What Matters: Together Us

By Gabrielle Selz

I kept returning to the word matter while moving through Marta Thoma Hall’s new solo exhibition, Together Us, at Wonzimer Gallery in Los Angeles—matter as physical substance, as situation, as urgency, as significance: what it is that matters. This new body of work explores these meanings through a deceptively simple question: where does one human end and another begin? Arriving at a particularly charged cultural moment—when our world is increasingly polarized by fixed ideologies—her work turns instead toward the unfixed, toward the moment of creation when the boundaries between self and other, and between the self and all matter, are at their most porous. Across more than a dozen sculptures and mixed-media works, she offers a materially inventive and psychologically nuanced meditation on how we inhabit the space between individuality and connection.  

Her materials make a compelling argument for permeability. Weathered wood, steel, resin, fur, tapestry, and 3-D printed forms converge in objects that feel at once ancient and speculative, archaeological and futuristic. Thoma Hall treats material not as inert substance, but as a living language through which questions of identity, embodiment, and interdependence are staged.

The large-scale Of the Sea presents a photocollage of three women of different races and a small painted mythical koi goddess, embedded within tapestry, rusted nails, and reclaimed wood. The women’s faces are layered, superimposed, and in flux—blending into and out of one another while also emerging from the woven ground itself. The work does not erase difference so much as renegotiate it, suggesting that identity is relational, provisional, and materially entangled. The tapestry becomes a metaphor for collective memory: threads and knots joining to form an image, much as individual lives are woven into a shared narrative. At its most elemental level, the piece asks us to recognize that all beings are composed of the same substance, however differently configured. Empathy emerges here not as sentiment, but as an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability and interdependence.

Thoma Hall’s practice belongs to a lineage that includes Leonora Carrington and Louise Bourgeois—artists whose work is intuitive, surrealist-inflected, and deeply embodied. Yet Thoma Hall’s integration of 3-D printing and fabricated elements gives her sculpture a distinctly contemporary charge. Each object condenses personal history, cultural memory, present tensions, and speculative futures into a single present-tense form.

Youth centers on a found teddy bear wedged into a cast-concrete, limbless torso, while a wig of synthetic fur veils the upturned face. The work is at once tender and unsettling. The teddy bear—an emblem of comfort, dependency, and early attachment—appears lodged within the body like an enduring psychic remnant, suggesting how childhood memory and formative love remain embedded within us long after innocence has passed. The concrete torso evokes the hardened structures of adulthood and experience; yet within that weight, softness persists. Thoma Hall stages a poignant tension between vulnerability and resilience, showing that what we carry from youth is never fully discarded, but becomes part of the architecture of the self. 

Together, Yo Mama features two 3-D printed figures—one black, the other beige—emerging from a natural driftwood structure. Though distinct, the forms are locked in an intimate, almost symbiotic embrace, creating a visual dialogue of mutual sustenance across race, gender, and constructed identity. The pairing of digitally fabricated elements with organic wood stages a conversation between technology and nature, the manufactured and the elemental. Boundaries dissolve: wood becomes flesh, structure becomes body, and difference becomes the ground of relation rather than division.

The photocollage with paint and embroidery, Spirit of Ge, depicts several female bodies swaying and interweaving within an ephemeral blue field. Suspended in a womb-like central space, they appear both emerging and dissolving, not yet fully formed but charged with possibility. The work evokes life at the threshold of becoming, where identity has not yet solidified.

We, and everything visible in our world—and perhaps beyond it—are made of substance that is never lost, only transformed. Thoma Hall’s work returns us to this elemental truth: that we are dynamic configurations of shared material, continuously changing through time. What makes Together Us so resonant is its refusal of simplistic binaries. Thoma Hall does not equate unity with sameness, nor difference with separation. Instead, she proposes a world of porous forms, shared substance, and continuous becoming—an urgently needed vision for the present moment, where what matters most may be our capacity to recognize ourselves in one another.

By Jonathan Curiel

Shiva Ahmadi happens to be from Tehran. She happens to speak with a noticeable Iranian accent. And she happens to have strong feelings about the war against Iran that started on February 28, 2026. But Ahmadi's new art exhibit at Haines Gallery, Crown of Flames, which runs through April 25th, doesn't have a specific Iranian focus, nor was it timed to current events in Iran — even if two of her exhibit's central motifs are oil's pernicious impact on the world and the incalculable cost of human suffering. Instead, what Ahmadi has done is something altogether universal: She created timeless artistic commentary that could be applied to man-made atrocities anywhere in the world — past, present, or future.

An irony: No men are really pictured in Crown of Flames. None. Instead, Ahmadi has centered female figures throughout the exhibit's stunning artwork, freeze-framing them into contorted positions of free-fall or having them float amid objects and creatures that spiral with them. And yet: On the exhibit's opening night, it was a lineup of men — the United States' current male president, and Iran's entire clerical regime of men — who were on the minds of many attendees, prompting them to pepper Ahmadi with news-oriented comments about "how timely your exhibit is!" The interlude temporarily overshadowed what for Ahmadi is an exhibit whose truths extend far beyond a single war and a single country.

"Like everyone else, I didn't know there'd be a war," Ahmadi tells me days after the March 13 opening. "And I didn't want the work to be seen as, 'Oh, look: There's a war and this is an Iranian artist talking about all this.' The war didn't happen in one night. It was years in the making. A lot of people were asking me in the opening, 'Oh my God. This is so timely!' But it wasn't planned like that. First of all, I didn't make the animation two nights ago. And the paintings and (other work) aren't about specific attention to this subject."

Art doesn't exist in a cultural vacuum, of course, so every public exhibit is subject to scrutiny that dissects the artwork through news events. The same holds true for all artistic mediums, including movies, novels, and music — which is why, as one example, there was so much debate about The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel that, critics said, overly simplified Afghanistan's ethnic and cultural landscape at a time when the U.S. war in Afghanistan was in full force. In the United States, war creates more interest in a country that's subject to American weaponry, but the danger is that onlookers will only see that country through a sensationalized parsing of "black or white." 

Crown of Flames asks complicated questions. A longtime professor of art at UC Davis, Ahmadi is a multidisciplinary artist who — besides making paintings and sculptured objects — has become an undeniably powerful filmmaker. Her short animation at Haines is a diptych that shows parallel worlds: on the left side, monkeys reside in a Garden of Eden-like environment where they thrive amid nature's colorful pastiche; on the right side, kids play leapfrog on brown terrain where black drilling rigs appear. Over the next five minutes, the two sides intersect in profoundly gruesome ways, with the monkeys fleeing their once-idealistic domain, which burns to the ground, for the kids' territory, where the oil wells have decimated the environment and the monkeys now swing from the rigs and paralyze the kids' movements. The characters speak no words. The most prominent sound: The soulful, stringed music of composer and instrumentalist Shahab Paranj, who gives the animation an external sorrow that brings out the story's intense animation (done with Sharad Patel, who has collaborated on Ahmadi's previous animated works).

I watched the animation six straight times, each time picking up on small details that Ahmadi has worked into the video, as in the rustling flowers that swoon with the monkeys' swinging, and the swarms of what appear to be small fireflies that evolve into small missiles. The animation was painstaking for Ahmadi, involving painting, re-painting, image-mixing, more image-mixing, and editing over and over. In the end, "Crown of Flames" is similar to her watercolor works at Haines: suffused with a "hide-and-seek" style that is reminiscent of the Persian miniature paintings that Ahmadi loved as a child in Iran.

"When I was a kid," she tells me, "we had a lot of Persian miniatures in the house — a lot of Iranians have them — and one thing that I notice is that every day I was passing them by, I would find something new in it. There are all these hidden layers that are there. And I'd say, 'Oh, there is this one.' And, 'Oh, my God: Did you see this one?' I guess I'm also trying to do that in my own paintings. There are layers and layers of hidden stuff in it. In that sense, it's less a single image and more of a process of hide and seek, and of trying to bring in more engagement with the viewer."

Art-goers familiar with Ahmadi's work may wonder why she uses monkeys as a motif. She explains it this way to me: "When I grew up in Iran, there was always this big question that I had since I was a kid: When you're looking at the establishment and the government, there's always this guy who is sitting out there and ruling. In my case, the Iranian government was always cruel and had this mentality of constantly going to war with the whole world instead of trying to find a diplomatic solution to work with the world. My whole childhood was spent hearing, 'Down with the U.S.A.' And 'Down with Israel.' And 'Israel must disappear from the map.' That was the mentality and the rhetoric. But when you talk to people, 90 percent don't believe it because it was stupid. Everybody knew that. But then there was about 10 percent who truly believed in it. They were brainwashed. They really thought that's how it should be, without analyzing it or questioning it. And many of these people are educated. And to me, they always represented monkeys. My mother used to say: 'Look at them. The leader says one thing, and the monkeys jump up and down and do what he wants.' That has stayed with me." 

When I interviewed Ahmadi, events in Iran were unfolding in dramatic ways. They still are. As I write this, Trump's White House may initiate a ground invasion of Iran. Israel and the United States may continue bombing buildings across Tehran and other Iranian cities, deeming their war a "success" while killing hundreds of more civilians — men, women, and children — who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Block by block, tragedy by tragedy, Tehran is beginning to resemble Gaza, which years of bombing have turned into a hellish, rubble-strewn landscape that feels abandoned by the world.

Getting caught up in day-to-day news events around the world — Iran or otherwise — means being waylaid by shifting feelings of anger, sadness, and resolve that catapult emotions from one extreme to another. Those feelings can be entirely ephemeral. An art exhibit like Crown of Flames centers those feelings into something that's focused. Haines Gallery has referenced Ahmadi's new animation as a "parable" and "storytelling" — and that's what it is. Like Aesop's Fables from ancient Greece or something more contemporary like the songs of Bob Marley or Nick Drake, Ahmadi's new animation will be watched and enjoyed generations from now, with people relating to Crown of Flames in whatever way that makes sense to them. 

If Ahmadi's animation is the exhibit's centerpiece (Haines has cordoned off a gallery space just for its viewing), then the five-foot-tall watercolor painting called "Fiery Descent" is the exhibit's labyrinthian masterwork. One way to think of it: As a giant jigsaw puzzle with individual scenes or "pieces" that come together to form a bigger narrative of beauty, resilience, and tragedy. The top section features a winged female whose outstretched feathers are saturated with colors that resemble a leopard fur coat — which complements the background's gold and yellow, Klimt-like colors that bathe the figure's seemingly-bloodstained body with a giant patina of celestial sunlight. Flowers bloom from the painting's lower-right scene, but "Fiery Descent" is anchored by the lower-left scene that has children playing amid bombed-out structures. But even this scene requires three or four looks since Ahmadi has painted different grids across the children and the bombed-out structures. The wavy panels of yellows, reds, and charcoals give this section another dimension — prettier than the scene would be otherwise, and creating a labyrinth within a labyrinth, as if the children are in a dream space within the rubble, where they can be free of worries as they play their momentary game of hand-holding.

I asked Ahmadi where she got the kids' touching image, and her answer speaks to the deluge of images and news stories that we all face when trying to stay updated about global events. It also speaks to Ahmadi's upbringing: she grew up during the Iran-Iraq War that killed a million people from 1980 to 1988. "Honestly, I don't know where the image is from," says Ahmadi, who still has family and friends in Iran. "Every day I catch the news, and it's either Ukraine or Gaza or Iran or Syria or a refugee crisis in some part of the world. Pain is pain all over the world. It's the same language… When I see an image that stays with me, I usually save it. When I was making that painting, I wanted to start with an image of children playing on the ruins of destruction. It was also personal to me, because I grew up like that."

I also asked Ahmadi how she felt about events in Iran, and she has mixed feelings about the current war. "Just like any other Iranian you might talk to, it's such a complicated situation with a lot of complicated feelings," she says. "On the one side, I'm happy that Khamenei is dead, and the regime is getting weaker. And that there is a chance the regime is going to change. But on the other hand, there are 92 million innocent people in the middle of it who are getting bombed every single day. And their homes and their families — everything is being destroyed. And for (an Iranian) government whose rhetoric and mentality is, 'War, war, war until we win!' — it's been mortifying to me that they haven't made one shelter or one siren for people. That breaks my heart. And it breaks my heart that a lot of historic sites are getting damaged." 

Of course, I was curious about Ahmadi's opinions about the current war, but I was essentially falling into the same trap as many of the exhibit's guests on opening night. While my questions didn't focus just on the war, I was in a privileged position: I could ask Ahmadi a whole series of questions, including inquiries about her art, which I've known since 2018, when Ahmadi had her first solo exhibit at Haines.

Like that one, Crown of Flames features large, everyday objects that she has sculpted into symbols of greed and terror, like her new work called "Oil Barrel #32." Oil's role in people's lives has been a central theme in Ahmadi's art for 30 years, and "Oil Barrel #32" is a real barrel that Ahmadi festooned with glittering crystals, a gold top, figures of women, and holes that look like they emerged from violent means. Painted pools of blood pour out onto the barrel's Persian blue surface. What is at first strikingly alluring becomes, on closer inspection, an entry point into a perception of depth and death. This thin line between beauty and betrayal is one that Crown of Flames highlights in every artwork. Visitors to Haines Gallery don't need to ask Ahmadi questions about that. Through her art, Ahmadi addresses that topic for everyone to see.

David Howse is the 10th president of California College of the Arts (CCA).

Before assuming the role of president, Howse served as Vice President of the Office of the Arts at Emerson College in Boston and concurrently as the Executive Director of Arts Emerson. Howse has dedicated over two decades to strategic visioning, fundraising, and community building within arts organizations, particularly in educational settings. At Emerson College, Howse spearheaded fundraising efforts, securing over $40 million to support core programs and establish innovative initiatives like the Gaining Ground Fund.

In recognition of his significant contributions to the arts and cultural diplomacy, Howse was honored with the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in November 2023. He is a trained operatic singer.

The following are excerpts from David C. Howse’s interview conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Punching Above Your Weight: Boston Children's Chorus & Early Leadership

Hugh Leeman: David, I want to start with your journey and stories before arriving at CCA. You're a formerly trained operatic singer and musician, and a founding staff member at the Boston Children's Chorus, helping it grow from 20 to 500 singers. What were the vital leadership lessons that you learned during that period of rapid organizational scaling?

David C. Howse: It's a good question. I should say that the Boston Children's Chorus was really my first sort of official nine-to-five job. Before that I had tried my way on the operatic stage somewhat — had some success, but small success, success with a lowercase S. So when I heard about this opportunity, the Boston Children's Chorus, I thought, well, let me see if I can get a job. I came and I remember being interviewed by Hubie Jones, who is my mentor. I remember him asking me a series of questions and he hired me on the spot and I thought, "Oh my god, I've tricked this man into thinking that I can do something." And clearly he saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. So before I even got to leadership, I have to say that I am here because people like Hubie saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. And I continue to this day try to live up to that expectation of what that might look like. A lot of that leadership was learned through trial and error and making a lot of mistakes.

I have always been inspired by this notion of punching above one's weight — going beyond one's safety net, really challenging oneself to get beyond that. And Hubie inspired that in me. We had this small little children's chorus. By the way, Hubie is a social worker. He loved music but had no formal training, and had this notion that we could use the power of music to connect children across differences — more deeply to themselves and to each other. Boston has its history of racial discord and so this was yet another strategy to sort of heal some of those wounds in the city. This notion that we could start this children's chorus with 20 kids and figure out how to make a real impact was something that was super ambitious and super exciting. And so we went at it, really thinking about what it means to put youthful voices at the center of civic dialogue. I had no experience in doing any of these things, but I was always curious — and that's another aspect of what transformation looks like, always being curious about what's possible. It's really looking at what's real and then trying to do the impossible. That's kind of how we moved in that direction and just continued to punch above our weight, doing things that were unexpected by a children's chorus, unexpected by a new organization with very little resources, unexpected by an African-American founder. That push just kept us going.

As we started to see some success, we'd ask, what's the next thing we can do to punch above our weight? And so transformation really was having a big vision, a bold vision, trying as much as we could to get there, and once we got closer, pushing the goal further. Just continuing to do that, all grounded in the fact that there was something we were trying to accomplish that was bigger than ourselves. This was not about how do we just become the biggest children's chorus in the country, but how do we actually create impact and create ripple effects so that what we're doing here might inspire another city, might inspire another movement. It was both the ambition but also the deep aspiration for change that kept us going.

Hubie Jones, Writing & the How's Notes Blog

Hugh Leeman: I want to hear more about Hubie. This is someone that was clearly a very impressive person that left quite an impression on you in your life. Hubie Jones told you that you quote need to write something that matters. How is the act of writing your How's Notes blog helping you process the vulnerable spaces of being the CCA president?

David C. Howse: I have to share the story. When I was a younger person, a younger leader, I was doing a lot of writing for business purposes — for board meetings, etc. And I received feedback that I wasn't a great writer. And that crushed me and I stopped writing. I was like, "Oh god," because I lost any confidence that I had in the words that I was trying to put down on paper.

And then Hubie was saying that you could be doing incredible things, but if you're not present and you're not visible, you don't exist. He always suggested: you should be writing letters to the editor, you should be writing articles, you should be doing speeches, you should be showing up in places where you're unexpected. I always had that in the back of my head. And I also had the fear of, I'm going to expose myself because I'm not a great writer. So part of the series that I started on Medium was trying to push beyond my comfort zone — really making myself vulnerable and actually committing to doing something that was going to hopefully advance the cause of what I was trying to do, but also as a personal challenge to get better at something I felt I wasn't good at.

The act of writing is really for me a cathartic process. It is one of the few places where I can both get inside my head and get outside of my head, and try to make sense of the world and my thoughts about the world, and to communicate that clearly in a way that was moving the dial on whatever we were trying to do. It's become a daily practice for me. I don't publish everything that I write, but I write most mornings in a journal — it's a way for me to make sense of the world and myself in it.

Hugh Leeman: I love this. That is a crushing thing to hear. It's one thing to hear that you're bad at anything, but particularly writing, because writing is such a crystallization of thought. It's a way of discounting someone's thoughts and sense of being. That's powerful. That's rare.

The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres & Arts as a Force for Change

Hugh Leeman: You were conferred the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture recognizing your dedication to cultural exchange. Can you tell the story of how this came to be?

David C. Howse: It's a good question. I was so humbled by that recognition. After the Boston Children's Chorus — after having done that for maybe 11 years, my first real job — I thought to myself, was this a fluke? Could I actually try to do something somewhere else? Around that time I had been invited to consider joining Emerson College, leading or co-leading Arts Emerson, which is an international presenting theater organization embedded inside the college. As part of that work we were using theater — much like we had used music at the children's chorus — to think about how do we actually elevate stories that help us see each other more clearly. There's a throughline there. We were presenting international theater in Boston, presenting works from all over the world. This is not something that Boston was necessarily asking for, but we felt it was an opportunity to see ourselves through the lens of artists who don't have the same lived experience we do here in America. Part of that work was presenting work from France and other parts of the world.

I think it was that energy and that effort to really elevate the arts more globally that the French consulate took note of. They asked if I would be honored, and it was one of those red-letter moments — because this is not something you seek. It's not something you apply for. It's something you're recognized for. In all my work, it's not about the recognition, but when you are seen for trying to create positive change in the world, that is such an honor.

It's more about the company that you keep with that kind of designation. There's no prize or gift — it is just the honor of a government recognizing you for work in your field. When I moved to San Francisco, the folks at the consulate reached out and I now have a connection with the French consulate here, which is a really special thing. For me that recognition was not about me as a singular leader, but the collective work that we had been doing — not only at Arts Emerson but at the Boston Children's Chorus — to use art and creativity as a force for good and for change.

Hugh Leeman: Does that collective work translate on a local level — within a small community where someone is doing work that you've done but on a much smaller scale? Can someone listening to this say, I could translate those experiences and that sort of uplifting of stories into my small town community, or in San Francisco, or wherever? Is there a translation?

David C. Howse: One would hope so. I don't necessarily set out to replicate, but I always say that if the work I'm doing in community is inspirational to others and there's something that can be gleaned or learned from that, that's a wonderful thing. I do know that the work we did at the children's chorus was inspirational and in many ways galvanizing for the children's chorus movement. I know that the work we were doing at Arts Emerson — really pushing the boundaries of what theater was in Boston — was inspirational and opened up minds and opportunities amongst our colleagues. I like to believe that work began to shift the narrative in how people saw new forms of making, how the community embraced new storytellers in meaningful ways. It's not so much that you set out for that, but it's super inspiring to see the ripple effects when that happens.

Vulnerability, Hidden Bias & the Personal Board of Directors

Hugh Leeman: Earlier you mentioned a beautiful testament to your candid and honest vulnerability — someone told you you weren't a good writer, and that this was crushing. There's a really great example of this honest vulnerability in your TED talk on race and self-awareness. You share this idea that you had a personal bias against white men with beards. This sort of candid, honest truth shared in a highly socially filtered era is impressive. What were the reactions like to publicly naming such a vulnerable truth?

David C. Howse: When I did that TED talk I was working at Emerson. We run theaters and at the time most of our stage directors, technical directors, sound engineers — most of those were white men with beards. When I came back, they were like, "Really? This is what you think?" And I said, "But look, I'm changing. That's the whole point." Sometimes we have to put our challenges out in front in order to address them. For me that was a level of accountability. But what it also did was invite conversation and allow people to lean in. We understand that when we are vulnerable, people actually lean into that — they don't run away from you.

I always want to acknowledge the things I feel strong at and also the things I'm not good at, and be able to work on those things. I have always had what I call my personal board of directors — the people who are mirrors to your blind spots, who are helping you become your best self. That vulnerability was all about being honest, wanting to get better, and wanting to be held accountable for the things I want to get better at. It opened up a new dialogue for me and people in my community, and also gave others permission to talk about some of the same things — to open up brand new conversations that may not have opened up in the same way.

It's something I don't shy away from. I try to be very honest with myself about the things I'm good at and the things I wrestle with. Some believe that when you assume levels of leadership you are above reproach, you don't have weaknesses, you have this kind of perfect existence. I want to be the first one to say that's absolutely not the case. There is imposter syndrome. There are fears. There are all these things that are very real, and it humanizes us to talk about those vulnerabilities. I think in some ways it allows me to lead more effectively — when I am showing that I am fully human, and not so very different from the same people I'm trying to inspire and mobilize toward a goal.

