Christy Chan is a Virginia-born, San Francisco Bay Area-based artist who uses video, installation, performance, narrative film, design and public art interventions to question the everyday power structures and social codes that uphold white supremacy in the United States. Her work has been presented at YBCA, ICASF and Mills Art Museum in the Bay Area; Wassaic Project x NY State Council of the Arts in New York; Film Independent in Los Angeles; Interfilm-Kuki and Dresden Film Festival in Germany; UMOCA in Salt Lake City, and other institutions. She is the recipient of a recent Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, and Kenneth Rainin Fellowship, among others. Her independent film “Somewhere To Be” will be screening in U.S. cities throughout 2026.

An interview with filmmaker Christy Chan, conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Somewhere to Be: Dark Comedy as Truth-Telling

Hugh Leeman:  Christy, your recent film Somewhere to Be centers on Shelley, an eight-year-old girl whose mother refuses to leave after gas station attendants deny service because they look, quote, foreign. When you were making this, how did you shape the incident into a dark comedy rather than a straight trauma narrative?

Christy Chan:  I think it naturally came out that way — it was naturally conceived that way. One of the things I love about being an artist and a filmmaker is that there's a process where memories are being collaged together and things are transformed. In a lot of my work, not just this recent film, I do have a tendency to want to narrate a theme or open a conversation through absurdist comedy — through something that has absurdist humor.

The Coming of Age of a Country, Not Just a Child

Hugh Leeman:  To give a bit of context for people listening or reading: the film is set in the 1980s American South, and you've spoken about growing up personally around Civil War reenactments and exclusionary local narratives. How did those childhood atmospheres inform the film's visual language and emotional temperature?

Christy Chan:  I think the past did inform the film, but the present does as well. One of my ongoing concerns as a person and as an artist is simply who gets to have a voice and who gets to have presence in our country. Immigrant families have historically — and now as well — needed to assert their right to exist, and how they get to assert that right has been mediated. What I was really excited about with making this film was showing a family asserting their right in a way that felt nuanced and authentic to me. Telling it through a child's point of view takes a lot of the rules off of storytelling — the guardrails are off. This film wasn't just about the coming of age of a child. In a way, I wanted to tell the coming of age of our culture, of our country. There's a rawness I wanted to infuse this film with — not out of scale with the rawness of the conversation happening right now around immigrant families. I'm wanting to transform the conversation, to broaden it.

Hugh Leeman:  You want to transform the conversation — I like this idea. What does it look like after the transformational act of art?

Christy Chan:  It's different with every project. With showing a film, you actually see the audience's reaction — you're talking to them after it screens. With an art opening, I get to talk to people after it happens. I don't think I can ever, as the artist, completely know what's happening for people after they see the work. But I do feel that once I've made a work and put it out there, it's no longer mine. I can trust it to live and breathe on its own — to be weird in the world without me, to be provocative in the world without me.

A Love Letter to Immigrant Families: Feeling Seen

Hugh Leeman:  From the perspective of you as the creator — and by extension as the creator of Shelley, the eight-year-old protagonist — there's an element to Somewhere to Be that feels like a love letter to immigrant communities, especially for people who may feel the pressure to hide or to be invisible, perhaps more now than ever. What kind of recognition do you aspire for immigrant viewers to feel in the theater after seeing this?

Christy Chan:  I would love for people to feel seen. I would love for them to see a little bit of themselves in the characters, whether or not they closely identify as descendants of immigrants. I'd like them to feel a little bit of delight that characters like this can be represented in independent film. The characters in this movie are flawed people — they're not model minorities. They're just trying their best to survive, like most of us are every day. I know that when the film screened — it just screened in seven cities, and I was at four of the festivals — some of what people were saying afterwards was that they identified with being the kid in the back of the car. They identified with feeling both powerless and powerful as a child of immigrants. They identified with both the fear and the agency. At the Minneapolis screening, the Q&A lasted a really long time, and afterwards people stuck around in the lobby for an hour to keep talking. That was such a gift to experience — when people want to hang out and share what it meant to them.

Powerless and Powerful: The Child in the Back Seat

Hugh Leeman:  Go to that idea again — powerless and powerful. People told you they felt that connection with Shelley, the eight-year-old in the back seat. They felt powerlessness, but also agency. Talk us through that.

Christy Chan:  In various different words, people in the audiences told me afterwards that they were the children of immigrants, or grew up in an immigrant family. The sense that the world is spinning around you, and you're seeing your family struggle, and you just want to do your part — they really identified with that. The curiosity: what can I do? I started working on this project almost five years ago. We shot it four years ago, finished it one year ago, and now it's screening in 2026. As I've watched things unfold on the news — the ICE raids in different cities, people standing up to this violence — what has personally moved me has been seeing images of kids caught up in this. That was something I really wanted to offer through the film: to put people in the situation and let them feel like they're the kid. Because really, it could be anyone's kid that this is happening to. It could be anyone's family. I crafted the film so that I take the audience for a ride, and at the same time I'm not protecting them from feeling their feelings. One man said at a screening that he hadn't been feeling very present because he'd rushed from work, but during the tension scene he felt completely pulled into his seat. Part of what I always want to do with storytelling is to take away the fourth wall and allow people to feel like they're inside it — not just watching it.

Hugh Leeman:  Does Shelley become effectively an extension of you, Christy — the powerlessness, the powerfulness, the agency of the child?

Christy Chan:  No. And I think it's very important to distinguish that what an artist makes and who they are are two different things. It would be very limiting if those two things always had to be tied together. When I make something, it's from my perspective, my resources, my time — but it would not be in service of the work if my work were necessarily a translation of me. It would actually be very dull. The story was always intended to live on its own and be of service to the conversation.

Being of Service to the Conversation

Hugh Leeman:  Be of service to the conversation — that's a powerful statement. What is the conversation you're wanting to serve?

Christy Chan:  We have trouble in this country telling the truth about racism, about white supremacy, about how these things affect families. These conversations are often had in soundbites and very hypothetical ways. The power of stories — the reason I watch a lot of movies and enjoy art with narrative embedded in it — is that you're allowed to have an unguarded moment as the participant, to simply feel your way through the subject matter. I think it's very important that we keep feeling our way through what is happening, and not just thinking our way through things. Feelings are very important — feelings are very informative. I really want to invite people to feel their way through this moment, as hard as it is. I'm not an expert on any of the topics I work on. I'm mostly interested in seeing how we can talk differently about them.

Hugh Leeman:  You're a storyteller.

Christy Chan:  Yeah. Yeah.

Innocence as Currency: The Child's Moral Weight

Hugh Leeman:  The Minneapolis festival listing describes the film as a story about love, courage, and trauma — and notes that children can feel these things very intensely. What did you learn by letting the child's perspective carry the moral weight of the story?

Christy Chan:  This might sound strange, but I don't know that I learned something new so much as I wanted to offer that perspective to the audience. In this film, innocence is its own currency. Having a kid in a movie is, in a way, a metaphor for looking at things through an innocent point of view. Something that can sometimes get lost when talking about racism and immigration is just the bare bones fact of: what is all this doing to our humanity? What are the things happening in the world doing to our collective sense of being human beings?

Inside Out: Censorship and the Right to Speak

Hugh Leeman:  I want to switch gears to another project — your public installation Inside Out, where residents of Richmond, California submitted more than 1,100 phrases. But city officials barred statements critical of President Trump if they named him specifically. What did that censorship reveal about what kinds of speech are considered "too political"?

Christy Chan:  To me, what happened in 2019 with that project was a signal of what was to come. It was a project that represented the perspectives of Richmond residents, and the critiques they were offering were very poetically expressed. When those phrases were banned by the city — due to fears of the attention it would draw from the administration at the time, which were not unfounded — I do think it was a sign of things to come. But I think in creating participatory projects, it's a really beautiful thing when people want to participate in a public art project and when they offer their time and perspectives in a way that is raw and unfiltered. I feel transformed by those projects and what people share. In the case of Inside Out, we had nine different community partners. We partnered with local churches. For folks for whom there were safety issues participating in a public art project, we offered one-on-one workshops with language translators. Many ways people could contribute, tailored to what would feel right for them. It was very people-centered, very community-centered. And I would say my film work is influenced by my work doing participatory public art, in that sense.

Dear America: Bypassing the Bureaucracy

Hugh Leeman:  Following the censorship of your work for critiquing a US president, you evolved your practice to bypass traditional municipal and institutional processes and founded Dear America. What did bypassing that bureaucracy make possible — and what did it make more vulnerable?

Christy Chan:  What it made possible was responding quickly to what was happening in 2021 — an epidemic of anti-Asian hate. I wanted to create a project that would support local communities and bring artists together in a show of solidarity. That project went from idea to launch in about three to four weeks, which is the quickest I've ever moved — and which would not be possible on a municipal art schedule. I do believe in working both with and outside systems. In this case, the project had a creative activism and advocacy layer to it, and being able to respond quickly was more important than following a traditional public art process. That was the right choice, looking back. White supremacy does not operate on a grant cycle, on a municipal art grant cycle. So in this case, the art making could not either.

Hugh Leeman:  That's a powerful statement. Do you feel this is the high aspiration of what you're wanting to address through projects like this?

Christy Chan:  I can answer that more broadly. I'm really interested in seeing how different communities can be activated to participate in art — the art ecosystem, local businesses, local citizen groups. When Dear America was launched, there were about ten grassroots community partners. Some of these conversations that might seem like they could divide us do have the potential to unite people on projects. I'm always passionate about how I can create the space for community groups and local citizens to come together and make something happen that could not have happened at the same speed or with the same energy had the project not been opened up to partnerships. And I'll say: in the arts, we talk about money and funding a lot. Something that is invaluable is the non-monetary wealth of resources that can come together through people believing in a project.

Fainting Couch: Who Gets to Rest?

Hugh Leeman:  I want to focus on Fainting Couch. You re-upholstered an 1890s fainting couch and invited people to rest on it as an act of decolonization. When you're watching unsuspecting strangers sit on it in different contexts — what did it say to you about what these people were expressing through the act of sitting, without saying a word?

Christy Chan:  Fainting couches were a symbol of social class. They were usually for the lady of the house, and they had a functional purpose: women of privilege in that era wore corsets, frequently didn't get enough oxygen, and would have to retreat and rest. It was considered not only acceptable but celebrated that women of a certain class could retreat and not participate. I thought that was an interesting metaphor for intergenerational privilege. I grew up in the South and saw fainting couches around me. I worked on this project in response to what was happening in 2021 — Southern states were starting to ban the teaching of what they were calling critical race theory and diverse points of view. The first county that actually banned the teaching of race was the county I grew up in. So I wanted to turn a fainting couch — an object you're normally not supposed to touch in art — into a touchable platform for conversation. Everyone was invited to rest on the couch, reversing the historical purpose. In that era, only the lady of the house could rest on it; someone who worked in the home would not have been allowed. After participants rested for as long as they wished, there was another stage where they could journal about their feelings about what was happening politically. In essence, it became a time capsule of what it felt like in 2021 to see education restricted, to see steps being taken to curb conversation around racism.

Who Gets to Be Fragile? Who Has to Be Strong?

Hugh Leeman:  There's a part of the project that asks: who gets to be fragile in America, and who has to be strong? As you were watching people experience the couch over time — reading their journals, seeing them struggle with what to say — how has that question evolved for you since the 1890s woman in the corset?

Christy Chan:  I think of this part of the project almost as a quilting project — quilting together videos and photos of participants. After people write their thoughts, I take photos of them there. Not just the writing, but their efforts to write. In some cases, people struggled with what they wanted to say and what felt okay to say — they balled up pieces of paper after writing. So in these videos, there are actually a lot of photos of balled-up pieces of paper where you can maybe catch a letter or two. I've asked participants' permission if I can photograph those balled-up pieces. The question of who gets to be fragile, who has to be strong — that's something I think about constantly. There's such a huge power imbalance. We're seeing it play out in the news in a way that perhaps not everyone had to see if they weren't directly on the receiving end of the violence. It raises questions of who has to survive violence in all its forms versus who can casually keep seeing it happen. And what's been interesting is that the average person doesn't want to see violence inflicted on their fellow neighbor. I want us to keep asking this question. We have a government that's behaving in a very fragile way — when they put in measures to limit what people can learn in schools and what they can talk about in the workplace, that's coming from a deep fear of the truth. A deep fear of people being able to talk about what is true and what is even historically factual.

The Complete Narrative and the Power to Participate

Hugh Leeman:  To bring some of these things full circle — you've previously said you wanted to show that the narrative was incomplete when voices were censored and could not appear. What does the complete narrative look like today?

Christy Chan:  I'm going to answer that indirectly, if that's all right. I think we're living in a time — this is just my opinion — where we're being taught that we don't have any voice, any power, any agency. And that is part of how fascism has historically worked. But the people still have power. The people still have agency. Art is still a potent way to talk about things. And I'm excited to see all the art that's going to come out of this period, because things are being made. Projects are being created. Maybe we're not able to talk about everything in the same way as before. But I really believe in the potency of everyone making art in this moment. Continuing to participate — whether that's through art-making, protesting, or keeping conversations going within your own community — that keeps the conversation alive. Not believing that the conversation is over. That these conversations can't be had.

Hugh Leeman:  The conversation keeps going. Christy Chan, thank you so much.

Christy Chan:  Thank you. Thank you so much.

 By Samantha Hull

In the historic Japantown neighborhood of San Jose, forgotten history is brought to life. Art Object Gallery, owned by Ken Matsumoto, is the latest location for South Bay artist Renee Billingslea’s exhibition, Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps. One of the three Japantowns remaining in the nation, Renee’s exhibition documents and connects isolated, wild contemporary landscapes with a harsh national history, to a neighborhood and community that has quietly endured the weight of its memory.  

Renee Billingslea is an artist who combines photography and stitching to illuminate historical and social topics in American history. She is committed to challenging accepted norms in our culture and, through her photographs, provokes a conversation about social issues and historical topics. 

Her photographic series, which culminated in the exhibition Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps, came to be during a research trip at the Library of Congress. There, she stumbled upon the photographer Russell Lee’s image of two Japanese women eating hot dogs with chopsticks at an assembly “holding” center in San Juan Bautista, California. Recognizing the site was just 50 miles from her home in Silicon Valley, Renee became engrossed with learning about Japanese-American internment during World War II.

Many Americans, including Renee, have had little to no education about Executive Order 9066. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed into law the authorization of military exclusion zones, which later led to the displacement and imprisonment of approximately 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. Each location is in a remote part of the country, demonstrating that even today, its location connotes an invisibility, hiding from our collective and individual consciousness of our country’s inexcusable history. Renee made it her mission to visit and document all ten internment camp locations, culminating in this exhibition.

For all but one location, Renee traveled independently to experience the land each internment camp was built upon. Witnessing the vastness, isolation, and intensity of each site’s natural landscape allowed Renee to fathom in real time the harsh realities Japanese-Americans faced during their imprisonment.

Depicting the land of each camp is just one aspect of Renee’s artwork. Also imperative is the curation and integration of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographs of Japanese-Americans interned. For Renee, the propaganda element of this government project intrigued her: photographers from across the country were hired and given orders to capture specific aspects of life within each camp. Even with strict orders from the government, some  WRA photographers, such as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, produced images that challenged the approved narrative being broadcast from Washington.  Using these WRA historical photographs as evidence, Renee retraced the steps these same photographers took to capture the landscape as it was then and now–bridging the gap between the invisible string that ties history and the present. 

Renee incorporates her photograph of the landscape with Dorothea Lange’s WRA image of the Manzanar camp, titled Manzanar, California, 2018. Past and present are intertwined with the artist sewing in gold string, honoring the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to repair what has been broken. This physical act bridges the past and present, sewing together what is a broken aspect of American history. By stitching the historical artifact into the contemporary image, the two become bonded, and the landscape is forever impacted by the camp's existence. What is now a severe remote landscape is embedded with historical significance. 

Soil from each landscape is included with every installation of the exhibition. For Renee, the physicality of the soil ties the land to the contemporary and historical photographs, making the location real and tangible. Up close, the soil from Topaz, Utah, 2019, shines with a slight blue tint, mimicking the reflection showcased in the photograph on view. The soil adds a material culture to the photographs, bringing a personal connection to each site. In this exhibition, each of the ten soil types is on display in two rows, showcasing the vast and diverse landscape of the camps. Two bowls remain empty to honor the native land that two of the ten camps occupied, stolen by the federal government and returned to its rightful owners after the war.

By bringing together contemporary imagery of each landscape with a historical photograph, Renee captures the individuality and grace exhibited by Japanese-Americans, even though their rights as citizens have been stripped away. In Rohwer Arkansas, 2019, Renee captures a barren contemporary rural agriculture field embedded within a historic photograph of camp prisoners leaving a high school football game. The scene looks as if it could be taken anywhere in America: stylish women and men socializing with their peers after an all-American sporting event. Our mind sees these prisoners as any and every citizen leaving a football game, and yet, Renee’s brilliant connection of weaving in their reality burns the image of imprisoned Americans firmly in the minds of the viewer. They look like any of us, and the chilling reminder that the American government took the liberty to imprison its own citizens while trying to maintain the image of normalcy.

An integral part of the exhibition is a printout of the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Civil Control Administration’s instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry. Reading this document is like reading any government memo—your mind at first wants to follow its orders, until you keep reading, each sentence stripping away the rights of the people one line at a time. The realization that the government simply and effectively created “lawful” documentation to imprison its own people is chilling. The success of Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps lies in its wherewithal to capture the viewer’s slow and yet deliberate understanding of the silent horrors our government inflicted upon its own people.

For Renee, discovering and researching the history and treatment of Japanese-Americans runs parallel to what immigrants and citizens of Central American descent face in our country today. Renee’s photographs visually demonstrate the similarities between the internment camps of World War II and immigration holding facilities that currently occupy landscapes across our country. Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps is her artistic appeal to reckon with the horrors of America’s past, in hopes that we wake up to it repeating itself in our contemporary lives. History is not linear; it runs parallel to the present and deeply affects our future. Renee Billingslea’s exhibition, Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps, shows us the importance of seeing the truth and therefore forbidding the horrors from happening again.

Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps is on view at Art Object Gallery through August 25, 2026, by appointment. Free admission.

Art Object Gallery, 592 N. 5th Street, San Jose, CA 95112

Vibrato of Memory

By Jan Wurm

To cherish freedom, to uphold liberty – to defend what has been so dearly won – memory must have a place not buried in the past, but integrated and woven through the present so that it may extend into the future. Slavery, conscription, incarceration, internment, expulsion – the plights of individuals, communities, and ethnicities are all readily pushed to the shadows, buried, erased. The work of Mildred Howard gives expression to these sorrows. The lock, the key –they stand larger than life to lead the way into the retrospective exhibition, Mildred Howard –Poetics of Memory, at the Oakland Museum of California.

It is in the aggregation of elements that Howard evokes the poetry of the single object that is transformed into symbol, that can speak to experience and time and the cycles of lives and communities.

Howard often draws from multiple sources for her assemblages: music, poetry, history, personal experience. Following travel to the South and the alligator-infested swamps surrounding the Indigo Plantation in Charleston, she built her tribute, A Salute to Sojourner: Still Water Run Deep (2001), as an altar with a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and a child's small foot in the clutch of alligator teeth. Attached, at the very base, the lock, from which the struggle rises. In referencing the dangerous flight to freedom, Howard interweaves the lives of Sojourner Truth and Stowe, two women who fought courageously for freedom and equality. The immediacy of their struggle is felt through the handwritten quote and the magnified, unflinching eye. It is the eye of the artist herself, not only bearing witness, but asserting: what has happened to those who came before is our history. 

The Other Side of the Coin (2014) allows Mildred Howard not just one alternative viewpoint but a series of works investigating meaning and impact in commercial images. Taking Fairbanks Gold Dust washing powder, Howard has excised the mascots, the Gold Dust Twins, Goldie and Dustie, from the packaging label, and inserted her own image. In placing a back-to-viewer defiant posture, the artist points to the racial stereotype coined with the slogan, “Let the Gold Dust Twins do your work.” These two variations from a series of ten show Howard working through shifts in posture, images of the young and the mature, and the meeting of selves in the doubling of image.

Within the world of Howard’s parents’ antique business, the objects held histories: the use they had given their owners, the pleasures they had sparked in the eyes of beholders long passed. The objects were touchstones for memories as well as markers of conventions and styles past. And they called out for care: repairs and mendings, touch-ups and coverings. Mildred Howard breathed the air of these objects, her hands learned to restore and heal these histories. The understanding of structure and pattern opened into the making of dance costumes, into design and the marriage of hand and cloth, finger and thread. It traveled on to stitch paper, to join wood, to glue glass. Objects spoke to Howard, sometimes quietly or enigmatically,held in flat files or boxes until their shape was fully announced…Until the objects came together in concert to tell stories more complex than the single note.

The Magnolia Project: III (2008) employed complex printing technology. Instilling an added layer of irony; Howard has dissolved the image by fragmenting the surface with buttons, the ancient invention meant to hold things together.

With the triptych, a traditionally religious format, Howard evokes not only the spiritual nature of memory and dedication, but also uses repetition and variance to slow the viewer’s visual pace. The triptych becomes a meditation. In Faith, Hope, and Charity (1977), the artist presents us with a measurable diminution as we pass from idyllic landscape to the darkly framed.

As vibrato oscillates, shifting in pitch and volume, so the visual memory in the work of Mildred Howard extends a smooth and even tone only to rise, drop, pierce the heart in the close viewing. The memories given material presence claim space with metal or wood or stone. But they reverberate through lace and mirrors. 

Not only does Howard use images of her own face to summon a bridge to the past, the geographically distant, the ancestral to the present, she veils and filters the view. In Untitled (1979), she layers the xeroxed image with lace – a step of removal from a direct reading of the artist to push into deeper pondering of time and place. In Untitled (1997), she striates her bifurcated face, pairing African pattern with the gold of ancient Egyptian convention.

