautrock.

Through Nov. 24: A Chuck Sperry Retrospective at the Haight Street Art Center, SF
Sperry’s flower-power-infused visions of beauty are always a colorful shot of much-needed dopamine. The Haight Street Art Center is currently displaying a collection of the San Francisco artist’s silkscreen prints, rock posters and tapestries stretching across his 40-year career.

When the art community bid adieu to the Wattis Institute’s decade-long home on Kansas Street earlier this year, I was heartbroken. It had been a good run of shows at the California College of the Arts’ exhibition space and research institute, as quiet and reflective as a selection of gelatin silver prints by Hervé Guibert and as boisterous and experimental as a three-part deep-dive into the relationship between music and visual art.

I loved the Wattis for bringing ambitious programming to a location a bit off the beaten path. It was a hidden gem in the no-man’s land between the Mission and the Dogpatch.

Now, the Wattis has reopened, smack in the middle of CCA’s newly unified campus in San Francisco’s Design District. (The school closed its storied Oakland campus in 2022.) Though the campus opening coincides with the recent announcement of a $20 million deficit, the new buildings are an impressive network of studios and classrooms, with the Wattis overlooking rooftop gardens and an amphitheater.

The Wattis is also under new leadership, with longtime director Anthony Huberman passing the torch to Daisy Nam, who comes to San Francisco by way of Ballroom Marfa and Harvard’s Carpenter Center.

So what better way is there to inaugurate the Wattis Institute’s new home than with an exhibition tapping artists with Bay Area ties whose work examines the concept of place?

All This Soft Wild Buzzing, curated by Deputy Director and Director of Programs Jeanne Gerrity, features artists re-evaluating and re-mixing the legacy of landscape art. With particular attention to the American West, the show confronts and counters historical associations with Manifest Destiny that once undergirded the colonial framework of the landscape genre.

The group show features nine artists, including CCA alumni Saif Azzuz, Teresa Baker, Christopher Robin Duncan, Bessma Khalaf and Dionne Lee, alongside Nicki Green, Young Suh, Stephanie Syjuco and Zekarias Musele Thompson, working across disciplines that include sculpture, painting, installation and video.

True to Gerrity’s vision, each artist takes a different, unorthodox approach to landscape art. You won’t see pastoral paintings or panoramic photographs here. Instead, it all feels more hands-on: not exalting the sublime from a reverent, if safe, distance but instead wading in up to the neck and getting hands dirty. These artists are exploring nature with a sensibility that foregrounds collaboration and reciprocity.

Khalaf’s are some of the most traditional landscapes in the show — at least at a glance, they appear to be. The black-and-white photographs are actually pictures of pictures sourced from magazines and books, which Khalaf photographs after partially burning them. Similarly, Suh’s color photos of the mechanizations of environmental disaster might qualify as agrarian landscapes — if it weren’t for the figures of firefighters trawling like ants across the scorched earth. Both artists play in the space between beauty and destruction, between nature’s course and the human intervention that both interrupts and accelerates it.

Lee, who recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, contributes a multichannel video installation of footage shot in and about the American Southwest. Grayscale landscapes are spliced with fragments of Bureau of Land Management signage at the entrance to national parks admonishing viewers to “Notice: You are on federal lands,” while Lee reads excerpts from “Observations on the Ground” by Mary Ruefle. Here, nature is all cerebral experience: a navigation not of the land itself but the human impositions that govern it.

In a more direct engagement with nature, Duncan employed a photogram process to treat fabric he then exposed to sunlight on the rooftop of the old Wattis location. The finished piece acts as both a collaboration with nature and a relic of the venue’s history of place. Syjuco, in turn, has used fabric to activate the new gallery, draping curtains across the exterior that feature reinterpretations of American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt’s 19th-nineteenth century lithograph prints.

Similar outdoor activations will be a mainstay of future exhibitions, as well as special commissions that take advantage of the Wattis’ proximity to CCA’s fabrication studios. And while the new location certainly opens the doors for certain possibilities, it also closes doors to others. Because while All This Soft Wild Buzzing explores the expanse of nature, spilling into the school’s outdoor spaces, that sprawl feels out of necessity rather than curatorial panache.

The old Wattis boasted a larger square footage, much higher ceilings and an open floor plan that could accommodate a variety of curatorial visions. It was expansive, pregnant with possibility. There’s something about the Wattis’ new home that feels limiting.

Maybe it’s the separation of the space’s two discrete galleries by the narrow hallway accommodating an elevator shaft. Maybe it’s the fact that three of the gallery’s walls are made of glass, restricting the ability to display wall-hanging artworks. Maybe it’s the on-campus nature itself that feels claustrophobic (though there is potential for commingling between the student body and the larger Bay Area art scene).

While the Wattis’ inaugural show feels like a celebration of Bay Area art and landscape, unified by a strong curatorial vision, I keep thinking how it could have been better served in the old space, with more room to unfold both in situ and within the community. The old Wattis had a decade to explore the space it occupied. It remains to be seen how the Wattis team plays within, and expands beyond, its current confines.

‘All This Soft Wild Buzzing’ is on view at the Wattis Institute (145 Hooper St., San Francisco), through Dec. 14, 2024.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the California Theater in Berkeley, which closed in 2020.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the United Artists theater in Berkeley (“the UA”), which closed in 2023.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the Pussycat Theater in Oakland, which showed adult films before it closed in 1989.

Who could forget the pussy hats, the colorful protest banners, the nude statues and subversive murals of the first Trump administration?

Voters, apparently.

Despite a surge in art-as-resistance eight years ago — hailed as crucial in the fight to defeat Trump once and for all — America is back where it started in 2016, give or take a few racist marches, abortion bans and felony counts.

And while the stakes for the future of the country are unquestionably higher this time around, artist reaction has been conspicuously subdued. Not only are activists organizing far fewer protests, there’s noticeably less anti-Trump art. Yes, even in the Bay Area.

How could that be? Well, it depends on who you ask.

“It feels to me like everyone just got wiped out,” said Brent Lindsay, artistic director of the Imaginists Theatre Collective in Santa Rosa, of the relative quiet from artists, post-election. “Everyone’s just — I don’t know about retreating, but everyone’s sort of going deep. Having to. And I don’t know what’s on the other side of that.”

A time of reorientation

Lindsay is no stranger to explicitly political art. In 2017, the Imaginists presented Stop That Show!, a bicycle-powered, bilingual outdoor satire squarely aimed at the Trump White House. Lindsay played “President Corn,” in a disheveled blonde wig and Russian-branded garb.

“It was good in that we all needed to find joy in some darkness, and we all needed to find a way out, shake it off, be entertained,” Lindsay said, acknowledging that the show was more a balm than a weapon of resistance.

No one can predict exactly what the next four years will bring from the arts sector. But Lindsay believes that alongside explicitly political art, the world may see more politically informed work based in storytelling and emotional resonance.

“You need both,” Lindsay said. “We need the bombastic, the in-your-face, the revolutionary. And this may be a silly analogy, but we need the bunny slope. Because we need new people coming and trying it, and working their way up.”

At Oaklandside’s Culture Makers panel on Nov. 14, comedian W. Kamau Bell, who endorsed Kamala Harris, was optimistic about the next era of direct political art.

“There’s going to be a type of artist now who’s going to be much more clear than they were in the past,” Bell said. “It’s an invitation to be much more clear on what the message is, what your goals are, to have art that actually points towards the change. I think it’s going to be a wave of really classic-era, political [art] — the right side of propaganda, pointing to the right side of history.”

Bell’s friend and colleague Favianna Rodriguez is the founder of the Center for Cultural Power, an organization that supports artists and arms people with artistic tools for resistance. In 2017, in opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban, Rodriguez’s series Migration Is Beautiful surged in visibility. Climate justice and reproductive rights have also been prominent themes in her work.

“I have seen both a moment of reflection, and a moment of reorientation,” Rodriguez said of the weeks following the election. “Our response as artists is going to take some time for us to get organized. But I do trust that artists are going to rise up and create work, and be angry and bold.”

Artists, Rodriguez asserts, have the power to change cultural narratives, which in turn shape political narratives.

“We can show the humanity,” she says. “We can help normalize things that were once seen as rare. We can help tell human stories that move people’s hearts.”

‘Not just an attack against Trump’

Pianist, hip-hop artist and member of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission Kev Choice says he’s angry and disappointed about Trump winning the presidency. He’s also contending with how many in his community — people who care about social justice and want an end to U.S. military aid to Israel — disengaged from the election.

He sees a disillusionment with the Democratic party’s role in the devastation in Gaza, as well as with the two-party system. Choice was just as disappointed with Trump’s victory as he was with progressive propositions, like rent control, failing in California.

“I’ve been sitting with how to address it on all fronts, not just an attack against Trump, but just our general engagement in politics and how we can be more impactful — and have just honest conversations about what it means to even be engaged,” he says.

Choice says he’s working on a song that airs out his community’s disappointment and grief over the election results, but he’s also looking beyond music. “Music is one thing, but supporting grassroots organizations to get people to register to vote, who will get people to campaign for certain measures or props — the day to day things that it takes to win a campaign,” he says. “It’s not always the flashy notoriety, like being on TV or releasing a song. It’s phone banking, canvassing, calling, traveling to other areas — and also bringing up those issues constantly in the art that we create.”

Filmmaker Josh Healey has advocated for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza with his podcast, Friday Night Semites, and organizing with Jewish Voice for Peace and beyond. His work, including the comedy series The North Pole, has also addressed class issues such as gentrification.

“I think the next couple of years we are going to see — and some of the people in this room are going to make — some of the dopest and most powerful art we’ve seen,” Healey said at Oaklandside’s Culture Makers panel.

“Where I’m at as a filmmaker is not just ‘fuck Trump’ and whatever local billionaires are running these campaigns,” he continued, “but also, Hollywood is done. And I’m ready to actually celebrate that. And what I mean by that is not the death of filmmaking, but the death of capitalist, consumerist — the normalization. So many of the stories of what is normalized comes from arts and culture. And so that is my responsibility, and our responsibility.”

Artists shifting to the right

Supporting Trump was more taboo among artists during his first administration, but with rappers like Kanye West, Sexyy Red, Kodak Black and Azealia Banks backing Trump, some observers see a rightward turn in the entertainment industry.

At the Culture Makers panel, hip-hop artist and organizer Maddy Clifford, who campaigns for student debt abolition with Debt Collective, talked about this shift.

“I think a lot of the country will go to the right, let’s be honest about that,” said Clifford, who has contributed to KQED as a cultural critic. “And so it’s going to be more important than ever for us to be really righteous and really stand in our solid values, because there’s going to be a lot of pressure to basically sell out, straight up.”

Clifford looked beyond Trump’s candidacy — which made gains with young men — and pointed towards conservative trends in culture, name-checking social media movements that promote conservative gender roles and normalize misogyny. “People are like, ‘How did this happen?’” she said. “Well, what about trad wife content? What about the manosphere? This has been happening for a long time.”

Déjà vu

”We’ve been here before,” says Angela Hennessy, an Oakland visual artist and California College of the Arts professor. Hennessy, whose work will be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 2024 SECA Art Award Exhibition, says this is déjà vu.

She’s more surprised that people are surprised. “This is America,” Hennessy wrote in an email to KQED.

Hennessy, a survivor of gun violence, uses hair weaving and braiding in her artwork as she navigates the connections between loss and liberation, death and despair, grieving and growing. She says that given her subject matter, her art has always political. And in this moment, Hennessy wrote, “My work can be seen as responding to the death machine that is our country.”

Hennessy asks people to read beyond the popular Toni Morrison quote, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” and see that the late author wanted people to make the connection between chaos and the potential of art as a kind of wisdom.

In this moment, “the opportunity,” Hennessy wrote, “is to be more brave, more unapologetic and articulate in knowing what we know. To make art, music, poetry, etc. as if something was at stake.”

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the UC Theatre in Berkeley, which is now a live music venue.