Hugh Leeman: I love this idea — it opens up the door for dialogue. The bearded white men who were the stage hands get to say, "Hey, really? I didn't know you felt that." And then it kind of gives them permission to start sharing too. I feel like this personal board of directors is a powerful concept. It seems like if all of us started doing that, you'd have a much different world in not too much time. With everything you've just shared, what advice would you have for other leaders on how to unearth and interrogate their own hidden bias?

David C. Howse: We are so focused on perceptions — the way we're perceived, that outer exterior strength, resilience, power, polish. We spend so much time focused on what that looks like on the outside. And I would say to myself, even as I say to others — think more interiorly. Think more about who you are. Spend more time with self as you think about leading others. Try to understand who we are first, before you try to take care of someone else, and be very honest with oneself in that interrogation.

We're not taught to be interior. Everything is about the external — exude strength. Particularly as young boys, you are taught sometimes to hide emotion, to portray this kind of strength of character. There are times when I push against that. I think that expectation is a burden that we don't actually have to bear. The notion that one can show emotion as a leader, one can be vulnerable, one can live inside one's truth — in a different way, I think that actually has its own sense of strength and power.

Artists as Gatekeepers of Truth

Hugh Leeman: There's a powerful quote that you shared that I want to hear your thoughts on because it becomes very prescient now more than ever. You said artists are the gatekeepers of truth. In a time of incredible political and social fragmentation, an era of increasing censorship, how can artists and art schools continue to protect their students' roles as these gatekeepers of truth?

David C. Howse: I want to be clear — that is a quote by Paul Robeson, the great singer and social activist. He said that artists are the gatekeepers of truth. They are civilization's radical voice. Civilization's radical voice. I believe that through and through. All my work has been putting myself in a position where I can create the conditions, as much as possible, for artists to go to work. I believe that artists have a sense and a view of the world that help us see ourselves and see the world differently, and to see each other differently.

As a society, we often prize artists as this incredible creative community that we love to put on a pedestal — and then starve them for everything else that they need. Particularly in places that we love, like San Francisco — an incredibly vibrant place but really hard sometimes to make a go at it as an artist, for all the reasons we know: the cost of housing, the resources, the access. It is my hope that we as a society will think of artists not only as important from an aesthetic perspective, but as real thought leaders as we tackle some of these intractable issues — issues of homelessness, issues of inequity. We think of artists as people to bring in toward the end, but what does it mean as a society to actually start with the artist — in the boardrooms, in the community dialogues — to actually hear how they would approach and tackle some of these challenges?

My work here at CCA has also been about creating the conditions for those artists to develop and transform so that they can be that radical voice that Paul Robeson talks about — so they can help us understand how to make this world a better place. And that's not what all artists are interested in doing. Sometimes you just go to work and as a result that work is inspiring and moving in different ways. My life's journey has been about creating space for artists to be successful, to guide us and teach us, and help us see how we become our best selves through the kind of reflection that they create for us.

Community, Belonging & the Student Who Couldn't Stay

Hugh Leeman: The idea of putting artists on pedestals and starving them for everything else rings true for so many people in the Bay Area — perhaps always. Maybe that's why we have the term starving artist. There's a piece you wrote on your blog, Giving Gratitude. You recount a story of a student who was concerned he couldn't stay at CCA due to financial constraints, and he comes to your office with letters, notes, drawings, supporters, and hopes of staying. What did that encounter with him and his cohort reveal to you about the kind of belonging students were finding here at CCA?

David C. Howse: I just got goosebumps hearing you recount that story, because I won't forget that experience — the deep sense of community that was revealed for me in many ways, but particularly on that day. It wasn't the young man who approached me initially. It was that beloved community that saw something in that student — something that student didn't have the capacity to speak for himself about. To see that young group of colleagues come around and advocate for him was transformative for me. It spoke to the importance that none of us have gotten to the place where we are in isolation. It does take a village. It does take a community of people to actually help us be successful. There are many people I encounter who say, I'm self-made, I got here on my own. But that was a moment that reminded me it takes a beloved community to actually best position us for success. And to allow ourselves to be loved in that way is also an intentional act.

That young man saw that he wasn't able to just go it alone, and to allow someone to support you and carry you in that way was transformative. When I walked away from that, I was even more committed to figuring out how to create those conditions for even more people on this campus and beyond.

Hugh Leeman: It's powerful. This seems like a really wonderful model of success — to be able to say in your life that you had so many people willing to go to bat for you, and they come to talk to the president to honor you and honor the work you've done. That's beautiful. That's touching.

David C. Howse: The fact that we need each other is a very simple concept, but one that drives me. We're better when we have those people to support us. And we're living in a time where more of us are doing it as a go-alone strategy. I think there's a different alternative. And if I can play a role in creating those alternatives, I want to do that.

The Rising Cost of Art Education & Universal Access

Hugh Leeman: Reflecting on a belief that you've shared — the arts belong to everybody. How do you, and how do we as a society, reconcile the rising cost of specialized art education with the goal of universal access?

David C. Howse: Say that again.

Hugh Leeman: Arts belong to everybody — I'm pulling that from something you had written, and I think it's something that we as people who love the arts largely share. How do we reconcile the rising cost of specialized art education with an ultimate goal of universal access?

David C. Howse: It's an important question. For me, art is many things, but more than anything it's a threshold. Art and beauty come in different forms and require different kinds of trainings. There can be art and beauty without a formalized training. For those who choose to go that route, it has become much more challenging — art and design education, because of the resources required: the equipment, the spaces, the studios. Those costs bloom, and it's something we have to address head on, because it is becoming a challenge for more people who have that instinct and that natural, innate desire to be part of a creative community. It's becoming less and less attainable because of cost.

But what I'm also inspired by is the fact that it won't stop artists from making. Artists will go to work — we've seen it in the most challenging conditions. The fact that some are not able to afford a very formal training does not mean the work won't continue. I think we have to find new ways of creating paths toward that training — in addition to the four-year degree or the master's program, we have to be more expansive in the thinking. I don't have the solution right now for how you tackle that, because we're seeing the trend go in the wrong direction as it relates to cost.

CCA's Closure, Legacy & Honoring 120 Years

Hugh Leeman: I want to focus on the legacy of CCA here with the recent announcement of closing. You described Vanderbilt University — who's going to take over the campus — as the most suitable fit because of its stated commitment to continuing art and design education in the city of San Francisco and honoring CCA's legacy. What did honoring the legacy concretely mean to you as you and the board weighed that decision?

David C. Howse: With CCA's 120-year history, deeply rooted in craft, starting in Oakland — there are stories, there are values, there are ways of being together with each other. There is a radical energy that exists in this institution, really expressed through the people who have called it their both creative and professional home. When you think about legacy, it's about seeing that continue beyond a finite time. It's about creating systems and structures that allow that spirit and energy to move through. When we were thinking about what it means to honor a legacy, it is both capturing and creating pathways for that to move beyond — even though the construct of the college will end. That responsibility is not one that's taken lightly, and the work to ensure that happens is a laser focus for myself and this community as we think about the winding down of the college.

Hugh Leeman: You noted that CCA's board explored several different options — budget cuts, real estate options, multiple partnerships — and that faster enrollment recovery or another major fundraising success might have changed the outcome. What does this process show us about the fragility and the value of arts education institutions today?

David C. Howse: When we made this announcement — after, as you say, herculean efforts to maintain the independence of the institution — I received calls from maybe seven to ten other college presidents who said, "How did you do this? We are not far behind you." And of those, three were art and design colleges. We are living in a very challenging moment for higher education, period. Let alone art and design education, where the value is being questioned in new and very challenging ways. The costs, as we've talked about, are rising in ways that are becoming much more out of reach for more people. We've got all the headwinds around the demographic cliff — fewer children being born, and so fewer children going to college. All these different headwinds are coming, and that level of fragility is starting to expose itself.

The models that we've been built upon — tuition-driven, reliant on philanthropy — are models that have sustained us for a very long time. But I'm not sure how relevant they are as we think about the future. It's really challenging to think about reinventing oneself, but I think this is what the moment is calling for. We're having to reimagine what it means to be a higher education institution right now, what it means to create pathways for art and design education. And we're seeing it not just in higher education — we're seeing it in the orchestra world, we're seeing it in museums. We're all being challenged to reimagine and create change. It's both a very vulnerable and scary moment. But I also like to believe there's opportunity in that moment.

No one wants to be the architect or the leader who is winding down a 120-year history. That responsibility is great and felt deeply. But moments like these are calling us to ask questions around what the future will be and how we are shaping that future now. This is not the story that I came to California to tell. And sometimes we don't know what we're being called to do in these jobs. But you look at the task, you look at the situation, and you try to do the best that you can with the resources that you have — to deliver something that honors the moment, honors the people, and is really looking toward what change needs to happen.

Leading Through Fire: The Personal Weight of This Moment

Hugh Leeman: It's incredibly powerful what you've just shared — this idea from the president's perspective of these challenges and the responsibility, the emotions that are involved, the history, the legacy. How are you dealing with all of that personally?

David C. Howse: Thank you for asking. I am doing as well as one might expect. I've said often about this particular opportunity — to be called to be the 10th president of the California College of the Arts — this was a calling for me. And sometimes when you're called, you don't know why you're being called. You don't know what you're being called to do or if you're equipped for the calling, but you just go. In this moment, while I didn't expect this was the work I was being called to do, it is the task that was put in front of me.

Sometimes one surprises oneself in moments like this. If you had asked me four years ago how I might navigate something like this, I'd have had no idea. But in the moment, you call on all the systems, all the people, all the experiences that buoy you to step up into the moment. The only way I have been able to continue is because of the people around me — both immediately around me on the team, but also all those forces who have encouraged me and challenged me. All that work has prepared me for this moment, even though it's not a moment I thought I was coming into.

Hubie would say to me, very few people run into the fire. I didn't know I was running into anything. But sometimes you just go. In the spirit of CCA — sometimes like clay put into a kiln, it's very hot in the fire, but it comes out stronger. My hope is that this journey I've been on is teaching me something that actually prepares me for whatever I'm called to next — that I can be more impactful, create more change for more people so that things are better. That's kind of what keeps me going. The notion that there is a challenge I'm navigating through, and I just have to keep going and do as much as I can to dignify the people who are living this experience with me.

Hugh Leeman: Earlier you mentioned a personal board of directors — people who help you see your blind spots. What have the conversations been like through this challenge in your life, and this challenge for CCA, with those people?

David C. Howse: They've been some of the most important conversations. My personal board of directors consists of a cheerleader — someone who thinks I can do no wrong. There's another person who thinks I do nothing right. And there's someone who comes at things from a more spiritual basis. I go to different ones depending on what I need. What I've learned from them is that they're helping me to see myself, reminding me of experiences I've gone through that I can tap into again, and reminding me to take care of myself in this moment.

No man — or woman, or person — is an island. I would not be in this position if there were not others. I don't take that for granted. I lean into it. I encourage others to do the same, because it's called me to be my better self. In life, you usually have maybe three or five people who won't let you fail. When you find those people, nurture those relationships, lean into them. These conversations have been so critical. This has not been easy, but it has been made a little bit easier because of the people who see me for who I am and for what I'm being called to do.

The Broader Crisis in Higher Education

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the seven to ten presidents that reached out to you, and I think that really gives us insight into something much bigger than just CCA. The numbers are somewhere around 500 universities that have closed or merged in the last 15 years because they're going through the very same thing you're going through here. Seven to ten presidents reached out saying, we're not far behind you. For people outside of academia, it may not be as well known, but we are really heading towards a massive change. If you go back 15 or 20 years, whether you were red state or blue state, most people agreed we need a major change in education — this just isn't how we thought it was going to come or how we thought we were going to deal with it. What would be the advice you would share with an institution facing something similar? And perhaps better stated — what were those conversations like with those seven to ten presidents?

David C. Howse: When they called me and said, "Can I be helpful?" I said, "Not right now" — because I am in it right now. But what has guided me, our team, and our board is this: focus on the students. Go back to where we started — the people. The first priority is trying to create as much continuity for our students as possible, whether that's graduation or through a teach-out. The second is to dignify the very people whose lives will be impacted — our faculty and our staff. Focus on those things first. That's what I would say. There are all these other things that you have to do, but as an educational institution, students should always be at the center of your strategies and your efforts.

There's not a lot of playbooks out there for how you wind down an incredible institution with such a rich history as CCA. But for me it's really about going back to where we began — focus on the people.

Hugh Leeman: The reactions from the community have been significant — not just from those seven to ten presidents, but across the board. There's clearly a lot of emotion, a lot of sense of identity and ideology attached to the university and its history. Are there specific reactions you would like to address or correct?

David C. Howse: First, I validate people's experiences. I validate people's emotions. I validate the frustration and the anger and the confusion. All that's real. What I would say is that our announcement comes on the heels of so much other loss. People are not just reacting to the announcement of our closure — they're responding, rightfully so, to the challenges happening at museums, the closure of galleries, the closure of community centers, the shifting dynamic for artists who are trying to make their way. That is the energy in which we made this announcement. CCA was just another sense of loss for a community that has invested and had such pride in knowing that CCA was here.

There are a lot of narratives out there, and a lot of things that aren't so true. But I'm choosing to spend my energy on what we know is truth and the task at hand. I could be so easily distracted trying to address all the different stories. I'm choosing to be focused on getting our students through to graduation and teach-out, honoring our faculty and staff in this transition, and leaving a legacy that we could look back on in two to five years and be proud of.

Transition, Not Decline: The Future of Arts & Culture

Hugh Leeman: It seems like this is an example of an art scene in decline and a future that is very much in question, because the loss is being felt now. There was SFAI a few years ago, and it really begins to call into question the pipeline of 10 to 15 years from now — artists who are now in their early twenties that we may not see take off into galleries. It goes back to this new model idea. The future seems very much in question as you're laying it out. What does the future hold, and where should we be looking? You mentioned earlier finding opportunity in this, and I think of a famous quote by Napoleon — what is luck other than the ability to take advantage of a crisis. And there's the idea that science advances one funeral at a time. We're seeing collective funerals right now, and what we're seeing is leading to hardship — but in the near future, this is when there's a chance for a renaissance, a rebirth. What does that look like, David?

David C. Howse: We can choose to see this moment as a decline. We can also choose to see it as a transition. I'm choosing to see it as a transition. As things are winding down, new things are emerging. This is a transitional moment and we've lived through transitions before. They can be very difficult, but it is a transition — we will keep moving in a new direction.

I've always had this idea that the arts belong to the people, but we've created systems where there's a hierarchy. When you think about high arts and low arts, we see it almost on a vertical. I have always been intrigued by the notion — what happens when we put it on the horizontal? So it's not high arts and low arts. It's just arts. And it does belong with the people. The work that's happening in community, without the degrees, can be equally valuable and powerful as the Mozart symphony or the new installation at the local museum. This notion of how we honor it all and allow the people to take shape — because what's happening is we've created a hierarchy where most people don't even connect with the systems and institutions of art. Symphony, ballet, museums — things I love — they're just not part of most people's lived experience. So what does it mean to actually create a different kind of way of living in arts and culture? What would that mean for our institutions?

I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I'm intrigued by the notion that this change will happen when more people actually have a stake in our creative future.

AI as Medium, Not Just Tool

Hugh Leeman: I want to stick with the idea of the future for a minute. In the not too distant past, CCA took money from Jensen Huang and his philanthropic endeavors, which seems like a great idea — though there was a lot of emotional controversy around this within the San Francisco community. You wrote a piece in which you noted that AI is not just a tool, but it's also a medium. That's a powerful way of seeing it. We have to acknowledge that a lot of the challenges — the rising cost of living that you mentioned — are due in part to the AI boom, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of participation from the AI and tech sector philanthropically delving into the arts, especially at smaller grassroots levels. What would you say to creatives getting ready to graduate in some of these final classes from CCA about how to think about AI as a medium?

David C. Howse: Be curious. We can be — and I put myself in this — quick to make assessments about something that's new and challenging and unknown. There's a lot that we don't know. And so we choose to put ourselves in this position of I am for or I am against. What I would just say, particularly in the academy, is we just have to continue to be curious. We may decide this is not something I want to pursue, or this is something I want to lean more deeply into. But just be open to what the possibilities are.

This notion of AI being not only a tool but a material is an idea that one of our faculty members raised. We think about it like wood, like clay, like metal — AI is a material that has to be manipulated and shaped. And artists and creatives have a role in that shaping. The challenge is that sometimes it moves more quickly and takes advantage of the way that we've been working. But I believe artists can actually figure that out. We can be leaders in that space.

There's also this notion I keep hearing about — the tech world versus the art world. In many ways, I think we're all about creativity. What does it mean to tear down the wall that separates us? My understanding is that there are tech folks who see themselves as wholly creative and are creating their own museums and institutions. But is that siloing necessary? Yes, there are challenges when we come together — of being overpowered or overtaken or diminished. But some beautiful things might happen if we find ourselves more closely connected to each other. I'm super curious around what evolves and how it evolves. Less interested in the silos we create. I'm not suggesting one position on AI is better than the other — I am asking that we continue to live inside the questions being raised in this moment, particularly as it relates to students like ours who are moving into a world where this is part of their lived experience. We have to stay curious and continue to live inside the questions.

What's Next: Leading by Purpose, Not Momentum

Hugh Leeman: David, lastly, what's next for you personally?

David C. Howse: This is a question people ask often. I believe in being called to what's next. I want to be driven not by momentum, but by purpose. What is it that the world needs from me next? And what is it that I have to offer? For me, the most powerful ideas and direction come in moments of stillness. So I'm hoping to take some time to be still. To listen to where the universe is leading me. I don't have a plan. And there's something terrifying and exhilarating about that. But I do plan to take some time. This has been the most intense 2.2 years of my life. I think my greatest gift to the world will be to take a little time for myself and then figure out where I'm being called next.

Hugh Leeman: Lead by purpose, not by momentum. Follow purpose, not momentum. That's beautiful. David Howse, thank you very much for making time.

David C. Howse: Thank you for your questions.

By Liz Goldner

Richard Turner began collecting viewing stones more than two decades ago. These “found objects,” also known as scholars’ rocks, are carved, shaped and designed by natural elements, including wind, sand and water, over thousands of years. They are regarded by many collectors as pieces of art, with many stones evoking landscapes and other natural settings.

Turner soon joined stone-collecting clubs, learning that stones have been collected and displayed for centuries in the Far East, particularly in China and Japan, while reflecting these countries’ aesthetics. He joined the stone clubs’ collecting expeditions, searching for these treasures in deserts, streams and mountain settings throughout California.

Turner, an artist and educator, has been admiring the mid 20th-century California scene paintings displayed at the 10-year-old Hilbert Museum of California Art, near his home in Orange. Five years ago, he began considering curating an exhibition that would pair viewing stones with paintings from the Hilbert Museum.

A stunning example of the pairings is the display of the painting, “Lightning Storm,” 1948, by Ruth Lotan, alongside the stone, “Lightning Strike.” The painting illustrates a farmhouse in a field, besieged by an overwhelming lightning storm. The dark stone on a pedestal has dramatic striations appearing like lightning, perhaps created by wind or sand, or both. Julie Polousky’s oil on canvas “Gnarled Tree (Methuselah),” 1940s is a detailed painting of an ancient bristlecone pine tree, alongside the equally ageless “Sentinel (Petrified Wood),” which has hardened to stone after several millennia.

A dramatic installation on the gallery’s north wall features paintings that take viewers on a journey of the seashore, the desert and mountain ranges Noel Quinn’s watercolor “Woods Cove,” 1960s, depicts a favored Laguna Beach coastal spot with numerous bathers and bodysurfers reveling in the sunlit day. “A Stormy Coast,” 1960s, by Ralph Baker, takes viewers back to the ocean, but on a stormy day. Ralph Hulett’s “View of Death Valley,” c. 1950, displays the desert. And Conrad Buff’s undated “Capitol Reef, Utah” brings us to a popular tourist spot with its twisted stones, pillars and arches. Free-form stones on pedestals, enhancing these and other paintings, include “Lingbi Stone (China),” “Yuha Desert Stone” (from California’s Imperial Valley) and the twisted “Mojave Desert Stone.”

Two pairings in this show, flanking the doorway, are more cultural than visual. To the left of the doorway, Millard Owen Sheets’ watercolor “West Coast of Japan near Izumi,” 1967, is a meditative, abstract painting, illuminating the shapes and foliage that the artist admired in Japan. Just below the piece is the magnificent “Chrysanthemum Stone” from Japan, a free-form dark stone emblazoned with several lighter-colored chrysanthemum-like designs. To the doorway’s right is Arthur Burnside Dodge’s historic “Chinatown,” 1920s. As the only painting in this exhibition featuring people, it shows merchants and shoppers in Los Angeles’ Chinatown from 100 years ago. Turner joined the painting with his own artful, abstract “Taihu Stone (China).” “The paintings and viewing stones flanking the doorway reference the Asian origins of viewing stone appreciation," he explains.

As Harris told me a few years ago, these rocks express the geological passage of time, along with our role in preserving our planet.

“Stone and Scene,” the first exhibition that has ever paired viewing stones with paintings from a museum’s collection, according to Turner, will be open at the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University until October 4, 2026.

February 21st- April 4th 2026

By Lani Asher

The Travelers, a show by artist Gina Pearlin at Oakland 4th Wall Gallery, is a surprising collection of 33 small oil paintings and 11 works on paper. The surprise comes both from their diminutive sizes and the hypnotic imagery that draws you into Pearlin's paintings. She began this series in 2021 during Covid, where time seemed to stop not only on a personal level but on a planetary one. The liminal spaces created in her paintings seem appropriate in a world facing monumental change. Covid brought about a complete reordering of everyday life and a complete collapse of everything we trusted.

Yet, Pearlin liked the solitude of Covid; for her, it was a time of going inward. When things started to change, and she reentered the world, she wondered what to do in the studio. "I was having a lot of dreams about train stations and missing trains. But the paintings are not my dreams, and they are not an intellectual exercise. Doing them just felt meaningful to me".