This distancing by obscuring the photographic image is writ large across an immense gallery installation of wall projections. Culled from recently discovered old 8mm film shot as a teenager on travels to visit family in Texas and in home and school life in Berkeley, the progressions of images merge as the viewer peers through the gauzy veil of lace curtains. Childhood, Family, Friendship: these provide central themes and a core essence of an artist whose work has been nurtured by her community, her history, and her broad curiosity and engagement. Moving Stills (2026) grasps the past, illuminating scenes for the brief moments before they are eclipsed by the next memory, revealed like an unraveling sweater briefly shows each stitch of the garment before it too is undone.

In representations of shelter, Howard has developed a language to address racism, injustice, need, and compassion. What sets her work apart from much politically engaged art is the grace with which she addresses history’s impact on private lives. In these houses, Howard has found a vehicle to address both the strength of the hand built, as well as the oppression and the denigration of slavery and poverty. With references to the shotgun house as well as the idiosyncratic bottle houses of folk art –these shelters in fact are open to deep vulnerability. The fragility of glass is ever-present, whether on a smaller scaled piece or a structure large enough for visitors to enter. Fall of the Blood House 2005 (View from within)

In a recent bottle house, Black Has Always Been a Color (2024), Mildred Howard references the title of an essay by artist Raymond Saunders, itself a response to poet Ishmael Reed’s article, “The Black Artist: Calling a Spade a Spade.” This bringing forward of the 1960s shared activism and common commitments of the Berkeley community rings with a new layer of sorrow and poignancy of loss with Saunders’ death last July. This glistening house of black glass reveals intimate senses –nose and mouth – along with the spot of red embedded – just the touch to punctuate the enclosed. The weighted and measured is a visual stop to slow, halt assumptions, reflect. And it is just enough to evoke a Saunders painting: black sprawling across a canvas with red to punctuate.

Punctuation, essential for clarity in prose, elemental when used in poetry, is the heartbeat of music. Each mark giving meaning, each able to alter meaning… Howard, an artist steeped in music, can take that small dot, and transform the shape of time. Enlarged a thousand fold and centered on the wall, that dot controls the dialogue. In black. In red. Full stop. Or she can place a question mark at eye level and turn worlds upside-down.

In a gallery bathed in colored light, three over-life-sized figures loom over the human. Peter Burnett: Histories/ Hidden Truths (2026), William Gwinn: Histories/ Hidden Truths (2026), and Francis Scott Key: Histories/ Hidden Truths (2026) have been wrapped – enveloped in red sheeting and bound –to transform the laudatory statue into the unidentifiable/unknown/obliterated. Still standing, they remain; but, now mummified, transformed: a red flag, a symbol of distorted reverence, a memorial to historical pain.

In a haunting illumination, Crossings (1997 / 2026), spreads a vista of an impassable terrain. Rendered not with chains or barbs, but rather with eggs that challenge passage with breakage, with destruction, with loss. The insurmountable and the puzzling are reflected in the huge, heavily gilded framed mirror propped to reflect the viewer, witness to the quandary of passage, the inevitability of breakage, of crushing destruction of material and spirit.

Imbuing public buildings with poetry and music, framing the landscape to capture nature’s beauty, excavating and marking history – in devoting her vision to public art, Mildred Howard creates opportunities for revelation in daily life. She magically brings the same intimacy of a family photograph out into public life and interrupts routine to interject reflection, memory, and song.

Mildred Howard, an artist productive and provoking through more than five decades of art making, has taken any and all material in hand. She has molded and shaped, cut and glued, joined and fastened. She has mined images and objects and brought these elements together to create a visual poetry that alludes and conjures beyond the page or pedestal. Her work calls out with ever expanding meaning and resonance. Mildred Howard’s art holds the memory of generations and vibrates with a spirit to animate, shepherd, and guide with profound,resounding humanity. 

Mildred Howard – Poetics of Memory, Oakland Museum of California, June 12 – October 18, 2026

By Deborah Bishop

For the past three decades, sculptor Al Farrow has spent countless hours cruising the aisles at gun shows.

Although Farrow can count on one hand the number of times he has actually fired a gun (“I tried it; I hated it,”), he has used all manner of deconstructed weapons and munitions to build exquisite religious reliquaries and intricately detailed places of worship as a commentary on the relationship between religion, violence, and hypocrisy. With this body of work, Farrow is defiantly agnostic: be it a synagogue framed out of revolvers, uzis, machine gun barrels and an Israeli-army-issued tefillin bag; a church bolstered by bayonets with Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse visible through the glass windows, or a Shia mosque whose dome—made of gold-leafed shell casings—has been reduced to rubble by a Sunni bomb. 

“Of course, I never told the vendors what I was up to—that I’m creating social critiques about how horrific guns are,” said Farrow, a gentle man whose aversion to violence is such that he told his wife early in their marriage that he could not join her in watching true crime dramas. 

Although Farrow had previously incorporated toy guns (in work that addressed America’s exploitative sales of weapons to foreign countries), he was struck with the idea of using real armaments—hand guns, machine gun barrels, bullets, rocket launchers, hand grenades—as building materials during a trip to Italy in 1994. “I was in a church in Gubbio when I spotted this silver reliquary housing the bone of a trigger finger—and it triggered something in me,” said Farrow, who observed how reliquaries housing the remains of saints and martyrs were often made from precious metals and adorned with jewels. “I thought, well, what’s precious to Americans? Arms and bullets,” said Farrow, whose work has long been scaffolded by social commentary, including the American fetish for firearms.

With his current show, It’s Not Dark Yet, on view at the Catharine Clark Gallery through August 15, Farrow continues to pull from his tranche of munitions while pivoting to a more personal and less overtly didactic body of work. “I realized that I’d been addressing the same subject matter for a long time,” said Farrow. “And my pieces kept getting bigger and more complex and frankly, more tedious to build.”  

Farrow shares that when Covid hit, he found himself at loose ends, with no shows on the calendar and no sense of when the ordeal might end. “So, I started doing these ink paintings, really fast and loose, just having fun, which I used to do 50 years ago,” said Farrow.  “And it reminded me of the joy I used to feel in being spontaneous and creative without a plan or the need to make a million measurements.”

When Farrow was ready to return to sculpture, the world was in a different place, and so was he. “Look, when you get to be in your eighties, as I am, you know in your bones you don’t have a lot of time left. At this point in my life, I don’t want to spend a year or two on a single sculpture, even if it’s wonderful. I want to play and have fun.” So, informed by the recognition that his own days are numbered, Farrow took his language of armament in a new direction—one more akin to bricolage, say, than architecture.

“I looked down and realized that, hey, trigger guards look a lot like eye sockets, and that was my jumping-off point,” said Farrow, who started picking through his stockpile of munitions and essentially riffing—like a musician playing an impromptu improv underpinned by years of practicing scales and perfecting sonatas. Armed with his torch, he began by constructing human heads, skulls, and masks—which are suggestive of steampunk portraits—before depicting animals, some of which are mounted on the walls like hunting trophies while others perch atop pedestals. A shorebird clutches not a fish, but a bullet in a long beak fashioned from repurposed bayonets. Cow Skull (2025) is made from a pair of gun frames and five bullets. “I was pleased with its simplicity, especially after all those complex sculptures of religious edifices,” said Farrow. “A few days later, I realized it reminded me of my favorite Picasso sculpture, Bull’s Head—which consists of only a bicycle seat and handlebars.”  As you take in the pieces, your brain toggles between seeing the finished forms and clocking the individual components—assorted implements of death and destruction. 

(L) Gun parts, gears, gold leaf, hand grenade, barbed wire, AK-47 magazines, bayonets, belted bullets, sub-machine gun barrels, machine gun bipods, steel, guns, cartridge shells 50 x 17 3/4 x 13 inches (including stand)

(R) Violin (Inspired by Violins of Hope), 2025 Guns, gun parts, bayonets, steel, barbed wire, gold leaf 27 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 5 inches

As the work shifts into focus, so does the show’s title. It’s Not Dark Yet is a Bob Dylan song from 1997, whose second line goes: “But it’s getting there.” In this show, spurred in part by Farrow’s reckoning with his own mortality (as the arthritis in his fingers attests), every piece is a memento mori of one kind or another, including the two musical instruments placed in the center: The Black Cello (2026) and Violin (2026). Both were inspired by Violins of Hope, a collection of restored string instruments that were rescued from ghettos, concentration camps, and trains and are now used in performances. “I read a really moving book about the people who played them, like resistance fighters in Poland and a kid who watched his family get wiped out and escaped with just his violin,” said Farrow. “My wife and I watch a lot of violin concertos on YouTube, and one night I started noticing how the vertical grain of maple on the side walls resembled bullets. I realized I could use a double-barrel shotgun for the neck, heat up a couple of bayonets and bend them around for the scroll—and there was no stopping.” The instruments embrace the best and worst impulses of mankind, made even more visceral by the barbed wire strings. “I wanted to reference the Holocaust and the camps,” says Farrow. “For me, they are also a reminder that we, as Jewish people, were not long ago in a position that is not unlike what is happening to the Palestinians.”

(L) The Last Reliquary (The Fibula and Tooth of Santo Guerro), 2024 Gun parts, bone, glass, bullets, crucifix, bayonets, steel, bullets, tooth

63 x 17 x 17 in

(R) The White House, 2018 Guns, gun parts, shell casings, bullets, steel, glass, patina 77 x 69 x 36 inches

Two older pieces round out the exhibition. Farrow’s final reliquary from 2024, The Last Reliquary (The Fibula and Tooth of Santo Guerro), houses bones of his invented saint of war and sits within whispering distance of The White House, which Farrow began building during the Bush administration as a response to the Iraq War. He hit pause when Obama was elected amidst a surge of hope, then was compelled to complete it during Trump’s first term. Monumental in scale and weighing some 2000 pounds, The White House is constructed of gun parts, bullets, shell casings, and glass, and was scaled not to plan, but rather to the eighteen machine gun barrels that form the columns. Today, its empty rooms and rusted façade embody the erosion of democracy—the literal death of a nation. Although Farrow sees it as a turning point in his work toward more secular themes, at the end of the day, zealotry—be it religious or political—takes no prisoners.

Best known for his representational narrative paintings featuring Greco-Roman classical themes, David Ligare exhibits a group of paintings, drawings, and lithographs he made over 50 years ago which depict sand formations. The fascinating group of works were previously exhibited in a one-person exhibition in New York City at Andrew Crispo Gallery in 1973.

While completely different from the paintings he would become known for, these works engage with many of the topics that have always occupied his work. They lean more toward abstraction and process-oriented art making, yet they implicate the nature of beauty, the relationship between equilibrium and symmetry, and the contrast of opposing values. They hint at what was to come and thus are historically noteworthy, yet they have their own power and subtlety. Ligare ultimately made his way to narrative pictures but the equally prevalent appearance of process-oriented art making, and mixing of painting medium (specifically aluminum powder which offers a metallic sheen contrasting with the softer quality of graphite), the utilization of photography, the Andy Goldsworthy-esque engagement with nature, and the additional layer of lithography, are perfectly suited to a multidimensional art style the 1970s and 80s art world seemed to relish.

Unlike Ligare’s later paintings, which preserve history, the Sand Drawings conserve the fleeting. They are records of something that no longer exists. The drawing is not the artwork itself so much as the memory of an encounter between artist, landscape, and time. It’s an artifact that tells the story of artistic exploration.

Installation view of 615 Broadway exhibition, Seaside, CA.

Ligare was living in Big Sur in the early 1970s when he made this series of work and would walk out to the nearby beach to get started. He made impressions in the sand, drawing directly into the wet sand with his hands. Described by Ligare as “jagged, quick and direct,” he was working in the free style and gestural manner of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism (particularly Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell), although the linear elements harken to a more compartmentalized and formal construction. Driven by intuition rather than a set program, the drawings nevertheless convey an aura of having been found, rather than made. Although the imprinting and mark-making are caused by Ligare’s own hand, they might have been made by objects or the ocean tides themselves. The very idea of the ephemeral, the fleeting and transitory quality of impermanence, and how we render the things we see onto a canvas, are all evoked in these works.

The process is compelling because it sits at the crossroads of Land Art, Process Art, drawing, and photography, while already hinting at the philosophical themes that would later define his classical paintings. They’re often labelled as simply “early works” before Ligare’s embrace of classicism, but they already contain many of the questions that he draws on today: the relationship between chance and order, nature as collaborator rather than subject, the translation of experience into image, the tension between the temporary and the permanent, the paradox that abstraction can emerge directly from observation rather than invention.

His mature paintings aspire toward permanence. They draw upon histories and ideas that have already survived centuries, employing a visual language that has proven remarkably durable. Whether depicting Petrarch, Greek mythology, or idealized landscapes, they participate in a tradition that assumes certain values can outlast the people who make them. The Sand Drawings begin from the opposite point. They are made with the full knowledge that they may disappear almost immediately. The tide is not an abstract possibility but an active participant in the work. Wind, water, or even a simple misstep can erase what has just been made. The drawing exists in a state of continual vulnerability. This distinguishes these works from Ligare’s later paintings without setting them in opposition. The contrast isn’t simply between abstraction and classicism, but between two different relationships to time.

Not dissimilar to our own existence and mortality, the drawings share the body’s condition. Both exist under the constant possibility of alteration. We tend to imagine our lives as stable until illness, accident, or chance reminds us otherwise. The drawings inhabit that same uncertainty. Their vulnerability is never hidden from us; it is the premise upon which they are made. We aren’t vulnerable despite our mortality; our mortality fundamentally shapes how we experience beauty, intimacy, memory, and time. The drawings seem to understand this intuitively.

The completed art works look like photographs, which at the inception of his project, Ligare did in fact take to preserve the evanescent moments he wished to depict. By the time he was transferring the images onto a canvas or paper surface the tide at Big Sur would have already erased the original. The ephemeral nature of these moments is the tension pulling these drawings from nature and human intervention all the way to the terminal layer of completed art works. Ligare both created a moment that would soon be in crisis, and thereafter played the role of rescuer, via photography and drawing, preserving a moment we now observe from a temporal distance.

Visually striking, the light raking across the elevated sand crests would offer enhanced softer shadows, particularly when the sun is lower in the sky, enhancing the textures and making more dramatic and longer shadows emphasizing texture, shape, and strength. The natural equilibrium found in natural forms needn't be balanced perfectly to convey a formal order, typically represented by symmetry. Inexact lines and awkward counterbalances can still convey poise.

The human intervention inherent in the construction of these images draw parallels to frottage where a sheet of paper is placed over a textured surface and thereafter rubbed or traced with a pencil or crayon to transfer the impression onto paper. They also resemble the pre-columbian geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines in Southern Peru. Made by scraping the outer layer of iron-oxide stained earth surface, including soil and stone, lighter subsoil is exposed creating a negative image viewable from nearby foothills or aerial vantage points. The pure organic nature of Ligare’s creations can also be compared to many naturally occurring processes whose forms are not imposed upon the natural world but emerge from the same visual language nature continually produces: the tracks left by a sidewinder snake across desert dunes, the mysterious sailing stones of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, the intricate circular nests created by the male white-spotted pufferfish on the ocean floor, and rain pulling dust into delicate branching rivulets across a window. With the latter example, you aren’t looking at rain itself, you’re looking at the evidence that rain has passed. That’s exactly what Ligare’s drawings become.

Each drawing is an inscription made by movement. None is intended to last. Yet each carries an extraordinary beauty precisely because it is temporary. Wind smooths the dunes, rain eventually obscures the playa’s tracks, currents erase the pufferfish’s elaborate geometry. Their impermanence is inseparable from their meaning. Every line exists with the knowledge that it may be the last moment it exists at all.

Ligare would later paint a series of sheets in the sky, what became known as “thrown drapery” paintings. This work from the later 1970s suggests a desire to capture the fleeting nature of beauty. In each case, Ligare is indebted to natural elements, yet these works cause us to examine the mundane. The fold of fabric or the shadows emanating from a ridge in the sand. Normally we might glaze right over such things, yet inspected carefully, when motion is stationary, we see the complex formations that are as beautiful as any forms we might innately dedicate more time to.

His later classically-themed paintings seek permanence by looking backward through civilization. The Sand Drawings seek permanence through memory. The original gesture disappears, but its essence survives because Ligare painstakingly translates it into graphite. In that sense, the drawings become acts of preservation rather than invention. His classical paintings deliberately converse with history, while these works seem almost prehistoric. They evoke the primal human impulse to leave a mark on the earth, knowing it might vanish before another person ever sees it. They’re less about culture than about existence itself. Their beauty lies not in resisting time, but in acknowledging its inevitability.

There’s something quietly profound in the fact that Ligare’s drawings are remarkably modest. He doesn’t impose himself upon the landscape so much as converse with it. The sea, the wind, and the sand retain equal authorship. The finished graphite drawings are therefore not copies of an artwork but records of a collaboration between human intention and natural forces.

Do these works activate the values that Ligare’s representational works arouse? Ligare has previously noted how Plato gave his essential criteria for a work of art including mimetic correctness (orthotes), attractiveness (charis), and a rather curious additional requirement of usefulness (ophelia). This latter consideration has been interpreted as requiring the work of art to influence culture in a positive way by imbuing a desire for knowledge and truth. This concern is what Ligare’s narrative paintings focus on. However, usefulness vis a vis the sand paintings could be about teaching the viewer how to see, how to look carefully, to come to terms with beauty being present in fragments and unlikely moments.

While Ligare is celebrated for paintings rooted in the permanence of classical tradition, the Sand Drawings reveal an artist equally captivated by the opposite condition; the fleeting, contingent, and fragile nature of existence. They suggest that permanence and impermanence are not opposing concerns in his practice, but two different ways of searching for the same truths.

Belonging and the reverberations of ancestral labor

By Tsitsi Michelle

Demetri Broxton’s work in Ancestral Echoes at the Museum of African Diaspora is versatile, colorful, inspiring and will “knock you out”, you’ll get that reference if you go and see it. The exhibit is being showcased at MoAD, June 10th - August 16th 2026. His family history is the canvas through which the concepts of safety, opportunity and kinship are explored. His family migrated from the South to California and Broxton describes his family’s migration as having created an “interruption to the transmission of knowledge”.It is that rift that he fills with glass beads, cowry shells, wool, horns, pendants, beads, herbs and cotton to tell stories of sovereign authorship. I was captivated by his work and the boxing motif he uses quite often throughout the showcase. I believe it spiritually signifies the journey of inner resilience and sovereignty.

Broxton leaves love notes in his work, “ancestral echoes” beaded into different art pieces, using both words and imagery. My favorite love notes are on the boxing gloves displayed in the exhibit. In one of the sets of gloves he writes, “I love it when you count me out”. As someone who faces racial discrimination and misogynoir, those words resonated deeply as a mantra that has seen me through hard times. I listened to the ancestral echoes steeped in those words and they left me with delicious morsels of both grace and grit. Through his family’s story of migration, he creates a space where ancestry is an active presence “shaped through care, intention and making”. He imagines that what may have been lost through migration can have a space where it can be reconstructed and consequently carried forward by the descendants who live on through and in time. It was beautiful to witness. But then I stood by the altar on display in the exhibit and that moment left me with a compelling thought. 

The altar has pictures of his ancestors, plywood, cotton, tobacco, rice and a few other giftings. Rituals are a crucial part of African diasporic spiritual and cultural practices. They are meant to adorn the individual with protection and fortitude, and so I had to honor that moment. The captivating thought I had was regarding the crops on the altar. “Ancestral echoes” manifest themselves in these four crops: cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice. The concept of ‘Belonging’ for Black Americans cannot be separated from the labor they provided since they landed in the Americas. The idea of “black labor” and its foundational contradiction within American history was conjured up by this altar. Black people were fundamental to the economic growth of the American South—and ultimately the nation itself—while being systematically denied basic human and political rights. Their labor sustained the country across generations, from enslavement and sharecropping to military service, industrial production, and the service economy. Labor existed outside the framework of freedom, status, belonging, ownership, sovereign authorship, citizenship and inclusion.

There I stood, stuck in that train of thought for a while as I ruminated on how plantation economies built around crops such as cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice became foundational to U.S. wealth and development.I thought about how Black labor cannot be separated from the landscape of American storytelling. I thought about the hymns and stories slaves had to adorn for protection and resilience. I thought about the myth of America and the understated truth of the thing that haunts it. Black bodies are archives, keepers of stories, of knowledge and are vessels of memory. The thing that haunts these lands is a profound inconsistent thread that has followed the American narrative regarding freedom. What does it mean for a people who labored on a land that stripped them of their identity, of where they belonged whilst simultaneously the very people who depended on their labor denied their humanity? What echoes from the ancestors on the lands they cultivated, labor they gave that transformed that land and yet they had no legal claim to? It is almost magical in some ways, that the hands that altered the ecosystems with their labor - be it songs, dances, manual work, spiritual and agricultural practises they brought with them - that their Beingness transformed geography. Embedded on this land was identity and memory as they created time and space to belong. A clash of the identity that was imposed on them and identity that was their birthright which came with them. And the grief of all that was lost in between. 

There is an art piece of Broxton’s grandfather holding his mother as a little girl titled “Just beyond the Waters”.His grandfather served in the US Army, put his body on the line to protect a country that did not fully recognize his contribution. I believe Broxton exists in the space that mourns what was lost due to his family’s migration, but also due to that lack of recognition of people like his grandfather. But, Broxton refuses to remain stagnant in the rotten ideology that started it all. He deliberately veils or conceals the background on this image because he believes that certain locations or spaces have often restricted viewers to perceiving Black people through a systemic gaze, one that is of a diminutive nature. And so he purposely conceals certain backgrounds so that his family can exist beyond time. I believe in the grand scheme of things, the ancestors cease to be anonymous or reduced to “labor” but they assert themselves as complete human beings who once lived and who live on through their descendants. 

A case can be made that ‘Belonging’ still feels like something white supremacy believes it can grant or deny. Yet Broxton’s work emphasizes the need to move beyond any imposed gaze or any static definition of the Self. Echoes from the past are meant to be the fluid aspect of Afro identity. Belonging had to be cultivated for Black Americans because waiting for it to be “given” wasn’t an option. Sovereign authorship, all circumstances considered, left Black people very little else but to establish belonging anywhere they were and everywhere else they migrated to.

