THREE CHERRIES
we feature three works by artists we love
Featured Artist #17 | Michele Hament
I wove my first basket from the long, hanging branches of the willow trees growing along the banks of the Charles River in Boston. I was captivated by the immediacy of the process and the satisfaction of working directly with nature. Over the decades since, as my vision has changed and expanded, I continue to explore functional and non-functional basketry. I have taught throughout the Bay Area, and have also had the amazing opportunity to teach pine needle basketry to Maya artesanas through their fair-trade cooperatives in the highlands of Guatemala. My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been included in 500 Baskets, Fiberarts Design Book II, and several other publications.
Process Note
My work often, but not always, starts with sketches to develop an idea or concept I want to explore. Materials and techniques, both traditional and non-traditional, influence the direction of my work. I use pine needles, branches, pods, kelp and vines as well as reed, wire, plastic bags, carpet tacks, and found objects. I create pieces using the techniques of coiling, twining and looping. I seldom consider function; preferring to let the piece evolve intuitively as the form continues to take shape. I am influenced and inspired by Congolese Nikisi figures, the drawings of Anni Albers, artist Judith Scott and her wrapped forms, and the late afternoon light on the hills behind my house.
Boxes of Baskets
12” wide x 16” tall
painted and dyed pine needles and raffia, tacks, lights, glass mosaics, bead, vertebra, plastic birds and baby, painted Mexican heart
Note: objects inside baskets are on springs and move when touched
Not Forgotten
4” wide x 5” tall
found watercolor, waxed linen, copper thread
Technique: plaiting and knotless netting
Note: I found a 2-sided unsigned watercolor paintings in a thrift store, which I respectfully cut into strips and wove into a vessel. It is a collaboration with, and homage to, an unknown artist.
Tack-y-cardia
9” x 9”
painted pine needles and raffia, tacks
Technique: coiling
Note: This piece evolved as an exploration between organic and non-organic materials. It was inspired by the Nkisi forms and figures of western Africa. Although the title alludes to the human heart, it also references coral reefs, the heart of the ocean.
Featured Artist #16 | Linda Norton
I’m a writer, editor, and collage artist. My collages appear on the covers of my own books and inside them, too (The Public Gardens: Poems and History, a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize; Wite Out: Love and Work; and Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages). They also appear on the covers of and inside books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, Maureen Owen, and Fanny Howe. In 2014, the US Embassy in Dublin subsidized a show of 48 of my collages at the Dock Arts Centre in Ireland. In 2014, I was awarded a Creative Work Fund Award about the history of mass incarceration in the US and installed an exhibit of my work and the work of others in Oakland at a small museum in the Fruitvale District where I hosted collage-making workshops. In 2019-2020, I was a columnist-in-residence at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space; my collages and photographs illustrate the essays I wrote for that commission.
Process Note
In one of my Open Space essays (“Slowly, with Much Expression”) I wrote about my practice as a collage artist, which started in 1993 when I doctored postcards of New York landmarks (especially the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor) with Wite-Out correction fluid. Gradually I incorporated found photos into my collages. Though collage is an art form associated with surrealism, I am not a surrealist; but when I juxtapose certain things in my collages, the effect is surrealistic because so many things in my history and history in general are almost impossible to believe. In 2014 I began to make collages on canvas with acrylic paint and archival materials. My practice continues to evolve and now includes excerpts from my own photos. My love of music (especially hip hop and sampling) is part of everything I make.
Lots of my collages draw from public domain resources, especially the FSA photographic archives at the Library of Congress. This collection of images from the 1930s and ‘40s includes many negatives damaged by punch holes because the director of the FSA project deemed those images unsuitable for public distribution and reproduction. I’m one of many artists who’ve downloaded and reproduced those images and made work that addresses elisions and violence in American history and in the archive. My process as both collage artist and writer includes reading and rereading images in the context of research and my own intuition and lexicon. I often incorporate documents into my collages, and over the years I have found painting invaluable as a way of establishing ground for cutting and pasting. I admire Walker Evans, called “the master of the edge,” because edges are important to me too.
I’m writing about the FSA archives, newspaper accounts from the 1930s, and women’s history in Ireland and the United States in The Ruins: A Memoir of Irish Women Lost and Found. I’m beginning a new series of collages about public libraries and freedom of speech. I was working along these lines before the right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and before I learned about the current regime’s efforts to erase the history of slavery at the Smithsonian and the US military academies and in schools. Current events add new urgency to my efforts.
Place is important in my work, and so is motherhood, race, and ethnicity. I grew up in Boston, lived in Brooklyn and worked across the street from Grand Central Station for many years, and have lived in Oakland since 1998. I’m about to visit Ireland for the tenth time for a residency in County Kerry. I’m a dual citizen of Ireland/EU and the US.
I wrote an ars poetica about my collage making and included it in the “Feminine” section of my second book, Wite Out: Love and Work:
Small Square
A blue peninsula, three sides and an edge,
the answer to triangulation, my issue—
frame and boundary versus
unholy trinity. This texture takes paint
well, this size is my size. One thousand
little things add up.
*
Saw yesterday at 5:15 PM:
a billowing cloud
moving across the suddenly
blue sky. A perfect
window, a SQUARE—
a word that should have
just four letters—opened up
in the body of the cloud,
a kind of stanza in air.
*
I didn’t gauge the distance from
the lip of the glass
to my own lip
and died laughing at what
fell in my lap.
The possibility of the personal
impersonal, the needle in my drink—
I can use it to scratch the surface.
*
The drone of radio rosaries
as I gouged a missalette—
Today I cut to ribbons
a list of "known abusers."