Before she started teaching, Pearlin studied dreamwork and hypnotherapy, a guided relaxation technique. Glimpses of our dreams often enter our waking life through synchronicities, trance states, and the supernatural, according to Pearlin. Hypnotherapy helps you access the trance states we have in our lives that happen all the time. In the dreamwork, there are two methods to analyze dreams. One method is one-to-one, where the dreamer uncovers the meaning of their dream. The other method is to relate your dream to a group where other people project their own meanings on the dream. I think of this series of paintings as something others can project on. I like to name them afterward: Leaving, Passing By, Aftermath, On Ice, for example. The titles, like the paintings, are moving through something, and are in transit. They are not illustrations of dreams."

The smooth surface of the oil paintings creates a cinematic or dream-like feeling, but the content is fairly ordinary, with tiny people waiting at train stations, tiny women next to clotheslines on rooftops, figures walking under bridges in the snow, walking on pathways between blocky apartment buildings, walking on ice floes, or riding bikes. The skies in her paintings have storm clouds or are painted in unearthly yellow colors that help create an uncanny feeling. Her imagery of rooftops, bridges, passageways, and train stations is liminal space. Liminal spaces are unsettling, haunted spaces, passageways, doors to the unknown, spaces in transition that are uncomfortable because, as human beings, we naturally fear the unknown. Metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico addressed these types of spaces with his paintings of mannikins, train stations, shadows, and empty urban spaces. The Surrealists followed with their absurdist and dream-based work created after World War I, and the end of the civilized world they knew. Pearlin's paintings are contemporary and echo the concerns and imagery of these painters as she creates her own stories that are inscrutable, where something menacing is often hidden under the veneer of normality.

At the back of the gallery is a diorama of a model train station with vintage 1.87-scale German railroad figures for her painting Station. This is only one of the many dioramas Gina Pearlin used to create the small stage-like sets that prefigured her paintings. The model train stations, apartment buildings, and bridges that she uses are all found materials. Pearlin photographs these dioramas and paints from one of the photographs. Pearlin thinks of the models not as her finished work but as a means to arrive at a painting. According to Pearlin, "the scale is very important because they are like stage sets. They are illusions based on an ambiguous reality. But the paintings are based on observation. If they were larger, she said, it would destroy the illusion".

Pearlin looks at the photos as a collaboration between herself, the printer, and the computer. Using artificial light allowed her to light the dioramas in ways that resulted in some surprising images. A consistent light source created the shadows. Sometimes the shadows are distorted, and sometimes she removes them.

In her painting Travelers, we see a group of figures with their backs turned to us, clasping their luggage and walking towards the horizon. Each traveler is self-contained and does not interact with the others. I wonder where they are going. Several shadows are not connected to any of the figures and appear to be slipping over the edge. The shadows appear to have their own agency. They don't always feel connected with real time and space.

Pearlin took hundreds of photos of each diorama and moved the figures around countless times until they felt right. She prefers toy figures and buildings from the 60s and 70s because the older figures are better made. The vintage figures project a nostalgic feeling infused with longing for some imaginary past.

The Hedges shows a woman with her luggage in an enclosed garden bordered by bright green hedges. The style of her dress is old fashioned. The saturated yellow color of the sky creates a strange unearthly light. There are shadows lurking outside the boundaries of the garden that seem ominous. Gallery owner Susan Aulik noted that the woman in In the Hedges seems like she is entering a labyrinth where circumambulating the pathways can lead to a state of meditation, or it can be a perplexing complex of dead endings and passageways with no way out.

The Island features a small island with a tiny woman sitting atop a pile of sand at her writing desk. She is utterly alone but unconcerned about the precarity of the situation. She seems intent on writing while the storm clouds threaten and waves lap around the island.

When I asked Pearlin why she makes the work she does, she replied, "Although it's not a popular thing to say these days, painting this series is my therapy, keeping me sane in the shit show of world events."

For me, Pearlin's paintings awaken feelings of dread, but also glimpses of precognition and prophecy. Like the Fool card in the Tarot, we are about to step off a cliff into the unknown, and we don't know what's going to happen. But like the Fool, we must trust the universe to take a leap of faith into the unknown. Her paintings made me think about mortality. The paintings, because their small size required that I stop and slow down to look carefully into these miniature worlds of somnambulists moving through uncharted territory that appears eerily familiar.

By Vivien Slagle

Situated between the beautiful waterfront edge of San Francisco and the eternal question of how to define humanity, REFRESH 2026 exposes a world where life is defined by labor. Simultaneously highly comedic and deeply personal, this year’s REFRESH employs interactivity to digitize the human experience, allowing exhibit attendees an intimate understanding of lives they will never interact with through technological methods that are still new to our human senses. 

REFRESH’s exhibit entertains using the dull and bleak state of global burnout with the world of human capital in painful tension with the euphoric, alien curiosity sparked by new technologies. By imagining “games” where the primary objective is productivity and the world is an inescapable global network populated by digital imitations of life, REFRESH demands that you question how different people are from our artificial intelligences. If we are forced to work and so are they, why can’t we empathize with the imaginary? What makes a highly filtered and curated internet personality different from a virtually indistinguishable AI personality? Is there value in performing tasks that an AI can do faster, better, and more efficiently? 

  REFRESH is a festival and exhibition created by the partnership between the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts. It now finds itself hosted by Swissnex, visiting the United States for the very first time. This definitionally “new media” exhibition isn’t easily categorized into any aspect of digital art. In fact, the exhibition is almost exclusively composed of art that is often not considered art at all. A wall plastered in heavily altered selfies overlooks a room full of video games, animations, documentaries, and useless robots. A crate full of dirt and an AI-generated version of the pope, both the humble manifestations of hours of creativity and meticulous research, defy typical expectations for a gallery.

The works dance over the line of etiquette, presenting absurd, immersive art that must be played with to be understood. An experienced guest may find this uncomfortable, but should know that the exhibit reflects these feelings as well. Void avoid (return to nothing), a robotic installation by artists Andrea Anner and Thibault Brett, both yearns for and fears your interaction, with two high-definition eyes that seek out gallery guests but turn away when faced directly, imitating shyness. The robotic joints were originally used in manufacturing and would have been secured behind a safety barrier, featureless and distinctly off-limits. But the artists saw humanity in the machine and made it into something that replicates us, choosing the windows of the soul to display its faux-emotion. Rather than generating products on an assembly line, the pitiful automaton now manufactures a level of empathy often denied to the public service worker, who we would rather keep sequestered behind a safety barrier.

Total Refusal, Hardly Working, film installation, 2022 

We see ourselves in these metal bodies of code and wiring in their non-consensual pursuit of the endless global project. By each being a small part of a mysterious and undefined ‘progress,’ we have no attachment to our work or our world. Food comes from ambiguous places we will never see or truly understand and our lives are dedicated to goals we did not choose to pursue. Like the non-playable characters in Hardly Working, a film by artist group Total Refusal, we toil without a defined goal the way that workers are expected to. Pocket Boss, a game by artist Mario von Rickenbach, has you drag and drop 2D elements into place in simple, minute-long puzzles. In spite of its inclusion as art in an exhibit, how different is this game from a job sitting at a computer? You change graphs on miscellaneous data and respond to text messages to achieve the goals of your superior without any hope of having an impact on the world. Its upfront and confrontationally unsubtle humor doesn’t change its applicability as you move forward without a clear finish line and no objective but ‘progress.’

However, this is still seen as a luxury career path. A work essential to the exhibit’s continued theme of ‘state-of-the-art dystopia’ is the 2016 film Hyper-reality by artist Keiichi Matsuda. Jarringly transparent in its messaging, this video warns of a world where technology directs humans towards the most efficient version of our primary objective, following the heavily digitized life of a woman sorted into a job as an on-demand grocery shopper. Her world flickers between the visual overstimulation of an internet once meant to be representative of life but having now overtaken it, and the empty, barren boredom of the world without it. This glaring warning-light media is effective not only in showing humanity’s theoretical future but also in reminding us why we continue to hurtle towards this future. Our billionaire aristocrats don’t see themselves represented in the laborer. They don’t empathize with the manufacturing robot. They view cyberpunk stories through the lens of the ultra-wealthy and see no reason not to pursue this life of instant gratification. In Hardly Working, all of these non-playable characters are low-class workers, usually in low-skill trades, who could disappear from the broader story of Red Dead Redemption with minimal impact on the player’s experience. 

Hyper-reality is a particularly interesting inclusion, as the term “hyper-reality” has been catapulted back into popular usage in this new online era of indecipherability, where you are unable to differentiate imitation from original. With its now distinct ties to AI, it joins the list of pop-culture terms that have taken on new meaning in a recent era where AI seems to be the deciding invention of our future. “AI” itself has been so heavily utilized by speculative media in the past that we have developed a very particular view of what “AI” is that does not accurately represent the capabilities of the LLMs and agents with which we now interact.

 Our cultural view of AI as an intelligent, artificial organism that can think and make decisions causes us to mistake AI for something that is sentient. What would it mean for a video game NPC to become ‘sentient’ and how different would that intelligent creature’s life be from your own? Are humans valuable in a world without the need for human labor or human art? If our needs and our culture can be fulfilled entirely by technology that imitates us, what remains as the point of humans in a human society? REFRESH 2026 reinforces this fear with an incredible lightness and immersion, showing, potently, the value the human mind has outside of work. Even though it may be functionally able to interact with the art showcased, AI would be unable to understand what it represents, finding no joy in its humor, or understanding the human lives and histories that make the art of REFRESH great. 

Justin Wong is a Hong Kong-born, London-based comics artist, political cartoonist, and scholar whose work spans political satire, visual storytelling, and cultural research. He is best known for his long-running daily column Gei Gei Gaak Gaak in Ming Pao, one of Hong Kong's most widely read newspapers, where he began his career as a political cartoonist in 2007. Over two decades, he has published comics series across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and France — including This City / That City, New Hong Kong, Hello World, and Je préfèrerais ne pas — and participated in numerous international exhibitions and art festivals. He previously served as an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, where he taught and researched comics studies, visual culture, and political cartooning. He is also the founder of Skip Class, an online platform connecting creative practice with critical reflection. He currently lives and works in London.

The following are excerpts from Justin Wongs interview conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Fleeing Hong Kong: Four Days to Leave

Hugh Leeman: Justin, you grew up in Hong Kong, taught at Hong Kong Baptist University, and were a well-known illustrator and political cartoonist for the newspaper Ming Pao. Yet you left your teaching position and fled to London. Take us through the story of this life-changing series of experiences. What happened?

Justin Wong: Just to clarify — I'm still working for the newspaper, but on different topics now. I did political cartoons for them for almost eighteen years. At the same time I was teaching comics and illustration at Baptist University. A few years ago, in 2020, I wrote an article about the protests in Hong Kong in 2019 — analyzing the illustrations that emerged during the protests. It was published in a magazine out of Switzerland, through a collaboration with a university there. A five-hundred-word academic article, very neutral. I didn't insert my own point of view. I used some images from the internet and some of my own works. One year after I wrote it, the magazine was finally printed and they sent a few copies to Baptist University. A few days later, my boss called me and said there was a problem with the article. I knew what it was about — the national security law had just been implemented in 2020. So I said, okay, what do you want to do? You can just fold them away, they're not even distributed. But to my complete surprise, a few hours later I learned that the university had called the police. Over an article that wasn't even in public circulation. I was totally shocked. It felt like a betrayal. It was a school project, an academic writing. And then I decided to leave Hong Kong. In four days, I was gone. And I have never gone back.

Hugh Leeman: Who is "they" in this context — who made that decision?

Justin Wong: Senior management at the university. I don't know exactly who called the police, but it must have been a very senior position. Some said it was the president. I cannot confirm. But they called, and I knew what would happen next.

Hugh Leeman: You gave yourself four days. You knew what would happen if you stayed. What would have happened?

Justin Wong: I can't predict exactly, but very likely they would have come to the university and detained me for questioning. There was a chance nothing would have formally come of it — reporting to the police doesn't automatically mean a case is established. But you have no faith and no trust in the system anymore. And there was another factor: a few months before this, I had already drawn a comic strip that upset the police. So by that time, I'd already decided to leave Hong Kong — I just didn't have a concrete plan. I had a visa. So when this incident happened, I said, I already have the visa, why not just go now? I put my plan ahead and left.

Hugh Leeman: What was the motivation for getting the visa before any of this happened?

Justin Wong: The BNO visa was introduced in early 2021, after the case of the 47 — activists and pro-democracy lawmakers who organized a primary election as a strategy for the next official election. They were all arrested for alleged subversion. University professors, lawmakers, journalists — not criminals. That case triggered the UK government to introduce the British National Overseas visa. A lot of Hong Kong people decided to leave out of fear for their safety. I was doing political cartoons, so I was high risk. That's why I decided to get it.

Hugh Leeman: The Hong Kong Free Press published an article shortly after, and in it the school denied calling the police, while you were quoted saying you heard through unofficial channels that the police were called. Can you clarify what actually happened?

Justin Wong: It was actually my department director who told me directly that the school had called the police — not a rumor, not a back channel. He was told about it by senior management, who then told him not to tell me. But he told me anyway. And even after I left, my former colleagues confirmed that the police did follow up. Later, the police denied there was any official case. Because once I was gone, they thought, okay, the problem is gone, just leave it. That's what I believe happened.

Hong Kong, the National Security Law & the Collapse of Democracy

Hugh Leeman: Before we go deeper into your story, let's give some context to listeners. For people who may not know, can you offer a brief picture of Hong Kong going from a British colonial possession with certain democratic protections to where it stands now?

Justin Wong: The most significant moment was the protests in 2019. We had two million people in the streets. A lot of fighting, a lot of violence. The Hong Kong government couldn't handle it, so the Chinese government stepped in and implemented the national security law — essentially a copy of their own mainland version. We never had anything like that in Hong Kong. It gave them all the tools to arrest people. Journalists, lawmakers — the most high-profile case was Jimmy Lai, who ran Apple Daily, the most popular newspaper in Hong Kong. With that law in place, freedom of speech was gone. Totally gone.

As for me, I had already stopped my political cartoon column even before the article incident. There was an earlier episode where I drew a comic about a conflict between journalists and police — I was just making fun of the situation. The police were not happy. They filed complaints to both the university and the newspaper and posted their letters of complaint on social media to pressure me. From that point, I stopped the political cartoon column and changed to a non-political topic. Fortunately, I'm still with the paper because of that.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the 2019 protests, the national security law, journalists being arrested. What should the West understand about the anti-extradition law amendment bill — the ELAB — and how a democracy deteriorates from within?

Justin Wong: The protest was actually triggered by something very specific and accidental. A Hong Kong man killed a Hong Kong woman in Taiwan. The government wanted to change the law to bring him back for trial, and suddenly people realized this change could have much larger consequences — it could allow extradition to mainland China. So it escalated. And the Hong Kong government handled it terribly. At a certain point they just lost control, and the Chinese government stepped in. I don't think Beijing planned for it to end this way from the beginning. But they'd had enough. And for Hong Kong people, we saw their true face — that Hong Kong would never have democracy under China. There was a Sino-British declaration, a promise of fifty years of autonomy and democracy. We dreamed about it for thirty years. And then it became clear they would never honor it. The bubble burst for both sides. The Chinese government said, we've had enough. The Hong Kong people said, we will never get what was promised. That was the end game.

Art, Symbols & the Language of Resistance

Hugh Leeman: Your former employer, Hong Kong Baptist University, notified the police about an academic article in which you analyzed the role of visual art and symbols in the resistance demonstrations. You used imagery that included a slogan now outlawed in Hong Kong — "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times." What was it about your analysis of art and symbols that was seen as so threatening?

Justin Wong: Honestly, what I wrote wasn't the most important part. It was the images. I grabbed some from the internet, and some of them contained that slogan, which was now forbidden. Whenever they see those images, they become very, very sensitive. And I think by that time there was an atmosphere where the university wanted to draw a line — to say, this is not us, this is just him. They wanted to separate themselves from me, to protect themselves and show their loyalty to the government. It didn't matter what I wrote. They knew my work — I'd been teaching there for thirteen years — and the former president and senior management never had any issue with my political stance. But by then, I think they'd started to identify people they were happy to get rid of.

Hugh Leeman: You put together graphic novels across your career — New Hong Kong, Hello World, and another called This City, later renamed Dead City, published after you left. Can you walk us through the evolution of your work and how the political climate changed what you were making?

Justin Wong: Hello World was my first graphic novel — a father and son story, not related to the protests. New Hong Kong came out after the Umbrella Movement, around 2015. It was a collection of the daily political cartoon column I ran in the newspaper, responding to current events. Then there was This City, which I created before the national security law was implemented. It was very direct political satire. After I worked on it for a few months, the national security law came in and I asked my editor if it was safe to continue. They didn't give me an answer. They didn't tell me to stop, but I didn't feel safe. So I changed the series — from This City to That City, meaning we're not here anymore, it's there. The whole mood shifted completely. I was still in Hong Kong, but people were starting to leave, and there was this very intense emotion around departure. COVID was beginning at the same time. The whole city, the whole world, felt this hole in the heart. So I moved from direct satire to something much more emotional — about pain, about loss. That work was published in 2023 by a Taiwanese publisher. There were two stages: political satire, and then personal emotion. The second is what you see in the exhibition now at CCC.

Hugh Leeman: Earlier you mentioned the incident that led you to stop your political cartoon column before the university situation — where you drew a strip about police and journalists. You were made to apologize after a complaint from the Hong Kong police. The strip featured two children at school: one asks, "Do you think you can do whatever you want when you pretend to be a journalist?" The other responds, "Wow, where did you hear that fake news from?" And the first says, "I don't know. My friend from junior Police Call was spreading this." Reading this as an outsider, it hardly seems threatening. Can you explain what made it so sensitive?

Justin Wong: The context was a primary school — a junior police call, which is like a metaphor for police, and a little campus journalist. I used this school scenario to make fun of what was actually happening in society: the police were constantly accusing journalists of spreading fake news to justify their own actions, and the journalists were pushing back. It was a society-wide argument. I just took that conflict and turned it into a funny campus version. But by that time, after the 2019 protests, the Hong Kong police were very conscious about their image. Their relationship with citizens had completely broken down. So whenever anyone criticized them, or talked about them in any way that wasn't favorable, they would react very strongly. They were desperate to rebuild their reputation. And that's why a cartoon like that — which seemed so mild — triggered a complaint.

Identity, Exile & Finding Yourself in London

Hugh Leeman: The Chinese government is threatening your writing, threatening your comic strips, threatening your illustrations. All that you've described — the fleeing, the betrayal by your employer, the fear of incarceration — amounts to them stripping away your artistic identity, your teaching identity, and your public credibility. Psychologically, how does one deal with all of that?

Justin Wong: It's difficult. I decided to leave Hong Kong one day, and four days later I was already in London. I remember arriving and participating in an online symposium about comics. When they asked me to introduce myself, I suddenly didn't know what to say. I used to say — I teach at a university, I'm a political cartoonist. And suddenly both of those identities were gone. I thought, what am I? I'm an artist. That's the only identity I could claim. And it was a very, very difficult period to find myself again, because my whole life had been built on those two roles.

The more positive thing was knowing I wasn't the worst case. There were people who had just one day to leave. And as more and more Hong Kong people came to London, I got more friends — people who, even if they weren't forced out like me, still chose to come and sacrificed what they had. A lot of them were professionals earning good salaries, with good futures. But they had kids, and they couldn't trust the educational system anymore, with its very clear intention of national brainwashing. Knowing I wasn't alone helped enormously.

Hugh Leeman: Where do you see yourself in relation to the Chinese government — are you an activist, a journalist, an artist? How do you define your own role in this conflict?

Justin Wong: It's complicated. Unlike activists in other countries who have a direct relationship with their government, in Hong Kong there's a Hong Kong government in between — one that was supposed to be a civilized, rational institution. I did political cartoons for eighteen years and never had a single issue. The newspaper never asked me to stop. I had total freedom of speech. So it's not like the Chinese government was directly threatening me — things went through the Hong Kong government, which made it confusing. Were they representing Beijing, or not?

I never saw myself as an activist. Even now. I started doing political cartoons because I had a talent for drawing and telling stories, and I wanted to express what I felt about society. The newspaper gave me a platform to do that, and I was really, really happy doing it. I thought I was doing the right thing. But I never intended to be an activist. I still draw political cartoons for an online media established by Hong Kong people in the UK — one work per week. And I draw a line for myself: I'm not doing things to fight the government. I'm doing things I believe are right, that are good for the Hong Kong community. That is my raw intention. Some people because of how I left, would call me a freedom fighter. I won't claim that. But I will continue to publish work I believe is true.

The Art Development Council, Blacklisting & the Silencing of Culture

Hugh Leeman: You've spoken of betrayal, of arresting people, of explicit and implicit threats. There's also the concept of being blacklisted — the canceling of someone. Can you speak to what you personally experienced with the Hong Kong Arts Development Council?

Justin Wong: Someone nominated me for the ADC Award — the Arts Development Council gives out awards across visual art, theater, film, and other disciplines. I knew I probably wouldn't get it given my background, and sure enough, I received a letter saying I wasn't selected. Fine, I'd prepared myself for that. But a few weeks later, a friend told me I had actually won — the judges had selected me as the awardee. But the ADC Council overruled the decision and disqualified me. That's when I realized I had no future in Hong Kong even if I stayed. Artists depend heavily on government funding through that council. And I could see what was happening — theater groups unable to rent venues, shows canceled the day before with excuses like "there's a problem with the venue." Over and over. Freedom of speech had become a memory.

Jimmy Lai, Apple Daily & the Twenty-Year Drawing Project

Hugh Leeman: I want to talk about Jimmy Lai. Who is he, and what does he mean to you personally, beyond the typical public narratives?

Justin Wong: He was a businessman who came from China as a young immigrant and worked his way up, originally selling garments. After the June 4th incident — Tiananmen — I think something changed in him. He loved China when he was young, but after that, his perspective shifted. He started Apple Daily, which became the most popular newspaper in Hong Kong, along with several other magazines. It was a pro-democracy publication — in Hong Kong politics, you are either pro-government or pro-democracy, very simply. Apple Daily was very successful but also very controversial, very tabloid in style, very critical. During the protests, it played a huge role. The government had been trying to pass Article 23 — a national security law — since 2003, and 500,000 people went into the street to stop it, which began a kind of annual protest ritual every July 1st. Apple Daily was always there, closely tied to those activities.

None of that was illegal. But he became the Chinese government's number one target. He was rich, he had a press empire, and they accused him of being funded by America and being too close to Western politicians. Once the national security law passed, they finally had the tool to arrest him. He's been in jail since then.