What remains beneath the historical narratives society chooses to remember about those crops I mentioned? About the slave laborers with or without names? About the inherited assumptions and imposed identities of those deemed invisible? About the horrors of displacement caused by slavery and colonization? This exhibition rejects the notion that people can only be understood through systemic definitions of their humanity. Memory, or lack thereof, for Black Americans is a site of trauma but it is also a site of reverence. This exhibition offers a pathway, a healing balm that centers knowledge, the body and ritual as sites of belonging. The altar is one of the most powerful elements of the exhibition. It is a communal act of remembrance that moves memory from observation into participation. It is where ancestral echoes are transmitted and transmuted. A living relationship with the past through ritual. The altar in my eyes becomes a metaphor for belonging itself. Belonging is not a fixed concept, it is a site of cultivation through fortitude. It requires tending to, fighting for, singing the songs and hymns that honor it, passing down the knowledge that lives on through “care, intention and making”.

I mentioned the boxing motif Broxton used throughout the exhibition. It is imperative I emphasize that ‘Belonging’ for Black people in America has been hard won. It has been a fight to exist as much as it has been a fight to heal. Broxton has a few different boxing gloves throughout the exhibit with “ancestral echoes” written on them. Generations of Black Americans left indelible marks on American history, fighting for the future of their descendants. They live on through their labor, knowledge and fortitude. Their fingerprints are all over the foundation of a nation that struggles, even till today, to acknowledge and recognize them. Broxton asks us as the viewers to remember that even if we may not know all their names, they were active participants in an ongoing story. Their echoes are the winds beneath the sails of Black Americans. And it is from that space that their identity is formed, not from the inert nature of racism. 

Leaving the exhibition, I found myself thinking, ‘could belonging be about recognizing and embodying the traces of oneself anywhere an Afro ancestor has laid their head?’ Maybe? I do not know. The exhibit offered no definitive answers either. Instead, I believe it leaves us curious, soothed, open to a powerful truth that I too also harken to. History attempts to reduce people to the labor they provide or the diminutive epithets and archetypes assigned through discrimination. But our humanity outshines all that brand of hatred endeavors to breed. Like the crops I mentioned before, humanity continues to bloom and so do the Afro descendants. 

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

By Olin Marcus Johanssen

Each day when I arrive at my studio, as I enter the floor where my unit is, I instinctively look left and listen for the sound of classical music drifting from KC’s studio. His door is almost always open, filling the air with the intoxicating scent of fresh oil paint and inviting any passerby to stop, say hello, and to satisfy the inquiring eye with a look at what he has recently finished or is currently working on. His output is prodigious for a person that has a full-time career. It seems that in a few days’ time, one can witness the completion of multiple paintings. They hang across the 12-foot-high walls, lean in tall stacks against each other, and sit framed in boxes in the corner, ready to be hung. One’s imagination may be visioning a large open expanse, something like a loft, but the reality is approximately 150 square feet, with a small skylight and four white walls. The floor is covered in heavy duty canvas painter’s tarps, emblazoned with the trampled drips and splattered remnants of the finished works. It is here, in approximately an 8 by 10-foot space, that KC stands, in workman’s coveralls, palette in one hand, brush in the other, and commands his orchestra of creative force. To see him without him noticing, his face holds an expression of serious contemplation, but upon noticing you his eyes light up, and a smile emerges as he engages with you in his kind-natured way. To those interested, he is happy to talk about whatever he is working on, and does so in a succinct and effortless way that few artists possess. One feels immediately included in the most intimate of manners, as if the work is being created specifically for you, and he has been waiting to tell you about it.

            This is the profundity of the work encapsulated in “Not Yet Form/D”, the solo exhibition by KC Ho currently on view at Upper Market Gallery. Featuring 22 new paintings, Ho takes the viewer on a journey of continued self-discovery, across the ever-evolving stages of his oeuvre. His deeply expressive paintings have in them a rhythm that is unmistakable and quite cerebral. They exist in a dance between tension and breath. Represented are 4 stages of Ho’s exploration: his portraits, figurative abstractions, pure expressionism, and finally his narrative expressionism. The thread between these works is clear and unflinchingly cohesive. 

            “Crimson Chromatic” a smaller portrait executed in a thick impasto that layers the canvas, making it feel as if a battle has taken place. In Ho’s way of repetition, erasure, and reapplication, the face portrayed is more than a simple likeness, it’s both moving and still elucidating both the inward and outward condition of the sitter. I am gifted by the sight of extreme tension, not only in the construction of the work but also in the subject matter itself. A closer look reveals that this is not a narrative about the strife of a man, but rather one of the necessary shedding required in the process of self-discovery — a person in the midst of becoming their true self. It is the cusp of the beauty which is about to be; the butterfly’s first moment as it emerges from the chrysalis. 

            Hung as a selection of many, “Crimson Chromatic” is anchored amongst a smattering of human silhouettes in motion. Most are set on dark mono or dual-chromatic backgrounds. This group of work includes the favorite of my eldest daughter, “Not Forgotten”. A figure in orange seems to approach us, emerging from a deep alizarin portal, framed in a red so dark it is approaching black. While it is seemingly simple in its coloration, the artist’s approach to this clarity in palette is a story of layers. These may be meant to represent those of our lives. As I become engrossed in discovering these I am confronted by the figure; I see it leaving, then coming, and then leaving again, repeating over and over. Its hand painted in white, is it reaching out to me or letting go? I want to both grab ahold of it and wave goodbye. I ask myself, “Is this a person or a ghost?” My daughter has been asking a lot about death as a child her age discovering this inevitable fact is prone to do. Her questions often confound and impress me with each new one: “Are you sad when you die?”, “Will you miss me when you die?”, “Will I miss you when you die?”, are just a few of the deeply inquisitive and perplexing ones I spend days thinking of my response to. In those moments, a need for clarity comes, and in it often the best answer, but those are for her. In “Not Forgotten” Ho appears to give us insight into his perception of the matter. In a conversation with him the day after the opening, he told me this work was in response to the recent loss of his father. That insight naturally gives deeper meaning to the work. I pondered if asked of the figure, “Are you sad when you die?”, would it answer, “Yes” as indicated by the cadmium orange emanating from the body like a soul ablaze on its journey from this world, its white hand left rendered in an obscurity of its intention. “Will you miss me?”, “Yes”, the figure says, as is seen by the revolving nature of its position, fighting its fate while trying to hold on. “Will I miss you?”, “Yes”, it replies, as the world around the figure goes from the red of love, rage, and loss to fading slowly to the black of absence, sadness, and disbelief. But there is hope, a fountain of it, and I am reminded by it that we don’t die, the world ends, and we ascend into the dimension of time and space where our consciousness becomes a shared entity. We are never forgotten. 

            Moving on to my personal favorite of the exhibition, “The Unfolding”, an expressionist painting primarily set in a field of yellow with beautiful blush undertones that slowly become green at the bottom. From underneath cadmium deep yellow pops whipped gold, and atop sit white clouds. All painted in repetitive, near lateral strokes, that move just slightly elevated to the left. Each time I see this piece, I am lifted. It is a breath, carrying me back to my first trip to California when I was nineteen. In an old cigarette burned forest green Buick LeSabre, tumbling up and down the live oak dotted golden hills of the 101 as I traversed south to north. My memory of that trip is one of light – the golden hour seemed to be permanent, eclipsing any specific memories beyond it.  A young man with a heart full of dreams, now an older man looking both back and forward, blinded by each direction. This painting is the memory that perpetuated my moving to San Francisco 10 years later, as I chased those dreams only to realize them in the form of my second born daughter, the most beautiful sunlight.

            The title piece of the show, “Not Yet Formed”, is a field of alternating blues and greens centered in a halo of misty white that fades into a beautiful raw sienna edge. This painting is a seminal example of where expressionism becomes narrative. Through the brushwork, figures emerge and recede with a repetition which reads as people walking outdoors, possibly near or in view of a body of water. In this square format I am on a path, meandering amongst the evergreens, walking in a circle with a beginning and end in mind but still looking for an alternate course. In the mist of the fog, I wonder if I am coming out of it, or if it is enveloping me in its enchanting chill. My becoming feels certain but remains unseen or rather “Not Yet Formed”.

            Please take the time to see KC’s work in its final weekend at Upper Market Gallery, 4690 18Th Street, San Francisco. A Closing Reception will be held this Friday, June 26th, from 5-9pm with additional hours Saturday and Sunday from 1-5pm. It has been both a pleasure to see these works in the beautiful setting of Upper Market Gallery, and also an honor to watch them come into existence through KC’s dedicated and committed hand in our shared studio space. 

The Wall That's Part of Us

By Erik Recendez

In a loneliness epidemic, is “Neighbors”, an exhibition at Et al. Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District,the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down? 

Weaving through the two-person exhibition featuring Daniel Arthur Mendoza and Daniel Trejo, curated by Justin Mata, my initial read is that it looks like a doll-house interior, in the colors of the night sky: Deep Indigo, Cornflower Blue, Soft Lilac, and Gunmetal. Disney-esque cartoon characters in states of longing are spaced across the walls, while rectangular sculptures vaguely suggest modernist design forms in our everyday lives, the refrigerator, architecture, a side table, and the smartphone, inhabit the floor space. The whole scene together suggests a cardboard toy house, parts dismantled. Narratives raced across my mind of the lives, of cartoon families, the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Griffins, ideal, devoid of true suffering, and filled with wacky, joyous memories. The curatorial juxtaposition of artwork reflects the exhibition's intent, a hopeful vision of cooperation and friendship, yet I found myself thinking about the binary of togetherness and loneliness. I am interested in how the artists in this exhibition utilize the shadows of the idealistic American home shaped by tech-minimalist aesthetics and gender norms as a catalyst for building real, meaningful connections. 

Daniel Arthur Mendoza's contribution to the exhibition is soft, composed of bedsheets, floral patterns, sequins, and Disney-inspired imagery. Mendoza says, “I often draw from hidden or possible queer narratives in cartoons from animated films from the 1920s to 60s. These stories often were built to construct normative, heterosexual, social structures of daily life and to repress the “other” which was often assigned to queer-coded characters.” He hints at latent dreams and desires by injecting intimate moments into these narratives. For example, in Under the Cover of Protective Darkness (2026), Mendoza uses bed sheets to carry the sensitive emotional palimpsest of a private life. Two feet touch one another. A simple act, but loaded with sensual potential. The tenderness of the materials, creates a “safe-space” that imbues the viewer with a sense of privacy, safety, or vulnerability.

I questioned him about the inherent vulnerability of the materials in his work. He said, “I like repurposing second-hand fabrics so that they have a different life and they become another thing. Which is kind of a queer aesthetic practice in finding a new relationship with materials, labor, and the world in general.” Seemingly drawing on the legacy of Pattern and Decoration artists such as Miriam Schapiro, Robert Zakanitch, and Robert Kushner, he is performing craftivism with his “femmage” statements of sensitivity. Through promiscuous patterns, Mendoza's work resists the sterility often associated with dominant masculine ideals, such as the deep-rooted cultural socialization that discourages emotional vulnerability. In doing so, it offers a quiet counterpoint to the expectations placed on men to appear controlled and invulnerable—an archetype that continues to shape contemporary male life.

Smartphones, smart cars, luxury condos, tech campuses, airport lounges, wellness brands — they all inherit a kind of Dieter Rams functionalist, tech-minimalist aesthetic prioritizing utility and cleanliness. If contemporary loneliness is partly a crisis of human connection, it is also a crisis of environments increasingly stripped of evidence of other people. Then Daniel Trejo comes along. His brand of minimalism reintroduces material contradiction and traces of the handmade, challenging the sterile, frictionless aesthetic of modern mass-produced design.

Like the post-minimalists Robert Morris, Lynda Benglis, and Scott Burton before him, Trejo revisits Minimalism not to celebrate its precision but to expose its limitations through material instability, anti-industrial tactility, and the refusal of Minimalism’s clean finish. In Waning Constellation (2026), a large foam wheel in the round appears almost proto-technological, now archaic and reduced to a prop. Leaning on its backside is a smartphone-sized ceramic tile, fragile and easily overlooked. Trejo handles materials: industrial foam, automobile paint, ceramics, nail polish, and fabric, with lyrical mastery—industrial, domestic, and cosmetic materials appear to collide. Its awkward physicality and palpable traces of the artist's hand resist the frictionless logic of contemporary "calm" design, which often seeks to erase evidence of human labor and minimize dependence on others. In contrast, Waning Constellation insists on material presence, vulnerability, and the imperfect residue of making. Throughout the exhibition, Trejos's sculptures produce similarly awkward encounters between handmade surfaces, bodily scale, and familiar forms that disrupt seamlessness. If contemporary loneliness is partly produced by environments designed for efficiency and self-sufficiency, Trejo proposes another possibility: spaces that acknowledge interdependence by preserving traces of the people who shape them.

Both societal diagnosis and antidote, the exhibition proposes forms of connection rooted in vulnerability, material presence, and attentiveness to others. Mendoza invites us into intimate emotional spaces where softness becomes a form of resistance, while Trejo suggests that relational failures are inseparable from the environments we inhabit. Mendoza and Trejo’s work, juxtaposed, creates a dual message: the loneliness epidemic is not merely a failure of personal relationships but a symptom of conditions increasingly engineered to minimize interdependence. In this sense, Neighbors is less about the people who live beside us than about the conditions that make genuine proximity possible.

By Garrett Caples

Will Yackulic is an artist I encountered first through the Bay Area poetry scene, rather than the art world as such. This is not suggest that he hasn’t had art world success—to the contrary, his work can be found in the collections of SFMOMA, LACMA, and the Berkeley Art Museum—but rather that he’s one of those artists, like a Brainard or a Jess, whom you frequently find in the company of poets, resulting in numerous book and magazine covers over the years. In a superficial sense, you could explain this away by noting his family connections to the New York School of poets: his aunt and uncle were Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, the title of whose posthumous final book of poems A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988) he has borrowed for this exhibition of small scale paintings, all of which are oil on wood panel and most of which measure 9” x 7.25”. As with this book—comprised entirely of poems written on 4.5” x 7” postcards—the restricted format becomes the form. The paintings could indeed make splendid book covers without any adjustment to their dimensions, though naturally they don’t require any purpose other than themselves. Intimate, intricate, often inscrutable as is the way with the contemporary lyric, Yackulic’s paintings are fundamentally poetic in sensibility, irrespective of any biographical lineage.

In a more thematic sense, A Certain Slant of Sunlight lends itself to this exhibition because light is a major preoccupation of these paintings, though in truth nothing seems to delight him more than a slant of shadow, as we see in Bosch, behind a book leaning against a wall, or in Crystal Clear Tape, from sunlight bisected by a window frame, or in Kitchen, from light traveling through a colander and etched glass tumbler. That said, Yackulic quite clearly responds to the light in the East Bay, the monumental quality it gives certain buildings, like the imposing bulk of Hill Castle Apartment Hotel IV, seen from behind on a sunny day, or the skinny Gothic revival skyscraper Cathedral Building, poking up behind a treetop on an overcast day. Deceptively simple, many of the paintings are as complicated as vision itself, such as Tree (Spring), where we look through lower branches that are backlit by the sun directly lighting the higher branches behind them. Such details don’t draw attention to themselves, lending the paintings an air of mystery; you know what you’re seeing but you don’t immediately know why you are seeing it. Why this image, isolated from the general welter of what we see? Yackulic’s paintings might be described as acts of attention that in turn only emerge through a viewer’s sustained attention.

The exploration of light quite naturally evokes the imperatives of impressionist painting; sometimes one of his paintings will seem almost photographic when viewed at a certain distance, but on close inspection will look almost comically unrealistic, thick with brushwork that defies disappearance into illusion. This is particularly the case here in paintings like Theater II or the two On Adeline, with the perspective of the street extending into the distance. The first On Adeline is especially impressive, the Berkeley hills faint but looming like a tidal wave, the just-before-sunset light changing in successive layers the closer the objects get. In the foreground, Yackulic adds an extra layer with the artificial red brake lights on the cars driving away from the viewer, at a time of day when it’s too bright to switch on the headlights, but dark enough for the electric light to begin to glow.

Yackulic’s earlier success as an artist had a remarkably different character, akin to op art, so this recent work can be seen as a rebellion, in some sense, from the work that made his reputation, the Poésies to its Maldoror. And yet, these two modes seem to me intimately related. His op art work—generally building up structures from small geometric increments—required a minute precision that, at a glance, he would seem to have abandoned in favor of impressionistic illusion. But to me, the current oil paintings suggest that he hasn’t so much abandoned this precision as exceeded it. The casual subject matter under attention conceals the highly composed nature of the image, as in Net II, where the natural elements of the landscape and the artificial ones of the basketball backboard, net, rim, and pole mirror one another in Yackulic’s attentive gaze. This compositional excellence combined with a technical effortlessness suggests he’s gone beyond virtuosity. All that technique remains, but unconscious, or rather he is no longer directly engaged with it in favor of what he sees. It’s almost like he’s deliberately degrading his precision as a challenge. Take the “D,” say,” in “OAKLAND” as displayed on the Theater II sign; it barely looks like the letter in question. But this doesn’t deform the impression of the word, or of the scene as whole, in the least.

It will be interesting to see where Yackulic’s art goes from here. In a sense, this post-technique era of his work could sustain an artist indefinitely, in the manner of a high-end photographer, endlessly able to frame and capture images with a camera. In both cases, the ability to see outstrips the accouterments of the media used to capture the vision. But I suspect a certain restlessness that has already characterized his artistic development will set in and lead to the next evolution of his work, in a way no less unpredictable than his turn from op art success to these poetically expressive oils.

The Quiet Eye: Guy Diehl’s Patient Light

By Gabrielle Selz

Guy Diehl has spent fifty years and five hundred canvases convincing himself, and us, that nothing in a room is more or less worth looking at than anything else: a tangerine, a take-out box, a postcard of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. But spend twenty minutes in The Quiet Eye, his seventh solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, and a different claim emerges underneath the first one. This is not, finally, a show about objects. It is a show about what happens to time when someone insists on looking at something for long enough.

“When I’m painting, everything stops for me,” Diehl has said. “It takes me out of the moment.” That sentence could serve as the show’s true subtitle. Diehl’s still lifes are often described, accurately but incompletely, as photorealist. Up close, though, the realism reveals itself as a negotiation rather than a transcription: there is exactly enough information to convince the eye an object exists, and not a brushstroke more. The effect isn’t documentary. It’s meditative. Diehl isn’t recording what a tangerine looks like; he’s recording how long it takes to really see one.

That distinction matters because it relocates the show’s real subject. Diehl arranges his objects (bottles, shells, books, the occasional reproduction of a Malevich or a Morandi) the way a director blocks a scene, but what he’s actually chasing is the light that falls across them. He sets up a composition and photographs it once an hour, tracking how daylight moves across the same surfaces over the course of a day before he ever touches a brush. “Mostly it’s about light,” he has said, comparing his own practice to Monet’s Haystacks. The shell, the box: he’s drawn to them as much for their shape as anything else, vessels for catching incandescence, throwing shadow, gathering the soft, bleeding halo that bright light leaves on an object’s edge, a phenomenon photographers call halation. The objects are simply where the light happens to land that day.

This is also where Diehl’s relationship to his own medium becomes legible as a kind of argument. He paints in acrylic, a medium that dries fast and forgives little revision, and he has spoken about that speed as a productive restriction rather than a limitation, a constraint that forces distillation instead of accumulation. He marks up his canvases against a color wheel, working out red against blue with something closer to a physicist’s notation than a romantic’s intuition. The result is paintings that feel underbuilt in the best sense: spare arrangements where linear perspective does the work that incident usually does in painting. 

Diehl likes to recall something Wayne Thiebaud once said in a talk, that an artist really only has three subjects, person, place, or thing, and the real craft is in how you combine them. Diehl seems to have taken this almost literally. By pressing "thing" and "place" into the same image, arranging objects until their recession along a single plane starts to read as geography, he collapses the very distinction Thiebaud was drawing, so that still life and landscape become two names for the same picture. His clusters of bottles and books resolve, at a certain distance, into something that reads less like a tabletop than a horizon: a still life that quietly behaves like a landscape, miniature and self-contained.

The show’s title work and Diehl’s five-hundredth signed canvas, The Quiet Eye (2026), plays this distillation as a kind of summation. Diehl’s signature bottles and shells meet the take-out containers from his more recent vocabulary, proof that no hierarchy survives long enough to matter in the artist’s eye. The background dissolves into geometry, handled like a painter’s palette, fields of muted lilac and deep violet into which Diehl has slotted an actual copy of the exhibition’s namesake book. It’s the closest thing in the show to a signature gesture: five hundred paintings arriving, deliberately, at an image of nothing more than a room holding its breath.

Allegory of Love: Conversation with Giorgione (2024) makes the show's argument about hierarchy almost confrontational. Giorgione's Sleeping Venus appears only as a postcard, flattened into the same plane as everything else on the table, her reclining body distorted once by reproduction and a second time by the bottle of red liquid set in front of her, its glass bending and reddening her image until she barely reads as a figure at all. That double distortion is what sets up the painting's real tension. At the composition's edge sits a glass marble, caught in the same wash of red. The marble does what the Venus, reduced first to a souvenir and then to a smear of color, no longer can: it holds its shape. It holds tension. It looks, in that instant, like it might roll off the table entirely, and the whole painting quietly becomes a memento mori built from nothing more than reflected light and a millimeter of glass.

Conversation with Robert Delaunay #5 (2026) takes the same device, the marble as a small optical universe, and turns it inward rather than outward. Delaunay’s concentric color rings appear twice in this canvas: once as a flattened reproduction among the other objects, and once again, inverted and miniaturized, caught inside the marble’s curved surface. It’s the most literal staging in the show of what Diehl means by “conversation”: not homage, but a kind of optical argument, where the original loses its claim to singularity the moment it’s reflected back at itself, distorted, in glass. Look closely enough into one of these spheres across the show and, occasionally, you’ll find Diehl’s own small reflection looking back, a self-portrait small enough to miss, embedded in the very mechanism that lets the paintings see themselves thinking.