One of those priests used to sit at our table
laughing with my mother,
eating cake. His thick cloud of hair
lit up the room. At his wake
my mother raved about it.
*
Pieces of men all over my desk,
two skies, you but never me,
the history of photography,
Wite-Out and varnish.
I like the precision of scissors.
Where is my pot of glue?
Where is my pen?
I should do something with this.
I dip my brush into my drink.
*
You with your lips in ruins,
saturated—I don’t do much with purple
so your windmill of a mind
may not show up this time.
The etymology of your soul is
your business.
*
When I was small but no longer young
I decided, building moats and dikes,
to use a neutral color, pale as a desert boot.
Even then I was famous for my values.
Now I mix glitter into cement.
You wouldn’t know me.
*
Remember my limited palette,
cracked panels and angels
entering frames like explanations.
Forgive my blue note, my halo, my
shitty materials.
Forgive me, and look at me
while I am talking to you,
or at least picture my face.
You can find poems, collages, essays, interviews, and reviews of my work at lindanortonwriter.com.
Featured Artist #15 | Nathaniel Parsons
Nathaniel Parsons was raised in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where his backyard connected to the town’s Riverside Park. He went to CCA(c) graduating with a BFA in painting and printmaking. He was a singer in a rock band Little My, now called INFROMATON. He went to the University of Iowa and received an MFA in painting. While there, he began creating performance-based work. After, he returned to Cleveland starting work as a professor of art at various schools including the Cleveland Institute of Art. He created work there and abroad including a group of interactive sculptural performance works in Skopje, Macedonia. He was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, creating a large picnic table that visitors, mostly fellow residents, were encouraged to leave their marks in. The table also served as a location for dance parties, tarot readings and games. He returned to Oakland the next year to live and began making personal work exploring his general theme of human’s relationship to nature. He was in two separate exhibitions at Southern Exposure Sonny Smith’s the Cries of San Francisco as Ha Ha La and in Working Conditions where he took walks with visitors and whittled them a souvenir. A solo show at Gallery 16 allowed him to share his continual practice of making oil paintings and placing them in an immersive exhibition while also exploring the role of curator by including other artists. A series of works were made for Progressive Company. Firstly, a large picnic table was made with workers at the company, the carved and painted surface was inked and printed, and it remains as a place to eat lunch and hold meetings. The second work, originally created with a road trip, collected tracings of employees’ arms which were painted and affixed to a ten-foot by twenty-five foot fence depicting a waterfall This became the centerpiece of an installation that included all the elements of a natural park, signs, firepit, benches, tables, and tent. Lastly, he had a second exhibition at Gallery 16 where he showed more oil paintings and picnic tables intersecting with carved snakes and introduced a new curatorial work called A Can of Peas. He lives and works in Oakland.
Process Note
My mind is one of repetition. What follows are three competing ways it sees itself. I like each.
1. Attempting to make work a location open to confronting outcomes and expectations. The work reacts to the seen (chaos) and the systematic (pattern). I chose to create art with materials and ideas that are familiar and relatable. How they get modeled and then arranged focuses on collective and associative methodologies. I believe my work plays well with others and am intrigued by that. When isolated, I feel the work gains a deepness and sometimes critical darkness. I’m not scared so much as disappointed in us as a species and feel my work reflects this. I am open to things being seen as performative. This moment we create, be it a concert, an arrangement, a built environment, is only the starting point how the work lives on after the brush is put down.
I am seeing how my nature drives my work, exploring materials, searching for the newness of surprise while accessing my technical abilities and skills. I want to make art that activates all of it. As for the specific processes I employ, most of my paintings are observational at some level.
Still life, landscape, and motif painting have always been my place to explore and reveal meanings through narrative. Installation tactics are employed to activate scale and unlock the function of objects. I see this public display mostly as signage; in this space, I also find places for relational aesthetics and interactive experiences.
I want to share how I see my work functioning. I have noticed that one of my favorite visual experiences is when my art starts to make itself or surrogates of themselves. I see this as a passive/ active place, one where I can be proud of a thing and its need and ability to find new representation. Transformation and translation are drivers in this dialogue.
2. Working in the collective nature of narrative artworks and objects. My aim is to add to and alter, make evidence of, create wonder, and disturb personal and societal expectations. Mostly my work is born from direct observations of humans’ relationship to nature, something that we’re a part of and seemingly apart from. This gives me endless ways and opportunities to make work, the focus becoming one of conversation. Having either a distinct work that asks to be considered in isolation or having a group of objects to reflect on why they are being included as a unit. As a location for my activities and research I am drawn to parks and my childhood home which bordered the town’s riverside park. Ideally a place for everyone, but who maintains the parks, who created them? I have always been aware that this built environment comes with costs. This affects who uses the parks. I explore not only what we have selected as the must-see destinations and views but also the uncomfortable histories, also the banal, incidental, and peripheral. I’m a staunch advocate for being an explorer, while I also understand it’s like being in a boat, it’s all about displacement. It’s virtually impossible to Leave No Trace. This reality has drawn me to make works that make room for inclusion and participation. I do this so the responsibilities are shared and we can focus on the complexities of a public space.
Alongside this, I focus on how to have a poetic relationship to life. Finding stories from the headlines, front page, back page, personal narratives, dreams, and the artist’s connection to nature. I attempt to find ways of representing how meaning is made. Of late, a special focus has been placed in creating work in situations where the image or object is found in a process of conversation with a viewer or visitor. This act of stripping away personal authorship allows me to focus on the many choices of how something can be represented. This method of production reinforces a belief I have about the nature of art, a souvenir of a thought.
3. This was observed, so it should be viewed as truthful?
Answer:
Vacant raft
Practice of art:
We prepare ourselves for a phone call.
We research the migration of birds.
To make the choice of where to place the birdhouse.
Making it useful instead of lonely.
Process art:
These are mine.
I’ve chosen them, honed them, and shown them.
Sometimes things prove themselves to be false.
The beat-side of freedom is backwards: weiv/view.
I generate things, sometimes on paper, other times as encouragement to others.
This stuff takes stuff to make the stuff. The heart of it is built with the heart of other’s activities, and thusly their hearts.
Putting to words:
Writers go first, burn quickly, enter doubt before others, and have the hardest time just being there, waiting.
What happened to the space between light and drag?
The un-finish of one becomes a finish for many, representing the collective, a motif as connector.
Rays of sunshine
Chain
Teardrops
Tape/staple/stitch
Festoon
Lights
Flag/dart
Heads
What makes up a decision?
Being, finding, making, and showing
Showcasing only the shown?
I’m drawn to how things become meaningful to me.
I look for the outward people, the lovers, and the givers.
I accept the thieves and the takers, but focus my attention elsewhere.
Allowing the authorship to be from another puts the act of creating it into the second and third form of gift giving, causing it to attain a meaning (value).
That succeeds in skipping or _________ the personal.
All I want, seems to return to, all I need, examines, where I’ve been, extorts, what it’s not.
I’ve sat in this chair, close to, why I’m here, before.
In that spirited lack of blood, tingled time.
Responsive to the many I’ve never known except through their letters or actions.
Who have shared with me, not time but place.
Looking to create excuses to dwell, live well, in the freedom they forged.
Being creative in public:
Sidewalks, walking, standing vendor tables
Café , table, kitchen
Store, counter, lunchroom
Park, blanket, bench, table
If I walked around it forever, I would have walked around forever.
Can I represent who I am?
Always a re (ly) ing (2) of life.
Passing on the gift, I received it, it compelled me to create this, take it now as the gift it is, ideas, stories, and understandings, something to stand on.
Making Moral Fruit
Gifts in motion: Broke, lost, pierced, used, burned.
Like the voices at the edge of sleep
Paraphrased from L.Hyde’s words on folklore
The power of the gift is its perpetual movement, never stopping, never becoming capital. I have avoided making for the market, though the act of letting it go has always been special and desired.
How can this understanding of gift be put to service in the creation of art.
Completing the action, timeframe, start/stop, restart?
How does process build upon process?
Does the adding up to, add up to anything?
When does one own one’s words?
Links
https://thecompoundgallery.com/living-in-danger-resting-on-sand-new-works-by-nathaniel-parsons/
https://gallery16.com/artists/nathaniel-parsons
https://www.instagram.com/parsons1970
This one you need to explore a bit, as it was a commissioned work for their annual report. Of special interest is the video, produced by Robert Bryant.
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/81/81824/arInter/18_annual/letter.html
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7CE1qdQaeBHQKvoZINWDE4?si=Z1nAO62mQK2VlBrn_zroEw
Little My recordings
Featured Artist #14 | Malcolm Ryder
Malcolm Ryder is a photographer and art critic based in Oakland, CA. He was one of Princeton University’s first photography graduates, by way of an independent major. From there he exhibited in the New York/New Jersey area and ran a photography business for several years before going to the National Endowment for the Arts where he designed and managed the selection process for the Visual Arts Program Artists’ Fellowships Grants. His later independent photography transitioned from years of shooting news, sports, performing arts, art collections, and publications, to its current form that blends documentary and abstraction. He has been exhibiting throughout the East Bay at top-tier venues including Gray Loft Gallery, UMA, Ethnic Notions, Art Works Downtown, and ACCI. He sits on the Board of Directors for Oakland Art Murmur and the East Bay Photography Collective.
Process Note
I am a photographer with a pronounced dedication to camerawork as the main feature of my practice. This is in distinction from artists who are primarily printmakers. The importance of the difference, in practice, is that I select, frame, compose, and expose in a way that intends to emphasize the experience had while actually viewing in real life what is displayed in my pictures. Another way to recognize this is to consider it more like cinematography than like painting or drawing. I shoot with compact digital cameras exclusively. Compositionally, my images have a rigorous architecture along with a strong interest in the abstract qualities of what I see. My mental approach begins with the “picture” being a blank surface, onto which I will place things, from in front of my lens, through my positioning of shape, texture, light, line, color etc. This in effect treats whatever is in front of my lens as raw material about which I make many decisions, regarding including or excluding them based on what they already offer me. Meanwhile, I select what to shoot based on my thematic concerns, which for several years now have been about making landscape as if it is portraiture of a place, and the place is Oakland. This makes my selection of scenes personally idiosyncratic, as I am interested mainly in two things. One is how a scene shows how people have already decided to make it, with aesthetics that are in effect their vernacular language. The other is a meditative respect for the ephemeral, transitioning, or at-risk. The combination makes many of my photos documentary in nature, often outlasting their subject. This also accounts for what is similar across what is a very wide range of types of images.
Related portfolios:
Lawn Chairs
Adeline Palace
Angela Davis Corner
Featured Artist #13 | Patricia K Kelly
Patricia K Kelly is a visual artist based in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Previously she lived and worked in Italy, and California where she graduated with an MFA (Painting) from the San Francisco Art Institute. Italy introduced her to historical traditions and techniques of Medieval and Early Modern painting. Subsequently in California she went on to develop these traditional and experimental techniques in abstract paintings. Her painting medium is tempera - egg yolk mixed in water with dry pigments - which she applies in fluid layers in combination with detailed brushwork that suggest primal form and woven pattern. Outcomes vary, but the origins of a painting emerge from nature. Awards and Residencies include: PEO International Sisterhood Peace Scholarship, Fine Arts Museum San Francisco, Headlands Center for the Arts affiliate artist, Sausalito, and visiting artist at the American Academy Rome. Recent group shows include ‘Sensing Nature’, Babylon Gallery, Ely, UK, ‘In Flux: Recalibrating the Unknown, MONCA, Chico, CA. Her work is held in public and private collections nationally and internationally.