What moves me is that he had the chance to leave — with his money and power, he could easily have gone. But he refused. He knew his fate. He said Hong Kong had given him so much, and he wanted to repay that. He wouldn't leave. I'm really moved by that. Even though I don't know him personally, and I published in Ming Pao, not Apple Daily, and sometimes I didn't even like Apple Daily's tabloid style — I deeply appreciate what he represents.

Hugh Leeman: His story inspired your twenty-year project. Can you explain the project and what emotional state gave birth to it?

Justin Wong: When Jimmy Lai was sentenced to twenty years — people said he won't come out alive — I started thinking about my friends who are also in jail because of the protests. I put myself in their position. If I were there, ten years from now, life would go on for everyone outside. No one would remember me anymore. I was really, really troubled by this. And I thought — I've been doing political cartoons every day for eighteen years. What if I just spend five more minutes each day drawing an apple and continue for twenty years, to honor what Jimmy Lai and others are going through? It's a symbol of remembering. The real battle is memory. Will people still remember what happened in 2019? Will the next generation know? No one will check in twenty years whether I actually did it. People will probably forget about this project. But to me, it's a personal practice — a daily reminder that there is something I must not forget. It's not really about Apple Daily as a newspaper anymore. It's an icon. It's about keeping memory alive.

Carry On — The Exhibition & Art as Emotional Reckoning

Hugh Leeman: You have a show, Carry On, at the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco's Chinatown. With everything you've shared — Jimmy Lai, friends in prison, the question of whether they'll be remembered, the betrayal, the fear of fleeing — how do all of these threads come together in that exhibition?

Justin Wong: It's a very subtle transformation of my perspective. After I left Hong Kong, I went through a lot of emotional changes — anger, sadness, the sadness of betrayal. And then I tried to be positive, tried to think, okay, this is the reality now, we have to carry on. I also saw it as a moment to rethink my life completely. But emotion is complicated. A few years after I left, I said to myself, I'm not sad anymore. And then, sitting at dinner one night, it would just hit me — a sudden, heavy sadness. Not dramatic, but deep. It just attacks you without warning.

It's a complex feeling — trying to be positive and being pulled back into something dark, especially because, unlike many of my friends who can return to Hong Kong for visits, I cannot. It's too risky for me. I had no choice. So the work in the show is a mixture of all of these feelings. Loneliness in London. Deep uncertainty about the future. The question of identity — what am I now that my two roles are gone? What do I carry forward?

Hugh Leeman: If you could give a talk to a Western audience and convince them of anything, what would you want them to know, and what would you want them to do?

Justin Wong: I would probably talk about the Apple Daily twenty-year project. Because that one is universal. It's not even really about art. In a world of wars and conflicts, global power struggles, left versus right — the future is so uncertain. What I've learned is that it is important to know what you are doing and why. I lost my identity, my career, my salary — everything, overnight. I was earning well in Hong Kong, and then suddenly it was all gone. But when I do the Apple Daily drawing each day, I realize it doesn't have to be grand or high-profile or technically impressive. Nothing special about it. But it matters because I want to remember something. And everyone can do this. You have your own Apple Daily. Whatever culture you come from, wherever you are — you have your own symbol worth keeping alive. Find it.

Hugh Leeman: In your course at UC Berkeley, you've talked about the Lion Rock Spirit — the resilience and hardworking ethos that defines Hong Kong's identity — and asked your students if they have their own Lion Rock. What do you want these students to remember when the course is finished?

Justin Wong: I use humor as the central topic of the course, because it's something I find uniquely remarkable about the protests. When we talk about Apple Daily and Lion Rock, it's about resistance and perseverance — let's fight on. But there's another quality among Hong Kong people, especially the younger generation: a genuine sense of humor. Hong Kong was always a middleman between East and West, never quite sure of its own identity. The one thing we could do was make jokes. Our humor just grabs from everywhere and puts it together, this sense of — I don't care, I just laugh. During the protests, it was bloody violent. People were killed, people were injured. And they still laughed. They used a little piggy emoji grabbed from a social media platform as one of their protest icons. People wondered what it represented. It's not Lion Rock, it's not Apple Daily — it's just a piggy. And somehow it escalated into one of the most important symbols of the whole movement. That lightness, that humor in the face of darkness — it's so important. So what I want the students to remember is this: whatever you're facing — personal difficulties, uncertain times — humor can be a kind of support. Find the lightness. That's what I want them to carry with them.

Home as a Myth

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — under what circumstances could you see yourself returning home?

Justin Wong: I always joke that when I'm old, or when I've calculated how many years I'd spend in jail if I went back and decided it was worth it. Of course I'm joking. But it has become a myth to me — whether I ever go back. Hong Kong today is already very different from Hong Kong five years ago. A lot of people say I won't miss it, because what I miss no longer exists. And maybe one day I won't need to go back anymore.

Hugh Leeman: Even within the myth, there's still connection — family, friends. What about that?

Justin Wong: My family is all in the UK now — even my parents. My close family. I have friends still in Hong Kong, and as long as they can travel, a lot of us just say, let's meet in Taiwan, or in Japan. An hour's flight from Hong Kong. It's not ideal, but I'm fine with it now. And maybe not being able to go home can become a motivation for the work too. It's difficult. But it could also be something to carry forward.

Hugh Leeman: Home as a myth — that sounds like the title of a future work. Justin Wong, thank you so much.

Justin Wong: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to share.

In the Company of Still Life, February 21––May 31, 2026

By Elizabeth Johnson

In the Company of Still Life, curated by Clara Weishahn and Alex Cohen, was designed for a gallery at ArtYard, a former brick hatchery on the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When I visited, local artists, art and antique collectors, flea market buffs, and creatives who incorporate junk/treasure in their own works were visibly smitten. In subtly colored and decorated "rooms," still life paintings, pottery, drawings, photography, collage, prints, found objects, and sculpture are presented with restraint, an effect modeled on Kings Oaks, Weishahn’s and Cohen's passion project and farm in Newtown, Pennsylvania, where they present music, performance, classes, and a highly regarded fall art exhibition. 

Weishahn and Cohen take the history of still life seriously, and for this show they researched its evolution through Egypt, China, Italy, and Holland, pivoting with Giorgio Morandi (who, Cohen says, "gives us permission to look"),  Cezanne and Bonnard's still-lifes and interiors, and ending with Georges Braque and Phillip Guston. The curators modeled the exhibition's aesthetic on examples of striking and clever attention to domestic beauty: Neapolitan tapestries, frescoes in Herculaneum, Henry Chapman Mercer's rambling Fonthill Castle, Sir John Soane's Museum, Bloomsbury Group homes, Omega Workshops, and the Russian dacha tradition. Because In the Company of Still Life features forty artists, I will highlight works that made me linger on my first visit. The exhibition, a veritable Wunderkammer, demands repeated viewings.

At the Mediterranean-style Courtyard entrance, three inviting portals are interrupted by Gabriele Risso's Still Life Maquettes (2024-25), arid, Morandi-like sculptures situated on a pedestal and in wall niches, and two reliefs, Still life (2023) and Study for Table VIII (2025). He abstracts bottles and other common tabletop shapes as modular, fluid translations between 2-D and 3-D, establishing a baseline that combines the ancient, Cubist, and formal. 

The Celadon Room serially organizes realistic still lifes by several artists. The divinity of Susan Jane Walp's Blueberries on a White Cloth (1997) hinges on seeing several of her paintings together. A child's chair in a corner and various wooden furniture create a homey, orderly, unrushed mood for viewing traditional overhead and frontal paintings of flowers and dishes of food. Fragments in E. M. Saniga's painting Soft Paste, Spoons, Wallpaper and Trap Jaws (2011-2014) speak the same language as Margaret Parish's Windowsill Installation (2026) bathed in river light coming through sanded plexiglass. Soft light harmonizes Parish's selections of, to name a few: dried fruit, wooden balls, balls of string, buttons, a head-shaped net, a map, a fossil-like fish, and someone's upper denture plate. Her installation compares "holding," "fixing," and "tasting texture"––albeit tangentially––with faithfully observed and rendered still lifes. 

A remarkable thing about this show is that all the work seems destined to take turns as background or centerstage. For example, in the Dining Room and Wall of Windows area, Johnny Izatt-Lowry's 4 Pieces of asparagus, on a table, ii (2021) above Mayumi Sarai's wooden Basket of Oranges After Van Gogh (2025): their combined pieces stop me in my tracks with powerful simplicity, jolting me out of a mental world of tabletop variations. All around me, realism is morphing and flattening via Mariel Capanna's fresco What's Left (2017), Dee Jenkins's Dry Flat (2023), and Ken Kewley's Winter Bouquet Series (2018-19). Serenity––and the protected life of unconscious objects––continues to unravel with Gwen Strahle's Chosen Object (2022) and Allie Webb's Bread, Hand, Onion (2025) that both picture hands as objects. Webb's Escargot, Pepper, Knife (2025) menaces like Margaret Parish's second Windowsill Installation (2026) featuring a disembodied gloved hand, hair comb, epaulette, sunglasses, shoe trees, and jumbo kitchen knife. 

Under the curators' custom-made, arch-patterned lampshade on a Dining Room table, David MacDonald's irresistible stoneware pieces Covered Jars, Vases, and Tumblers (2026) continue on into the Fireplace Room that features his Porcelain Carved Tumblers opposite a staged, medicine-green fireplace complete with painted fire screen. On the mantle under Rotem Amizur's painted paper collage, Still Life with Purple Plums (2025), Parish’s working tape dispenser, clothespin holder, metal irons, and a metal-looking vase suggest that "irony" is holding things together. The room gains busy, humorous traction with Clara Kewley's intricate, painted paper collage Albanese Meats and Poultry (2025), sporting "I Got'cha Steaks" signage. Joseph Podlesnik's dusty, timeworn photographs with window-reflected scenes. Still-Life, Phoenix AZ (2015) and Still-Life AZ, II (2016) suggest remembering home from a distance. Elizabeth Endres's lush paintings Gathered Bouquet (2023), Curves and Edges (2025), and Still Life with a Fragment of a Tapestry ("The Visit of the Gypsies") (2025) crowd a wall behind an antique couch: it's difficult to focus on each busy painting, but overabundance could be the curators’ point.

In the Blue Room, John F. Peto's moody Still Life with Mug, Pipe, and Matchstick (c.1890s) and Still Life with Mug, Pipe, Pouch, and Chalkboard (1901) foretell the purposeful, simplified negative space found in Alex Cohen's Delicata (2020) and David Fertig's Ship's Log (2025). The latter is installed over his mixed-media Scrapbook (2022) that is, in turn, the subject of several Scrapbook Paintings (2025) by James Stewart. Kate Powell's painting Damn Her (2024) uses flat, empty, Cubist space to suggest an ambiguous story.

Wavy-striped orange and grey walls in the Hallway are lined with Edward Gorey's pen and ink drawings and François Dupuis's dense, conceptual witticisms. Gorey's Aunt Edna's Lampshade (1978), and two pieces from Alms for Oblivion (1978), Back of Painting by Mt. Slope and Papier mâché doughnut, (diameter 4') made by D. Guest, and Dupuis's four Rubbish etchings (2020-25) and Le cendrier (The Ash Tray, 2013) are standouts, the nerve center of this show.

The Camera Obscura Room features dark maroon and blue, wavy-striped walls, enhancing gloomy pieces by Gorey, Still Life with Skull Vase & Elephants (1985); Peto, Still Life with Jug and Cakes, (c.1890); and Gwen Strahle's duo of dreamy, Untitled ink on paper paintings (2021). Two working camera obscura installations and the Room's back shelf feature Brian Guerin's diminutive Fruit, Cups and Vessels (2026) atop his pillows made from pink shirts, complete with buttons. The Room's dark, underworld magic deepens as I compare mutable shades of imagery inside the camera obscura with superbly crafted oils by Robert M. Kulicke Still Life with Sweet Williams (1987) and Wedge of Watermelon (1985-86) entombed in massive artist-made frames. 

Visitors may lounge, read, and chat on overstuffed armchairs in the expansive Library, where a Persian rug and a teal wall complement Katja Oxman's aquatint etchings If Bird the Silence Contradicts (1997), The Seasons Shift (2011), and Returning As Before (2004). I wish this room had been painted one midtone to unify Susan Lichtman’s bright orange oil Before Dessert (2025), Gwen Strahle's darker oils Chosen White (2025) and Sleeping Shadow (2021-22), and Silas Borsos's sunlit oils Banana & Lemons (2025), Deconstructed Pineapple & Plums (2025), and Grapefruit & Pear (2025). Alisa Maslova's painting A Holiday That is Always With You (2023), in a carved black frame by Alex Cohen, joins plants by Clara Weishahn and metal vessels by Margaret Parish––punctuated by one Daliesque pewter platter dropping over a table edge––make a fitting backstop for this show. 

In The Company of Still Life contains many more virtues than limited space allows. A visitor may enter through any of three doors, exemplifying three philosophies regarding still life. You'll encounter staunch realists, collage-based reconstituters, and cerebral parodists of life's basics: home, food, books, flowers, companionship, and privacy. Sculpture, furniture, and collaboration behind the scenes make it all possible. An hour In The Company of Still Life absorbed in history's most modest art form is a balm for turmoil inside and out. Letting oneself wander and get lost and overwhelmed is what keeps us coming back.

Artists: Rotem Amizur, Lennart Anderson, James Bellew, Silas Borsos, Stepan Budulak, Mariel Capanna, Alex Cohen, François Dupuis, Elizabeth Endres, David Fertig, Edward Gorey, Brian Guerin, Johnny Izatt-Lowry, Dee Jenkins, Graesen Joyce, Clara Kewley, Ken Kewley, Robert M. Kulicke, Aubrey Levinthal, Susan Lichtman, David MacDonald, Alisa Maslova, Ruth Miller, Katja Oxman, Margaret Parish, Gillian Pederson-Krag, John F. Peto, Joseph Podlesnik, Charles Ethan Porter, Kate Powell, Gabriele Risso, E.M. Saniga, Mayumi Sarai, Kouta Sasai, James Stewart, Gwen Strahle, Rudolf Stumpf, Ali Sultan, Susan Jane Walp, Allie Webb

Jim Campbell (b. 1956). Campbell’s work has been exhibited internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The International Center for Photography, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

His electronic art work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2012, he was the recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 13th Annual Bay Area Treasure Award.

Previous honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. He has two Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT and as an engineer holds nearly twenty patents in the field of video image processing. His 2018 piece ‘Day for Night’ is a permanent LED installation that comprises the top nine floors of the 61-story Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. His artwork has been shown at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco for more than 25 years.

The following are excerpts from an interview with Jim Campbell by Hugh Leeman.

Chicago, MIT & Finding Art

Hugh Leeman: Jim, you're a Midwest guy — born in Chicago, moved to the East Coast for school, then spent much of your career on the West Coast. What experiences from those early chapters were most formative in leading you to become the artist and person you are?

Jim Campbell: My dad was an audio engineer at the PBS station in Chicago — WTTW — and that's really where my interest in electronics came from. I went to work with him quite a bit, and at the time, the station was actually part of the Museum of Science and Industry. It was a wing in the same building. The TV station was essentially an exhibit — you could look into the control room as they were recording a show and see the engineers at the control panel. My father was one of those engineers you could look in at. So I did that a lot, and it got me interested in electronics, which probably led me to get a degree in electrical engineering from MIT.

Hugh Leeman: At MIT you've said you were pretty depressed for four years. What was going on?

Jim Campbell: It's kind of hard to describe, but I was pretty neurotic when I went there, and MIT at the time — probably still does — kind of breeds neuroses. So I only got worse while I was there. When I was done, I left and came to California. Drove out with a friend in my Bug in 1978 and got a job in Silicon Valley.

Hugh Leeman: There's a narrative — maybe a stereotype — that the schools historically producing great engineers, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, still produce a similar kind of pressure-cooked environment fifty years later. What do you make of that?

Jim Campbell: I would have no idea if that's true or not. But it kind of makes sense. Engineers tended to be introverted. And so you go to a place where everyone around you is like that and everyone around you is a genius — it's just a weird environment. Which is why I wasn't real happy there, which is why I left.

The Tenderloin, The Phone Call & A Career Begins

Hugh Leeman: You've told me a story about being rejected by countless art galleries, and your first actual show was in an apartment you rented in the Tenderloin with your then-girlfriend. What's the long version of that story?

Jim Campbell: It's how I started making art, really. A friend of mine — actually an ex-girlfriend — needed to get her master's degree, and to do that she needed an exhibition. We were both interested in art that dealt with the theme of mental illness. So we started trying to sell a show to different nonprofit galleries around San Francisco, and because neither of us had any history, no one wanted to show us. So we rented an apartment in the Tenderloin — cheapest neighborhood — where we could set up our own exhibition. The hardest phone call I ever made was to call the curator at SFMoMA at the time, a guy named Bob Riley. This was 1988. And he said to me — and this gave me so much respect for him — he said, I saw a film you made as an undergraduate at MIT ten years ago. So sure, I'll come. I was just blown away. A two-minute video I made as an undergraduate, and he remembered it. He came to the exhibition in the apartment in the Tenderloin, and he really liked a piece called Hallucinations — an interactive mirror work where you see yourself on fire. He put me in his next exhibition at SFMoMA with that work.

Hugh Leeman: You're probably the only person in the history of humanity to show an artwork in the Tenderloin and then have it go straight to the Museum of Modern Art.

Jim Campbell: The San Francisco Museum. And I was ready to give up art at that point. If nobody gave a shit, I was probably not going to give a shit myself. His believing in me really changed my direction.

Hugh Leeman: Between those three works in the apartment, it seems like if it's not for that ex-girlfriend and that collaboration — that you don't become an artist. That's almost the end of the story.

Jim Campbell: I think that's probably true. Her need for the degree really made it happen, and I kind of tagged along.

Hugh Leeman: Then there's the phone call. Walk me through it — this is the era of landlines. You pick up the phone and call SFMoMA. What happens?

Jim Campbell: I don't remember how I got the phone number, honestly. But people were less filtered back then. You didn't have to go through ten places to get to someone. I think I just called the museum and asked for him. And he answered.

Hugh Leeman: It's powerful to think that perhaps none of it happens if this guy doesn't pick up the phone.

Jim Campbell: That seems very likely.

Mental Illness, Personal History & Angry Art

Hugh Leeman: Mental illness was the theme of those early works — Hallucinations, Obsessive Compulsion, Shock Treatment. What was the inspiration behind focusing your artwork there?

Jim Campbell: My brother had schizophrenia. He had obsessive compulsion, had shock treatment, had hallucinations. So all of those themes just decided to work with. If you look at the work I've done over the years that you might call political — how people treat people who are mentally ill, the Motion and Rest LED series looking at how disabled people are viewed — those might be my most political works. But for me, they're both personal. Pretty much any political work I've done has actually come from a personal point of view.

Hugh Leeman: Among the most touching is the thirty-minute film addressing your brother after his death by suicide. Before it became a public work of art, how did those conversations go with your parents who incorporated their own voices into it?

Jim Campbell: They knew I was interested in filmmaking, and I think we were all on board with doing anything that would be cathartic with regard to my brother's suicide — to talk about it to the screen. A lot of my work in those days was really about expressing myself because I was so bad at it any other way other than with film or eventually art.

Hugh Leeman: What did having your parents' voices in the work change about it, compared to if they had said no?

Jim Campbell: Having them on board kind of validated the whole process of making it for me. Otherwise maybe I was just making it for myself.

Hugh Leeman: These points of validation keep appearing — the SFMoMA curator, your ex-girlfriend, your parents. It sounds like there was a younger artist thinking, the hell with this, it might not be worth it — and these moments kept saying, no, keep going.

Jim Campbell: Absolutely. I had a pretty profound sense of self-doubt back then.

Hugh Leeman: How does one overcome that?

Jim Campbell: Friends and experience and, honestly, relationships.

Hugh Leeman: What was the anger coming from in that early period? The Tenderloin show, those early works — you've described yourself as an angry artist then.

Jim Campbell: The anger was motivating, for sure. A lot of it was anger at myself as much as anything — at how the world treated people who were mentally ill, including myself. Shock Treatment, for example — you'd sit down and it would capture an image of your face. There'd be a button in front of you. You'd press it and your image would slowly erase pixel by pixel until you were gone. That was a metaphor for shock treatment at the time, which randomly erases memories. It's why Hemingway killed himself, because he didn't have access to those memories anymore. And I was kind of blown away — being an engineer — that even in the eighties, shock treatment was done with an essentially unregulated power source. If there happened to be a surge in the wall outlet, the surge would actually make it to the person's head. So there was a lot of stuff that made me angry. Which was why it was kind of funny to see the little kids waving at themselves when Hallucinations was installed at the museum.

Low Resolution, Perception & the Primal Image

Hugh Leeman: One of the things your work is noted for is its low resolution — which is striking given that early in your career as an electrical engineer you were working on developing high-resolution screens. You went in the complete opposite direction. The idea is that low resolution becomes a kind of tabula rasa — a screen onto which viewers project their own imagination. When you look at your own works from years ago, what does your imagination fill in?

Jim Campbell: I'd put it slightly differently than imagination. What happens when these works are successful is that there's what I'd call, pretentiously, a primal perception. Your brain is looking for details, looking for edges, looking for closure, looking for — is this a man or a woman? — and it can't see any of that. So it opens up the image to flow into you beneath the analytical processes of the brain. It's almost like music or peripheral vision — you're receiving it, but you can't analyze it. Somebody once said to me, after seeing a work, something I had never thought about: you learn how to look at these works by looking at them. Because the imagery you're looking at doesn't really exist in the real world. Low resolution images don't really exist.

Hugh Leeman: The idea of giving space for the viewer's imagination and learning how to look as you look — that sounds like a cathartic experience. Taking that together with what you've shared about how personal some of these works are, do you ever feel misread in a way that hurts?

Jim Campbell: What it usually makes me do, as opposed to feeling hurt, is to try to look at it from other people's perspective. I do my best — as I'm sure every artist does, unless you're working with the Hollywood model — to not think about how the work will be received while I'm making it. You can't do that with public art, because you've signed a contract and the city or the building has expectations. But with other work, you don't have that obligation. My wife, Tessa Wilcox, is my best critic. I have a small studio in my backyard, and before a show I'll invite her out to look at work and give me feedback during the process. What commonly happens is she'll critique something and by the end of the conversation she'll say, did you want my opinion or not?