The show’s most pointed staging of that tension between control and feeling is Still Life with Egon Schiele Nude (2025). Schiele built his reputation on raw, nervy line and bodies pushed to the edge of distortion, the kind of expressionism that announces itself. Diehl borrows none of that heat directly. He renders the reproduction small and flat, boxed into the same disciplined geometry as the paper-wrapped package beside it, so the painting becomes a quiet argument between two opposed instincts: the expressionist charge of the source image and the almost minimalist restraint of Diehl’s own hand. The wrapped parcel keeps its secret. The borrowed nude keeps its silence. Even here, the arrangement resolves into something closer to a horizon than a tabletop, blocks of paper and color receding like the geography of a small, contained landscape. Diehl isn’t quoting Schiele so much as cooling him down, proving that even a charged image can be absorbed into the same patient, even light that governs everything else on his table.

That patience, the willingness to let an object, a sealed package, simply remain unresolved, is the connective tissue running underneath every painting in this show. Diehl has said that by selecting and arranging objects, he can introduce a narrative into his paintings, but the narratives here are unusually quiet ones: not stories about the things themselves, but about the duration required to actually see them. By relying on a steady set of recurring props (marbles, paper bags, books, shells) across hundreds of canvases, Diehl turns repetition into a register fine enough to carry real variation; the nuance lives in the light, not the object.

Five hundred paintings in, The Quiet Eye doesn’t announce a culmination so much as confirm a method: slow the eye down enough, and even a take-out box starts to look like it’s been waiting its whole life to be seen.

Tom Marioni, born in Cincinnati in 1937, is a pioneering conceptual artist whose work helped define social practice, sound sculpture, and performance art. After studying at the Cincinnati Art Academy, he moved to San Francisco in 1959, where he became a central figure in the Bay Area conceptual art movement.

Marioni’s One Second Sculpture (1969) anticipated later artistic uses of sound, duration, and action. In 1970, his Oakland Museum exhibition, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, became a landmark work of social sculpture and has since been restaged internationally. That same year, he founded the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, one of the first alternative art spaces, which he described as “a large-scale social work of art.”

Marioni has exhibited and performed at major institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, ICA London, Centre Pompidou, de Young Museum, Tate Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum. His work is held by SFMOMA, MoMA, the Pompidou Center, and other major collections.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and multiple NEA grants. He is also the author of Beer, Art and Philosophy and other writings on art.

This interview with Tom Marioni was conducted by John Held, Jr.

Telling His Side of the Story

John Held: You’ve been interviewed many times. Do you enjoy the process, view it painfully, or do it out of necessity?

Tom Marioni: I’ve been interviewed many times over the past fifty years. I prefer to do it on email because I can check what I write before I send it out. When I have been interviewed, I find out that I stutter sometimes and there's a lot of ah’s an oh’s in the finished transcription. I enjoy telling my side of things.

A Catholic Cincinnati Childhood

John Held: You were born 1937 into a Cincinnati, Ohio, Italian American family to a doctor father with three other brothers, Paul, Don and Joseph, who also became artists. Additionally, your nephew, Dante Marioni, went on to become a noted glassblower. What was the family dynamic driving family members not only to practice and excel in the arts, but in such diverse fields? What was there in this strictly Catholic raised family that produced both a monochrome painter and a conceptual artist?

Tom Marioni: Yes, I was in grade school during World War Two. My father came to America from Italy in 1921 when he was 21, and became a doctor. His best friend was a painter, famous in Cincinnati for painting the murals in the airport. Dad was a Sunday painter and painted at home every weekend. My mother came from Syracuse, New York, and her parents were from Italy. My mother played the piano, harp and sang. My three brothers Don, Paul and Joe studied the piano and the three of us became artists. Paul makes art from glass, cast glass and stain glass windows. Joe moved to New York and became a monochrome painter. He was red /green color blind like me. I thought you cannot go wrong if you only painted one color paintings. He died in 2024. We all studied music. Don and Joe the piano, and I studied the violin and played in a youth orchestra at the Conservatory of Music when I was fourteen.  

A childhood friend of my father in Italy when he was child wanted to visit Dad in 1958 when I was in art school. I drove my father to New York City to meet Dr. Bassi and his daughter, who came to New York on the cruise ship the Leonardo da Vinci. I took my father to Birdland, the most famous Jazz club in the country, and I was glad to introduce him to Jazz. I graduated from art school at the end of the 1959 and took the train to San Francisco to be a beatnik.

Learning Jazz as a Second Language

John Held: Before we move on to the San Francisco years, let’s stay in Cincinnati and discuss some of your formative experiences. Did your brothers join you at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where you received your art training from 1955 to 1959? Was here competition between you, support from your parents, similar interests shared? Was there one professor who left an indelible mark on you? What was art school like in the 1950s and why did Jazz play such an important role in this early stage of your artistic development?

Tom Marioni: I remember also the Art Academy. My brother Joe who was six years younger than me went there after I left for San Francisco. Paul never went to art school but studied English literature. Noel Martin was my design teacher, my biggest influence. He said you should support products that have good design. I judge wine by the price tag and the label design.  

My father did not expect any of us to become doctors. And I was interested in art. The 1950’s were the high point of modern Jazz. I went to Jazz clubs then and learned it as a second language. I even met Miles Davis briefly at the Monterey Jazz festival. My teachers in art school made fun of the Abstract Expressionism that was the art of the time. Be Bop and Jackson Pollock were the beginning of American Art.

Beatnik Dreams and the Army Years

John Held: You mentioned moving to San Francisco in 1959, but soon after went into the Army spending the next three years stationed in Germany. There were still a lot of fresh wounds from WW2 on display in Germany during the time you were there. What was this period like, and did it have an impact on your art down the line? I know that you became an admirer of Joseph Beuys, who dealt with his country’s fracture. Did any of this have to do with your first hand witnessing of a unique historical situation?

Tom Marioni: I went from art school to San Francisco and moved into a furnished room on California Street near Fillmore. The Fillmore area was a kind of West Coast Harlem in the 1940’ and 1950’s. I saw Big Mama Thornton and B. B. King there. I got a job working for a designer designing rugs and wall paper. It lasted about 9 months. I bought a motor cycle, a Matchless 500 CC, and went to North Beach every night. I realized I went to San Francisco to be a Beatnik, and because Italians had status.

After a year I was drafted into the army. I found out if I signed up for three years and not two, I could request to be sent to Europe and not the US or Korea. This was between wars. I was sent to ULM Germany on the Danube River. I was in the Infantry but after a few months I wrote to the Stars and Stripes newspaper for a transfer with my resume and they accepted me to be on their staff. My commanding Army colonel said if I forget the transfer he would give me my own office and put me in charge of beautification of the post. I painted murals in several buildings.

I got married to my San Francisco girlfriend Marilyn Swensen and was able to move off post. We went to Munich on our honeymoon and that was a great art town at the time. I got a Volkswagen, and an apartment for forty dollars a month. I made friends with a teacher at the famous High School for Design founded by Max Bill. A friend I met in basic training, who was stationed in Frankfort, got together and I drove my wife and his German girlfriend to Paris to see Bud Powell at the Blue Note Jazz club. Germany was good to me. We even drove to Rome and other parts of Germany.

After two years I was transferred to Columbus, Georgia, for six months. I got a job there at the sign painting office and had my first one man show in the art museum there. I was discharged in 1963 and drove with Marilyn and our first son Marino to San Francisco in an Oldsmobile that my brother Paul gave to me. Right away we got an apartment on Hyde St. for eighty-five dollars a month. My first room was at 2246 California Street in 1959.

My first job in 1964 was in a plaster shop, I was the finisher and spray painted the lamp bases, decorative objects etc. It was on Minna Street where the park for the Moscone Center is now. I was a layout person for a commercial newspaper after that, and a free lance graphic designer. I had a studio on Third St. where the SF Museum of Modern Art is now. It was across the street from a porno theater. There wasn’t much on Third St. then. Marilyn got a job downtown and Marino (now Reno) and Tony used to jump on the Hyde Street cable car to the bay beach and jump off if the conductor asked for their fare. Tony was in a school with all Chinese kids and the teacher told the class “you should only speak English when you are home.”

I was out of work in 1968, and I got a job at the Hunters Point Shipyard for one month when I suddenly became the curator of the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California.  I was there until 1971. I organized several important conceptual art exhibitions. In 1969, Invisible Painting and Sculpture included the first time Larry Bell was seen in the Bay Area. Also The Return of Abstract Expressionism, a sculpture show about process art, installation, and records of Earth Art etc.

I got fired in the beginning of 1971 because my shows were too far out. Up until Richmond I was doing minimal sculptures and Op art paintings. I started doing language pieces to put on refrigerators like Free Beer, and Art is a Bunch of Shit but I love it. In 1969, I made an action piece, One Second Sculpture, that I later became famous for. I threw a metal tape measure into the air and had it photographed as it was opening itself up. It was an example what today is called Sculpture Based Performance. (A lot of this stuff is in my book Beer, Art and Philosophy [Crown Point Press, 2003]).

Curator Before Artist

John Held: You went to work at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California, just across from San Francisco in the East Bay in 1968, quickly turning it into one of the most adventurous alternative art spaces in California before you departed in 1971. These years were particularly decisive in the Bay Area socially, politically, and artistically. What was the inspiration for your programming at the Richmond Art Center? How did you see yourself fitting into the artistic scene in San Francisco? Who was the audience for your work? How did the Richmond Art Center distinguish itself from the other alternative art spaces developing in San Francisco?

Tom Marioni: Another thing about the Richmond Art Center, it had a great history. It was started in 1936 by Hazel Salmi in her house, who was responsible for getting it included in the civic center complex in the early 1950’s when it was built. It had a history of showing recent Bay Area artists, like most of the figurative painters, and in the 1960’s for showing some of the Funk artists. I just thought it was my job to continue this tradition to show the art of the late 1960s, the first Conceptual Art in the Bay Area.

They also had juried shows, and I did that too. After I got fired, it returned to a crafts center and never did any important shows after I left. My shows were reviewed in the SF Chronicle, even if they made fun of them. I was a conceptual artist that did many things including being a curator. I was not a curator that became an artist. It was the other way around. Unfortunately, in the Bay Area I was known as a curator at that time before I was known as an artist, and that hurt my career as an artist. People only want to see you for one thing.

In the 1970’s, I became known in Europe as a first generation conceptual, performance and sound artist. Also, at that time The Berkeley Art Museum was created, and Peter Selz was hired from New York’s MOMA to be the first director. He did the first Funk art show and it was written up in Newsweek, that put us on the art map.

Founding the Museum of Conceptual Art

John Held: After your departure from the Richmond Art Center, you created the Museum for Conceptual Art to continue your own practice and the curation of conceptually based artists in the Bay Area including Terry Fox, Paul Kos, David Ireland and Howard Fried. You also served as a destination point for visiting conceptual artists Chris Burden, Barbara Smith and Linda Montano.

Was MOCA a direct result of your firing at the Richmond Art Center? What were some of the more noteworthy performances that occurred? What was it like paving the way for a new artistic medium with a cadre of friends that were eventually responsible for initiating the New Genres program at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979?

Tom Marioni: I founded the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in 1970, the year before I left the Richmond Art Center. MOCA’s philosophy came from Joseph Beuys, who was the inventor of Sculpture Based Performance and Social Sculpture. MOCA was a museum for actions by sculptors. There was no theatre or dance. The collection consisted of relics, records and documents. The 1970’s was the most important decade for me as an artist. Other important local artists at the time were John Woodall, Mel Henderson, Bonnie Shirk, Linda Montano, Terry Fox, Paul Kos, Howard Fried and me. David Ireland, the one you mentioned in your question, was seven years older than me and came into the Conceptual Art world as a second generation Neo-Conceptual artist.

I gave shows to artists outside San Francisco like Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Barbara Smith and Robert Barry. The first show in the beginning of 1970 was Sound Sculpture As. I think it was the first sound art show ever. (Not music, sound as a sculpture material) It was actions by sculptors. The next most important exhibition was All Night Sculpture, actions and installations by nine artist from sunset to sunrise. I sold the MOCA archive to the Berkeley Art Museum in 1994.

In 1970, I moved to Forest Knolls, and in 1972 I divorced Marilyn and moved into my MOCA space at 75 3rd Street. In 1974, I moved in with Kathan Brown in Berkeley, and we were married in 1983. We were together fifty years. We had a happy marriage, and she passed away on March 10, 2025. Kathan founded Crown Point Press in 1962, and I was invited to make prints there many times over the years. I was also the designer for the press. We made many trips to Japan and China where I made actions and wood block prints. 

(End of part 1 of 1970’s)

The work I am most known for besides the founding of MOCA is 

The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970, originally at the Oakland Art Museum. Sixteen friends were invited during an afternoon when the museum was closed, because I didn’t want to have my friends be performers for the public. The act was the art and the debris was left as evidence of the act. The left over bottles etc. were on exhibit for the rest of the month. It wasn’t aesthetic, just what was there and what happened.

Later over the years, it became more and more organized as an installation. It became more aesthetic over time as I was influenced by the Japanese tea ceremony I saw in Japan. The basic elements after years of doing it around the world are yellow light, Jazz music, a refrigerator (with FREE BEER on the door) behind a bar that the gallery builds, a wood table with four wood chairs, a shelf to hold 216 bottles of Pacifico Mexican beer, if possible, and a flat screen video monitor vertical on the wall with a video of the inside of a beer glass filling up.

I have recreated this work about fifty times since 1970. It’s a work of art that will always be in the present every time it is created and never be dated. During these fifty years since 1973, I have been meeting with friends in my studio every Wednesday. It has changed location and titles, and since 2000, it has been called the Society of Independent Artists, SIA. People sign up to bartend and after three times they become members.

In 1975, I created Vision an art journal published by Kathan and Crown Point Press. I was editor and designer. We did five issues until 1981: California, Eastern Europe, New York City, Word of Mouth (three lp records), Artist Photographs. We went to an island in the Pacific for a week with about thirty-five people and twelve invited artist to record twelve minute talks. The artists were all recognized artists from Europe, New York and California. The fifth issue was Artist Photographs that included fifty-six artists from sixteen different countries, who produced photographs as art. These artist were not photographers but painters, sculptures and mostly conceptual artist. These books have become collector items. A teacher once told me that he used the New York issue as a text book in class.  

With MOCA and my books, I have been trying to explain conceptual art to the art public. In 1978, John Cage came to us to make etchings. I asked Kathan to invite him, and he came every year after that until 1992 and stayed at our house in Berkeley. We got to know him and become friends. He recommend me to a German radio station that produced Radio Plays as new music and sound recordings. 

Zen, Cage, and the Pacific Rim

John Held: What draws you to John Cage, zen, and Japanese Art? Do you think California artists have a special affiliation with our Pacific Rim neighbors? How does this appreciation of zen run through the body of your creative work?

Tom Marioni: I was very influenced by Asian ideas in the 1970’s. Beginning in 1972, I started to make my out of body free hand drawings. Drawing a Line as Far as I Can Reach was the first. It was like doing yoga while holding a pencil. It was supposed to be a tree, but not the way a tree looks, the way a tree grows. I drew a line from the bottom up on a large piece of wrapping paper. Later, when I studied Chinese writing in the 1980’s, l learned how you write “stick.” It was a word like my line drawing. Another one was “art.” “Beauty” was the left character, the one on the right is “skill.” I saw it as male and female. Male dancing with  female.

In 2016, I was in a show at the Guggenheim Museum, American  Artists Influenced by Asian Culture. I made a wall drawing of a circle, Out of Body Free Hand Circle on Prepared Wall. Living in California, on the Pacific Rim, it is impossible not to be influenced by Asian culture. When I sold my first Line Drawing to the Oakland Museum, the art critic in the paper referred to it as, "A mindless drawing on cheap brown paper.” Later I told him he was right on.

When the Action Is the Art

John Held: I’m very interested in that many of your art works come out of physical actions, and they are the primary motivation, not the look of the finished product. It reminds me of the Japanese Gutai art movement, where participants focused on the material itself, feeling it was the artist’s responsibility to reveal the poetic core of the material under investigation. What were some of the other “out of body free hand drawings,” you’ve performed over the years, and how have they developed, if at all, in unexpected ways? 

Tom Marioni: Running and Jumping While Trying to Fly, was a record of flight, and the finished drawing looked like the wing of a bird. Walking, drawing, holding the pencil at my hip and walking along a long piece of paper. The result was a wavy line like a snake, 

The Drum Brush Drawings started in 1972. I drummed on large sheets of sand paper with wire Jazz drum brushes. The result of the trance drumming was like a shadow of a flying bird. It was just what happened after the action, a marriage of art and music. It was usually a Jazz 4/4 tempo. 

Prints and the Cycles of Art

John Held: In contrast to your performance drawings, you have done more formal prints under the supervision of the master printers at Crown Point Press. How many prints have you done with them over the years? Do you enjoy collaboration with the Crown Point Press staff? What has been your relationship with other Crown Point Press artists, such as Richard Diebenkorn, who successfully recommended you for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. What has been your role and rationale for recommending other artists to work at Crown Point Press?

Tom Marioni: I have been making prints since 1974. I have made fifty-six etchings over the years, and five lithographs in Texas since 1972. Richard Diebenkorn recommend me for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1981. Hans Haacke, John Cage and Larry Bell all recommended me for grants in the 1980s.

Starting in 1977, painting returned and conceptual art was over. No-one bought it because it had no color. I think that the seventh year of every decade starts the next movement in art. 1947 abstract expressionism, 1957 pop art, 1967 conceptual art, 1977 Neo AE painting, 1987 Neo pop and so on. I called 2007 Pathetic Art, artists complaining about their place in the world. We are still in a series of Neo movements.

Jazz stoped evolving in 1970, and art stopped in 1980. When the economy is good, art is about money and painting always returns. When the economy is bad, the art is philosophical, poetic and usually does not sell. In the early part of the 20th century after Dada, people predicted the end of art and what they really meant was the end of painting. Duchamp declared that he had quit art to play chess. He was quitting painting, and he continue to make sculpture additions and exhibit ready-made objects. My work in the 1980’s became more three dimensional with shadow boxes and installation. Usually about countries cultures and, cities.

In 1970, alternative art spaces started after MOCA. They were artist run and about alternative art, not formalist art. By 1980 performance art had evolved into theatre, dance and cabaret.

Seven Shadow Boxes

John Held: You mentioned your shadow boxes. Can you tell me more about them?

Tom Marioni: In the 80’s I spent the whole year making seven shadow boxes (a 19th century deep frame box with objects). They were named for the days of the week, the way the Bible described what days God invented life on Earth. Monday was for Leonardo and the universe; Tuesday was for Duchamp with objects for Rrose Sélavy, John Cage an ear, bell etc.; Wednesday was for Joseph Beuys, erasers, Allan Fish disguise, hat mold; Thursday Brancusi, tools; Friday for Yves Klein wine bottle, woman figure; Saturday Music, Miles Davis music score, trumpet, the day of rest and celebration. It would take too long to describe all the objects and their meaning.

The rest of the 1980’s are just a list of exhibitions in Europe, and the United States. I did books, Beer Art and Philosophy, Writings on Art, Social Art, 1969-1999, and Social Art translated into Italian, published in Rome.

The Salon That Became a Society

John Held: Besides being a maker of objects over the years, the fallout from the Oakland Museum installation, Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, continues into the present. When MOCA came to an end, the camaraderie continued at Breen’s Bar on a weekly basis. How did this art salon come about? Was it a natural occurrence or was it modeled on a historical precedent? Why do you think it has lasted until the present, under the banner, Society of Independent Artists?

Tom Marioni: In 1973, I started doing it in MOCA with video and free beer from a NEA grant. In 1976, I moved it downstairs to Breen's bar and called it Cafe Society. 2 to 4 pm. In 1979, the bar closed. I moved it next door to Jerry and Johny's and called it Academy of MOCA. From 1981-82, I issued Artist Credit Cards for free beer with an NEA grant. In 1989, the earthquake hit San Francisco and the bar closed. In 1990, I continued Beer with Friends in my new studio, and called it Cafe Wednesday with bartenders who become members after bartending three times. In 1999, I make it official and call it Society of Independent Artists (SIA), named after the early 20th century group in New York founded by three people, including Duchamp. I have house rules and give degrees to bartenders.

I continue to be invited to have shows in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe, including Beer with Friends. Around 2010, I started telling jokes at my openings. I see this installation/action like a symphony. I am the composer, the bartender is the director and the drinkers are the players. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art lives on and will never be dated as an ongoing art work.

Standup as Performance Art

John Held: You mentioned that in 2010 you began telling jokes. You have even performed at bars, clubs and galleries as a standup comic. How does that fit into your artistic practice, and what are some of your funniest jokes? 

Tom Marioni: O. K. Stand up Jokes. The difference between performance art and theatre is that in theatre the performer is being someone else not himself, story telling and creating an illusion of time. A performance artist is being himself and manipulating material, not the audience or playing a role. I was a performance artist and sound artist in the 1970’s. I considered that in the 21st. century, stand up comedy was performance art. A comic acts funny. A comedian tells funny. I cannot tell my funniest jokes in mixed company because they are too dirty. My best jokes are in my book Social Art. 

Social Art and the Italian Instinct

John Held: Social Art seems to be at the core of your artistic repertoire. Many consider you the father of Relational Aesthetics, whereby the artist requires the collaboration of others in the completion of the work. This goes back to the time you were tied to Linda Montano. Your weekly artist salon is a perfect example of this. So are the Sound Art orchestras you’ve put together in the past. How does this reliance on others grow out of your work? Why is it important for you to include others in what is normally a solitary pursuit?

Tom Marioni: I was told that my social art was an Italian thing. New York’s Little Italy has Italian Social Clubs where Italians meet to drink, eat gamble, etc. I had three bands, the first was the MOCA Ensemble. We played free Jazz in the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. My second band was The Art Orchestra in 1997. We performed a one time show made up of 15 sculptors who invented their own instruments at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. My last band in 2004 was The Buddhist Band, composed of six sculptors playing invented instruments that created low frequency chant like sounds.