Process Note
On beginning a painting I focus my attention on the blank work surface. This surface is the meeting ground where my observations and impressions arise and mingle with memory and feeling to bring forth an image. It takes time to give substance to form. My uncertainties evolve into choices that become the image. But when I lose contact with the image I draw from life and imagination in my sketchbook. A sketchbook goes with me wherever I go. The hands-on materiality of tempera paint is central to my practice. Mixing earth and mineral pigments, with their intrinsic crystalline qualities connects me to deep geological time. In the studio I work in natural light. As light fluctuates so too does the image. This interaction is important. How the changing light both conceals and reveals form and substance. At heart I’m a cave painter - at home in the dark, yet loving the light.
Feelers
Egg tempera, chalk on paper, 7”x10,
2024
Portrait of a stone found by the wayside of a construction site
Atoms for Peace
Egg tempera on paper, 9”x12”
This painting is undated because the call for peace and reconciliation is perennial
Transit
Egg tempera, graphite, shell gold on paper, 7”x10”,
2024
Fenlands, earth dormant. Mists, marshes and migrations.
Featured Artist #12 | Karrie Hovey
Hovey grew up in the Northeast Kingdom, a rural area in northern Vermont. There she developed an appreciation of the natural world and a respect for the environment. This is also where she learned many of the hand-craft and construction techniques that are present in her work. Hovey received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her Master’s of Fine Art from San Francisco State University. Since graduating, Hovey’s wanderlust and art career have taken her on artist residencies throughout the United States and Europe, and to China and South Africa. Hovey currently splits her
creative time between Northern California, and Vermont. In addition to Hovey’s art career, she is a certified wildlife safari guide and founded ProjectThorn. ProjectThorn funds tangible projects that prevent rhino and wildlife poaching in Southern Africa. Hovey is represented by Aurelia Gallery in Santa Fe, NM and Red Fox Gallery in Pound Ridge, NY.
Process Note
As a multidisciplinary visual artist, I seek inspiration from the natural world. My work explores the symbiotic relationship between the human landscape and the natural world. I travel for inspiration, I seek out unique habitats, extreme landscapes, unusual flora, and endemic fauna. Although the work I create is diverse in material, process, and execution, the pieces contextually relate to concerns for the environment, sustainability, biodiversity and physical geography. My artworks are experiential and mixed media. They typically incorporate textiles, recycled resources, and natural materials.
www.projectthorn.com
www.karriehovey.com
Featured Artist #11 | Cynthia Brannvall
Cynthia Brannvall is an art historian and an interdisciplinary multi-media artist who works and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She teaches art history through a global lens at Foothill Community College as a full-time tenured faculty member. Cynthia has undergraduate degrees in Art Practice and Art History from UC Berkeley where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Ronald E. McNair scholar and was awarded the Departmental Citation for her research in Art History. She has an MA in Art History from San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art. An advocate and ally for social justice and equity, Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations of body and spirit. Her artwork has been widely exhibited in juried group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington DC. Cynthia was selected for the 2022-2023 Emerging Artist’s Program at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco where she had her first solo exhibition March 29-June 12, 2022. She was awarded a 4-year studio residency at Cubberley Artists Studio Program in Palo Alto and has exhibited in multiple museums—MoAD, San Francisco, New Museum Los Gatos, Triton Museum, Marin Moca Museum of Northern California, Museum of Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Luis Obispo. Cynthia has published short essays for exhibition catalogs and has served as a juror for exhibitions and public art commissions.
Process Note
Cynthia Brannvall’s work engages with intersectional entanglements and collisions of history through a feminist lens to explore themes of identity. She uses the visual language of art to express individual and collective identities and the histories, cultures, economies and geographies that they are tethered to. Brannvall creates paintings and sculptures out of vintage and antique clothing fragments and textiles as a nostalgic lure to evoke a soft-landing place to ease into complex conversations about race, labor, history, and slavery. The faded, frayed, stained, and torn fabric fragments conjure the presence and labor of women. The patterns and marks in the materials she uses as a media function as potent conceptual signifiers of labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history. She imagines the abstract patterns in the material as protein folds of DNA that migrate across bodies of water and continents through the bodies of ancestors. Cynthia Brannvall’s art exists in an interstitial space between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting and sculpture, landscape and portrait, abstraction and representation, history and the present. For Brannvall, to be fluent in these margins, is to understand the movement of people, ideas, and resources through forced and voluntary migrations with clarity, empathy and honesty.
Continents, 2014-2016, Vintage and antique cotton textiles painted on crinoline, 3 panels 48 x 68 inches (68 x 154 inches installed)
Not Quite Tame, 2024, Vintage birdcage, globe, sea fans, vintage and antique trim, lace, and crocheted doilies and trim. 19 x 36 x 12 inches
Shadow Work #2: A Pickaninny World, 2024, Quilting hoops, ruffles and bows from a 19th century dress, vintage silk and velvet ribbon, vintage seam binding tape, polyester ribbon, acrylic paint and globe. 30” x 28”x 26”
Featured Artist #10 | David L. Cooper
David L. Cooper is a painter and musician living in Oakland, California. He earned his MFA from Mills College in 1993. He took a 20-year break from painting, working as a graphic designer, illustrator, and animator. He performed as a vibraphonist in bands such as Eskimo, The Beth Lisick Ordeal, and Dropsy. He recently resumed painting, but has not yet publicly exhibited his work.
Process Note
First of all, I’m as bewildered by my work as you are. But I steered toward that. I developed a method of semi-consciously drawing after accidentally discovering that the results were better. My office meeting doodles were quite mindless while my hand made them, and they were often more compelling than anything I drew with intent. So I cultivated that trance in the studio, silencing reason, focusing only on form.
It’s fair to say that my paintings are senseless, if sense is made of words. I think visual art, much like music, can offer us a shared respite from language. Paintings can go places words can’t.
Picasso may or may not have said: “The world makes no sense, so why should art?” I would just tweak that to: “The world makes nothing but sense, so why should art?”
Should you seek in my work any resemblances to the known visible world, you’ll find some, but I try to both invoke and scramble familiarity, much as our dreams do. I feel more like a servant of my work than its boss. I intuit what it wants, and try my best to maximize its fruition. This, too, resembles dreaming; it’s all coming from a part of my mind that I don’t fully control. I’m in the audience.
I believe the purpose of art lies in the viewer’s (or listener’s or reader’s) reckoning with it. We don’t have a good word for that encounter. “Kapow,” maybe. But we all hope for it – that spark of connection between maker and recipient. It can be sensible or not, just like all love. We create for one another.
"Ascension"
oil on birch panel, 14" x 14"2025
“Assumption"
oil on birch panel, 14" x 14"2024
"Equinox"
oil on birch panel, 14" x 14"
2024
Featured Artist #9 | Roberto Benavidez
Piñata-based sculptor, Roberto Benavidez (b. 1973, Beeville, TX) lives and works in the Los Angeles, CA neighborhood of El Sereno. His work has been featured in American Craft Magazine, ARTnews, Artsy, Atlas Obscura, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Orion Magazine, Politiken, The New York Times and This Is Colossal. Most recently he was featured in the New York Times Series “The Art of Craft.” Benavidez has exhibited his work at the AD&A Museum at UCSB, Craft In America Center, Mingei International Museum, Palo Alto Art Center, Self Help Graphics, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum and Riverside Art Museum; and this year his work was included in the 2024 Homo Faber Biennial in Venice, Italy. He is also featured in the “Play” episode of the Craft In America PBS series, and is the subject of the 2024 documentary short “Piñatas of Earthly Delights” directed by Tom Maroney. His work is in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, LA Metro, The Museum of International Folk Art and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Process Note
For over a decade my sculptural art practice has centered around the piñata form and technique. My work is informed by the multi-cultural history of the piñata and the star piñata as a proselytizing tool, allowing me to weave in both mixed-race and queer coding within my work. Each work begins as a paper mache form using balloons as support. These balloon forms are then refined with paperboard for each desired form. The crepe paper fringe covering each work is layered with multiple colors to create a vibrancy of hues. The fringe is all hand cut and applied in a meticulous fashion and flow to accentuate the form.
https://www.instagram.com/roberto_benavidez/
Bird No. 1
Illuminated Piñata No 21
Benavidez Stigmata Piñata
Featured Artist #8 | Masako Takahashi
Masako Takahashi is a visual artist who works in San Francisco, California, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She was born in Topaz, Utah, a concentration camp, during WWII. After high school in San Francisco, Takahashi went to Bard College in New York, and (after dropping in and out of school for two years to travel) graduated from UC Berkeley, in California. Takahashi has exhibited in museums and galleries in Mexico, The Netherlands, Spain, Japan, and the USA. www.MasakoTakahashi.com has work and exhibition history.
Process Note
My work ranges from painting to the embroidery I do with my hair. I turned to embroidery after living in Mexico for a few years. The work is done on silk-- embroidered in a "text" I invented in order to communicate meanings that words don't seem to render. Each 'word' is as long as the length of its hair allows.
For the Friendship Series I chose colors reminding me of the complexions of friends. After a trip to Bhutan and Tibet, I composed the 'words' in the texts into Mandala patterns and ran them together without spaces between the words, so they read like chanting, one word running into the next.
My hair contains my history, lived simultaneously to the time any viewer has lived, and I hope that offers a subtle link. When I made my Journals, the 12 meter long scrolls stitched on uncut kimono bolts, I made the text vertical, as in Japanese calligraphy. As my hair turns predominantly white, I work on black silk.
Some of the work is as large as 5 x 4 feet, while others are done on small embroidery hoops. Interpretation is left to the viewer.
--
Black Hoop/1
2024
artist's hair, silk, wood, metal
8.5" x 8.5" x .25"
Black Hoop/6
2024
artist's hair, silk, wood, metal
10" x 10" x .25"
Black Hoop Series/4
2024
artist's hair, silk, wood, metal, needle
Featured Artist #7 | Laurie Steelink
Laurie Steelink is a cultural practitioner and multidisciplinary artist. She is a citizen of the Akimel O’otham Nation from Arizona and is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. Steelink’s primary focus is the exploration of her Native American/Indigenous ancestry communicated through assemblages, installation and events. Incorporating found objects, deconstructed paintings, sculpture, sound and photography, when orchestrated as an installation, she considers her work as a living diorama or form of theatre. Adopted at 6 months old in Phoenix, AZ, and raised in Tucson, Steelink received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is the 2024 Native Scholar in Residence at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA and she is on the organizing committee for the Many Winters Gathering of Elders held annually in San Pedro, CA since its revival in 2017. Steelink is also the founder and director of the project space Cornelius Projects in San Pedro, California. She currently resides in San Pedro on the unceded territory of the Gabrieleno-Tongva Peoples—the past, present, and future stewards of Tovaangar (Greater Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands).
Process Note
My multidisciplinary practice addresses the complexities of division and fragmentation in my life from a contemporary Indigenous perspective. I'm constructing a bridge using the tools I've received-my education and experience-and embedding them in a kind of conceptual offering with a critical gaze while paying homage to my Akimel O'otham ancestry and the land I am a guest on. The process is an evolving decolonization exercise, a continuum where everything, including the materials I use, from re-purposed paintings, treated found objects, assemblage, installation to curatorial projects is a constant rethinking, blending, and recovering.
GHOST
2024
Mixed media assemblage consisting of found porcelain and cloth doll, hand sewn linen robe, acrylic paint on paper, PVA glue, polyester fringe and ribbon, wiggly eyes, leather cord, metal swivel hook, wood hanger
43 h X 14 1/2 w X 15 1/2 d inches (includes hanger)
At home in ways that people cannot be
2024
Mixed media sculpture consisting of cardboard, acrylic paint, paper, PVA glue, metal jingle and wire, horsehair
11 x 7 x 8 3/4 inches
SUPER BAD
2024
Acrylic paint, paper, PVA glue, cardboard
8 x 8 inches
Featured Artist #6 | Dan Nelson
Dan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who plays with language and signifiers to look at how humans create meaning and social structures.
His diverse practice is realized in the multifaceted office-humor-meets-capitalist-critique The Corporation, in participatory works such as The Escape and Your Name Here, and in brazen material experiments like Oddballs, 90 miniature sculptures made of paperclips. Nelson is best known for his book “All Known Metal Bands”, published by McSweeney’s, which won an AIGA design award and was reviewed as the “The Best Bathroom Book Ever” by Rolling Stone.
Nelson has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco Bay Area and New York venues including Boontling Gallery, The Compound Gallery, Faultline Art Space, The LAB, NIAD Art Center, Plexus Projects, ProArts Gallery & Commons, Swarm Gallery, and Your Mood Gallery. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley.
Process Note
At the start of 2024, a gallerist, who I'd met at his booth at an art fair and with whom I'd bonded over funny text paintings, offered to show some pieces at his gallery in the fall and said he liked the list-based work that he'd seen. Being a little tired of lists and feeling like it was a bit played-out in non errand-based contexts, I nevertheless wanted to oblige and just took it as a limitation to work within.
So here you see one piece that is the title of a listicle instead of the list itself. Which is like...50 movies? It would take me 5 years to watch that many movies, and when the next listicle arrives in 2 months then what, I ask you? And there is a painting featuring the names of towns I drove through on one of two consecutive cross-country drives made in the process of moving out here to New York state. They form something far more poetic than the hellish reality of US route 80, which I would suggest be your last of many options when making that trip. The third piece started with some lyrics by Mark E. Smith that reminded me to find stimulation in the tedium of repetition, in my case the endless march of items in lists. Along with the cross-country painting, it also shows a new approach: be sloppier and sketchier and let the marks be the beginning of the process which is then traced on the proverbial page. Ever since I read that handwriting accesses both the linguistic part of the brain and the part where drawing originates, I've been trying to hang out there more.
the four R's
50 Movies
cross country
Featured Artist #5 | Adrian Arias
Adrian Arias is an international multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual arts, poetry, performance, and social justice. A descendant of the Mochica culture of ancient Peru, he embraces his culture’s use of dreams as a transformative catalyst between reality and imagination. Arias has created large-scale murals for public and private businesses such as Google and a three-story mural at the corner of Turk and Hyde in San Francisco, commissioned by the Luggage Store. He has recently created murals for Magic Theater, Freight & Salvage, Red Poppy Art House and murals in Mexico, Peru and Italy. He is the co-founder of Mission Arts Performance Project MAPP, and the creator of ILLUSION show and the Tarot in Pandemic & Revolution, a multifaceted collaboration by sixty two visual artists and poets in the creation of a community tarot deck that speaks to historic events that transpired over the pandemic. As a writer he has created 5 books of poetry and one of art and science fiction, in addition to appearing in more than 20 California poetry anthologies. http://adrianarias.com/
Three works by Adrian arising from the power of Dreams, and the need for social justice and peace of mind
River to the Sky
Latex-acrylic on wall, December 2021 - January 2022
2700 sq ft.
Located at Turk and Hyde in San Francisco, this three-story mural celebrates the Black Hawk Jazz Club, once a haven for legends like Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. The mural's journey began six months prior to its creation, inspired by my exploration of the Tenderloin area and dreams depicting the community's struggles. Initially, I sketched in black and white, reflecting despair. However, after engaging with local residents and artists, I uncovered the vibrant history of the Black Hawk, which sparked a new vision filled with color and hope.
A dream of San Francisco's subterranean waters rising to the sky inspired the concept of a "River to the Sky," where musical icons coexist, and an ancestral hummingbird spreads hope alongside California poppies, known for their calming effects. Bold "BLM" letters signify the movement's role in restoring hope and combating injustice, crafted from a mosaic of indigenous cultural imagery, including my own Mochica heritage. The design also honors the Ohlone territory with a wave pattern reminiscent of their basketry. This mural represents a healing journey and a musical celebration of resilience. Central to its essence is the idea of sanctuary, providing solace to the Tenderloin community. Thanks to Urban Alchemy, its vision extends into a park with exercise facilities, a children's play area, and tranquil pathways.
Commissioned by The Luggage Store Gallery and the Someland Foundation, the mural embodies renewal and connection for the community.
Timelapse: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/682109842
Complete information: https://shorturl.at/Z9PpV
FOX-KTVU: https://shorturl.at/9o2Nl
Poem
A river rises to the sky,
from the streets of pain,
where shadows lie.
Dreams of jazz and colors bloom
on the wall of dark memories,
Miles and Billie cross the gloom.
A hummingbird sings the sweet plea of hope
In a shining ancestral flight
while poppies give us a breath of peace.
the waters lift darkness to light.
El Beso / The Kiss (in Pandemic with Fishes)
Ink and acrylic on Arches paper.
52 x 72 inches.
Private collection.
This piece, done in ink and acrylic on paper during the pandemic, reflects the profound impact of the enforced six-foot separation between people. As the world came to a standstill, prohibitions on physical contact, especially the simple joys of hugs and kisses, altered our expressions of affection, replacing them with a widespread collective fear of intimacy. Creating “The Kiss,” was an act of liberation and defiance. The artwork portrays a couple engaged in a catharsis of passion and tenderness. They merge as one, their emotions laid bare, invoking the elements around them, particularly water, a symbol of fluidity that proved so elusive to us during that time. Within this turbulent aquatic scene, more hands than usual emerge, as well as abstract sea creatures and fish, embodying our innate need for flow and reminding us of the currents of connection we were losing to the virus. “The Kiss” represents a journey of inner purification and transformation, born from a deeply impactful experience that initially instilled fear in me. The piece took place over three sessions, and after the first, I had intense dreams that inspired me and helped me continue with the drawing. I visualized effortless gliding fish, palpable sounds, and a heady sea scent that drew me into a world of vivid sensory exploration. Although I was inspired by Klimt’s iconic “Kiss,” I used my own visual language and dreamlike imagery to bring my vision to life, including my own hand and foot prints as part of this passionate ocean of imagery. Ultimately, “The Kiss” illuminated my fundamental longing for human connection and the giving of love. After finishing it, I found myself hugging and kissing with renewed fervor, rekindling the intimacy we had all missed.
Haikus for “The Kiss”
-I-
Six feet keep us apart,
forbidden embraces sigh,
fear hangs in the dark.
-II-
The Kiss blooms again,
hearts connected in gentle dusk,
water’s grace renewed.
-III-
Visions of the sea,
shadowed fish dance in the night,
fearless love flows free.
The Indigenous Woman is not invisible
Acrylic on canvas.
48 x 72 inches.
This work is part of a triptych I painted in 2023 during my artistic residency at CAST (Community Arts Stabilization Trust). It is part of a series dedicated to Indigenous Women, created with the purpose of making Native women visible and claiming their rights. The idea came from a deep dream, in which my grandmothers told me that they were not invisible. The central figure of the painting is inspired by the strength of four indigenous women from different regions of what we now call America: a Mochica woman from Peru, a Nukak from the Colombian Amazon, an Ohlone from the Bay Area, and Yuma and Papago women from the territories that extend across Arizona and Mexico. In this painting, the telluric energy of nature is manifested: the mountains, the lightning, the waterfalls, and the symbolic power of body art in the native cultures of the Americas. A prominent element is the golden fallopian tube that symbolizes the reproductive rights of indigenous women. On her right ear, the ancient Andean Chakana—a symbol that embodies the interconnectedness of the universe—connects the piece to a cultural legacy that is over four thousand years old. Meanwhile, on her left ear, the message “Say Her Name” links the fight for indigenous women’s rights to the broader movement against police violence and brutality towards women of color. Through the combination of these symbols, the work expresses a deep need for justice, recognition, and respect. My intention with this piece is to reclaim the narratives of indigenous women, ensuring that they are seen, heard, and honored as living, powerful forces shaping the future, not shadows of the past. The drawing that inspired this series was created in 2022, and from it three murals were born: one at the Magic Theater at Fort Mason, another at the corner of Folsom and 23rd Street in San Francisco, and one more on the door of Good Vibrations in Oakland.
Images of the original drawing and the murals can be seen here:
http://adrianarias.com/selected-murals-adrian/
Poem
Four faces of my land unite,
in a single form, their spirits ignite.
Mochica, Nukak, Ohlone stand tall,
and Yuma from dreams, she answers the call.
With painted face, her soul’s set free,
a woven hat bears threads of peace.
"My body is mine," her voice resounds,
Chakana's force in her heart abounds.
Featured Artist #4 | Vince Montague
Vince Montague is a writer and visual artist working with language and clay. He is the author of Cracked Pot (Latah Books 2023) a memoir about ceramics, writing, and grief. He is also the author of Next Door (Bottlecap Press 2023) a chapbook of experimental prose poems. He works with clay making vessels and pots exhibited across the country. His work can be found at Hugomento (San Francisco, CA) and Craig Krull Gallery (Santa Monica, CA) as well as the ACCI Gallery (Berkeley, CA). His work has been juried into recent shows at AMOCA (Faranheit 2024) and Kellogg Gallery at Pomona College for Clay and Ink 2024 as part of the PST Art (Pacific Standard Time Los Angeles) a city wide collaboration sponsored by The Getty Museum, Where Art and Science Collide.
Process Note
Working as a writer and investing myself in language to create poetry and prose is a type of conceptual art because the majority of the work of a writer is invisible. The sentence or fragment of poetry lives in the mind of the reader ultimately. The process shapes those words by using the skill and craft of good writing. Clay is a different type of material where the work is visible and manifest. The material of the earth is manipulated and crafted into vessels and sculpture that employ their own language. The labor can be felt just by touching.
Working with clay encourages the intuitive side of my brain, a brain not thinking about words or language, a mind open to the spontaneity and wisdom inherent in dirt and mud. A lot of the work here is simply done by playing around with shapes and looking to resolve whatever I started to reveal the piece. I don’t have an agenda with clay, whereas sometimes with writing I am more regimented, more tight. I wish I felt the same way with writing as I do with clay, but the two processes are feeding off of different sides of my imagination. One side is about sculpting ideas and shaping those ideas by editing and rewriting. The other is about starting out in the unknown to discover new territory.
Citizen
Ceramic 2024
16” x 14”
This is from a series of Big Heads I made as a resident at Township 10. These are hand built and fired to a high temperature. What interests me in this head is the volume I create by building by hand. The vastness of the human imagination, the protean nature of intelligence, the limits of the human experience are the concepts inside this figurative head.
Decency
Ceramic
2024
9” x 11” (2 pieces)
These figurative pieces are purposely ambiguous and non specific. They are part of the spectrum of imagination that keeps defining and redefining how we adapt and change.
Teapot
Ceramic
2022
This piece is part of my ongoing obsession with teapots, their relation to the body, to the soul, to the act of protecting and giving sustenance.
featured artist #3 | Wendy Lee Gadzuk
Wendy Lee Gadzuk is a visual artist, writer, musician and diviner living and working in the Mojave Desert of California, where she also co-curates La Matadora Gallery in Joshua Tree. Trained at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia as a jeweler and metalsmith, she now works in various mediums, resulting in 2 different bodies of visual art - finely detailed visionary work on paper incorporating free-form drawing and traditional Byzantine iconography techniques, and altar-like 3-dimensional mixed media assemblage pieces, often using recycled materials. Religious and occult imagery are recurring themes, though, contrary to popular belief, Wendy was not raised in a religious household. Over the past couple of years, her experience as a caregiver to her partner has influenced her work in a noticeable way, resulting in a series of large-scale assemblages using medical waste. The work all holds a similar thread, connecting in its own way to the collective unconscious desire to honor the mundane.Wendy recently created an oracle deck called Deconstructed Divination and released a limited edition book called 'The Magic of 8' to accompany it. She exhibits regularly in the Los Angeles area and beyond.
Process Note
My process is a mess. I suppose my process is that of bringing order to chaos, of reigning in this ever-expanding collection of materials (because EVERYTHING has the potential to be an art supply) until they flow with an air of refinement and a sort of sacred order. Collecting is part of my process. It can become obsessive. Digging through jagged, rusty burn piles, collecting and cleaning roadkill, picking up rusty bottle caps in parking lots, rummaging through swap meets and estate sales - it never ends. Saving cat food cans, jar lids, or anything else that I hear pleading for a new lease on life. Once a vague idea calls out to me from this massive pile of what some may call junk, I start "sketching." This really means laying the pieces out until they make sense together. Then the problem-solving begins. How do I actually make this work? Craftsmanship is important, so the pieces must be well-built. It's frustrating, but then it comes together, evolving during the process. And it's never done when I think it is. There is ALWAYS that last thing that comes after what I think is the finish line. And I've NEVER regretted that, though some say "less is more." Not for me. This is often where the magic happens. Who am I to get in the way of that?
@wendy_lee_gadzuk
www.facebook.com/wendyleegadzuk
And I’ll Be Waiting Here for You With Open Arms
Guest Speaker
Blue Charge
featured artist #2 | Lexa Walsh
Lexa Walsh is an artist, cultural worker and experience maker. Her upbringing as the only bad athlete in a family of fifteen, and coming of age in the Bay Area post punk cultural scene of the 1990’s informs her interest in alternative lifestyles, economies and communities. With a background in both sculpture and social practice, Walsh makes site specific projects, exhibitions, publications and objects, using an array of materials and often employing social engagement, institutional critique, and radical hospitality to question hierarchies, power and value. She recently relocated to the Hudson Valley.
Walsh is a graduate of Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice MFA program and was Social Practice Artist in Residence in Portland Art Museum’s Education department. She was a recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, the CEC Artslink Award, the Gunk Grant and was a de Young Artist Fellow. Walsh has participated in projects, exhibitions and performances at Apexart, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, FOR-SITE, Grand Central Art Center, Kala Art Institute, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, NIAD, Oakland Museum of California, SFMOMA, Smack Mellon, Walker Art Center, Williams College Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and has done several international artist residencies, tours and projects in Europe and Asia. lexawalsh.com
Process Note
Remnants: Plaid Studies, one of my few abstracted series, are in alignment with all of my work: questioning hierarchies, power and value, including of materials and processes. These are made from scraps of leftover slabs when I make functional ceramics and medals. I reuse and weave, trying to make clay act like textiles, save clay reclamation labor from the hard working crew at the ceramics studio, evoke my catholic school plaid uniform, and play with some formal jazz (god forbid!).
featured artist #1 | Mark Dutcher
Artist Mark Dutcher brings together elements of abstraction, Surrealism, and Pop in paintings that incorporate layers of words and symbols, imprecisely rendered and frequently illegible. Often sampling song lyrics or names of former loves in his rough-hewn paintings, Dutcher explores notions of transience, loss, and death. He leaves blemishes and fingerprints visible and mistakes intact, emphasizing the artist’s hand and process. “I’m interested in flaws and systems that leave flaws, in the traces that demonstrate that things don’t always work out the way you think they will,” he has said. Dutcher experienced the loss of a partner and of friends during the AIDS epidemic, and his work has obliquely addressed these personal traumas. Influences on his practice include the work of the Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko and the California artist Richard Diebenkorn. He lives and works in Los Angeles and The Sea Ranch, California.