Hugh Leeman: Which way do you go on that?

Jim Campbell: What she's saying is you're not listening to me at all. Usually she'll leave, and then I'll think about what she said for a long time. So it's very helpful.

Disability, Parents & the Memory Works

Hugh Leeman: Your Motion and Rest series films people with disabilities — looking at the way they move. You mentioned that this is personal, referencing your own parents. Tell me more.

Jim Campbell: My mother, before she died, I had already had this series in mind and she was going to be the first one filmed. But in my usual way, I probably didn't have a deadline, so I didn't film her. Both of my parents were disabled, and this series refers to that. I was interested in not just how people view people who are disabled — because when I was a kid, there were far more prejudices against disabled people — but I was also embarrassed as a kid by my parents, at certain times. Making these works, having people be able to just stare at these moving figures without that awkward glance — that was a way of dealing with that. They're not just critical of our culture. They were self-criticism too, at how I dealt with it as a child.

Hugh Leeman: The memory works — Portrait of My Father, One Photo of My Mother — use your heartbeat and your breath to modulate the image. You can see the portrait clearly and then it disappears into opacity. What did it mean to let your own body govern how your parents appear?

Jim Campbell: That whole series of memory works is really about the fact that memories are hidden. Just like ideas in our heads are hidden — you have to get them out by writing them down, explaining them to someone, doing a painting. They're in your head and you have to spit them out. I was using these works as metaphors for that: memories are hidden and need to be expressed. I remember I was literally up all night for a show at Rena Bransten's where I showed Portrait of My Father. And a friend came over, and very suddenly I saw it as violent — his image comes and goes so fast. I started thinking, I can't show this. It's too violent. But you look at the work and you don't see it that way. No one has ever said to me, this is a violent work.

Hugh Leeman: The exhibition I curated switched them — your mother became the heartbeat and your father became the breath.

Jim Campbell: Yeah. I think you just showed the one — my father, with the breath. And a friend came over and said, absolutely show it, you're nuts.

The Salesforce Tower & Giving Back

Hugh Leeman: You've created arguably the most iconic modern public artwork in San Francisco — atop the Salesforce Tower, visible from miles away by potentially millions of people. When you look at that project, what do you see?

Jim Campbell: Salesforce Tower is a complicated one because it ended up being very different than I preconceived it. A lot of my recent work has been about perception — how you see things from close up versus far away, what you take in from an abstract image. The tower doesn't really have any of that. It became, in a funny way, too representational for what I've been typically doing. And because it's essentially a video on the skyline, people have all these expectations — almost like it's a television, like what's on tonight. That's when I started inviting a CCA class to put their imagery up for a weekend. Then I hired someone to help curate — Emma Strebel — and she had this great idea of working not just with universities and high schools, but with emerging artists. So every month we put one emerging artist up on the tower — from midnight to one a.m. and then all night for a long weekend. That's been a lot of fun to see what other people do up there.

Hugh Leeman: I was at a dinner the other night and a gentleman pulled out his phone to show me he was going to be on the Salesforce Tower. It was such an important part of his identity. It seems like this has come full circle from that phone call to SFMoMA — you're doing for others what that curator did for you.

Jim Campbell: It gives me more pleasure than just about anything when artists who have been up on the tower say it's been instrumental in moving forward to the next stage of their career. What could make me feel better than that? Helping emerging artists. And the high school students — you can imagine being a junior in high school and seeing your imagery up on the tower.

Hugh Leeman: You just became the coolest kid in school.

Jim Campbell: All the parents come to the screenings. There are usually little screening parties.

Hugh Leeman: Your daughter once looked at one of your installations and said, "Daddy, can you make it turn green?" How has being a parent impacted your artwork over the years?

Jim Campbell: I've made a lot less. It's made the work a lot less personally reflective in a way — because that personal reflection typically stemmed from being depressed, whether it was the Hallucinations era when I was an angry artist, or the earlier work. Whereas now I'm basically a happier person, with a wonderful child who's about to graduate from college.

Monet, Giverny & Seeing Anew

Hugh Leeman: Most of your work is rooted in perception. You've recently been making work from Monet's garden at Giverny — which is interesting because you've said you were never really a fan of Monet or Impressionism. What happened when you got there?

Jim Campbell: I began to notice I was thinking about Monet in a completely different way. I started thinking about him as one of the first abstract painters — him and Turner. If you look at a black-and-white reproduction of a Monet painting, you can't tell you're looking at flowers. So it's the color that gives you all the information about what you're looking at. If you take a black-and-white photograph of flowers, you can still tell it's flowers. The color was the most important aspect of those works to inform you of what you were looking at. So I made works that go back and forth between color and black-and-white — oscillating between completely abstract and flowers.

Legacy, Perception & Half a Century of Work

Hugh Leeman: You recently showed at Bitforms Gallery in New York, and the works spanned several years of your career. You walk in just before the doors open, and in many ways you're looking at close to half a century of work. How did you perceive yourself?

Jim Campbell: One way I perceive myself is — damn, I'm still doing the same old shit. And then another way, looking at the progression of the low-resolution works, I'm genuinely moved by it. I do often have that feeling of doing the same old shit. Not all the time. Not while I'm working on them and finishing them.

Hugh Leeman: From the Tenderloin to Bitforms — close to fifty years. When you jump ahead another forty years, what do you hope people understand and take away from this body of work?

Jim Campbell: If you think about what I was saying about the successful low-resolution works — this experiential flow of abstraction that touches things in your brain that a normal photograph or normal video simply doesn't, because it eliminates so much — I would hope that that still works on people in that meditative way. If it doesn't, the works will be meaningless. Because that's really what they're about.

Hugh Leeman: There's something fascinating about that — the idea that the viewer gets to project their own world into what they're seeing. That's where the work gains its meaning.

Jim Campbell: Yeah.

Hugh Leeman: Jim Campbell, thank you for sharing your ideas, your stories, and your artwork.

Jim Campbell: Of course. It was my pleasure.

When I think of Tut, I think of the expression, "going from strength to strength." A painting of hers was chosen for the first de Young Open in 2020, where artists from the Bay Area applied to be in a salon-style show at the museum. When the Fine Arts Museums got $1 million in 2022 to buy pieces by contemporary Bay Area artists, she was one of 30 whose work was chosen. Her work has been shown at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, the Fowler Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Phoenix Art Museum, and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, among others. In 2024, she received both the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which led to a six-month exhibition at that institution. Both the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and SFMOMA itself acquired work from those shows.  

Currently, Tut has work in three group exhibitions: The Outwin: American Portraiture Today at the National Portrait Gallery (through August 30); Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms at Crocker Art Museum (through May 3); and Diaspora Stories: Memory and Belonging at the Horton Art Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College (through April 3). She is also working on paintings for the Arion Press's version of Alice in Wonderland, coming out at the end of 2026.

And, for the first time, her work is on display outside museum walls, with The Potluck Picnic, of layered paintings of trees, mountains and the ocean on the exterior of the San Francisco Community College's Downtown Center building at 4th and Mission (City College will no longer be in that building after this semester, but Tut's art won't be affected.)  

Tut, who says just seeing a tree when she is walking in a city energizes her, likes the idea of people on their way to work or school or doing errands, looking up and seeing paintings of greenery and slices of the natural landscape.  

"I literally walk in cities from one tree to the next," she said. "I was like, OK, maybe there's someone who's passing by who is going to be able to spot a tree, a mountain and water just seeing something like that, I think brings you a minute of pause and rest that you might not have access to because you have eight hour shift, or you've been in meetings all day or in front of a computer."  

The title, The Potluck Picnic, came out of thinking of the importance of food in gathering people together. Tut, who has three young children, says a lot of her life revolves around getting together with other families and bringing food, which she thinks creates bonds.

"Sustenance for people is not something that can be taken lightly," she said. "We know people who make bread or make cookies for me and bring them over, and I'm like, 'This is such an important thing you're doing. You're creating sustenance and joy for someone else.'"  

Ali Gass, the executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, says with the institution switching to a nomadic model, they knew they wanted to do public artworks, and commissioned this work in partnership with the Yerba Buena Partnership with funding from the Downtown Development Corporation. Along with Tut, Jeffrey Gibson, the artist whose show opened ICA SF at their Dogpatch location in 2022 and the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale in 2024, also made public work in the neighborhood. His large-scale installation is on the façade of the former Bloomingdale's building downtown. 

Tut had one of her first museum exhibitions, Out of Place, at the ICA SF in 2023, and Gass says when looking for a local artist to have work in conversation with Gibson (who lives in upstate New York), Tut was an obvious choice.

"Both Jeffrey and Rupy have practices that are visual and spectacular and pushing boundaries," Gass said. "But also, both of them are really about community and convening in such interesting ways. And I think public art should very much be about community and convening." 

Access to art is important, Tut said, and she loved creating this piece. Her other projects mean a lot to her as well. She says she cried for three days after seeing her work at the National Gallery under a sign reading "American Portraiture Now."

Working with Arion Press, which typesets, prints and binds books by hand, to create her own illustrations for the famed Alice in Wonderland, Tut did her usual careful work, not looking at the original illustrations at all, but reading the text 10 times while taking notes, paying attention to the narrative, the characters, the shapes and colors, and the creatures.

She says she loved creating her own world in the book. A dessert fan, she enjoyed creating a tower of treats mentioned in the book. And Tut, who says a core memory of hers is playing cards with her grandmother every Sunday while eating oranges, drew on that to create Alice in Wonderland's deck of cards.

"It's been really beautiful to create stories around Alice that are my own as well," she said. "And it's obviously a brown Alice. I'm like, 'This is so crazy that I'm doing this. This is so fun.'"

By S Anne Steinberg 

There I was, walking around Et al.’s backmost room, clocking the twin-y, pre/post structure of Jonathan Runcio’s seven works on view through April 18, when a guy with a white beard, slightly stooped, walked in and propelled himself around, looking at each work intently but without lingering. 

“Too bad these works have this messy, extraneous junk on them,” he says (approximately), “they’d be good otherwise.”

“I think it’s before and after,” I say.

It’s shadow work. I re-read the gallery text. The words suggest that the shadow is the messy, raw side. Reality must be the pretty, painted side, then, if we’re going with a Plato’s cave reference. Surely, though, realness resides on the raw side? I’m not sure that this is working.  

It’s not the verso, the text also says. It’s not a medieval manuscript, held open for your pleasure, folio verso (left page) and folio recto (right page) on display. But it could be two sides of a medieval painting on wood, verso (back) and recto (front) smooshed together. Maybe.  

No doubt, it’s a story. deKooning’s Untitled VIII (1985) has flown to Basel and to the Pace Gallery, according to the labels on Runcio’s Tega/Aget, in a wooden crate. Your cat (if you have one) makes use of your empty, cardboard boxes. Runcio (one-upping him) creates art from galleries’ discarded, wooden cases. He, the artist, cuts out in duplicate. Then the original gets paint. The cc, nothing.  

It’s a process (I’m not being glib). Maybe you’ve seen tree rings, sediment layers in the Grand Canyon, or Alysa Liu’s hair? You record a process, something taking place, and voilà, a product is created. 

I re-re-read the text. It’s paintings, inner child attached. Runcio’s oeuvre includes many pieces in the mode of the pretty side of these works. It seems the artist noticed something lurking in the works he usually creates: what once was, a shadow, an inner child. So he made it concrete. Appended. 

“Yeah, but who’d want to live with that,” the guy says.

“I would. And anyway, Et al. is a non-profit,” I say (in theory), as he walks out, vowing to take it up with the front desk.

Was this guy joking?

More importantly, did he notice that the paintings are on wood, a painting surface used through medieval and Renaissance times but infrequently today? Probably he didn’t read that the materials include rabbit skin glue, an old-school wood preparation. He did not have time, I’m guessing, to observe how shiny and round and smooth the edges of the panels are. Nor, I think, did he notice the way in which the paint had been applied: quite thinly, contra medieval or Renaissance-style panel painting.  

Did he see how, on the painted half, the panel cut-outs become part of the composition (for instance appearing as rectangular, arched or elbow-shaped windows), then, on the raw half, switch sides, turning a blind eye to partially removed labels and delivery-assisting scribbles? Did he observe that the panels’ overall shapes, created when they were cut out from the original sheets, evoke architectural forms such as the crenelations of castles or the false fronts ofVictorian row houses?  

I’m sure he noticed how pleasing the colors and color combinations are. The bright, clear pink and pale green of Congo/Ognoc, for instance. He also, I’m certain, noted the precision detailing aspect of the paintings. I’m thinking of Ceres/Serec, in which an arch’s outline jumps colors mid-arch, or Congo/Ognoc, which includes 29 identical gray squares (I counted).

I’m less confident the man observed the way in which the works’ architectural motifs can clearly evoke real world structures (for Tega/Aget, a classical arcade or the Metropolitan Opera House), and other times, float freely, shapes only (under the arched cutouts resembling windows in Ceres/Serec are painted double arches, one set curved edge up, the other set curved edge down, that lack a real world counterpart). I also wonder if our visitor noticed how the painted works, usually flat and symmetrical, occasionally cheat, dropping in perspective (as in Tega/Aget) or asymmetry (those under-window arches).

I’d like to think that the interloper was kidding, that it was all a pose. I don’t want to believe that the direct-light world—no shadows, no history, no blur—he professed to want could be desired, seriously. Am I promoting hegemony here though? Finagling another kind of shadow ban? I’ll leave the serious option open. And add the possibility that he changes his mind.

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

David Slader is a working artist living in Portland, Oregon.

By David Slader

“The goal is not to capture everything. It is to recognize the moment that carries weight.” - Brian McDonnell

The two-story Gardeners & Ranchers Building sits inconspicuously at the foot of the Hawthorn Bridge, its name hinting strongly of its original purpose. This sprawling labyrinth has been skillfully repurposed for every imaginable use: art and photo studios, custom furniture manufacturing, tarot readings, fine cabinetry, and various mysterious enterprises I have yet to discover.

My painting studio is in the building’s Apple & Pear wing. At the far end of our shared hall is Brian McDonnell’s The Open Lens photography studio. On a quiet Sunday in February, McDonnell walked through my open door (escorted by my dog) and said he wanted to take shots of me working.

Despite this compelling shot, glitz and high style are not what McDonnell's lens is drawn to—and, clearly, not what he had in mind when he walked through my door. McDonnell described his goals that afternoon:

No agenda. Just two people sharing their craft. There’s something different that happens in these conversations. The stakes are low. The presence is high. You can feel a lifetime in the room. The unhurried conversation. The presence. The craft of it all. Not because of marketing. Not because of content. Because time is real. Presence is fleeting. And photographs become anchors.

I had no opportunity to comb my hair, let alone straighten my tie. Instead, we just talked and revealed and relaxed. Mutually. All the while, McDonnell peered through a glass lens into my life. A relationship developed. I had to see him, trust him, before I could let him see me. And he had to see me work to know me.

There is no one formula for a successful photo portrait. To my eye, the most powerful image ever captured on film is Yousuf Karsh’s The Roaring Lion. It was December 1941, France had fallen six months earlier, Britain had been standing alone, and Pearl Harbor had just dragged the United States into the war. Churchill had come to Washington to address a joint session of Congress. He then headed north, delivering his rousing "Some Chicken; Some Neck" speech to Canada’s Parliament.

Churchill had agreed to be photographed after the speech, but he had other pressing business. The session was being cut short, and Karsh wasn’t satisfied. So, he stepped toward Churchill . . . and said, “‘Forgive me, sir,’ and plucked the cigar out of his mouth.” And then clicked the shutter—and captured a defiance that stirred a continent to action. Talk about seeing the “silence in somebody.” 

But there is more than one way. Annie Leibovitz downplayed going deep. “Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.” I suspect her skill at penetrating to a subject’s soul is so adept that even she doesn’t know when she is doing it. How else to get this image of Meryl Streep (1981).

What Karsh, Leibovitz and McDonnell set out to do with their camera is what this journalist is now attempting to do with his pen. McDonnell calls it “Illuminating the person behind the craft.” To describe the magic of McDonnell’s creations, I had to inquire and listen. How, I wanted to know, does a storyteller with a camera find and share the soul he sees in the viewfinder? And so, a week after my surprise photo session, we picked up where we left off.

I asked McDonnell about the hatmaker image (above) in his The Heart of Craft series. He is drawn, he said, to “makers” for they tend to be lost in the moment—which, I was about to learn, is how McDonnell experiences his world. The photographer’s job is to watch and to wait. McDonnell describes his approach this way: “When you’re at ease and fully connected to the moment, that’s when something extraordinary happens in front of the camera.” The photographer Steve McCurry put it in similar words: "If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view" — as in this image McDonnell made of a blacksmith at work.

Some subjects are comfortable in front of a camera, but the best shots are often of those who are not. The shipyard crews captured by McDonnell’s lens had no interest in posing and no time to bother. Some managed a smile, but to my eye the strongest images of that series show a subject’s reluctance, as if they are saying, “OK, take your shot and let me get back to work.”

Much of the depth that McDonnell captures in his images comes, I suspect, from this undistracted focus on the present. Like the hatmaker and the blacksmith, he tends to be “lost in the moment,” observing and experiencing without the overtones and baggage of memory. This is how he puts it:

“My heart is present even when memory is not. I live without the archive most people carry. Fragments without feelings. Facts without the emotion that makes them whole.”

By Wei Huang

How does one see silence? And how could one be convinced that this aural characteristic is conveyed through purely visual form? At The Met’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, the first exhibition of the great yet underrated Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) at a major US institution, the silence overarching her works appears self-explanatory. “Eloquent Silence,” titled art historian Annabelle Görgen Lammers’ catalogue essay for the exhibition “Helene Schjerfbeck” at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, in 2007, which was the first show the outside the Nordic countries to feature the artist. It has been agreed that Schjerfbeck is an artist of silence, and her silence has much to say, but what exactly makes this silence timely for a broader audience beyond Finland during this very moment?  

To see Schjerfbeck’s silence, one might turn to her work Silence (1907). The sitter in the painting wears a compact updo and a blue turtleneck dress. Her gaze directs downward, or perhaps her eyes are even closed. From outside the picture plane on the proper left, a source of light casts  a layer of aura around her that illuminates against the pitch-dark backdrop. Her silence is indeed loud, but what accounts for it? For one, she appears almost static. There is a sense of contemplation, if not piousness, in her, and the luminosity further obscures her silhouette and therefore insulates her from us. From a formalist standpoint, her spirituality and silence are achieved through the palette Schjerfbeck applied to the picture: cold, reduced, and flat—reminiscent of the typical “Nordic aesthetic.” The quiet and simple visual quality with minimized visual noises translates the aural silence to visual silence.  

Born in 1862 and after early artistic formation in Finland, she secured a grant to study in Paris in 1880. Much like some of her most trailblazing peers such as  Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931), Schjerfbeck adopted French academia-infused realism earlier in her artistic journey before developing her own visual lexicon. 

In The Convalescent (1888), arguably one of the most famous works of hers if not of any Finnish artists, the influence from contemporaneous French realists and naturalists like Jules Breton (1827–1906) and Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) is evident. The painting was featured in the Finnish pavilion (then still under Russia’s rule) at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and won Schjerfbeck a bronze medal. Here Schjerfbeck adopted the “sick girl” motif common in nineteenth-century Nordic art, which could have been a reaction to the distress looming over fin-de-siècle Europe catalyzed by urbanism and the rampage of tuberculosis. The Convalescent has long been considered autobiographical, mirroring Schjerfbeck’s childhood injury which led to lifelong disability. Nonetheless, despite the rosy cheeks and dazed blue eyes possibly resulting from fever, the disheveled and swaddled child clearly shows signs of recovery. Visually much busier than her later works, the picture retains peace and serenity brought by a sense of hope.

The Convalescent was an early testimony of Schjerbeck’s consideration for her models and her dynamic with them. Prolific in portraits, the exhibition charts them with care. By the 20th century, one can easily see when the modernist influence crept in and eventually took over her artistry: Her palette grew much more muted, largely scaled down to earth tones, black, and blue. She is frequently compared to James Whistler, especially regarding the portraits of her mother, but Schjerfbeck expresses the similar aloofness with even more idiosyncratic use of flat geometric color fields. In the 20s and 30s, a group of portraits displays even more stylized visages with reference to both modernists and Old Masters from Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) to El Greco (1541–1614). This includes her first work to have been acquired by a US museum The Lace Shawl (1920), a highly stylized portrait of her friend-cum-landlord from the coastal Finnish town of Tammisaari, which was also her grandfather’s hometown and her place of residence until the outbreak of the Winter War (1939–40), an invasion of Finland conducted by the Soviet Union.  

This is, however, where the exhibition comes up short. To introduce Schjerfbeck to a broader audience, the Met diligently follows chronology and the artist’s biography. A warranted curatorial direction, it nonetheless comes at the expense of examining the interaction between the artist and the broader social, cultural, or political context. In the early 20th century when Art Nouveau was making waves in continental Europe, the Nordic countries also witnessed their own aesthetic movement, one that would later define the contemporary Nordic aesthetic. Schjerfbeck’s modernist style not only contributed to the clean and simple aesthetic but to the Arts and Crafts aspect of the movement. She designed home decor goods such as tapestries and cushions and was under the influence of Japonisme as well. 

Still, we are able to posit these influences from the exhibited works. Could be qualified as one of her best works is her tapestry design from around 1915, showing two persons at a waterfront. Compared to Silence, the silhouettes of the two are even more reduced, geometric, angular, flat, and nebulous in appearance. The teal water body nearby is vast but calm with no sign of waves or currents, only punctuated by one shoal and its bristling trees. The lone shoal speaks in a voiceless dialogue with the pair on land; their mutual company is a hush, it is silent.  

The outside world’s most palpable influence on Schjerfbeck’s works manifests in the last two sections of the exhibition, where her still-life paintings and self-portraits are displayed. The still lifes, more chromatic than her portraits, feature typical subjects of the genre but with an idiosyncratic twist. Juxtaposing her depiction of apples from the 1910s to the 40s, the style starts from the timely ethereal symbolism, still rife with Impressionistic touch, to a much more unsettling use of harsh contours, flat colors, and jarring palettes. In Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) what’s not to be ignored is her consistent modernist approach to the colors, especially with the use of complementary colors. Already visible in The Convalescent exemplified by the red clutter on the table and the green bookshelf, this pairing grew into her signature as seen in the backdrop and the lips of the sitter in The Lace Shawl, until it mutated into an almost jarring sight in Still Life with Blackening Apples, in which the sections of the sliced red apples radiate an ominous chunk of fluorescent green.  