The Masters Over the Bar

John Held: I know you have a list of mainly deceased artists (Leonardo, Duchamp, Brancusi, Picasso, Klein, Cage…) hanging in your studio, that have guided your art, but who are some of the living artists you’ve met over the years that have impressed you in some manner? Can you list five for me, and the reasons you responded to them?

Tom Marioni: The masters of art for me are on my studio wall over the bar. All invented a new way of seeing. Leonardo -automation, Duchamp -conceptual art, John Cage- the happening, Joseph Beuys- sculpture based performance, Brancusi -abstract sculpture, Yves Klein -invisible art, Picasso- cubism and collage.

Contemporary artists that I admired and knew are Walter Di Maria, his Earth Room, moral and political art (God has given us the earth and we have ignored it). Hans Haacke, exposing corruption. Sol LeWitt, manifesto for conceptual art. Carl Andre, invented minimal sculpture. Larry Bell, the father of the LA light and space movement.

The More You Know, The More You Can See

John Held: It’s just as crucial that artists sharpen their spirituality, as hone their craft. You have a sign over your bar reading, “The more you know - The more you can see.” Meeting artists like the five you mention cannot help but advance one’s insight into the creative process. How do you think your artistic range has changed over the years, and what perspective have you gained by repeated contact with some of the greatest artists of our time?

Tom Marioni: I got a whole lot of spirituality from John Cage, who I knew. I am a sun worshiper. Five thousand years ago people thought the sun was God because it gives life. I have kept up with the times until about twenty years ago, but I’m 89 and too slow to keep up with anything except friends. I try to learn from life not from books, but I do read biographies of artists and comedians.

The Question of Legacy

John Held: In matters of artistic legacy, I take the long view and am willing to sacrifice current recompense for posthumous reputation (for example, giving a lecture for free). You on the other hand, have often expressed to me that you won’t be around to collect on anything after you’re gone, so you might as well reap the reward while you can. Have you thoughts on shaping your artistic legacy, or is that just best left to others? How do you think you’ll be remembered?

Tom Marioni: I don’t know how to answer that. I will be remembered, and I have no doubt that I will be remembered as an influential and important artist. 

Manifesto 2025

The new aesthetic is no aesthetic. Multicultural is everyone except Europeans. There is no excellence in universities or art museums. The art museum has weaponized itself against intellectuals. Art museums formerly collected preserved and interpreted the most excellent examples of a cultures products. 3 elements in conceptual art of the 60's and 70's were elegance subtlety and contact. Artist are trained observers and private investigators. Today everyone is an artist so art is all over. AI cannot make art only copy it. Social art is the new art after grievance art. Artist invent a new way of seeing that becomes a poetic record of the culture. The rich don't dress up anymore.

— Tom Marioni

Andy Rappaport (b. 1957, New York City) is a sound and video artist whose work draws on his experience as a photographer, musician, composer, and technologist. His newest project, not [TEXT], combines sound, images, and AI technology to explore the human compulsion to extract meaning from the smallest fragments of recognition. Other work, both solo and in long-standing collaboration with Deborah Oropallo, has dealt with various cognitive, social, environmental, and political themes.

Andy’s solo and collaborative work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, the Kramlich Collection, and 21C, as well as many private collections.

With his wife Deborah, Andy is also the Founder of the Minnesota Street Project and Minnesota Street Project Foundation, which provides support for visual arts and artists and facilitates connections between visual arts and the community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

An interview with artist, philanthropist, founder of Minnesota Street Projects, and venture capitalist Andy Rappaport, conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Venice Biennale: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

Hugh Leeman  Andy, you’ve just come back from the Venice Biennale, where the art world addresses the global stage on social issues. Of what you saw in Venice, what spoke to you most impactfully?

Andy Rappaport  It was an interesting experience seeing the Biennale this year because of the political backdrop. The thing that spoke to me most wasn’t officially in the Biennale — it was an exhibition of the work of Gabrielle Goliath, who was scheduled to be the representative of South Africa. Shortly before the Biennale, the Minister of Culture in South Africa said this work would not appear on behalf of South Africa. So it was mounted in a church not far from the Arsenale, where part of the main show was, and it was one of the most moving pieces I have ever seen.

The basic idea of the piece is to give voice to the voiceless, and to deal in particular with women who are voiceless in society — specifically African society. But the piece also includes a poem by a Palestinian poet, and that was the part deemed too political, too controversial, and therefore not worthy of being seen. The piece itself was spectacularly moving, and the setting was perfect — visually, conceptually, acoustically. It was very powerful, both the piece itself and the reflection on the morality of any government that could deem it should not be seen. That was by far the most impactful thing I saw there.

Why Guitars: Music Over Investment

Hugh Leeman  The idea of collecting has woven its way through much of your life. You’ve become an incredibly successful venture capitalist, but you’ve framed your guitar collection among your greatest investments — in an NPR article you said, “My guitar collection has outperformed almost anything else that I’ve been invested in over the last 10 years.” What first made guitars objects of emotional connection and historical importance, rather than just a musical instrument or an investment?

Andy Rappaport  The guitars for me are about the music. They’re beautiful objects — you can see a few behind me; I’m always surrounded by guitars — and I’m very fortunate to have accumulated a big pile of instruments. But when I was younger, before I had the means to really accumulate them, I was accumulating them anyway, because they were tools. I played in rock and roll bands; I briefly supported myself that way after I left college.

For me, the instruments are about the music. I’ve been a musician my entire life. I cannot not make music. The instruments that speak to me speak to me because they have music in them, and I like getting the music out of them. Nobody needs as many instruments as I have — it’s kind of crazy. But what I find when I pick up an instrument is that because it feels different, because it sounds different, because I don’t have a history with it, I’m doing different things with it. Different music comes out. The idea that it’s different appeals to me; the idea that it’s pulling something different out of me appeals to me. And so they follow me home.

“113”: When a Marching Band Becomes Gunfire

Hugh Leeman  Your passion for music connects to your collaborations with Deborah Oropallo. You created a project titled 113, which links high school shootings to school athletic fields, tracks, and marching-band rhythms, interspersed with sounds that represent the delayed recognition of gunfire. How did the conversation begin between you and Deborah to address a topic so challenging?

Andy Rappaport  My work with Deborah is very fulfilling, in part because she shares a passion for doing things that are challenging and using our art to challenge people. One thing that became apparent very early in our collaboration is that we both have this slightly twisted idea that we should use things that are aesthetically very appealing — visually, acoustically — to draw people into work that then reveals itself to be about something absolutely appalling. We both have a natural desire to use the tension between attraction and repulsion.

When we had the opportunity to do 113, dealing with school shootings, we started talking about it on the 20th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. The question was: how do kids experience shootings in their schools? One of the things you read about — especially early on, when shootings were much less prevalent — is that there’s a very delayed recognition. There’s a sound, and you don’t know what it is, the kids don’t know what it is, and then it goes on, and it starts to dawn on them what’s happening. That felt to us like a chilling experience. Schools are supposed to be for kids — supposed to be joyful. It’s not just about learning; it’s about becoming a person: your social environment, the athletics, the extracurriculars. I discovered music in school.

So when we asked what this piece should sound like, it was actually Deborah who had the idea. The conceit of the piece is that the oval in almost every high school sports field looks like the oval in the NRA shooting-practice target. The visuals overlay gunshot or bullet holes on top of aerial photographs of these oval playing fields. You think about those fields, and you think about the marching band — every school has one, and you hear it at the games. Deborah said, “When I see these ovals, I hear a marching band.” And I immediately said, “Yeah — and it’s the drum beat, the tom beat in the marching band, that’s going to turn into gunfire.” That’s how we would acoustically signify normal sounds morphing into something else, and the sudden recognition that you’re hearing something really horrible. It came to us very quickly, in our first conversation about the piece.

“One World”: Memorializing Ordinary Life Before Catastrophe

Hugh Leeman  Your collaborations with Deborah wind through the dark corners of American history and society. There’s another project the two of you worked on, One World, at the Smithsonian, which uses postcard-sized monitors to remember the World Trade Center on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. What did the postcard format let you address about memory and tourism, or mass trauma — and perhaps most specifically, ordinary life as a place before catastrophe?

Andy Rappaport  It’s the ordinary-life aspect that’s exactly what we hoped to capture with the postcard format. Deborah and I both grew up outside of New York at around the same time, as the World Trade Center was being built. We both remember Lower Manhattan before it was built, while it was being built, and then once the World Trade Center became this beacon of New York commerce and finance — all the things it came to represent. It was very much a part of our lives.

As we started thinking about this piece, what struck us was that the World Trade Center had a life and a meaning long before it became defined as the symbol of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. So we wanted to celebrate the World Trade Center, and celebrate life in New York, as a commemoration. Of course, the piece is chilling, because when you see it now — any time after 9/11 — you know what’s coming. The piece is about five minutes long, and four and a half minutes of that is the history of the building and life in New York. We wanted it to be joyful; the music I wrote for it is the most uplifting music I’ve ever written. I did that on purpose, and it reflects my awakening in jazz in the 1970s and what that meant for me emotionally. But that’s the attraction-repulsion thing: you’re uncomfortable as you watch it, because you know what’s going to happen. The building was memorialized in postcards, and so was life in New York, so Deborah started collecting those images, and we said, let’s make the piece a postcard display.

Where Were You on 9/11?

Hugh Leeman  Many people remember exactly where they were at major events — the assassination of Kennedy, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. Where were you on 9/11?

Andy Rappaport  I was at home in Woodside, California. I remember listening to the radio in the shower as I was getting dressed that day and hearing about 9/11. I remember that day the way almost anyone who was alive and cognizant remembers it — I remember basically what I did that entire day. But it was otherwise a normal day at home and at work.

From That Morning to the Memorial: A Twenty-Year Timeline

Hugh Leeman  From that day in the shower to the piece you made 20 years later — what was the timeline like, from day one of 9/11 to having these conversations with Deborah about bringing it to light?

Andy Rappaport  I didn’t think about 9/11 as something I wanted to commemorate in art. I wrote some music that just poured out of me, out of the emotion I was feeling at the time, but I didn’t do it consciously. As the anniversary started coming up, Deborah and I began talking, and we realized we needed to do something. I think it was a year or two before the anniversary that we said, let’s think about doing something. As it approached, Deborah started collecting the images — some of them postcards — and that’s when we started talking about centering the piece on the postcard-display concept. It was really the first time I thought about making something that specifically relates to 9/11.

“Flight”: Refugees, Ancestors, and the Power of Place

Hugh Leeman  The piece Flight is particularly impressive. It’s described as depicting “the universality of suffering as refugees seek escape and shelter on essentially every continent.” It uses nine framing monitors with “ornate frames suggesting ancestral portraits. Our ancestors were refugees. The survivors depicted here will be someone else’s ancestors.” It’s been shown indoors and outdoors, including on a beach in Miami near real landing scenes. How does site change the meaning of the piece, especially when it’s placed near real geographic locations of migration?

Andy Rappaport  The piece preceded any thought that we might be able to place it near one of these landing sites. As you said, it’s about the universality of the refugee crisis and refugee suffering, and the idea is to call attention to the humanity of refugees. The frames carry the idea that my ancestors were refugees — fortunately, they were welcomed here when they arrived, but they were refugees, and so many of us have ancestors who were.

This is characteristic of a lot of the work Deborah and I do: we deal with phenomena that are universal — all over the world, very constant, all around you — until you become numb to the sheer magnitude of the crisis. With refugees, it’s common to hear about it only in terms of numbers: how many there are, how difficult the problem is. What you forget is that each of these refugees is a person, and families traveling together are families. So we wanted to make this our form of portraiture — some of the images interspersed with the refugee images reflect portraiture — to call attention to that humanity.

We weren’t thinking, “We’ll show this on a beach where refugees had landed.” But when we had the opportunity to do that in Miami, it became very powerful — not just because the work itself portrayed the humanity of these people the way we wanted, but because you were looking through and over the piece at the actual beach where some of the refugees depicted in it had landed. We had hoped to make real for people the idea that this is not just something you hear about on the news — these are real people going through real terror, real pain, real challenge. Having the piece almost exactly where some of those landings took place really reinforced that this crisis is real and directly affects people.

“My Ancestors Were Refugees”: A Family Story, One Generation Apart

Hugh Leeman  You make two striking points there. First, that the statistics you hear are actual human beings and families — there’s something humanizing about that. And then you connect it to yourself: your ancestors came here as refugees. Who were they?

Andy Rappaport  My ancestors came from Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during the time of the pogroms, prior to the Holocaust. This was in the late 19th century, when Jewish men in the Russian Pale of Settlement were subject to lifelong conscription into the army so they wouldn’t reproduce, and towns were literally burned to the ground to rid them of their Jewish population. My ancestors were able to escape and, one way or another, find their way to the United States, where they were welcomed.

It’s interesting: when my kids were in high school, one of my daughters was studying refugees and refugee crises. She’d heard about my grandfather — her great-grandfather — whom I knew quite well, and who had escaped Russia under very difficult circumstances. I’d told the story of his escape many times. When my daughter Rebecca was in high school, she came to me one day and said, “Dad, I don’t get it — how was it that your grandfather was able to come into the United States?” I said I didn’t understand the question: he got himself to England, got on a boat, came to Ellis Island, was registered there. She kept asking, over and over, until I finally realized what she was asking.

When he came over in the late 1890s or early 1900s, refugees were accepted here — they were welcomed. There was a system for accepting them. Life wasn’t easy once they got here, but they were allowed in. What she was wrestling with — and this had to have been the early 2000s — was, “We’re closing our borders; refugees aren’t allowed here.” The contrast between my growing up valuing the fact that my ancestors were able to escape, that hundreds of thousands of other people’s ancestors did the same, and simply taking that for granted — and here’s my daughter, one generation later, surprised that we were ever welcoming refugees, at a time when the government was working to close our borders. The idea of refugee abandonment, of borders closed, of having to go from country to country trying to find someone who will take you — which is the current and, I think, worsening climate — is anathema to me. It goes against everything I was raised understanding about quite literally how I got here.

One Generation, A World of Difference

Hugh Leeman  It’s a powerful story. The idea that our understanding can change within a single generation — your daughter questioning something that seemed inherently obvious to you, and realizing her perspective is so different contextually — gives us all insight into a very interesting movement.

Andy Rappaport  In one generation. That is the thing that, to me, is most shocking.

Art as an Ecosystem: The Origins of Minnesota Street Project

Hugh Leeman  You’ve said that you and Deborah realized the visual arts community is an ecosystem that depends on others to survive. How has your understanding of that ecosystem changed since you opened Minnesota Street Project in 2016?

Andy Rappaport  First, here you’re referencing the other Deborah in my life — my wife, Deborah. It gets a little confusing between Deborah Oropallo, my artistic collaborator, and Deborah Rappaport, my collaborator in life for my entire adult life. But yes, Deborah Rappaport and I have really come to understand that art requires an ecosystem. It requires one because artists on their own can’t completely control everything. We can control the creation of our work to some degree — though artists need support to create work, especially ambitious work. They need support to exhibit it, and support while they’re making work that isn’t producing income. And then there needs to be support in figuring out how the exhibition of work turns into commerce that provides ongoing support.

What we realized, when we started thinking about what became Minnesota Street Project, is that in a community like San Francisco — a creative force of artists — it isn’t enough to directly support the artists. Even if artists can eat, if they can’t show their work, collaborate with other artists, or find collectors and institutions interested in their work, it’s not a particularly fulfilling or productive environment. San Francisco has thrived artistically because, at various points, it has had an effective ecosystem for art — and that somehow needs to be recreated.

What we’ve learned operating Minnesota Street Project is, first, that it’s very difficult, because you also need critical mass — and I don’t think any single institution in San Francisco can by itself provide the critical mass for all the elements of infrastructure required. It takes a lot of collaboration and a lot of commitment from the community overall. The other thing we’ve realized is that needs change and environments change. The challenges facing artists, galleries, and institutions in San Francisco today are different from the ones they faced 12, 13, 14 years ago, when we first had the idea. So if we want to build something sustainable that helps sustain the community over time, it has to have the idea of evolution built into it — evolving to meet the challenges as they change.

A Prediction from 1990 Meets the AI Economy

Hugh Leeman  In preparation for this interview, I listened to a 2019 talk you gave at the Commonwealth Club about the thesis of a paper you co-wrote, “The Computerless Computer Company.” You said, “The inspiration about how to use technology is going to eclipse in value the construction of the technology itself,” but that this also raised questions about inequality and whether the fruits of that competition can be shared sufficiently broadly. How do you connect that 2019 concern to today’s AI economy — globally, and here in the Bay Area?

Andy Rappaport  This is something that haunts me. The Computerless Computer Company — the paper that interview was about — my co-author and I actually wrote in 1989 or 1990, so it’s been almost 40 years. We were concerned that to the degree technology was creating economic change, it would create economic dislocation; there would be have-nots; economic prosperity would attach more to capital than it had historically, and less to labor. We thought at the time, well, these will be difficult problems, but they’ll be obvious problems, so societally we’ll figure out how to deal with it. Governments won’t abandon people. Society won’t abandon people. We’ll figure it out as we go.

Little did we know. Little did we know that the forces that make that difficult would be stronger than the forces that make it possible — and that we’d have the level of economic inequality, largely as a result of this technological change, that we have now. Even before the explosion of AI, that’s a very disturbing phenomenon. My realization was that, at least here in the United States, society was just not equipped, and in some cases didn’t even care, about the implications of these trends. You can’t really reverse them — they’re not exactly laws of physics, but their economic power is so strong that it’s almost impossible to reverse them. All you can hope to do is cope with them and muster appropriate responses that keep people thriving and healthy. In my opinion, we failed at that in the United States even before AI.

So now we have AI. What’s its implication in this context? There are two that I find challenging to the point of being somewhat chilling. One: it’s moving at 10 times or more the speed of the forces I was writing and talking about 40 years ago. It’s extraordinary how fast these changes are occurring, and it’s not going to slow down — the dam is broken, and the rate of improvement is extraordinary. So society has a lot less time to deal with these effects than it did with the ones I was writing about, which society did not deal with effectively anyway. Two: AI will much more directly displace labor. It won’t necessarily eliminate it, but it will change the flavor of it to a degree people are unprepared for. There’s this notion that you can always retrain people, and up to a point that’s true — but then you have to actually be committed to doing that retraining. Because of the nature of what can be displaced by AI and related technologies like robotics, the effect on the labor pool is going to be very stark, and the need for retraining and other mitigating programs is very strong.

Just as it’s moving 10 times faster, I think these effects are an order of magnitude more direct. I’m not a doomsayer in the sense of “Oh my god, our AI overlords are going to wipe out civilization” — I don’t believe that’s remotely true. But I do believe that the rate and depth of economic dislocation as a result of this is something that, in the United States and most of the developed world, we’ve proven we are not up to. And if there isn’t a change in how we think about our responses, the consequences can be quite dire for a very large swath of the population.

How Do We Cope? Society vs. the Individual

Hugh Leeman  You used a powerful word a moment ago: coping with the implications. How does society — or the individual — cope with the implications you’re describing?

Andy Rappaport  How society copes is different from how individuals cope, though obviously they’re related. If every individual could cope, society wouldn’t need to. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to be the case. Individuals need to, as much as they can, think about what skills are going to be needed in the not-very-distant future to remain productive in society. You can’t just hide under the table and hope this goes away.

Societally — and I wear my political leanings on my sleeve — I think what society needs is a commitment that it’s going to take care of people. There’s an idea that we’ll be able to push back on the technology, and I don’t think that’s ever worked. The most successful pushback on technology has been nuclear détente — not exactly disarmament, but the neutralizing effects of mutually assured destruction. That may be the best example of pushing back on strong technological forces, but it hasn’t stopped proliferation or development. So it’s naive to think we can just ban it and make it not happen. What society has to do — and all of us have to play a role — is say: to the degree there are going to be increasingly severe consequences from economic dislocation and income inequality, society has got to take care of people. We have to find a culturally palatable way to commit to getting people from one side of this chasm to the other, and not just leave it to personal ingenuity and luck.

“Homeless People and Billionaires”: Why Minnesota Street Project

Hugh Leeman  I admire your optimism — I feel a bit pessimistic that a government, particularly the U.S. government, which can’t handle basic healthcare, could do a basic-income kind of thing. The generosity you’ve displayed sets a template for that, perhaps. You’ve been incredibly generous in supporting the arts, starting Minnesota Street Project, which combines subsidized, below-market space for artists, galleries, and arts nonprofits. What inspired your investment, and what is the importance of the arts?

Andy Rappaport  What inspired us is simply that Deborah and I feel incredibly lucky. We’ve been together since our early 20s. We were fortunate to be raised in households that valued education and imbued us with good values, but neither of us came from money — when we first got together, we were congenitally broke. We never imagined a life like the one we have now was even possible; we didn’t even know people could have lives like this. And we realized we didn’t get here on our own. We benefited from a society that educated us, a society that made some of the companies I helped start possible. Our success derives from the environment we’ve been able to live in, so it’s been very important for us to give back — not only to recognize the value of the opportunities we’ve had, but to help lift other people up to better lives. It’s an innate part of how we were raised and who we are, and quite frankly, the example we wanted to set for our children.

Why Minnesota Street Project in particular? Deborah loves to tell the story that the genesis of the project was her reading an article one day about a long-term gallery going out of business in San Francisco because it couldn’t afford its rent. Without thinking, Deborah basically said, “If nobody does anything, San Francisco is just going to be a city of homeless people and billionaires. And who wants to live there?” We looked at each other and said, well, if somebody needs to do something — who’s somebody? And we said, let’s see what we can do. I joke that it’s a little bit my penance for having had a successful career in tech. I’m still active in tech, I think tech does a lot of great things, and I’m not anti-tech at all. But because of the economics of technology businesses relative to art businesses, tech has the ability to drive everything else out of town. If you don’t want San Francisco to become a monoculture — if you want it to keep the kind of creative force that makes any good city vibrant — then something specific and purposeful has to be done to counter the natural economic forces. That’s where we said, okay, what’s within the scope of what we can do, and let’s take a shot at it.

