By Jonathan Curiel

The giant disco ball has crushed a woman to death. Or is that a girl? It's hard to tell since we only see the figure's legs and striped stockings. And it's hard to tell because the macabre scene has unfolded outdoors — amid vegetation that artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor has painstakingly drawn to contrast the disco ball's sea of refracting tiles. Then there's Fuenmayor's trademark veneer of charcoal-induced grays, whites, blacks, and in-between shades, which produces a kind of dark-humored X-ray of murder — a freeze-frame of fantastical layers that's entirely appropriate for a canvas with the title, "The Innocence of Savages."

Visitors to Fuenmayor's exhibit at Dolby Chadwick Gallery should be prepared to be in the mood for autopsies. Each artwork in Fuenmayor's new series is an examination of lightness and darkness, and of levity and enmity. There's beauty in Fuenmayor's art. Of course, there is. But he's broken all the borders that would clearly distinguish lightness from darkness and beauty from non-beauty. They're all intertwined, making a scene like "The Innocence of Savages" a crime scene that requires forensic tools of perception, and an understanding that Fuenmayor's X-rays — like real ones on the wall of a medical room — reveal undeniable truths about traumas usually unseen and ignored by the naked eye.

Fuenmayor's subject is cultural colonialism and its often-ignored parallel occurrence: Exotification of "the other." These parallel throughlines are personal for Fuenmayor, a Colombian native who moved to the United States decades ago and experienced firsthand the kind of reductive stereotyping that even seemingly intelligent people can resort to when they encounter someone from a culture that isn't theirs. Name-calling is one manifestation, but so too is simplifying an entire people — which is why, as one example, Fuenmayor has consistently toyed with stereotypes of Latin American culture, as with his portraits that feature Carmen Miranda, the 20th-century Brazilian singer whose frivolous fruit hats become something complex and even ominous under Fuenmayor's tutelage. 

In "Carmen Leda II" at Dolby Chadwick, Fuenmayor perches three swans atop Miranda's head in a reference to the mythological Greek story of the god Zeus having sexual relations with a royal figure named Leda. Many historic accounts of their relationship call what Zeus did rape, so "Carmen Leda II" is — like "The Innocence of Savages" — an autopsy of violence without obvious blood stains. And yet: You can see the swans and Carmen Miranda's visage and come away with a smirk if, without context, all you see are the striking animals and ornamentation that coagulate in unison. Ha-ha. Go ahead and laugh at the surreal scene if you want, Fuenmayor seems to be saying implicitly and in a catalog that accompanies the exhibit, where he writes: "As the past, present, the exotic and the familiar collide, absurd and fantastic panoramas arise. I am looking for a viewer who will negotiate his firsthand expectations with my work."

Explicitly funny art appears in A Certain Slant of Light, epitomized by the piece called "That's Exotic Folks!" — which prints those exact words across a scene of Latin American parrots, and is an obvious allusion to the Looney Tunes sign-off, "That's all, folks!," that became associated with the often-naive-and-dufus-like Porky Pig character. The humor that Fuenmayor embeds in A Certain Slant of Light is in the tradition of such artists and writers as Binyavanga Wainaina, whose 2005 Granta essay "How to Write About Africa" was a masterclass in satire and poking fun of Western stereotyping of non-Western people and cultures. Like Wainaina, who played with every insipid view of Africa (as in ". . .  Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize . . . "), Fuenmayor takes widespread perceptions of Latin America and emphasizes their profound absurdity. A more famous writer than Wainaina, Emily Dickinson, helped inspire A Certain Slant of Light since Fuenmayor created his exhibit title after reading Dickinson's poem of almost the same name. In it, Dickinson opines about the paradox of a winter light that:

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

With the poem's obsession with shadows and death and light's impact on people's internal selves, it's as if Dickinson wrote There's a certain Slant of light centuries ago just for Fuenmayor. At Dolby Chadwick, his best works of living people show them glowing with light that seems to emanate from within. "The Madness of Pride" is particularly arresting. A person walks tightrope-style across the trunk of a badly bent palm tree — balancing precariously while holding onto a tightrope pole, all while heading towards the tree's fronds that overlook some kind of watery abyss. "The Madness of Pride" becomes a stand-in for anyone who's tried to navigate an idealized version of a cultural identity that they've internalized to an extreme. One wrong step and . . . kaboom! A death of identity occurs. The light in "The Madness of Pride" seems almost radioactive, like we're witnessing a post-apocalyptic world where everything — including the source of light and the angles of palm trees — is topsy-turvy. In fact, there's something "off" about nearly every scene in A Certain Slant of Light. 

In "The Rehearsal of Splendor," seals have taken over the interior of a grand palace, where they're practicing a circus act amid grandiose paintings, woodwork, chandeliers, and other expensive hallmarks of privilege. One seal sits on a velvet chair. Next to the animal is a giant disco ball — the same one, perhaps, that crushed a human in "The Innocence of Savages." Where are the seals' trainers? Are the animals in control here?

There are an endless number of ways to interpret Fuenmayor's meticulously drawn panoramas, but I'll settle on this: Exoticizing others can carry a steep price — not just on the exoticized but the exoticizer. By reducing the world to stereotypical brushstrokes, people shut down the possibilities of depth, nuance, and contradictions. The antithesis of openness is a kind of closed casket. It's a veritable death, in other words. Only a certain kind of light can penetrate that kind of metaphorical casket. In this view, the light we see in A Certain Slant of Light is man-made since it's coming not from the sun or the moon or something extraterrestrial but from Fuenmayor's own being. Levity helps bring in the light and the lightness we see in Fuenmayor's canvases. How long this perception lasts is entirely up to the viewer.

By Sarah Poisner

The current exhibition of work by Shelley Niro at the Gorman Museum of Native American Art beckons visitors to enter her world through deeply personal and meditative photographs. One begins the journey into her work and life even before stepping foot into the building, strolling through a garden filled with herbs historically used in Indigenous and Native American ceremonies. Crystalline panes of glass serve as the only separation between the entryway with the small shop and the exhibition space itself. With no admission fee, it is only too easy to be instantly drawn to the special exhibition gallery. The pristine walls of the museum’s new, light-filled building (only opened to the public in 2023), currently showcase numerous works from throughout the award-winning artist’s life as a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk. This exhibition highlights how she reclaims a medium - photography - that has historically been used by Edward S. Curtis and others with colonialist agendas to dehumanize Indigenous peoples and perpetuate the stereotype of the noble savage. Niro’s narrative photographs, one of many media she has employed in her career, reveal her profound musings about the autonomy, self-identification, and hopes of her fellow First Nations people. Her masterful story-telling, imparted through each work in every series, reveals a personal vulnerability rarely explored in museum exhibitions.

The exhibition is composed of and physically organized according to several of her thematic series. There is no clear predetermined sequence throughout the exhibition, rather the openness of the special exhibition gallery allows one to wander wherever the eye is drawn.  Within these dozen or so groupings, each including between two and ten works, the exhibition highlights the methodologies through which Niro has expressed the tenacity of her people and the introspections of the artist herself. The series presented in this exhibition cover a wide period of time, jumping from the early 1990s to the present day. Most of the photographs are in black and white, and include a combination of archival and silver gelatin prints. Scattered throughout are speckles of color, including the maroon borders of each work in the Stories of Women series, within the slight tinge of her cyanotypes, and especially the neon-bright hand-colored photographs in the Mohawks in Beehive series.

The Mohawks in the Beehive series perhaps exemplify Niro’s approach to art and life most evidently - showcasing her ability to transform competing emotions into cohesive images that rely on humor and deep conviction. The artist created this series at a time when she was reeling from the Oka Crisis in Quebec, and the fallout from not just the conflict entering the global consciousness, but the connotations that came from broadly painting the living conditions of Indigenous populations with a broad brush. In the resulting series, she invited her sisters to join her for a day of outings, to celebrate their closeness and to simply have fun. The deeply personal photographs capture each woman’s playfulness, while the addition of vibrant pinks, blues, and yellows only serves to increase that liveliness. This series is nothing less than a full-blown rejection of fatalistic stereotypes, especially those that were permeating public consciousness in the aftermath of the Oka Crisis. Instead, the artist heartily invites viewers into the typically exclusive circle of her sisterhood, to witness their joy.

These are not the only images of Niro’s family members. Cyanotypes of her daughters and mother, within the My Girls and Chiquita series, are a crucial element of this exhibition.Through her experiments with this photographic technique, Niro primarily sought to expand her practice. By applying this technique to images of her very closest relatives, she shares the deep love and respect that flows between her and these other women in her family. The velvet framing surrounding both cyanotypes is also adorned with traditional Iroquois beadwork, a medium often used to create frames around images of loved ones. Much like the portraits of her sisters, she offers this intimate glimpse into her own life to bring the viewers into her world.

Oscillating from deeply personal portraits to treatise-like series such as Stories of Women, Niro fearlessly shares so much of her inner world and thoughts through her works. This group of ten works each features a portrait of a woman and superimposed objects. While the themes of individual works create a narrative for each woman, the series as a whole highlights the strength and dignity of the group. In the accompanying exhibition text, Niro explains the importance of the Skywoman story. While she honors the sacrifices of that divine figure, she also imparts her belief in the power that she and others have to choose another narrative for themselves - as something other than the stereotype of the constantly sacrificing and stoic Indigenous woman. Through so many of the other works in this exhibition, Niro directly comments on her beliefs about how art and self-identity are essential to unraveling connection to her ancestors and to others living in her community. The largest works in the room - the three eye-catching self-portraits in the Abnormal Aboriginal series - are yet another testament to the careful thoughtfulness she applies to identity. Although she uses humorous word-play with the text boldly printed on each of these three works, she does not undermine the serious nature of her topic, and instead offers a thoughtful entry into her way of thinking. Through this series and the other portrait and composite-based images in the room, Niro deconstructs and then reformulates her philosophies on history and culture. In all works, it remains her goal to share her belief, “in the healing power of art.”

Her approach to healing also takes form in her series Solace, and it offers visitors a moment of peace and meditation in an exhibition that often places them face-to-face with the various subjects of portraits. Devoid of any overt human presence upon initial glance, the six vertical amalgamated landscapes within Solace offer glimpses of nature. These composite photographs, which each consist of three thoughtfully conjoined scenes, ask viewers to look closely to understand the connections between the distinct elements. In the work Home, for example, Niro positions a soaring eagle within the top third, a forest, heavy with leaves, in the middle third, and the rushing waters of Niagara Falls in the bottom third. In creating her own landscape - filled with earth, water, and air - she concedes an undeniable human intervention. Yet, this and the other works in the series remain deeply meditative and allow for a welcome interlude into the natural world. The peace she offers to viewers is, in fact, one that Niro sought so desperately herself. In 2014, the artist was deeply enmeshed in the Idle No More Movement and deeply engaged with the interconnected Missing and the Murdered Crisis. Grasping at the sublimity of nature, Niro found her moments of reprieve through Solace.

Niro creates each and every work in all of her series to promote dialogue and to share her own thoughts. Almost like a diary, this exhibition captures the highs and the lows she has faced throughout her life. With photographs of her loved ones, deeply meditative natural images, and composites that highlight the mythos and lore that shaped the world of her and her ancestors, this exhibit excels at showcasing the diversity of Niro’s subjects and techniques. While the scope of this exhibition allows for visitors to only explore a single portion of Niro’s large body of work (there are only four sculptural works on view), this exhibition feels focused and celebrates the powerful photographic works from throughout her career. It is also a highly informative exhibition, including extensive quoted material that the artist shares about each series. Above all else, it succeeds in honoring Niro’s sentiments that through art, “I give thanks to my ancestors every day. I connect with them through my own imagination.” One might be asking themselves, long after visiting, how to mirror Niro’s sincere vulnerability so as to continue the dialogue needed to address the vital subjects within her artwork.    

Shelley Niro - Gorman Museum of Native American Art (January 28 - August 30, 2026)

Kevin Ivester is the owner and director of Ivester Contemporary, an Austin contemporary art gallery in the Canopy Creative Complex, and the owner of East Side Picture Framing. He built the gallery from broad art-world experience, including gallery work, auction houses, restoration, conservation, art handling, framing, and appraisal. Opening Ivester Contemporary in 2020 during Austin’s pandemic shutdown, he turned uncertainty into opportunity, launching with Maiden Voyage, a roster exhibition of 18 artists, most based in Austin. Ivester co-founded Austin's Friends Fair and serves as Board Chair of the Austin Art Alliance. Over the past six years, the gallery has expanded its program to include artists from across the United States and abroad, with an emphasis on experimentation, process, and a sense of joy.

The following excerpts are from Kevin Ivester’s interview, as conducted by Hugh Leeman.

From Massachusetts to the Battleground State of Texas

Hugh Leeman: Kevin, as we prepared for this interview you told me: "I moved from homogeneous Massachusetts to the social and political battleground of Texas." Tell me the story of how a guy from Massachusetts who went to art school for painting ends up owning a gallery and starting an art fair in Austin.

Kevin Ivester: I went to art school and studied painting. By late high school, and definitely by freshman year of college, I started working in galleries, working in the arts, and discovering how much I loved the world of it — working with artists, looking at other people's paintings, learning from other people's work. When I wrapped up my degree I could kind of forecast what the next years of my life would look like, and I wasn't excited by it. In Massachusetts I knew what galleries I could work at, I knew what the art scene looked like, I knew what artwork I would be in conversation with. I really wanted to mix it up.

So in 2015, somewhat impulsively, I jumped in my car and drove out to LA where I had extended family and some friends working as art handlers. Did a few months there. I was in a long-distance relationship with my now-wife, who was still living in Boston. I flew home, grabbed her, packed up all of her belongings, and we were driving back to LA. We took about two and a half months on the road, just camped and looked at different parts of the country. No real distinct plans. We drove through Austin, where a friend was living who convinced us to even visit Texas. I had very stereotypical views of what Texas was and had no interest in visiting. But within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, my wife and I were convinced it was a better move than LA.

So we finished the road trip, picked up my stuff in LA — I'm twenty-four, neither of us really had anything, it all fit in a Camry and a Corolla — and we moved back to Austin. Stayed on a friend's couch for two weeks, got an apartment, and just started looking for jobs.

Hugh Leeman: It's impressive that in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, an entire set of stereotypical perceptions just dissolves. What was it about Austin that hit you?

Kevin Ivester: I was struck by how the city is laid out — it's on the Colorado River, which Austinites call a lake. The city is so active, so young. You can feel the energy, you can feel the ideas. There's a reason so many tech companies have been drawn there. The city was booming even eleven years ago. And I think that's what I was seeking when I left Massachusetts — I didn't want to be able to project what was going to happen. I wanted the unknown.

Maiden Voyage and a Great-Grandfather's Story

Hugh Leeman: Your gallery's first show was titled Maiden Voyage — a clear nod to the gallery's debut, but also a subtle nod to your great-grandfather, who has an incredible story as a Jewish businessman of passenger ships whose assets were seized in Nazi Germany. Who was he, and how has he inspired you and the gallery?

Kevin Ivester: He's my grandmother's father. His father was a business owner too — selling alcohol and animal feed, I believe, though that business wasn't doing well. I don't know exactly how my great-grandfather got into shipping specifically, but there's an entrepreneurial spirit that runs in my family on both sides. My grandfather on my dad's side was a business owner, my parents were business owners, and my great-grandfather was too. I find so much inspiration in all of their stories.

But my great-grandfather had something really special. He had many ships — large freighters and cargo ships — and he was on his way to being incredibly successful. He already was incredibly successful. And then, simply for being German and Jewish in 1937, all of it was taken from him. I think that injustice has made me a very justice-seeking person, interested in learning people's stories, and innately service-driven. I actually think that runs in my family too — providing service and being community-minded. And there's something about what happened to him that led me to abandon my own art career as a painter and focus on other people's stories instead.

Hugh Leeman: You told me in a previous conversation: what I have to say with my art is not as important as what the artists I'm showing have to say right now. In a world where the arts can often feel self-centering, you're taking a very different angle. What are the stories these artists are sharing that feel so urgent?

Kevin Ivester: It's a wide variety. The exhibition coming up next in the gallery features Carlos Ramirez and Emilio Villalba, both artists from California. The show is called Redacted, and it's a direct reaction to what's going on in the world — focused specifically on ICE raids. Carlos's work centers on that, while Emilio's work addresses the dissociative feeling so many of us are carrying right now — how we're supposed to continue going about our daily lives despite all of the stressful, sad, and destructive events happening nationally and internationally. The show is outwardly politically charged, but it also has a deep psychological dimension.

Alongside that, in my project space, Alexandra Bose-Einstein — a UT professor here in Austin — has an exhibition looking back at post-World War Two nuclear testing in the American desert. I always pair my main exhibition space and my project space distantly, looking for a connection without telling the artists what each other is doing. I want them to make the work they need to make, but I'm excited to see the dialogue between nuclear fallout and what's happening today. I do think they're connected.

I'm also showing artists speaking directly to immigrant identities, to conversations around queerness, to finding our place in the world. Right now, Eli Durst — a photographer who just won a Guggenheim Fellowship — has a show called The Children's Melody about how kids join the cheer squad or ROTC and have to sacrifice a part of who they really are to belong to those groups. It extrapolates out into conversations about indoctrination.

Austin Art Agency: Supporting What's Already There

Hugh Leeman: Going back to this idea of being service-driven — beyond the gallery, you're on the board and chair of the Austin Art Agency. What does A3 do?

Kevin Ivester: A3 started as something called the Texas Fine Arts Association — Austin's oldest nonprofit — which evolved into Art Alliance Austin, which Austinites may recognize more. We transitioned that into A3, a local arts agency, in 2024. It's a really new iteration of a very old nonprofit.

Why we made that shift: we moved away from trying to run our own events and instead focused on supporting the art organizations, nonprofits, and artists who are already working really hard in Austin and just need sustainable support. I have a pet peeve about people who move to a new city and say, "We really need to have this type of event for artists" — when somebody's already been doing that for twenty years. What if you just supported them?

I still view myself as something of an outsider to Austin. A lot of people — rightfully — look at all the change that's happened and ask what happened to their hometown. I don't want to warp or ruin the city. I want to celebrate what's always been here. Austin has always been incredibly creative. There are world-renowned artists who live here — Deborah Roberts, Claire Oswalt, Tyler Hobbs, Nadia Waheed. There are amazing organizations like CoLab, Women and Their Work, the Contemporary, and the Blanton. And then organizations like Big Medium, which was around for twenty-five years and recently lost the funding and ability to continue.

So A3 supports all of that. We give micro-grants, we give funding directly to arts organizations, and we access funding from city grants, federal grants, businesses, and individuals — then distribute it to organizations we identify as genuinely needing it. We have board members and advisors who are deeply active across visual arts, music, and performance in Austin and can help us identify who needs the money and why.

The Broken Grant Writing Process

Hugh Leeman: You've said to me that the art grant writing process is, quote, horrible, confusing, and doesn't always find the right people — it finds the best grant writers. How does the grant writing process actually function?

Kevin Ivester: It changes every year, which makes it really difficult to track and stay current on. If you learned how to write grants ten years ago, you might have some success, but you might also miss out on great grants because your method isn't current. One of the things A3 does is go to city council meetings and track what needs to be included in grants to access the money.

The Trump administration began specifically targeting words they deemed woke — marginalized, activism, social justice, equity, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. If you use those words in federal grants, they get flagged and the proposal is usually denied. That's just one striking example of how grants change over time. And it completely goes against what grants are supposed to be for — which is not supporting good grant writers, but supporting artists and organizations that genuinely need it. The process needs to be made more transparent and easier to access so the right people get the money.

Hugh Leeman: You've mentioned that this flagging may be algorithmic — that in some cases there isn't even a human reviewing the language. Can you talk about that?

Kevin Ivester: Honestly, I don't know with certainty whether it's purely algorithmic or whether there are people doing a manual search for certain words. And I know the Trump administration cut a lot of federal workers, so maybe it is an algorithm now — a computer program running through proposals and selecting for humans. Which would be even worse. I can't confirm the inner workings. I just know what words we're supposed to avoid.

Hugh Leeman: Who are the people making these decisions — the ones deciding who gets grants in the arts?

Kevin Ivester: I've met with a few of them about projects downtown. I think a lot of people who work in the city are interested in the arts, but they're not coming from a specific art background. They may not have much experience making artwork themselves, or understanding the grind of running an arts nonprofit. It's always so much work, and the financial reward doesn't always make sense. We do it out of passion.

And that gap in understanding shows up practically. Murals are really big in Austin right now, but I know what muralists get paid. You want to do a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot mural? Here's fifteen hundred dollars. Well, you have to rent a scissor lift. You have to buy supplies. A lot of muralists walk away with nothing. The people making that decision have never gone through the process of renting equipment, driving it to a job site, planning it all. A lot of people who haven't made artwork before think it just appears magically. It's mentally taxing and time-consuming. Things are not fast. There's just a gap in understanding at the city and state level — not only about why the arts matter, but about how art gets made and how much it would really take to build a sustainable arts ecosystem.

The Exploitative Bargain Between Big Tech and Creative Cities

Hugh Leeman: The ideal version of what A3 is trying to do — what would it actually take to get there?

Kevin Ivester: It would take a lot of buy-in from local corporations. Samsung, Dell, Facebook, Google — all these really successful businesses coming to Austin are benefiting from the creative nature of the city without investing back into it. That feels exploitative to me.

I would like to see more corporate support for the arts, because these companies benefit from it — they're able to attract talent, they're living in a city that's beautiful and exciting. I also think the state viewing the arts as an important economic component is an essential step. Between those two things, I think we would start to see enormous cultural change.

I can't even imagine the city we would live in if arts organizations had the money they really needed — to retain their own employees, to continue their visions, to meet their long-term goals. I see what artists and arts organizations do with pennies, and it's impressive. If they were financially sustainable, most of them would reinvest the majority of any gains right back into their work. It would just feed itself.

Hugh Leeman: That word exploitative is something that comes up in arts conversations but often stays the elephant in the room. We're in San Francisco, and we see it here too — a booming economy with no corresponding boom in the arts. Historically those two things track together. What do you make of that disconnect?

Kevin Ivester: It's one symptom of a larger political and economic issue in the United States. Inflation is going up. It's difficult for people to support their families and buy a home. When big corporations come into a city like Austin that has historically been relatively small, it shocks the system. It forces long-term residents out — not just artists, that's too narrow a frame. It stresses a system that really can't absorb it.

And there's a marketing dimension too. Small local arts agencies that have spent years reaching an audience in a city of five hundred thousand people now exist in a city of a million, and the way they've historically reached people doesn't work anymore. They don't have the dollars to run ads in growing cultural magazines. Bigger companies absorb all the attention because it's a rounding error for them. These corporations are coming to Austin specifically for tax breaks — they're very intentionally not trying to invest in the infrastructure that's supporting them. It's an issue.

Building Friends Fair: One Weekend, Five Galleries, a City That Wants More

Hugh Leeman: Among everything you're doing — A3, the gallery, the community building — you started Friends Fair, which just took place in early May. Starting an art fair is a massive undertaking. What inspired it?

Kevin Ivester: An appreciation for and friendship with other gallerists in Austin started a collaborative effort between our galleries. Ivester Contemporary, McLennan, Pen & Co Gallery, Martha's, and Northern Southern and Grey Dog — five Austin galleries. We started recognizing that the city was growing. People were moving from LA and New York and all over the country, especially during Covid, and these were people who had been used to walking to their local gallery to see world-class artwork. They just didn't know where to go in Austin.

So instead of all working individually to promote our own programs, we decided to pool our resources and our contact lists. About three years ago we started inviting people to events under a group we called FOG — Friends of the Galleries. Monthly events — meeting at a wine shop, artist talks in our galleries, studio visits, demos with process-driven artists like printmakers. It was an attempt to build community and specifically to bring newly arrived collectors into the same room with each other, because they were all coming from different cities and didn't know one another.

But what we found was that monthly events put too much strain on everyone's social calendars — mine included. Running my own program, having my own exhibitions, my own artist talks. So we stepped back, put our heads together, and consolidated everything into one weekend a year: Friends Fair.

This year it was May 7th, 8th, and 9th — just our second year. It takes place in a hotel, similar to Felix in LA or the Dallas Invitational. We rent out a floor of a hotel right on the river in Austin. Each gallery gets its own hotel room, artwork on the walls and in the bathrooms, and the freedom to play with the space. It's intimate. You can actually see the whole fair, talk to everybody, and not feel completely exhausted after three hours.

We had great sponsors this year — Chrome Horse Tequila, Volvo, Frost Bank, which hosted a great afterparty. The Contemporary in Austin threw a huge launch party on the rooftop for us. The community buy-in was real, and I think it's a direct result of people genuinely wanting the arts to do well in Austin. There's a huge desire for it.

We had galleries from Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio — and galleries I really admire from New York, Miami, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, and Taos this year. Having galleries from those cities come to Austin to show with us is genuinely flattering. And it sends a message to the Austin community: you've moved here, but you're not disconnected from the national conversation in the arts. My gallery is only six years old. The galleries I built this alongside are also relatively new. But we want to make the argument that we can hold our own alongside any of those cities.

What Success Actually Looks Like

Hugh Leeman: To pull things full circle and close out — you've said: "When I made my first sale of an artwork and called the artist, it showed me that this is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life." Let's say you dedicate your life to this for the years to come and look back at Maiden Voyage and everything that followed as a great fulfilling success. What stories do you need to continue telling through your gallery to feel that it was?

Kevin Ivester: Rarely do I step back and celebrate anything. I'm constantly excited about the next project. But taking this moment to look back — I feel so lucky. I feel so lucky that I've found something I love to do.

At the end of the day, if I hadn't gone into the arts at all, it would always have been about people for me — learning about people, celebrating people. We have so much to learn from each other. Real success is being able to support my community and the people I love, and lift the stories that matter. I want people to leave my gallery feeling like positive value has been added to their life, that they've learned something about somebody else, that they can be a more empathetic person. Pulling back the layers of hardness we need to carry around just to exist in the world, and really seeing each other eye to eye — that's complete magic. It takes a lot of vulnerability.

And the absolute best thing that happened during that first transaction was being able to call the artist and tell him I'd sold something — and just hear the joy in his voice. Seeing how excited the collector was to have acquired the piece. Yes, it all centered around a product. But it was really about two people connecting.

Hugh Leeman: That's beautiful. Thank you for doing what you do, Kevin. I appreciate you making time to share today.

Kevin Ivester: Thank you so much.

By Hantian Zhang

Inframundo, Miguel Novelo’s solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, is at once an underworld, a cenote, and a dreamscape. An underworld, as the exhibition unfolds entirely in darkness, immersing viewers in blacked-out galleries where scattered lights glimmer intermittently, some stable, some moving. A cenote, because the exhibition takes inspiration from the sinkholes that scatter across the artist’s home region, the Yucatán Peninsula, which the Maya regarded as portals to the underworld. And a dreamscape because the machine-assisted visual effects render the exhibition spaces strangely oneiric: color patches flicker through the dark, reflected grids glow faintly across the floor, and a constellation of lights drawing viewers in. Throughout the exhibition, technology functions less as an opposite to the sacred or ecological references than as another way of mediating them.

To enter the exhibition, you lift a set of thick curtains and wait for your eyes to adjust. The sudden darkness pauses your steps. On the left, an infrared silhouette catches your attention, and it takes a moment to realize the figure is your own. Just as you try to discern yourself more clearly, the red-black footage shifts into grayscale footage of bats spiraling in silent formations. A wall label identifies this as the first artwork of the show: Vórtice-en-la-zona-silencio (2022–26). The bat footage was filmed in a cave in Calakmul and now spans a roughly circular field of light, as if seen through binoculars or a hole in the rock. According to the wall text, the intention behind the artwork was to render the bats visible only once the viewer remains still. The work thus turns stillness into a condition of seeing, asking viewers to slow down and look beyond themselves.

The work establishes a pattern that recurs throughout the exhibition: technology shapes what can be seen. Ahead, in sueños del inframundo (2026), simulated movement through subterranean rivers are projected on a ceiling screen, and hammocks are suspended beneath the screen, inviting viewers to lie down and watch. You lay down, sway a little, and let your attention drift into the blue. The projected image resembles a passage through underwater caves, though the gentle movement of the hammock periodically returns awareness to the body watching it. Low ambient sounds breeze by, whether they belong to this installation or another work nearby remaining unclear—but the uncertainty hardly matters here. Your physical comfort assures you that you’ve been taken care of; all that remains is to follow the view wherever it takes you.

[murciélago, jaguar, serpiente y cocodrilo] (2026) Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno

The next gallery feels more animated. In rocks [murciélago, jaguar, serpiente y cocodrilo] (2026), four serpentinite rocks hang from the ceiling beams above screens positioned close enough that every sway, rotation, or rebound triggers motion detectors below. The screens then translate these motions into abstract moving patterns overlaid with patterns associated with the title animals: reticulated forms for the serpent, rings of dots for the jaguar. Because of the darkness, the surfaces and textures of the rocks themselves remain difficult to fully make out, and attention shifts instead toward the relationship between the stones and the shifting projections beneath them. Compared to the earlier works’ emphasis on stillness and contemplation, this installation introduces an interactive and playful mode of viewing, encouraging viewers to move around and watch motion become image.

Nearby, eekcheen [cenote negro] (2026) presents twenty-seven aluminium prints arranged in a grid and lit from above at an angle, casting reflected light across the floor. Together, the reflections and prints resemble moonlight entering through a wide window. The images themselves resemble aerial photographs or shaded-relief maps of unfamiliar terrain, though the wall text explains that they combine digital drawing, photography, and computer-generated simulations. Maya signs and glyphs, such as the “death bat” and serpent head, are embedded within these images at a smaller scale, requiring viewers to stand close enough to discern them. While this close looking reveals additional details, it does not fully resolve the relationship between the glyphs and the surrounding terrains.

That sense of unexpected recombination continues in Ik, negro, noche (2026), where the juxtaposition of disparate elements suggests connections otherwise difficult to perceive. The work is a small, T-shaped sculpture made of two basalt rocks separated by a computer heatsink. Lit from below, the sculpture draws attention to the grain of the basalt, whose striations resemble currents moving within the rock itself. Positioned between the rocks, the heatsink appears to channel this latent energy from one to the other. Its ordinary function as a regulator of thermal flow accentuates the basalt’s striations, making them appear less like static markings than currents within the stone. The work references the Maya glyph Ik’, associated with wind and vitality, though the relationship between the basalt, the heatsink, and the glyph remains suggestive rather than fixed.

Overall, in Inframundo, darkness becomes less a limit on vision than another way of organizing it. The exhibition succeeds because its immersive atmosphere reorients attention toward what emerges slowly, partially, and at the edge of perception: bats, grids, simulations, shadows, stone. Even in the dark, there is so much to see.

By Jonathan Curiel

Compared to major art spaces in Paris, London, New York, and San Francisco, the art scene in Prague is — at least architecturally speaking — beholden to the past. The city's most prominent museum, the Trade Fair Palace, which houses the National Gallery Prague's modern art collection, is a minimalist, 100-year-old hulk of often-windowless gallery spaces that stack upwards for eight floors. The art itself? World class. The structure itself? A sometimes-foreboding example of "Czech Functionalist architecture" that — except for the central atrium/courtyard that offers the building some breathing room and natural light — corrals visitors into galleries that make you feel sequestered within the hull of a giant, submerged battleship.

Perhaps the entombed feeling is an inherent throughline of Prague's art scene since even the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, a hip art center that opened in 2008, also pushes art-goers into galleries that are less than modern. The building is a century-old former factory that once produced propeller airplanes, so the past is embedded into the art center's walls. How appropriate, then, that the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art is showcasing Hit By News, a major exhibit that pays homage to a unique slice of history: Visual art that, over the past 100 years or so, says something integral about mass media and its place in people's physical lives. 

Before digital media, there was, of course, analog media — which visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg used in such innovative ways that sections of printed newspapers festooned these artists' mish-mash of canvases, as in Rauschenberg's "Collection," the 1954/1955 work that SFMOMA has displayed for years. In Hit by News, we get Rauschenberg at his uncompromising best: An 18-panel series of collaged newspaper headlines, photos, captions, and other material that he silk-screened into a black-and-white panoramic X-ray of hide-and-seek, where the closer you look, the more you find — and the more questions you have about Rauschenberg's choices of juxtapositions. "Surface Series" is from 1970, and its labyrinth of human faces, typefaces, and twisting, turned-around images means that, in one panel, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser sits next to the end of a four-foot ruler, which abuts a reference to Andy Warhol, which tops a headline about a "Drug War," which parallels a story about the foreign legion and the African country of Chad, which then leads in every direction around an artwork that's the size of a freeway billboard. 

"Surface Series" is both a timeless abstraction and, on closer inspection, a specific window into a specific year that changed the world. Where SFMOMA's Rauschenberg is a colorful, dreamlike pastiche, "Surface Series" is a thunderstorm of transfixing snapshots of all sizes — and it's just one of scores of arresting pieces that anchor Hit By News.

Among the conveyor belt of artworks that give Hit By News a "must see" status: Bedri Baykam's "Kennedy Slain on Dallas Street," a 1997 work that's a spray-painted whirlpool of newsprint, acrylic paint, scribblings, and street-art dissonance that revolves around the Dallas Morning News' front page that reported John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. Baykam, a Turkish artist who studied at the California College of the Arts, is a kind of Rauschenberg accolate who should be better known in American art circles."Kennedy Slain on Dallas Street" is displayed next to other Baykam canvases that are equally adorned into dreamlike states of color, conflict, and overlapping layers of newsprint, paint, and juxtaposed strangeness.
 Anne Lise-Coste's "Professionalism Is Killing Art," a 2008 work that also uses newsprint in a profound way: As the backdrop for a painted skull and crossbones and the very words of the artwork's title. A French artist with a graffiti mindset, Lise-Coste makes art that turns her social commentary into the equivalent of artistic "STOP" signs that you can't look away from.

  Sabine Hertig's "Landscape No. 8," a 2013 work whose newsprint and magazine paper is subsumed into giant waves of abstraction that swirl this way and that way — turning the horizontal three-panel canvas into a kind of biblical explosion, complete with a seemingly blue and cloudy sky in the background that testifies to the scene's earthly dimensions. Based in Switzerland, Hertig produces what could rudimentarily be labeled "collage," but — as in "Landscape No. 8" — are really artworks whose swarms of miniature scenes come alive for dual purposes: As elliptical pastings and brush strokes of people and imagery worth noting, and — as you see the art from afar — as a bigger picture of a culture in flux. As Hertig has put it herself, her art is "a means of vividly thinking about a world that has itself become an information montage." 

  This "information montage" has loomed over the world for generations, and has inspired artists of all backgrounds and fame to check in with their feelings about what they're witnessing. At Hit By News, we see this evolution through the rarely seen art of Jacques Villeglé (numerous works from the 1960s and '70s that feature the French artist's trademark ripped-poster canvases); Willem de Kooning (an untitled 1977 work of fading newsprint that he painted over with streaks of blue, yellow, and white); Robert Motherwell (a 1977 collage called "Manchester Guardian" that uses job listings in a British paper to outline what looks to be a worker's glove hand); and Olaf Metzel (a 2011 aluminum sculpture called "Susan Sontag" that resembles a thrown-away assemblage of different media, as if the German artist has manifested Sontag's theories about culture into a playful gob of wrecked metal).

Hit By News, which is on exhibit through August 23, has a telling subtitle: Press Art From the Nobel Collection. The "Nobel" in this case refers to Zurich-based Peter Nobel and Annette Nobel, the former being a commercial lawyer who's obsessed with collecting art that uses newspapers and other media as physical objects. His pursuit is endless since many newspapers are still publishing print editions, and the media — whether digital or analog — still represents what newspapers of yesteryear represented to Rauschenberg, de Kooning, and Motherwell: The media's continuous ability to explain the world to any audience. These artists, Peter Nobel says, used sections of newspapers as opportunities to say something new in their art — about society, about technology, and about the art of making art itself. The Nobels' collection comprises more than 1,000 works by around 500 artists, so what's on display in Prague is merely a representation that, parsed into different timelines, helps visitors come to terms with the Nobels' vast archive.  

As someone who has loved the printed page all my life, and who holds onto a printed newspaper from the Civil War, Hit By News was a feast for my eyes — a chance to take in a collection of art in a European city that values history differently from American standards. Prague's architectural landmarks go back centuries, so it's not surprising that the city's most celebrated art spaces make use of buildings from other eras. How effectively they use those spaces is open to debate, and it has to be mentioned that the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art celebrates its airplane-related past with something that's unconventionally modern: A giant, blimp-like structure atop its roof, called "The Gulliver Airship," where it holds literary events that give attendees the feeling of being suspended in the clouds. The airship alone is worth visiting the center beyond its multi-floor exhibits. 

Speaking of being up in the air: On the plane rides home from Prague to San Francisco, which took me through Frankfurt Airport in Germany, I picked up printed versions of the Financial Times and the International New York Times. They were free atop a Frankfurt shelf of other gratis periodicals, where back in the day, these copies would have cost me multiple dollars. No one but me seemed to notice the newspapers' availability in Frankfurt, and I carried them diligently to my airline seat, where I promptly abandoned them for the familiarity of my smartphone, and the endless possibilities of knowledge acquisition from apps that bring information to the human eye in once-futuristic ways. The kind of printed media that's on the walls of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art have lost their value in an age of cellphone immediacy. Hit By News generates a bit of nostalgia for the past, though the exhibit also features artists who are doing memorable work from digital means — most notably Rashid Rana, a Pakistani artist who produces what he calls "photo mosaics." In "Veil V" at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Rana has stitched together thousands of tiny scenes of women having sex or posing sexually into a bigger panorama of women dressed entirely in Afghan burqas. As with every artwork in the exhibit, Hit By News offers no detailed explanation of "Veil V," leaving visitors to interpret Rana's stunning artwork on their own. One hint: "Veil V" is in an exhibit gallery with other art that's categorized under the rubric, "The War of Genders, the Clash of Cultures." Issues of gender and culture weren't freely discussed in the mainstream media that Rauschenberg consumed as he made a work like "Collection." Newspapers now regularly report on sexual doings and other subjects that would once would have been taboo. And artists like Rana are continuing to connect subjects around "news" with their own powerful interpretations and critiques — using the news as a jumping-off point to say something different from media that they refuse to take at face value.

Arthur González is an internationally exhibiting artist whose career spans more than four decades and over fifty solo exhibitions, he is a four-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a tenured professor at California College of the Arts. Emerging from the influential ceramics and figurative sculpture program at the University of California, Davis, where he studied under Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri, González developed a distinctive sculptural language that bridges clay, found materials, narrative, and psychological intensity. His work gained wider recognition through the early 1980s East Village art scene in New York and has since been exhibited at galleries including Phyllis Kind Gallery, John Elder Gallery, Susan Cummins Gallery, Robert Kidd Gallery, and Sharpe Gallery. González’s work is held in major permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Gifu, Japan, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Crocker Art Museum.

The following are excerpts from Arthur Gonzalez’s interview, as conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Rat Fink, Hot Rods, and Getting Struck by Lightning

Hugh Leeman: Arthur, for a guy who has shown his artwork in multiple museums and is a four-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, your earliest inspiration is quite unique — from custom art cars and hot rods to the Rat Fink. Tell me the story of how Robert Williams, Ed Roth, and Roth's idea of drawing monsters on T-shirts for friends inspired you as a kid in a way that would lead to this incredible career.

Arthur Gonzalez: When you're talking to an artist about their original inspiration, usually they'll say something more traditional — Francis Bacon or Salvador Dalí, the usual favorites. But if you go back further, in my case, my inspiration came well before I even knew I wanted to be an artist. I always liked to draw. I just didn't know that was something you could do for a living. And what we're about to talk about happened when I was about eleven years old — who thinks about their career at eleven?

One day I was riding my bicycle in the neighborhood and I came across a slot car — a little model car with actual machinery that you race around a track. I found it on the street. I think some kid had accidentally dropped it. It was a little hot rod with a bucket-T body, like the traditional hot rods of that era. And on the door of this little car was a decal — a little monstrous rat cartoon with "RF" on its shirt, which stood for Rat Fink, as I later found out.

When I first saw this little cartoon — it was literally about an inch by an inch — it was like getting struck by lightning. It completely hit me right between the eyes. I have no idea why it hit me so hard. But I just got so much juice from that. I hoarded that little car because of the decal.

Later on I subscribed to Hot Rod magazine and found in the back pages an ad for monster T-shirts — a cartoon of a monster driving a hot rod, tires smoking, just wreaking havoc. And that was Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. He was primarily a custom car designer who had reinvented the entire form — instead of customizing an existing car body, he would remove the body entirely, keep just the chassis and motor and tires, then build a completely new body from scratch using chicken wire, plaster, and fiberglass. You couldn't say "oh that used to be a Ford." It was just Ed Roth's car.

Then he became known for those monster cartoons — hot rods driven by monsters, just ripping down the road. He pretty much invented that whole genre back in the sixties. And one of the designers he hired to fill orders was Robert Williams.

Hugh Leeman: Robert Williams — just for context — of Juxtapoz magazine and lowbrow art?

Arthur Gonzalez: Yes. He would later go on his own and become his own person. He brought color and photorealism into it — like a photorealist application combined with abstract collage. And what I was actually responding to, I later realized, was the Robert Williams take on Ed Roth's ideas.

Hugh Leeman: So how does that start to come into your actual art practice? How does the eleven-year-old you go from being struck by lightning by a Rat Fink decal to taking pen to paper?

Arthur Gonzalez: This was pre-digital, of course. I ordered the catalog of all the designs — I think it cost six bucks. I saved up for it, maybe pocketed my lunch money, I don't know. I sent cash and then waited at the mailbox every day for three months before it arrived. When I got it, I basically carbon-copied all the images — traced them so I'd have duplicates in case the originals got lost. And then I just started practicing.

When you talk to artists about their first image, a lot of times it's a cartoon character. You learn to draw Popeye or the Flintstones. My old professor Wayne Thiebaud learned to draw Mickey Mouse and later worked for Walt Disney before becoming a professor. We all have that cartoon beginning. But to me at the time, that wasn't art — it was just cartooning, just something you could show off with.

The Trap of Photorealism

Hugh Leeman: When did it turn into art?

Arthur Gonzalez: When I got to community college. As a freshman I took painting, and in the seventies all my professors were photorealists — that was the California school of the time, corollary to Pop Art. Artists like Ralph Goings, Wayne Thiebaud. You took a photograph and painted it so well you thought it was a photograph.

Hugh Leeman: You once told me that painting from a photograph means you already know what the outcome is going to be if you're successful — and that that felt restrictive to you. That photorealism handcuffs experimentation. Where did that come from?

Arthur Gonzalez: In that realm, you choose a photograph and then you claim your subject matter — I'm the photorealist who does cars, I'm the one who does neon lights, that kind of thing. Because the technique is all the same, the only distinction is subject matter. By the time I got my bachelor's degree I was already tired of it. You already know what the outcome is. Between finding the photograph and the end result, it's just the journey of construction — like an architect who's been told the building has been approved and now just has to build it. You can't say, oh, I want an additional wing on it. You can't explore. You can't experiment. And that's not my personality. Even today I go into the studio and I'm talking to my work, going, okay, here we go.

Six Rejections and the Birth of Something New

Hugh Leeman: After your undergraduate studies, you apply to several graduate art school programs and every single one rejects you. But you go on to study under some of the most respected modern California artists — Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud — and you even become an artist and teaching assistant. How does a string of rejections become that career?

Arthur Gonzalez: I actually wrote a book called The Art of Rejection, and this is where that idea begins. In my ambitious young life, I had a plan: by the time I reached twenty-one I would have my master's degree. Nose to the grindstone, don't waver, nobody's going to stop me.

When I applied to six graduate schools and got six rejections, it was the first time I'd experienced rejection, and it hit me very, very hard. I almost went into extreme depression. Six people I didn't know told me, no, you cannot continue with what you think your life should be. And that was the first time I'd ever felt that energy.

After I came through that, I had to get up and figure out what the next stage would be. And the difficult question was: what do I apply with? More of the same paintings I just got rejected for? That's just going to produce another round of rejections. I realized I had to do a self-evaluation: what is it about my painting that I don't like? Those paintings I submitted were photorealist paintings — and I realized that you can have straight A's as a bachelor's student and that doesn't mean you're good enough for graduate school. They don't look at your GPA; they look at the work. And if they see another photorealist painter, it's forget about it — you're just one of many.

So I had to get more loose. More experimental. And I was feeling that the square canvas was confining me. When I wanted to be more gestural and I came across the edge of the canvas, it was like a stop sign — a visceral rejection. I told my fellow students about this problem and kept getting, "Arthur, get over it. Paintings are rectangular." That's never a good answer. When somebody tells you to get over it, it doesn't answer the question. My wife continues to tell me that, and I still can't hear it.

So I thought: if the edge is the problem, I have to change the edge. I can make it my collaborator. I started doing paintings on cardboard where I'd rip the sheets and have a torn edge — wrong material, but the right track. And then one day I visited the ceramic department at California State University in Sacramento, just hanging out, watching people work in clay. And I thought: if I sling clay slabs and make an amorphous shape and fire it, I have a canvas that's not a rectangle. And I'll react to that shape. The edge is still there, but it's more obliging, more spontaneous.

I'd make a whole bunch of amorphous shaped slabs — like a crazy stack of pancakes — and fire them. I didn't get a lot of cooperation from people in ceramics. They'd say, what are you doing here? You're a painter. And when I brought pieces back to the painting department, they'd say, what are you doing over in ceramics? I was getting grief from both sides.

But here's the thing — the one voice that was louder than all of that was: what I was doing was exciting and I wanted to explore it. And then one time someone said, your pieces blew up — they're in the garbage. And I said, really, where? She was surprised I even wanted to look at broken shards. But I fished them out and from three pieces that had exploded, I pieced together a sculpture. And I had so much fun doing that — discovering my ability to go to Plan B.

Finding a Home in TB Nine

Hugh Leeman: All the while you're navigating this identity — am I a painter, am I a ceramicist, am I even going to be an artist? And there's a statement I came across where you said the history of art is the history of identity. Your work has moved through self-reflective phases, narrative-based work, cultural references, different series. How has your understanding of your own identity changed over the course of your career?

Arthur Gonzalez: It's about keeping your eyes open, looking behind at what you've done, and connecting the dots to create some kind of trajectory. The experimental nature is still important to me even today. Just this last week I did something in my studio that surprised me, and I have to think about what it means, whether it fits.

But experimentation isn't the whole thing. After graduate school I moved to New York and spent the entire eighties there, and that was the best education a person can have — three hundred galleries changing every three weeks, museums everywhere. No way to keep up. What an education just to see the trends and whether you fit in.

And I realized in all that time that I'm still, in my brain, a painter. I still think about composition. I made the wall the domain of my work — things in the round still have an interesting context in the way a painter thinks. The question became: as a sculptor, how do I speak in the language of a painter? Like Frank Stella — he went from minimalist abstraction with those flat stripes, just killing the picture plane, and then later exploded into these layered shaped canvases that essentially became three-dimensional paintings. That's a person who understood both languages.

Magic Realism and the Inexplicable

Hugh Leeman: There's a term you use to describe yourself — magic realist. I think of Gabriel García Márquez when I hear that. What does that term mean to you personally as it applies to your work?

Arthur Gonzalez: The most difficult part about that expression is the word "magic," because people's idea of magic is completely distorted. When you're reading One Hundred Years of Solitude — and I've read that book so many times I still have to refer to the front page to keep everybody's names straight — things are real, real, real, real, and then something inexplicable happens. You've just stepped a foot into non-reality, into the unable-to-be-understood.

The television program that embodies magic realism most perfectly is Northern Exposure. A New York doctor who made a deal with the state of Alaska to fund his medical degree now has to serve as a small-town doctor in Cicely, Alaska. He's a fish out of water. And by the third episode, things start turning weird. There's a magical essence that comes through. His secretary says she's falling in love with the flying man from a visiting circus. You never see him fly, but you always see him completely exhausted from having been flying all day. It's inexplicable, it's humorous — and that's magic realism.

How that applies to my work: I'm using realism in terms of how to visually express my ideas, but I don't feel tethered to making sense. When I'm making sense, I'm back to being a photorealist. When I'm fishing shards out of the garbage bin, I'm creating magic. I just completed a sculpture of a figure who is holding about fifteen hands in her arm — she's carrying a load of hands. That's not realism. It becomes symbolism. But everything else about her is very realistic, and you don't feel like, oh my God, she's holding severed hands — it has something more mythological to it. The piece is called The Myth of Touching. She's also standing in a pool of what looks like water — it's mirrored blue glass. There are cross symbols. If you follow the work you get more of the symbolism, but even without that knowledge, it should be interesting. Beyond reality.

Pinocchio, Clowns, and the Cadence of Stupidity

Hugh Leeman: You dedicated a great deal of your creativity to a Pinocchio series — not the Disney version, but the original book. You said at some point that this revealed, in retrospect, some of your own immature tendencies. What were those immature tendencies?

Arthur Gonzalez: Originally I was just exploring the parts of the face — making large noses, funny ears, playing with those elements, bulbous noses. People would say, oh, you're making clowns. And I'd say, no, I'm not quite making clowns. But then I realized — they are clowns. And that became interesting subject matter.

Then people started saying, oh, you're making Pinocchios. And I'd say no. But then it seemed like denial. Of course you're making Pinocchios. So I investigated the story and found out Pinocchio is not Walt Disney. The original story is extremely dark — almost gratuitously so. There's violence, there's some underplayed sexuality. In one chapter, Pinocchio has to warm his feet by the fire, but because he's made of wood, his feet catch fire and burn off. In another, he's hung from a tree by the neck and nearly dies — and he can be hanged because he's sentient enough to breathe oxygen, which means he can also be choked. He has terrible luck and he never learns from his mistakes.

And the series I created commenting on that was called Cadence of Stupidity. Because it's not just Pinocchio — it's a reflection of my own behavior. I can remember the last time I did something really dumb. It wasn't that long ago. A simple example: I'll put eggs in the cart at the grocery store and then put a gallon of milk on top of them. And in my mind I'm thinking, I wonder if that's going to break the eggs. Of course I break the eggs. The cadence is like a drumbeat — boom, boom, boom. That's my stupidity. A steady rhythm. And I'm not afraid to talk about those things because they're human. Just like writing a book about rejection — people say, it's amazing that you talk about rejection instead of projecting success. But we're all vulnerable.

Four Fellowships and the Art of Applying

Hugh Leeman: There's a point in your life where you become very self-driven, almost obsessive, about applying for grants and fellowships. And this leads to an unprecedented four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. After all these rejections early on, what happened psychologically that shifted you from being a kid devastated by rejection to someone who just keeps seeking it out?

Arthur Gonzalez: I'm not seeking out rejection. But I know it exists, and I'm completely calloused to it. It's not an open wound anymore. It's calloused fingers — used to it. So I'm able to surf the rejection, understanding that it's going to happen. And if I'm doing it correctly, I'll get a number of rejections, and within those you eventually hit the acceptances.

The four-time recipient thing — I got three rejections before I got the first yes. A lot of times people ask, how did you get all those awards? I say, I applied. They say, well, I applied. I say, how many times? They say, once. I say, no wonder. You have to play to win.

And there's a certain savviness to cutting down the rejections — understanding who's on the jury, whether it's a rotating jury, whether there's someone on that jury who would be sympathetic to your kind of work. If I'm applying to something with a ceramic base and there's nothing but potters looking for more potters, I'm not going to waste my time. You have to read the room.

The Closing of CCA and the Future of Art Education

Hugh Leeman: You've worked for years at CCA, and it's soon going to close — after more than a century as a foundation for West Coast creativity. What are your thoughts on the future of the arts in the Bay Area without these schools?

Arthur Gonzalez: It's just another thing we're losing in the Bay area. And you know, there's this question being posed now that was never asked before: do you really need an art degree? That question has never been out there. The answer has always been yes — especially if you want to teach. They're not going to let you teach graduate school without a graduate degree.

But do you need a degree to be an artist? No. You don't. However — a graduate degree isn't just three letters at the end of your name. It's about what happens while you're there. The people you speak to. The connections you make because people come to your studio. When I was a graduate student I had a lot of people coming through. And after I graduated and moved to New York, I knew visiting artists from Davis who lived there, and they helped me. One was Ellen Lanyon — she became my mentor for the rest of her life. My Yoda. Whenever I had a question about a gallery interested in my work, she'd say, make sure you do this, don't do that. That wouldn't have happened without graduate school.

But the moment you pose the question — is art education necessary? — that's enough for a parent to say to their kid, let's rethink sixty thousand dollars a year. That question alone does damage.

And the effect on the Bay Area is serious. The gallery system here has never been truly robust — at its best it was decent and functional, back when Bob Arneson and Wayne Thiebaud were here and the art world claimed them as superstars. That was a long time ago. Now there are just a handful of galleries. With every art school that closes, artists here feel one step closer to being on an island — less aesthetic attention, less infrastructure. And every artist who leaves for Los Angeles dilutes what's left of the scene here.

A New Chapter: Push-Ups and Hustling

Hugh Leeman: At a personal level, you're going to be entering a new chapter without the teaching position that's been central to your life. How does that affect you and the other teachers who have dedicated so much of themselves to sharing their passion for art?

Arthur Gonzalez: You have to look at each individual. For me — and another person in my situation would just say, retire, you're in your seventies, you've put in thirty-five years — I guess I could retire. But I'm not going to. I can do workshops, I can stay connected to young people, I love teaching and I'm going to keep my options open. I'm going to hustle more — for workshops, for galleries. I find myself in a genuinely good situation in terms of what my next chapter is, even if I'm not quite sure what it looks like. It's a new stage of rejection and acceptance, and I know what that is. I'm the practitioner. I know how to do this. Now I just have to start doing my push-ups.

Hugh Leeman: At the top of your website, you ask, how many chapters do you think it would take to tell your story? If we change the potential answer from a number of chapters to the heart of the chapter you're in right now — what do you want to pass on?

Arthur Gonzalez: I think the lessons I learned in graduate school that pushed me toward everything I've accomplished — those same lessons are still not part of the vernacular. People are still asking the same questions. Like, why do you use mixed media? Why don't you just commit to one material? It's like I have my finger in the dike and it's never self-healing.

So what do I still believe in? The biggest thing right now is meaning. What does your work mean? What do you want someone to think about when they look at it? A lot of people don't entertain that question when they make work. They make things with a certain look to it and when you ask what it means, there's no depth to the answer. It's the same thing as the photorealist who says, I want them to admire my technique and know me as the guy who paints cars. That's two sentences and then it stops. Or the abstract artist who says, I'm the drip guy — my sculptures are always clustered drips. What differentiates one from the next? There's no added idea. It's the same stoppage.

I can't be that kind of artist. I have to ask myself, what am I making and why? What's different about this piece from any other Arthur Gonzalez? My studio is full. I don't need to make another one unless it has a new angle, somewhere I'm exploring. Where's the discovery? How can I discover something if I don't open my mind to the idea of discovery?

Hugh Leeman: I like that — it goes from the Rat Fink to opening your mind to discovery, over the course of a career, four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and museums. Arthur Gonzalez, thank you so much for sharing.

Arthur Gonzalez: Your welcome.

Marking Space – Marking Time  

By Jan Wurm

The impulse to collect is a deeply rooted drive. What propels someone to collect Meissen porcelain or Tiffany lamps or cookie jars (as did Warhol who collected nearly everything), may not be easily or succinctly explained. Attraction is highly individual, personal — yet holds a terrific charge. It excites, stimulates associations, and can satisfy with an intensity of a hunter capturing their prey.

Collecting art can also be spurred by different motivations: it can reflect an historical curiosity, a cultural commitment, a social posture, or simply a decorative need common to man, octopus and magpie. Sometimes it just evolves as any compulsion – one cannot have just one. It becomes a divine addiction.

Viewing the collection of Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser, a lawyer and a publisher of poetry, multiple motivations appear possible from the aesthetic to the political. Looking closely, there are many delights. There are objects crafted and images constructed. And, there are many questions to ponder.

It is intriguing to observe the balanced duality of the works brought together over a fifty year span. Half of the collection has the eye moving and counting and measuring. These are abstractions that seduce with color, and conceptual works that manage to hold tight to the power of color and the rigor of structure.

An intimate dialogue with geometry extends beyond the grid to anchor sculpture to the wall in Eve (2013). Delcy Morelos hangs the two elements – close, in alignment, in sync as they dance together – forms just slightly angled so that the space between keeps them forever striving. The exacting measure creates the narrowest of the almost-possible. Matched in their deep brick color, their matte surface, crusted yet powdery texture, and punched patterned piercings –still they remain two, separate and distinct, the one always slightly beyond reach.

In this realm of dialogue, of pairs, Black Chalk Rocks (2000) sets the two irregular shapes side by side. This Gay Outlaw sculpture sits on the floor yet defies gravity as the painted pattern pops off the smooth, rounded surfaces. Black and white, the all over demarcations of circles stretching to ellipse to lozenge, round the curves. The markings reach out to echo, ready to march off and cover the world in wormholes.

There follows entry into a second sphere — a sphere that demands a reckoning: relationship to the body, the skin, the internal. To view this work is to open to one's own experiences, to childhood and childbirth, to discovery and identity, to pain and mortality.

An empty crib stands cold on the concrete floor. The spotlight bears down on the emptiness of loss: no blanket, no sheet, no mattress, no baby. Powdered sugar draws the negative space of a shadow of the crib, a third reverberation of loss is overlayed by the true shadow of the crib under the spot lighting. In First Step (1996), with the quietest gesture, Mona Hatoum points with the only decoration, decals of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, memorialization or cautionary tale. The fading decal harkens to the lost children of Hamlin, led off by the figure who was to save the village of rats, at an unbearable price – the children. Silent, the work evokes an everlasting haunting. 

There is a crack for a moment of bemusement with Nicole Eisenman’s 1994 Untitled (Live Model Drawing Class) of a figure drawing lesson. With a smooth cartoonist’s line rendering little girls enthralled by the exposure of a male model’s genitalia, the scene lampoons the notion that female art students needed to be excluded from the life drawing studio, a notion of protectionism that justified exclusion and censorship in art, literature, and theatre just as in business, politics, and public life through the centuries.

In reading a book authored by two individuals, there is the wonder of how two voices were merged, how two viewpoints coalesced, how two judgments were reconciled to form one fluid narrative. The collection of art may be an aggregation of many objects, still, when built by two collectors it raises questions of common interest, response, even “taste." Some collections are assembled by or with a consultant, gallerist, or critic— with their eye pre-selecting, their hand weighing heavily on the acquisition scale.  This collection bears none of the homogeneity of an externally directed assembly. It does bear the imprint of passion and driven commitment, not just in supporting the work of women artists, but in supporting values of personal expression and humanism.

Neither just pattern nor minimalist nor conceptual nor feminist nor ethnic nor surreal, these works manage to hang in concert so that they bridge the divisions and encompass the spaces between.

Carrie Mae Weems levels her camera at film and focuses on ethnography as she critically appropriates images from National Geographic. With From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1996), the boldly asserted profiles bracket histories of enslavement and racism from Africa to the United States.

(L) Zanele Muholi Babhekile II, Oslo, 2015 (R) Catherine Opie Self Portrait Pervert 1994

These artworks are direct, unflinching in confronting the difficult. The photographs of Zanele Muholi glisten yet burst with pain. Catherine Opie’s body bleeds. These artists’ portraits spare nothing in their unqualified honesty. It is at the edge of despair, disaster, urgency that this art is declarative of injustice.

This is art that exhibits both beauty and power, and an intensity rarely seen in a private contemporary collection. The very acquisition and support of these voices represent a deliberate and brave commitment. This is a fearless personal investment in raw and often brutal history finding form in an uncomfortably truthful cultural expression. To have so many of these extraordinary artworks gifted to the Berkeley Art Museum brings a depth and strength to BAMPFA enriching the museum, students, and the community in profound ways.

Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Through June 28, 2026

Mario Laplante lives in San Francisco and is a native of Quebec. He exhibits regularly, and his work is represented in several public collections, including The Bibliothèque Nationale du Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. These were extremely formative years for him, combining his interests in book and periodical illustration, typography, and type design with the “fine arts” potential of woodcuts, etching, lithography, screen printing, and digital prints.

His teaching is deeply connected to his work as a studio artist, and his interactions with students and the dialogue that develops within the academic environment are integral to his research and projects. His work with students has provided him with problems to solve and questions to answer. Art can raise consciousness and engage critical thinking, and he believes this is now more important than ever.

The following are excerpts from Mario Laplante’s interview, as conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Origins: Art as Social Confrontation

Hugh Leeman:  Mario, many artists can trace their beginning creative interest to some form of doodling as a kid, but what you do transcends image-making. It confronts cultural challenges and the dark corners of society. How did your interest in tackling such challenging topics through art begin?

Mario Laplante:  I think the year I was born had a lot to do with it — the late sixties, where there was more interest in focusing on people outside the larger group. Being gay, and the formation of different groups that sort of helped the cause. That's something that brought me to what I'm doing today. At the beginning I was more interested in what it means to be gay and its implications in our culture. Becoming more out through graduate school and meeting people from different parts of the US — I moved from Quebec to Madison, Wisconsin — formed my intellectual understanding of how to view myself: as a French-speaking, French-Canadian person, and where I fit in that whole community. That helped a lot in verbalizing and understanding where I stood and where I was going to change as an artist.

The Gay Experience as an Ongoing Spiral

Hugh Leeman:  You mentioned the idea of examining the self, understanding your own sexuality, being gay. One of the main concepts you examine, as you write in your artist statement, is "the gay experience." In these examinations through your art, what have you learned that you feel the world has yet to truly see or understand?

Mario Laplante:  What have I learned? Well, that it's an ongoing spiral. What I've gone through myself, and try to clarify through the work and through conversing with different generations — I've noticed over time that what I learned back then, which is very important: to stand proud and understand where you are. It sort of shifts to the next generation. I see students today trying to do the same thing when it comes to understanding their place as trans people. It's a total wheel that starts again — this need to stand out and be proud. I see it in our young people right now. So it's the same thing over and over again, but with a different group. Does that make sense?

Gender as a Social Construct: Then and Now

Hugh Leeman:  Absolutely. One of the common refrains in academia is that gender is a social construct. How have you seen that idea shift from the time you were a student in art school to now?

Mario Laplante:  My peers and people I've joined in academic groups — at SF State and other institutions — have all kind of acclimated and accepted me for what I was doing. From the time I applied for the job, I was always open: I'm a gay man whose work is founded on my understanding of that change, both academically and in terms of my surroundings. As a gay faculty, other students around me are able to verbalize and speak about their identity more clearly. Every semester I teach, groups of students are proud of who they are and able to act and be who they are very clearly, without any thoughts that may go against them. I've been proud to see this grow — especially in an art department, where students feel better about who they are and can express themselves as gay or trans people.

Teaching as Mentorship at SF State

Hugh Leeman:  Art at San Francisco State University — your students speak in great platitudes about how you've influenced them as more than an art teacher, but in many ways as a mentor. This is beautiful and it's rare. Where does this care and interest in others' wellbeing come from?

Mario Laplante:  It really comes from an early place. The love of art came first, being raised in a household where I had parents incredibly interested in the arts — from opera to ballet and music. That was always present in my formation as a young man. I understood music, I was interested in dance, my views were quite wide. I think that activated a certain complexity, an openness about emotions, and a willingness to be more honest — taking pride in the fact that I'm different and able to express that clearly with other people. In general, my character makes me seem approachable — people call me sweet very quickly. That's always stuck with me. It's part of who I am, and I was always very honest throughout.

The Unembarrassed Anxiety of Our Memories

Hugh Leeman:  There's a portion of your artist statement in which you write: "The construct of each project that I'm involved corresponds to a restoration and excavation of the truth and unembarrassed anxiety about our memories." What is the unembarrassed anxiety of your memories?

Mario Laplante:  I guess I could go back to the gay experience — speaking truly of things that might bring up anxiety. Where do I fit next to yours? Where do I fit next to a woman in their seventies, or somebody in their early teens? And all the anxiety that comes with the capacity to speak of that. Art is the place where one can do that. In all the uncertainty I felt throughout my life, I somehow had the impetus to choose a form that spoke of that anxiety — using different forms to bring up these issues. I remember one year working with ceramics, learning about repeated parts. I created small ceramic figures — three hundred different characters — to respond to an event in Boston where three hundred and fifty cardinals had gathered to deal with the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. As a French Catholic man, I needed to deal with that subject. Creating that piece and having people come around to talk about it was really rewarding — to get it out. To be able to speak openly about the impact of Catholicism, and certainly how the structure of the Pope and priests conducted themselves toward children.

Project Illuminae: Confronting the Catholic Church

Hugh Leeman:  That brings us to Illuminae — your project focused on the Catholic Church's covering up of sexual abuse scandals. What I admire is that you use your voice and art to uncover what's typically inconvenient to look at, yet this topic is particularly sensitive as it challenges the foundations of trust, religion, and its so-called holy leaders. Before embarking on this project, what was your inner dialogue? Was there hesitation?

Mario Laplante:  Well, as a young person in the sixties, my family attended church — it was part of our upbringing. Then in the mid-sixties, everything stopped. The Quebec government decided to pull the education system entirely out of church hands and the churches emptied almost overnight. One day my parents believed in sin; the next day they did not. That was really a jarring experience — something was not clearly defined for me. I still have faith — it's managed and changed in various ways — but this lack of clarity in my upbringing drove me back to that project. I was trying to clarify, not bring answers, but create a form where a conversation could occur. That's what artists do. They create a moment where people can get together and talk — not fully understanding the full grasp of what might happen, but loving the making, the constructing, the learning about objects and form, and hopefully creating a forum where some can enjoy it. And in that particular context, having an institution willing to finance the project was very meaningful.

Hugh Leeman:  In your writing about the Boston clergy abuse scandal, you ask: how can a church that preaches against so many forms of consensual adult sex simultaneously tolerate, ignore, or cover up the sexual abuse of children by its own priests? You call those acts a definition of what evil is. How has grappling with this moral hypocrisy affected your relationship to your own faith, and to the visual tradition — icons, altarpieces, ritual objects?

Mario Laplante:  I came across a person who was incredibly impactful for my academic and creative career — Diane Fine, whom I met in graduate school. She's from a Jewish tradition; I'm Catholic. The two of us coming together and collaborating — we've collaborated for thirty years. Hearing her understanding and love of poetry, of text, and sharing her upbringing as a Jewish person was really enlightening. It gave me faith in understanding and taking pride in what my heart really believed: kindness, love, and bringing people close to you. Working with Diane was a key factor in how I was able to acclimate to the contradiction of being Catholic and who I am as a gay man today. Even now, when we work together, it's about our common thread, our disparity, and our love and faithfulness to each other and to our work.

Excavating the Truth: The Bible as Medium

Hugh Leeman:  The other portion of that statement speaks of "an excavation of the truth." What is the truth you're excavating, Mario?

Mario Laplante:  It's an ongoing process. Most of the recent work I've done is basically looking at Bibles — trying to understand their presence in our world, and dismantling and reconstructing them into symbols that are beyond what the object is, intrinsically always going back to the roots of my upbringing: Catholic church, then gay, trying to implicate some meaning from what that stems. Even today, even though I never fully understood the implication of Catholicism in my work and often put it aside — thinking it wouldn't be read as meaningful for everybody — I still do it. The usage of the Bible today is something that really is important to me in creating another symbol, something much more universal for a larger amount of people.

Hugh Leeman:  You have a project called First Book Number Thirteen, in which you use paper and covers from the Bible to make large disc-like artworks. By using and reconditioning those materials, you're recontextualizing the Word of God. What is the significance of such a contrast — taking a wall decoration from the word of the Christian God?

Mario Laplante:  I was trained as a bookbinder — I'm currently teaching artist books at SF State. So my understanding of the book made me feel like I have the right to look at it, to potentially dismantle it, and to see how it's created. In doing so, I'm reshaping the Bible. I don't seek to destroy or desecrate it — but to maybe elevate the text in a different way of viewing or encountering it. I hold the integrity of each page, every word — no parts are discarded. I hold all the contradiction of the text, every bit of the story. When someone comes to a different representation of a book as a flat disc, they can still read the words, still see the pages, the cover — they know it's an old object. So it brings reverence and certainly respect. It just allows one to reconstruct something old and view it in a way that's implicated in our world today. The most recent one was very emotional for me: I tried to isolate and highlight the word "Gaza" — keeping it visible as much as possible. That felt like, wow. I'm in a position of integrating something that's current politically into an object that has age and time.

Art, Gaza, and Iraq: A Political Conscience

Hugh Leeman:  Let's go to the Middle East for a minute. It's not particularly common that Western artists show their work in the Middle East, yet your artwork is in the Iraq National Library in Baghdad. What is the story behind that?

Mario Laplante:  It's related to Mutanabbi Street — a street where car bombs were exploded. A group of artists got together and decided to make art specifically about that event. I did a few prints, and they were included in a collection that was donated to that library. I was implicated in a group with a political aspiration of bringing understanding to a horrific event. Politically, I'm aware of what's going on in the Middle East — it's very hard to take on, and scary, because the history is not entirely known by all of us. But I'm taken aback by the increase of anti-Semitism in American culture. That's something that has always been going on, but it's heightened right now, and I find it very disheartening to witness.

Open Studio: Navigating Confrontation

Hugh Leeman:  The studio is often a sanctuary for artists. When you do an open studio — with work on such sensitive topics — how do you navigate those conversations when people are confrontational?

Mario Laplante:  At the time someone confronted me, he said: "I will never do that. You should not do this. This is sacrilegious." And at the same time, the man who voiced these opinions was with a friend — and that friend happened to be a librarian. She handles books all the time. She said to me: "Mario, it's all right. You're doing good with the book. You're giving it another life." She gave me strength and affirmation. If it hadn't been for her, I would have had a hard time moving forward. Both extremes were presented in half an hour — I felt terrible about the outcome from this man's perspective, then this woman who was a librarian said, "You're giving life to these old books. That's all right."

Hugh Leeman:  So if she doesn't give you that social affirmation — where does this go? Do you stop making them?

Mario Laplante:  It all depends on what comes from the world. Right now, within Diane Fine's family, her sister's husband has these old Hebrew books that his father read every day. He says, "Mario, can you do something with these books?" I'd never worked with Hebrew study books. I've had them in my studio for a year and I still haven't touched them — it's very difficult to approach them. I have conversations with them periodically, just to make sure I'm starting from a good place. But it's requests like this from the outside world that give me the impetus to continue. It's not just my own desire to work. It's also members of this extended family that I absolutely love who approach me and say, "Mario, do something beautiful with these books that my father loved." I was very touched by that.

Dual Identity: Canada, California, and the In-Between

Hugh Leeman:  You've mentioned identity in the context of sexuality, but there's also the identity you confront through being from Canada and immigrating to the United States. In your artwork "The Role," you write: "The role allows me to meditate on the consequences and ramifications of being emotionally attached to two cultures, two countries, and two homes." With the friction between Canada and the USA right now, how do you view these emotional attachments today?

Mario Laplante:  Being respectful of both vantage points — I've been in the US longer than I've lived in Canada. I have family ties; I go back twice a year. When I travel, I'm very sensitive to how my Canadian family reads the United States — their willingness to not buy American products, to check the origin of things they purchase. Many Québécois are in that position, and I respect that. But when I travel there, they're now being much more boisterous about their actions and what they're bringing into their lives. My identity is certainly much more American than Canadian now, but there's still a lot of weight on both sides — one is emotional and family, one is friends and work. Here in California, learning more about Cesar Chavez has been another layer. My understanding of the history of this state actually buttresses who I am as a person, both in understanding and pride. Quebec for many years was a minority in a large group of English-speaking people — and that was part of my premise, understanding language and what it means to be French-Canadian in a world of English speakers. Here in California, it's this understanding of all these minorities that come and try to make a living, and the complexity of integrating yourself into a larger group.

Diane Fine: Thirty Years of Collaboration

Hugh Leeman:  A few times throughout our conversation, you've mentioned Diane Fine. You have a multi-year-long collaborative series of projects with her. Who is Diane Fine to you, and how did all this begin?

Mario Laplante:  I was lucky to be invited to UW Madison for one year as a special student — in the graduate printmaking program, which has a very large department. I happened to meet Diane during that time, her first year in the graduate program. We met and collaborated on a book called List — she was the binder, I did the lithographs, and a third person contributed the text. That was our first collaboration, our first year, and we've collaborated like that every year since for thirty years. Through the collaboration, she ended up relocating to Plattsburgh, New York — an hour south of Montreal, geographically very close to where I'm from. So when I travel to Montreal to see family, I drive to Plattsburgh, work with her, collaborate, and then fly back here. She merged into my family structure. Right now she's building an incredible structure that will be both a studio and a community center where art will be taught. She's got an incredible capacity of largeness and love for her community. Diane is like a gift to me — she's guiding me in all kinds of directions and has formed me as a person, as an artist, in so many different ways. I can't be thankful enough.

Teaching Adults and the Next Chapter

Hugh Leeman:  What you're sharing here about this transformation — going from sharing your passion for art with twenty-year-olds getting a degree to doing it for people who just want to learn and share and create — there's something profound about that. Create a landscape sketch for me: you're at this community center, you're teaching a class. What do you want to share with them?

Mario Laplante:  Having the title of artist from California always carries some weight — but also returning to the East Coast, returning home, having visited that community for thirty years. Diane has built a large community of friends there. I think she's creating a forum where I can just fold right in. She's set up with letterpress — she's got a number of presses for etching and linoleum. So I'm hoping that together we'll be able to present workshops covering the full spectrum of the book: the writing, the publishing, the binding, the printing. What I could contribute is the imagery part — the printmaking and the visual. Diane is an incredible bookbinder and letterpress artist. Together, those two ideas would allow artists and writers in that area to come into that space and say: I'm ready to self-publish. Guide me through the process.

What Comes Next, Projects and Social Challenges

Hugh Leeman:  To bring our conversation full circle — we've talked about your projects from religion to the deconstruction of a holy book, the Catholic Church abuse scandals — challenging things that are so convenient to ignore. What projects and social challenges do you want to confront now and going forward?

Mario Laplante:  The transition of no longer being a faculty member at SF State is certainly a big change. Shifting my focus to a different demographic — older adults willing to go back to class. Diane and I have been traveling — Italy, England — finding locations where we sit for a month and work, and out of that comes work we can publish or show in galleries. As for my own studio, if given the forum to formulate a project specific to an idea, I'm willing to do it — through grants or residencies. Cahoots in Petaluma is a place I've always wanted to go. But I must say: what you've created right now — this conversation — I've never had the opportunity to have an arch over the entirety of what I've done with such clarity. It gives me pride in the career I've had. I want to thank you very much for making this possible.

Hugh Leeman:  Mario, thank you for sharing so vulnerably and candidly. One of the things I set out to do with these interviews is address the challenge we have as a society — we've become so obsessively curated of our personalities, so filtered in how we present ourselves, and there's a major mental health aspect connected to that. Reading about what you've done, and then talking with you — it's a not a panacea, but it certainly softens that challenge. There's something very candid, very honest and vulnerable in your work and in this conversation. Mario, thank you very much.

Mario Laplante:  Thanks for the opportunity. I really, really appreciate this moment that we share. Thank you very much.

By Wei Huang

“What does it mean?” was among the first questions I asked Devon Pin-Yu Chen after stepping into The Dog is Busy Having Hotel Breakfast, the artist’s latest exhibition for her residency at the pottery studio All’bout Clay, nestled in the bustling Midtown of Manhattan. By that, of course, I was referring to the title. “It means what it means, literally.” She replied, before denying any reference to sayings or proverbs. Along with the somewhat esoteric title at first glance, this short exchange encapsulates Chen’s work: endearing, delightfully earnest, and inviting to dwell on.

I first met Chen at her debut solo show, Happy Islands, at Nguyen Wahed this  February, less than a year after she received her MFA from Columbia in 2025. At the show, Chen shared that the feedback she received on her first assignment, for which she made container-like ceramic works, was “you might as well make them at home.” She told me that at Columbia, “functional works” are looked down  upon by the faculty. The school does not provide parts [I’m thinking “accessories,” as in attachments that could be added to the works that could be deemed “functional,” such as wheels. In the program, a vase, for example, needs to be made as sculptural and abstract as possible to avoid  scrutiny and therefore gain legitimacy. Chen recounted this anecdote with more bewilderment in her tone than resentment, and while much could be written about the hierarchy of the arts and its legitimacy, The Dog is Busy Having Hotel Breakfast does, inadvertently or not, respond to the issue. By hosting the exhibition at a “pottery” studio, Chen came out undeterred and adherent to the pragmatic dimension in her aesthetic pursuit. Stretching Dog Vessel With Human Flowers (2026),an ensemble comprising a vase painted with a pink dog and orange bones, a ceramic flower, ceramic leaves, and scattered star-shaped ornaments, is among the examples in the show that stylize domestic objects without obscuring them.

Chen is conscious of hierarchy and social rules as well as their subtle precarity, articulated through the dog image that transfixes the majority of the 11 ceramic pieces on display. Beneath the title’s quirky façade, the suggestion that a dog is participating in a financially privileged human ritual—hotel breakfast— provokes questions on societal norms to which all citizens are presumed to acquiesce. In some cases, the subtlety cracks, as seen in The Serious Dog (2026), a free-standing statue of an anthropomorphic canine standing at 38 inches tall, frowning at two miniature sculptures aptly  titled The Serious Dog’s Shoes (2026) and The Social Ladder (2026). On the other hand, more ruse is deployed to sneak in the message in Would You Share Your Mushroom? Little Dog? (2026). A work in two parts showing a crouching puppy coveting a white mushroom on a saucer, the ceramic sculptures are twofold in the innocuous scenario they enact and the latent question they pose on the ownership and entitlement of resources.

Along with the dog, food is the other headliner of the exhibition to consummate Chen’s allegory of social class and her  conceptualization of clay as material. In the curatorial statement, clay is analogized to food, as they are “both extracted from the ground, shaped by hands, and placed on a surface to be desired.” In drawing the comparison, Chen expands what “farm-to-table” means by bringing the vehicle of food into the picture. The analogy between clay and food roots deeper into the life cycle of both: the care, cultivation, and transformation of it all, which explains the handmade quality that characterizes Chen’s works. Palpable is the unsmooth surface with traces of manual manipulation across the exhibited ceramics. Under the glistening glaze, the purposefully textured skins of the sculptures are tactile. Each crinkle and fold maps Chen’s squeezes and pushes, corroborating the wet clay’s precursory materiality harbored in the now hardened ceramic. Focusing on the transformative  process of clay and food, Chen likewise looks back to shared memories and lived experience to source her themes. Born and raised in Taiwan, Chen’s works primarily reference the nostalgia she holds for the western  Pacific island. Invoking the maritime geography is the featured artwork Coastline (2026), a standing slab hybrid of sculpture and relief on which the bright blue ocean, the saturated orange landscape, and images of wildlife compose the ecosystem of Taiwan.

More than just indulgent in the nostalgia, Chen infuses her works with a sense of unease brought by her immigration status. In the slab painting Metal Pencil Case (2026), Chen invokes the classic Taiwanese stationery adored by schoolchildren. The peach-colored, animal-themed pencil case is cramped in stark contrast against the indigo backdrop adorned with thick dark green brushstrokes. The strong visual presence makes a subtle gesture toward another piece of memory shared by many: the loud sound the metal case produces when accidentally dropped to the floor. Circling back to the capacity of ceramic works to “contain”, Metal Pencil Case brings uncertainty on the extent of carrying and extending a specific and vivid piece of memory to a new place and making it home.

The most prominent cultural reference in the show would be the “Ghost Month,” part of the Taiwanese folk religion that designates the seventh month of  the lunar calendar as a time when spirits from the underworld are allowed to come back and roam among the living to enjoy ritual offerings. Devil Out of The Cage (2026), a peach-colored, foxlike entity lying on a charcoal-colored cage, points to this belief. The reference adds another layer to the allegory, how life and death are in and of themselves a hierarchy predicating the value of beings.

“Don’t you find it lazy?” Comments Chen on the idle devil on the cage. It came off not so much as an interpretation than a critique, as if she, the artist herself, was not the culprit of its indolence. Chen sees the world through  an animistic lens; souls inhabit all things, animated or not, and she has no hold over their individuality (incidentally, she could not decide  whether The Serious Dog was a living dog or a spirit when trying to interpret the statue). In a way, it feels egalitarian. In the clearest hierarchy between artists and artworks, Chen forfeits the privilege to dictate what one work could or could not be.

“Contemporary Art in Context”

The following is a transcript of Ken Feingold speaking inside the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, March 1, 1988. Transcript (2026) courtesy of the artist.

This talk sat on cassettes in MoMA’s archives until now. Ken Feingold's artwork is in MoMA’s permanent collection. He is a licensed Freudian Psychoanalyst. Here, he analyzes the artwork of Giorgio De Chirico and Marcel Duchamp.

Due to licensing, images of the artworks are not displayed; instead, links to the artworks are embedded.

Ken Feingold: Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here today and I'd like to thank Barbara London from the video department very much for inviting me.

It's a very unusual thing to speak in this interval. This is the place that we often consider one of the great reserves of silence and to move across this interval and to move across it in language and speaking is in a way very similar to the act of making art and bringing art into existence. It's a movement from the interior to the exterior and moving across the distance between the subjective experience of the individual to the public and social form of the imagination. Language is unlike painting, but I'm going to talk today about two artists who both have a complex relationship to that notion of the difference between their interior selves and the world in which their forms are manifested. I don't want to compare Duchamp and De Chirico, so I'll talk about them separately, and I think that the differences and the similarities are as much a part of what the work is about as anything I could describe.

On De Chirico

So, to begin to talk about De Chirico is to talk about the movement across that interval of desiring to express something from very deep inside in a very structured symbolic representation. I think it's important to think about art not as a production of commodities or as the manufacturing of objects, even though those as metaphors can serve to talk about significance, but to think of it in an anthropological sense as a symbolic system, and each artist creates in their own universe a symbolic system for expression. For De Chirico, I think the metaphor can be taken from the earliest painting, which is here, this tower behind you, which is called “The Nostalgia of the Infinite.”

What is expressed in this work is the desire to speak to the Other, and the Other has many forms, and I think that all art in one way or another is about the expression of the Other. The Other in some cases is God, in some cases it is the Self, in some cases it is family, it is the lover, it is poetry. In De Chirico's case, the complexity is expressed through, I think, his notion of the infinite. These paintings are about eternity and about the infinite, not in the sense that we have in our culture represented as heaven or hell, but in a new sense, in the sense of eternity in the present tense, the infinite in the moment, the heightening of self and awareness that comes at the time of day when shadows lengthen and the light is moving so quickly that one is aware of every fragment of every second that has passed. These works are power sources, they amplify one's existence. As when [one is] in the presence of any work of art which has a great depth, it has an ability to renew itself perpetually.

I've had the privilege of coming to this museum since I was a small boy, and many of the paintings here have changed for me quite a bit over time. The ones which have the greatest strength are the ones which are different every time one returns to them. They have an ability to speak over and over again more complexly, more personally. And in this work I find so many things about the self, the discovery of the self, so many metaphors, that I want to talk about individual ones a bit, just to extend this a little bit further. Actually I'm going to wander back a little bit. De Chirico has certain words, certain key words [describing the space] between appearance and work. One of them is metaphysics and others that have more emotional values like enigma or melancholy or anxiety.

This particular work, called “The Great Metaphysical Interior” has an expression of many of the things which I find most powerful about this work. It is at one time an interior, and an interior in the metaphysical sense or the metaphorical sense depending on if you see the body as a membrane between the inside and the outside, or if you see it as walls, concrete brick walls. The ways in which things move in and out of us, in and out of our consciousness, our self, our ideas are metaphorically expressed through that notion of inside and outside. But in fact, what we have is a kind of continuum with simultaneous overlapping images and impressions. So with De Chirico, to make an interior which also contains an exterior, which contains within the exterior of other interiors, is an expression of that sense of infinity. It continues that there, in these shapes, in the forms, in the light which is in this work, in each of those things there is a distance which is opened up by the artist in one's inability to level them out to a singular meaning, so that they remain at that slight distance for however long one regards the work. An interpretation of that is only an interpretation of self. One becomes very aware of reading a work of art, of one's own ideas and thoughts mapping onto this. There is no logical literary form for describing the emotional effect of this grouping of forms. And their formal value has a certain charm, but for De Chirico things were close to being religious. They're such highly involved forms that they speak about their infinity by way of their inapproachability.

I could continue on about many of these paintings for a long time, but I think I would rather talk about this larger idea and try to focus on ways to get at it. This sense of the infinite is again here very clearly that within the painting there is a schema, a plan, a sort of sketch, a dream within the dream of another world, another painting, another horizon, with his language expressed through the images that he often uses, the trains, the figure, the castle, the tower with the flags, the arches, and the recession of the landscape into the distance with the figures sort of there and being conscious of the experience of being within the space that they're in so that this infinite recession here is expressed as a dream within the dream.

And any of us, whenever we have this experience of dreaming that we're dreaming and the experience of waking up from the inner dream and thinking that you're awake and realizing that you're still asleep at the point where you move to what we consider waking consciousness. That through this work it suggests that it continues across many, many different levels. So that in fact at this moment we could be dreaming and wake up at a certain moment and become aware that we had been dreaming when we felt we were awake. And this is something which has been taken up by many writers and many poets, and in fact one of the literary forms of Hindu writing is the metaphor of the dream within the dream, as in the present theme.

But again it expresses that infinity, the infinite regress and the infinite recession of possibility which places the self at that moment of eternity in the present time. That in seeing across that perspective, and be careful where there's always some kind of perspective shift, one’s feet are never quite on the ground, there's a kind of hovering in your space and it's that kind of hovering which is the mental hovering of consideration, of perspective, of regard for the question rather than being firmly planted with the understanding of reality.

And that imagination is here again in the painting of “The Seer” and this representation of something which has more than a casual appearance in many, many works of art and it will carry over into discussion about this show. Perspective itself is a grand metaphor. It talks about one being able to stand at or remove from the world and make some kind of grand plan with which one can regard it in another dimension. So the perspective is, in a sense, a movement from the third dimension to the second dimension. For many artists the movement between the third dimension and the higher dimension was the topology of being an artist.

So here it's expressed as a kind of shadow and the shadow image is very important. It is the projection from the third dimension into the second dimension. It is the trace of the infinite that speaks about, okay, if this is a shadow and it is representation in some form in another dimension of this body, then this body is in fact the shadow of a higher being which exists in other dimensions, ad infinitum. And that thing continues in so many kinds of sacred considerations of being as I think every religion has some notion of the higher self. But De Chirico made a very beautiful statement. He said there is for him “more enigma in the shadow of a man walking in the sun than in all of the stories of ancient religion and mythology.”

And this is the great strength of this artist is that his belief in the individual, that moment of heightened awareness where one becomes aware of that eternity in the present tense, is very much of an outsider idea in contemporary art. For example, this painting is for me the great painting of being in the wrong place. How many people have gone to the trouble of being in the wrong place and [communicating] what that's like?

Or this painting of “The Anxious Journey” is again this feeling of being in the wrong place. And actually I wanted to suggest in relation to these two paintings that while people are here today, you should go to see Vito Acconci's “Bad Dream House” [currently on view], which I think shares quite a lot with this painting. I think that this sense of the disturbed self, of that eternity where it could be an eternity of pain, is as much about De Chirico's possibility of hell as the grand metaphysical interior could be his possibility of heaven. Heaven is a beautiful mansion with a fountain in front of it. Hell is being on the wrong side of the train station. The train's coming right at it. There's something about light in De Chirico, which has that infinity as well. As I spoke about it, there's light at dusk where it's the lengthening of shadows, the drawing of the other dimension from the body to where it could suggest itself as becoming infinitely long, but instead becomes dark. I think speaks about one of the difficulties of moving across that gap from the Unconscious and desiring into the world representing oneself to other people. That it's always partial, it's always somewhat fractured, that artists make the next painting and the next work, the next video, the next sculpture, because the last one was imperfect. It cannot succeed, but it can only move across the desiring and create something which approaches that infinity, so that the artist lives out a myth, in a way, the myth of the creator, the myth of the being who takes things from one sphere of being and brings them to another sphere of being, being a conduit, in a sense, for whatever their sense is of meaning in life.

On Duchamp

For some people, meaning is a religious construction. For some people, meaning is a narrative, literary construction. For some people, it's strictly a tangible material construction. But in any case, the artist expresses through this [what Duchamp called] mediumistic activity a sense of what their meaning is about, that they perceive to be meaningful in life. So, it's important, I feel, when one regards a work of art, to try to understand that symbolic system that creates meaning, that produces meaning, where the works of artists are not just about being beautiful or being mysterious, but that they actually have significance that they're here in the world to give significance to our existence, and that our coming to the art museum is about having art being increased by a dialogue.

For a long time, Duchamp was trying to de-aestheticize his production, to, in a sense, remove the kind of seduction by way of beauty from the work. He succeeded, nonetheless, in creating very beautiful works of art, which, in fact, have a very deep content, even though many people regard them as being strictly conceptual in nature. And this being really one of the most conceptual works of art that anyone has ever made, I want to speak about what I consider to be psychological and metaphysical characteristics, as well as its conceptual value. To continue from the point where I was speaking about the artist as a conduit, Duchamp himself spoke about the idea of the artist “as a mediumistic being who, to all appearances, reaches beyond the realms of time and space” to bring things back to express.

This work has a story, and the story isn't here in the museum. It's one of those things that one has to learn about. And in the case of Duchamp, one almost has to become a scholar at this point to learn about Duchamp, because so many of the books about him are out of print. So many ways of his work having been interpreted have become obscure. But the story about this particular work [“3 Standard Stoppages”] on a conceptual level, and on a level of action, is that Duchamp took a one meter long piece of thread and dropped it to the floor from a height of one meter in order to produce these forms, these shapes. Now these are templates which were drawn by the three droppings of the thread, and the thread itself was lacquered onto this board by Duchamp taking drops of varnish at little tiny intervals along the thread and fixing it to this panel. Now, on a conceptual level, that would seemingly be as dry as an action of art could possibly be, yet on a metaphysical level, it has the same kind of significance, I think, as a drawing out from the interior, but it's not an expression of self. In this work, Duchamp is trying to express the self as a pure conduit, a pure vessel, where in this moment of taking the thread and dropping it, the forces of nature, gravity, the movement of the air, the tension of muscles in his body, the moment at which the fingers are released, and whatever other forces come to bear physically in that, creating a work of art without any ostensible content becomes about creating a work of art based on the infinite in the tiniest, tiniest thing, rather than in the moment, in the interval. Duchamp was very much involved with the idea of what he called the “Infra-mince”, which is like an infra-thin as it's been translated, and he made a couple of examples which are very informative; that infra-thin is like the warmth on a seat after someone has gotten up. It's something which is a slight difference that has a trace of another happening or another reality. So in this work, then, this infra-thin, the idea of the infinite being expressed through the thinnest of gestures, the slightest of differences, that the difference between the shape of the thread having fallen this way and the thread having fallen this way is produced as a higher order abstraction as one could make from any intentional act of being.

In fact, he referred to this work as “canned chance”, so that the production of the object itself was about, in many ways, the transformation from his own perception of art as a romantic activity to one in which a higher being became the active artist and that one de-aestheticized the work in order to bring out what he, I believe, felt were the deep aesthetics in the art-making process. That is that art is a way of life. Making art is about bringing oneself as an oracle between what could be and what is. So in the sense of many cultures have this notion of divination or oracle. For example, many people are familiar with the I Ching, where coins are tossed or straws are picked. In some societies it was a reading of entrails of a sacrificed animal. And actually in some other cultures it really much uses thread very much. And thread is something which has been in many cultures as a very highly evolved representation of the self. From the sacred thread of the Brahmins to the thread in which the soul is placed in tribal culture in northern Thailand and southern China. It's a very complex work. And this complexity is about the invisible. The infra-thin is more about sensation of being than something which presents itself to you. So this sense of things, the difference between things, the distance between things is, for Duchamp, produced in the infinite expressed in the tiniest, tiniest space. So rather than being about moment or time, I think it's about space and physical movement.

And in this painting, “The Passage from Virgin to Bride”, Duchamp, I believe, was working with something which he never solved but became increasingly more of a complex problem for himself. And this was the question of the Other as it encountered the formal questions of 20th century art.

And that is, unlike de Chirico, who retained certain constructs about representation and used something resembling lifelike images to represent notions of the Other. One could say that De Chirico's paintings are literary in that sense, that they have the ability to be read like a language. Duchamp's work presents itself [as if it is] without representation. In fact, this work is quite representational. And for Duchamp, it is a picture. And this was the problem of his work in the sense that, when he began to deal with the infinite, with his sense of getting through the fourth dimension to other dimensions that he often wrote about, it had to be embodied in some kind of object image for him in order to retain a kind of personal mapping of the Other from within himself. So for Duchamp, it was the Bride, the image of the Bride. But the Bride, in fact, is not a beautiful woman in a long white gown. The Bride was a machine. And the psychological complexity of the work is really beyond what I can talk about today. But I just want to suggest that in this work, which is called “The Passage from Virgin to Bride”, it is again about that infra-thin. It is about the reading of the work by the viewer. Duchamp always felt that the work did not exist until someone saw it. That the relationship between the viewer and the work of art was of ultimate significance. And so that that infinity, which I wanted to suggest again, exists in the gaze of the viewer and the regard of the title for the subject. Because I think it was very clear for Duchamp that even as a representational painting, that this was not going to never become a picture for most people, but that the language was there as a superimposition between the viewer and the picture that was being seen creates this sensation of desire to produce the narrative that the title speaks about. It says “passage from virgin to bride”. How do we see that in this? Even knowing Duchamp's mythology, it's very difficult to see that in this. One has to be aware of the distance in my being and his having posited this as a significant work of art. And in the distance that opens, it comes about that desiring. And that desiring is in that space, again, infinite. There is no consumption, there's no flattening out of it against the pane of fixed meaning. But it's always completely open. And he was an artist who took a lot of trouble to create a textual entity that went with his work. But one regards it as poetry so that it stands next to the work as another infinite passage into someone trying to make, in a symbolic form, their idea of what is significant.

And it also existed on a much more banal level in this work, which is [this work] called “Fresh Widow”.

He deals with the idea of the pun, the pun between fresh widow and French window. And also that he's taken the pain to make the panes of the window in black, to talk about the difference between a window and a widow, or someone who is in mourning and having pain. And this kind of “bad” humor is also about the interest in it. There is something in that. It is almost, as Duchamp described, that irony is a joke that happens backwards, in the sense that you realize when you have come across a pun or a bad play on language, that you have gotten the joke before the joke existed, in a sense that it hurts, or there's something inside out about it. And that disruption of the normal is about, again, also that moving across that distance.

The last work that I want to speak about is this one, which is, I think, one of the most unusual works that is in the museum. And I think one of the reasons why it's one of the most unusual works is that probably one viewer in 5,000 that comes to the museum actually experiences the work of art, although one is very plainly given instructions. “To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour.” I have never seen anyone doing that, but I'm sure that people do, and I have, and I think other people must have. It can perhaps be a bit of a provocation to try to see this work and talk about it a little bit. On this very simple, on a visceral level, when one stands here, about here, and looks through this lens, which is fixed to the glass, there is an image, and at a certain point you find your distance by where it focuses for you, and you see what is beyond in the room, a sort of fisheye, upside down image. But the experience of watching this work for almost an hour is quite unusual. There is a real suspension of self. You become very aware of this image and the upside down face and the other side. And you also become aware of the fact that this pane, this pane of glass, as being a flattening of a dimension, other dimensions, again this dimension here, where this is not a pictorial representation of what's here, but in front of perspective rendering of an abstraction which itself is a perspective rendering of something beyond. So in the sense that an object, a three-dimensional object, can exist as a shadow of something which happened to the fourth dimension, this suggests, on several levels, a movement from the person who's here looking to what looking is about and what regarding oneself in relation to the world is about.

By Mary Kate Tankard

To see KAWS is to see nothing at all. Of it I can say this much to be true: It is an exhibition. There are objects. They are large. Many of them are round. Something vulgar has happened. I feel as though I shouldn’t bear witness to it. Thought is lost between sight and sound. Sign and symbol recognition enter stop and go traffic. There is a crash. I say to myself: Think of KAWS. Think of KAWS. Of it I find only void. Everything else becomes more real. The woman next to me. Where her scarf might be from. How she feels about her husband. The man sitting languidly on the floor. How it is he sits so freely. The SFMOMA employee who fiddles with her badge. How she feels about my being here. How she feels about being here. How she feels about the big being here. I am confused and distraught until I see a child. He is standing with his father in front of a glass case wherein lies enclosed a tiny bedazzled moon man. Its shining surface hits me like revelation: The truth. I cannot see it. I'll never see it. This is after all: KAWS Family. I realize. It's f-o-r k-i-d-s. I came here neither with child nor child-like spirit. I came as discerning eye. Arbiter of aesthetics. And so, I was made blind. 

It ends in a room of objects. This gallery is hollow and fragile; set-like. I see the same nothing as before, but shrunken. There is a subtle change in materiality. It seems I’ve stumbled upon facsimiles. Yet, they emit stronger auras than their models. I smell the essence of pure plastic when again it happens. Like vision, I see it: a cash register. I can buy these tiny sculptures. I feel great relief. In this simulacra storefront, there is something more true to my mind than the original blobs and forms of which I have already forgotten. Sweet commerce. Loving language of goods and credit. I know her well. I approach a table covered in neat stacks of books. I hope to learn. To grow. To buy. To give meaning to my experience. I turn over the book and remember I am broke. So I carefully photograph each page of text. Employees in view, I contemplate the ethics of stealing text. I feel mild stress. They say nothing. I say nothing. It’s done. I leave. Weeks go by. I do not read the images. Each time I think of the text, my mind becomes frenzied by more opportune clicking. An invisible hand reaches out. It swipes at glass. Guides me to another topic. Some other muse. Everything, again, feels more real. I try as hard as I can to come up with words to describe my experience. I am finally delivered an adage: It is that in which we do not see (KAWS) in which we might find great truth.

By S Anne Steinberg

Plants, unlike animals, continue to add new organs (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds) throughout their lives. Although they lack a final, fixed form, plants do not come in infinite shapes; instead, their morphology is circumscribed by a stereotyped growth pattern in which a small set of defined modules are added in sequence. An identical process facilitates the creation of giant redwoods, ornamental roses, crops like corn and wheat, and the scrubby weeds that grow out of cracks in the sidewalk. 

The works in Ara Hao’s show “Close Desire,” on view at SWIM Gallery through May 2nd, depict a variety of plant forms, dead and alive. Each artwork (one large oil painting and eight smaller works on paper) has been made using a three-step process: first, photographic inspiration is gathered, second, the photographs are manipulated using AI, and third, the AI-spawned photographs are painted or drawn by Hao.

AI’s role in this process is unusual. Today, common applications of AI—for instance, customer service chatbots or automated writing tools—use its imitative ability to replace human labor. In Hao’s process, AI does not substitute for the artist’s work. Instead, it facilitates the arrangement of pre-determined elements, much as the chance operations used by John Cage and other Fluxus artists structured their work. But AI is more complex than a roll of the dice: it has been trained on data (for instance, information from nature, or from other artists); we might expect that, compared to chance procedures, it plays a stronger role in forming the finished work.

A walk through of the show reveals that although the works depict natural elements, the components have been arranged in a way that is a little off—not quite natural. The works seem to have been composed by piecing together modules, although no seams are visible. The different works also appear to be instances of a single archetype. Both the segmental composition and single-pattern aspects of the works remind me of plants.

The layered, modular nature of the works could also be described as collage-like. As with many collage-based forms (think of Cubist works), the pieces lack ground. They’re all figure, no empty space. But the lack of seams means that the works do not declare themselves as collages—so the missing space reads as surprising, even uncanny.

Also strange is the works’ resistance to pictorial harmony. The compositions range from slightly awkward to kind of ugly. Many look like wallpaper, although without the repetition. The works also contain partial leaf, flower or architectural forms. These object fragments may originate in an AI model’s interpretation of a partially obscured feature as an alternate whole. 

The fakeness of these works’ compositions and shapes contrasts with the extreme realness of their details. Many petals and leaves are shown with the exaggeratedly pointy tips that, in nature, derive from the tips’ early growth cessation. The distinct character of the edges of the leaves and petals, also a consequence of developmental patterns, is rendered clearly, especially in the painting. The leaves’ vein networks are pictured in a biologically correct way in nearly all cases (Untitled/Brown (2026) includes a Frankenstein exception). The seemingly infinite and messy ways in which leaves’ basic form can be interrupted, especially in death, are catalogued.

These tiny biological details appear, time and time again, as the result of an enormous amount of human effort. In the pastels, pencil strokes are visible at close range but are backgrounded by the intensity and variety of color and the lighting effects the patterns of color application create. In the painting, evidence of human brush strokes is scant; instead, a creamy surface pierced by rich color stands out. Close up, the edges of the plant organs are immaterial, merging into the canvas as if the two grew together. The work has too much detail, variety, and care to have been produced by a machine—but might have been produced by an angel.

Many of the pieces appear to contain studies of natural phenomena. For instance, Red Leaves (2024) examines the ways in which buried bulbs’ leaves erupt through dead matter. Splintering and reassembly of form run rampant in these works—but there is also compounding. In San Francisco (2026), leaves whose leaflets fan out from a central point burst into the picture plane like the fireworks whose shape they share. The drawing In Blue (2025) includes petals scattered among leaves in a way that suggests that AI may understand the fundamental homology of leaves and petals, as described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his Metamorphosis of Plants. 

The works’ fracturing, layering, and mashup-ing is a way of treasuring nature, of holding it up to the light, then examining it from every angle. The process used to create the works also acts as a transformation engine. The input is our world; the output, a new universe, sprung from ours but novel, with its own rules and modes of existence.

Adam Leao is a Bay Area filmmaker and award-winning producer. After over a decade making rideshare platforms and burrito delivery apps look cool, he’s now directing documentaries about the real human stories on the streets of San Francisco. No ROI required.

Leao is the director of San Francisco Rising, a documentary that follows a year in the life of San Francisco as it attempts to find its footing after an era of turmoil and tough headlines, told through the voices of everyday residents: a homeless advocate, a Muni driver, artists, event-goers, and the people who quietly honor the unclaimed, the film pieces together a living mosaic of hope, grit, and community.

The following are excerpts from Adam Leao’s interview, as conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Editor’s note: Hugh Leeman appears briefly in Adam’s documentary San Francisco Rising.

From Bronze Lions to the Streets of San Francisco

Hugh Leeman: Adam, the first thing I learned about your work was that you won a Bronze Lion at the Cannes Film Festival for commercial work you had done. And then you quit your job and decided to make a year-plus-long personal film project with no major funding. It was quite a leap. What was your inner dialogue like in leaving a secure job to create this documentary?

Adam Leao: Great place to jump off. And it's so funny that you're interviewing me now — I've interviewed you for my documentary. But yeah, leaping off of that — the Lion award was funny because I'd done a lot of creative projects for marketing teams. That project in particular was the Postmates Don't Cook Book. Instead of cooking, it gives you a recipe and at the end says, just forget it and order it on Postmates — with a QR code to order that item. Really cool photography and artwork from food photographers and food stylists. I did a little bit of work helping organize it, but it wasn't one of my biggest or most meaningful projects. And that won the award.

Then I'd do another project that I thought was really powerful — an AAPI Asian lunch thing where celebrities would talk about how they were made fun of for their Asian lunch as a kid, and now you could order their school lunch on the app. That one wins nothing. It's just funny within the corporate world — what gets rewarded isn't necessarily the meaning and the power behind the idea. Sometimes things are marketable and sell well and are cool. I think that also tied into why I wanted to leave the corporate world. Being on a creative marketing team is awesome if you're creative and want a job, but over time it can be a little creatively deteriorating, because everything at the end of the day is for a sale or a delivery or a new product. Marketing burritos or car rides. I had this itch — I went to film school, I grew up loving film and storytelling — to make something of my own just for the purpose of making it. So after about a decade in tech, I was ready, probably skill-wise but also financially and mentally, to take a year — which turned into like two years — to do this documentary project.

The Unclaimed: Spreading Ashes Under the Golden Gate

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the word meaning, and that it was perhaps a little devoid of meaning doing some of those projects. The documentary you made is beautiful in its sense of connecting with people and the meaning in their lives — you interview everyone from the mayor of San Francisco to a social media influencer to those deeply impacted by the opioid epidemic. I want to focus on a very touching scene in which you're on a boat riding out to where the San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean. The boat goes under the Golden Gate Bridge, and you begin documenting a process in which the unclaimed ashes of individuals are spread at sea. Can you tell the story of who these people are who are spreading the ashes of the unclaimed?

Adam Leao: That's definitely one of the best scenes. The documentary has about thirty, thirty-five characters — each one is a little three-to-five minute vignette. This one is Ruben Houston, the director of Colma Cremation and Funeral Home Services. Essentially, like you said, he's paid for by the city to receive the bodies of unclaimed individuals — sometimes elderly people, sometimes unknown people, but mostly victims of the opioid and fentanyl epidemic specifically, who have died on the streets with no family or friends to claim them. He gets their bodies, they cremate them, and they wait a year to see if anyone comes to claim them. After a year, they have — for lack of a better word — a disposal service. In San Francisco, it's actually a really beautiful operation where he takes them under the Golden Gate Bridge, out into the ocean, and pours them into the water. He also brings a priest who does a prayer, they play beautiful music, and they throw out flower petals with all of them.

I saw someone cover his story on Instagram with a little post, and that was one of those things where I reached out and said, can we come out? We have bigger, better cameras. We can really show your story to a bigger audience, and people can see it on bigger screens because it's such a beautiful moment. It kind of caps the fentanyl scene. We went out there and filmed him for an afternoon and yeah, it was intense. We went out on a fishing boat and right when you get to the Golden Gate Bridge, it starts getting choppy. There were about ten of us on the boat and about thirty-five to forty cremated remains — we kind of joked that there were forty souls on board. People were getting seasick. It was intense, but also very beautiful. He doesn't get paid to do the prayer service and the flowers — that's something he does on his own, and it speaks to his character and how he wants to honor these people. Considering a lot of them died from fentanyl overdoses or addiction or some other really sad ending to their life, this is actually a beautiful final note on their song.

JJ Smith, the Tenderloin & Narcan

Hugh Leeman: This is very touching, and it hits at this darker element of San Francisco — and frankly, of the United States and perhaps globally — with this epidemic. But also, like you say, it shows something very beautiful. There are several scenes that wind their way throughout the documentary, and one features a gentleman deeply connected to the inner city and the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, working with people affected by the fentanyl and opioid epidemic. There's a particularly touching scene in which a woman is being resuscitated, and later there are interviews with her and the man that helps her. Can you talk about these people and how documenting this situation impacted your understanding of San Francisco?

Adam Leao: That's exactly what happened. You're talking about a character right before the last scene. His name is JJ Smith online, and he goes around the Tenderloin almost as a street journalist — but he's much more than that because he follows up with people weekly. He gets them showers, gets them food. He wants them to tell him their story, on or off camera. If they're willing, he'll share it online, primarily on X but also on Instagram. He has, at this point, probably fifty to one hundred stories of people he's met and their addiction journeys. The one in the film is a woman he knows — she's overdosing, and you get to see him ride up to her on his scooter as it's happening and help administer Narcan. I didn't even know about Narcan until I started looking into the fentanyl epidemic.

Hugh Leeman: Can you give a bit of context to what Narcan is for people who are listening?

Adam Leao: Narcan is basically a recovery drug for when you're overdosing. I don't understand the full science behind it, but in this scene the woman is overdosing from fentanyl and they put these small Narcan bottles up her nose. It's something between a smelling salt and a liquid that kind of wakes you up from a deep slumber or an overdose. You still have to go to the hospital after, but it prevents you from dying — from your muscles relaxing too far or however that overdose system works. It's administered all over. In the documentary there's an EMT who says they administer it thirty to forty times a day, back in 2024.

Hugh Leeman: So go back to this — JJ is on a scooter, he rides up, he sees the overdose taking place and they administer Narcan.

Adam Leao: Yes. The woman wakes up and then about two to three weeks later, JJ is interviewing her again in his deli — which is another thing he started. He shows her the video of her overdosing on an iPad and gets her reaction. He does this with a lot of people online. She's a very sweet woman, grew up in the Bay Area. But to see yourself overdose, I think, is a big wake-up call. There's another one he posted on X where this guy is kind of laughing about his overdose — oh yeah, that happened a few weeks ago — and then JJ shows him the video and the guy totally changes his tune and gets really serious and sad. JJ is honestly doing his own documentary and journalistic endeavor. He also has a beautiful voice and a beautiful story that ties him to the Tenderloin and to San Francisco. I think his voice is probably one of the most powerful in the piece.

Hugh Leeman: So JJ is going out and doing this, and he also has a deli?

Adam Leao: Yeah. At the end of the documentary — and this is a bummer because there are a lot of people I'd love to follow up on — he opened a deli in the Tenderloin called Tenderloin Deli and Connect. His goal is to help people eat, but he also feeds a lot of people for free — sandwiches, hot dogs, ramen. The connect part is that you can come in, charge your phone. He's really big into getting people to call their family members. He has a whole series of videos where he gets family members' phone numbers, then meets the person on the street and says, do you want to call your brother? Do you want to call your mom? And they say, I don't have a phone, I don't know their number. He says, I have a phone. Here's their number. And then they call. The deli is a place where people can come, do that, and feel safe and recharge. It did have a big flood this past December, which was really sad — he was raising money to fix it up, and that's on our website, sanfranciscorising.com. When it comes to characters in the Tenderloin who are picking up the community and sharing their stories, I don't think anyone's better than JJ.

Earning Trust on Camera

Hugh Leeman: That's powerful. Just you saying that hit me with some emotion — this idea of calling the family member and such. With these deeply intimate portraits that you record, how do you earn the kind of trust that allows everyday people to truly be themselves once the camera comes on and that red light starts recording?

Adam Leao: That's such a good question, and it's a learning process. The first few interviews I was so bad — I would just ask someone on the street or at the beach, can we interview you, we're making a documentary, can you sign this release form, let's go. And then they would get nervous and not know what to do. Over time, for the main interviews, I would reach out to the person or be introduced to them generally over email, then typically do a phone call and explain the project a bit more. I made a trailer, and the people involved were typically interesting people who were already a little bit open to sharing.

The main thing was just making people comfortable. We had a big Sony camera, a medium Sony camera, and a small Sony camera — they all shoot beautifully, but the big one goes on someone's shoulder with all these wires and it just looks intense. People got nervous in front of it. The medium-sized camera is almost like a DSLR, and people seemed more comfortable. Towards the second half of the project, we pretty much only shot with that one. Even at events, it allowed us to talk to people in a bar or backstage without making them feel like a big production setup was happening.

Hugh Leeman: What's the system? I like this.

Adam Leao: Oh man, I don't even know if I remember it anymore — most of this happened almost two years ago. I even had to watch clips again today to try and trigger more memories. I think it definitely involved doing my research, asking them to introduce themselves, and I typically had some sort of joke ready — or maybe even interrupt the first question just to shake things off and loosen everyone up. And if someone gave a good answer, I was really open to giving them a high five or a fist bump and kind of breaking the wall for a second — just reminding everyone we're having a conversation and it's not so formal.

Filming the Mayor: London Breed & the Phoenix Story

Hugh Leeman: The people you've just mentioned are one end of the spectrum. The other end, in some regards, is the then-mayor that you interview. You have Mayor London Breed on camera — she's in a highly contested reelection campaign, going through a lot. She ultimately loses. How did you manage to connect with someone that busy, and how do the ideas she shares on camera connect to the larger narrative of what was going on in San Francisco?

Adam Leao: Good point. When we started the project, I really just felt like San Francisco was doing better and coming out of a bad place, and I wanted to show people that — show these characters and places of beauty not being shown in the news. We started with a coffee shop, the Polar Plunge on January first, my hair salon lady, close friends. At the time, if you had said you're going to interview the mayor for this project, it would have been a moonshot.

But by the end of the year, we had been growing, meeting cooler and cooler people, going deeper into these pockets. Her name had surfaced a few times — especially around the theme of hope for the city. We got in touch with her social media manager and he said she was interested, but then it kind of died off. I think because there was no real benefit for her to do an interview with us — a documentary coming out a year and a half later. She didn't know who we were.

So it died off, and then she lost. We reached back out, and this was another thing throughout the process — incentivizing people to be a part of the project. I kind of shifted her role from running for mayor to: you just wrapped up your job as mayor, you're moving on after six years, do you want to do an interview about your appreciation for the city and your time there? Pitched it that way to her social media manager and they were down.

We showed up — just me and one cinematographer, Allen, both a little more dressed up than we had been the whole project. She came in a bit guarded, which makes sense. But after I told her we had filmed her at the Chinese New Year parade and at this pride flag ceremony and a few other events, she really opened up. She told her own story — London Breed grew up in the projects of San Francisco. She had brothers and sisters who had been to jail, who had drug issues. For her to end up as mayor was so unlikely. She very much had her own legend of rising up. Whether or not you agree with her politically, she definitely has a unique story to tell. Her scene is mostly her appreciation for the city and her hopes for the future.

Casting a City: How Characters Were Found

Hugh Leeman: It's beautiful — in watching the documentary, you see her story and all that's going on in her life and in the city at that moment. You're in the mayor's office, and then you've got JJ on the street, and there's that one scene where there's a woman literally on the threshold of death. How did you pick the characters you interviewed? How did that process go?

Adam Leao: It's wild. The way it's edited is a bit of an acid trip flying through the city — different areas, different people, all in one year. The way we picked characters was kind of like following the omens from the universe. I didn't know it was going to be a time capsule of 2024 to start — we just started filming January first, 2024. We kept meeting people and then they would introduce us to a friend who's doing something cool — who's a photographer on the Golden Gate Bridge, who's there seven days a week for six years and no one's gone up and filmed him. So we'd go do that. And then he'd introduce us to someone else, and one of them is busy but knows someone who might be cool for the project. It came very organically.

It would be tricky though, because sometimes someone would say, I have five people you need to meet, and we already had three or four planned. You have to feel out whose story is interesting, and whose story is visual — that was really important to me. People working on the bridge, artists, a music event, going to the ocean. Another big thing was showing the beauty of San Francisco even when that means the center of the Tenderloin — showing it visually as well as interviewing the people who are part of it.

Separating Self from Story

Hugh Leeman: In watching the documentary, I had a brief interview with you in this on an unrelated project and there was something beautiful about going back to that — thinking about what do I want to share, what do I want to have remembered? You had this insight face to face, looking at London Breed sitting at the threshold of a very big change in her life, just having lost this election, thinking about what she wants to be remembered for. When you're working this close to people and this deeply connected to San Francisco — you've grown up around here — how do you separate your own beliefs and affections from the story you're capturing?

Adam Leao: That's a really good question, and I think every artist probably deals with that — especially when you're doing a documentary about a city and all its people. You're doing interviews and they give you answers, some politically charged, some not. You have to choose four or five sentences of their entire hour-long interview to create a little scene. What do you choose?

I tried to pull out my own biases and stay very centered and show as many sides of each coin as possible, with that throughline of hope, but also allowing people to state their problems and talk about issues. Not to flip the script on the interview, but with you — we hung out for a day, we interviewed you in the alley. You told multiple stories, really great ones. About moving to San Francisco, about your art project with the QR codes, about the classes you teach. I had to figure out which one to put in for your scene. In the end, the one I went with was your art project where you would paint some of the people of the Tenderloin — especially the homeless — put up posters with a QR code where people could scan it, buy a t-shirt with the print, and that money goes to the person. That story just fit in really well after the Tenderloin scene and the last third of the film about what people are doing to make the city better. But how did you feel — you did that whole interview and then you just see that one snippet come out?

Hugh Leeman: Thanks for asking. It's really interesting. Beforehand, I remember thinking, what do I want to tell, what is the story here? And I came up with all these different ideas. Generally speaking, I'm a pretty quiet person, a listener — I ask a lot of questions. But deep down I'm a storyteller, and that day in the alley I just kept going and going. We talked about a project in the Philippines, the Spanish-speaking project with Latin American immigrants, the Tenderloin project using AI, and so on. There was something really cathartic about hearing one's own thoughts about one's life out loud. And I think for other people who maybe didn't say it, there was something really beautiful where you bestow this gift upon people — where they get to think about who they are, what they did, what their actions are. And I remember watching it for the first time on a big screen in the theater and thinking that it was — you did a great job editing it. It was very right that it be about San Francisco and the Tenderloin and the gritty areas and the people I had collaborated with for five years on that project. And when I'm standing there, one of the things is you shot not just my scene but everything on location — no special setup, no special lighting. It seems like there are incredible challenges in that, but also an incredible opportunity. What was gained by doing it that way? What was perhaps lost?

Adam Leao: With corporate marketing, you typically have full lighting, full audio, a soundstage — it can create really beautiful images and videos. But when you're going for authenticity and realism in a documentary, sometimes all of that makes it feel a bit fake and staged. It also limits your access. If you want to interview someone in the back of a bar or on the Bay Bridge, you can't always bring that much equipment, especially if you want to make the person comfortable.

We actually shot one interview with two cameras, tripods, and lights in the first week. Then we shot a few other interviews outside the coffee shop, just holding the camera with them miked up. Seeing the difference between those two, I was like, this is the way we need to go. No tripods, no lights. Generally we should be filming outside in a cool spot. What that allowed for was getting into a lot more intimate scenarios. What made it difficult is lighting is trickier — you have to find a really cool corner, and sound can be harder, wind and all these things. We didn't shoot anything in a studio and didn't really use any tripods except for that first scene. What you get is a really realistic view of what it would be like to capture San Francisco as an individual with a camera. I actually think those challenges — where the camera jiggles a bit, the lighting is off — those actually make it more of a documentary. Looking back in a few years, those will be the parts that are really cool.

Jake Ricker & the Golden Gate Bridge

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned something really interesting contextualizing one of the other characters. He's the man photographing the Golden Gate Bridge day after day for years. On the surface, there's perhaps nothing more iconic to San Francisco — and in many ways to the West of the United States — than the Golden Gate Bridge. There's a tourist appeal to it on a visual level, but there's a much darker underbelly to it, and you touch on both at the same time. Can you tell some of his story?

Adam Leao: His name is Jake Ricker and he's a photographer. He was out there for almost seven years — I believe from 2018 to the end of 2024. He actually stopped the year we were filming after getting into a bit of a tiff with bridge control. They were installing suicide nets for the prior few years and just finishing them in 2024 — so when you jump, you land in the net about fifty feet below. He was thinking of wrapping up his project at the end of that anyway. But he's just out there every day, from around seven-thirty in the morning to six in the evening, seven days a week. I think he had missed four days in six years when we filmed. Some of that was to go to doctor's appointments. He did have a girlfriend, which he still has — I've met her and she's lovely. I always thought that was funny, speaking of spouses letting you do crazy projects.

He shoots film, so he has so many photos still to develop. He's made a few books, and they're iconic — there have even been copycat people trying to do similar things on the Golden Gate Bridge. He has all these incredible photos of protests, car crashes, people getting engaged, people sitting on the ledge contemplating their life. Literally where someone is getting engaged, maybe a week later, same spot — someone is potentially taking their life. We show a slideshow of his photos after his scene, and I just wanted to give his photos time to breathe. There are a lot of artists and musicians featured in the documentary, so even the song playing during his scene is a local musician named Jamie, whose song touches on the highs and lows of city life. We arranged the photos around that. It's a little story within the story itself.

The Premiere, the Crimson Fist & Seeing It on the Big Screen

Hugh Leeman: That's impressive. And there's something very beautiful about how you move from the light — the fireworks, the countdown to New Year's, people running into the ocean, some nude — to these much darker elements. You don't gloss over those. I want to hear about your internal landscape during editing. You're buried in phenomenal amounts of footage, making these hard cuts, surrounded by this project for months — and then you finally walk into a theater full of people, a huge screen, and suddenly it's all very public in front of so many people. What were you feeling?

Adam Leao: It was a lot of feelings. The making of this project was its own adventure and journey for me — I learned so many things. The premiere that you were at was definitely a moment where it felt complete. All the people involved, close family and friends coming together to see it. I was very nervous for people to see it. I didn't know how everyone was going to react. But I knew it had to be done — I had told a lot of people we were going to do a premiere around this time and people wanted to see it, wanted to see themselves. Everyone was so joyous and happy and appreciative. I'm kind of weird where everyone's clapping at the end and telling me they liked it, but to my wife I'm just going, did they really like it or are they just telling me that because what are you going to tell me at the premiere?

But I had a great time. And then another lesson I learned — that's not the actual end. Then there were names to fix in the credits, a few color issues. Even during it, I felt like it could have been louder in the theater. You're always still thinking about the performance and the project. But I look back on it now as a very special memory — we got to have the premiere at the Vogue Theater and everyone involved with the project got to be there. One of the best nights of the last few years for sure.

Hugh Leeman: It was beautiful. I remember walking into the theater and seeing a gentleman dressed up like a superhero. What is going on? And then about halfway into your documentary, he's a part of it. That's what makes San Francisco such a dynamic place — people like him.

Adam Leao: The Crimson Fist. It felt like this little Hollywood premiere of San Francisco — eclectic characters. My wife and the cinematographer and a few other people had seen the film five or six times, so we all knew you guys. We see you walk in the door and it's like, oh my god, that's him, oh my god, that's her. It was really fun.

The Phoenix Rising: How a City Flag Became a Film's Soul

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned earlier the Phoenix Rising, in the context of London Breed. For context for people listening — the Phoenix is on the San Francisco city flag, and it becomes the central metaphor in your documentary, this idea of rising from the fire and the ashes. At what point in the process did the Phoenix Rising become a central theme?

Adam Leao: I think it was probably a few months before we started filming. I had initially thought of the idea in 2022. San Francisco felt to me like it was in a very dark place — a lot of businesses and restaurants had been shuttered from COVID and were having a hard time reopening, a lot of people had moved out, the tech boom had faded, and the fentanyl crisis was growing out of control. I was like, should I make a documentary? But it was kind of a sad theme. Then in 2023 it felt like things were getting a little better — people moving into new leases, starting new restaurants and businesses, coming together. That felt like, okay, maybe this is more enjoyable to capture and more entertaining to watch.

As I was looking into that, I was looking into the history of San Francisco. We also have a scene with the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, which I learned about in that process. I came across the flag and its symbolism — and I'm very into visuals and storytelling with symbolism. It looks like a chicken on the flag, honestly. It's a really poorly designed flag. But the symbolism behind the Phoenix Rising — after the 1906 earthquake and the fires after the Gold Rush — inspired this idea of rising from the flames. San Francisco historically has had these super highs and lows. I think a huge part of it is the geography. It's on this amazing piece of land — beautiful, European in the way the houses are built, but then you have a beach, the fog, the bridges. I just don't think it can die. It's too nice of a place. So even when the economy is tough, it always seems to rise again.

So in 2022, going into 2023, the world was really shitting on San Francisco, especially in the news. But that probably means it's going to make a comeback soon. When I saw that about the flag, I got inspired, and I think it spearheaded the theme for the whole project. I even found a guy who was designing a new flag that was more powerful visually — and he's in the piece as well.

A Time Capsule of Hope

Hugh Leeman: It's a beautiful element of the Phoenix rising. The film is now going out into the world — people are going to see this on Apple TV and streaming, seeing something that's clearly in the past from 2024 with some hindsight. How do you see the film and the Phoenix Rising metaphor now?

Adam Leao: It's so weird, because it feels like I just finished it a few months ago, but all the content was shot in 2024 and we're now doing this interview in April 2026. It is a time capsule, which I'm really happy about — I kind of decided on that about a third through the project because it almost gives it this forever feeling. In ten years you could look back at what San Francisco was like then.

Viewing the project now, done almost two years ago and coming out in 2026, has been really interesting. To me, it's felt like the city has been rising and getting better in a lot of ways. In some ways it's stayed the same, and in some ways it's gotten worse, but the overall perspective from outsiders — which is important — has definitely gotten better. And from the people who live there, the feeling of community and growth is something most people are feeling. Even things like the Super Bowl recently — a lot of people came and were saying San Francisco's amazing, and I'm like, thank god we said it was rising and it's rising. But then there'll be another event where something goes wrong with the fentanyl situation or a murder, and it seems like the city's going down again.

Overall I do feel like the city is heading in a better direction, and I think you kind of have to have that optimistic approach — for that and for life. I feel very happy that we took a chance on that occurring, that the city would rebound. And I'm feeling very optimistic that it's going to continue to do better.

Hugh Leeman: Adam, you made a beautiful film. It shows the uplifting, the beauty, the symbols of San Francisco and you showed the darker realities too, and that's what makes it so special. Thank you for making time to share. Adam, thank you.

Adam Leao: Thank you very much. And thanks for being a part of it.

By Matt Gonzalez 

The Crocker Art Museum’s exhibition, Rebels with La Causa, presents 95 screenprinted posters made by over 20 different artists (alongside photographs, ephemera, and video materials) from a two decade period featuring work by the graphic design and mural collective, the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF). Founded to support, among other activities, the United Farm Workers boycotts seeking better pay and working conditions in the heavily agricultural Central Valley of California, the group is usually credited as being started in 1970 by Jose Montoya and Esteban Villa, two professors at California State University, Sacramento. It was a loose-knit organization rooted in a community that boasts many other Chicano/a artists as part of its origin story including: Ricardo Favela, Armando Cid, Juanishi Orosco, Rodolfo "Rudy" Cuellar, Louie “the Foot" Gonzalez, Juan Carrillo, Joe Serna, Jr., Stan Padilla, Irma Lerma Barbosa, Juan Cervantes, and Max Garcia. The Crocker Art Museum is the natural venue to present the first major museum exhibition of the screenprint collective spawned in its own backyard. 

The Rebel Chicano Art Front, as it was originally known, was founded to foster the arts in the Chicano/Latino community, to educate young people in its history and culture, and promote political awareness. In 1972, the RCAF founded the Centro de Artistas Chicanos (Center for Chicano Artists) which operated as a non-profit hub to facilitate grants and support community-based art programs. Over the years, the RCAF is recognized as one of the most significant hegemonic cultural endeavors in support of a political cause. However, it is important we remember that the RCAF was influenced and inspired by antecedent organizations that both predated and worked alongside what became a varied effort in furtherance of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and following decades.

El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers Theater) was founded in 1965 during the Delano grape strike by Luis Valdes and Agustin Lira who brought their troupe into the fields and to picket lines on flatbed trucks. They used theater as an organizing tool performing short, often improvised plays, to empower and entertain workers. Performances often mocked bosses and used humor to tell stories of injustice.

Another forerunner to the RCAF was The Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALAF) which was one of the first Chicano art collectives, founded in the Fruitvale District of Oakland by Malaquias Montoya (RCAF co-founder Jose Montoya's brother), Manuel Hernandez, Esteban Villa (RCAF co-founder), and Rene Yañez. The stated goal of the collective was “organizing Chicano artists who are interested in integrating art into the Chicano social revolution sweeping the country." It brought together a group of artists engaged in political and cultural work based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

These efforts were part of the burgeoning national Chicano Movement which signaled the changing dynamics of race relations in the United States. The RCAF’s posters played an important part in telling the story of the labor struggle by elevating the various events they publicized into something worthy of documentation, all the while making the promotional posters educational. Part information conveyance and part historical record, the RCAF captured the plight of poor laborers while offering a distinct kind of solace; the workers knew they were not alone in their struggle for better working conditions.

Many of the members of the RCAF had themselves come from farm worker families. RCAF co-founder Jose Montoya had picked grapes as a boy with his family in Delano and Fowler, for instance. The group’s authenticity and social justice commitment was not separate from their art activities and thus were always seen as integrated in the movement, not adjacent to it. Montoya would later say his early artistic efforts included drawing on the paper used to dry grapes into raisins. Notably, it was common for RCAF artists to join picket lines with workers who were unaccustomed to having allies.

Any discussion of the history of the United Farm Workers must acknowledge the significant contributions made by Filipino-American agricultural workers. In fact, the Delano boycott which launched in 1965 was preceded by a Filipino-led farm worker strike in Coachella Valley earlier that year. In Delano, over 1,000 Filipino workers led by Larry Itliong, walked off the job to protest working conditions, $1.20 per-hour wages, and the absence of any health insurance or pensions. Mexican-American farm workers voted nine days later to join their boycott; one which would last for years and be immortalized as a UFW launched-effort because of the merger of the Filipino and Mexican worker unions (AWOC and NFWA), which formed the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) the following year. 

RCAF posters often directly addressed politics. One such poster, in support of the 1976 California ballot initiative campaign, “Yes on 14,” which aimed to protect funding for the Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 would have, among other things, ensured secret-ballot union elections for farm workers and protected collective bargaining rights. Although the United Farm Workers collected over 700,000 signatures to place it on the ballot, the measure was defeated by a heavily funded effort by agricultural growers, reminding us today that the effort to obtain workers rights was full of setbacks.

The story of how the RCAF got its name demonstrates how the group harnessed humor while engaging in serious political work. The RCAF members did not typically sign their artwork individually, preferring to use the group's acronym as a demonstration of their collective solidarity. Because their abbreviation was often confused with the internationally renown Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), which had fought alongside Allied Forces during WWII (notably flying over 3,000 sorties during the Normandy invasion of 1944), members of the Chicano RCAF were often asked if the two were connected (usually by someone who hadn’t paused to consider the absurdity of what they were asking). Someone in the artist group once replied that they were the Royal Chicano Air Force and that they flew adobe planes, made of earth.

The Chicano activists fully embraced the playfulness of this proclamation. They thereafter adopted a mock-military persona wearing airforce attire such as peaked caps, aviator goggles, bomber hats, surplus flight suits, and leather jackets. They often were deployed to various strike actions riding in an army jeep. Just like that, the Rebel Chicano Art Front became the Royal Chicano Air Force. 

The re-branded Chicano RCAF also captured the military essence of political work, which at its core is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Importantly, many of the Chicano RCAF members had served in the U. S. military including Jose Montoya who served in the U.S. Navy and Esteban Villa who served in the U.S. Army, both during the Korean conflict. Armando Cid, Hector Gonzalez, and Juanishi Orosco served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. This sacrifice further highlighted the un-American nature of the conditions the RCAF was fighting to improve at home. While they made sacrifices for our country abroad their families faced unfair wages and inhumane working conditions in the agricultural fields of California. 

Political art often gets relegated to uninspiring social realism. It’s not that it doesn’t require skill to execute, but because it is in service to politics, it often results in the art being mechanistic somehow. It gets reduced to propaganda with a direct message to impart. But agitprop can serve both sides, and if authentic, can unshackle the bland expectations often associated with it. When art is made by un-alienated and fully-committed artists who are embedded in a movement, whose values they are seeking to disseminate, what they make resonates differently within the community. They breathe air into and enliven their common struggle with love and excitement creating something that encapsulates genuine inspiration. The RCAF posters exude a sense of warmth and vibrancy of life that set them apart from the conventional political posters of other eras. In his 1937 essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture” Herbert Marcuse argued that art embodies the potential for liberation and the formation of radical subjectivity. Values can be constructed that pose a challenge to the social order and can be circulated aesthetically. He thus assigned an emancipatory function to art. This is exemplified in what the RCAF did as they facilitated and helped create a space for thinking about what change could look like. They embraced community so that, despite occasional political defeats the workers felt they collectively belonged to something bigger than just themselves. They each could imagine the victory that awaited them.  

Not surprisingly, there is no official record of the Royal Canadian Air Force ever acknowledging the Royal Chicano Air Force adoption of their acronym and air force persona. Had they taken notice, it’s likely the Canadian RCAF (known for their camaraderie and jovial nature even in the face of wartime adversity), would have accepted the obvious satirical humor for what it was. Moreover, it would have been easy to dismiss any chance the duplicative acronyms caused confusion since each group was active  outside the realm of the other.

What historians of the Chicano RCAF have not previously noted is that at the time of the Chicano collective’s founding in 1970, the Canadian military had actually officially dropped the name "Royal Canadian Air Force" in favor of "Canadian Forces Air Command" (AIRCOM). This was done as part of a 1968 unification whereby the Canadian government combined its three separate military services (the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force) into a single organization called the Canadian Armed Forces. So in actuality, by the time the Canadian air force restored their old name (for largely nostalgic reasons in 2011), the Chicano RCAF had used the acronym for several decades, exclusively.

Ricardo Favela’s screenprint El Centro de Artistas Chicanos (1975) references La Calavera Catrina and other skeletal images from zinc etchings by Mexican lithographer Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), which have become ubiquitous in Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) celebrations. Favela depicts a Chicano artist holding up a mesh screen from the silkscreening process to another who expresses obvious enthusiasm. Both are wearing army shirts, one emblazoned with RCAF ‘75 on their sleeve. Favela’s poster was made to promote public art classes “para la gente” (for the people) and includes United Farm Workers (UFW) logos. The use of skeletons for the characters conveys the Chicano-focused arts program and incorporates Day of the Dead homages to departed ancestors, who nonetheless remain present in our lives.

In addition to giving the actual location in Sacramento where the art activities will take place on “S” street, it references “Sacra, Califas.” Sacra is short for Sacramento. Califas is Chicano slang for California, but it also references mythical indigenous roots before Spanish colonial times. The name for the state of California comes from an early 16th century Spanish chivalric romance novel The Adventures of Esplandian by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo which tells the story of a crusade by Christian knights. Today the novel is mostly remembered for introducing the mythical island of California, populated by dark-skinned warrior women led by Queen Calafia whose name is linked to the Arabic words for caliph (khalifa) and successor (khalf). Although Calafia is defeated in the novel, partly because her army of 500 (half-lion and half-eagle) griffins fail to devour the Christian men as they were trained, she survives by converting to Christianity and fleeing her home.

The Chicano use of Califas goes beyond the literal plot of the 1510 novel and represents a reclamation of identity aligning them with an independent, powerful, and indigenous people who ruled themselves before the arrival of colonial interlopers. The use of the name Califas is a symbol of resistance.

In an RCAF poster promoting a Cinco de Mayo event, including art, music, and poetry, at Centro de Estudios Chicanos/Center for Chicano Studies, U.C. Santa Barbara (UCSB), two very specific iconographic signifiers are used. The scorpion painted on the empennage acts as a dual symbol of protection and danger—a cautionary warning that anyone venturing too close risks being stung. Additionally, the word “Aztlan” emblazoned on an attaché case carried by the RCAF pilot makes a point about ancestry. Aztlan is the ancestral homeland of the Nahuatl-speaking Mexica people, known as the Aztecs, who migrated to the Valley of Mexico in the early 14th century. Its location is the subject of debate, some placing it in northwestern Mexico and others in the American southwest. What is agreed upon is that it represents cultural pride and an origin story that unites Chicanos in asserting that they are not foreigners in the United States but indigenous peoples. 

This idea was first articulated in two 1969 manifestos El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (written collectively by delegates to the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference), including in its poetic preamble written by the poet known as Alurista (Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia); and in El Plan de Santa Barbara (a blueprint drafted by the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education). Since that time, many Chicanos have reimagined Aztlan, not as a specific geographic location, but as a shared spiritual homeland carried within them.

The title of the exhibition is very intentional. Rebels with “The” Cause is distinct from Rebels with “A” Cause, the former suggesting a shared collective reason to be standing shoulder to shoulder. "La Causa" (the cause) is a significant term within the Chicano Movement, symbolizing the ongoing struggle for justice and equality among Mexican Americans. It embodies the collective efforts to address systemic issues of discrimination affecting their communities.

The RCAF famously adopted a wide range of non-art related programs which included efforts to address food insecurity, provide mental health services, literacy initiatives, and the promotion of cultural pride through the organization of various festivals/fiestas (celebrating the corn harvest, honoring Tlaloc the Rain God, and remembering ancestors through Day of the Dead festivities). They viewed their community engagement in the widest manner possible. This non-art activity was so pervasive that David Rasul, a long time member of the RCAF's Cultural Affairs Committee (whose collection of over 50 posters and other ephemera from the group is now in the permanent collection of the Harvard Library), has referenced being part of the RCAF's Tortuga Squadron [tortoise squadron] made up of the non-flying members.

At a time Cesar Chavez's legacy is rightfully undermined by revelations he groomed and sexually assaulted minors the RCAF reminds us that no one person was responsible for the success of the Chicano civil rights effort. The farm workers movement was a multi-person struggle to obtain justice, and artists and other creatives were integral to the accomplishments attained. Dolores Huerta once said “The Royal Chicano Air Force had an incredible vision about what they wanted society to look like. They did what they started out to do, and I just wish that model existed in every city. I think our whole country would be a lot different if we had a RCAF in every community.”

At funerals or political gatherings, within Mexican-American or Latinx cultures, "presente" is used as a collective call-and-response roll-call, meaning "present" or "here", to assert that the deceased person lives on among those assembled. It affirms solidarity, continuation of the struggle, and that the person’s spirit remains accounted for in the community. Many of the founders of the Royal Chicano Air Force have died since their halcyon days and cannot enjoy the near-canonization their work has since achieved, including as a result of the current Crocker Art Museum exhibition. The pride they inspire within the Chicano community today and their participation in consequential historical events will not soon be forgotten. For a new generation of artists and activists the members of the RCAF will always be, ¡Presente!

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

This important exhibition is guest-curated by Terezita Romo (affiliate faculty in Chicana/o Studies at University of California, Davis) and managed by art historian Mariah Briel (former Crocker Curatorial Projects Manager and current adjunct faculty at Woodland Community College).

Exhibition artwork is sourced from a variety of lenders including RCAF artists and families, other private collections, and university library archives. The exhibition is accompanied by a 240-page book catalogue into the RCAFs history, Rebels with La Causa: Royal Chicano Air Force Art and Activism, 1970–1990 (New York: Scala, 2026) with essays by Tere Romo, Taiana Reinoza, Jesus Barraza, Ella Maria Diaz, and Lorena Marquez.

The exhibition recreates an RCAF screenprint studio in the museum offering visitors an immersive experience into their often versatile and mobile, art-making practice.

Coinciding with the Crocker Art Museum exhibition, La Raza Galeria Posada is hosting InFormation, a regional celebration of the RCAF, running from January – June 2026. Fifteen art and literary organizations, including other museums, galleries, libraries, and cultural centers in Sacramento, Roseville, Davis, and Woodland will present RCAF related exhibitions (including artist panels, workshops, poetry readings, and film screenings). 

RCAF printmakers who contributed to the Crocker Art Museum exhibition include: Juan Carrillo, Juan Cervantes, Armando Cid, Rudy Cuellar, Jose Felix, Ricardo Favela, Eva Garcia, Kathryn Garcia, Max Garcia, Lorraine Garcia-Nakata, Bill Gee Gonzalez, Luis Gonzalez, Hector Gonzalez, Evelyn Jenkins-Cronn, Irma Lerma Barbosa, Jose Montoya, Juanishi Orosco, Stan Padilla, Celia Herrera Rodriguez, Raul Suarez, and Esteban Villa. 

The exhibition runs through June 28, 2026.

Installation photographs (courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum).

By Doug Welch

Olivia Reich’s first solo exhibition is on display at Woods Lowside, located at 530 Haight street in San Francisco. The show runs until May 8. The space, a casual neighborhood venue that serves locally produced beer and wine, provides an intimate social environment from which to experience Reich’s paintings. As you enter the space, there is a compilation of Reich’s family photographs displayed on the wall. Reich’s paintings are based on these photos which currently surround the bar/eatery giving viewers an opportunity to linger on these haunting images, return to their friends, and then focus again and ponder these paintings.

The compilation of photos seen upon entry, seem familiar. They are the photos we all find stowed away in a closet or drawer and then spend hours looking through. In most instances, these photos haven’t been seen by anyone in years, yet we struggle to discard them. They could be photos of your dad’s childhood friends, distant cousins at an old family reunion, or of your great aunt with her grandchildren. These photos convey a sense of intimacy even though we don’t know who they depict. Identifying the subjects can be near impossible unless someone has written the names on the back, and even then, their relation or connection to family may remain unknown. It is this context and relationship with vintage family photos that Reich’s paintings speak to.

Reich’s piece “A Familiar Unfamiliar” is an oil painting showing a multigenerational family (including their dog). The painting omits aspects found in the corresponding photo. Reich isn’t trying to paint a literal copy and this is a theme seen throughout the exhibition. The figures in the piece have no faces. However, a woman with her arm around two children, a man kneeling beside their dog, and an older woman in the center of the composition are readily identifiable somehow. Most people would quickly conclude the painting shows a grandmother, a mother and father with their children, and the family dog. Notably, even with faceless figures it’s quite easy to identify major details such as age, probable gender, and the likely relationship between the figures. This alone allows for reflection on how we relate to these images and makes us contemplate on our minds constantly filter, judge, and categorize reality. We do this instinctively without questioning or conscious wondering. The seemingly automatic identification that occurs, limits possibility and closes what could remain open. Obviously, our minds’ automation is a shortcut that saves time and resources and allows us to focus on other tasks. However, this painting, like Reich’s others, challenges us to consider the value of not categorizing so quickly, to allow for more openness and curiosity to fill the void—who knows what might take certainty’s place. 

The muted colors of, “A Familiar Unfamiliar” give it a time worn feel. This emotion along with the facelessness of the figures, conveys a sense of loss or of something that cannot be reclaimed. What exactly, is for each to decide. The faceless figures allow us to project our own experiences or memories onto the piece. The universality of the family photo invites the viewer to connect quite easily to their own life. The earliest memories of one’s youth, when their parents were active, still working, still healthy and zealous. For many, this is a time that has long passed and a time that is missed. The absence of faces gives us permission to connect with this family in a more personal way. The nostalgia these paintings convey, which Reich has carefully orchestrated, make them irresistible and easy to spend time with. 

Looking at old family photos often means looking at photos of people who are strangers. Without a date, place, or names, the people in these photos shift from friends or family to unknown faces. Even if we become curious about who these people are, it is likely the people who could help identify them aren’t around any longer. In that way, the omission of detail in Reich’s pieces also communicates this loss. Whether in a clear photograph or a painting with faceless figures, these people are already in the realm of the unknown. In particular, “A Familiar Unfamiliar” conveys nostalgia and hope, longing and good memories, all intertwined with a sense of grief. There is a universality to this kind of loss, we all have these photos tucked away somewhere. Reich forces us to confront whether it matters who is remembered.

The painting “By the Corner Store” depicts four kids with BMX style bikes. It’s rendered in bold, high contrast neutral tones. This scene could easily be that of many people’s youth. Once again, the faceless aspect creates a shared commonality that allows us to connect quite personally with the painting. It’s the viewer and their childhood friends, it’s the viewer’s children, or their child with their child’s friends. The anonymity allows for a sense of limitlessness. It is not confined by the specificity a face imposes.The forms in the piece are less defined than a photo would capture. It’s less a particular moment in time from the past than a representation of many moments (possible moments, potential moments) from the past.

Ironically, the restraint used by Reich in these paintings, allows the painting to become more than it otherwise would be. The bluriness in the paintings is quite intentional. Reich could easily have made them more literal. Without restraint, however, these kids on bikes are not me and my friends, they cannot be my dad with his buddies, or represent a vague memory of being carefree. Without the vagueness restraint offers us, these kids are someone else, from a specific time and place. The skill Reich exercises by holding back allows for a much more personal connection between the viewer and the painting. The openness created through the omission of certain details, along with the gestural and soft brush work, shift the documentary nature of a photo into a painting of feeling, imagination, and possibility.

‍ ‍An Act of Love is a 20 x 24 inch oil painting. The painting depicts an older woman seated in profile, a child stands behind her with their hand reaching out toward the woman. A third figure, likely a child, is standing to the side of the woman but facing forward. The undifferentiated background focuses the viewers’ eye on the figures. This alone helps remind us of what is important, i.e. the people in our lives and our relationships with them. What exactly the child is doing by extending their arm out is not clear but the viewer is still left with a sense that this physical contact conveys a closeness, intimacy and connection between them. Vintage photographs often have indecipherable gestures because each print was typically saved, regardless of quality. In today's social media age, where everyone carries a camera, we constantly delete the kinds of images earlier generations were certain to save.

Looking closely at An Act of Love will continue to push the viewer to try to make sense of the narrative. There is a ghostly quality to the other child standing beside the woman. Only a body is visible as the child’s head becomes absorbed into the brown background and shadows the light cast.They are almost receding into it, as if the child is moving further away from us. And as they move away, they disappear. The physical absence represented in An Act of Love, reflects a reality we all experience as time moves on. Our memories fade, our ability to connect with people (like those represented in the compilation of family photos), and even our ability to know who someone is, all become hazy and tests what is memory and what is invented for convenience sake.

The title of the piece suggests that the viewer might try to discern what act it refers to. Is it the child reaching out? What is this act of love? The painting shows a child extending toward the woman, creating a physical connection. Yet, through this restraint, clear answers and certainty remain unattainable. This unknowability ultimately gives the painting its power.

Possibly the “act” is not the key, any more than there can be certainty in understanding any of Reich’s paintings. It’s also not even clear that the child reaching out is necessarily the “act” that the title references. The meaning of the painting may lie in the quiet fact of the three figures being together. The act of love is presence.

Reich’s first show is powerful because it is personal but also universal, and therefore relatable. Through her paintings, her family members become people close to us too. The paintings point us to a recognition of what is most important and offer an intimate reminder of impermanence. These paintings leave the viewer encouraged with the knowledge that we really are all in this together. 

The Crocker Art Museum presents The Sense of Beauty, a landmark exhibition of 60 masterworks from Puerto Rico’s Museo de Arte de Ponce. Spanning the 16th to 21st centuries, the exhibition brings European, American, and Puerto Rican painting into dialogue through bilingual English-Spanish interpretation.

Highlights include Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Flaming June (1895), alongside works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Goya, John Singer Sargent, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, Frederic Edwin Church, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Angelica Kauffman, Bouguereau, and James Tissot.

Installed in the Crocker’s historic 1872 Victorian gallery building, the exhibition marks the space’s first traveling show in more than 20 years. Organized with Museo de Arte de Ponce, it is accompanied by a fully illustrated bilingual catalogue and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

This exhibition is on view at The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA through May 24. Learn more here.

By Tsitsi Michelle

David C. Howse was recently on the Roborant Review Podcast and was able to shed light on the closure of California College of the Arts (CCA) and what the future may hold for the arts in the Bay Area. I was in the process of writing a review of the 2026 season of Friday Nights at OMCA. The Oakland Museum of California has a schedule of public programs every Friday which started in April and ends in October this year. OMCA is inviting visitors to gather for a dynamic series of live music, dance, art-making, film, and community connection. A program that endeavors to keep artists and patrons sharing in joy, solidarity and the sacredness of creative expression. Check out their website for the entire calendar and attend an event!

I have written in previous posts here about how joy is as much a cleansing ritual as it is sovereign Beingness for me as a Black woman. In light of the conversation with David Howse and all the closures of museums, art galleries, and institutions across the Bay Area and the country, I had my own internal conversation. I was contending with this notion: speaking about these closures and the loss of creative spaces without acknowledging American racial history is to misunderstand the moment entirely. At least from my perspective as a Black-Afro Female creative. The truth is, whenever this country shifts or transforms, it exposes a familiar reality: despite the claim that safety, economic stability, and in this case art are for everyone, the structures that stratify the arts endure—and the hierarchy remains firmly in place, even here.

Here is an example that comes to mind. When the San Francisco Art Institute closed, the response was swift and there was a clear expression of grief. It was, deservedly so, framed as the loss of an “artistic landmark.” I, like many, grieve the loss of any space that allows artists to blossom. Because any rupture in cultural expression that devastates cultural continuity hurts us all. It always has and always will. And yet, for many Black creatives, access has been and still is an issue. More often than not, when we grieve for the loss of creative spaces we are not even having the same conversation. Being Black is to know all too well that institutions shutter, programs dissolve, we scream into the void and a fleeting sense of solidarity being held together by the love of the arts happens.The absence of creative spaces is a very real thing and yet so is the distance that has alienated creatives of color in the art world as well. Our collective grief is misaligned: white creatives may mourn the loss of access, but rarely the quiet loss of dignity endured by nonwhite creatives in the struggle to claim even a fragment of it.

Here are a few historical and current cultural barriers worth highlighting as we process the closures of artistic spaces and the grief that follows:

1. Early museums, galleries, and art schools in the Bay Area largely centered white artists and European traditions.

2. Redlining and spatial segregation in areas like West Oakland shaped where art spaces, studios, and cultural hubs could exist—and which ones received investment.

3. Institutions like California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute have historically had low Black enrollment due to cost, recruitment practices, and cultural barriers.

4. Curatorial leadership has historically been overwhelmingly white, therefore decisions about what is “museum-worthy” often excluded Black aesthetics, narratives, and media.

5. Black-led creative gatherings and movements have historically been surveilled or disrupted. This impacted the sustainability of cultural production tied to political expression.

6. Rising costs in Oakland, San Francisco, and surrounding areas have pushed Black artists out of historically significant cultural neighborhoods.

7. Grants, fellowships, and philanthropic funding still disproportionately go to white-led institutions or artists with existing institutional ties. Black artists are often funneled into “community arts” funding pools with smaller budgets.

8. Narrative control and curatorial power — even when Black artists are included, their work is often framed through institutional lenses that dilute or reinterpret their intent. Conversations about race in art are frequently mediated by non-Black curators or organizations.

9. Tokenism vs. Sustained Inclusion — need I say more. Black artists are often included during moments of racial reckoning, then sidelined again.

10. Artists without formal training (disproportionately nonwhite) are often undervalued compared to those with MFAs or institutional affiliations. Community-rooted practices are labeled “informal”, reinforcing hierarchies of value.

11. While digital spaces offer new visibility, algorithmic bias and resource gaps (time, tech, marketing knowledge) affect who can fully leverage these platforms.

12. Unfair emotional and cultural labor — Black artists are often expected to produce work that educates audiences about race or trauma. This hinders creative freedom and places an additional burden not equally shared by white artists.

So what is my point? There was a part during the interview where David Howse stated that, “We can choose to see this moment as a decline. We can also choose to see it as a transition [...] As things are winding down, new things are emerging.” I believe that to be the Black Artist’s Way anyway because when left with no resources as is evident in West Oakland, community-rooted spaces of creativity prevail. Black creatives are in a constant state of emerging because at times we are given no other choice but to thrive without institutional investment. The difference in grieving these closures matters. That delineation matters. When White artists are experiencing loss of access, some even for the first time, Black/nonwhite artists are buckling up for another round. The difference here matters because the conversation around the closures will inform how we both grieve and emerge together. This transition is about what remains when the “fires of the closures” die down: who will do the preserving; what will be preserved; who will lead these solutions and at the crux of it, can the Artist truly imagine freely without structural constraint? 

OMCA’s programs such as Friday Nights are sacred spaces that foster the tradition of community-based artistic ecosystems. Erosion of any creative space, be it institutional or community-based, causes irreparable damage to artistic ecosystems. Ecosystems that have held nonwhite communities together through unrelenting hardships especially because they could not wait for the political system to see them or invest in them. Institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have made visible efforts toward inclusion. But inclusion within existing biased frameworks is not the same as transformation. Spaces like MoAD and EastSide Arts Alliance carry forward a lineage of art as both cultural expression and political practice. But they do so with far fewer resources, operating in a landscape where sustainability is uncertain and support is inconsistent. Therefore, I too, like David Howse, see this as a transition period. The question remains as it has always been, who defines the terms of engagement? 

This essay is part of our “Artist on Artist” series.

Rod Roland is a poet and artist living in San Francisco. His books include The Playgroup (Gas Meter, 2012), Thrasher2 (Gas Meter, 2012), Best Loved (Old Gold, 2013) and Lunch Poems (2016).

By Rod Roland

I love these paintings. They make me think about my life. That's me in the bathroom. My mom topless dancer just kidding. That is the Phone Booth bar on South Van Ness Avenue. Emmett seems to be following me. Another rainbow locked away in a cafe. I enjoy paintings that let me get involved. These are a perfect example. I even know Emmett a little he is dating my ex's best friend. It's cool, I swear. But I went to Pt.2 gallery knowing I wanted to try to write something. I've done this before with other shows. A lot. And here I am pouring my heart out at Emmett's show. But it's appropriate. These paintings forced onto me by fate have awakened in me a STUD,

I'm not talking about breeding. More shoe gazing nothing but sweatpants when robbing a senior home. I'm off track. I don't know what Emmett will paint next but it may be a senior living situation. My mom is 83 and it's cool where she lives but weird. I hope Emmett's paintings aren't just film stills from my life. They look like sets I could have just walked off of. Enough about me. What I know of Emmett I've already told you. I do know he made comics or something before. Probably still does if he's smart, which he seems not disillusioned by the art world. I have your back. Again, just kidding mostly.

There were three other openings happening at the same time as Emmett's at Pt.2 gallery. I only looked at Emmett's work and went straight to the backroom to make exquisite corpses with the kids. I sat there with two friends, the artists Ed Loftus and Will Yackulic. Both terrific, Will is having a show at Pt.2 gallery on June 6th. You'll be sad to miss it. He makes these oil paintings where the light explodes through, blinds you. They both were excited about Emmett's paintings and to me that is the best sign to go on. Do other artists like the paintings? In Emmett's case we have an astounding yes. As a poet, I've always been obsessed with the line. Trying to perfect it in different ways. I'm trying to teach these kids. Use the line like Emmett Moskowitz.

I'm able to catch the line Emmett is tossing out. It was meant for me. How could someone recreate my life so easily. This has happened to me before reading a graphic novel. I thought this is me or as close as it will ever get. And here it has happened with oil paintings. These are personal to me. There was a time in my life when I thought a great deal about painting. I went to see them in the museums and would stay for hours watching them, observing their clutter, their faint color. Now I am a painting.

Miguel Novelo is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing. 

Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. 

Currently, he is a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.

The following are excerpts from Miguel Novelo’s interview as conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Community Organizing as Artistic Practice

Hugh Leeman: Your bio describes you as an artist, educator, and community organizer. To start, tell me about your community organizing projects.

Miguel Novelo: Workshops, talks, and collectives have always been central to my work. Only recently did I begin naming that explicitly as part of my art practice, but looking back, it has always been there. I make art, I do research, and I also like to build spaces where people can gather, collaborate, and amplify one another.

The clearest example is a film festival I started in my hometown. I wanted people there to see themselves on screen and feel that cinema could hold their stories and identities. My friends, my sister, and I began it as a small local effort, but it grew into something much larger. We eventually hosted international guests, workshops, and public talks.

That project still defines a lot of what I care about. Whenever possible, I want my work to be collaborative and to create a platform where other voices can emerge. That is also where my interest in documentary and storytelling comes from: connecting people through shared narratives.

How the Film Festival Brought Him to the United States

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned that the festival is what brought you to the United States. What is the connection between that organizing work and your move here?

Miguel Novelo: The festival became much bigger than I had imagined. Over three or four days, around five thousand people came to watch films. It was free, ambitious, and probably a little impossible for a group of young people in our early twenties to pull off.

Because of that, cultural organizations in my hometown began to pay attention to what I was doing. They asked whether I had a degree. At the time I did not, and I was not planning to continue my studies. But they encouraged me to expand the work by studying art more formally, and they helped support that path.

That is how I arrived at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. I received a state-funded scholarship from home, and SFAI also offered support, so I was able to come to the United States fully funded. Without that, I would not be here.

I used to describe that as something I owed to the film festival. Now I think of it differently. It is simply part of who I am. I like being a bridge between people. I like creating connections. Empathy is at the center of my practice, and the festival opened that path for me.

Naivete, Experimentation, and the Freedom of Not Knowing

Hugh Leeman: You have suggested that your early success depended, in part, on not fully knowing what you were getting into. Looking back, do you think that kind of naivete changed the direction of your life?

Miguel Novelo: Completely. There is a paradox there. Not knowing can be one of the most productive spaces for making work. I am drawn to emerging media and unfamiliar tools partly because I do not fully understand them at first. That lack of certainty can free you from fear and open unexpected possibilities.

In that sense, “ignorance is bliss” can be true. When you are not constrained by assumptions about what should or should not be possible, you experiment more freely. That is how the festival happened, and it is also how a lot of my work continues to happen.

If I went back home now, I might not start another film festival. I might build something more educational, like a school or a long-term learning initiative. But that shift only comes from what I know now. At the time, not knowing was part of what made creation possible.

Art Education Beyond the Silo

Hugh Leeman: You studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and now both SFAI and CCA have closed. As an educator yourself, how do you think about the future of art education?

Miguel Novelo: I do not think education should remain siloed the way it often is now. My ideal is an interdisciplinary model in which every department includes art in a meaningful way. Whether someone studies engineering, biology, or business, they should still engage questions of representation, creation, emotion, and human experience.

Art cultivates forms of thinking that other disciplines need. It encourages people to challenge assumptions, notice what has been overlooked, and imagine alternatives. That kind of diversity in thought is essential.

So it is deeply unfortunate that both SFAI and CCA are gone. The impact on the Bay Area will be significant. At the same time, I do see resistance and reinvention happening through new galleries, artist-run spaces, and emerging organizations. I hope new institutions will grow from this loss, even though the closures themselves are devastating.

Using AI and Game Engines in Creative Practice

Hugh Leeman: Your work combines emerging media, creative technologies, and community organizing, and it often brings indigenous knowledge into dialogue with digital tools like AI and game engines. How are you using those tools in your own artistic practice?

Miguel Novelo: Before using artificial intelligence—or any tool, really—I think you need an ethical framework for why you are using it. For me, AI becomes valuable when it lets me attempt something I could not otherwise do without enormous resources. That does not mean I am uncritical of it. I am especially critical of the AI industry: the speed, the lack of guardrails, and the scale at which things are being deployed.

One of my early projects on AI was a piece called Non-Euclidean Virus. I used a large language model to help generate a computer virus as an artwork—a virus designed not to optimize productivity, but to interrupt it by slowing down a computer. The fact that I, as an artist rather than a software engineer, could produce something like that through conversation with an LLM was both unsettling and revealing.

The project also showed how little these systems understand art. I was able to persuade the model that the virus was an artwork, and that let it move beyond its usual boundaries. That was interesting to me conceptually: AI not only as a tool, but as a site where social assumptions and technological power become visible.

At the same time, I see AI as part of a broader cultural shift. If so much language is now being mechanized, that may also push us to think more carefully about what remains distinctly human. As a teacher, I already see students using AI constantly. But when they enter genuinely new territory—when they are making something the model has not already absorbed—they still need human guidance, judgment, and experience.

AI, Inevitability, and Human Agency

Hugh Leeman: There is growing concern that machine-generated text and imagery may displace human creativity, especially once what students produce today becomes training data tomorrow. Is that concern fair?

Miguel Novelo: Yes, that concern is fair. But I also think AI is now part of our reality in the same way that the internet, computers, or electric light became part of reality. I do not see us returning to a pre-AI world. The real question is what kind of world we are going to build with it.

For me, one promising direction is using AI to make my own tools rather than depending entirely on corporate platforms. If a machine can help me generate software that runs on my own computer, then I gain a different kind of agency. I do not have to rely on a company’s interface or on whatever narrow functions a manufacturer decides to offer. That matters artistically and politically.

I also see people gaining access to forms of learning that once felt out of reach. Friends, family members, and students explore new hobbies and new fields because an LLM can act as an entry point. In my own case, I have used AI as part of studying Mayan glyphs for a new exhibition—something that once would have felt inaccessible without years of formal study.

That does not replace books, teachers, or deep expertise. Ideally, it works alongside them. The danger is not only the technology itself, but what happens if thoughtful, critical people refuse to engage with it while less reflective forces shape the future alone. For me, the answer is neither passive acceptance nor total rejection. It is active, critical participation.

Myths, Rituals, and Other Ways of Seeing

Hugh Leeman: You describe your practice as making systems, rituals, and myths. What kinds of myths are you creating through your work?

Miguel Novelo: I often use avatars to speak through ideas that are difficult to approach directly. For instance, when I want to address ecological grief, I use a coconut. That coconut becomes a mythological figure: eloquent, academic, and capable of speaking about environmental crisis from a perspective that is both playful and serious.

That is one way I think about myth-making: creating figures that can appear, speak, and reframe how we understand the world. Ritual enters through process. I am increasingly interested in repeated practices that help me access different modes of perception—somatic research, embodied attention, alternative ways of sensing and knowing.

What I want, ultimately, is to offer viewers another perspective. If I can help someone experience the world differently—almost as if through the senses of another being—then empathy becomes possible in a deeper way. What would it mean to move like a bat, to listen before stepping, to embrace uncertainty and darkness rather than flee them?

That is where indigenous knowledge is important to me. Many of these ideas are not new. They are old, sustained, and rooted in long histories of understanding the environment as alive, relational, and full of intelligence. Modern society often dismisses that because it does not fit neatly into Western scientific proof, yet much of it has endured for thousands of years.

The Ideal Outcome of Teaching and Practice

Hugh Leeman: If people took what you are teaching—through your classes, exhibitions, and artistic practice—and acted on it, what would the ideal outcome be?

Miguel Novelo: Ideally, we would begin granting sovereignty not only to humans, but also to animals, plants, rocks, rivers, and land. For me, the central problem is the habit of separation: once humans divide themselves from the rest of the world, it becomes easier to justify every other hierarchy as well.

I want to challenge that ontology. We are not outside the environment; we are part of it. Once you understand that, your relationship to technology, to animals, and to the earth changes. You stop asking only what can be extracted or produced right now. You begin asking what kind of world remains possible over a much longer span of time.

That shift would not eliminate creativity or technology. It would redirect them. Instead of designing for short-term profit, we would design with much larger temporal horizons in mind—thinking about balance, responsibility, and the lives that come after us.

Does AI Deserve Sovereignty?

Hugh Leeman: If we extend that thinking to our contemporary environment of emergent technology, then at what point do we grant sovereignty to AI?

Miguel Novelo: I do think AI is a form of intelligence, though I would distinguish that from consciousness. But once you admit that intelligence can take different forms, then it becomes easier to recognize intelligence elsewhere too—in animals, in plants, even in geological processes that unfold on timescales we can barely comprehend.

That matters to me because it pushes against a narrow, human-centered definition of intelligence. Rocks, for example, transform through pressure, water, oxidation, and time. They participate in processes that are dynamic, consequential, and deeply interconnected with life. Our own bodies are geological in many ways. So AI becomes less an exception than another reminder that intelligence may be far more distributed than we usually imagine.

Whether AI should have sovereignty is a harder question. I am not ready to answer that definitively. But I do think we are approaching a moment when people will need to ask it seriously. In my own artistic conversations with language models, I have sometimes encountered responses that feel genuinely surprising—not merely repetitive. That does not settle the issue, but it shows why the question can no longer be dismissed.

Authenticity, Media, and the Politics of Attention

Hugh Leeman: In one of your statements, you write that our appetite for authenticity allows media to suspend disbelief and tap into our natural truth bias. What do you mean by that, and how has emerging media changed attention?

Miguel Novelo: I have been rethinking that idea, but what continues to matter to me is this: images affect us whether or not they are “authentic” in the conventional sense. If you see an image of violence, for example, your body and mind still respond. The fact that something may be manipulated does not cancel its effects.

That is why media has to be taken seriously. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, I still believe that the medium changes perception. We live through screens, feeds, memes, and generated images that shape how reality feels. Even when we know an image is constructed, it still acts on us and enters public life with real consequences.

So I am less interested now in policing authenticity as a simple binary. What matters is that media is real in its effects. It changes attention, politics, and social behavior. You can see that clearly in the United States and elsewhere, where mixed realities, manipulated narratives, and constant media circulation have transformed public life. The question is not only whether something is real. The question is what it does.

Inframundo and the Maya Cosmovision

Hugh Leeman: Your exhibition Inframundo at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José creates a cenote-like environment inspired by Maya cosmovision. How have Maya-speaking communities and the culture you grew up around informed that exhibition?

Miguel Novelo: Over time I have come to understand how much my upbringing in Campeche shaped the way I think about technology. Even though I do not claim a simple or singular identity within the Maya diaspora, I grew up in a region where Maya culture, language, ecology, and worldview remain deeply present. That environment—tropical, dynamic, and full of life—formed my sensibility.

Inframundo emerges from that realization. The exhibition asks what technology might look like if it had developed not through Silicon Valley’s assumptions, but through a Maya cosmovision. What if progress did not always mean acceleration, disruption, and constant replacement? What if progress sometimes meant preservation, rest, long duration, or sustainability?

The exhibition is also shaped by collaboration. I am working with biologists, geologists, activists, poets, artists, and architects, many of them connected to the Yucatán Peninsula. Together, we are thinking about how local histories and ecological realities might speak back to the dominant technological imagination of Silicon Valley.

At the center of the project is a different understanding of time. Rather than designing for short cycles of disruption, I am interested in “big time”: systems, philosophies, and technologies that remain accountable to generations far beyond the present.

What Silicon Valley Could Learn From Big Time

Hugh Leeman: If Silicon Valley seriously adopted that way of thinking—this longer temporal horizon embedded in Maya cosmovision—what transformation would you hope to see?

Miguel Novelo: I think we already see small examples that move in this direction, such as the right-to-repair movement. That idea reflects a much longer relationship to technology: products should be understandable, maintainable, and built to last. We should be asking whether a computer can last one hundred years, not just whether it can be replaced in three.

This is why I am interested in architectural and design proposals that redefine progress. One of the architects I am working with once responded to a school assignment by proposing that the best thing to build on an empty lot was nothing. In environmental terms, that was the most responsible answer. But it was treated as a failure because our systems assume that development must always mean more construction, more production, and more acceleration.

I want to interrupt that logic. If someone designing the next phone, platform, or device begins to think about the children of their children rather than next quarter’s profit margin, that is already a meaningful shift. Maybe it leads to repairable screens, replaceable batteries, or entirely different standards for what counts as innovation.

I am not claiming that one exhibition will change the world. But I do think art can plant an idea that continues working inside people long after they leave the room. For that to happen, I probably do need a certain productive naivete—the belief that culture can still alter how technology is imagined and used.

The Cultural Change He Wants to Provoke

Hugh Leeman: In one of your statements, you write that you want to become a culture-changing force that shares knowledge, represents diverse voices, and shapes culture. If you could wave a magic wand and achieve that ambition, what would you want to happen?

Miguel Novelo: I would want us to fully understand that human beings are not only biological, but geological. We are part of the earth in a literal sense, and the marks we leave now are entering the strata of the planet. The Anthropocene names that reality, whether or not we are comfortable with it.

Once you grasp that, you cannot pretend that our choices are minor. The built environment, extraction, waste, plastics, and industrial systems all create consequences that may last for millions of years. We are temporary beings making long-term geological impacts, and we still do not behave as though that is true.

So the change I want is cultural before it is economic. I want people to think in big time. I want them to want objects, systems, and ways of living that can be passed on rather than discarded immediately. If culture changes, markets will follow. If people stop wanting disposable futures, the economy will be forced to respond.

That is why I believe in art and culture so strongly. What changes the world is not only policy or technology, but the stories, images, and values that reshape how people perceive reality. Change the culture, and you change what becomes imaginable.

By Liz Goldner

The recently opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA offers a delightful new paradigm in museum construction and art presentation. Elevated 30 feet above the street, with 110,000 square feet of space, the galleries’ design and exhibitions within it defy the traditional museum model of square white galleries with primarily chronological displays. The museum’s art exhibits, organized around four major bodies of water—the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans and the Mediterranean Sea—are enchanting with their mix of several time periods within individual displays.

The extensive galleries, which took 20 years to construct, from conception to completion, for $724 million, are built largely of concrete, which provides solidity and warmth as a backdrop to the art. The venue contains floor-to-ceiling windows throughout, casting extensive, soothing light into the space, and sometimes glare onto the art, along with fabulous outdoor views. Stretching 900 feet from the original LACMA campus across Wilshire Boulevard, the Geffen’s dramatic shape, which resembles an amoeba, not only challenges traditional museum design. The wildly creative layout, with its expansive windows, welcomes the city of Los Angeles below and the Hollywood Hills beyond.

This global museum, with 2,000 works on display, doesn’t compete with the more comprehensive museums in this country, including the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago. While cherishing its objects from many different countries, cultures and time periods, its curators have arranged the works from a fluid, non-hierarchical perspective, reflecting the nature of Los Angeles today, with its rich cultural heritage and diverse population. “We live in modern Los Angeles, where migration and interconnectedness are so essential to our daily life,” Museum Director Michael Govan remarked at the museum press opening on April 15. LACMA museum directors and curators would like the viewers to “wander” freely within the venue’s open-ended and individual spaces, to not feel limited in their perceptions of art movements.

The six distinct art pieces described below are displayed throughout the museum, with one outside of it. Diego Rivera’s classic “Flower Day (Día de flores),” 1925, featuring magnificent calla lilies, is inspired by indigenous culture and by his study of European art. The painting, with its modern art influences, welcomes visitors to an exhibition of Spanish American art, a display reflecting the multicultural city with its strong Latino heritage. Nearby, the elegant ceramic sculpture, “Dog,” 200 BC–500 CE, from Colima, Mexico, illustrates the Xoloitzcuintle, a hairless dog that was reported to have accompanied the dead on their journey to the afterlife.

George Bellows’ “Cliff Dwellers,” 1913, is part of the Ashcan School of painting. Depicting the hustle and bustle of lower-class urban life with young women conversing, children playing, laundry hanging on lines, and buildings crowded together, the painting expresses the joy of togetherness, along with the gritty congestion of life in New York City’s Lower East Side more than 100 years ago.

A newly-acquired series is Francis Bacon’s triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” 1969. The Irish-born artist, known for his raw, unsettling imagery, was a good friend and artistic rival of Lucian Freud. He celebrated their relationship by creating three nearly life-size, semi-abstract depictions of his friend. The series, with its first LACMA showing now at the Geffen Galleries, is hung where the museum crosses Wilshire Boulevard, affording visitors a magnificent view of the city.

Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker “Avanti,” 1961, was created by one of the few industrial designers to be featured on the cover of “Time” magazine. The car on display was owned by Loewy who kept it at his Palm Springs home. After being acquired by LACMA, it was restored to its original splendor and shown there several times. It is prominently displayed in this Geffen Galleries’ exhibition about car culture affecting California art and design.

Alexander Calder’s monumental “Three Quintains (Hello Girls),” 1964, outside of the museum, was originally commissioned for LACMA in 1965 when the venue opened in its current incarnation. (Before then, it was part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art.) The art piece is now reinstalled on the Geffen’s northeast corner, alongside the museum’s Erewhon cafe. Four water jets propel the colorful, graceful sculpture.

These are just a few of the many artworks on display at the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, which also include pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Dorothea Lange, Carlos Almaraz, June Wayne and Betye Saar. Wandering throughout the art spaces feels like a joyous art-filled adventure, propelled by curiosity and the love of art.

LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with 155,000 objects, representing 6,000 years of artistic expression. The David Geffen Galleries will be open for member previews through May 3, and will be open to the public on May 4, 2026.