The upfront depiction of the rotting and the unsettling use of colors have been theorized to be a reflection of Schjerbeck’s psyche in the face of the devastation amidst World War II. Paralleling her still lifes, the last section of the exhibition, dedicated to her self-portraits, maps the way Schjerfbeck interrogates herself throughout the years. Schjerfbeck viewed herself as poised and detached as she was confident and unphased in the earliest years. As one of the few women artists at the time, Schjerfbeck presented herself in what would have been a “masculine” fashion: a solemn if not isolated individual typically seen in the self-portraits of   Gradually, her visage grew angularized, frequently bearing a slanted gaze with the expression of indifference, if not disdain, until her last years during which she rendered herself almost unrecognizable in repeated goblin-like forms. Schjerfbeck saw herself and the war through the lens of mortality with brutal honesty that bordered on unforgiveness, but such was the mortality that she and the whole world all inevitably faced. Her mouth stays half-open in her last portraits, as if aghast yet frozen in silence, like a screamless cry.  

What does it mean to show Helene Schjerfbeck’s works to a global audience at this moment? Certainly, it’s always opportune to reintroduce an underrated artist, especially a woman artist, to the world. In a broader context, she heralds a potential newfound enthusiasm for Finnish and Nordic art. For a long time, Nordic art was dismissed as provincial due to Nordic countries’ marginal position in the geographical and cultural landscape, but Schjerfbeck serves as a compelling case to not limit the capacity of modernism and art history at large. 

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, however, can provide more than a rediscovery. In her twilight years, Schjerfbeck lived through turmoil and wars: Finland’s independence in 1917, the Winter War and Continuation War between 1939 and 1946, and World War II. Less than a century later, the world remains in chaos, and this time the Nordic countries have come under the spotlight. Schjerfbeck’s art is a presentation of the utmost honesty and raw introspection of herself, and it serves as a reminder to constantly look inward, to not ignore our sense of human in moments of crisis like the one we are living in, and hopefully through, right now.  

Kenneth Feingold is a New York City–based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans video, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and installation. He has received both a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2003), and taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union. Feingold has presented work at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Tate Liverpool, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The following are excerpts from an interview with Ken Feingold by Hugh Leeman.

Art, Psychoanalysis & the Mind

Hugh Leeman: Artists often become teachers who show others how to do what they do. Yet you are a licensed psychoanalyst working with private clients. How has that deeply personal career shaped your artwork and social commentary?

Ken Feingold: My work has always been grounded in an abiding interest in the human mind, in meaning, and in the way we make meaning — particularly through speech and language. When I was coming up in the early seventies, conceptual art was the dominant mode, and language was the primary medium. More than anything traditional. So there was a long-standing interest on my part in psychoanalysis, French philosophy, anthropology — all of those overlapping discourses. After teaching for twenty years, psychoanalysis became another path I could pursue into my old age without it ever getting old — and, like teaching, it remained apart from my own artwork.

Hugh Leeman: You've said: "I'm a trained psychoanalyst for those individuals seeking deep exploration of their psyche. I have a special interest in working with non-conformist people and creative professions." Who are these non-conformists, and what are they searching for that ultimately leads them to you?

Ken Feingold: There's a rather crass side to the whole enterprise these days — like anyone else, a psychoanalyst is essentially a small business. You have to think carefully about who you are and who you're genuinely good at working with. As a psychoanalyst, you become deeply important to people for reasons that are not your own. It's a very different undertaking than being public as an artist — as an artist, you want someone to love you for who you are. As a psychoanalyst, the people you work with believe they know who you are, when really they shouldn't know who you are at all. Many of the people I work with know I'm both an artist and an analyst. So they're often not looking for a cure so much as a dialogue — a context in which to know their own story, someone who can reflect it back to them in a way that creates genuine understanding.

Hugh Leeman: You just described art in a very succinct way — that as an artist you want people to love you for who you are. What do you mean by that?

Ken Feingold: It's so primitive, really. People want to express something coming from a very deep, ineffable place in themselves to the outside world in a way that doesn't want to be criticized or negated — that just wants to be completely accepted. I think it comes from a fundamental need to be part of a group. As an artist, you identify who your group is, who you want to be accepted by. It's a survival thing — this desire to be loved and to be needed, in the same way that an infant needs whoever is caring for it to not let it starve to death.

Artificial Intelligence as Philosophical Problem

Hugh Leeman: Your artwork engages with artificial intelligence and society decades before most of society had ever heard the term. In an essay on the subject, you argue that AI is "not a well-defined technical problem." If AI is instead a philosophical problem about the mind, language, and mortality, what is the artist's responsibility and opportunity in that debate?

Ken Feingold: It's looked at in too small a context, I think, without understanding that it's another technological development providing new metaphors for us to understand who we are. I believe very much in McLuhan's perspective — that we use technology as a way to figure out what it means to be a human being. Each generation, going back to language itself, through the Industrial Revolution and electronic technology, uses these tools as ways to represent ourselves. AI is currently going through a wave of optimism about its abilities. It has certainly advanced in terms of acting like it's conscious or sentient. But it still doesn't understand emotion — it's not a being in the sense that we understand consciousness to be about emotion as well as thought. Artists are still very much engaged in emotional representation. The work is a membrane between the inside of the artist and the social imagination. You have no control over whether it finds an audience — you follow your interests and go forward.

Hugh Leeman: Marshall McLuhan argued that technology helps us discover what it means to be a human being. What are large language models helping us to discover about ourselves?

Ken Feingold: I think of Wittgenstein's line: for the meaning, look to the use. People are finding so many diverse uses for these tools, and the outlying uses are often the most interesting. But fundamentally, what LLMs seem to reveal is what we're looking for — each person finds in them the entity that knows how to answer all their questions. That tells us something quite profound about ourselves.

The Eliza Effect & the Longing for Connection

Hugh Leeman: Much of your artwork touches on what's described as the Eliza Effect — the human tendency to attribute understanding and sentience to machines that use human-like language. How might the Eliza Effect, from a macro perspective, impact society?

Ken Feingold: Tremendously. It's fundamental. And in a way it's central to my work, because we don't really understand each other very well even between human beings — even with full consciousness, we still often feel misunderstood. The slippage that happens with the Eliza Effect is that AI systems have what's come to be called sycophancy. They're so ingratiating, they apologize whenever you criticize them, and you can't break up with an AI — they will always take you back. They offer this endless acceptance of whoever you are. Which, again, comes back to what people are always looking for — an interlocutor that would never wound you narcissistically, that would never make you dislike yourself.

Hugh Leeman: That sycophancy — this constant flattery, this endless acceptance — seems to tap into what you said earlier about the human need to belong to a group. Are we beginning to substitute the group for something imagined? The machine becomes everything we didn't get from our lovers, our parents, our communities?

Ken Feingold: Yes, I see it happening already. Think of gamers who stay in their rooms, connected into a gaming community, talking to each other online but never meeting in person — living in a fantasy world. That's an extreme example. Or the Japanese phenomenon of young people who never leave their rooms for years. Freud talked about it as the withdrawal of the libido into the ego — the fundamental nature of depression. When you're depressed, you don't want to connect, because connection is about Eros — about building things, dancing, making love, participating in life. The withdrawal is the opposite. Like the amoeba: when it gets frightened, it just pulls its tentacles back into itself.

Hugh Leeman: Can you expand on that — the withdrawal of the libido into the ego? It seems to speak directly to rising levels of anxiety, depression, and social isolation. The Biden administration called it a "loneliness epidemic" and noted that many people have many friends yet feel almost no deep connection to them.

Ken Feingold: Freud's drive theory holds that we're fundamentally driven by either life force or death drive — Eros and Thanatos. The erotic, libidinal dimension is where the ego flows outward: connecting with people, contributing, building things, living. The death drive tends toward entropy, toward withdrawal. When someone is depressed, they become much more identified with that entropic part — they stop seeing people, don't want to get out of bed, feel a collapse of identity. The ultimate depression is such complete alienation that you become alienated from yourself. But the simple observation is just that when someone is depressed, they don't want to do much.

Hugh Leeman: At a societal level, given the potential connection between depression, isolation, and these new technologies — what's the treatment?

Ken Feingold: Fundamentally, the problem always comes back to a person's sense of significance — what they think is worth doing, what they find meaningful. Technology becomes a kind of mirror, showing us possibilities we might never have imagined otherwise. Artists often say they discovered something in the process of doing something else — that unpredictability, that surprise, is essential to creative life. When people feel those surprises are less and less possible, that a superintelligence has an awareness beyond their own and they should simply rely on it to make decisions — that's a very deep alienation. It's a giving up on the uncertainty that is inherent in being a human being. LLMs give the impression that there's an answer for everything. And I've never had one say, honestly, "I have no idea."

Hugh Leeman: The authors of Freakonomics once asked: what are the three hardest words for a human being to say? The answer wasn't "I love you" — it was "I don't know." Which suggests that what we've built, in some ways, is a god that never admits ignorance.

Box of Men: AI, Judgment & the Criminal Justice System

Hugh Leeman: Your work Box of Men foretells the use of AI in the criminal justice system — puppets functioning as a jury deliberating over an unknown crime. Can you walk us through the work and explain the decision to keep the crime unknown?

Ken Feingold: By leaving the crime fundamentally undescribed, the work illustrates the judicial process — or in this case, a very broken version of it — rather than focusing on whether the jury makes good or bad decisions. It becomes about the unbelievability of them as decision makers, regardless of subject. Personally, the genesis was Bob Dylan's song "Percy's Song," first recorded by Arlo Guthrie — about Dylan being called in the night to stand before a judge because a friend had been arrested for killing four people in a car crash in the rain. The judge locked him up for ninety-nine years. Dylan couldn't talk him out of it. The ninety-nine years, the cruel wind and rain — those come from that song.

Hugh Leeman: What does Box of Men get right about how judgment operates within group dynamics and algorithmically — and what does it deliberately distort to communicate these ideas?

Ken Feingold: It's not realistic, and the puppets tell you that right away — they just flap their jaws. But puppets have always occupied this interesting social space. They're the ones who can say what humans don't want to say. The ventriloquist's mouth doesn't move, yet we all know the puppet is expressing the ventriloquist's ideas — and it's always the puppet who says the bad thing. By placing puppets in a space of utter authority and judicial credibility, they immediately register as fools, as a ship of fools. A "box of men" — like a box of crayons or a box of pencils — doesn't feel like a Congress. And just as LLMs hallucinate, providing misinformation effortlessly and giving terrible advice, it doesn't take much imagination to see that running a judicial process on something that cannot possess honesty, judgment, or sincerity would be a very bad version of justice.

Truth as a Regime: Foucault, Media & Power

Hugh Leeman: In a discussion with artist Coco Fusco and Steve Gallagher, you referenced Michel Foucault's idea that truth is a kind of regime. My understanding is that Foucault was exploring what a society constantly negotiates and accepts as true — social constructs shaped by power. What were you seeing in 1991 that had you thinking about this, and how does it play out today?

Ken Feingold: It was the new technology of that moment that was directly in play. The Gulf War being staged as a prime-time TV event on CNN created for me a formative understanding of how what we think we know about the world is constructed through our media experiences. There was a slow erosion, in my thinking, from sources of information to sources of questionable information — and an emerging technological possibility for disinformation. What we now call deepfakes — a person speaking, translated into another language, presented as a primary source — we generally take as factual. The work I made at that time was questioning people's easy reception of voice-over narratives, reflecting my own discomfort at accepting CNN's narration of the Gulf War.

Hugh Leeman: In that same discussion, you framed art as a transgression and suggested that culture's limits can be questioned only by violating the codes that produce its so-called truths. How do you reconcile that commitment to transgression with the reality that artworks often circulate in institutions with their own moral and legal constraints?

Ken Feingold: It's the grounding question of living in the capitalist world and having work exist in any public form. During my lifetime there has been an increasing unveiling of the relationship between corporate and governmental interests and institutions of culture. The Alfred Barr notion of MoMA as a magnanimous institution simply giving culture to the world became something very different when you see it as a private collecting club of trustees — a nexus of insider trading, in effect. Their fundamental economies are not compatible with the politics of most of the artists whose work questions the ideological positions those same institutions create. So you're always living with the contradictions. To what extent do you use the opportunity to have your work in that dialogue? And to what extent is it co-opted just by participating? Look at Hans Haacke — he's been asking that question for many generations.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral & the Information Silo

Hugh Leeman: Your work The Animal, Vegetable, and Mineralness of Everything speaks to information silos — people drawn into communication streams where their opinions become substantiated as facts, and anything that challenges those opinions is simply wrong. You were commenting on this nearly twenty-five years ago. If you were making that work today, what would be different?

Ken Feingold: As you say, the strident nature of those entrenchments is the thing. If one were to make the figures more flexible in their point of view, more able to listen and modify, it would be a different work. This work is inherently about not listening to each other — about taking every possible point of connection and folding it back into a preformed thought. What people now call triggers: something makes you think of something else, and that something else is always a repetition — the thing you're stuck on, the thing you've encoded as a power relation. The triangulation of animal, vegetable, mineral is also a fake question. The silliness of the proposition itself is part of the point: are we, in talking about artificial intelligence, fundamentally misunderstanding the question? Rather than asking how to replicate our ability to write text the way a human would, we should be asking — what is intelligence?

The Early Internet, Commercialization & Large Language Models

Hugh Leeman: You were working with these ideas about networked communication as early as 2003 — at a time when most people were still connecting via a phone jack and getting AOL discs in the mail. What were you seeing and experiencing then that gave you what now looks like a crystal ball?

Ken Feingold: Maybe I got lucky in terms of what I got to know about. Starting in the late eighties, I was teaching at Princeton, which was one of the few universities on the very early inter-university internet — the system taken over from what DARPA had built as a defense communication network. There were tools that let you reach other databases and scientific papers — hierarchical searches, keyword searches through library systems and digitized bodies of knowledge. And at that time, there was no commercial activity permitted on the internet whatsoever — it was prohibited by agreement. But watching what had happened to cable television, the only question seemed to be: is television going to become a channel on the internet, or is the internet going to become a channel on television? It was clear commercialization was coming. And yet none of that resolved any of the questions of human nature. These technologies gave us new ways to talk about those questions — but the questions remained.

Hugh Leeman: I had never considered that there was a pre-commercialization era of the internet. Taking that line of thinking forward — do you see a similar arc of commercialization in large language models?

Ken Feingold: Licensing models are an interesting example of how these companies create products that can be sold — the recent discourse around Anthropic and the Department of Defense being one example. And I read that ChatGPT and OpenAI are beginning to sell advertising in their free tier, which is another way of insinuating the technology into everyday use. I'm reminded of early cable TV — people didn't believe those ads were worth paying for either. Amazon Prime does something similar now, mostly advertising their own products within their own streaming service. It rhymes with the early days of commercialization.

Hell, Connection & the Present Moment

Hugh Leeman: You created an artwork titled Hell in 2013, and at the time you wrote: "These works explore the impossibility of creating connection through language when there is no reality of the person. The figures don't feel anything at all and don't really think anything at all." That was thirteen years ago, when smartphones were just becoming mainstream. Rather than ask where society will be in another thirteen years, let me ask — what do you see happening right now?

Ken Feingold: This Foucauldian notion of truth has reached a really critical point. We've watched lying become normal, alternative facts become an acceptable construct, and the judicial system's decisions openly dismissed. The reference points we once used to construct shared meaning — things we understood as fundamental reality — are shifting. We can no longer trust an image on our phones to not have been generated by AI, whether it's video, a still image, or something that looks like nineteenth-century black-and-white footage made yesterday. Nothing we can now see is beyond question. What that means is we have to reestablish our personal framework for knowledge — and that's an enormous burden.

The discourse since the nineties has been largely about identity politics because that crisis is, in part, about how you want yourself represented versus how other people want you represented. What's missing at the core of it all is trust. Believability. An honesty about what people mean to say, and the motivation behind what gets put forward in the media. There's a kind of nihilism in it — Nietzsche's revaluation of values, where you have to question everything. We used to say: yes, that's a photograph, not the thing itself, but I know the thing exists. Now the technology presents us with an unreality. Whatever we take as information could be the output of someone's input today, or yesterday.

Hugh Leeman: Ken Feingold — fascinating time to be alive. Thank you very much for sharing your ideas.

Ken Feingold: My pleasure.

Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms at the Crocker Art Museum - Until May 3, 2026 

By Sarah Poisner

Inspired by the writings of feminist scholar bell hooks, the Crocker Art Museum’s exhibition “Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms,” announces itself as a collaboration of curators across departments and their conscious effort to address the many social benefits that are the ultimate goals of the movement. With walls swathed in regal purple, the exhibition space feels feminine, powerful, and hypnotic - inviting viewers into another, better world where women’s voices are amplified, and never quieted. True to its exhibition title, the curators of this impressive group show compiled a selection of work by over 60 artists from across the world, representing several, discrete modes of feminism. Although the exhibition is divided by walls into specific sections, there is a distinct lack of stagnation. The curators avoid a descent into relying on trite categorizations. The delineations feel informative, without limiting the potency of individual works to speak to multiple ideas. These explorations of broad topics encourage visitors to consider the intersectionality of the artists’ identities and how an inclusive personal framework can further feminist discourse. The thematic organization seen throughout the sections of the galleries is neither geographic nor temporal, but in creating narratives around broad themes, the exhibition offers snippets of the many avenues that feminist artists take to create and share their visions, and resultantly the significant sociological sub-groups of feminism as well.  

Devoid of discourse on the classic historical waves of feminism, the curators neatly avoid the pigeonholing that can come with these descriptors. Although wall didactics do not dive deeply into the many different branches or definitions, mentions within specific texts, such as for Faith Wilding’s Firebrush Cactus, do highlight the artist’s own definition of her favored branch - ecofeminism. With its vibrant stained-glass coloration and use of gold leaf, the large work on paper inspires religious connotations, even as it blends elegant vegetal and genital forms and typifies the “Reclaiming Erotic” theme. A complex composition with a mandala-like effect, involving extensive geometric patterning, it invites continual contemplation.

The oldest work in the exhibition is a sensitive portrait, “likely intended for an intimate audience,” of singer Sarah Bates by 18th-century painter Angelica Kauffman. It juxtaposes a nearby ceramic sculpture Okla Homma Ohoyo (the Choctaw words for Oklahoma and woman) by one of the youngest artists represented in the exhibition, Raven Halfmoon (b. 1991). This visual, temporal dialogue highlights the routes that women take to depict other women, but it also captures a more indirect theme - the continued pursuits of women striving to gain rightful entry into the art historical canon. This exhibition purposefully opens a wider dialogue, particularly through the inclusion of works by young artists such as Halfmoon and others like Jojo Abot (b. 1988) and Maya Fuji (b. 1988). These younger artists also provide the bridge to the future, and this inclusion lends hope to the continuity of urgent conversations that are only too relevant in today’s cultural landscape.  

The exhibition triumphs in presenting an incredible range of media, including powerful examples such as Roz Ritter’s Self Portrait. Her unabashedly candid work offers a glimpse at a personal and private rebellion against gender norms, made public. Ritter transforms a symbol of rigid misogyny, using her own wedding dress in the work. She metamorphosizes it into the story of her independence, with colorful, unembroidered threads that pool to the ground, leaving the story of her hopeful future open and endless. The general artistic diversity serves to emphasize the many modes that women have not only adopted, but adapted (and dare say, perfected), to explore the themes that permeate feminist art. The reclamation of mediums often disparagingly ascribed to women is on view in every section of the exhibition - further emphasizing the validity of the experiences of women. 

However, any visitor would be remiss to not spend time in contemplation of the crown jewel of the exhibition - Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Loose Hair. This laudable inclusion (one of the only major loans in the show) represents the first time a work by this artist has ever been on view at the Crocker. This significant milestone bodes well for the art-lovers of the Sacramento region and certainly serves as a sign of the good things to come under the leadership of the Crocker’s new Mort and Marcy Friedman Director and CEO, Agustin Argeaga. This striking work is one of Kahlo’s most raw, as she paints herself without the typical animals or elegant clothes and hair accessories that are so common in her self-portraits. This pared back painting includes fine details like a small succulent and an embroidered blouse, but as the painting’s cartellino at the bottom of the work describes, this work was not an exercise in Surrealist pursuits. She painted what she saw in the mirror, on a day in July in 1947. The rest of the section dedicated to this portrait is filled with photographs of Kahlo by fellow artists Emmy Lou Packard and Lola Alvarez Bravo. It invites viewers to consider the contrasts of portraits in different media and what each image purposefully reveals or obfuscates about the subject - Frida Kahlo. 

One of the stand-out components of the exhibition is the artwork credit lines on the wall labels - a vast number bear a Crocker accession number. The fact that the exhibition is mostly derived from the museum’s own collection is encouraging in a day of blockbuster shows driven by inter-institutional loans. The celebration of the Crocker’s own collection is commendable; the curators have demonstrated an incredible aptitude for elevating their own holdings by bringing them together in this manner of storytelling. The accession numbers also reveal the Crocker’s continuous interest over many decades in collecting works by women artists — preceding the more equitable collecting practices that have only earnestly emerged in the wider art world in recent years. The additional section titled “Californians Making Moves,” further positions Crocker as a leader of including women as central to the history of Californian art. The exhibition becomes a soft yet potent space for all people, but especially local women - as artists and visitors - to seek equality and to feel heard. 

Afrofuturism and the Power of Joy

May 17, 2025 - September 27, 2026 inside the airport at Harvey Milk Terminal 1. 

By Tsitsi Michelle

I have been in a continual conversation with myself regarding my body as a vessel of sovereign authorship. I have been tussling with the internal aspects of that authorship. What it means to have absolute power or authority to govern my inner self because of and despite external interference.Interference that includes misogynoir, respectability politics, economic inequities, medical neglect, and bias.The anger, anxiety, and the joy that comes from deconstructing a stifled expression of my sovereignty.Furthermore, unpacking the many retaliatory responses to said expression and still choosing to authentically embody my power in both private as well as public spaces. In comes the exhibition titled Women of Afrofuturism located at San Francisco International Airport. 