Closing Galleries, Shuttered Schools, and a Contracting Market

Hugh Leeman  There’s clearly been a change since COVID. At Minnesota Street Project, there’s recently been the loss of several galleries in quick succession. What does this moment — not to mention CCA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and a list that goes on — reveal about a deeper art-market contraction?

Andy Rappaport  A couple of things are going on. When you think about galleries that have gone out of business, this is not a San Francisco-specific phenomenon — it’s happening everywhere. You read about long-term galleries closing in Los Angeles, New York, everywhere, and it reflects global changes in the art market. Some are the natural result of consolidation, where more and more of the market is controlled by large international galleries, which creates a different set of challenges for smaller local and regional ones. Much more art commerce now happens at art fairs rather than in local galleries. The life of a gallerist has changed dramatically, as have the economics of gallery ownership, as you contend with what it costs — and the risks and lifestyle implications — of needing to be present at a different art fair every couple of weeks to stay competitive.

Culturally, things have changed too. The whole nature of retail, and how people think about acquiring things — especially in the Bay Area, where younger people weigh the value of possessions versus experiences — has changed the nature of commerce in retail generally, and in galleries specifically. When Deborah and I were young, even before we could afford to buy art, it was fun to wander from gallery to gallery, learn about art, and talk to gallerists. That doesn’t happen as much anymore; other things compete for people’s time and attention. Some kinds of businesses can become online-only and don’t need large facilities — but with art, you need to see it, you need to experience it. It’s not bought very much just online, and that creates a challenge: how do you justify a place where people can see things if nobody goes there?

So at Minnesota Street Project, we’re encouraging experimentation. One interesting thing — sad on one hand, energizing on the other — is that some galleries that grew and were extremely well regarded were dealing with artists whose price points had become high, where the demands of representing them were significant and, in some cases, not really sustainable. The galleries at Minnesota Street Project that closed last year had been successful for a period of time, and the responses to what it would take to sustain them in the current environment were just things that people who’d been at it a while didn’t feel made sense to try. It was very hard to say goodbye to those galleries and gallerists — many represent artists we collect, and many are friends. But there are also galleries doing more experimental things, meeting the newer generation of collectors where they are, the way some older galleries did 30 or 40 years ago. Some of what’s happening there is very exciting. We started the Atrium Art Fair this year to showcase those galleries and artist cooperatives doing vibrant things, and you’ll see the mix at Minnesota Street Project change.

That’s one part of your question. The other — San Francisco specifically — is that we are stunned and quite concerned about the loss of art schools. The closure of SFAI and CCA is a huge problem and an enormous challenge for the city, on top of the essential closure of the Mills program and others that were bringing young people to San Francisco and creating a regenerative, multi-generational system of artists fueling the creative culture. If we don’t have art schools drawing young people to the city and encouraging them to pursue art, how is that going to be regenerated? And if we don’t have art schools where artists can teach and earn a living while developing their careers, why are artists going to stay here? How are they going to afford to? Even if Minnesota Street Project could provide space absolutely free, living here would still be unaffordable without a job. So we’re quite concerned about what can be done. There are some budding programs — different kinds of arts education, mentoring, things that can draw people to the city. Through the Minnesota Street Project Foundation and the Artist Studios program, we think a lot about how to create space and programs to help draw young people and create opportunities. But the community has to respond quickly and definitively. If we lost X students and student opportunities between SFAI and CCA, we should be thinking about how to build back at least half X, or two-thirds X, to keep San Francisco a place where young people want to come and be creative.

An Alternative Model for Arts Philanthropy

Hugh Leeman  The Minnesota Street Project Foundation has a central philosophy that philanthropic support for the arts today requires an alternative model. That seems important — because, as you say, even free rent doesn’t do much if people don’t have jobs and the schools are closing. What does that infrastructure philosophy, and the potential of long-term investment in people and place, look like — especially as people stop walking out to galleries to buy and linger?

Andy Rappaport  It’s a great question, and a hard one to answer quickly, because there are a lot of components. There’s no silver bullet — if there were, somebody would have found it, and we’d be doing it, and it would be working. You started this conversation by recognizing that there needs to be an ecosystem, and that ecosystem is complex, with many different elements. What has to happen is that we find people who are passionate about each of those elements. It doesn’t have to be the same people — different people have different passions — but in aggregate we need to activate and support a sufficiently diverse set of things to recreate a sustainable ecosystem.

A couple of things are really important now. First, how do we make San Francisco a conducive place for young people? If we think medium- and long-term, and we’re not bringing young people here — and we’re not — then we’re not regenerating the creative force in the city, and we’re not encouraging the kind of experimentation that has characterized art here. And by art I don’t just mean visual art, but music and performing arts. That level of experimentation, and tolerance for it, created the creative climate that has existed in San Francisco, contributed by people coming in. People don’t come to San Francisco mid-career. If they don’t come when they’re young, and they don’t have the ability to stay, then the creative forces we have now will simply leave or die off. So how do we invest in programs — they might be institutions, they might not — that make it attractive for young people pursuing a creative path to end up here? Some of it can be art schools; some can be the natural vibrancy that attracts young people to a city.

The second thing is, how can artists survive here? San Francisco has long been a high-cost-of-living city, and Minnesota Street Project addressed that: our founding idea was that if we reduce the professional costs people face in their artistic pursuit, it gives them a little more to pay for housing, and maybe they can stay. But we have to think about supporting artists now, at a time when, first, some of the jobs that propelled artists’ careers have gone away because the art schools are going away, and second, it’s a more challenging environment to survive as an artist because of the nature of our commerce. At the Foundation, we think a lot about this in connection with the Studios program: how do we expand it, serve more artists, make it cheaper to be there, and provide more forms of resource, so artists can more easily pursue the art they want to create? And how do we create connections between artists and the rest of the community — the part that will exhibit the art, buy it, or provide employment, grants, and other economic opportunities?

When we say it requires a different philanthropic model, the basic model is the same: you put money behind things likely to make a social difference. But we have to recognize the inability of even the best institutions to fully address the whole panoply of things that need to happen to sustain this creative community — and therefore be willing to create and invest in programs that live alongside those great existing institutions, complementing, augmenting, and supplementing what they do with different kinds of programs that better meet the needs of this particular time.

What the Death of Records — and the Boom in Live Music — Teaches Us About Art’s Future

Hugh Leeman  Art often needs to be experienced — you have to go to a geographical location; it’s not in the palm of your hand. In that context, art is up against perhaps impossible competition. Its high aspiration, as you said, is to challenge people’s thoughts, to shake them a little — but we seem to have moved toward a society that conveniences itself with information that already agrees with us. People 25 and under express little interest in art and the consumer culture around it, and museums are majorly struggling. What might a bridge between these worlds look like?

Andy Rappaport  I love that question, and I have very specific thoughts about it. When we started Minnesota Street Project, it was fundamentally about real estate: if we could provide rents for artists’ studios, galleries, and nonprofits substantially below market, we could help with the biggest problem they face. So we set about acquiring property, and the most common question we got was: “Wait a minute — everything’s moving online, and you’re investing in real estate. What makes you think people are going to show up?”

My answer stemmed from my experience with music. From the dawn of the internet to around 2010 or 2012, when we were getting Minnesota Street Project started, the recording industry was decimated. Because people could listen online, nobody was buying physical music anymore; it was very difficult for artists, and record companies were going out of business. It appeared to be a one-way transition from physical to virtual in the delivery of music. But at the same time, the live music business was setting record after record, year over year. People were showing up in ways they never had before. Why? The simple answer is that people still want interpersonal social experiences. When you’re listening to music by yourself, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an LP, a record, or an online stream. But when you’re listening together, it matters a lot whether you’re in a club, an arena, a place where you’re celebrating your membership in society, with your friends — feeling like you’re part of something.

That observation — record sales dying while live music thrived — is what made us structure the Minnesota Street Project real estate the way we did. It’s no accident that about half of 1275 Minnesota, our galleries building, is empty: we built a big atrium so it could host social gathering, so the building could feel like a gathering place, not a warren of individual experiences. In the studios building at 1240 Minnesota, more than a third of the space is given over to shared spaces, where artists can see each other, collaborate, and share resources. That has produced collaborations, residencies, and conceptualizations relating to the community in ways we didn’t predict — just because we brought people together.

So as we think about engaging people: if you take people in their early 20s and lecture them — “Your life will be empty if you don’t fill it with art” — that’s going to fall on deaf ears. But if we can create experiences that are fun, rewarding, and fulfilling, that make people feel part of something and feed this need to turn out with one another and experience things together — and if art is a component of that, because art in all its forms can drive the nature of those experiences — then that can lead to discovery that’s much more natural, organic, long-lasting, and powerful. That’s our motivating force right now: do as much of that as we possibly can.

The Crystal Ball — and the Danger of One Good Prediction

Hugh Leeman  The paper you wrote 30-some years ago reads as if you had a crystal ball — you were seeing things in the present that others weren’t. What are you seeing now in society that gives you insight into where it’s going, and where the arts are going?

Andy Rappaport  The worst position anybody can be in is having made one very successful prediction — and then believing you can make others. I think I just revealed my thinking on this. The way I was able to have that insight back when I did was by not assuming the past predicts the present directly — by assuming that the nature of things continues to change, and then looking for the forces that are going to change it.

And here I think I gave my hand away by talking about the relative power of social experience versus any particular didactic. We talked about AI and its impact, and it is going to be dislocating; it’s going to challenge people in ways that are very uncomfortable. There’s a lot going on societally right now that’s challenging people in extremely uncomfortable ways. And my core belief is that those kinds of challenges drive people to seek one another out far more than they otherwise would — not everyone, but in general. So having gone through a period where people got close to their phone screens, and those screens could be isolating — technology has allowed us to isolate more when we’ve wanted to — I actually believe that some of the direct implications of the very technology that facilitated that isolation are going to bring us back together.

The things that will be most important in shaping society are going to be the ones that allow people to come together, that empower groups to accomplish what individuals can’t, that provide comfort by satisfying what must be some kind of evolutionary need to come together and experience life together. I think we’re going to see greater importance attached to those things. When I think about how that relates to art, commerce, and technology, I think the things that serve to further that are going to turn out to be the most successful and impactful — with the caveat that I’ve made one good prediction, and it’s not clear that means all my predictions are good.

Hugh Leeman  Andy Rappaport, with his convoluted crystal ball — I appreciate your insights. Thank you so much.

Andy Rappaport  Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

By S Anne Steinberg

Patricia Piccinini’s show, on view through July 3, begins as soon as you walk into the gallery’s second-floor space. A motorcycle has mated with a cartoon character, and the offspring–machine and rider, or perhaps a single creature–fills the vestibule.The motorcycle’s preening toughness? The cartoon’s simpering cuteness? Gone and gone, replaced with swooping, unselfconscious shapes and two clustered antennae made of side mirrors.

Past the entryway, the show fills half of the gallery’s space with sculptures and a few drawings, all depicting creatures that come from a world like ours, only smudged. Probably most arresting are three figures with peach-colored flesh and features floating somewhere between human and animal. There are also two creatures, more clearly animals, in a brightly colored cartoon mode. In a corner, three gigantic bell jars in brilliant orange and pink enclose totem-like figures mounted on vertical rods.

One of the figures with lifelike, silicone-fashioned skin, The Stalwart (2026), sits upright, like a person, but bears elongated arms that end in hybrid foot-hoof appendages. The creature’s face, topped by a shock of real human hair, is arranged like that of a pig—wide-set eyes, upturned nose, ears near the top of the head—yet the eyes, nose and ears are clearly human in form. Another figure in this mode, The Protégé (2023), lies on her stomach, sporting a face shaped like a sheep’s and an extravagant, lizard-like tail. A third peach-fleshed creature, also depicted in two drawings, has a Toucan’s beak, a dragon’s mane fitted with human hair, and a pouch full of babies.

In the cartoon mode, The Sage (2025) is a straight-forward portrayal of an owl in purple and green—except for the strong cock of her head. Cloudgazer (2024), a more ambiguous cartoon figure, is also in motion, pushing her beak as close to straight up as possible. The figures enclosed in the huge bell jars have strong, exaggerated features, somewhat obscured by their containers.

Despite their different modes, the works all seem to be from the same world. One reason is that their bodily construction, rather than being anything-goes, follows rules derived from living vertebrates. The creatures are generally bilaterally symmetric, for instance, and their features are related to those of real-world species. 

All the creatures retain some mystery. Those not trapped in the glass jars also show evidence of an inner life. The Stalwart (2026) is a being who, in the face of indignities or worse, refuses to be crushed, or even to complain. She reminds me of one of my relatives.

The Protégé (2023) radiates the self-assurance of a newly minted trillionaire, despite holding a toy. With The Sage (2025), you can forget what you’ve heard about owls not being especially wise, just looking the part. This owl cocks her head, focusing on the viewer. Never mind projecting qualities onto her—we wonder what she thinks of us.

The figures in this show may be described as mutants. Rather than being spun from whole cloth, the creatures are our reality, tweaked. The figures remain fundamentally natural, of the earth, featuring neither the oversimplified blankness of many hand-drawn cartoons nor the bland uniformity of machine-made manipulations such as beauty filters.

In biology, mutation powers evolution by giving selection something to act on. Here, mutation is also a creative act. The creatures in the show look very strange, the opposite of conventionally beautiful, yet the exhibition is not a dystopian one. The weirdly-shaped figures, with their relatable feelings, allow us to see ourselves plainly–and show us our kinship with other animals, our place in the world.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argues that a house is much more than a physical structure. It is a repository of memory, imagination, daydreaming, and lived experience. For him, rooms, corners, drawers, cabinets, stairways, and attics are not merely architectural features; they are psychological spaces that shape how we understand ourselves and the world. For Bachelard, a house is not simply inhabited; it accumulates meanings over time, becoming a container for memory, imagination, and lived experience. 

That perspective corresponds remarkably well with David Ireland's aesthetic. A sculptor whose vision was nurtured during the 1970s by the process-based practices of Bay Area conceptual artists, Ireland sought to create work so thoroughly integrated into existing spaces that it became almost imperceptible. In 1975, he began transforming his Victorian home at 500 Capp Street into a work of art—not through conventional renovation, but through careful attention to the traces of time already embedded within it.

The house became a vessel of collected experience. Layers of paint, repaired surfaces, found objects, dust, and evidence of habitation acquired meaning through Ireland's acts of observation and preservation. He expanded the significance of this detritus by treating it as relics. Cracks, bumps, and bruises in the walls were burnished and varnished, transformed into uniquely beautiful surfaces. Although Ireland's aesthetic reflected his intentions as a conceptual artist, its outcome also evokes wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophical worldview that finds beauty and serenity in what is impermanent, weathered, and imperfect.

In keeping with this sensibility, Ireland transformed 500 Capp Street into a kind of Wunderkammer—a cabinet of wonders—filled with objects and curiosities, collections and remnants, juxtaposed in cabinets, on tables and shelves, and grouped associatively on walls throughout the house. Visitors are invited into a process of discovery. The house functions simultaneously as a repository of memory, a living archive, and a container of stories whose physical traces offer clues to its history. One memorable example is Ireland’s The Safe Gets Away for the First Time November 5, 1975--a metal label adjacent to a deep unpatched wall gouge--a playful marker of an event that launched Ireland’s thirty-year transformation of his home into an art installation.

If Bachelard's house shelters memory and imagination, Ireland's house gives those qualities material form. It is both a poetic dwelling and a cabinet of wonders.

Léonie Guyer and Joyce Burstein, the current artists-in-residence, each met David Ireland during their student years at the San Francisco Art Institute. Their two-person exhibition Amitié—French for "friendship"—brings together memories of Ireland with their own distinct artistic trajectories. What is particularly compelling about the exhibition is the degree to which both artists extend Ireland's ethos. Their installations do not simply occupy the rooms; they activate the house’s latent memories and emotional resonances. The exhibition feels less like a presentation of discrete artworks than an invitation to experience the house as a poetic field of relationships among people, objects, spaces, and time.

Guyer's subtle drawings and paintings of enigmatic forms seem naturally at home within the historical setting of Ireland's uncommon house. Its sparsely furnished rooms and luminous golden walls provide an ideal setting for works such as Untitled, no. 102 (2018), a small, unframed marble painting whose presence is heightened by the patinated wall that supports it. Suggesting a bearded chin resting atop a necktie, the image embodies the understated playfulness that animates many of Guyer’s forms. 

Similarly, Untitled no. 123 (2023), a small oil and incised-line painting on marble, is beautifully situated within a cabinet whose worn Pompeian-red interior evokes the wall paintings of ancient Roman villas. Guyer's contribution also includes small drawings on paper and paintings directly on windows. One window painting, described as "sit(ting) in the sky in a window in David's study," is particularly subtle, changing with the shifting daylight and encouraging prolonged attention. 

Burstein’s rescued stars preserved water droplets, and intimate accumulations of materials such as fingernail clippings function as contemporary curiosities—small phenomena reclaimed from everyday life and granted renewed significance. Like Ireland, Burstein is interested in discovering meaning that exceeds conventional interpretation.

A particularly engaging example is the flag of the night sky: liberated stars (1994–2026), a constellation of fifty stars removed from American flags and distributed throughout the house. Separated from their original context, the stars become less emblems of nationhood than wandering, poetic forms whose meanings remain open to discovery. Installed on existing nails, historic nail holes, architectural surfaces, and even attached with water, the stars encourage a close reading of the building's interior while creating imaginative pathways through the exhibition. Burstein's material kinship with Ireland is further revealed in fingernail drawing (2026), installed on Ireland's dining room table adjacent to his own collection of fingernail clippings.

Burstein’s most memorable work, however, is the ocean of yes and no (2026), in which a single drop of water appears miraculously suspended beneath a glass bell jar. Displayed and spotlit like a precious gem atop a small black sphere adjacent to a candle, and elevated on a metal laboratory stool, the piece resembles an alchemical wonder from another era. Its apparent magic arises from Burstein's understanding of simple physical processes: the droplet is preserved through a vacuum created when a candle burns away the oxygen inside the sealed jar.

Significantly, knowledge of the mechanism does little to diminish the work's enchantment. Rather, the piece feels entirely at home within Ireland's environment, surrounded by the house's abundance of handmade, weathered, and pre-industrial details.

Unlike many installations by artists working at 500 Capp Street, Guyer's and Burstein's interventions feel integral to the house rather than superimposed upon it. Neither artist overwhelms the site; instead, each contributes additional wonders to its existing constellation. Ireland's house exemplifies Bachelard's proposition that a dwelling is not merely inhabited but imagined. Amitié builds upon that insight, revealing the house as a space where friendship, memory, and material presence continue to unfold long after their original moments have passed. 

By Vrushali Anil Dhage

Rainbow, a show curated by artist and curator Marie Cameron at the Whitney Modern, features more than 130 works by 38 artists. Given the number of artists and the apparent heterogeneity of their works, one wonders whether all of them consciously worked on the concept of the rainbow in their respective practices. Hence, the curator’s concept is the primary premise of the review. The works exemplify the same. The catalog candidly mentions some artists who admit they barely felt the rainbow as a referential element in their works until the curator suggested it. Cameron presents Rainbow from multiple vantages - literal, intensely personal, referential, and political, affecting the masses. While viewing the show at the Whitney Modern, a sense of plurality, near-disparity, and yet a collective appeal is obvious. Nevertheless, the gallery space and its design help accommodate it seamlessly.

The reference and relevance of the rainbow have long carried visual, religious, scientific, and political meaning in art history. From early childhood education, with pretty pictures of the rainbow, the early attempts to remember seven colors, to the Irish folklore of the leprechauns and the pot of gold, the rainbow offers a spectrum of relevance and symbolism from biblical to contemporary times. Biblical references in the Book of Genesis, the great flood, and the rainbow as God’s promise that he would not flood the earth again. The Rainbow Landscape (c. 1638) by Peter Paul Rubens presents an idealized view of a working landscape, with the ephemeral natural phenomenon of the double-arch rainbow (The Wallace Collection, n.d.). The Blind Girl (1856) by John Everett Millais allegorically expresses the contrasting experiences of the two girls. The Rainbow: Study for 'Bathers at Asnières' (1883), by Georges Seurat, was another example of the play between the optical impact and scientific color placements; to the mysterious work Figures on a Beach – The Rainbow, (1975), where Richard Ernst Eurich created a rainbow without the conventional colors (Doble, n.d.). The examples are numerous and distinct. The current show similarly contextualizes and interprets many works as aligned with the multiple ways a rainbow can be read, experienced, and re-imagined.

The curator’s interest in the concept, the visual, and the symbolism of the rainbow stems from her artistic practice during the COVID-19 period of imposed isolation, when the rainbow got integrated into her works. For some artists, it was a childhood memory, a loss of a loved one, or a life-changing event. The meaning of the phenomenon ranges from the elemental scientific one, to the enigmatic illusion, a visual meditation, religion, energy, as assurance of hope, gratitude, earth and its nourishment, identity, inclusion, sexuality, and pride.  

Understanding the natural phenomenon of the rainbow from a scientific perspective involves aspects of physics and optics, intriguingly concluding that no person can see the same rainbow at the same time. Hence, calling for a collective yet uniquely personal experience. Cameron bases the show on similar grounds, initiating multifarious dialogues. As with some artists, Claire Buckley, Erin Fong, Wendy Fountain, Alexandrya Eaton, Chandrika Marla, Angel Oloshov, Kerith Lisi, Leah Rosenberg, Michaela Sampas, Sabrina Sanchez, Harumo Sato, Christine Wilkinson, present abstract, metaphysical, to quasi-tantric works, with colors that subtly explore a psychological realm. At the same time, some address the instinctual, inexplicable relation between the chromatic layers and compositions. The visual spaces in these works range from rich, textured color fields to scapes of meditation and introspection. To some, it is about one identity, inclusivity, and pride. The rainbow transforms from a legible, identifiable form and symbolism into that of realization.

Contrastingly, the visible rainbow appears through the identifiable VIBGYOR or the reverse ROY-G-BIV as seen in works of Gabe Brown, Marie Cameron, Elise Ordorica, Heather Robinson, Nicholaus James Dalton, Wendy Ackrell, Danielle Krysa, Alis Whitman, Theresa Giammattei, Bob Stang, Victoria Wagner, Rinat Goren, Ian James, Jaya King, Alicia McCarthy, Jonathan Parker, Stephanie Metz, Seonna Hong, Stephanie Robison, Full Bloom by Leah Rosenberg, Jenn Shifflet, and Jenna Bonistalli. Stencil-ized forms co-occur with geometricized clouds, calibrated by the medium and design appeal. Sharp spectral radial lines, like a ray passing through a prism, to the free-spirited strokes of color reverberating luminosity, to the gradual soft gradation of hues in a near-lyrical fusion, render the rainbow visible. A variant is Cuong Nguyen’s painting, conjuring a play of the absent and the present. The rainbow isn’t visible, but the dark, laden clouds are suggestive of its possible appearance. Weaving the mythological and the personal occurs in the works of Tino Rodriguez and Gina Tuzzi. Humans, ubiquitous objects, realistic rendering, commingle with the curious and the imaginary.

The works by Karen Gutfreund and Charlotte Kruk employ words and colors, furthering the power of ‘the legibility’ of a visual. Gutfreund reconstructs personal memory and emotions. Kruk’s works ricochet between reflection and confrontation, as we intentionally or otherwise succumb to consumerism and its menacing grip of the characteristic excess.  

The show runs at the Whitney Modern till the end of June. Being a large show, it entails a lot to take all at once, especially given that the visual languages of the artists are largely varied. Simultaneously, it efficiently encapsulates the plurality as emphasized by the curator. Furthermore, having a show titled Rainbow in June, the LGBTQ+ Pride Month, contributes to its intent.  

References

Doble, F. (n.d.). The significance of rainbows in art. Art UK. Retrieved June 15, 2026, from https://artuk.org/discover/curations/rainbows-final

The Wallace Collection. (n.d.). The Rainbow Landscape. Retrieved June 16, 2026, from https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=64938&viewType=detailView

A Brief History of My So-Called Life, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chester Arnold, on view at the Catharine Clark Gallery from June 6 - August 15, 2026. 

By: Bill Russell

Chester Arnold enters his sixth decade as an artist with a solo exhibition called A Brief History of My So-Called Life at Catharine Clark Gallery that feels markedly more inward-looking. The large canvases and small studies on display draw on memory and imagination rather than the expansive worldviews that often define his work.

You may be familiar with his complex, aerial depictions of resistance marches, where thousands of tiny figures surge across vast landscapes; or his defiant images of human intervention in the land, from garbage dumps and quarries to weather events that hint at a destabilized climate. 

Many of those images and concerns persist in these paintings: gnarled trees, freshly dug plots, abandoned objects, holes breached in walls, and the murmuration of leaves. Now he offers us evidence of what he sees as a world straining for hope and meaning. Here we enter landscapes strewn with psychic debris of the artist’s own unsettled unconscious.

I’ve always known Arnold to be articulate about his life, art, and process, so I asked him to share his thoughts for this show. He says these paintings draw on the “primal elements of love, life, and death (that) have never been more vivid than in the imagery of forests, leaves, and our presence in nature.”

The signature painting is The Forest’s Edge, a work that offers a metaphor for an artist (perhaps lost) at the far end of his life. Inspired by his wanderings through West Marin, Arnold constructs a prison‑like stand of pines, a freshly dug pit, and an ambiguous clearing in the distance. From this stark arrangement he draws out both insight and a measure of optimism. “I’m living in the forest of my own creative life, finding my way through, from place to place. I’m still in the forest, but I feel like I’m getting close to the edge, looking through the trees you can now see the coast, and light beyond.”

There are other clues to find. There’s a brightly colored surveyor’s marker in the bottom left suggesting a plan to clear cut the forest, an ecological message suggesting human intervention on the landscape. Arnold offers, “Are we at the edge of our capability as a species? Are we exhausting everything? (It) seems like we're doing that?” The narratives he offers press us to reconsider our place in the world. This is his call‑to‑action: it isn’t too late for us. He hints it may be too late for him, except to keep painting. He speaks candidly about the melancholy that accompanies aging and the choices he’s making as he moves toward the final chapters of his life.

Chester Arnold's work and life contain multitudes*, imparting life wisdom, art‑historical fluency, with a generosity of spirit. It’s no surprise he taught for many years at the College of Marin, leaving behind a long line of appreciative students. (Full disclosure: I was his student for a brief time.)  

*Arnold would tell you that, in his teens, his encounters with literature, particularly in the works of Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Darwin, and Humboldt, were a critical contributor to his education.

In A Curbside Elegy and its study, Gravity’s Long Embrace, Arnold honors the commonplace, which he clarifies, “is not meant to evoke mediocrity”. These are lyrical forms of maple, oak, and ginkgo leaves held together by close values and subtle shifts of hue. How often do we look at what’s fallen to the ground and notice the beauty and meaning in these autumn castoffs? Arnold says that collecting, sketching and painting leaves have become “an absolution for the bruised soul.” He continues. “We are all the children of gravity, as multitudes gather perpetually as our world spins its journey in the cosmos.”

This forest reveals a car tire, a plank, and the remnants of a homeless encampment. Standing water reflects the sky, perhaps suggesting a heaven on earth. It’s not the only painting that suggests that Arnold experienced a transcendental moment in nature.

There are a couple of paintings of water reflecting the sky. In Two Stars AwakeArnold tells us that, “when it’s neither night nor day, and the world reflects itself in the water and also two stars are shimmering in the water around the branches of the tree, one is filled with wonder. Even at my age, to feel that sense of wonder and delight is a kind of a spiritual experience, a thrill of the spirit that can’t be expressed any other way than to paint it.”

I asked Arnold about the painting of a moss-covered culvert pipe he titles Oracle (above). He often visits this place while hiking on the Overlook Trail in Sonoma. Did you ask the oracle a question, I asked? He answered, “the question is the painting.
In the making (of variations) of the painting, it revealed things that I hadn't anticipated along the process. I thought there would be more transformation, but the presence of a larger image has a different kind of impact.” 

A skull appears as offhandedly as a tossed bottle. The leaves that return to earth are painted with a lively and energetic touch. This painting is dedicated to Bruce McGaw, one of Arnold’s formative teachers at the San Francisco Art Institute. I imagine McGaw helped set him on the path to sharing his passion for making art and for teaching through shared experience.

In folklore, the wolf moon evokes themes of endurance, hunger and introspection. Here’s a large painting of a decaying yet still upright pine that Arnold came upon on a hike at Limantour Beach. Smaller versions and studies are arranged around it, suggesting a kind of meandering. The tree bark is falling away, revealing surfaces riddled with woodpecker holes, suggesting pride and persistence against the elements.

Why the fascination with dying trees, I ask? His response goes deeper than I expected. “It’s a recognition of their cycles, as our own as we age, rising and falling, providing venues for the exercise of elegiac metaphor. My earliest memories are filled with projection and animation, sensing that everything has feelings, a soul even, and has attracted hypnotic attachments to so-called inanimate objects in the natural world. As years have passed, the richness of such connection provides life with electric meaning, and countless opportunities for painted homages.”

Arnold shares his thoughts about this small yet significant painting of his studio table bearing his journals, books, materials, and more specifically, a skull.

“The presence of skulls throughout my decades of image making was never freighted by an obsession with mortality, rather it was the deep fascination with anatomy and zoology, expressed as structure in the resplendent beauty of bones. Having crossed the finish line of the proverbial three score and ten, the meanings reflected in this iconography have been expanded by the inevitable loss of friends and family. Rather than diminish my enthusiasm, however, my regard for the world and everything in it has grown ever more poignant and what I recall now is life’s radiant tincture. Drawing and painting are simply the output of paying attention to the world, and this attentiveness reaps rich harvests in the minds of practitioners. Granaries of memory filled with the abundance of joys and sorrows, balanced, upon reflection as each image appears in the mind or as it happens to occur spontaneously on a page or canvas. This little painting appeared after weeks of larger formats, a postcard to my conscious life from my unconscious, a game of juggling, of shaping forms that feel essential, and serve as an external representation of the archives accumulated in a life of...what is it again?”

The three large flat tire paintings Scenes From The Age of Gravity and Friction, Alley Flat and Whitewall are underwhelming to me, with their frontal presentation and hackneyed metaphors for deflation and impotence. Arnold is at his strongest when he turns to nature’s metaphors, gathering insight from the wanderings that carry him through it.

The North Gallery presents Al Farrow’s inventive bestiary of animal skulls and constructions are made of guns, bullets, and shell casings that function as a contemporary memento mori. Though the theme of death threads through both his work and Arnold’s paintings, Farrow’s commentary is more direct and political, while the messages in Arnold’s paintings involve more introspection.

Chester Arnold’s new paintings trace a life lived in deep attention, where forests, leaves, bones, and sky become mirrors for memory, aging, and wonder. This exhibition gathers those clues into a moving testament to an artist seeking light at the edge of the trees. These are personal, powerful pieces that hold their own within the full span of his career.

Faig Ahmed (b. 1982, Sumqayit, Azerbaijan) lives and works in Baku. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts in 2004. Ahmed represented Azerbaijan at the country's inaugural pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and the Azerbaijan National Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia (2026) with the solo exhibition The Attention.

Ahmed is internationally recognized for transforming the visual language and techniques of traditional carpet weaving into contemporary sculptural and conceptual artworks. By reimagining one of Azerbaijan’s most enduring cultural traditions, he challenges conventional perceptions of craft, heritage, and materiality. His practice deconstructs established patterns and symbols, creating unexpected visual forms that merge historical craftsmanship with contemporary aesthetics, digital culture, and emerging technologies.

Working across a broad range of media, Ahmed draws inspiration from world religions, mystical traditions, ancient texts, calligraphy, geometry, science, and technology. In recent years, his practice has expanded into interdisciplinary research exploring consciousness, perception, neuroscience, and the relationship between human experience and emerging technologies. His works often combine meticulous handwoven techniques with digitally informed distortions, examining the intersection of tradition and innovation, the physical and the virtual, the ancient and the future.

His work has been presented in museums and institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Bellevue Arts Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design; Boca Raton Museum of Art; Newport Art Museum; George Washington University; Honolulu Museum of Art; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art; Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University; Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO); Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney; Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania; Textile Museum of Sweden, Borås; Istanbul Modern; New Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Princeton University Art Museum; Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah; Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; and Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, among others.

Ahmed’s works are held in major public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Palm Springs Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; RISD Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art; Brooks Museum of Art; Currier Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Birmingham Museum of Art; Bargoin Museum, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Kraków; National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; Arsenal Contemporary Art Montréal; National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway; Istanbul Modern; and Maraya Art Centre.

The following are excerpts from Faig Ahmed’s interview as conducted by Hugh Leeman

What the Venice Biennale Is Really For

Hugh Leeman: Faig, your work is the solo exhibition for the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale — where the art world addresses a global stage. In your installation and artworks in Venice right now, what do you want global visitors to notice?

Faig Ahmed: I have an answer, but it's not telling anything — and yet it is. You're right that the Biennale is one of the major events in contemporary art today. But because it's presented by countries, questions of origin, identity, culture, and social context inevitably arise. We all know from the news what's going on in the world. What I keep asking is: what can art give that's different in a world already full of information?

The only answer I arrived at was the person themselves. What I really want — not from all visitors, but from what I'd call special visitors, those who genuinely want to engage with themselves — is for them to simply be with themselves. The whole idea of the space is built so that nothing has to disturb you from yourself. The poetry inside, the carpet itself — it leads you to certain points where you can, literally or abstractly, reflect on yourself as a person. The person is the most important element here, because everything — including the final work, which we'll discuss — only becomes whole if the visitor completes it.

Speaking Freely Through a National Pavilion

Hugh Leeman: There's an interesting complexity to your work. You delve into issues that are, at times, taboo in Azerbaijan. You've said before that the Biennale in Venice remains one of the few places where it's possible to speak freely about everything on equal terms — and yet you're speaking through a national pavilion. How do you want this exhibition to hold that tension between national specificity and shared human experience?

Faig Ahmed: What makes the local global, and the global local? What can traditional culture give to a world that is already full of information and knowledge?

I think the answer is quite a lot. As contemporary humans, we are just discovering how much our ancestors accumulated — and today we talk about data. If we can read that older data, we can access something genuinely tested by evolution, including cultural evolution — things that we may or may not need today.

One of the ideas I approached was poetry, because Azerbaijani culture is genuinely full of it. Even everyday language, even jokes — they have to be poetical for them to make sense, to make humor land. So poetry — and specifically mystical poetry — drew me in. I approached a particular school of thought that comes from the region that is today Azerbaijan. The school is called Hurufiyya, and one of its great poet-presenters is Nasimi, a 14th-century poet who wrote in the Azerbaijani language, which I can read directly.

Nasimi and this school speak about the importance of the self — that in moments of hesitation, of doubt, when you must choose, choose yourself. Within yourself is truth. That idea developed in a direction close to pantheism, but they added something else: that everything in the universe, the world, reality itself, is coded. That thought from 15th-century Azerbaijan runs in a remarkable parallel line with ideas from quantum physics and theoretical physics — what we know today as the simulation hypothesis. Physicists like John Wheeler, who proposed the concept of "it from bit" — the idea that reality itself, not just matter and space and time, but reality as a whole, can be described by information rather than by physical matter and movement — that connection between a medieval Azerbaijani poet and contemporary theoretical physics is what sparked this project for me.

Social Codes, Unspoken Language, and What Art Can Find

Hugh Leeman: You mention personal data and codes, and in many ways, even in your previous exhibitions before Venice, you dig into the sensitive nature of social codes — how unspoken social codes influence an individual and influence a greater whole. Can you give the listener some context about what these social codes are that you're exploring in your work?

Faig Ahmed: Human behavior is extraordinarily complex — behaviorists, theorists, many fields have tried to address this. But art, I think, can offer another view into this language. Through art, we can describe, or even discover, new patterns in human behavior that other methods can't reach. Art can dig into very small details of a certain subject, and at the same time see the bigger picture. That's what art has to do.

Hugh Leeman: You said something to me previously that I want you to expand on. You told me: "Freedom is opportunity, and something that you have to pay for." What has freedom cost you — artistically, socially, spiritually?

Faig Ahmed: For every movement — which is freedom — as in geometry and physics, you have to pay with energy. And in life, it can work similarly. I try to balance. I pay with my own freedom, in a sense, because I'm not free to do whatever I want at any moment. Planning something large means planning many smaller things just to reach the larger goal — it divides and structures my time in ways that don't always give me enough open space.

But on the other side, art itself gives me the opportunity to meet people — like you — and to talk about subjects that genuinely interest me. And without this work, without this direct connection with people, which is what matters most to me as an artist — the connection through the work is one thing, but the direct human connection is something else. Art in that case becomes a language to talk about something deeper.

Balance, for me, is not a static thing. It's a rhythm — finding a rhythm through which you can give and take and maintain some control. And sometimes, like in meditation, there are zero points where you're neither giving nor receiving anything. That stillness is part of it too.

The Women Weavers and the Price of Collaboration

Hugh Leeman: Early in your career you were made to communicate with women weavers through their brothers and husbands because you couldn't speak directly with the women themselves. This sits directly on the intersection of connection with people, freedom, and social codes. How did that experience impact your artwork and your understanding of what remains unsaid in social life?

Faig Ahmed: That was one of the most interesting and complex parts of the work — and honestly, I understood as a young artist that it's not just about a good idea. When you take something that is deeply important to a society and a culture — in this case, the carpet, made by the most skilled weavers who live in traditional communities, far from cities, in villages and countrysides — you're entering a world that is more traditional in behavior and everyday life.

What I realized, though, is that even within that society, nature makes its choices. Between those very traditional women, there were some who were more liberal in their thinking — women who actually liked the idea of doing something different. I understood that only after speaking with them, after learning their perspectives and what they wanted from life. Innovation has to be supported by people who are, sometimes, what looks like a little crazy to their surroundings. And traditional people, at the same time, shape those innovators. Both parts are natural. Without both, the world would not exist as it does.

What will ultimately change these communities is not anything I'm doing — it's the arrival of global ideas in any form: products, television, words, technology. Villages in Azerbaijan today are already using AI for farming. That wave of globalization is, in this particular contest, winning. And the most traditional way of life changes alongside it — not because anyone decided it should, but because that's how evolution works.

The 1990s, the Soviet Collapse, and the Search for Identity

Hugh Leeman: You've described the 1990s as a period of very big changes, and you've said that the carpet became, quote, your enemy, because it stood for a conservative social structure. How did living through the breakup of the former Soviet Union shape your early views toward tradition, and how have those views evolved?

Faig Ahmed: The Soviet society was very specific — there were no capitalistic choices as we have today. And most post-Soviet people appreciated the openness that came after, because they hadn't had the ability to choose or produce freely before. But at the same time, there was no ideological preparation for that freedom — no spiritual framework, no range of perspectives offered to people so they could compare and choose for themselves. And communism as an ideology held that there were no nationalities, no religions — only humans. Which is, in a sense, true. But we as human beings want some personality — I'm from this place, I'm part of this tradition, someone is my brother or sister. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, our generation — and not only in Azerbaijan, but across Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe — suddenly had no established identity. The generation before ours couldn't teach us who we were, because they didn't know how to answer it either. We were somewhere between a new world and an old one, with nothing clearly handed to us. And no one in Europe or elsewhere would accept you without an identity — we understood that clearly from our first international exhibitions, mostly in Germany, and then at Venice in 2007, when Azerbaijan participated as a national pavilion for the first time.

That was one of the big conversations then: who are we, and what do we want to say? As young people we were detached from the deep valleys of tradition, hearing only their distant echo. We were looking for a new identity that held elements of the past and elements of the future. My choice of the carpet was some kind of working through that — a beginning of how a new society forms itself by asking: who are we, and where are we going?

Baku and the Village: A Country of Contrasts

Hugh Leeman: For context — Azerbaijan is a very dynamic place. The rural areas remain quite conservative and traditional, while Baku is strongly secular and has embraced digital culture. How does that tension between a deep traditional past and an embrace of the digital future manifest in your work and research?

Faig Ahmed: Geography shapes it first. Azerbaijan is a crossroads — a border between different cultures, between West and East, between North and South. You can't be too conservative when your neighbors are so varied. And within Azerbaijan itself, there are several ethnic groups who have lived together for thousands of years. Some of them have languages so ancient they don't share roots even with neighboring languages. For several hundred years, different religions have coexisted — in the same village, you can find a synagogue, a church, and a mosque together.

People have lived in what I'd call a stable dynamic — accepting what has been there for thousands of years while being accepted in return. If you are different, you are respected. If you respect their difference, you can live together in that condition. That's why, throughout different periods of history, various schools of thought — Christian, Islamic, Sufi — have been respected rather than suppressed.

Baku is super secular. People are not deeply religious in general, but those who are religious have the freedom to practice, and no one blames them. The challenge that comes from this is that when nothing unifies a country — not religion, not nationality, not a single culture or language — it becomes difficult to bring people together around shared action. But when that unifying force is absent, people are also genuinely free to choose how they want to live. Both sides of that are real.

Shame, Secrecy, and the Village That Asked for Silence

Hugh Leeman: There's a story you've told in another interview about going to a village of weavers, where the weavers thought you were mocking or teasing their tradition. One household agreed to work with you — but only under the condition that you, quote, never say to anybody that we created this. Can you talk about that story, and what it reveals about shame, secrecy, and the social risk that comes when innovation first appears as taboo?

Faig Ahmed: That was actually the moment where I almost stopped — I thought I would never do this, because it was too sensitive. But after some time, even within a very traditional society, I found that there were women among them who were more open in their thinking. There were women who actually wanted to participate, who found the idea of making something different interesting. I understood that only after genuinely speaking with them, learning what they wanted from life, trying to see from their perspective.

I had to accept their world before I could approach it again. That wasn't easy. I fought with myself, because as a young person, I had seen some of this work as a kind of resistance against certain traditional views. But later, you understand that both parts are natural. Without both, the world wouldn't be what it is. Maybe it's not even a choice of individuals — it's an evolutionary wave that pushes everything to change, and that's how we survive.

What that story also showed is something positive: bringing those questions into a traditional community creates new conversations. That's always good. It leads to development of ideas and views. And at the same time, yes, global ideas in any form will eventually change those societies — that's the direction globalization moves, and it's not balanced. In that sense, it is winning.

The Importance of the Carpet

Hugh Leeman: Something we should address for context — what is the importance of the carpet, for someone who may not be familiar with Islamic culture or Central Asia?

Faig Ahmed: The carpet is much older than Islam — older than Christianity, older than all the major religions we know. The oldest carpet ever found has been dated to approximately 2,500 years old. So it's an object that already, in a sense, lost its connection to any one religion long ago. It's abstract enough, and has enough faces, that it can accept the character of any society. When one religion prevails, the carpet takes on that color. When another arrives, it shifts again. You can see this through history — even the Communist Party influenced carpet design. There were portraits of leaders, communist symbols woven in. That wasn't traditional, but the carpet absorbed it and survived it.

Through changes of language, changes of religion, changes of writing systems — Azerbaijan has changed its script several times — the carpet survived. Architecture changed, everything changed, but the carpet maintained its value. It's too abstract to be pinned to one religion or one geography or one time. And yet it is that old — my grandmother has old carpets from her grandmothers, because for generations, it was deeply important for women to make a carpet before they married. That knowledge was passed directly from mother to daughter to granddaughter for thousands of years.

The carpet, in that sense, is a kind of living archive that has outlasted every ideology that tried to claim it.

Walking Through the Venice Exhibition

Hugh Leeman: With the context you've shared — the social taboos, the conservative rural areas versus secular Baku, the inherited silences — let's walk into your exhibition in Venice. You are our guide. What should we know, what should we begin to consider?

Faig Ahmed: The space consists of seven rooms, including a closed garden. All of them are covered by carpet — as one entity, one continuous pattern that flows from room to room. In some rooms, the carpet begins to lose its stability, its defined personality — becoming undefined. Every traditional carpet pattern comes from a specific geography and a specific time and carries a very exact context behind it. Here, that identity begins to dissolve.

The first thing you do when you enter is take off your shoes. I hesitated about whether to require that, but I decided to do it because during the Biennale, visitors walk an enormous amount, and they need a moment to simply relax and be with themselves. That first contact is through the body. The body connects to the work from the ground up — someone described it as having a logic of chakras, beginning from the bottom and moving upward. You are not separated from what you're feeling under your feet. If you look at what surrounds you, you are part of it — you are not outside looking in.

In the garden, there is a hidden work — directional speakers that play fragments of the poetry of Nasimi, the poet I mentioned before, who spoke of coded reality. You can hear him saying something like: “I Can Contain Both Worlds But I Do Not Fit Into This One” . By "two worlds" he means the outer and the inner — the world of the body and the universe that surrounds it, and the world of consciousness and everything consciousness can achieve. None of these worlds can contain me, he says. What I am — the energy, the power of who I am — is larger than body and mind.

That work is very hidden. There's nothing marking the spot. If you happen to cross it, you simply find it.

In one of the rooms, there is a piece of earth — actual soil — that responds to the presence of the visitor and to the connection with the ground. You can literally ground yourself there. You can meditate with it, and you can feel and hear the sound of that connection. The technology behind it is something we developed specifically for this work — a group of scientists and engineers contributed to it — because as far as we knew, it didn't previously exist.

And then there is the final work — we call it the Altar of Entropy. It's a system built on principles drawn from quantum physics. Inside this structure, you receive a message. A personal message. Everyone who enters receives it as an individual. I didn't fully understand how it would work before opening. Now, after five thousand people have gone through the experience, I understand that it is doing something genuinely interesting. It draws on theoretical physicists' hypotheses about a possible connection between human consciousness and quantum systems — the idea that consciousness itself may interact with probability at the quantum level. The altar makes that interaction tangible, or at least legible, as an experience.

Traditional Society as Battery

Hugh Leeman: You've said that society is effectively a collective order. Does that collective order — the structure you've described of rural tradition, conservatism, unspoken codes — become the very thing your work attempts to disturb?

Faig Ahmed: I think traditional society is, for an artist, something like a battery — an accumulator of energy gathered over thousands of years of cultural change. What makes an accumulator useful is that it can collect and hold energy without it all leaking away. The work I've done has been a kind of bridge — transferring some of that accumulated energy into something new that the current moment needed. I don't think there was a special reason for that. It just seems to be where life led me.

Any natural system looks for the weakest point — the place where two charges come close enough to connect and influence each other. For an audience that had no connection to tradition, my work made them think about the carpet — is it important, does it matter? And for traditional communities, it raised new questions. That exchange, that dialogue between the two charges, is the connection that makes the work meaningful.

Art as Healing: The Shaman and the Contemporary Artist

Hugh Leeman: Beneath the surface of what you've shared — traditions, taboos, cultural wounds, changing languages, changing propaganda, changing ideals — you've told me that the projects of art can heal society. What would healing look like when the wound is not only political history, but also the bodily shame, the secrecy, the inherited silences you've been touching on?

Faig Ahmed: Different sicknesses require different healings. But I see a parallel: if you compare our complex contemporary society to simpler societies where our ancestors lived — or to some communities that still exist this way — there was often one person in the village, a shaman, who performed this healing. Whatever the healing was — psychological conflict, physical illness — that person worked in a complex, non-logical language that could speak to hidden patterns.

I see today's artists doing something similar. The wound you're describing — the questions around sexuality in Azerbaijan, for instance, that have gone untouched for many decades including through the secular Soviet period — those are rising now. Society is becoming more psychologically ready to look at itself, to accept things it has been hiding from itself.

When it comes to social-political questions, artists show something that everyone is following but no one is seeing as a whole. Art metaphorizes the situation. It shows the top picture — the view from above where you can see the whole structure and find yourself within it. And that's why art has to be communicable. It cannot be disconnected from who you already are. It shouldn't ask you to become someone else just to enter it.

That is the healing. When you understand that you are part of a bigger system, something releases. The enormous, invisible weight that culture places on us — the faces we wear, the costumes we put on, the shame installed from childhood — begins to lighten. Not because it disappears, but because you can finally see it clearly from the outside.

Hugh Leeman: Do you mean that culture is literally taking energy from the individual?

Faig Ahmed: Yes. Culture in a kind of standby mode — where you are fighting to maintain it, defending it, preserving it — consumes real energy. And then new ideas arrive, sometimes not even by intention but through external forces like war. Society, faced with questions it has no answers to, accepts any explanation because our biology and psychology require at least one description of a situation more than none at all. That's also how manipulation works, and how ideology takes hold.

Choosing the Matrix, or Stepping Outside It

Hugh Leeman: To close — what is it that we haven't talked about today that you would like to share?

Faig Ahmed: The only thing I really want to share is: experience it yourself. I don't have any other message, honestly. Any other advice.

But there are many subjects we could continue to discuss — the intersection of science and culture, for instance. We're living in a very interesting time when we can look at ourselves not only as free human beings, no longer attached to old ideologies, but as cosmic beings — someone living within the cosmos, with the possibility of building any type of society we want. Of course that will still be attached to certain constraints. But it is possible to release from old disconnections and look at the world from a genuinely new perspective — as a person, and as a society.

Hugh Leeman: How does a person actually do that — accepting the new, releasing from the old?

Faig Ahmed: The most reliable method is the harder one — the way of monks. They literally detach from society, living outside of it. They release from the first instinct, which is to be near your people, near safety. They don't have sex, they have very limited food. They save that energy and redirect it toward what they choose to redirect it toward, depending on their tradition — Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist. It's a radical method.

For contemporary people, it's very hard to live as a monk. But it's possible to apply the same methodology at a smaller scale. Detaching from the screen, from the smartphone — even sometimes — gives you perspective. You come back more effective, with more clarity. And as you detach, even briefly, you feel the resistance. That resistance is actually a good sign. It means: I am not free from that yet. And when you look at yourself in that space, you see yourself more naked — not always a comfortable sight, because we carry so many faces, so many costumes, applied through social communication and shame installed since childhood.

It's a little like the character in The Matrix who says: I would rather choose the Matrix, even knowing it's all fake and simulated, than struggle the way we struggle. That's easy to understand. And we are living in an interesting moment because all knowledge is now open. We have the opportunity not to choose the matrix. But we don't yet have a form of society, a shared strategy, for how truly free and released people can live together. What would our new plan be? Because culture itself is a language — the way people walk in Japan is a different language than the way people walk in New York or in Baku. We are always inside a language we didn't consciously choose.

That conversation is just beginning.

Hugh Leeman: Faig, you have your fingers on the pulse of a very interesting heartbeat — not just of Azerbaijan, but of the world, on the Venice stage and in the undercurrents of culture. I appreciate what you're doing, and thank you for making time to share with us today.

Faig Ahmed: Thank you very much. This was one of the rare things I would not call an interview — it was truly a conversation. It's very rare that you can go this deep into different subjects with someone who is this thoughtful. And I will repeat what I said earlier, because it's an important part of what I do: it's not about objects, it's not about systems — it's about this communication with people, where we can share these kinds of ideas. Thank you.

By Liz Goldner

A dramatic series in this expansive exhibition is “Dear America” (2002), (the inspiration for the show’s title) by Tom Jones, Ho-Chunk Nation. The series contains enlarged postcard scans featuring white Americans, along with Indigenous people. Each panel displays handwritten lyrics from the song, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” (1832). 

By combining the images with the well-known lyrics, the artist explores his perspective on patriotic imagery, land ownership and representation. As a significant artwork in this semiquincentennial exhibition, it is one of 100-plus items. Included also are prints, photos and drawings, exploring our country’s landscape, its people and concepts of freedom, most from the National Gallery’s extensive collection of American art.

The exhibition is divided into sections. The “Community” section includes the Tom Jones’ series. Looking at the images, reading the song lyrics written on them, then reading the artist’s handwritten inscriptions reveal conditions that Indigenous people have endured over centuries. These include settler colonization, land seizure, forced removal from their homes, federal policies and broken treaties, all undermining tribal sovereignty.

The first panel with the lyrics, “My country 'tis of thee,” portrays a depressed elderly Native woman, while a smiling angelic white woman stands behind her, overwhelming her, and holding a large American flag. The message is clearly that our country is owned by white settlers and their ancestors. 

The second panel, “Sweet Land of Liberty,” is a collage of a 19th Century group portrait of Sioux Indians, with a victorious white hunter in the foreground. By displaying a large raccoon that he has captured, he symbolically indicates the white man’s ownership of the land. Jones wrote onto the image, “The hanging of 38 Sioux and Ho-Chunk took place just south of Mankato, Minnesota Valley Regional Library…[it was] the largest mass execution in North American history the day after Christmas, 1862.“

The third panel, “Of thee I sing,” a more positive version of the Native condition, pictures two proud members of the Lac du Flambeau Band from the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe, relaxing by a lake. The words “Indians at Lac Du Flambeau, Wisconsin,” written by Jones on the panel, refer to the Natives’ centuries-old practice of catching fish at night by torchlight.

“Land where my fathers died” depicts a distraught-looking elderly Indian man with two young boys, all wearing Native clothing. The desperation of the trio is echoed by the artist’s written words on the image: “The Ho-Chunk people were removed at least seven times by the United States government from their homeland in what is now called Wisconsin.” 

“Land of the Pilgrims Pride” is a photo of a dozen young women dressed in traditional clothing with head-dresses and feathers, and their hair in braids. Viewers can decide if the women are Native Americans from decades ago, or contemporary white women dressed for a costume party. The verse, referencing proud pilgrims, invokes settler-colonial origin stories that marginalized Indigenous presence, as Native people have lived here for millennia. Regarding the image, 100 years ago, photos of Native people, real or manufactured, were offered as souvenirs to tourists. 

The panel, “From Every Mountain Side,” with the words, “A council of the blackfeet Indians at Glacier National Park,” describing an image of Indians meeting harmoniously, is the most dramatic piece in the series. The image is collaged onto a 1910 flyer that says, “Indian Land For Sale, Fine Land in the West.” The artist has created an in-your-face example of white settlers embracing a bureaucratic ideology, transferring Indigenous land to white people. The doctrine is based on the belief that settlers had the God-given right to seize land that Indians had lived on for millennia. 

"Let Freedom Ring" illustrates two young cowboys, posing as if to shoot someone in front of a hand-painted scene that captures the mythologizing of westward expansion. The panel exposes how settler ideas of freedom and property were often built through Indigenous dispossession and anti-Indigenous violence. It also references the entitled sense of freedom and ownership of the land that white people have possessed for centuries.

While there are more illustrative panels with subsequent “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” lyrics, these seven panels convey a powerful message about Native Americans’ centuries-long struggles; specifically about their ongoing efforts to assert sovereignty, cultural survival, and self-representation.

Additional sections in “Dear America” include “Land,” honoring the grandeur of the American landscape. Here are paintings of the mist-shrouded “Tower at Tower Falls, Yellowstone” (1872) by Thomas Moran; Winslow Homer’s “Hudson River, Logging” (1891-1892), with two loggers admiring the magnificent scenery; the vibrantly colored “Grand Canyon” (1977), by Clare Romano; and “The Niagara Cascades” (2024), by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma). The gelatin silver print, “Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, Alaska” (1947), photographed by Ansel Adams was made to advance Alaska’s wilderness as the “most important campaign in which I have participated.” 

Mitch Epstein’s “Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Six Grandfathers, South Dakota” (2018) was shot with clouds partially obscuring the carved portraits. It references the controversial history of the monument as a symbol of broken treaties, as the Memorial was built on Native land. Mount Rushmore is in the Black Hills/Pahá Sápa land, guaranteed to the Lakota under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, but later seized by the United States; “Six Grandfathers” is the Lakota name associated with the mountain before the carving.

Also in the “Community” section, several intense portraits by Sedrick E. Huckaby reveal a unique manner of depicting Black Americans in the 21st century. His textured paint captures the emotions of people historically marginalized, aspiring to achieve entry into the middle class. 

Embracing modernism, Robert Indiana’s pop art styled “Liberty ’76” (1974–1975) was created to celebrate the Bicentennial 50 years ago, with the message that genuine freedom is fundamental to our democracy. 

The final section in “Dear America” addresses the concept of “Freedom,” with depictions of the American Revolution and the Civil War. These are followed by photos by Lewis Hine, “Climbing into America” (1905), a close-up of Italian immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, and Alfred Stieglitz's, “The Steerage” (1907), an overview of immigrants arriving as part of the mass movement of people fleeing oppression. 

“Artists have long helped us see America not just as a place, but as a living idea shaped by many voices,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Through these remarkable works from the National Gallery’s collection, visitors to the nation’s art museum can witness the power of art to illuminate our shared past, illustrate the experiences of our lives, and inspire our collective future.”

“Dear America” runs through September 20, 2026 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D,C.

Schumaker is greatly influenced by Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright and poet, and his absurdist views of the human condition.

The artist says, I think of Beckett's Not I, in which the stage is bare except for a hole in the curtain exposing the actress's mouth—in sections, he commands her to speak faster than the audience can understand— abstracting the words. Sometimes I use words to be read, sometimes I like them abstracted, layers upon layers of type, revealing here and there a few comprehensible words. Some artists paint nudes; I paint words.

     On one of his neighborhood walks, he found used rolls of printing paper from a local business, which were regularly thrown away. According to Schumaker, that paper has just the right thickness for his word stencils, which are all hand-cut. The paper often breaks down while he is stenciling, which results in blobs or imperfections that he enjoys in his paintings and handmade books.

     In the front room of the gallery, as you walk in, there is a painting titled Roots and Leaves (2025), which is based on a childhood memory of listening to music at school in Omaha, Nebraska. The words come from a collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. He began stenciling the words that he remembered, and eventually the painting was similar in color and texture to the dead leaves, cattails, decaying carcasses, snakes, spiders, sticks, and mud that he encountered as a youth hiking with his dog along the banks of the Missouri River.

The atmospheric quality in many of his paintings is the result of both thick and thin acrylic washes over stenciled words and nonsense calligraphy mixed with methyl cellulose, traditionally a glue used for book binding and for conservation. He learned to use methyl cellulose mixed with acrylics in a paste paper class at San Francisco’s Center for the Book. He likes the dreamy effects it can create, and its hard matte surface. Often, he uses a whisk to create bubbles, creating the kind of mess that he finds appealing. Making one-of-a-kind, hand-painted books used everything he wanted: non-objective brush work, stenciled type, the turn of the page, the larger format, and often a bit of narrative.

Schumaker left Nebraska when he was a young man, threatened with arrest, after one of his paintings was judged obscene. He worked as a paper company salesman, quit that job, and at 35 years old started doing graphic design and illustration. Illustration led him to Yolla Bolly Press, and Yolla Bolly Press led him to handmade books. He illustrated two limited-edition letterpress books for The Yolla Bolly Press: Two Kitchens in Provence by MFK Fisher and Paris, France by Gertrude Stein. Later, when Yolla Bolly closed upon the early death of the publisher, he got a letterpress of his own. But lacking the necessary disposition for exacting letterpress work, he soon began covering his less-than-perfect letterpress prints with paint. Eventually, he got rid of the press and simply painted the pages.

Several of his hand-painted books are in display cases in an interior room. When we met, Schumaker brought one of his books to look at in person. Elixir Refused is loosely based on the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Hindu text. It is a mix of brushwork, stenciled words, and a palette of reds and browns, layered with washes. The pages feel durable and smooth to the touch because of the methyl cellulose. The title, Elixir Refused, is a bit of a joke on the idea of enlightenment, as are the last pages of the book-MAKE HAPPY -MAKE HAPPY-AND KEEP ON REPEATING IT UNTIL -I THOUGHT IT WOULD BORE ME TO DEATH-I PADDLED ON. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna guides Arjuna through duty, action, and devotion to wisdom and knowledge, but in Schumaker's version, he refuses this path because he finds a life of perfection to be boring. Schumaker believes most people, including himself, don’t look for perfection or enlightenment but prefer to foolishly travel on. 

Surrounding the glass display cases are a collection of eclectic paintings. There are several paintings based on modern composers he likes, like Phillip Glass and Louis Andriessen. He uses large, complicated, hand-cut stencils for paintings of the Tower of Babel, and paintings that use the circular shapes of snowmen or the Venus of Willendorf, and stenciled dots based on Dogon art and architecture from a trip he took to Mali.

A number of his most recent small works line a small hallway, incorporating the use of Morse code. His friend and former gallerist, Jack Fischer, sent him an online tool one could use to turn words into Morse Code. Finding it strangely beautiful, he printed out the code and used it as a matrix for cutting stencils.

Schumacher's interest in words and absurdity took an unexpected turn with the first presidency of Donald Trump. Trump's seemingly endless stream of invective made Schumaker indignant and sparked his imagination. At the gallery’s front desk, there are free copies of small folded prints based on his earlier 1992 project featuring quotes from Donald Trump. After a conversation with his small grandson about bullies, Donald Trump: Hate Is What We Need was born and was later published by Chronicle Books (2018). Schumacher did another unique book of Trump quotes, now in the Achenbach collection. But realizing that few people ever see his one-of-a-kind books, he started making large hand-painted posters and started posting on social media. He thought he might create ten, but he couldn’t stop, and during Trump’s first administration, he created 350. And sometimes he can’t help himself from cutting just one more deplorable quote

Schumaker is a good storyteller, and his work has a spirit of the magician or the alchemist in search of the philosopher’s stone. His prolific output can be nostalgic, and his work hovers between the sublime, the beautiful, the ugly, and the awkward. He takes delight in the unknown and the accidental, a proverbial traveler through the liminal spaces between his art, life, and the material world. The exhibit showcases his work from the last 20 years.  With the closing of his former gallery, Jack Fischer, this year, the show at Modernism functions both as a bookend and the start of a new chapter for this effervescent artist. 

By Mike Hinckley

Kevin Keaney's recent pop-up exhibition, At Home, which opened May 28, occupies an intimate venue: a collector’s 5th-floor apartment in the historic Bank of Italy building overlooking the Powell Street cable car turnaround. Installed by Michael Snyder at the Lofts at One Powell , the 15-foot ceilings showcase twenty-one mixed media paintings incorporating paint and college, the largest ones being 72 x 60 inches. The clean and luxurious setting is both perfectly suited to present works featuring urban environments while also offering a stark contrast to many of the grittier paintings which seem to highlight San Francisco’s street life.

Collage has long been present in Keaney's paintings, the combination of photographic fragments and loosely painted surfaces being a hallmark of his work. In this new series, the collage elements announce themselves more boldly. Torn paper exposes layers beneath, revealing flashes of carefully chosen color and imagery that become active in the compositions rather than simply supporting material.

The paintings are noticeably brighter than in much of his earlier work. Vivid reds, blues, and pinks push against passages of atmospheric grays and blacks. Urban imagery—streets, churches, utility wires, figures and fragments of landscape—appears and disappears beneath layers of abrasion and reconstruction, creating pictures that feel simultaneously excavated and assembled.

Speaking after the exhibition, Keaney described a conscious effort over the past year to simplify and accelerate his process “I kept telling myself I want to improve. I need to improve." His unexpected solution was to work faster than he has worked in the past. Rather than attaching to something he liked early in the painting, he learned to keep pushing.“I can't stay here for two weeks staring at this beast in the exact same condition it is right now.'"

This willingness to trust instinct and embrace spontaneity has resulted in compositions that are unified and color balanced. They offer the viewer multiple different ways to enter into what seems like a single landscape comprising the exhibition. The collage elements Keaney utilizes are not disguised, he clearly embraces how fragmentary and recognizable forms can activate his compositions. Keaney leans into the technique to make the torn paper elements the key features of his constructions thus eliminating a layer between the real and imaginary places he depicts. Importantly, much of the representational imagery he uses originates from his own protographs thus ensuring the final composition encompasses different aspects of his own gaze.

Learning that the piece is almost entirely collage comes as something of a shock. Keany, a self described color enthusiast, has discovered that the color he seeks already exists in the photographs he has made over three decades wandering San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. "The color's there in the photographs. It's in the sky, it's on the buildings, it's in the stripes painted on the street."

The paintings are also deeply rooted in San Francisco itself. Churches, street corners, signs, workers, and neighborhoods become repositories of memory. The Ferris wheel, in particular, carries multiple meanings. It represents both the increasing transformation of San Francisco into a tourist destination, and the spectacle and coexistence of purpose all urban spaces represent. "All great cities experience catastrophe."

Yet beneath the architecture and the layered surfaces lie human stories. The solitary figures that appear throughout the paintings are not symbols of victimhood. These are not marginalized characters to be used for political fodder, they are resilient survivors. As a result, these narratives carry autobiographical weight. Keaney spoke candidly about childhood housing instability and later struggles as an adult that left him briefly forced to call his truck home. Those experiences lend authenticity to images that might otherwise risk sentimentality. These narratives also are not meant to attack affluence, rather they speak to the coexistence of different realities with the microcosm we inhabit.

Likewise, the dogs that frequently accompany these figures occupy a special place within the work. Keany suggests they are the moral center and the spiritual center of the works. Representing loyalty, courage, and the capacity to protect, the animals embody qualities Keaney admires and sees reflected in those living at the margins of contemporary urban life.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of At Home is the ease with which opposing impulses coexist. Disorder and structure, improvisation and control, intimacy and spectacle are held in productive tension. The paintings are emotionally vulnerable yet unexpectedly comforting. There is familiarity to be found by almost anyone, making these works feel nostalgic and relatable.

More than anything, the exhibition reveals that Keaney isn’t trying to be anyone else. He isn’t chasing trends. He owns that these paintings are intensely personal and deeply lived. They possess the conviction of work made out of necessity. Keaney has always painted with commitment. In At Home, he turns the volume all the way up. And somehow, by doing so, the work becomes quieter, cleaner, and stronger than ever.

Bravo.

The exhibition, which has been extended and can be viewed by appointment, is part of Skypomp, a Pennsylvania artist-run gallery and project space aiming to make art work more accessible by activating unorthodox venues.