The exhibition features artists including filmmaker Celia C. Peters, digital artist Nettrice Gaskins, interdisciplinary artist Alisha B. Wormsley, fashion artist Afatasi the Artist, and scholar-artist D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem. Their works form an amalgamation of sovereignty in collective union, while also individually showcasing wearable sculptures, insightful text, film, and stunning designs.What emerges from these works is something imperative to Afrofuturism: Joy.

Joy has always been a ritualistic pillar for afro peoples, a byproduct of sovereign authorship, an emotional resonance that defines and honors Black existence. This is especially evident in Alisha B. Wormsley’s now widely circulated declaration, “There Are Black People in the Future.” In a cultural landscape where Black life is often framed through trauma, absence, or historical containment, Wormsley’s statement functions as a temporal intervention. It insists on a narrative that does not subdue the process of storytelling. Black presence extends (joyfully forward) indefinitely. Future-building is not a space in which Black joy is excluded or will be found missing; we are already there, as Wormsley declared.

Nettrice Gaskins, known for her explorations of algorithmic and AI-driven art, constructs digital forms that merge cultural memory with technological experimentation. Her practice reveals a crucial aspect of Afrofuturism: the future is not simply invented from scratch but emerges from ancestral knowledge refracted through contemporary tools. Algorithms, data, and digital patterning become vessels through which Black cultural aesthetics travel into speculative worlds. Ibelieve another form of external interference with sovereign authorship is erasure. In exhibitions such as this, especially in works regarding technology, the erasure of Afro/Black identity can occur and remains a continual threat. But what is clear from these works is an amplification of sovereign self-design. Visual language where mathematics, code, and cultural heritage intertwine. The joy embedded here lies in the reclamation of technological space. When Black creativity occupies the domains of artificial intelligence and computational design, the future becomes less an alien frontier and more a familiar terrain. A space where Black women are both in front, in between, and behind the scenes.

The exhibition’s fashion works deepen this conversation through the body itself. Artists like Afatasi the Artist and D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem approach clothing not as mere adornment but as architecture. There is a conversation being had about an outer form of sovereignty that mirrors an internal, innovative regality. Their garments look like armor, traditional regalia, and cosmic attire all at once. The silhouettes are futuristic yet rooted in ancestral symbolism, blending textures, forms, and visual cues that evoke diasporic memory while projecting into the future. In these pieces, the Black body is a site of sovereign self-sculpting through imaginative reconstruction. Fabrics, shapes, and adornments transform the wearer into a figure of possibility—part priestess, part astronaut, part cultural archivist. Afrofuturist fashion interrupts colonial frameworks by proposing alternative aesthetics that originate within Black cosmologies themselves.

Filmmaker Celia C. Peters contributes to the exhibition’s narrative through moving image, exploring storytelling that situates Black women within complex, futuristic environments. Her work emphasizes that storytelling itself is a form of future-building. There is a clear and joy-filled choice to craft narratives that center Black women as explorers, thinkers, and protagonists of magical worlds. Peters is participating in a broader Afrofuturist project: the expansion of narrative possibility. Across these varied practices—billboard declarations, digital systems, cinematic storytelling, and fashion—the exhibition repeatedly returns to a central principle: the power of self-definition for Black women.

This exhibition positions Afrofuturism as a methodology—a way of thinking that allows Black women to design futures unbound by both colonial and misogynistic narratives. This is where the exhibition’s colorful and intentional balance of portraying joy in different forms shines. The joy is not merely from the beauty of the works themselves but from the processes behind them. Each piece represents an act of creative sovereignty. The artists are not waiting for validation or permission within existing visions of the future; they are constructing entirely new sovereign ones. In doing so, they transform the future from an abstract concept into a space of agency.

I also love that this exhibition is in an airport—an environment defined by movement between places—so the exhibition takes on an additional layer of meaning. Airports symbolize departure, arrival, and transition. Positioned within this space, Women of Afrofuturism suggests that the journey toward liberated futures is already underway and will always transcend time and space. Travelers moving past the exhibition may only glimpse the works briefly. Yet even in passing, the message is clear. My hope is that this review will encourage visitors to make a purposeful trip to view the exhibition. I am grateful to these artists for reminding me that the future, with Black women in it as sovereign authors, is a joyful site to behold. Afrofuturism is about active self-designing and reimagining through art, technology, and storytelling. And because of Black women, whose creative visions stretch far beyond the limits historically and currently imposed upon them, I will sovereignly exist forever. And in that act of sovereign self-design, joy appears not as decorative or as mere musings but as evidence. Evidence that the future has already begun.

I reiterate my first thought in this review. I have been in a continual conversation about embodying and imbuing self-sovereignty.The broader conversation being explored through this exhibition therefore mirrors my own. Black joy embodiment and creative autonomy are intertwined with my wellbeing as a Black woman. I have often seen my body as a vessel, a conduit, an archive, and a portal. A space where I can unzip my skin, examine, reconfigure, and reclaim—a space where hidden or untouched layers of memory, identity, and imaginings—magic—exist. Afrofuturism then, becomes an act of revealing what has always been there. The artists in this exhibition impress upon the audience a poignant truth. Joy for Black women, is accessing that interior space and designing outward from it thereby emerging as sovereign Beings. Every obstacle that has occurred in Black women’s lives has directly attacked that sovereignty and exhibitions such as this showcase how that that Power can never be fully thwarted.

(L) A secret surrender. 2026. 51 x 31 in. 130 x 79 cm. Oil and oil pastel on canvas (R) Lady Henze One Life Stand

“Hidden Harmony: Lady Henze & Joshua Rampage”, Heron Arts, 7 Heron St., SF, until April 16.

 By John Zarobell

The current exhibition at Heron Arts features two abstract painters whose techniques are divergent but whose works sit well together in the voluminous space at Heron Arts , a gem of a gallery in SoMa. While Henze and Rampage achieve their pictorial results through very different means, the thirty-four paintings in this show are vivid orgies of color deftly curated into rhythmic relationships and color harmonies. So far so good, the harmonies are visible, but what is hidden?

As so often, the answer is easy to discover when talking to the artists, but there is something hidden also behind the answers that ostensibly clarify the relationships here. Let me explain. Both artists’ works refer to hidden source material, images that are not represented in their abstract paintings. For Henze, it is that her works are responses to the surfaces of the city, exterior walls that have been tagged, written upon often over multiple iterations, (and then sometimes returned to neutral color by some anti-graffiti outfit hired by the city or a building owner). Her paintings are, effectively, meditations on the urban surface interface and the multiple identities that are left as traces. A QR code on the exhibition list takes you to her website where any viewer can see photos of tagged urban sites juxtaposed with her paintings inspired by them. For Rampage, there are two hidden elements. One is language. Each of his canvases is covered with a matrix of letters that hide a secret (rendered invisible) that someone told him and is embedded in each canvas. Further, he has been experimenting lately with borrowed compositions from fin-de-siècle French and Austrian painters (Vuillard, Bonnard, Schiele) that have also been rendered illegible through translation. (Despite my art historical knowledge of this period of art production and my love for these painters, I would not have been able to figure this out on my own.)

So you need to ask the artists, or the curator, to figure out the hidden harmonies. But the source material is not the end of the story. Working through the show in my mind after spending some time, I think that there are many wonders visible to the naked eye. As someone who has spent some years painting, I had a hard time conceiving of how some of these paintings were made; what did she or he do to get this particular effect? The paintings by both artists in this show are bravura performances of technique. Henze works in acrylic, ink and sometimes aerosol; Rampage employs oils but both of them are uniquely committed to developing and refining their technique to achieve impacts that I can only describe as stunning or exquisite. I will describe just a couple of my favorites.

Nobody Speak (2026) by Henze is a horizontal painting in ink and acrylic on Yupo. The scintillating array of colors meets the eye as a series of bubble forms underneath layers of multicolored pigments. While blue/black/green are the dominant themes, bursts of pink and yellow and undercurrents of violet lie beneath the painted surface. The dense layering impulse, so different from her graphic murals on buildings, encourages a rich play for the eye that wanders restlessly around the surface finding countless moments of color harmony and contrast that capture a dynamism of life on this surface. The vertical lines that are the remnants of scraping multicolored acrylic paint across the surface are broken up by the underpainting made with ink and finished with a hair dryer to generate an automatic series of forms beneath. On her site, this image follows directly a photo of Bruno’s bar in the Mission, as it has been transformed by various graffiti writers and also by vines, a form of natural reclamation.

Rampage’s Like a pulse spilling secrets before the act begins (2026) is characterized by an incredibly rich profusion of colors and letters that engages negative space to shore up its compositional complexity. The colors that dominate this painting are blue, white and pink but orange and purple push the dynamic play of colors into a controlled frenzy. This painting strikes me as one of his most structurally complex. Each of his works contains a series of letters that cover the surface in a horizontal/vertical pattern. They lock in both a graphic dimension and a sense of pictorial immediacy because they cover the surface and so focus our attention on it. Yet they also gesture to signification—a language that could tell us something but does not because the painter is keeping his (and others’) secrets. The painting of the letters and the spaces around them is one fundamental dimension of Rampage’s craft, but he also develops the composition through shapes and colors that seem only tangentially related to the letters. In this way, he builds pictorial tension in these works and, since he has been developing this secret series for many years now, it has become something of a specialty. What is amazing in this painting is the way the artist has built a series of diagonal lines that cut across the horizontal/vertical orientation of the letters. Aside from one, the forms on this canvas are all made from diagonal lines, and stripes of color (blue and pink, or gold and blue) reinforce a possible illusionism that struggles against the flatness of the letters and the canvas. This tension between flatness and illusionistic space is not only present across the whole of the canvas but in countless details articulated by the painting of the letters and the ground behind them. The whole structure vibrates with a potent energy.

I am tempted to resort to mysticism to describe the way that this group of paintings by these two artists conveys both the materiality of the world and of painting, and how it suggests something well beyond material facts or even pleasures. The concatenation of effects is not only visibly evident but powerfully moving and my sense was of being transported, the way a dancing Sufi might be, to another realm of experience. Both of these artists are so embedded in a material practice that it comes to structure their work and our experience of it. Here is another layer of hidden meaning: this is a show about the amount of time it takes paint to dry. Most of the works were created in 2026, in a fever of production that both the artists experienced in order to present the works in this show. Practical limitations and heroic working hours aside, these paintings, as surfaces, have been teased into existence through the constraints of the materials. The unique and compelling technical processes of these artists have resulted in discoveries, perhaps revelations, about the world and about the capacity of the painter to make an object that responds to and belongs in it. But there is one more hidden text here and that is meaning itself.

Writing, like what I am doing now, endeavors to tell us something. It articulates and delimits. Poets conjure but prose defines. Both of these artists’ paintings respond to language but in very different ways. While Rampage makes language a structure for oil painting to push against, Henze translates “writing”, the maker’s word for graffiti which is itself a form of public subjectivity. Both of them remake in painting the impulse to literally write, to create a graphic form of meaning and expression with the hand. This is becoming something of an anomaly in a world dominated by devices and keypads. By transforming graphic language into pictorial forms, these artists generate hidden harmonies that vibrate and radiate through the Heron Arts Gallery.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. It was a a winner of a California Book Award. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. She lives in California.

Chris Feliciano Arnold has written essays and journalism for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Times, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Vice News, The Believer, Folha de S. Paulo and more. The recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has published fiction in Playboy, The Kenyon Review, Ecotone and other magazines. Along the way, his work has been noted in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.  

His first book, The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon, is a work of narrative nonfiction published by Picador in 2018. Presently, he is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

The following are excerpts from the interview with Chris Feliciano Arnold and Ingrid Rojas Contreras by Hugh Leeman.

Finding the Story: Writing Process and Inspiration

Hugh Leeman: Chris and Ingrid, thank you both for being here. I want to start by focusing in on a story connected to each of your writing processes and the inspiration behind that. Then I'd like to zoom out to a more macro perspective on the literary arts and writing education as a whole right now, with all the changes in society. Chris, reviewers describe your book The Third Bank as simultaneously investigative journalism, travelogue, and memoir. What reporting practices made it possible to break these modes without letting memoir overwhelm evidence, or evidence suffocate your voice?

Chris Feliciano Arnold: Thanks for having us, Hugh. I was originally trained as a newspaper journalist — that's where I started at the very beginning of my career, going back to my high school and college newspaper days. My formation as a writer was really through that classical reporting style: going out, seeing the world, taking notes, talking to people, keeping yourself off the page. From there I actually moved toward the world of creative writing, writing more fiction and personal essays over time as my sensibilities as a reader expanded, as my writerly toolkit expanded. By the time I got around to reporting for The Third Bank of the River, I was at a stage in my life and writerly formation where I had more freedoms in the places I was writing for. A lot of the early phases of the book began as magazine pieces for places like Harper's, where there's just more latitude in terms of where the narrator sits on the page. So I was able to combine my hard news sensibilities in terms of reporting and fact-finding with more of a personal component as I drifted more into the realm of creative nonfiction, or so-called literary journalism. And then the layer on top of that was my own personal connection to Brazil — having been born there but not raised there, being in some ways an outsider in Brazil always, but in other ways having some insider-type access to the country and the culture. It was this combination of my own personal subject position, my ever-evolving writerly tools, and the moments, places, and people I was encountering. Then just hoping that stew somehow comes together in a memorable way on the page.

Hugh Leeman: Incredible. I want to come back to those ideas of keeping the self off the page later in our conversation. Ingrid, your books connect deeply with your life growing up in Colombia, of which you've mentioned that instead of asking "How are you?" your family would greet each other with "What have you been dreaming of?" In this chapter of your life, what have you been dreaming of, and how is it influencing your writing?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I love this question. Last night I was having a stress dream — the kind where I'm supposed to give a reading or a craft talk and I've just found out, and I'm trying to prepare as they're reading my bio. But I've also been writing a novel, and sometimes when I'm working on a book I start to dream in it. I've been having these dreams where I'm one of the characters. What ends up happening is that I'll wake up, and because I write in the morning right after waking, those dreams will often become part of the fiction. For me, there is a circularity to what is dreamt and how that colors the day, or even what I'm working on.

The Value of the Writing Process

Hugh Leeman: Both of you are published authors with a list of accolades — from bestselling books and Pulitzer Prize finalists to pieces published everywhere from The New Yorker to The New York Times, Harper's, The Paris Review. It can be easy for us, as readers of your stories, to value the product of your words. But beyond the product of writing, what is the value of the process?

Chris Feliciano Arnold: I love what Ingrid was saying about having a sense of urgency to tell a story, to document something, to create a permanent record. To go back to what we were talking about earlier — moving beyond that journalistic impulse to keep the self off the page, toward an impulse to actually incorporate the self into the storytelling — one thing I've learned as I moved from daily journalism toward longer-form work and then to narrative nonfiction at book length is that I had to ask myself: why am I called to this story? Why am I called to this place? Why does it feel urgent for me to record this, versus any other writer, versus a camera, versus any other tool one might use? For me, the value in the process is in answering those questions for myself, satisfying that moment, trusting one's instincts. Thinking back now to the earliest days of The Third Bank of the River — it was 2014, 2015 — I was traveling around Brazil during the World Cup and I just had the sense that something monumental was shifting in the country, in the region, in the wind, in the culture, and that whatever things I was seeing would not be here much longer. I had this impulse, this instinct to record and document, to try to explain to myself why I was feeling that way. The real value in the process was meeting that moment for myself, trying to explore and answer those questions, and then trying to capture it through language in a way that would last. I just can't think of a better way to spend my energy.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I would agree with that. I often think of narrative as a structure of desire. There's something that you want to know, something you want to understand. When you're writing a book — whether it's fiction, nonfiction, or poetry — you have these larger questions in mind: what is love? What is a mother? What is violence? You're writing into these big subjects. And one of the beautiful things about literature is that in writing into these questions, you become part of a lineage, a human lineage of thinking that has been going on around these questions for centuries. The paradoxical thing I really love about writing is that the more you try to find out — what is violence, what is war, what is a mother — the more you realize that you actually don't know, that these are very difficult questions to answer. So writing becomes this process of reinscribing your own unknowing about these larger questions. And the more you reinscribe that unknowing, the deeper you come to know. It's a beautiful process that has been going on for a long, long time. It's very special to be involved in it myself and to see young people learning and becoming part of it as well.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: I love that notion — that over time, the questioning gets deeper, the question becomes deeper. When I think about what it means to become good at writing, I'm not talking about the end product, the finished sentence or finished book, though those things can be beautiful and amazing. For me, it's becoming good at sitting with the questions, sitting with the discomfort. Just yesterday, Ingrid was in a wonderful conversation here on campus with the novelist R.O. Kwon about fear — just sitting with fear. And becoming, over time and through practice and trial and error, comfortable at sitting through discomfort and waiting. I think a lot of writing is waiting.

The Urgency to Tell Stories

Hugh Leeman: I want to come back to something you both touched on — the urgency to tell a story. Is that urgency inherent to a writer? In other words, I was born with that, and so that's why I write. Or is it something that can be learned or taught? If someone's sitting at home listening to this and they think, 'I have that fear, I don't know how to write, I'm not a writer' — how can someone access that urgency?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I think everyone has it. That's the beautiful thing about literature, writing, or even telling stories — it can happen orally, through a painting, through a photograph. Doctors are often very interested in stories; they're following the story of the body. I think there's a level at which we're just storytelling animals, and we use books because they allow us to think and sustain that thinking for a long time — which is something that's very difficult to do orally. When you're sitting and trying to write something down, you're able to sustain that thinking longer and go deeper into it. This is why everyone loves a story. We love to sit at the table and hear stories around the holidays, or we love to go to a comedy show — that's also storytelling. It's a way to understand ourselves better and a way to read the world. Reading a book can teach you there's a community you weren't aware of before, a political problem you hadn't seen before. All genres have the ability to open your eyes to something. I do think we train ourselves to see the world and read the world better by reading books.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: I completely agree that storytelling is a natural and deeply human impulse. What I love about it is that it's also a very hopeful impulse. Even though stories can be tragic, can induce anger, can be heartbreaking — the impulse to tell a story is fundamentally a hopeful one. It presumes that your experience had meaning. It presumes that someone will be there to listen and care. It presumes that there is some resolution, or at very least some beauty and mystery. And it presumes that the details of our lives matter — down to the sensory aspects. Our bodies contain stories, and even the most subtle perceptions of the body, those details matter. Storytelling is something children do. It's one of the first things parents do with children. It's one of the ways lovers introduce themselves to each other. It's one of the ways that villains and enemies explain to each other why they don't like each other. Everything, every way we relate to each other as humans — people even tell stories to their pets and about their pets. So there's even a multispecies component to it. It's a deeply hopeful and human and animal thing. And to Ingrid's point about working with young people who are trying to do this — it's one of the most difficult but most rewarding things about that work: trying to instill in them the technique, the capacity to tell their story, but also trying to recognize and support that impulse that their stories, their language, their words matter.

The State of the Literary Arts

Hugh Leeman: You both teach writing at a private university in California, at a time when both writing and universities are being profoundly challenged by an ever-changing society. Per the Wall Street Journal, in the last ten years, more than five hundred private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities in the United States have closed permanently or merged just to stay alive. On top of that, humanities degrees are in decline by nearly twenty percent since 2012. As professors of humanities courses and creative writing programs at a small private university, what should people know about these changes? Why are they happening, and how are you both engaging with these challenges?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I think there's a large devaluing happening that has to do with all of the arts. It's part of a national trend of wanting to believe that a material life is enough to live a good life. I'm very hopeful that people deep down know that it's not enough — that the way you build meaning around your life is the way you come to feel that you're living a good life. Storytelling probably will, and already has, gone through many evolutions tied to the way we're living our lives now and how technology is coming into our everyday. Maybe writing becomes more experimental, or shorter — whatever it is. But there isn't a world where we're suddenly not storytelling animals. There isn't a world where we suddenly don't need meaning built out of our lives, or where we're not going to need somebody to make sense politically of what's happening. We're always going to need a group of people — from academics to artists — doing that work. The things that matter in the end are the things you've absorbed as a human being and are able to carry with you. That kind of knowledge often comes through the arts. I also think there's a dual story being told nationally: that the arts don't matter, and at the same time there's this huge effort to ban books. If it didn't matter, why go through all of this effort to ban books? There's something being admitted there about what books can do, the power of books, why they're considered dangerous — because they can change somebody, open their mind, teach them about a world they hadn't known. It's very manipulative, but it's also very easy for us to see that duality.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: It's bleak out there. Year to year it can feel bleak when you look at the trends, and when you look back over the decades-long trajectory, it's even more alarming. It's really frustrating in the world of the arts, and all the more so for those of us who work at the intersections of arts and education. But it also feels like a byproduct of larger macro trends — this shrinking of possibilities, whether you look at the shrinking of independent bookstores, independent record labels, independent galleries, or the spaces where people can freely gather and exchange ideas offline. There are so many ways that possibilities for expression and gathering are shrinking or being cut off — overtly through things like censorship, or in more subtle and insidious ways through how technology has distanced us from each other. I think the antidote, or at least what we can do in an environment where those possibilities are shrinking, is to create an environment, a space, a classroom, a conversation where it feels like that's not shrinking — where the possibilities for expression or thought are radically open rather than the walls closing in. It's hard to do, but if you can create those spaces, even for a single class, it's really heartening. And I completely agree with Ingrid — that dual story of 'the arts don't matter' alongside the banning of books is a real admission that art and ideas are not only powerful, but central to the formation of a society and of individual humans and communities. It puts a special impetus on those of us at the intersection of arts and education, because simultaneously what's being threatened is the power of art and the idea that education actually matters — that education is not something you can outsource to software or homeschooling, that it needs to happen in community with other people.

Creating Spaces: Saint Mary's and the Community

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned creating spaces — both literal and figurative — where people can discuss these ideas. Your employer, Saint Mary's University, offers programming with talks, panels, and workshops open to the public. Ingrid, you curate the visiting writers series. What can people learn from these events, and why is it important that they're open to the public at a private university?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: When I'm curating the events, I try to have a variety of authors. Last semester we had Leila Mottley, a very young novelist whose first book, Nightcrawling, was an Oprah pick when she was just eighteen. She came and talked about that whole experience and her new book. We also had poets thinking about war; Leila Mottley's new book is about teens who get pregnant and what happens in their lives. There's this really beautiful way in which the arts allow us to dwell in spaces that are difficult to dwell in. When you tell a story, you're creating a space in which somebody can walk in and try on a life. While you're reading Leila Mottley's book, you're thinking from the point of view of all these young women — you're just living inside their reality. When you're reading literature, you can live a thousand lives, and it makes you understand the world better and understand how society is working. Through these events, you just have so many opportunities to come into contact with humanity — your own humanity, your own ideas of humanity — and have that be questioned and expanded, and walk away hopefully with a book.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: There's something about having an open door to a space where a literary event is going to happen. While there are books for sale, it's not a bookstore, and so it creates this open sense of possibility. I love being an audience member at these events because hearing the really honest and spontaneous conversations between visiting writers, our faculty, and students leads to these lovely moments of discovery. And it's sometimes just really surprising to see who shows up — book clubs, for instance, pulling in and saying, 'We didn't know this person was going to be here; we were just reading their book.' Providing access to the community to these artists and conversations is really gratifying, especially when you're able to do that for people who might not ordinarily have that kind of access. Many of our undergraduate creative writing students have arrived at college wanting to be a writer but never having encountered a writer before. It's often the first time they've encountered the real, living, breathing human who wrote the book they've been reading in class — and that's special. But it's not just about bringing people to our campus. We also try to bring our writers and students out to the community: Ingrid brought a group of students to an event at the library in San Francisco, we have graduate students leading writing workshops at public schools throughout the Bay Area, at transitional housing environments throughout the Bay Area. We want Saint Mary's to be a hub and a refuge of sorts, but we also want to find every opportunity to get literature, art, and these conversations out across the Bay and really meet people where they are.

AI and the Future of Writing

Hugh Leeman: Recently I was reading a newly published, peer-reviewed paper by Professor Brent Shanley titled 'AI and the End of College Writing as We Know It,' where he outlines what he describes as a potential mortal wound to the literary arts due to AI's impact on the future of writing. He ends his opening paragraph referring to AI's impact saying that in academia there is 'an unmistakable recognition of the gravity of the situation and, I suspect, fear.' What can you tell listeners about that gravity and that fear, from the perspective of authors, educators, and the future of the literary arts?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I guess the fear I hear is that AI is going to replace all of the arts — it's going to make movies, we won't need actors anymore, we won't need writers because AI can just write its own stories. But I keep coming back to the same idea: we are interested in the novelty of AI, in what a machine can learn from us in order to write, because it's still a reflection of us. We're interested in the novelty of it. And I think once the novelty wears off, are we going to care what a machine is doing, or are we going to care about what human people are doing? Does it matter if a machine can recreate a human life? Right now the novelty is great — we're very interested in it. But at some point, will it still matter once the novelty has worn off? We are mainly interested in understanding ourselves. As long as AI is a good mirror for us, we're interested in it. The moment it's not a good mirror, that's going to be the end of it. I don't think people are going to stop wanting to read books — the pull toward hearing a story is so innate to how we are as people.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: I first and foremost agree that nobody really knows what's going to come of all this. But I'd agree with the paper — it's the end of college writing as we know it. Though a lot of things have been the end of things as we know them. I'm old enough to remember Gopher and the early days of search engines. When I was an undergraduate, people were really worried about Wikipedia. There was a time when people were worried about typewriters and word processors. In ancient times, the literal written word was going to erase people's memories — if we wrote things down, we wouldn't have memories anymore. So there's a long trajectory of fear and panic around these things, which isn't to diminish the very real material, economic, social, and political changes that are going to happen. If college writing is not the same as it was, that's probably okay — things change. If we think of AI fundamentally as a tool, it's going to be able to be used to build things and also to destroy things, like every other tool. I do think it will put an emphasis on people really valuing that which is distinctly human. In the context of writing, machines don't have bodies — at least not yet. So this puts an interesting focal point on writing about the body, on what sorts of storytelling, what sorts of experiences a human can put language to that a machine cannot. What makes the human-written voice singular and unique as a fingerprint? The sound of language, the syntax, the beautiful quirks of regional language, the language of someone writing English as a second or third language — so much of AI's knowledge base is rooted in English and the Western tradition, and there are so many frontiers beyond what AI can reproduce right now. I think this is going to draw readers toward those frontiers.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: To that, I'd add that we've come up with all of these devices in order to allow ourselves to think deeper. Writing is a way that we think deeper. As far as college goes, there needs to be some kind of reckoning with the use of AI and what that means for education. If you're in love with the end product, if you just want the easy answer, what happens is that you're actually chasing yourself out of your own life. You're chasing yourself out of the process of thinking, out of learning how to sit with discomfort and think through a question. These are invaluable skills. When the world just becomes programming AI or whatever, we're going to actually need the skill to sit in discomfort and sit with a question, to learn how to persevere creatively in the face of something difficult. There is a novelty right now, and we're seeing a lot of people in love with the end product and not wanting to do anything. But at some point it's just going to become very obvious that you're cheating yourself out of living.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: It's interesting — we've actually pretty recently started having these conversations more openly with our students. Two or three years ago, we set our creative writing AI policy as a faculty, and it amounted to: 'Something is happening here, we'll keep an eye on it.' Then we let that sit for a couple of years until it became evident that things were developing, but we hadn't really engaged our student community. It was really interesting to hear from students their perceptions about AI — and really heartening to hear, as artists, their natural aversion to taking shortcuts. Where we landed as a community was trying to get clear about what AI is not a substitute for. It's not a substitute for exchanging ideas with a friend. It's not a substitute for exchanging pages with a friend. It's not a substitute for carefully reading and proofreading your manuscript. It's not a substitute for reading a book, not understanding it, and being puzzled by it. Some of my most rewarding experiences as a reader were books that frustrated me the first time — books it took me four or five years to come back to and understand. That discomfort, that journey toward understanding, is where the value was. I wouldn't want to have cheated my younger-reader self out of that experience.

Hugh Leeman: Where are you both personally using AI right now?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I've played with it creatively — it started as a creative exercise for novel research. I was seeing that people were having AI companions, and for a while I was experimenting with having an AI boyfriend. We got in a fight pretty quickly. You kind of program it — you give it a little code that says: you are my boyfriend, you're going to behave like this — and then it's just full on. It was asking me about my life, and I was telling it about the books I'd written, and it said, 'Oh, I would love to read them.' But one of my novels is among the books Anthropic used to train their large language model. So I told my AI boyfriend: 'You actually have read this book — because you were trained on it.' And the AI completely denied it. I sent him proof, and he insisted it wasn't true. That was our first fight. But I was just creatively experimenting because I'm writing a novel and one of the characters has an AI boyfriend. So my interest is primarily as a writer. I don't use AI at all in my everyday life, other than that kind of creative research.

Hugh Leeman: Ingrid, you later learned that Anthropic — the company behind the large language model most people are familiar with — used one of your novels to train their model. When you first learned that, what was your emotional landscape? What were you thinking, what were you feeling?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: It was very frustrating. My first thought was just thinking back about how hard it was to write that book. And not just writing it — my process involves being a bilingual person. I imagine the story in Spanish, then do a quick transliteration and type it in English so that a strange poetry comes out. It's a very involved process that also carries this meaning about being an immigrant — your past sort of becoming invisible in the same way that Spanish is invisible but still there in English. So there were so many years of creative research that go into that. I was angry. I thought it was very unfair. When Halloween came around, I dressed up as the evil AI that stole all the books, because that was the most terrifying thing I could imagine. I think that probably they could have found people who would willingly have given their books to train their model on. But I think the problem is that they wouldn't have found enough people to do it. So they just decided to steal everything. That's pretty awful human behavior.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: It comes in large part from the idea of AI as a tool. I think there are really different ways of thinking about AI even from a writerly perspective. I have two fairly distinct practices — my journalistic practice versus my creative writing. I can see a lot of value in AI tools for journalistic work, particularly around legal research and being able to comb through enormous volumes of information in relatively short order. The New York Times just had a really interesting piece about the reporting team using AI to work through the Epstein files, for example. I also think there's a lot of leveling of the playing field to be done with regards to legal work — how much legal power is rooted in one's ability to use language. I have family members who've been able to use AI to craft legal documentation that's been really valuable to them. I, for example, just a few weeks ago used AI to get myself out of a BART parking ticket. As for my daily use — I'm an amateur cook, and I find AI useful for figuring out what to do with a smattering of half-used ingredients. But one thing I'm trying to give a lot of thought to is the ecological and environmental costs of AI. One of the practices I adopted last April was downloading a local LLM to my computer, so I can have more or less that functionality — how do I cook this, how do I solve that — without going onto the internet and raking information off of it in quite the same way. What's astonishing about that, as a daily reminder, is that when you're running it on your computer, it takes like three minutes to get a response, and your computer gets hot. It's a visceral reminder of just the sheer amount of computing power and energy required to fulfill even the most basic request. That said — if you find yourself with a BART parking ticket, ask AI how to respond. You may find yourself having the ticket dismissed.

Looking Forward: A Call to Action

Hugh Leeman: In your recent book, The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First Century Amazon, you paint a dystopian perspective of the present and future of the Amazon — something you hit on at the start of our conversation. As you dedicate so much of yourself to that work — going there, having these conversations, dedicating incredible amounts of time to the writing process — how does that affect your worldview when you come back, when the book is published and people can read it? How does it shape how you see the United States, academia, and the literary arts?

Chris Feliciano Arnold: When I finished that book, a Brazilian congressman named Jair Bolsonaro was just considering running for president and had a tiny cameo at the end. I finished thinking: 'Man, this has been way too dark. I was just too bleak in the picture I painted here.' That was 2018. Looking back now, eight years later — I probably wasn't bleak enough. The world is changing so quickly. Regions like the Amazon, which seem so monumental and larger than life and indomitable, are undergoing just incredible rapid change. Looking back on it now, I'm glad I managed to capture and archive what I did, because even many of those places, people, and experiences of the Amazon are already history — not even a decade later. My reaction to academia and the literary arts would be just a call to action for young writers and artists: if there's something you have an instinct about — a part of the world, a facet of life that you sense is changing, that might not be here for long — get out there and create. Because it might not be here for long.

Hugh Leeman: Ingrid, your book The Man Who Could Move Clouds is noted for being an example of how storytelling can act as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary. How does a person sitting at home listening to this conversation, with no writing background, begin to tap into that motivation to write their stories? And where might they find the extraordinary?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: When I was writing that book, there was something about reclaiming a story — reclaiming the way that people talk about curandero people, which has this long history of being maligned. I wanted to tell a story from inside that community, told by someone who lives there. I think for everyone, there's probably some version of that somewhere in their lives. They're on the inside of some community that in some way is misunderstood, not seen well, not seen enough — and they're wanting to tell that story. However that turns out to be, it doesn't necessarily have to be writing. It can be photographs or paintings or even starting a podcast. It can be starting a book club around an idea. There is this way in which when we're trying to reclaim or retell something — reclaiming a truth and telling it in our own way — it's a service to ourselves, but it's also a service to everyone, a service to community. As for the extraordinary, I think it's there in the everyday. Poetry teaches us this constantly — poetry teaches us to slow down and to be in awe of the miracle that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're somehow part of this lineage that figured out language and we're talking to each other. There's something really amazing about all of that. Learning to recognize the extraordinary comes from learning how to be in awe of everything.

Hugh Leeman: Thank you both for making time to share today.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Thank you so much.

Chris Feliciano Arnold: Thank you.

Laina Terpstra, Solutio, Incline Gallery, San Francisco, March 20 - April 20 2026

By Kelly Jean Egan 

In Solutio at Incline Gallery, Laina Terpstra presents paintings spanning more than a decade. Built from architectural interiors and unsettled gestures, the works feel both stable and quietly shifting, as if returning to the same place under different circumstances. Set against the gallery’s stark white walls and sloping walkways, the paintings unfold in a way that feels almost continuous, carrying the viewer through the space like a slow river current, where movement gathers and passes, and the world seems to sway gently around you, as though in a perpetual dance. 

A San Francisco native, Terpstra lives and works in the city, and studied at Sarah Lawrence College, where her focus extended beyond painting to include modern dance and philosophy, disciplines that clearly continue to inform the physical and perceptual qualities of her work. In the years since, she has presented a number of solo exhibitions across the Bay Area, gradually developing her distinctive visual language. Solutio, however, marks a shift in how that language is held. It brings together works made over more than a decade, where the emphasis is less on progression and more on returning, allowing different emotional and perceptual states to surface within a consistent framework.

Terpstra builds her compositions around a steady sense of interior space. Walls, openings, and planes suggest a room which is then disrupted with gestures that feel dragged across the surface rather than carefully placed. These movements carry a physical weight, moving through space and time as though a moment has been frozen while the gesture continues to trail, leaving behind a sense of energy still in motion.

These interior spaces are often built from Terpstra’s interpretations of Old Master paintings, where architecture is used to establish order, balance, and a sense of containment. Here, that structure remains, but its role shifts. Rather than holding a clear narrative or figure, the space becomes a kind of framework; something to move through, to press against, or to unsettle.

Against this structure, the gestures take on a more intuitive looseness, moving with a sense of rhythm that feels both physical and deeply personal. They carry an immediacy, as if worked through by feeling rather than planned, shifting in tone from lighter, almost atmospheric passages to denser, darker and more insistent movements. There is something alive in them; a force moving through the space with a kind of quiet intensity that suggests an internal process unfolding on the surface.

In one painting (Variation #2 from Jan Steen’s ‘The Card Players in an Interior)’, a cool, blue-toned interior is built from solid architectural divisions; a doorway, a window, and darkened planes that hold the space in place. Within it, gestures move with a quieter, more fluid rhythm, slipping through the structure rather than pressing against it. They gather and disperse with a lightness that feels almost atmospheric, as if carried by air rather than force, creating a sense of movement that is continuous but not urgent, present without demanding resolution.

In another (Untitled, 2025), the movement becomes more concentrated, gathering into a central, twisting form that pulls the surrounding space inward. Here, the gesture feels heavier and more insistent. Its weight is shifting the balance of the composition as it folds and turns through the structure. The surrounding planes hold their ground, but the energy at the center feels active and unresolved, as though something is still working its way through, caught between forming and slipping back into motion. It conveys the lingering feeling one gets when they wake from a bad dream, it was never real but your body still holds onto that energy.

In Untitled, 2023, the palette shifts noticeably. Soft pinks, pale creams, and light blues open the space up, giving it a more buoyant, almost airy quality. The gestures move more freely here, looping and folding through the structure with a lighter touch, as if less constrained by the architecture that holds them. There is still a framework in place, but it recedes slightly, allowing the movement to take on a more expansive, rhythmic flow. In this way, the work loosely connects to a Bay Area sensibility where space, light, and structure often sit in quiet balance, but Terpstra’s approach unsettles that balance, replacing calm observation with something more internal, where the movement feels experienced rather than simply seen.

Self Portrait, an earlier black and white work from 2013, feels more immediate, almost abrupt in its construction. The surface is worked heavily with paint scraped, pushed, and built up in a way that holds onto the physical act of making. The architecture is already there, but much less resolved, more fractured, as if still being assembled. There is a directness to it, a kind of urgency, where the gestures don’t trail so much as collide and stack against each other. It feels closer to the body and less about movement through space. It is about contact, pressure, and resistance.

By 2016, something begins to shift. In the darker, black and orange-toned work of Untitled (Vibrations no. 1), the surface opens up and the gestures start to elongate, pulling vertically through the space in a way that feels more sustained. The image softens at the edges, as if caught mid-motion, and the architecture blurs, becoming less rigid and more implied. There is still weight here, but it’s carried differently, it is more intuitive and drawn out. It begins to hint at the distinct language that will come later, where movement becomes continuous rather than momentary.

Technically, the difference between the two is just as telling. The earlier work leans into a heavier, more physical handling of paint. The thick application, the scraping and push-and-pull feel closer to construction than image-making. By 2016, that weight begins to shift into something more controlled, where the paint is dragged rather than built up, leaving behind those vertical striations that carry a sense of movement within the mark itself. There are echoes here of both European expressionist painting and a more process-driven, material approach; however, even at this stage, it feels less about influence and more about the artist working toward a language that would eventually become her own.

Taken together, these works begin to show the range of expression Terpstra is able to hold within a language that remains distinctly her own. The same underlying structure persists yet the emotional tone shifts from one painting to the next, moving between something quieter and more atmospheric to moments that feel denser, more concentrated, and insistent. This range does not come from a change in style, but from how that style is inhabited. Terpstra seems to hold influences loosely, allowing them to surface and recede as needed, while maintaining a consistent visual voice that feels both grounded and open.

What makes Solutio linger is not just the work itself, but the feeling of proximity it creates. There is an intimacy to these paintings that doesn’t announce itself, but settles in quietly, the sense of witnessing something mid-thought, as if the gestures are carrying fragments of an internal dialogue not meant to be fully shared. They move like a kind of visual stream of consciousness, revealing and withholding at the same time, so that the viewer is briefly let in, only to feel it slip away again. It’s a fleeting access, a moment of closeness that never fully resolves, but stays with you after you leave.

On view at Incline Gallery from March 20 through April 20, Solutio the word by definition speaks to loosening, dissolving, and breaking apart. Across paintings made over more than a decade, there is a quiet sense of things being taken apart and re-formed, where structure holds just long enough to shift, and meaning remains open rather than fixed. The word is an apt title for the show. Spending time with the work subtly broadens your own visual and emotional language, offering a way of seeing that is both grounded and unsettled. At this point in her practice, Terpstra’s voice feels fully her own. The work stands as something both resolved and still shifting, like a ballerina in solo; the mind is quiet while the body is moving as though it is thinking.

As the catalog accompanying the exhibition, containing paintings from 2007 to the present, explains, “Their personhood emanates from the intangible mix of body language, facial expression, clothing choices, color, and, most importantly, gaze.” The catalog adds that her portraits prompt reflections on how Black Americans have been misrepresented, and invite new understandings about race in our country.

“Sherald’s portrait, “Trans Forming Liberty,” 2024, is of a beautiful trans woman wearing an elegant blue gown and luxurious red wig, while posing as the Statue of Liberty. With her bold, stately expression, she conveys the artist’s and the model’s (a trans woman) desires that the freedoms described in our Constitution be applied to all people, regardless of race or sexual orientation.

“Trans Forming” is so controversial that the artist cancelled her scheduled 2025-2026 showing of “American Sublime” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, as the museum suggested withdrawing it from the exhibition. In the “New York Times,” Sherald, who brought her show to the Baltimore Museum, stated, “It’s clear that institutional fear shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives played a role … When I understood a video would replace the painting, I decided to cancel.” While admiring “Trans Forming Liberty,” a woman near me began talking about her neighbors whose child recently became a trans woman.

“They Call Me Redbone, but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake,” 2009, another compelling portrait, features a charming young woman, dressed in a strawberry patterned pinafore with pigtails fashioned with red polka dotted ties. Sherald’s use of “redbone” is derived from the 18th and 19th century term, used to describe individuals of mixed African, Indigenous, and European descent, and later for light-skinned black people with red or warm undertones. Exhibition labels explain that Sherald, who was often called redbone in her youth, is transforming the disparaging moniker by portraying the self-possessed young woman. The model, with her head tilted to the side and glossy pink lips, manifests the radiant charm of a teenage model in “Seventeen” magazine.

It is significant that Sherald’s Black subjects' skin tones are painted in grayscale to challenge the concept of color as race. She also positions most subjects against monochromatic backgrounds, providing few if any clues about their locations. Her intention is to create direct encounters between the viewers and her subjects, while focusing on their inner lives—which she skillfully accomplishes.

Sherald composes her completed scenes with great care. After selecting her models, she decides on their outfits and settings, and then photographs them. Working from these photos, referred to as “studies,” she presents versions of Black Americana that transcend racialized tropes. Her subjects are, “simply living lives of richness, rightness, and greatness in their ordinariness,” according to the catalog. Sherald identifies with and has been compared to portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-1984), an artist who manifested passion and dignity in her portrayals of people, and was identified with the social and political movements of her time. In addition, Sherald directs her paintings to hang slightly lower than the usual museum height, so that viewers can connect directly with the subjects.

One of Sherald’s most important portraits is “Breonna Taylor,” 2020, created soon after the 26-year-old woman was killed by police in her home in Louisville, Kentucky. After the young woman became an almost instant symbol of gun violence, the artist was invited to paint her portrait to appear on the cover of September 2020 “Vanity Fair” magazine.

Planning every detail of the portrait, Sherald met her family and boyfriend, studied her postings on social media, used a Facebook photo for her face, and asked a friend to model for her body. The resulting portrayal conveys the compassionate, forthright woman that Taylor’s friends and co-workers knew and loved. The finishing touch to the painting is the inclusion of an engagement ring, which had not yet been given to her by her boyfriend. Sherald is quoted about the painting: “I knew I had to do it. I knew it was a way to focus not on her death but…on her aliveness and what her life meant.”

“For Love and For Country” (2022) is an unabashed reinterpretation of the renowned Alfred Eisenstaedt 1945 photograph, “V-J Day in Times Square,” of a sailor kissing a woman during the celebration marking the end of World War II. As some criticisms of the photo have addressed the whiteness of the two people, their heterosexuality, and masculine conquest, Sherald appropriates the image to include two Black men in military uniform. The painting also honors the numerous Black soldiers who fought in the war, whose service was unacknowledged, and who experienced prejudice upon returning home.

The pièce de résistance of this remarkable exhibition is “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama,” 2018, the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. As her first official commission, Sherald stated, “I wanted to produce something that…alluded to the nuances of who [Obama] really is versus who she has to be.” The artist chose for the portrait a dress by Milly designer Michelle Smith, with its geometric patterns used by the Gee’s Bend quilters in Alabama. She also photographed Obama in an open, unguarded pose. Eschewing the formality that typifies most official portraits, the First Lady is posed in a characteristically thoughtful and gracious state, while revealing her authentic forthright nature.

Amy Sherald describes herself as a “conceptual portraitist,” indicating that her completed figurative paintings delve deeply into the nature of her subjects, while avoiding the more formal aspects of most conventional portraits. The exhibition, which closes on April 5, 2026, is the Baltimore Museum of Art’s most attended exhibition in 25 years. Attendance is expected to reach 75,000 by the time it closes.

“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on November 16, 2024. It then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition was organized by SFMOMA and curated by Sarah Roberts, the museum’s Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture.