“When the principles of perspective are reversed and solidified into sculpted paintings something extraordinary happens: the mind is deceived into believing the impossible, that a static painting can move of its own accord.”

—Patrick Hughes, Quotes About Art

Stepping into a gallery filled with Patrick Hughes’s work evokes the odd sensation of tumbling down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole. While I couldn’t initially figure out why, I began to feel genuinely dizzy as I walked through Scott Richards Gallery, experiencing Hughes’s starkly realist still lifes and landscapes. This experience seemed to mimic sequences in Alice in Wonderland where Alice drinks a magic potion and eats a piece of cake, causing her physical environment to expand, contract, and twist in direct defiance of natural logic.

  This optical disorientation has profound and poignant roots. Born in England in 1939, Hughes spent part of his childhood sheltering from World War II air raids beneath his grandparents’ staircase. Looking up at the underside of the stairs, he became fascinated by its inverted architecture—a configuration he later described as “stairs that only a spider could walk up.” In another room, two opposing mirrors produced an endless sequence of reflections, offering an early experience of infinite space. These childhood encounters with spatial reversal and optical illusion were formative for Hughes’s artistic imagination.

Hughes’ early experiences also fostered his lifelong passion for books, which offered another kind of escape, and left him looking at the world “the wrong way round.”  These experiences also situate Hughes within a lineage of visual paradox, bringing to mind the surreal perspectives of Giorgio de Chirico and the subversive wit of René Magritte. He was also drawn to M.C. Escher’s impossible geometries, which helped shape his signature technique of “reverspective.” Hughes paints on wooden panels that project outward, reversing the conventions of linear perspective: what appears distant in the painting is closest to the viewer.As viewers move around the work, its apparent depth and perspective shift, unsettling their sense of space and distance. More than a visual trick, the effect can be physically disorienting, even inducing nausea.

‍ ‍Once you stabilize your footing in the gallery’s “wonderland,” you encounter Hughes’s conceptual wit. In works like Box Fresh and Love Books (both 2026), he creates dialogues between physical objects and cultural memory. By juxtaposing a trompe l’oeil Warhol Brillo box and a Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture with art history monographs dedicated to those same artists, he constructs interactive archives. As you look at the iconic object, read the adjacent book spines, and move around the piece, you find yourself caught in a continuous loop: the physical artwork points to the history book, which in turn validates the artwork. 

In Books of Babel, this impulse becomes a celebration of Hughes’s pleasure in literary association. The titles on the stacked books read like a conceptual playlist, chaining together into a living linguistic landscape. For me, Books of Babel serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition. Its pyramidal form rises from evocative titles such as Paradox, Pun, Perspective, and Contradiction near the base, to Surrealism and Infinity near the top, with Poetry, Geometry, and Imagination among the ascending titles. The work is both playful and profound, and evokes the Tower of Babel as a metaphor not only for the confusion of language, but for the physical instability of perception itself. As you walk past, the books appear to shift, warp, and move on their own, evoking the biblical builders who suddenly could not understand each other or their reality. Viewers experience the inability to fully trust their perceptions and what they are seeing.

In his Vuittons series (2025), the boundaries of reality stretch even further. Here, Hughes targets the heavy, grounded luxury of classic travel trunks. Hundreds of hand-painted monogram details and weathered vintage travel stickers wrap around strategically stacked luggage. Yet his three-dimensional construction unmoors their physical weight. Because of how the perspectives fold in the relief, the heavy leather and brass trunks seem to break free from gravity and float effortlessly in mid-air, a striking visual metaphor for the transportive, weightless spirit of travel itself, suspended in empty space.

This cerebral wordplay and floating imagery shift from a conceptual puzzle to a deeply visceral challenge when you face Hughes’s grand architectural pieces, such as The Stage is Set and Pretend Palazzo. Here, his signature reverspective technique moves beyond visual playfulness and again triggers a genuine sensation of vertigo. I spent a significant amount of time studying Pretend Palazzo, walking back and forth to analyze why I felt so physically challenged, even videotaping myself to understand how the architecture seemed to shift. It recalls the “Mona Lisa effect,” in which a subject’s eyes seem to follow you as you move through a gallery. Except with Hughes, it isn’t just a pair of painted eyes tracking you—it is an entire palace. The walls pivot, the colonnades rotate, and the whole structure turns its head to watch you move, upending logic, balance, and scale.

While Hughes has long focused on European art and optical traditions, this exhibition also includes works specific to American artists and institutions. NYC MOMA and SF MOMA (both 2026) reimagine those museums as reverspective structures, folding iconic artworks and architectural spaces into single, shifting images. By bringing these institutions into his play with perspective, Hughes invites us to reconsider not only how we see art, but also how art history itself is constructed, layered, refracted, and always subject to changes in viewpoint.

SF MOMA,2026, Oil on board construction, 30 1/16 x 18 3/8 x 10 inches

KC Ho is a San Francisco-based painter known for his expressive approach to abstraction. His richly layered paintings draw upon personal experiences of migration and belonging.

KC HO

Thanks for agreeing to this interview. We’re delighted to learn more about your practice. Can you start by describing your work and specifically what you’re working on now? Do you have a preferred medium? Subject matter?

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this interview. I’m honored to have the opportunity to share more about my practice and work.

I work primarily in oil, with a focus on abstraction. I’m drawn to oil paint because it slows me down and gives me time to experiment, connect with my feelings and rework the surface until the painting feels resolved. I’ve become increasingly interested in what paint itself can do—how color, brushstrokes, texture, and layers can express emotion and give a painting a sense of presence. I build up, scrape away, and rework the surface, allowing forms to appear, disappear, and change. I don’t always know where a painting is going at the beginning. I discover it as I work.

My painting process allows feelings and experiences to emerge organically. I often listen to classical or jazz music while I paint, as it can evoke memories and deepen my connection with my emotions. Sometimes grief, joy, or longing finds its way into the marks and layers. The paintings feel personal, expressing things I can’t always put into words.

Lately, I’m exploring darker colors that I haven’t used much before. They bring new questions and challenges, encouraging me to move beyond familiar choices and let the paintings surprise me.

Where can people see your work? Are you in any exhibitions right now or have anything scheduled? Do you welcome studio visits?

I’m based in San Francisco, and my work can be viewed on my website at www.kchoarts.com and on Instagram at @kchosf. I recently presented my first solo exhibition, Not Yet Formed, at Upper Market Gallery in San Francisco. I continue to develop new work while seeking opportunities for gallery representation.  I’m also in early discussions with the OUT Museum in San Francisco’s Chinatown to plan an exhibition, tentatively scheduled for September 2027.

I also welcome studio visits by appointment at my studio in the Mission District. I enjoy talking with visitors about the paintings and learning what they see in them. These conversations often reveal things in the work I hadn’t noticed myself.

Can you share how you became an artist? Did you have an epiphany that compelled you in this direction? Did you have formal training? Did you grow up in a family that valued art and left the door open for you to become an artist?

I grew up in a modest household in a small, predominantly Chinese village in Malaysia, where cultural traditions and expectations played a significant role in daily life. I was curious about the world beyond my village and what lay beyond those boundaries. In high school, I often found myself more drawn to painting than to my Chinese language studies. Because I am Chinese, some teachers and classmates saw this as a rejection of my cultural heritage and called me a “cultural traitor.” Their words led me to question my identity and sense of belonging in that community.

My family saw art as an impractical career, largely because of their concerns about my future financial security. Becoming an artist was never an obvious or encouraged path. Instead, I moved to northern Michigan to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemical engineering. It was a culture shock. As one of only a handful of minority students in my engineering classes, I faced racial discrimination on campus and often felt unwelcome among my peers. During this time, I was also navigating the process of coming out as a gay man and learning to accept myself. It wasn’t until college that I saw oil paintings in person for the first time. Although I never attended art school or received formal art training, I continued to make art in my free time throughout my university years and began exploring it more deeply.

There wasn’t one defining moment when I decided to become a painter. It happened gradually, as painting became a way to process my feelings and understand myself. I grew up with the teaching that “silence is golden,” and openly expressing emotions wasn’t always encouraged. Learning to be vulnerable and allow myself to be seen took time. Painting gave me a way to express what I found difficult to put into words.

What is the most challenging thing about being an artist in San Francisco [OR ANYWHERE]?

Living and working in the Bay Area connects me to a generous and engaged artistic community, surrounded by beautiful landscapes and a rich diversity of people and cultures. At the same time, the high cost of living, limited affordable studio space, and competition for exhibitions and visibility can make it difficult to sustain an artistic practice. I have to balance my desire to devote more time to painting with the practical realities of making a living. Despite these challenges, San Francisco’s creative energy and artistic community continue to inspire and encourage me.

There’s a lot being said now about the changing landscape of the art scene here. On the one hand there is criticism that City Hall isn’t doing enough to support the arts and some are pointing to the changing landscape of the gallery scene. That perhaps the old model of a brick and mortar gallery that represents artists, with exclusivity agreements, is dying off. Any thoughts?

I haven’t had much direct experience with traditional gallery representation or exclusivity agreements, so I can’t speak to how that model is changing. I do think it’s important for artists to explore opportunities beyond brick-and-mortar galleries and find different ways to share their work and connect with audiences as the art scene continues to evolve.

Have you ever put on exhibitions yourself as a curator or organizer? If you were to put on an exhibition in the future do you have any curatorial ideas you’d like to share? Is there a show you’d really like to see put on?

In June 2026, I worked with Upper Market Gallery to present my first solo exhibition, Not Yet Formed. I was involved in every stage, from selecting and arranging the paintings to installing the work. It made me think about how the placement of paintings changes the way we see them, both individually and together.

For 2027, I hope to develop an exhibition centered on darker colors. I’m interested in how they can conceal, offer a sense of protection, or draw attention to subtle details we might otherwise overlook.

The idea is still developing, but I’d like to consider the whole space—how the paintings are lit, how much room there is between them, and what visitors encounter as they move through the exhibition. I imagine a show that gives people time to pause, look closely, and make their own connections.

Do you think art should make political or social commentary? Does your art do that? Is there a role for the artist to play in challenging political climates?

I believe art can engage with political and social issues, but I don’t think every artwork needs to make an explicit statement. Art can challenge us by questioning what we take for granted, giving visibility to overlooked experiences, or offering a different way of seeing the world.

My paintings don’t usually begin with a political message. They grow out of my experiences, including questions of belonging, vulnerability, and the freedom to express myself. Those experiences have social dimensions, even when the paintings remain abstract. I’m comfortable leaving room for viewers to find meanings I may not have intended.

Do you believe art reflects an artist’s diversity such as gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race? Are these (or any other diversity consideration) present in the art you make? Why or why not?

Hell yeah. I think an artist’s history, culture, and identity shape how they see and make work, whether consciously or unconsciously. Those influences don’t always appear as recognizable images or stories.

Being a gay Malaysian Chinese immigrant has shaped my relationship to belonging, desire, vulnerability, and self-acceptance. Moving to the United States, studying engineering, and traveling internationally for work have exposed me to different ways of living and thinking, broadening my perspective on the world and my place within it.

These experiences find their way into my paintings through color, gesture, material, and revision. Even at times I begin without a specific subject in mind, my history and experiences are present in the decisions I make and the work that gradually unfolds.

What do you think artists should be talking about right now?

Affordability is a big part of that conversation. The cost of living and studio rent can make it difficult to sustain an art practice, especially in San Francisco. How do we make sure artists can afford to stay and work here, and that there are still places for people to encounter their work?

I also worry about what happens to human connection as we spend more of our lives on screens and AI becomes part of everyday life. Technology can open up new possibilities, but I hope we continue to value the personal experience, time, and care that people bring to making art. Artists, galleries, and art institutions can create opportunities for people to come together, experience work in person, and connect with one another.

Are there any contemporary artists you draw inspiration from? Can you name the artists and say how or why they inspire you? Same thing for historical artists. Are there any who speak to you despite their living in a different era?

I’m particularly inspired by Abstract Expressionism, especially the work of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. Cecily Brown and Yan Ping are another important influence. I’m drawn to the different ways they create an emotional presence through paint—from Rothko’s quiet intensity to the layered, energetic gestures of Mitchell and Brown. I’m fascinated by how their paintings can feel spontaneous while revealing deliberate choices, revisions, and a strong sense of structure.

Their approaches have influenced the way I think about painting, particularly my willingness to experiment with color, texture, gesture, and layers. I’m inspired by the freedom in their work and their ability to push paint beyond representation, allowing it to communicate through its own physical and emotional presence. Although I don’t aim to imitate their styles, their paintings encourage me to take risks, trust the process, and continue exploring the possibilities of paint in my own practice.

Artists are increasingly expected to have an online presence and, in some cases, become their own publicist. How do you feel about social media? Has it helped your career, or does it sometimes feel like another job entirely? Any social media rules or tricks you abide by?

Social media can be a useful tool for sharing my work and connecting with people, but I also find it challenging. Artists are increasingly expected to be their own publicists, marketers, and content creators. It can feel like another job competing for the time and energy I want to devote to painting.

I try not to get caught up in online attention or lose sight of what matters most to me: painting and pushing my work into unfamiliar territory. Likes, followers, and sales can be misleading measures of artistic success. They don’t necessarily reflect the quality of the work, the depth of an artist’s practice, or the time and effort that go into making it.

I also think we don’t talk enough about the less visible sides of being an artist: self-doubt, rejection, financial pressure, and loneliness. Social media often highlights success while leaving these struggles out of the picture. It can create the impression that everyone else is thriving, even when that may be far from the truth.

My guiding rule is to protect the freedom to experiment, fail, and take risks in my painting. I share when I have something meaningful to show, but I also want to give the work time to develop. Its value may not be immediately apparent in a photograph or a quick scroll.

It’s difficult to talk about being an artist without talking about money. What does making a sustainable life as an artist look like to you? Do you think the art world is honest enough about the financial realities of being an artist?

For me, sustainability means being able to meet everyday needs while preserving the time, energy, and freedom to keep painting. Balancing painting with work outside the studio is part of that reality. Financial stability matters because it gives me room to experiment without needing every painting to sell. Earning a living solely through art sales is difficult, especially in the Bay Area, where the high cost of living adds to the pressure.

I grew up in a family of modest means, where art was not considered a practical career. When I spoke about pursuing painting, my family discouraged me because they worried about how I would support myself. That tension between creative ambition and financial security has shaped how I think about a sustainable way to pursue painting. For me, a sustainable artistic life means finding a balance between financial stability and staying true to my artistic vision. Making sales matters, but so does having room to experiment, take risks, and allow the work to evolve without financial pressure determining every decision.

I do not think the art world is open enough about these realities. We hear about exhibitions, record breaking multimillion-dollar sales and success, but less about how artists support themselves, the sacrifices they make, or the emotional weight of financial uncertainty. Greater openness would help artists set realistic expectations and feel less alone. I would like to see a society that values both the art itself and the conditions that allow artists to keep making it.

What are you unwilling to compromise on in your work, even if doing so might make the work easier to sell?

Honestly, I don’t paint with the intention of making work that sells, although I recognize there is a contradiction in that. I’m unwilling to give up curiosity or the freedom to follow a painting somewhere unexpected. When I’m in the studio, I want to discover what the work can become, even if that means moving away from something familiar or easier to sell.

Of course, I want people to connect with my paintings, and I want to build a sustainable career. My inner voice keeps telling me, “Stay true to your vision, and your audience will find out” I hold on to that belief while knowing it isn’t a guarantee. I’m still learning how to balance the desire to sell with the need to keep growing as a painter.

Whose opinion of your work matters most to you?

The opinions of painters I admire matter most to me, especially those who offer thoughtful, honest feedback. I value conversations that challenge me, broaden my perspective, and deepen my understanding of my own work. I’m part of a critique group with several artists, and I appreciate the balance of encouragement and constructive criticism we offer one another. Sharing the joys and challenges of making art makes the process feel less solitary.

If you suddenly had unlimited money, space, and time to make one work or project, what would you make?

I would love to create a series of six to eight large painting panels, each measuring around 8 to 10 feet long and 5 to 6 feet high. The Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is one of my favorite museums, and I’m deeply inspired by the immersive experience of seeing Monet’s Water Lilies there. The way these monumental paintings surround viewers and transform the space is something I find extraordinary.

I’m drawn to the physical presence of large paintings and how their scale can shape the viewer’s experience. I would love to create an environment where people can immerse themselves in the paintings, experience the colors and textures up close, and feel surrounded by the work rather than simply standing in front of it. With unlimited time, space, and resources, I would explore how painting can become an immersive experience that engages viewers both emotionally and physically.

What current art trend have you noticed and do you support it? Are there any fads or trends in the art world you believe will be fleeting?

I’ve noticed the influence of graphic elements and graffiti in contemporary painting. I enjoy the energy and visual language they bring, especially when artists interpret them in a personal way. I’m less interested in predicting which trends will last than in seeing how artists develop these influences over time. For me, what matters is whether the work holds my attention beyond its initial visual impact.

What do you make of celebrities who turn to visual art outside of the careers they’re known for? Do you enjoy seeing what they make, or does it bother you that their work can receive immediate attention simply because they already have an audience and a platform? Is that just the nature of the art world, or does it make it harder for working artists to be seen?

I envy the immediate attention they receive. It can be difficult to watch someone enter the art world with an existing audience and platform while many working artists spend years trying to be seen.

At the same time, I’m happy for anyone who discovers a new way to express themselves, and I enjoy seeing what people make outside the careers they’re known for. Their advantage doesn’t make their interest in art invalid.

I can acknowledge that the attention is something I wish I had and still be glad that someone else is making art. Envy and generosity can exist at the same time.

If a fancy collector wanted to take you out to dinner anywhere, where would it be? Do you have a suggestion for a great inexpensive meal in San Francisco [OR ANYWHERE] for the proverbial “starving artist”?

I would invite the collector to my apartment for a home-cooked meal. To me, cooking is much like making art. Both draw on personal history, culture, and lived experience, and both involve attention to color, texture, and how different elements come together.

I grew up eating Hakka dishes such as salted fish with pork, meatballs with salted duck egg, ground tea rice (Lai Cha), pork belly with preserved mustard greens, stuffed tofu, and yam abacus noodles. These foods connect me to my roots,and are an important part of who I am. I enjoy sharing them with people who are curious to try something unfamiliar.

I like to imagine that collectors who connect with my paintings might bring that same curiosity to the table. Sharing these dishes would give us a chance to talk about where we come from and get to know one another beyond the paintings. For an inexpensive meal, my own answer is often to cook at home—though some of these dishes take more time and preparation than others.

LAST QUESTION: Any question you wished we asked you? What is it and what is the answer to it? Pls

What is the most impactful advice you get from other fellow artists?  How has that changed your art practice?

The advice that has stayed with me most is, “Keep working on your painting and don’t give up.” It reminds me to keep showing up in the studio, even when the work feels uncertain or progress may be slow.

I’ve also learned from fellow artists how valuable it is to engage with the art community. Although my interactions have been limited, they’ve encouraged me to connect with others and share my work. In fact, I connected with Roborant through an artist in the same studio building. These experiences have encouraged me to balance time alone developing my practice with participating in the community and giving my work opportunities to be seen.

Katherine Sherwood (b. 1952, New Orleans) is an American painter and disability-rights advocate whose work reimagines art history through feminism, neuroscience, and disability. A graduate of UC Davis and the San Francisco Art Institute, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for more than three decades, establishing the course Art, Medicine and Disability. Following a cerebral hemorrhage in 1996, Sherwood relearned to paint with her left hand, developing a fluid approach that has become central to her practice. Her acclaimed series, including The Healers of the Yelling Clinic, Venuses, and Brain Flowers, examine representation, the body, and cultural ideals of beauty. Sherwood has exhibited internationally and received an NEA Artist Fellowship (1989), Pollock-Krasner Grant (1998), Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2006). She also co-founded the Yelling Clinic. Her work is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ford Foundation, and National Academy of Sciences.

Katherine Sherwood interview by Hugh Leeman

Catholic School and the Saints

Hugh Leeman: Katherine, you grew up in New Orleans during the '50s and '60s, a period when expectations surrounding gender, religion, and social identity were very different from what we see today. What memories from your childhood best illustrate those expectations, and how did you begin to question them?

Katherine Sherwood: I moved from New Orleans to California when I was in seventh grade. My dad died when I was nine, and that was a very impactful event. When we moved to California, my new stepfather had promised his deceased wife that he would educate my stepsister in Catholic school. So we all went to Catholic school — the three of us in our family went and joined her.

It was seeing Catholicism anew that really intrigued me — not anew, exactly, but as a religion that was new to me. I became so involved with the idea of the saints at that time. When I did the Pandemic Madonnas, which we can talk about later, I was thinking, where did these come from? And then my studio manager, Farley, reminded me that I had done that kind of work early on, when I went to the Art Institute.

A Superior Somebody

Hugh Leeman: Thank you for sharing that. What sticks out to me is that idea of renewing your perspective on Catholicism, and that you got really interested in the saints. Over the years of my life, one of my great interests has been people's faith, whatever their religion or belief system. And it seems a common theme for people who have engaged with a faith is a dynamic, nebulous, if not constantly changing, relationship with God. What has that relationship been like for you — from the time you were nine years old and your father died, until today?

Katherine Sherwood: Well, I went to college and was a religious studies and art major, so I really started comparing religions and trying to figure out which one was right for me. I settled on Buddhism and meditation — and even the Buddha says it's not a religion, that it's more a psychology. That's been a steady force in my life for the last thirty years.

I do believe there's a "superior somebody." That's what the Hopi say for their Supreme Being — superior somebody — and I really like the sound of that.

Hugh Leeman: Oh, so do I. A superior somebody. There seems to be this deep need many of us share, wanting to be a part of something greater, wanting to believe in something greater.

"I Would Cry If I Got Any Bad Reviews"

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned approaching all of this through a lens of learning, and you chose Buddhism, which you speak of as a philosophy or a psychology. You originally studied art history at UC Davis, but instead of pursuing formal training as a painter, you took a different path. What was happening in your life when you first began making paintings?

Katherine Sherwood: It really happened when I was taking a studio class for my undergraduate major. I had to take two studio classes, and I had the great fortune of having the great painter Mike Henderson, who is a Black painter. He said to me, "Why don't you pursue art?" And I just looked at him and said, "Oh my god, I would cry if I got any bad reviews." I think of that so much, because I've gotten so many bad reviews, and I'm just fine.

Hugh Leeman: That's really interesting, because the perception of a lack of social validation can become such an impediment. All the beauty you've since discovered might never have happened because of that fear — of a lack of validation, or of being degraded through someone else's eyes, some critic's eyes.

Katherine Sherwood: I think I was buoyed because I had so many friends who were art students. I moved with a bunch of artists to San Francisco and got a loft there, and having them as examples was really good for quelling my fears. And within five years of getting out of college and moving to San Francisco, I was getting some really resoundingly bad reviews. I just started to laugh at it, because — what else are you going to do?

The Ugliest Paintings

Hugh Leeman: Resoundingly bad reviews, or resoundingly good ones — it's such a fascinating element, and something I wanted to touch on with you today, because you have such a unique connection with art. There's the process of making art, being alone with whatever's happening, which has gone on for twenty-plus thousand years, since the caves. And then there's the relatively new, modern phenomenon of manufacturing value around it. Part of that is what's often referred to as intersubjective reality: you get a quote-unquote expert to convince other people what is good and what is bad, and if you can convince enough people, that becomes the reality. Going back to religion, this is what pastors and priests have done for thousands of years — there's a man who can walk on water and heal the blind, so who are you to doubt it? When you faced those resoundingly bad reviews — the fear you'd had, now manifest — how did you feel?

Katherine Sherwood: I felt relieved that I wasn't destroyed by them. I remember distinctly one reviewer said, "These are the ugliest paintings I've ever reviewed." But hopefully my sense of humor helped a lot. And I just realized it was sort of funny.

Hugh Leeman: The humor that you found in it — what was that humor? Because that's kind of a magic art in and of itself.

Katherine Sherwood: Oh, I'm not an expert at always bringing humor to the situation, so I'll not answer that.

The Trouble with the Overcoming Narrative

Hugh Leeman: You and I had a previous conversation in which you mentioned the risk and the damage of the overcoming narrative. You're very well known for that narrative: something bad happens, you overcome it, and look at you now, this hero. That's obviously an oversimplification of a life and a career. In our conversation, in a way that was very bold and candid, you said that this oversimplified narrative has a real negative impact, and that it poses a risk not just to the person who's the subject, but to people who will often never be seen or heard. Where does this narrative begin for you, and what are the risks it poses?

Katherine Sherwood: Well, it all started with the Wall Street Journal. It wasn't a review, it was something else — I was pictured above the fold, and it took the writer forever to write it, because I was an evergreen piece, meaning I could fit in anywhere. And I actually think he did a good job. But then there was all the fanfare — I was in the Whitney Biennial that year. And I wasn't involved with disability studies yet, but I soon became involved. I became aware of how it affects disabled people to raise up this one person and say, see how good she's doing. When I became painfully aware of it, I thought, okay, I'm going to try to get to the next level in people's criticism, in telling my story.

Hugh Leeman: When you think of that, are you putting yourself in the other person's shoes — someone who isn't Katherine Sherwood, who wasn't above the fold — hearing that narrative and being told, "Well, John or Sally, why can't you do what Katherine did?"

Katherine Sherwood: Yes. That's exactly what I feared. And now, with a disability studies background, I can see it's just a classic case of how the media deals with disability: you're very special. And you're right — all the other people are hidden by that kind of narrative.

Who Needs a Hero?

Hugh Leeman: What do you make of the narrative itself? If you set yourself aside, and all the other people who may feel its risk and damage, it almost seems to be commenting on something within society — this desperate need to construct the heroic. It's used in sports all the time, at the shallower end of the spectrum: he was just a poor kid from Akron, but my God, look what he did. Why do we need that as a society? And who is it, actually, that needs it?

Katherine Sherwood: That's a really good question. I don't know. I don't know if it's in the writer's mind at all, or if they just accept this kind of format, this way of seeing things. I don't know who's behind it, or what's behind it.

Disabled people are hidden in different ways in different cultures around the world. There are different cultural things. And disability arts has certainly grown so much since I had my stroke.

Art, Medicine, and the Medical Model

Katherine Sherwood: I became a sort of art historian of disability arts, in that I taught a class called Art, Medicine, and Disability. It was an unusual thing for me to combine medicine and disability in the title, because disability activists had for so long tried to get away from what we call the medical model. But I talked to a bunch of disabled people, and they gave me the okay. They felt it was time to introduce that.

And now I've read so many articles about sick people — how they're treated, what they have to do — and they are very active in the disability arts community. I wanted to also talk about people who had a cancer diagnosis and other things besides disability.

A Marketing Term

Hugh Leeman: I appreciate you mentioning that. In our previous conversation, you also mentioned something that's maybe a cousin to the overcoming narrative: the use of phrases like "disability art," almost as a marketing term. What do you make of that, and how do you react when you hear it applied, whether to yourself or someone else?

Katherine Sherwood: If I step aside, I'm very aware that it's a marketing term. I don't think that was its origin, but maybe it is now. I don't know what I think of it, to be honest with you. I don't have a good answer for that.

Hugh Leeman: It seems there's been a bit of a pivot — not that one has gone away — from "this is disability art," or "this person has an overcoming narrative," to using gender and ethnicity as a mechanism for marketing. So many times.

King Solomon's Seals

Katherine Sherwood: Yes, I see that. I'm an observer of all this, because at first, the work I did right after my stroke, when I was just getting used to painting with my left hand, was very inward-looking. It was referred to as abstract, but it was based on King Solomon's seals.

King Solomon was a crip. He was a disabled man, and he achieved such great things for his culture, and he had riches. He used these seals to try to materialize his wishes, so to speak. I used the white magic seals, and I took all the ones that had to do with healing. I worked in that manner for probably ten years after my stroke.

Then I turned around and started looking at disabled people in society — how they have been wiped out — and bringing them back in by using art historical tropes. That's how I began my Venuses of the Yelling Clinic: nudes based on paintings by male painters, which had my brain scans as their facial features, and then a little symbol of disability, like a blind cane, or a brace, or an amputation. That was significantly different from the attitude I had when I was doing the abstract work. So I changed a lot in what I was looking at.

Hugh Leeman: There are a few things you said that I'd like to hear more about. To go in reverse chronology — the white magic seals?

Katherine Sherwood: The seals are attributed to King Solomon. I really liked them because they were very non-symmetrical, and very surprising. I bought a book of magic seals — a pamphlet, really — and found them in it, and I just became fascinated. Then I discovered that King Solomon was disabled, and I just went from there.

The Yelling Clinic

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the Yelling Clinic. Tell me more about this.

Katherine Sherwood: The Yelling Clinic is a disability art collective. We were very concerned with the disabling effects of war. For instance, in 2013 we went to Vietnam to meet with victims of Agent Orange. Agent Orange has now affected three or four generations since the war. That was really interesting — we got to look at some of their art and talk with them. Nothing really significant came out of it; we had a show of work related to it.

We haven't been that active lately, but we also made a film after we went to the Create exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2012. That exhibition featured three progressive studios: Creativity Explored, NIAD, and Creative Growth. And we were horrified, because there were so many inaccuracies from the director and the curator. For instance, we'd ask, "Do you talk to the artists about their work?" And the response was, "Well, they don't talk." And there was an artist whose work had hypodermic needles and other medical equipment in it, and they'd say, "Oh, that has nothing to do with his disability" — when, to us, it was totally grounded in his disability.

At the same time, I started imagining a Yelling Clinic. That's why I started doing the nudes — so they could hang up in the Yelling Clinic.

Intervening in the Museum

Hugh Leeman: Those conversations you had — what came of them?

Katherine Sherwood: Well, the video came of them. And it has actually been brought forward by many people as the first museum intervention by disabled folks.

I kept writing back and forth with the director. But ever since the stroke, I write very, very, very slowly. It would be the type of thing where I'd spend a week composing a letter, and then get a letter back from him right away. I didn't want that to be repeated, so that's why I thought of making the film. And they paid for it, at whatever cost, and it was actually shown in the art museum. Small things, small steps, but good ones.

Hugh Leeman: Who is "they," when you say they paid for it?

Katherine Sherwood: The museum.

What Are You Searching For?

Hugh Leeman: A lot of times, we as artists — or even just as humans — are searching for something, and often it falls into the category of resources: social validation, of which Instagram culture is a great example, or financial remuneration, which the arts are infamous for being horrible at, though art schools have historically been very good at selling people the idea that they'll be the next massive success. What you're doing is very different. You're going to Vietnam, looking into these dark corners of the universe, and not just touching on them for some sort of social flag-waving, but actually putting yourself into it, amid your own challenges. What are you searching for, Katherine?

Katherine Sherwood: I guess I felt the need for the articulation of these disabled values so much that I thought, well, I have to do it, or my friends who are disabled have to do it. We just can't stand aside and let this kind of erasure happen in the museum.

When Life Caught Up to the Art

Hugh Leeman: You were already making paintings about the brain, about chance and the fragility of human existence, before the cerebral hemorrhage in 1997. How has that extraordinary convergence between your art and your life shaped your understanding of coincidence, or fate, or intuition?

Katherine Sherwood: Well, I like to say it took a while for my life to catch up to my art. I started using brain imagery as early as '91, and I didn't have my cerebral hemorrhage until '97. I do believe there is a spiritual connection with chance.

Joan Brown's Request

Katherine Sherwood: Another thing happened to me. Do you know the painter Joan Brown?

Hugh Leeman: Sure.

Katherine Sherwood: She was my mentor at UC Berkeley. We were at a party at Paule Anglim's house for Epiphany, and she said to me, "Katherine, will you take care of all my disabled students when I'm gone?" And "gone" meant she was going to India. She was setting up a monumental sculpture there, and the roof fell in and killed her and her assistants.

That's a case where I thought — well, it was way before I had my stroke. But I took it seriously: okay, I will be the one to mind your disabled students. Joan also led by good example. She was very involved with Creative Growth, and very involved in bringing art to the prison system. So that little thing she mentioned to me was everything.

Hugh Leeman: Joan Brown clearly had quite an impact on you.

Katherine Sherwood: Yes. And she was a very spiritual person, and that also had its impact on me.

Hugh Leeman: Are you a spiritual person?

Katherine Sherwood: Yes, I would say so.

Hugh Leeman: And that manifests through your practice of Buddhism.

Katherine Sherwood: Yes. And hopefully it manifests through everything I do — my painting as well.

The Empty Well

Hugh Leeman: You've discussed experiencing extended periods of creative block, where after years of prolific painting there's this empty-well effect. How has that affected your sense of self, your identity outside the studio? When someone builds their identity around being an architect, or working for the garbage company, or whatever it may be, and suddenly that's gone — how has that affected you?

Katherine Sherwood: I've been rather lucky, in that my artist's blocks really haven't lasted more than six months. I don't know how I'd respond if one went on for years. I was just trying to get out of one when I had an early-morning reverie: I saw these brain figures with really long skirts. And I thought, this is the stupidest idea ever — but because I was really searching for ideas, I welcomed it.

Hugh Leeman: During those blocks of up to six months, when there seems to be a nothingness in the creative sense, what did you discover about yourself?

Katherine Sherwood: If I had one tomorrow, it would be much different than when I had them before. A lot of it was that I was teaching full-time, so it made me not as anxious about not making art. I'm really a dedicated painter, and it takes a lot for me to separate myself from it. But those periods gave me that separation, and gave me the impetus to expand and change my art.

Retiring Into the Studio

Hugh Leeman: You just mentioned something really important to your life and your journey — what you've given and how you've served others: teaching. And it seems to go far beyond teaching the visual grammar of art. For more than three decades you taught at UC Berkeley, and retirement gave you more uninterrupted time in the studio. How has this later chapter changed your understanding of ambition and success — and of the ego, which is usually the food for ambition and validation?

Katherine Sherwood: I retired early. My family really asked me to, and I'm so glad I did, because it was the first time in my life I felt I could dedicate every fiber of my being to my painting. And I was really surprised when the paintings were accepted and shown. I question myself, and I think it's good to question yourself. I think every artist should have artist's blocks, too. I think it's a natural part of the process.

Art, Medicine, Disability — and Death

Hugh Leeman: You've described teaching Art, Medicine, and Disability as one of the greatest joys of your career. What happened in that classroom that made it so meaningful?

Katherine Sherwood: First, I'll tell you I also taught a class called Art and Meditation. I looked at art that had been made under a spiritual or religious impulse, and we all meditated before class began. Those two classes were definitely the high point of my teaching career.

In Art, Medicine, and Disability, the transformation of the students was really accelerated, to me. I think that came from being exposed to so much art about or including disability. I also say the class really should have been called Art, Medicine, Disability, and Death, but I didn't want to put that in an advertisement for a class of twenty-year-olds.

Another thing I think was very successful: students from my class interned, as part of their grade, at Creative Growth, at NIAD, and at Creativity Explored. What I always said to them was, you are going to learn more about disability by going to one of those places than you will ever learn in a classroom.

What the Students Taught

Hugh Leeman: There's a cliché among teachers that "my students taught me more than I ever could have taught them." But to play to that — what did your students teach you about disability, perhaps beyond your own experience?

Katherine Sherwood: I met so many disabled artists who were students in my class, graduate students and on through. So I really got a sense of the concurrent domain of art and disability at that time. I would never have said I learned so much from my students — but I did learn from my students, I guess.

That class was very different from a painting class, or any kind of art practice class. It was more like an art history class, but it was a hybrid: they made art, they did internships, and they attended the class.

The Pandemic Madonnas

Hugh Leeman: I want to go back to what you were talking about earlier — your father dying when you were nine, your new understanding of the Catholic faith, your interest in the saints. In your more recent Pandemic Madonnas, you revisit Renaissance religious imagery and introduce disability, medical imagery, prosthetics, and even protective masks. What questions about suffering, protection, and the sacred are you exploring?

Katherine Sherwood: I really looked at thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Madonnas from Italy. I bring that up because I get completely bored once the Renaissance stuff starts. I'm much more interested in the non-formalistic way of working.

Hugh Leeman: That non-formalistic way of working seems to have become a bit of a way of life for you. You told your students that if they really wanted to learn, they had to go out into the world and do these things. When they came back from those places, what kind of stories did they share with you?

Katherine Sherwood: A lot of my students eventually became employees of Creative Growth, especially. Because there was always an art component that made it so special, they'd tell me about that. And I also have students who are disabled and have had resplendent careers in art-making. In fact, those are the people I really learned from in my class.

Redesigning the Curriculum

Hugh Leeman: Much of your teaching has challenged established art historical narratives, particularly the exclusion of disabled artists. If you were redesigning a university art history curriculum today, how would you change the way students encounter disability, illness, and the body?

Katherine Sherwood: There are introductory classes offered in disability studies — one is Women and Disability, another is just an introduction to the field. Ideally, those students would then be ready to encounter me and art, and how that filters into it.

"I Hate the Word Outsider"

Hugh Leeman: In preparation for this conversation, I was listening to a talk you gave, and a phrase stuck out to me because it echoed something you'd said to me personally. You said, "I hate the word outsider." You said it while discussing Yayoi Kusama and the relationship between psychiatric institutions and achieving artistic recognition in the mainstream marketplace. What troubles you most about the designation of outsider art?

Katherine Sherwood: Because I think it is, more than anything, a commercial term: this art will be cheaper for you to buy.

Now the historian in me comes out. Hans Prinzhorn was the first person to go to psychiatric institutions in Germany and Austria and start collecting work. He was a psychiatrist and an art historian, which is a funny combination. His book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, was under every artist's bed in Paris, for instance, because they got so much influence from it but didn't want to show it to everybody. And I think that's what Art Brut did, what Dubuffet did — just ape the style of the outsider artist. So the commercial aspect of it, the historical aspect of it — it doesn't make sense to me at all.

In another situation, I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art around 2015 and encountered a Judith Scott sculpture. Judith Scott is the most well-known artist in this area; she died quite a few years ago. She had Down syndrome and was deaf. And at SFMOMA they had one of her beautiful pieces right next to a really well-known artist. You didn't have to stop and say, oh, this is an outsider artist, or this is a disabled artist. She was just an artist. And that's what, in a perfect world, I would like.

Contribution Beyond the Object

Hugh Leeman: Katherine, thank you for sharing so candidly. In a lecture, you said that if you're an artist, even if you aren't making art, you can make valuable contributions to the world — suggesting that being an artist isn't necessarily defined by producing objects. What other forms of contribution have become important to you, in your own practice or in others'?

Katherine Sherwood: When I was at the San Francisco Art Institute, I was constantly around performance artists and installation artists. I really studied conceptual art and saw my place in it. That's what I was thinking about when I said that — because they don't produce objects. Or rather, they produce things that aren't bought and sold. I can't even imagine twentieth-century art without the development of conceptual art.

Hugh Leeman: To close: how might we rethink the value of an artist whose greatest influence occurs outside the studio?

Katherine Sherwood: You know, I let other people make those kinds of decisions.

Hugh Leeman: Katherine Sherwood, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for sharing.

Katherine Sherwood: Thank you, Hugh. Very, very interesting questions.

Tamsin Spencer Smith is a San Francisco–based painter, poet, and essayist. Her expressive paintings explore the space between abstraction and figuration through gestural forms and intuitive compositions.

TAMSIN SPENCER SMITH

Thanks for agreeing to this interview. We’re delighted to learn more about your practice. Can you start by describing your work and specifically what you’re working on now? Do you have a preferred medium? Subject matter?

Oil is my Play-Doh. It’s so mutable and expansive; it lets me be untethered from outcomes, whereas acrylic is my go-to medium when I have a specific scene or subject to render. One of my best artist friends just challenged me to return to still lifes in oil, so over the next few months I plan to set the abstract work aside to compose a new series of interior vignettes in oil. 

Where can people see your work? Are you in any exhibitions right now or have anything scheduled? Do you welcome studio visits?

I was part of two great group shows in Sonoma County this Fall, so I am back in my studio in Sebastopol, CA now. Visits are always welcome.

Can you share how you became an artist? Did you have an epiphany that compelled you in this direction? Did you have formal training? Did you grow up in a family that valued art and left the door open for you to become an artist?

I was a poet before I picked up a paintbrush. Writing is so in the head and in the ear for me, whereas painting engages the body and the eye. I like how they feed off each other.

What is the most challenging thing about being an artist in San Francisco [OR ANYWHERE]? There’s a lot being said now about the changing landscape of the art scene here. On the one hand there is criticism that City Hall isn’t doing enough to support the arts and some are pointing to the changing landscape of the gallery scene. That perhaps the old model of a brick and mortar gallery that represents artists, with exclusivity agreements, is dying off. Any thoughts?

Community is the center of a healthy culture and a good society. Art fosters people coming together to think beyond the boundaries of their own imaginations. It can be two people sitting on the floor drawing, or a private gallery or public institution serving as a space for people to gather in community to consider how others find their way to expression. When I become enraged about the state of politics or the planet, I remember that to fight evil, one also needs to create more good. Organizing a poetry reading or a painting party may seem like small change, but it’s also an act of world-building.

Have you ever put on exhibitions yourself as a curator or organizer? If you were to put on an exhibition in the future do you have any curatorial ideas you’d like to share? Is there a show you’d really like to see put on?

I was curator in residence at Arion Press, where the focus was dialogue across literature and the visual arts. I’m a fan of cross-pollinating art forms. I’ve always loved the idea of a project that begins with a single prompt to create a chain reaction as it moves from the hand of one artist to another. Maybe it starts with a musician improvising, then a poet responds, then a sculptor, then a painter, then a dancer, then a weaver, then a printmaker, then a short story writer, and then….

Do you think art should make political or social commentary? Does your art do that? Is there a role for the artist to play in challenging political climates? Do you believe art reflects an artist’s diversity such as gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race? Are these (or any other diversity consideration) present in the art you make? Why or why not?

To be convincing, I believe art needs to be rooted in the personal but reach for the universal. None of us has the same point of view or life history, but a great work of art can unify the experience of being human. We all feel beauty, anguish, longing, anger, oppression, euphoria, and despair. Art reminds us we are neither unique nor alone; it kindles empathy for others.  From my perspective, authenticity is the most important subject matter. 

Outside of art-making are there any cultural projects you’re interested in or currently engaged with? Any art adjacent hobbies you enjoy?

I’m co-founder and songwriter for the indie rock band The Strays. We just released our third album GAWD SAVE THE STRAYS. I totally love making and playing music. It’s just another form of storytelling.

Are there any contemporary artists you draw inspiration from? Can you name the artists and say how or why they inspire you? Same thing for historical artists, are there any who speak to you despite their living in a different era?

I was in Spain recently, and it was a joy to see some of the works in the Prado that bowled me over back in high school, particularly the surreal social commentaries of Hieronymus Bosch. The Picasso Museum in Barcelona was also inspiring, principally to be reminded of his constant push to keep exploring. I like work that seems to collapse the past, present, and future into some kind of eternal maybe. Cy Twombly makes me feel like this, as do Joan Mitchell, Frank Auerbach, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth.  It’s already impossible to limit the list, so for contemporary artists, I’ll just focus on the Bay Area, which has a culture of generosity and inclusion that sets it apart from more commercial art scenes. Griff Williams and his son Keelan draw the portrait of this spirit so well in their film “Tell Them We Were There”. As to individual artists: Emilio Villalba, Cate White, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Chelsea Wong…so many more…

Do you have a favorite public art piece? What is it and why?

The Natura Nostra Forest was planted in conjunction with London’s Hayward Gallery as part of an international group exhibition: “Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis”. Composed of 100% native British flora, the forest is now a thriving space of biodiversity restoration and nature reconnection in the heart of the brutalist concrete jungle that is the Southbank Center. It’s incredible to see how quickly this SUGi pocket forest has grown and how much cooler the temperature is next to the forest, compared to just a few steps away, where the heat island effect this summer was particularly nasty. Nature is the ultimate artist.

Can you say something about the art you live with? Whether you bought, found, were gifted, or traded for the piece, what artworks do you live with? How has the experience of having these pieces influenced your own art making?

I couldn’t live without art around me. It’s creative oxygen. The current favorites are a wall sculpture by my friend Joe Szuecs and a painting by Kevin Keaney.

Whose opinion of your work matters most to you?

Artists whose work I admire.

If you suddenly had unlimited money, space, and time to make one work or project, what would you make?

I’d fund and recreate Black Mountain College in every State in the Union, and reopen all the great art schools that have been shuttered.

Susan Kelk Cervantes is a pioneering San Francisco muralist, educator, and community organizer whose work has transformed public spaces into sites of collective expression. In 1977, she co-founded Precita Eyes Muralists with artist Luis Cervantes, establishing a nonprofit that has engaged generations of residents, students, and artists in creating and preserving public murals. Inspired by the Mujeres Muralistas, she champions collaborative design, placing community voices at the center of artistic production.

Cervantes has directed or contributed to hundreds of murals, including works at Mission Playground Pool, Precita Valley Community Center, and San Francisco’s Women’s Building, where she helped create the landmark MaestraPeace mural. Through workshops, youth programs, and neighborhood partnerships, she has made mural painting a vehicle for cultural identity, civic participation, and social change across the Mission District and beyond. Her honors include the 2017 San Francisco Latino Legacy Award and the San Francisco Symphony’s Ellen Magnin Newman Award.

Artist Susan Cervantes | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Leaving Dallas at Sixteen

Hugh Leeman: Susan, you graduated from high school at sixteen and moved from Dallas to San Francisco for art school. What gave you the confidence at such a young age to leave everything familiar behind? And what do you remember about the person you were when you arrived here all those years ago?

Susan Cervantes: I left my home in Dallas when I was sixteen, just about to turn seventeen, to start art school here in San Francisco — which was then the California School of Fine Arts. I'd been an art student in high school, and I really loved art. My art teacher got me into a painting class for high school students at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. I went to two summer schools to get all my academics done, so I graduated a year or two earlier than my class, because I really didn't want to stay in high school. That let me take two or three hours of art classes every day.

The museum class had a graduation exhibition, and they chose me for a scholarship to go to any art school I wanted. My art teacher said there weren't any good art schools in Texas, so I did some research and found that at the time — this was around 1960, '61 — there were only two schools in the whole country that actually gave degrees. My teacher at the museum was from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and wanted me to go that way. The only other one was the California School of Fine Arts. My parents wanted me to get a degree. Pennsylvania took five years; California took four. So I said, I'm going to go to California and continue my art practice there. I came to San Francisco and I was so excited. I was painting, trying to do a painting every day if I could.

I set up the room I was renting as a studio, and once I got into the school's studio, I just took over a whole corner. I was only one of about fifty full-time students at the time. The following year, it became the San Francisco Art Institute. And that's also where I met my husband, Luis, who became my life partner. He was in the night painting class. I'd taken over a whole corner of the studio, and the night teacher would tell me, "Susan, you can't paint in here during my evening class, because the students might need the space." So I said, okay, I'll just sit here and wait to see if anyone takes it — otherwise I'd be painting. And Luis set up his easel in that space, so we got to know each other, started dating, and became partners for the next forty-four years.

I had a little apartment on Russian Hill, above the school, but we moved to his place on Valencia and 22nd Street, in the Mission, where we lived for nine years. I kept painting and going to school. I got my Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Institute and then my Master of Fine Arts, and I kept getting scholarships — I never had to pay tuition except for one semester. After our first son was born in '69, we were evicted and basically became homeless. We were told we could live in an old storefront on Precita Park. After looking at everything we couldn't afford, we decided to try to make it happen in that storefront — and it became our home for the next thirty-five years. My other two sons were born there.

In that first year, around 1970, with a young child, I started looking around at what existed for children. There was a dilapidated playground in Precita Park, a community center at the end of the park with no arts programming, and an elementary school across the street. Since there wasn't any art for children anywhere, I decided to volunteer my time at the Precita Valley Community Center — preschool art classes and after-school classes for kids, and adult painting classes in the evening. Meanwhile, Luis worked as a custom mattress maker at the McRoskey Mattress Company for over forty years. He was also an artist — a painter and sculptor. When I first met him he was a ceramic sculptor, but we didn't have a kiln, so he started working in other materials.

We were very familiar with the other Latino artists making work in the Mission District, and got involved with Galería de la Raza, another cultural cornerstone of the neighborhood. I knew a lot of the Latinas who were making art. One day I saw them painting a mural on Mission Street, on the old Mission Hiring Hall, a two-story building. It was fantastic to see women up on the scaffolding, getting paid to make a painting about the culture. So I'd visit them every day, bring them refreshments, and document their process. They invited me to work with them on their next mural, at Paco's Tacos. Graciela Carrillo invited me — she was one of the original Mujeres Muralistas, "the women muralists." There was Patricia Rodríguez, Consuelo Méndez, Ester Hernández, and Irene Pérez. Consuelo and Graciela were commissioned to do the new mural at Paco's Tacos, and that's when I started painting with them. I got very excited about how they worked — so well together, collaborating, respecting each other's ideas, creating a unified concept out of all of them. That's really how I got involved with the mural movement.

Sharing a Life and a Studio

Hugh Leeman: I want to go back to Luis — your late husband, with whom you shared an incredible life, a family, and a studio for more than forty years. Beyond the works you made together, how did living with another artist affect the way you understood yourself, as a person and as an artist?

Susan Cervantes: It was wonderful. Our old home on Precita Park was one gigantic room, with fourteen-foot ceilings. When we got there it was just an old, rat-infested grocery store with no amenities at all — no bathroom, no kitchen, nothing. We had to build all of that out. But we wanted it to be an open space, no walls. We built a little loft to sleep in, and our first child slept underneath. It was all wide open, so Luis took one side of the space and my studio was over by the kitchen; his was by the open area that was more of a family room. We were face to face with each other, watching each other work — him on his sculpture, me on my painting.

It was wonderful to share that space and our creative energy, to share our processes and our stories. And the children grew up in that creative environment. We never had any challenges with it; we were always very compatible. I was really more into color and light, and I think that influenced his palette, while his wisdom, his nature, and his stories influenced my thinking and the way I perceived things. We shared so much, we were always together, we went everywhere together — we were never separated. It was just the very best you could possibly ask for.

Eviction, and a Circle Back to the Sears Building

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned being evicted. I'd read that a nursery you grew up around as a child, before moving to San Francisco, was later taken from your family when highway construction cut off access to the property. And then decades later you experienced displacement yourself here. How have those experiences shaped the way you think about home and land — and about the human consequences when development changes a community?

Susan Cervantes: It was very, very sad and disheartening to be evicted from my home of more than thirty-five years — particularly two months after Luis passed away. Very difficult. I didn't really have any income. We'd lived off the grid; our rent was super low, a totally different reality from everything outside our space. Once he passed and that support was gone, everything changed. But it seemed like things fell into place for me — little miracles kept happening.

I had two sons still living at home when we were evicted. My youngest, Monty, decided to move out on his own, and my middle son, Suaro, was still with me. It took me more than six months — I tried to fight the eviction, but I saw it was impossible, so I let that go and had to figure out how I was going to live, support myself, and find a new place I could afford. I had very little savings, basically just set aside for our health. Luis had a very small pension I didn't even know about. He'd been working on something at the table before he passed away — he died before he could finish it. Through a very close friend of mine who did a ceremony around him, she said he'd told her there was something on the table I needed to finish. I'd covered everything on the table with a big cloth, because people were coming by with food and flowers, and it wasn't until everything settled that I uncovered it and saw what it was. It was about his pension. It was very small, but a lot of money for me — enough, if I finished it, to put toward a first month's rent.

It took me more than six months to find a new place, and it was a kind of miracle. I found a place in the old Sears building — which was striking, because when I came here in 1961, that was the first place I worked to support myself, in women's apparel, back when it was still Sears. Sears closed around 1972 and it became artist lofts. I'd known people who lived there, including some of our closest friends, whose children grew up with my sons, but I'd never really gone there myself. Someone had breached their lease, and when I first went to inquire I couldn't rent anything. I was about to give up on finding anything possible. Then they called to say someone else had breached their lease — was I still interested? I went to look, and it was perfect. Luis's sculptures weigh tons and are taller than I am, so whatever space I took had to hold them. I opened the door and thought, this is it. I put down first and last month with the pension funds I'd finished — without that, I couldn't have done it.

I'm the founding director and co-founder of Precita Eyes, and I was still managing the organization, but I'd never really paid myself a salary — I was always looking after everyone else. I had to ask the board to establish an income for me, which they did, and that let me pay the rent and continue. That's what I still do today; I supplement it with Social Security. If I weren't still doing my work here, I wouldn't be able to pay the rent.

Saving the Space: A McDonald's Mural

Susan Cervantes: I learned something from that eviction, because later we also faced one at Precita Eyes, which was on Precita Park. We were renting two storefronts, and the landlord closed off the passageway between them, because they were going to put the other building on the market. I could tell it was an eventual eviction, so I had to think, how am I going to save this space? My heart was around Precita Park, but there was nothing available there. I went down Balmy Alley, the mural environment we take visitors through, from Precita Park over to see the murals.

Back in the early '70s, while I was volunteering at the community center, I was also volunteering as a tutor at the 24th Street Place, a little storefront at the end of Balmy Alley that Mia González directed. I'd bring children to my studio to learn to read recipes — you read the recipe, make the food, and then you have food to eat, or an art project to do. Going through Balmy Alley, I saw that the old 24th Street Place tutorial center had been boarded up for years, and I wondered about the space. A friend gave me the name of a broker, and I asked what was going on with it. They said it had just gone on the market.

We only had about $11,000 in our capital campaign — this was around 1996. I knew we were going to be evicted, so I had the insight to look for an alternative. But I didn't know how to do five-year cash flow projections, or get a bank loan, or any of that. I wasn't able to get a loan, and I raised some money but not enough for a down payment. The owner said, "We don't know what to do about you — nonprofits, how do you make your money?" I was completely disheartened.

I calmed down, and about two or three months later, another building on 24th Street became available — the one we have now. It must have been meant to be, because I was able to get a bank loan, I had a little more cushion in savings, and lots of people started giving me loans to make it happen. But we were still about $15,000 or $16,000 short of the down payment. Then the man opening the new McDonald's contacted us to do a mural. I said, that's great, we'd love to — but I've never even eaten a McDonald's hamburger. He said he thought it was part of the culture and important to support. I said, so we should be able to do whatever we want on your building? He said okay. We designed it with all of our children, youth, and artists, everybody donating their time, and the money from that McDonald's commission is what paid the down payment for the building that is our home today.

Hugh Leeman: For someone who'd never eaten a McDonald's hamburger, it was McDonald's that put the final touches on making this possible. I want to hear more about Precita Eyes, because it's been such an incredible part of your life. It developed from a neighborhood workshop into an organization whose methods have traveled internationally. What has it been like to see it become not just murals, but an artistic methodology?

The Precita Eyes Way

Susan Cervantes: What's been really important is our process. I can see it now in perspective, after doing this for almost fifty years — next year will be our fiftieth anniversary. Every mural Precita Eyes has ever done has been by request, because people want to experience something together: building community and creating something special of their own that tells their story. That's what I learned from the Mujeres Muralistas — how they shared each other's ideas and integrated them into one unified concept. Every workshop we do follows that same process.

We hold a community mural design workshop with whoever we're serving — a school, a university, a health center, a hospital, a homeless shelter, a senior center. Many of these people have never drawn or painted before; they just want to be part of something and create something beautiful for their space. The community decides the theme. We make a list of themes, and they choose the one that most resonates with them. After they do their drawings, everyone discusses what's important in their drawing, what it means to them, and why it should be in the mural.

Then we make a list of all the images — it goes from the verbal to the image — and we start seeing how they relate to each other. Even though everyone's coming from a different place, their ideas are all interconnected, and we keep the integrity of everyone's ideas together. No one is excluded; everybody's ideas are in the story the whole collective makes. A kind of magical moment happens when we make the composite together, decide where things go, and all of a sudden it all makes sense — it tells its own story, with all these other stories inside it, and it's unified. They get so excited participating in it. From there, the lead artists develop and research the ideas and share the full-scale drawing, with the community's own voices and narratives behind it. Once we have the approvals, we prepare the wall, and we often schedule community painting days so people can come out and help paint. Done that way, it's a true community mural process — we call it the Precita Eyes way. That's what we practice, and that's what people keep asking us for.

Carrying the Process Abroad: Russia and China

Hugh Leeman: You've taught community mural methods in places from Russia and China to Sweden and Canada. What have you learned from communities elsewhere that has affected the way you work with communities here in San Francisco?

Susan Cervantes: It's really interesting when you go outside your own world and begin to share this with other people. I went to Russia because I was invited, and to China because I was invited, to share the process with people who had no idea what it meant but really embraced it. Working with Russian artists in a collaborative, community way — they'd never worked on anything collaboratively before, so it was all new; everyone had to wrap their heads around it and embrace it. We had a great time, bringing people in and making them feel part of it. I went three times; the last was in 2004, doing a mural with twenty Russian children at a children's art school. It was amazing.

In China it was the same, and they're even more individualistic — though the Russians are too, and I think their social situation makes it very hard to sustain anything communal. In China they had never seen people come together to create something collectively. Everyone's very individualistic — "this is mine, that's yours," no one touches your work. The first time I went, I had about 150 students doing two murals, in groups of about thirty. What struck me was that they had never even touched each other's drawings. Here, we're always sharing them — holding them, putting them up on the wall next to each other. They felt intimidated by that, until I showed them how to put things together after drawing out their ideas — setting your drawing aside, looking at it alongside everyone else's. It was the first time they started touching each other's work. And when they began composing together, a big light bulb went off. They got so excited, there was this buzz, this energy — everybody really got it.

Because of that, I was invited back to work with twenty art teachers from all over Beijing, at the same site, a huge national children's garden and pavilion. The teachers embraced the whole idea completely. They'd show me, "There's a new wall at the Chinese National Museum — we're going to work with the community and put a mural there." They were ready to start practicing it in their own communities, which was the whole point of working with the teachers: so they could share the process all over northern China. I'm so glad they embraced it. Those Russian artists and children are probably all grown now; I think it was a very meaningful experience. But with the world situation the way it is now — it's a mess. They say, don't even think about coming here, it's a mess, and that's unfortunate. You'd hope for more communication, more inclusiveness in our processes — not just as artists, but as people, as human beings. I think that's the whole point of our being here: respect, and loving each other just the way we are.

Water Is Life, and a Mural for Now

Hugh Leeman: I want to talk about that. There's one mural in particular, the Water Is Life mural, that emerged from an American-Soviet collaboration concerned with peace and the environment. Decades later, residents fought to preserve it long after you were gone from the scene. Today, given climate change, war, migration, and political division, what issue would make you feel compelled to paint a new international mural — and what would you want it to ask people to do?

Susan Cervantes: I imagine it would be a mural reflecting all the beautiful creativity that human beings can share with each other — through dance, poetry, music, painting, making food, all the great things that make up a human being and what we love to share. If it were international, you'd want to invite people from all over the world, from different countries, to contribute to an overall theme of peace, a global cultural theme. We'd put all their ideas into one big composite and then invite everybody to come and paint it — if we had a big enough wall. I've always thought the wall behind the Orpheum Theater, at UN Plaza, would be a great place for something like that. I've had a vision of an international mural, and that's how I see all the pieces coming together: incredible artists from all over the world sharing their ideas and putting them in one place.

Should an Artist Take a Side?

Hugh Leeman: You once said, "It's not about becoming an artist, it's about becoming a better human being." In the history of muralism — and in your own work with Precita Eyes — there are elements of activism, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit. Is there a case where an artist should remain neutral in the face of injustice, or should it be addressed in the mural? How do you and Precita Eyes think about that?

Susan Cervantes: When we have discussions about the themes and issues come up — homelessness, abuse, intolerance, any kind of issue — we talk about it. This is a great place to have dialogue, to discuss people's experiences that have been traumatic, where they feel they're different, outsiders. There needs to be a discussion so we can find solutions within it, as the designs and ideas are developed, and those solutions get incorporated into the mural. So it's not just showing the negative part, but the solution too, and everybody agrees on that.

We did a mural down on 6th Street at the Rose Hotel, a homeless hotel, and there was a lot of discussion about drug abuse, violence against women, mistreatment of each other and of yourself. But there was this hope, this real positive energy that came out of the designs and images from the homeless people participating. Even with the internal struggles they'd had, and the abuses they'd suffered from other people, it was shown side by side with a positive, hopeful, loving life. That helps uplift and reach the people who need the care.

Hugh Leeman: You've spoken of muralism as something inclusive, not exclusive. Are there moments when an artist, or a community, should take a side — where it can no longer be entirely inclusive, where you need to make a statement? How does that work in the Precita method?

Susan Cervantes: There's room for that, but we have a strong feeling for being inclusive. We're not the ones designing it — it's the people we're working with whose images are drawn, composed, and developed into the final concept. There's always been some common ground; people find themselves and each other in the process, no matter their differences. Where you see people who might never have worked together, a bond is created. That's the impactful part of the mural process: people begin to talk to each other, to see each other for who they really are and respect that, letting their true selves be seen and reflected in the work.

Because of that, it's transformative — people apply it to other parts of their lives. Twenty years later I'll get an email: "Thank you, Susan, for letting me participate in a mural, because it totally transformed my life. I'm a better person; I see things differently now." But I'm not thinking about that while we're doing it or facilitating the process — it just happens, and we're all grateful that it does. As long as people still need or want this, we're here to share it. It's really important for people to be able to see themselves, to express themselves, to have an outlet. There are so few outlets for expression. We should see art in the street every day, people making music every day, dancing in the street, community painting every day — there needs to be more of that. I think art is transformative, that it can change people's lives and make them better human beings.

What the Next Generation Should Keep

Hugh Leeman: A consistent through-line in your stories today has been collaboration and influence — the Mujeres Muralistas, and your decades with Luis. Muralism today keeps expanding; it includes graffiti and street art, social media, digital projectors, even AI-generated imagery. What do you think the next generation should preserve from the community mural tradition, and what should they be willing to reinvent?

Susan Cervantes: They're going to have a lot of new tools — technology is pretty amazing. A lot of the time I still say you have to start at the drawing board, with a pencil and paper, though most people are doing it on their tablets now. But the philosophy will be the same. I have a lot of beautiful young emerging artists working here at Precita Eyes, and they're really its future. They're grateful to have a place that cares about community, that wants to bring art to the people, because there's almost nowhere else they can turn to do that. We train people to work with communities, so they can go out into their own neighborhoods and do the same thing — I see the same practice being shared in many other regions.

They'll have new tools — social media, AI, things beyond what we can even imagine — and those can still be used in an inclusive, respectful way, with beautiful visions and solutions to the problems people face. So it's going to continue in some form. The mural movement has spread all over the world, and so has the graffiti movement, which has been fantastic. We started our urban youth arts program in the 1980s, when I started seeing little throw-ups on the walls and wondered, who's doing this? It was another new form of muralism — back when it was still considered criminal just to carry a marker. Spray paint is just another tool, like a brush; it's a preferred tool with its own style. Our youth do traditional painting too, but they do their touch-ups with spray paint, and they can use projectors to put up their images — though when we work with large groups we still use the grid method. All your concepts can go on the computer, be moved around and layered. Those tools are there for everyone.

But it's the same idea: sharing your ideas with other people, being inclusive in whatever you do, in whatever discipline — dance, music, poetry, whatever it is. I think an inclusive action is what we need to grow and go forward and see more beauty, more people coming together, living a beautiful life.

Hugh Leeman: Sharing ideas and inclusivity, working together to lead a beautiful life. Susan Cervantes, thank you so much for making time to share these ideas and the stories from your career.

Susan Cervantes: Thank you, Hugh. I really appreciate your time.

“You only do a piece like this once in your life. You don’t want to strive to make pieces that are loved by everyone. Then you’re f--ed. But it’s fantastic to have made a piece that people love and everybody can relate to. It’s fantastic.”

– Ragnar Kjartansson

In the pursuit of truth, I accidentally asked of Gemini: Have you ever been visited?

A sparkle starburst ✦ followed by:

“No, a visitor has never come to see me. I live in computer servers, so I do not have a front door or a house for guests. No one can knock on a wall or walk into a room to see me.”

Gemini never got to see Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors” at SFMOMA, which in the year since its closing still resonates – an Icelandic oneiric, an Að vitja nafns, or dream visitation to the more than 1 million viewers who submerged themselves in the 64 minute, nine-screen sound and video installation.

Part “Uncle Vanya”/part “Let it Be,” “The Visitors” makes an impression.

Ask someone who lingered in the silent disco of “Feminine Ways,” the tone poem musical performance authored by Ragnar’s ex-wife Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, and inspired by ABBA’s final studio album.

Did you visit?

A million did.

A million or more dreamscapes, a million or more stories.

This is mine, informed by a retrospective of Ragnar’s “early funny work,” set to the beat of “The Odyssey.”

Book One

The Telemachy

The Guests that won’t go away

For a brief period early in the century, I lived in the Berkshires, where I was helping produce a feature film underwritten by the kindness of strangers and tax shelters. Some of the crew – imported from New York, and Jersey, and Philadelphia like Poland Springs water, lived in an isolated cabin we dubbed “the Blair Witch House” – our locations and sets were haunted by the ghosts of resident icons Norman Rockwell and Joseph Pilates.

The Berkshires were the place you went to rehab, if you were from Boston or NYC, and had premium concierge-insurance, the grand old estates now wellness retreats or treatment centers to rival Edith Wharton’s “The Mount,” checkerboarded with the more modest abodes of the lower-born literary proletariat – Melville drank here with his wingman Hawthorne.. hey was that Edna St. Vincent Millay burning the candle near the ol’ W.E.B. Du Bois place?

One of our shooting locales was the warden’s house of an exclusive prep school that cost more per year than my entire university education – the students were there to help, and bolster the crew – and to keep them quiet and to insulate the set from the gas generator powering our lights, we’d huddle in the bitter Nor’Easter air and dying light and sip packy store beer on the apron porch.

A game of “Visitors” v. “Visitors” – and no one blinks.

It’s a maze within a maze and like a river you can’t enter (the same) twice, the room has already changed, a gesture, a (literal) movement, a cue, a chord, an arpeggio. Blink and you’ve missed it, linger and it’s fleeting, return (return, return, home) and it’s gone.

Timing is everything; you rarely enter a 1hr. plus video loop in the beginning, or stay ’til the end. But many do, plumbing the depths of “The Visitors” virtual tour of the Rokeby house from timecode unknown (HH:MM) to the final fade.

And then (rewind) watch again from the start..

And again..

There’s the oft-repeated film theory axiom, usually applied to Welles and Hitchcock; the most-important shot of a film is the first (think: “Touch of Evil”) or the last (“Citizen Kane.”)

But in considering “The Visitors,” a multiscreen installation that features nine possible opening shots: What is the first shot? The first chord?

I can tell you definitively the first chord is a Dm; Ragnar’s hand drawn chords charted in a poster which hangs on my office wall.

Opening shot? In linear sequence it’s Ragnar himself, recumbent in a sudsy antique bath, midriff screened by expandable wooden bath tray, acoustic guitar strummed against a background of peeling plaster and buttery soft Hollands licht.

The image matches the beat – the same vinyl villain chair used by Blofeld in “You Only Live Twice.”

It’s the family band, or family as band – like the young Beatles in 1965 or Dylan and the Band, recording their “Basement Tapes” in their Woodstock houses – Ragnar’s “Last Waltz” (or “Neverending Tour.”) is a family affair – members of Icelandic bands múm, Sigur Rós.

“You can concentrate on the solo performance,” said Ragnar “Or you can concentrate on the whole thing.”

It’s my second time thru the looking glass – I first viewed “The Visitors” at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. in 2012. Then I was drawn to Ragnar’s doppelgänger, the co-composer and cigar-chomping pianist Davíð Þór Jónsson.

I recall a CalArts/REDCAT production of “King Lear;” (2002) we intrepid few who wandered the site-specific complex of the old Pabst Brewery in downtown LA as the all female cast performed in deserted industrial caverns; there was no raging against “another part of the heath.”

Instead the King and Fool remained in place – it was the audience, in Christo-covered mobile bleachers – who rolled and roiled amidst epileptic phosphor flashes – a camera obscura on wheels.

In the dark aperture of “The Visitors” Ragnar is Lear, and the Fool – all of us his offspring vying for affection.

Literary allusions abound:

• Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” (2000). Rooms within rooms within rooms.

• Arthur Miller’s original stage concept for “Death of a Salesman” (1949) – “Inside of His Head” – a giant skull as set, with characters wandering amongst the nooks and crevices.

• Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” (2014) and its permeable, transformative, and endless encroaching borders.

• Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More” (2011) – a haunted, audience-immersive “Macbeth”.

• “The Backrooms” (2019) – 4chan post morphs into horror franchise.

Book Two

Descent into the Underworld

Dead Can Dance

If you’ve ever listened to a Philip Glass opera, or immersed yourself in the HD liquid of HBO’s “100 Foot Wave” then you’ve already visited the land of the dead.

The sound of “The Visitors” is not the jasmine-scented New Orleans brass and blues of “Hadestown.” Ragnar’s soundtrack is funereal, a dirge. It’s Schoenberg 12-tone, boiled down to Glass’s metric modulation and repetition. It’s John Grant electronica whispered by Björk.

Call it “Icelandic Primitive.”

Formally titled, “Feminine Ways,” he labels it a “feminine nihilistic gospel.”

I waking/dreamed of Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai,” or the frozen fractals of “The Shining” –

What is staring into the infinite abyss of a hall of mirrors if not a glimpse into the inner maze of creation?

“Once again, I fall into my feminine ways /
There are stars exploding around you /
And there’s nothing, nothing you can do /”

(Ritornello, Ostinato, Refrain, Reprise)

The mistress of time is concomitantly the dictator of space.

As I’ve discovered in the late stages of my daughter’s flag football games, she who controls the clock – often an opponent’s parent – is the mistress of time, and the mistress of time is concomitantly the dictator of space.

Roughly at the 32:00 mark of “The Visitors’” Tardis loop, the music crescendos in a jam band high. I realize I haven’t moved from the spot. Grandaddy’s “At My Post” weaves into the instrumental fill.

Out here at my post, I’ve learned a few things/
Like the sun ain’t afraid to bleach out a dream/
And the way that you were ain’t the way that you will always be/

Ragnar’s frozen time and with it my heart.

He’s performed this legerdemain before:

The precedent is an early black and white funny work, “Death and the Children” (2002.)

Part Edward Gorey/part SCTV “Count Floyd,” “Death” finds Ragnar cosplaying as the Grim Reaper, ambushing summer campers on their tour of Reykjavik’s main cemetery.

His tale from the crypt masquerades as a “Los Espookys” outtake – high existentialism tamed with low-brow hijinks; the happy campers ain’t impressed with Death, or his cardboard prop scythe. Much like Matt Damon’s EA tech-bro Odysseus, they laugh at Death (and taxes) blissfully unaware that it comes for us all after the IPO.

Returning now to the land of the living, I can still smell the sulfur of the underworld, museum-industrial rug shampoo, and the rising scent of Illy espresso brewing a floor below.

The dead have spoken. I’m ready to return to the land of the living.

Book Three

The Sirens

Silent Disco

What do the sirens sound like?

You could ask Odysseus (but he’s taking the fifth.)

You could listen yourself, but in our noise cancelling headphones era you’d sacrifice your sanity for the sake of science.

In truth, and reconciliation, it’s not that different than a BART ride; you’re sharing the space, but the dude next to you may be decibel surfing on Turnstile? Lerado Khalil? Fantastic Negrito w/SFS Strings?

We’re never going to know – it’s binaural bingo, digital “Name That Tune,” and the closest we get is Homer’s musical manna description, from the text:

The Sirens sing what the listener longs to hear, psychically adapted to the individual listener’s identity, vulnerabilities, and desires. According to Odysseus “All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for.”

Specifically their voices are “honeysweet,” “melodious,” and “delicious.”

“It told you what you most want is what you can’t have, and what you can’t have is what you already possessed and lost.”

Put your hands together for the Valtýsdóttir sisters, Gyða and Anna, featured on cello and accordion (accordingly). Seraphic, ethereal, barefoot and empyreal in sound and countenance, the twins and founding members of múm hover just above the melody, a hybrid helix of Moaning Myrtle and the waltzing holograms of Disneyland’s “Haunted Mansion.”

Painted in chiaroscuro, you can’t look away; blink and they’ve moved from the corner of your eye to a soloist’s spotlight, Weeping Angels, selkie tangled in spectral light and wavelength and vibrato oscillation.

Feint with their lullaby. Look back/don’t look back.

For the first time you understand what Odysseus had to hear.

Why John, Paul and Ringo followed George to the Maharishi – and stayed for 6 weeks.

And at long last, can you forgive Orpheus for turning back – did he ever truly have a choice?

Book Four

The Bending of the Bow

The Seventh Seal

A core excavation of Ragnar’s work unearths not so much an aversion to endings, but a polarity magnetically attracted to exclamation marks. Suspended somewhere between Eliot’s “And the end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where we started” and The Doors’ “my only friend,” Ragnar isn’t long on goodbyes.

Despite labeling a 2009 video piece “The End,” Ragnar’s terminal points are more precisely graphed as circular closures; he shakes the Etch A Sketch and begins anew.

His 2000 piece – “Me and My Mother” – repeated cyclically every five years – chronicles his mum, Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, a noted Icelandic actress and Björk’s great-aunt (it’s a long story) spitting in his face with Oedipal scorn (and glee). Perhaps he never calls?

What is the future of work at the dawn of AGI? It’s “Woman in E” (2016) – fourteen female rockers working two hour shifts, pedestal worshipped in gold lamé and tinsel, carousel spinning a single (minor) chord – a gilded caryatid of Neil Young’s cinnamon girl muse.

“The Visitors” takes rare exception; a single screen reveals an antique cavalry cannon abutting the porch, prepped and primed by Rokeby patron Ricky Aldrich. It’s Chekhov’s gun. It’s the dueling pistols bequeathed to Hedda Gabler. It’s an “1812 Overture” rock show at the Hollywood Bowl (pre-9/11.)

You get not one BÚMM, but two bangs for your buck. Fin. Saga Búin. Thank you for coming and please make sure you have all your belongings.

You didn’t think he was going to bring a cannon to the party and “not” fire it?

The cannon fire and curl of post-coital smoke isn’t the exclamation point – it’s the em dash.

It’s a feint, a diversion. In magician’s parlance, Ragnar’s pledge/to his turn. Consider the very nature of video installation – at some point it loops. The prestige. The cannon fire and curl of post-coital smoke isn’t the exclamation point – it’s the em dash.

Troubadours gather beneath the portico. Celebratory champagne flows. Ragnar still soapy slick from the bath, a red towel and guitar pageant draped across his pale form.

Two thoughts dueled in the dark:

Wow.. is this all there is? Even Bill & Ted bested Death at “Battleship” and Electric Football, and lived to die another day.

And..

This is how every film should end.

We live, we cry, we sing, we celebrate, we die, we mourn.

We dance.

You don’t need the lights to rise to know that Ragnar has left the building.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors (2012) is currently on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, as part of the solo exhibition Ragnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious running through January 31, 2027.

Chad Abbley is a San Francisco-based artist whose vibrant abstract paintings draw from graffiti, nature, and technology. Originally from San Bernardino, Abbley now lives and works in San Francisco, where he is also active as a curator.

Thanks for agreeing to this interview. We’re delighted to learn more about your practice. Can you start by describing your work and specifically what you’re working on now? Do you have a preferred medium? Subject matter?

Currently I’m working on some paintings that revisit a technique I was using several years ago. Over the last few years I’ve been pretty focused on more graphic work with a lot of control and hard edges. More recently I’ve been trying to relinquish some of that control and let the work get a little more blobby, fluid, and flowy.

My studio setup has also changed the way I work. I don’t really have the wall space to paint vertically the way I did in my previous studio so now I’ll open up a folding table, lay the paintings flat, and work around them almost the way you would with a drawing. It takes some of the formality out of the act of painting.

The overall process that gets me to the finished piece is still similar to what I’ve been doing for the past several years but the last part of the process has changed. I’m trying to integrate the material into the work more and step away from needing to be so in control.

I think as artists we understand that some of the best work comes from a place where you can set the table and arrange things but you’re not telling your guests what to eat? Letting things happen in the process that I couldn’t have pre-planned makes the work more interesting for me. But, I am definitely not an improvisational artist. Relinquishing control in my work for me might seem like OCD to others.

The best work I’ve made has usually come from not being obsessive about the outcome. I’m trying to get rid of some of the editing and mechanical feeling and maybe cleanse some of the sterility out of the work.

Where can people see your work? Are you in any exhibitions right now or have anything scheduled? Do you welcome studio visits?

I’m planning to be included in an exhibition at Root Division in November called New Works. I’ll be showing some of the pieces I’ve been working on over the past year.

I’m open to studio visits. My studio is in Union Square and people can reach out by DM or email if they want to come by and chat.

Can you share how you became an artist? Did you have an epiphany that compelled you in this direction? Did you have formal training? Did you grow up in a family that valued art and left the door open for you to become an artist?

One thing that I think about is in third grade when we were coloring pumpkins with crayons as a class project and my orange ran out halfway through. Recess was about to start so I grabbed another orange and scribbled fast. It was a different shade and I thought I ruined it but my teacher said it looked great and asked if my parents were artists. I had accidentally added some light and depth to a flat drawing. I still think about that because it’s what I’m after in the work now. I can only take a piece so far on purpose and then something else has to come through the process.

I drew all through middle school and high school but didn’t get into paint until my friends and I started doing graffiti. That’s when paint became a material for me. Part of it was teenage angst and part of it was composition and location, and seeing how far you could push an idea.

My family didn’t like the graffiti. My sister was always artistic and my mom was very creative. Neither of them an artist exactly but I got a lot of that from them.

I don’t have any formal training. I learned about contemporary art from friends and going to galleries and looking at work and using the internet. The barrier to entry is as low or high as you want it to be. If you take the work seriously you take it seriously and if you don’t, you don’t.

What is the most challenging thing about being an artist in San Francisco [OR ANYWHERE]? There’s a lot being said now about the changing landscape of the art scene here. On the one hand there is criticism that City Hall isn’t doing enough to support the arts and some are pointing to the changing landscape of the gallery scene. That perhaps the old model of a brick and mortar gallery that represents artists, with exclusivity agreements, is dying off. Any thoughts?

I think it’s rough for artists in San Francisco right now. You have institutions and arts organizations taking a hit. CCA is closing, SFAI closed several years ago, and those arts education institutions used to be magnets for talent from around the world. We may not feel all of the ramifications immediately but over time I think that loss is going to be significant unless there’s some kind of shift.

That’s especially disappointing to me because I’ve been in the Bay Area since 2012. I came here because of the creativity and the ethos and I stay here for the same reason.

The city does a lot of PR around arts and culture but I think there’s a difference between decorative support and the kind of support that actually helps sustain artists financially. Rent is high and income disparity is huge and now there’s another influx of high-income tech and AI jobs. San Francisco seems to go through these waves and there’s always a question of what gets pulled out of the city in the process.

At the same time, I’ve been here long enough to understand the underpinnings of the community and I really value the anti-commercial side of the art that gets made here. A lot of people are perfectly willing to make work outside of the commercial art world and I think there’s something honest about that.

As far as the old brick-and-mortar gallery model, having any brick-and-mortar business in San Francisco is hard right now. An art gallery has the added challenge of selling expensive objects to a relatively small group of collectors. There have also always been far more artists than galleries so representation was never an evenly distributed path in the first place.

I don’t think gallery representation is something I would tell a younger artist to make the center of their plan. What I’ve learned is that it’s more realistic to find a way to sustain the practice alongside other sources of income. When I left my full-time W-2 job I think the dream was to sustain myself on art alone but over time I realized I haven’t figured that out. Most artists I know haven’t either. The real goal is to build a life where the art can continue. You can be an artist and also be something else at the same time.

Have you ever put on exhibitions yourself as a curator or organizer? If you were to put on an exhibition in the future do you have any curatorial ideas you’d like to share? Is there a show you’d really like to see put on?

I’ve organized a couple of shows in the Bay Area with my friend Shrey Purohit including a show on Treasure Island a couple of years ago. We’ve also done a couple of exhibitions in New York which were a lot of fun.

For something in the future, I’d be interested in working in a less traditional gallery setting. Maybe a basement, storage room, or another kind of space that’s interesting to physically be inside. I like the idea of a visual art show where the space itself supports the theme.

One idea I’ve been thinking about is giving artists an outlet to respond visually to the direction the Bay Area is going in especially around AI and this next wave of tech descending on the city.

Do you think art should make political or social commentary? Does your art do that? Is there a role for the artist to play in challenging political climates?

I think art can absolutely make political and social commentary. It’s a strong tool for doing that. You go to any protest and there are signs everywhere. At the end of the day art is a form of communication.

I do think we can sometimes get caught up in the idea that the art itself is enough. If you’re making work that’s explicitly social or political I don’t think the work should necessarily be the end of it. There has to be some kind of action beyond the art too.

Do you believe art reflects an artist’s diversity such as gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race? Are these (or any other diversity consideration) present in the art you make? Why or why not?

Yeah definitely. Any time work is made it reflects something about the person making it.

For my own work, especially more recently, it has been less about representing one fixed identity category and more about moments in my life. The work can come out of an event that happened, something that brings me joy, something I’m thinking about, or just where I’m at in my life at that moment.

My work is abstract, and I like to keep it open rather than nailing a piece down to one singular theme. More recently I’ve been building multiple pieces around a shared reference or idea, almost as a way to help me understand my own life.

What do you think artists should be talking about right now?

I think artists should be talking about whatever they actually feel like talking about.

There can be pressure to talk about whatever is trending at the moment especially because social media gives everyone the same little nuggets and references at the same time. It makes sense that people start riffing on the same themes but some of the most interesting work goes against the grain a little bit.

I’m interested in work where somebody takes an idea that might seem random, and makes a connection from an angle that feels genuinely unexpected rather than trying to be forcefully unique. That’s also pretty close to how I’d ideally like to approach my own work although I only have so much control over how it comes out.

Outside of artmaking are there any cultural projects you’re interested in or currently engaged with? Any art adjacent hobbies you enjoy?

I’ve recently gotten into 3D printing. It’s a brand new hobby for me and right now I’ve mostly been using it to make functional things for the studio. But ideas are already percolating about how it could eventually find its way into my creative practice too.

Are there any contemporary artists you draw inspiration from? Can you name the artists and say how or why they inspire you? Same thing for historical artists. Are there any who speak to you despite their living in a different era?

Katherine Bernhardt is one contemporary artist who comes to mind. I don’t know if the influence is one-to-one but I really like her work and where she is in her career and trajectory. Every time I see the work I respond to it.

Misaki Kawai is another artist who always comes up as one of my favorites, and Keltie Ferris makes great work too. I found out about all these artists either through Instagram or the Art21 series on PBS.

For historical artists, I’d probably leave that part open for now rather than forcing a list of the usual names just because they’re expected. The little I know about art history is awesome though.

Do you have a favorite public art piece? What is it and why?

Domestic Seating in Bronze by Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe

Can you say something about the art you live with? Whether you bought, found, were gifted, or traded for the piece, what artworks do you live with? How has the experience of having these pieces influenced your own art making?

The art that I have collected over the years feels the same as the art that I am surrounded by in my own studio. There is so much that happens when you are going about your day and subconsciously interacting with this stuff. It really is like some kind of magic.

Artists are increasingly expected to have an online presence and, in some cases, become their own publicist. How do you feel about social media? Has it helped your career, or does it sometimes feel like another job entirely? Any social media rules or tricks you abide by?

Social media is something I was resistant to for a while but I’m trying to adapt to it. Whether it’s art, your personal brand, or a business, everybody is online now. We’re all content creators and our own publicists yes.

It definitely can become another job. It can even become an income stream in itself and for an artist who is clever about it, it can create a kind of sustainability outside of simply marketing and selling the art.

Has it helped my career? I guess to some degree but I also think we sometimes give social media more credit than it deserves. If I got one art sale over a number of years because of Instagram does that mean Instagram created my career? If we weren’t pushed toward social media we would probably find other outlets to promote ourselves and generate revenue. Social media needs us more than we need it. So I don’t necessarily give social media all the credit. It’s one of the ways to market yourself now no matter what industry you’re in.

It’s difficult to talk about being an artist without talking about money. What does making a sustainable life as an artist look like to you? Do you think the art world is honest enough about the financial realities of being an artist?

A sustainable life as an artist is finding a way to generate an income and still have the time and energy to make work. That’s what it has grown into for me.

I don’t think the art world is very honest about much at all and money is definitely part of that.

My current studio practice is supported by contract jobs and I’ve also been doing a lot of screen printing as a service out of my studio (generalprintingservice.com) to help subsidize the rent. That has been helpful and I think a smart way to use the space.

Having a studio is a luxury that most people don’t have but in a city it can also become a necessity if you’re trying to make work and don’t have enough room at home. It becomes this double edged sword. Either you have a small apartment and a small studio or you have a living situation that’s large enough to make work in. For me part of making it sustainable is trying to maximize the resources of the studio and make the space work in more than one way.

What are you unwilling to compromise on in your work, even if doing so might make the work easier to sell?

I’m open to the work selling. I’m not overly precious about it and over the years I’ve become less possessive of the work once it leaves me. I’m even comfortable with the idea that an artwork can become a product to some degree even if that sounds like a dirty word.

What I don’t want to do is make creative decisions based on guessing what will sell. I think the work I’m making now is as good as it has ever been because I’m trying to make honest work. That’s really the bottom line for me. The work has to come from an honest place.

Whose opinion of your work matters most to you?

My friends and community.

If you suddenly had unlimited money, space, and time to make one work or project, what would you make?

I’d probably make really similar work to what I’m already making just at a larger scale.

What current art trend have you noticed and do you support it? Are there any fads or trends in the art world you believe will be fleeting?

Airbrush feels pretty hot right now. But maybe even that is fading. I’m not sure what the kids are doing right now to be honest. In art, design, and fashion there are always techniques that bubble up again. Sometimes they last and sometimes they fade.

Y2K aesthetics also feel very present right now in design and art, including that weird tribal kind of graphic language. I think maximalism is supposed to be making a comeback?

What do you make of celebrities who turn to visual art outside of the careers they’re known for? Do you enjoy seeing what they make, or does it bother you that their work can receive immediate attention simply because they already have an audience and a platform? Is that just the nature of the art world, or does it make it harder for working artists to be seen?

It doesn’t really bother me. If you have a platform you should be able to take it into other industries. Celebrities move from entertainment into fashion or from music into art. That isn’t really a new thing.

I have no problem with it but just because I like your music doesn’t mean I’m going to like your paintings.

If a fancy collector wanted to take you out to dinner anywhere, where would it be? Do you have a suggestion for a great inexpensive meal in San Francisco [OR ANYWHERE] for the proverbial “starving artist”?

For the fancy dinner I’d probably go to House of Prime Rib.

For the inexpensive meal I’d probably go to Golden Boy Pizza in North Beach.

LAST QUESTION: Any question you wished we asked you? What is it and what is the answer to it?

I think this was good.

At first, it is not entirely clear where—or how—we are meant to enter Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change. The entryway floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, covered in brightly colored strips of vinyl tape that ripple across the space and up the stairs, seems to be a pulsing, almost psychedelic field of color. I hesitate before stepping onto it. Is this floor meant to be walked on? There seems to be no other way, so I venture forward.

Jim Lambie’s Zobop (Colour-Chrome) transforms our experience of the gallery. Its effect is playful and disorienting: the familiar space of the museum has been subtly altered, and with it, our sense of how to move through it. Lambie has observed that “a simple addition of color and pattern can radically shift how we experience space.” Here, that shift becomes the prelude to the exhibition. Before we encounter a single work about climate, geography, or the future, we are asked to experience transformation ourselves.

At the top of the stairs, the world seems to open before us—and then to come apart. Teresita Fernández’s monumental Island Universe 2 (2023), a dramatically reconfigured, thirty-foot-long map of the world, stretches across the gallery. Drawn and sculpted in charcoal, it is at once recognizable and strange. The continents we know have been pulled together into a single, borderless landmass, recalling Pangaea: a configuration from the distant past that also suggests a world yet to come.

It is deeply meaningful that Fernández named the piece Island Universe 2. The title points to the limits of our myopic worldview: we mistake our single planet for an entire universe, remaining preoccupied with arbitrary human boundaries while orbiting in a vast galaxy.

Fernández’s map was inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1954 Dymaxion Map, which challenged the presumed neutrality of conventional geographic projections and the biases embedded in their systems of orientation and scale. But Island Universe 2 pushes that disruption further. The familiar divisions of North and South, East and West, are no longer fixed coordinates. Geography becomes provisional—a world among worlds, capable of being rearranged.

This is the first of many shifts that animate Future Geographies. The exhibition does not simply ask us to imagine what the future might look like. It asks us to actively consider how the future is already being shaped by the maps, histories, systems, and ways of seeing we have inherited. Its artists look backward as they look forward, revealing a future that is less a blank horizon than a terrain already marked by the past.

Standing before Island Universe 2, I found myself thinking about how the present is always informed by the past, while our understanding of the past is itself shaped by the present. Both inevitably become part of how we imagine what might come next. Fernández makes this instability visible, asking us to think of geography not as a static backdrop against which history occurs, but as something shaped by it—and in turn, shapes how history is understood.

This is one of the great strengths of Future Geographies: its premise places contemporary art within the moment we are living through. We do not yet know what this “century of climate change” will ultimately mean. We are inside the history rather than looking back at it. The exhibition asks us to consider the ideas, materials, and systems we are carrying into the future.

What happens when geography itself becomes a way of imagining the future?

The more than 30 participating artists do not offer a single vision of what lies ahead. Rather, each responds to this question in markedly different ways. While Fernández looks back to an earlier geological time to destabilize the geography of the present, Brian Jungen transforms objects of contemporary consumer culture into the skeletal remains of an ancient creature.

Jungen’s monumental whale, constructed from white plastic chairs, is both immediately recognizable and strangely otherworldly. The chairs—objects of everyday use—have been stripped of their ordinary function and reassembled as the bones of a great marine animal. They become evidence of a culture whose material remains might one day be read archaeologically. We are looking at a whale, but also at the remnants of a particular kind of human consumption.

Installed in the same gallery, Liz Larner’s Meerschaum Drift (Blue) creates a compelling encounter between materiality and transformation. Like Jungen, Larner asks us to look differently at the material world we have produced, making plastic waste and its environmental consequences unexpectedly beautiful. The gallery itself is one of the exhibition’s most memorable spaces for me. Neither artist relies on simple admonition. Instead, they alter our perception of the objects and materials that surround us.

Jean Shin extends this investigation into the material systems underlying our increasingly digital world. In Huddled Masses (2020) she transforms obsolete mobile phones into scholars’ rocks, traditionally valued in Chinese art, while electrical cords evoke the raked lines of a Zen garden. Around them are spherical “e-bundles” made from laptops, computer towers, and hard drives wrapped in cable. The bundles almost function as reliquaries, entombing the personal histories of the devices along with the material consequences of technological consumption.

A related transformation occurs in Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mideegaadi: Fire Bison (2022). Constructed from materials sourced from salvage yards and recycling centers, the work transforms the remnants of industrial and consumer surplus into a human-animal hybrid that evokes kinship, adaptation, and survival. Part of Luger’s ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies series, the work draws on Indigenous customary knowledge while imagining speculative futures.

If Shin and Luger ask us to reconsider the material remains of contemporary life, Carolina Caycedo turns our attention to the histories embedded in landscape and water. Her To Drive Away Whiteness/Para alejar la blancura (2017) is composed in part from handmade fishing nets collected by the artist in river communities in Latin America affected by the privatization of waterways. Caycedo considers these sculptures talismanic, embodiments of local resistance to corporate and governmental attempts to control the flow of water. Her work brings questions of extraction, capitalism, cultural survival, and environmental biodiversity into the geography of the present.

With Vertigo Sea (2015) John Akomfrah also considers the ocean through history, but on an expansive temporal and geographic scale. The three-channel video installation draws on literature, music, and the histories of enslaved people and freed sailors, collapsing centuries of migration, colonialism, slavery, and climate into a meditation on our relationship to the sea. Rather than treating the ocean simply as an environmental resource or threatened ecosystem, Akomfrah reveals it as a site in which histories of human movement, exploitation, and survival continue to reverberate.

One of the most surprisingly poignant works is Clarissa Tossin’s Future Geography: Cosmic Cliffs (2023), created from discarded Amazon boxes. As Tossin explains it, the boxes symbolize excessive global consumption and the conceptual displacement between Amazon (the rainforest), and Amazon, the e-retail company. At the same time, she was thinking about spaceships and rockets crossing the sky and journeys to other planets, “maps of journeys that are yet to be made.”

These are not merely different subjects. They are different ways of making time visible. Fernández brings deep geological time into the present. Jungen and Larner expose the material consequences of consumption. Shin reveals the infrastructure of our digital world. Caycedo brings colonialism and extraction into the geography of the present. Akomfrah brings the ocean into a vast historical field of migration, colonialism, slavery, and climate. Tossin connects consumer culture with cosmic speculation. Luger brings ancestry, community, and future generations into the conversation.

What connects them is not a single vision of the future, but an understanding that the future is already being assembled from the remnants of the past and the conditions of the present:

Charcoal.
Plastic chairs.
Discarded objects.
Cell phones and cables.
Amazon boxes.
Historical images.
Indigenous knowledge.
Recorded voices.
The ocean.
The body.

The future, in this exhibition, is not made from nothing. It is assembled from what we have inherited.

The questions raised by Future Geographies are also part of a larger cultural moment. Across contemporary art, artists are increasingly turning to hypothetical futures as a way of reconsidering histories of colonialism, displacement, environmental destruction, and technological change. Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, and other forms of speculative practice have challenged the idea that the future is a neutral or universal space, asking instead: Whose future? Whose history? Whose geography?

The Tate Modern’s A Year in Art: 2050, for example, considers how artists might imagine a future shaped by climate change, while its Alterfuturisms project examines alternative ways of envisioning the future beyond a predominantly Western, technology-driven model. These approaches reflect a broader shift in contemporary art: the future is increasingly imagined not simply as a destination ahead of us, but as a contested space shaped by the histories and power structures, we carry with us.

By contrast, what distinguishes Future Geographies is the way it makes geography itself the site of this inquiry. Its artists move between geological time, colonial history, consumer culture, Indigenous knowledge, migration, and cosmic speculation, asking us to reconsider not only what the future might hold, but the very maps and systems through which we imagine it.

Rather than presenting the future as an empty space waiting to be filled with new possibilities, the exhibition asks us to recognize how thoroughly that future has already been shaped by what came before—and by what we continue to do now. 

Future Geographies does not offer a singular image of what is to come. Instead, it asks us to look closely at the materials, memories, histories, and systems from which our possible futures are being constructed.

Exhibition runs May 14, 2026 - January 10, 2027.

Robert Flynn Johnson was Curator Emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. His interest in art was sparked while studying at McGill University, followed by an early curatorial post at the Worcester Art Museum and then a role as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Recruited to San Francisco, he led the Achenbach for 32 years, retiring in 2007 after helping expand the holdings to roughly 90,000 works on paper.

Alongside his museum career, Johnson built a private, Impressionist-leaning collection, especially works on paper by Edgar Degas and his circle, valued for their intimacy and sense of process. The traveling exhibition Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist draws entirely from his private collection and reflects his stated belief that curiosity, more than “taste,” is the collector’s essential attribute.

Curator Robert Flynn Johnson interview by Hugh Leeman — Part Two

20,000 Artworks

Hugh Leeman: I'm Hugh Leeman, managing editor of Roborant Review. Today we're with Robert Flynn Johnson, the former curator for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who acquired some twenty thousand artworks over thirty-two years for the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. This is Part Two of a series with Robert; you can see Part One at roborantreview.com. As in Part One, we'll look at the stories behind a handful of standout artworks he acquired for those collections. Robert, start us off with the work on the screen now — tell me the story of how it became part of the collection.

Artist Day and Expertizing Day

Robert Flynn Johnson: When I was curator at the Achenbach, I considered us the city's museum, with a responsibility to have an interface with the public. So once a month I'd hold an Artist Day, where any artist could bring in a portfolio by appointment — prints, drawings, watercolors, whatever — and I'd give them feedback. Not necessarily buying anything or offering an exhibition, just feedback, so that artists in the community couldn't say the curator was inaccessible. I'd see three or four artists every month.

I also had an Expertizing Day — another day of the month where anybody with a work of art they couldn't identify could bring it in. A little like Antiques Roadshow, but for works on paper: prints, drawings, watercolors, etchings. The one condition was that I would help research whatever they brought, but I would not give it a financial valuation. It was not an appraisal, only an expertizing. If somebody brought in what they thought was a Whistler lithograph, I could research it and say, "Yes, this really is a Whistler," or "No, this is a reproduction." Since we're so far west, far from other research institutions that could help the public, I always felt that was a responsibility — to help people understand what they had, without giving them a financial appraisal.

In 1986 our museum had a wonderful exhibition called Venice: The American View — works on the subject of Venice by important American artists like John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Maurice Prendergast, who went to Venice and made beautiful works there. Prendergast, whom you see on the screen, was a Canadian-born American artist, a wonderful painter and watercolorist who also specialized in monotypes. A monotype is a unique print: you put ink onto a copper plate and run it through the press once — you don't engrave or affix the surface in any way, you just print that single impression. This is a beautiful Maurice Brazile Prendergast monotype called After the Review.

While that show was on, a woman called to make an appointment for Expertizing Day, and she brought this exquisite Prendergast monotype into the Achenbach. I nearly fainted, it was so beautiful. She'd inherited it from her mother and had it hanging in her bathroom over in Marin, and she wanted to know what it was. I told her exactly: an absolutely exquisite monotype by Maurice Brazile Prendergast, really, really beautiful. And I said — using the word "if" — if you ever think of selling it, our museum would be interested. She said, "I really like it, but I have four or five grandchildren, and I need to provide for them." I said, well, if you give the monotype to one of them, you'll have to compensate the other four, because it's worth money — but if you sold it to the museum, you could divide the money equally among them. And if you sold it to us at a slightly better price, we could attach your family's name to the work as a purchase and partial gift, so your name would always be with it.

She went away, and about two weeks later called back: "Are you really interested in buying it?" We figured out a fair price, and we acquired it — paying her ninety percent of its value, with the other ten percent as a gift to the museum, and her family's name attached forever. We'd never have acquired it except for that exhibition on American artists in Venice, which prompted her to bring it in. So Expertizing Day really paid off.

Hugh Leeman: Was that idea — bringing the community in — something you'd wanted to do? How did those conversations go with the museum to make it happen?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Artist Day and Expertizing Day were both my own initiative. I don't believe the museum does either anymore, but we did them when I was curator, simply because we were a city museum with a responsibility to the public and to artists — to let three or four artists a month bring in work I might not otherwise see, since they weren't being shown by galleries in town, and to help people understand what they had.

I remember an older woman who called and said, "I'm not sure if I should bring this in — I'm not sure it's a real Degas drawing." I asked if it was framed. She said yes. I asked if there was anything on the back of the frame. She said, "There's a label from the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was in an exhibition in the 1940s." I said, I'd love for you to bring it in, but I can almost guarantee you one hundred percent you've got a real Degas — because it has a label from the Chicago Art Institute on the back. And of course she brought it, and it was a real Degas. She never sold or gave it to us, so we never got that drawing, but I was delighted to confirm it. Over the years, many people brought in reproductions of Van Gogh thinking they'd buy a house with the proceeds — which they wouldn't — but I've also helped people confirm that what they had really was what they thought. Always without a financial valuation. We're not auctioneers; we just help people figure out what they have.

A Degas Masterpiece at a Morning Auction

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned a Degas — and part of the collection you acquired was this Degas. How did it come to the Achenbach?

Robert Flynn Johnson: When I was an assistant curator at the Baltimore Museum in the early '70s, I was introduced to a very important New York collector named David Daniels. He specialized in Degas but owned many other beautiful drawings, did exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, and took me under his wing — an older man, a mentor who gave me a greater sense of connoisseurship about drawings. I knew him for years, even before I came to San Francisco.

Around 1995, David decided to sell his Degas collection — fifteen or sixteen Degas in an auction catalogue at Christie's, including drawings, pastels, and this one great bathing scene, the most important work in the sale. A donor and friend of mine named Dora Donner Ide, who'd given works to the Achenbach, got a copy of the catalogue. She called me, excited, first about a modest figure drawing; a few days later, about a landscape pastel that was more expensive; and finally, five or six days before the auction, she said, "I think what I'm really interested in is the woman bathing" — the pastel you see here, by far the most expensive work in the sale. She asked what I thought it would bring. I said probably a million and a half dollars. "Why so expensive?" Because it's a masterpiece — and since Christie's has an office in California, you'll have to pay California sales tax. She asked how to avoid the tax. I said you could move to Oregon or New Hampshire, which have no sales tax. She wasn't going to do that. She pondered, then called back: "What if I give the museum the money to buy it directly — do I pay the sales tax then?" No, you don't. "And can I have it hanging in my apartment in San Francisco for a month?"

I called Harry Parker, explained the situation, and he said of course, we'll arrange the insurance. So I went to auction with instructions to bid up to a million and a half, and we got it for about $975,000. She was thrilled, then asked, "What's wrong with it? We got it at such a good price." Nothing — the work had been placed in a morning auction, and morning auctions don't have the big hitters bidding. Had the seller put it in the evening auction, it would probably have brought a higher price. Regardless, we got a dead-bang masterpiece at a really good price. It took two weeks of persuading her, from a figure drawing to a landscape to a masterpiece, and she was very pleased in the end — as are we.

Hugh Leeman: Did this piece end up hanging in her bathroom for a time before the museum?

Robert Flynn Johnson: No, her living room. You're mixing it up with the other woman, whose Prendergast hung in her bathroom. This hung in her living room for a month, and then she let us retrieve it for the permanent collection.

Hugh Leeman: There's a Cassatt that's at least visually somewhat similar, from the late nineteenth century. How does this indirect view of the woman's face shape our relationship to it? It's a very private act — and in neither work can we actually see the person's face.

Intolerable That a Woman Could Draw So Well

Robert Flynn Johnson: They're both intimate scenes of la toilette. Someone once referred to Degas's pictures as "keyhole pictures." Earlier in the nineteenth century you'd have a woman lying on a settee, displaying her body, à la Manet or Courbet. Here, Degas and Cassatt show women at their toilet, seemingly unseen by the artist — as if he's looking through a keyhole.

Mary Cassatt came from a very wealthy Pennsylvania family; her brother ran the Pennsylvania Railroad, and she had enough financial independence to come to Paris and become an artist. She was very talented — a painter, pastelist, and printmaker — and she was mentored by Edgar Degas, who taught her printmaking. One thing she did that Degas never did: in the 1890s she experimented with color printing, which meant making a print from multiple aquatint plates and overprinting them — a very complicated, difficult procedure. She did a series of about ten or twelve of these color etchings, exquisite things. Degas, when he saw them, joked to her, "It's intolerable that a woman could draw so well."

My first job was at the Worcester Art Museum, outside Boston, which owned a complete set of the ten color prints by Cassatt, acquired from a collector at the turn of the century. Boston has many, the Met has some, Chicago too. But when I came to San Francisco, we had no color prints by Mary Cassatt at all. In 1980, five years after I arrived, there was a major sale of Mary Cassatt prints from a French private collection — a man who had inherited his stock from the great dealer Ambroise Vollard. This print was on the cover of the catalogue. I went to our director, Ian White, told him this was by far the most important of all Cassatt's color prints and a beautiful impression, and that we should go after it. We had the money, and he agreed.

I didn't go to the auction — I sent one of my assistants, whom nobody knew, so that when she bid, they wouldn't know it was our museum. We were lucky enough to acquire it. The next day, the Wall Street Journal ran an article: it was the most expensive American print ever sold at auction. We paid $80,000, and it was worth it. One of my East Coast curator friends chided me — "Why did you need another one of those color prints?" I said, that's typical of you: your collection acquired these things a hundred years earlier, as a matter of course. I had to go out and buy this. It's the only one we have, and if we hadn't bought it, we wouldn't have one. Later I got the great poster artist and printer David Lance Goines, at Saint Hieronymus Press in Berkeley, to make a beautiful facsimile poster of it — twenty-six color runs to get it just right. We made it slightly larger than the original and put a blind stamp in the corner of each, because it was so good you could otherwise pass it off under glass as the real thing.

Hugh Leeman: Something really interesting there — it was the highest-selling American print at the time, $80,000, yet you sent someone else to bid, because if they'd seen Robert Johnson bidding, it would likely have pushed the price higher. Is that a common tactic in museum acquisitions?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Absolutely. To this day, if I can help it, I never leave a bid. At a French auction, if something is estimated at five to seven thousand euros and you leave a bid for seven thousand, there's a very good chance it'll sell for exactly seven thousand — the house might run it up to your limit, because they know you'll pay it, rather than sell it to you cheaper. I'm always suspicious of auction houses, so it's best to bid by telephone or send someone surreptitiously, rather than put your hand up publicly.

Why I'm Suspicious of Auction Houses

Hugh Leeman: For people less familiar with auction houses — what do you mean by "suspicious"?

Robert Flynn Johnson: An auction house tells the person consigning a work that it will get them the highest price. And it tells potential bidders to come in because they might get the work at the lowest price. They're telling two different audiences two different things. It's the old story that victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. If a work estimated at eight to ten thousand dollars gets no bids and is bought in, the house will have an excuse — too large, too small, too faded. But if it sells for forty thousand, they'll pride themselves on being so smart. They're positioned to defend themselves either way. I've got nothing against auctions by and large; I'm only saying that people who think they'll always get a bargain at auction, as opposed to buying from a dealer, are misguided.

Hugh Leeman: We looked at an Edgar Degas, and established Cassatt's relationship to him. I want to go to yet another piece — a ballet scene.

Robert Flynn Johnson: This is not by Degas — this is by John Singer Sargent.

Hugh Leeman: Oh, wow — thank you for the correction. Tell me about it.

The Only Sargent Monotype in Existence

Robert Flynn Johnson: This is one of the greatest surprises of my career. I was out to lunch one day, and a volunteer handling the phone told me when I got back, "Boy, did I have a phone call — a very old lady says she has a John Singer Sargent monotype." I said, "John Singer Sargent didn't do monotypes." She said, "Here's the number, call her."

So I called this woman, who sounded very old, up in Reno, Nevada. She said, "I have this monotype by John Singer Sargent. I called the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery in Washington, and they weren't interested — they told me to call you, being on the West Coast." I said, well, okay — since she sounded too old to manage it herself, I asked, is there any chance someone could package it up and send it to San Francisco so I could look at it? She said yes, I gave her my address, and then I proceeded to forget about it.

About two and a half weeks later, I came in one morning to find a large package in my office, about thirty inches by twenty-five, and I didn't know what it was. I opened it — and it wasn't just a John Singer Sargent monotype. It was a masterpiece of one. As I said, a monotype exists in a single impression. This was an amazing sepia-colored opera scene, with the bass fiddles of the orchestra in the foreground, fully signed "John Singer Sargent, 1890." I got on the phone and said, thank you for sending it — it really is by Sargent. What's the story behind it?

She said, "My grandfather was Joseph Jefferson." Joseph Jefferson was one of the most famous American actors of the latter third of the nineteenth century, known for playing Rip Van Winkle in a famous play, the way Yul Brynner played the King in The King and I. He was wealthy, friends with Sargent, and had a summer place on Cape Cod. He invited Sargent down, and Jefferson was himself an amateur artist who made monotypes. He showed Sargent his copper plates and asked if he'd like to make one. So Sargent made this single monotype, signed it, and gave it to Jefferson when he left. It stayed in the Jefferson family collection. Years later there was a show at the Metropolitan Museum on the history of the monotype, and this was in it — alongside Degas, Picasso, Prendergast, and Gauguin — as the only monotype in existence by John Singer Sargent. So if you want to see a Sargent monotype exhibition, ours is the only one you need, because it's the only one.

Hugh Leeman: What a story — one of the great surprises of your career. Of the roughly twenty thousand works you acquired, does this one count among your personal favorites, because of the surprise? How do you feel about having favorites?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes — and with all due respect to my colleagues at the National Gallery and the Met, this could have been in their collection, but both institutions blew this woman off. It's like the publishers who turned down The Catcher in the Rye from J.D. Salinger, and then someone said, "We'll publish this." All she wanted was some attention for it; she was an old lady who wanted to place it somehow, and they weren't interested. This was 1981, before the internet, so she couldn't have emailed a photo. Quite frankly, if I'd known how good it was, I'd have driven up to Reno to see it. I didn't know what it was — but I at least asked if she could send it down, and she did. The rest is history.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned this was before the smartphone, so she couldn't send a digital photo. You had a decades-long career before and after the proliferation of smartphones — how did they impact your job and your connection with collectors and auction houses?

The Smartphone, and the Extra Set of Eyes

Robert Flynn Johnson: It makes things easier, and also more complicated, because now you have access to hundreds of auctions and dealers who put catalogues online. Before, the only way to know about a European auction was a hardbound catalogue, or a dealer's catalogue — and some dealers sent them, some didn't, and if they didn't, you'd never know what was in their show. So it's sped everything up and brought the world closer — someone in San Francisco closer to the art markets in Paris, London, Berlin. But it also means spending far more time going through far more material.

I should mention one thing from before the internet: sometimes I'd have a friend, like the artist and collector Joseph Goldyne, and if he was in New York, London, or Paris, I'd ask him to keep an eye open — not for me personally, but for the Achenbach. He knew the collection well, and he'd say, "There's a beautiful Dutch drawing at a gallery in New York, good price, you should check it out." I'd call the dealer and say, our mutual friend Joseph Goldyne told me about this drawing — can you put it on hold and send a photograph? A number of works in our collection came to us because I had an extra set of intelligent eyes out there, in places I couldn't be. It's good to have a good eye, but it's also good to have friends.

Hugh Leeman: Let's go to this next piece — Toulouse-Lautrec, 1899. There's a circus horse and, seemingly, a fallen trainer. How did this come into your hands?

A Ticket Out of the Sanitarium: Toulouse-Lautrec

Robert Flynn Johnson: It's a great story. At the end of the nineteenth century, Toulouse-Lautrec was in bad shape — a serious alcoholic, starting to have delusions. After a period of blackouts, he woke up in an asylum; he'd been taken drunk from some bar and placed there under a doctor's care, under lock and key. His family — he was a count, with money — had put him away in this locked sanitarium, and he couldn't get out. After a couple of days he sobered up and realized he needed to get out of there, but he had to show the doctors he had his faculties about him so they'd let him leave. A friend of his, Théodore Duret, helped devise a plan: Lautrec proposed doing a series of drawings from memory of the circus he used to go to as a boy.

Most of Lautrec's drawings were soft, light, spontaneous sketches, not particularly finished. But the thirty-nine circus drawings are all meticulous and exquisite — and done from memory. He didn't go to the circus to watch the horses perform; he had to remind himself, from memory, what a horse would do rearing up on its legs, which is extraordinary. The beauty of the drawings was such that they let him out of the sanitarium. Sadly, within a year and a half he'd died of alcoholism — he didn't stay on the wagon — but he did these drawings to win his release. It's a very famous story.

This drawing was in a private collection in San Francisco — given to a couple as a wedding present from a member of one of the families, who were very wealthy. The couple was divorcing, and the drawing was being sold; a member of the family called me to come look at it. The day before I was to go, our curator of paintings told me he knew a man named Jack Tanzer, a dealer at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, who'd come to San Francisco to buy a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing — obviously this one. So the next day, when I arrived at the appointed hour, just as I came in the front door, Tanzer was leaving — but he didn't have the drawing under his arm. I went into the living room, saw the drawing, and — it's a masterpiece. One of the greatest Lautrec drawings of all time. Just jaw-dropping.

Hugh Leeman: Fascinating to consider the context — that for him, drawing this was very much a ticket to his freedom from the sanitarium.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes. All thirty-nine drawings are very good; this is one of the two or three best. The person selling it said, "That was Mr. Tanzer from Knoedler Gallery" — I played dumb — "he's offered me fifteen thousand dollars. But I just assumed it'd stay in San Francisco. So if you're interested, I'll let you have it for the museum for fifteen thousand, and because you're a museum, I'll give you ten percent off — thirteen thousand five hundred." I walked out the door with it under my arm. About four years later — this was 1977 — we lent it to the Art Institute of Chicago for a big Toulouse-Lautrec show, and insured it for almost a million dollars.

It's a rather poignant, bittersweet story, because he eventually couldn't help himself and fell back into alcoholism. And there are all these connections: Toulouse-Lautrec loved Edgar Degas, though Degas wasn't entirely fond of him. Degas used to say, "Lautrec is painting with his hand in my pocket," because Lautrec painted those beautiful scenes of prostitutes that Degas did too. When I did a show in 1985 of the greatest drawings in the Achenbach collection, we put this Toulouse-Lautrec on the cover of the catalogue.

Hugh Leeman: I want to turn from the Lautrec to a piece by Munch. It really turns the corner on the aesthetics here — how dramatic it is. Tell me the backstory.

Munch, and the Michaels Bequest

Robert Flynn Johnson: First, a bit about Edvard Munch. Munch did everything "wrong," as opposed to Vincent van Gogh's family, who did everything right. When Van Gogh died, he'd sold only about one work in his lifetime, and his brother Theo died shortly after, so both brothers were gone. But Theo's wife controlled Vincent's collection, and she did two things: she kept half, which is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one of the great museums in the world; and she sold the other half over the years, so there are Van Goghs in Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco — all over the world. That's part of why he's so famous: there are Van Goghs in many museums.

Edvard Munch was a great Scandinavian artist, one of the great post-Impressionists. He painted many masterpieces, but after a nervous breakdown in the early twentieth century he withdrew from life, became reclusive, and when he died he left his whole studio to a museum in Oslo. So many of the Munch paintings that might have been in museums around the world are in Oslo instead. If you really want to see Munch as a painter, you have to go to Oslo — there are only two or three good Munch paintings in American collections. The way to see Munch in depth in the United States is through his prints, and luckily he was an absolute master printmaker in etching and woodcut. This is a unique color proof called Moonlight, done in 1896 — a haunting picture, the visual equivalent of an Ingmar Bergman film: mysterious, sad, beautifully expressive.

When I got to San Francisco, we had a couple of etchings and one lithograph by Munch, but none of his color woodcuts — considered his greatest works, and also the most expensive. Here's what happened. The Achenbach has a support group called the Graphic Arts Council, which raises money and also educates people about connoisseurship. There was a couple in Marin, Vera and Herman Michaels, who were the lowest-category members — they paid a hundred dollars a year, which was fine; I knew them, they were nice. One of them died, and the second about a year later. Then I was informed that the Michaels, who had no children, had left five percent of their estate to Meals on Wheels, five percent to guide dogs for the blind, five percent to a boys' school in Marin, and eighty-five percent to the Achenbach — in a fund to purchase works of art, on one condition: the works had to be made before 1900.

That was several hundred thousand dollars, exactly what I needed. When this Munch print came up at around $185,000 or $190,000, I was able to use the Vera and Herman Michaels Fund to buy it. Some people bequeath funds as a lump sum you can spend entirely; others give an endowment where you can spend only the interest. In this case they gave a lump sum, which mattered — an endowment would have kicked out only five or seven thousand a year, and we'd never have been able to buy a nearly $200,000 print. It was the right work at the right time with the right funds, and luckily it was made in 1896 — under their 1900 line by four years.

Hugh Leeman: An incredible story — a unique act of generosity. They paid a hundred dollars a year to be part of this, then left such a massive gift that it let you acquire this Munch.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes. And I should say the Achenbach isn't like the Getty, with one extremely wealthy benefactor; these things come and go. Without the Michaels, we wouldn't own the Munch. One of the beautiful things about America is that our museums, operas, and dance companies are built on individual private philanthropy — unlike Europe, where everyone waits for Berlin or London or Paris to send money. Our institutions are funded by people who love art, music, and dance, and support their own communities. So it takes many people to build a collection like the Achenbach — not just the curator, but the people who give the funds to acquire work that will be in the collection for centuries.

Hugh Leeman: The works so far have focused on people. I want to turn to our first work with no person in it — a piece by Cyril Edward Power from the early twentieth century. Of all the works you wanted to share, what is it about this one that calls to you?

Below the Radar: Cyril Power

Robert Flynn Johnson: This is by an artist of the so-called Vorticist school, the Cubist-influenced school of English art in the 1920s and early '30s. I was very unfamiliar with it. I was visiting a dealer in London to buy a nineteenth-century French print I knew of, and before I left he said, "I've got some English prints I might show you — interested?" He opened a portfolio of prints by Cyril Power and others, and I was fascinated. They weren't expensive, so that one afternoon I bought about ten of them for around a thousand dollars, around 1980.

It's almost amazing: within a couple of years there were exhibitions and publications on these works by Cyril Power, Claude Flight, and others, and the prints became very fashionable. They weren't fashionable when I bought them. I remember — not this print, but another from that day — reading an article five or six years ago in an English trade newspaper. I contacted the Achenbach and asked, didn't we buy a print by a woman artist called Gust of Wind? They looked it up: bought in 1980, along with this one, for a hundred dollars. I said, you've got to change the insurance value — it just sold for 120,000 pounds, about $140,000.

This print, The Tube Staircase by Cyril Power, is one of the most important and largest of them. It's very important to me to say that I bought it not because it had become famous or expensive, but because it was under the radar — this art was very underappreciated and quite affordable then, and I took a chance on it because it was very good. I bought on the question of quality, not rarity or fame. We got a whole group of them, a nice key group, and I'm very happy we did, because it would be very expensive to add to the collection in this area now.

Hugh Leeman: As part of this series — in our previous discussion you mentioned a criticism in your career, that you were frittering away the collection's money on unimportant artists, buying things where people asked, "Who is that? Why would he get this?" Do you think pieces like this put those criticisms to rest?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Yes and no. Some of my more adventurous, under-the-radar acquisitions are only now becoming known as smart moves. I simply stand by them. I bought these in 1980 — about nine of them for a thousand dollars — and said they're good, they're important English works that are undervalued and underrepresented in our collection, and we need them for historical purposes, for no other reason. That they've become very valuable now makes me happy, and also happy because if we didn't have them, we'd have a very hard time acquiring them today. But I didn't spend all my time looking for bargains; sometimes I had to acquire works retrospectively for a lot of money, as with the Cassatt, the Degas, and others.

Hugh Leeman: At the other end of the spectrum — in a much more modern context — there are works like this Diebenkorn. Where did that fall on the spectrum when you purchased it, in terms of how people felt about you bringing it in?

The Crown Point Press Archive: Diebenkorn

Robert Flynn Johnson: This work came from a collection of over a thousand works. Crown Point Press — famous as the greatest intaglio workshop in America, publishing etchings and aquatints — was based in San Francisco, run by Kathan Brown, who'd been making prints for many decades. She moved to new quarters in 1988 and had just finished the space at the time of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which irreparably damaged it. It was condemned, she had to move out, and she needed funds to build a new workshop. She had kept one of every print she'd ever published, in an archive, and decided to make that archive available for sale to raise the money.

So we had an opportunity to buy it, and we had to fend off the National Gallery in Washington, which also wanted it. We didn't want this great San Francisco press's archive to leave the city, so through private donations from many of our trustees and other collectors, we raised over a million dollars to buy the complete Crown Point Press archive — on the condition that we would also receive one of every print the press published in the future, for free, so our collection would stay complete. This Diebenkorn is just one example. We have every etching and aquatint that Richard Diebenkorn did at Crown Point. This print, Green, is his largest and most expensive there. Funnily, this single impression is worth about $600,000 today — more than half of what we paid for the whole thousand works. And we get all the future prints too. It was good for everybody: the city kept the collection, the Achenbach has it, and Kathan Brown was able to rebuild her thriving press. She sadly passed away about a year ago, but she was a great pioneer in the history of American printmaking.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned something interesting — that part of the deal was that going forward, you'd get one image of everything they produce. Can you talk about the role the curator plays in those negotiations, and how the director and trustees function in them?

The Achenbach Proof: Ed Ruscha

Robert Flynn Johnson: You need to appeal to people's generosity and common sense. If you buy an archive going back to, say, the early '60s, and you're getting one of an edition of twenty-five from fifty years ago, that print could be very valuable. But here's the deal for future work: when an artist makes an etching after you've acquired the archive, he or she only needs to print one extra impression — the "Achenbach proof." If the edition is twenty-five, the artist prints twenty-five to sell, tells everyone there are only twenty-five, but there's also an Achenbach proof, printed only for the museum and never for sale, so it doesn't affect the number on the market. All we're asking the artist to do in the future is pay for press time and one extra sheet of paper. By printing that proof, your collection stays forever up to date. That's how we've kept the Crown Point Press archive complete — and how we did it with Ed Ruscha's graphic archive. We're the only museum in America with a complete archive of all of Ed Ruscha's prints.

Hugh Leeman: Let's go to that to bring things full circle. You mentioned his name — and as a final piece, one of the iconic Standard stations. Tell me about it.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Here's an interesting story. The Walker Art Center did an exhibition and catalogue raisonné of all of Ed Ruscha's prints. They have some Ruscha prints, but they're mostly a painting and sculpture collection, so they weren't interested in acquiring his print archive. The exhibition was going to travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ruscha has been an LA artist for decades, so logically the archive might have been offered to LACMA.

Ed wanted his graphic archive — all his prints, plus his working proofs and color proofs, the unique things, the colors he considered but chose not to use — all placed in a museum where it could be used for study, rather than sold off piecemeal from his estate after he died. He was going to sell it, but he wanted it all in one museum. But when the Walker show traveled to LACMA, the director at the time made a terrible mistake. I don't think she was a great fan of Ed Ruscha, and she said the exhibition didn't need so much space — show only two-thirds of it, cut it by a third, leave a third in the crates. That really upset Ed; he wanted the full show that had been at the Walker. He got ticked off at LACMA and told his dealer, "Do not offer the Ruscha archive to LACMA. Offer it to my friend Bob Johnson in San Francisco." Ed and I were friends, and he offered the collection to us.

The dealer asked if we wanted to buy the archive. I said yes, but we want prints from his future editions as part of the deal. "You want us to give you prints from future editions?" Yes — it only costs Ed a piece of paper and press time for that extra proof. Ed agreed, and the price was $750,000, an unbelievable bargain. I went to a dear art patron named Phyllis Wattis — an elderly woman with wonderful taste, interested in contemporary art — and she provided the $750,000, so we acquired Ruscha's complete archive. The print on the screen is Standard Station, Mocha Standard, a beautiful large silkscreen from 1965. We have six or seven impressions of each of his standard stations, two or three of which would be worth the price of the whole collection today. And we get all of Ed's prints in the future — he's been making prints for us for almost twenty years now, so we get all the Achenbach proofs from everything he's done, in addition to what we acquired back in 2000. Ed is a good friend of mine to this day.

Hugh Leeman: Robert Johnson, thank you so much for sharing these backstories, and giving us context not just on the artworks but on how they came to be part of the collection — the stories that make them personal to you. It's a beautiful context that brings art to life.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Thank you. As I've said this afternoon, a lot of it is knowledge, and being in the right place at the right time — but it's also making connections and friendships. Having people like Phyllis Wattis believe in you and be willing to write a check, or the Michaels, who left us their money to acquire something beautiful. One of the keys to being a good curator is to make people dream your dreams. And with their generosity, the collection grows for the future.

Hugh Leeman: I love that — make people dream your dreams. Robert Johnson, thank you so much. Until the next time.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Very good — thank you.

Cañada College Art Gallery
The Mirror: A Student Exhibition curated by Emilio Villalba
Featuring: Alan Pobanz, Anya Masnik, Ariana Myers, Cece Escobar, Corin Vernon, Dorothea McCowan, Estefani Cisneros Frias, Gail Felchle, John Guinn, Katharine Wolf, Remy Steiner, Rho Bean, Richard Holober, Sally Roth, Shasha Tao, Violaine M’Raihi, & Yichen Wang

September 10 through October 27, 2026

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The earliest known use of mirrors in painting can be traced back to the Renaissance, specifically in works like Jan van Eyck's “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434), featuring a married couple standing in front of a convex mirror which reflects the interior portrait scene and makes the painter an eye-witness to the moment. Other well-known paintings utilize an object, which was once called a looking glass, as a compositional device. Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656) places a mirror in the background that reflects King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, who appear to stand where the viewer is located thus making the painting's viewpoint deliberately ambiguous. In Edouard Manet, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882) a large mirror behind the barmaid reflects the crowded music hall. The reflection's angle does not seem to match the woman's position, creating a famous visual enigma still being debated as showing us a viewpoint highlighting impossible perspectives or the complexity of viewpoints a mirror can offer us. Pablo Picasso’s “Girl before a Mirror” (1932) has a young woman, presumably Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, standing before a mirror facing her reflection. The reflected image contains radically different colors and forms, suggesting contrasting emotional states. 

A mirror allows light to bounce off it forming an image of whatever is in front of it. Importantly, mirrors operate on the principle of light reflection. A mirror reverses the direction of light at an angle equal to its incidence thus allowing the viewer to observe things behind them or whatever may lie even at an angle depending on the direction the mirror is facing. In some cases the viewer sees their own image, in other cases the angle of reflection shows us things that would otherwise be out of view. Placed into paintings, the use of a mirror can expand the composition and meaning of a painting. 

In keeping with this tradition, Emilio Villalba, an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Cañada College (in the Humanities & Social Science Department), has curated an exhibition of student works, “The Mirror: A Student Exhibition at Cañada College Art Gallery.” Villalba’s instructional prompt allowed each of the student artists to use a mirror to challenge the viewer's understanding of space and perspective.

Villalba’s exhibition catalyst gave students direction: “Each artist was asked to create an original work in which a mirror appears somewhere in the composition. There were no restrictions on medium, size, or subject matter. The only requirement was that the mirror be present — and more specifically, that it be shown as a physical object: its edges visible, what it rests on, the context around it. Not just a painting of a reflection, but a mirror as a thing that exists in the world of the painting. That distinction — the mirror as object rather than window — is what drives the concept.” Importantly, Villalba emphasizes that “When the mirror is grounded in physical space, it creates a layered, pic-in-pic composition: the viewer moves between the real space of the painting and the reflected world inside the mirror. Not a literal narrative, but a visual road that keeps cycling the eye in and out of the painting.”

All of the students’ original works created interesting possibilities manipulating prospective and compositional arrangement consistent with the tradition of placing mirrors in paintings and the disruptions of visual composition that result.  

Alan Pobanz

Pobanz utilizes the mirror to show a view of a green apple which otherwise isn't in the frame of the still life composition. Making the apple one of the subjects of the painting, an object that otherwise would have been left out of the picture, allows for a juxtaposition between it and the guajillo chile peppers that are posed on top of a book in the foreground. An apple is laden with symbolism related to temptation, knowledge, and sin while the peppers often represent warding off negativity and bad luck. An oil on paper composition, the painter shares in the promotional material for the exhibition, that he primarily used “a single warm lamp, with ambient overhead light from the classroom” for lighting.

Anya Masnik 

Masnik captures his partner in what is likely a familiar, intimate pose. The paint application to the face is chunky which competes with the figure’s own application of make-up. The subject’s facial expression both captures the focused attention and expectation of an imminent date, as well as the routine process of applying makeup, where you often see the furrowing of a brow and the pursing of lips in concentration. The title of the painting suggests Masnik is trying to assuage any hesitation his partner has about her attractiveness, “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty.” The prominent flowers in the foreground suggest that whatever truth the mirror offers us may in fact be irrelevant as the floral offering tells us someone else (here the artist, himself) has already made a romantic gesture meant to make his partner feel chosen and cherished. The partial figure to the right of the composition, the only part of the subject we see in full reflection, is quite convincing and particularly well-executed. Masnik observes that mirrors are the primary tool we use to observe ourselves, and his attention to detail, despite a painting style that has qualities of expressionism, respects the accuracy of a mirror’s reflection.

Ariana Myers 

Painters often rely on self portraiture when another subject isn't readily available. There is always the self to paint. Here, Myers relies on her cat, Athena, to saunter into the composition creating both a staged self-portrait and one with an expected participant. It lends itself to a familiar moment and one which any viewer who has lived with cats can relate to. With added features such as houseplants bookending the scene, it has the look of a classical setting, yet modern with its color-field, austere surroundings. The reflection visible on the ribbed, purple-glass plant mister is rendered, alongside a broad-leafed plant in a vibrant blue ceramic pot, in a particularly capable manner. One wonderful element is the still unfinished drawing, a study of the painting we are looking at, presented in reflection in the bottom foreground of the composition. Notably, Athena appears in a different pose, facing toward the artist, thus heightening the elusive sense of time Myers ultimately captures.

Celeste (Cece) Escobar 

Escobar offers two paintings, both quite successful. The untitled clown painting lets the viewer see the artist in a contrived, yet relaxed and candid manner. The accents of paint on the face both covers her face yet reveals the contemplative sense of self. It raises questions of how we often hide behind things, makeup and clothing, yet still retain our inherent presence. In “Pomegranates,” Escobar uses the mirror to render a partial visage with two pomegranates. The additional placement of a fork poses the question of why a spoon wasn't chosen to more easily access the juicy seeds. Escobar’s arrangement of her face partially to the side of the mirror, reminds us how too much symmetry can make a painting look contrived. Here, the skewed countenance is an element that adds realism and suggests tension and movement. 

Katharine Wolf

The cafe or restaurant scene presents us with a server or cook standing at a counter preparing a take-out order. The subject checks to see if the order is correct as she works the register. There are many little details painted austerely, visible in the composition. From bottles on a back shelf to objects on the counter in the foreground, the Morandi-esque vignettes show off Wolf’s talent for rendering objects with just enough detail; throughout it all, Wolf doesn't lose the power of ambiguity. An oval mirror on the back wall reveals a complicated combination of mirror reflection and the vantage point of the viewer, which also convey a reflective quality. The customer, precisely where the viewer is standing, appears in the oval mirror. Both server and customer look downward emphasizing the drama in the painting are the subtle details, not an overt expression of emotion.

Rho Bean

Bean paints a self-portrait captured in the painter's teardrop-shaped palette knife or trowel. It features a pointed tip and broader midsection lending itself to enough space to capture a nostril and one eye. The composition is purposely unsettling in its orientation. The main figure is presented in reflection. The viewer can see part of the self-portrait being painted to the right of the picture on a yellow canvas; then the self-portrait on the trowel itself; and finally reflected from a mirror with horizontal blinds. Bean shares that “The work was painted from life, using oil on canvas and a limited palette (black, white, red, and yellow ochre).”

Richard Holober

Holober’s oil on panel painting depicts a scene from the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young song “Almost Cut My Hair,” a decidedly rebellious song that questions whether the singer should cut his hair and conform to societal norms. Instead, the songwriter David Crosby, dressed in a fringe buckskin jacket with prominent tassels, and sporting his horseshoe mustache, rejects any notion of fitting in. Holober captures a moment that is an articulation of counter-cultural values, yet conveys an almost humorous scene as the viewer can see a police car with its lights flashing in the rearview mirror, seeking to pull him over. There is defiance, on the one hand, and a pondering of whether perhaps a little conformity might have been more practical. The juxtaposition is both cheeky and accurate as the lyrics from the song speak to how the decision to keep his hair long has fueled his paranoia, “like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car.” Villalba’s prompt might have been about self-reflection in a mirror, here seen in the rearview mirror, but Holobern captures the theme of reflection as the subject ponders the ramifications of life choices; a reflection in a metaphoric sense.

Sally Roth

Roth’s oil on oiled-in plywood painting challenges the viewer the most. What exactly are we looking at? It's a century-old vintage mirror with many flaws, rendered realistically with objects in the foreground. The plywood support has been treated with oil to create a stable surface allowing the oil paint to adhere smoothly. Roth shares that she worked as an architect for many years, and this is reflected in the “design and qualities of built environments.” The defects on the coating of the mirror conveys a haunting or ethereal quality that draws the viewer closer to make out various marks and blemishes. In the foreground two small rounded objects, which could be small glazed ceramic vessels, are visible. Roth shares that they are actually known as an artist’s dipper or palette cup. Small, rounded containers with a screw top and a spring clip at the bottom, which can be affixed to the edge of a palette, allowing a painter to keep solvents or mediums nearby to mix with paint. Their nature will likely be mysterious to the viewer who will see generic still-life elements. The wood grain Roth has painted with sharp realism is very successfully rendered. The artist’s four letter initials are visible in the bottom left of the composition.

Shasha Tao

A number of artists utilized the mirror element to offer the subject’s own countenance looking back at the subject. Shasha Tao has a subject facing a masked-figure in the mirror, where even the color of the clothing does not match. Tao trades accuracy for a psychological message of how the mirror’s reflection is contrived and subject to the way we see ourselves. Tao reflects how "The past (is fixed) watching a synthetic present — or is the synthetic self staring back at a frozen memory?"

Violaine M'Raihi 

M’Raihi emphasizes the temporal element of age thus making the piece about the dialogue between a younger and older self. There is a contemplative narrative at play, as the subject confronts another version of themselves. She poses two different figures looking at one another raising questions about how we see ourselves, versus how we actually are. M’Raihi notes that “the values of the past that led to this moment” is the subject as “one’s reflection, usually a grounding force in the thought process, looks away. One is on their own.” The chalk pastel artwork succeeds because the viewer can see they’re encountering a conversation between selves at mid-point, and they are invited to reflect on their own lives. A cat depicted in the bottom right of the composition completes the picture and stands as a witness to everything unfolding.

Gail Felchle 

Felchle depicts the essential things that comprise a life. The figure wearing a cap is her 95-year old immigrant father-in-law seen in a mirror on a shelf of a desk he has had since his youth. A military cap, childhood toys, various books including a collection of hymns, first-place athletic ribbon, wedding photograph, a passport, and a small coronet, all unite to tell his story. Coming to the United States, adolescent success, and a career as a psychiatrist are all reflected here. The title emphasizing a “life well lived” embraces the idea of a subject looking at personal objects or talismans, that cause self-reflection and exploration of memory and the past.

Other student artists in the exhibit also offer intriguing works based on Villalba’s prompt. 

In John Guinn’s “Sylvester Waiting,” dry pastel on paper, 24 x 18 inches (2026), Guinn renders a tilted rectangular mirror depicting his small white dog amidst a living room setting. Fabric folds on the artist’s clothes are accurately rendered showcasing his attention to detail. The angles of the tall mirror frame cause the composition to look narrower at the bottom foreground; a realistic element which helps the viewer to consider the subject’s vantage point from well below that of an adult person, serving to heighten the stature of the subject.

In Remy Steiner’s “Squash & Sweet Potato,” pastel on paper, 14 x 19 inches (2026), Steiner pushes the limits of Villalba’s prompt by incorporating at least four mirrors. She used a long and tapered sweet potato and a striped delicata squash from a farmers market to explore the abundance of reflections. 

In Dorothea McCowan’s “A Sense of Clarity,” chalk pastel on paper, 20 x 16 inches (2026), McCowan depicts a silhouette of greenery foliage which when reflected in the small table mirror, reveals a cluster of grape hyacinths with bell-shaped florets. The viewer sees truth in the reflection rather than what can be seen directly toward the more shaded and ambiguous flowers. 

In Corin Vernon’s “Perceived Image,” chalk pastel on paper, 16 x 20 inches (2026), a self-portrait holding an ornate oval vintage mirror, which partially reflects her face, is presented. Vernon tells us that she wanted to share her experience with the condition known as dermatillomania, “an uncontrollable urge to pick at the skin.” Vernon presents “the moment before the mind betrays its own skin.” The painting background is detailed with delicate white flowers, simple five-pointed white star-shaped blossoms, set against a dark green leafy background. 

In Estefani Cisneros Frias’s “The Cleansing,” oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches (2026), the subject wears a cerulean blue gown accented with bright crimson ribbons, while holding a young green sapling of some kind. A goldfinch perched to the bottom left side of the canvas watches the main figure in a moment of solitary reverence. Cisneros Frias, who is from Michoacán, Mexico, notes her culture's belief that mirrors are “portals and holders of energy.” Symbolically, the mirror in the right portion of the composition only reflects the image of a single smoldering candle standing before it. Some blue folds from the figure's gown are also visible, but otherwise the composition excludes the figure, flower, bird, or books stacked nearby. The mirror here is pointed more toward the viewer than the objects in the painting causing one to ponder where each of us fit into the settings we inhabit.

In Yichen Wang’s “On The Road,” oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches (2026), Wang renders a passenger seated in a car. Her expression gives off a sense of anxiety perhaps emblematic of the highway as a metaphor for life. The viewer sees the partial road ahead, with various other cars, through the car’s windshield, and the vacant road behind her from the passenger rear view mirror. A small mirror on the sun visor shows us the passenger.

Of the 17 artists included in the exhibition, five are foreign born (from Mexico, China (2x), Austria, & Ivory Coast) and at least three originally hail from states other than California (Oregon, Indiana, & New York). Not surprisingly this diverse group offers distinct and creative ways to honor Villalba’s original assignment. As a result, Villalba has assembled a worthy exhibition showcasing a theme long utilized by painters over the previous centuries. 

Since the fall of 2024, this is the 6th exhibition Villalba has mounted. The preceding shows included a survey of work by Bill Morales, a former professor at Cañada College; paintings and drawings by Bay Area Figurative painters Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown; a student exhibition featuring seven women artists; a retrospective by realist painter Guy Diehl; and, contemporary works by Wardell McNeal, a Filipino artist based in Oakland.

Future exhibitions are planned which include an exhibition by abstract figurative artist KL Folgner, who currently shows with Pamela Walsh Gallery in Palo Alto.

Installation photographs:

Ben Davis is a San Francisco-based public art visionary, creative producer, and founder of Illuminate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming urban spaces through monumental public artworks. In 2011, Davis envisioned The Bay Lights, an installation by artist Leo Villareal that transformed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge into an illuminated landmark. Since its debut in 2013, Illuminate has developed ambitious projects including the Golden Mile in Golden Gate Park, the Pink Triangle on Twin Peaks, and large-scale laser installations across the city. Davis also coined the phrase City of Awe, an initiative encouraging San Franciscans to embrace creativity, civic engagement, and collective experiences of wonder. With a background spanning public communications, urban revitalization, and civic projects, Davis approaches public art as a catalyst for community connection and urban transformation. His work seeks to make extraordinary artistic experiences accessible to everyone while reimagining the possibilities of public space.

A Roborant Review interview by Hugh Leeman

The City of Awe

Hugh Leeman: For many people, the last few years in San Francisco have been a story circling around the so-called doom loop. Yet you've invested so much of your practice in the opposite — this optimism of awe. When you walk out your door in San Francisco today, what are you seeing that the doom loop naysayers are missing?

Ben Davis: First of all, light finds its highest purpose in darkness, so I felt extremely motivated during dark times. And what I see — honestly, I feel like I'm living in the most amazing, most important city in the world right now. I've never seen San Francisco look more beautiful. I've never felt its energy be more coherent. I've never seen more people desiring to acknowledge the specialness of this place, the city of awe.

I also have the benefit of seeing the power of cumulative generosity. Just in the stuff that's in my realm, it's all around us. I go down the Golden Mile and see a mile and a half of people joyfully interacting with the space — sitting in yellow chairs, at the band shell enjoying a concert, moving into the evening with the Bay Lights, in Fulton Plaza, or the more ephemeral laser installations we put up. I see the power of humanity and generosity manifesting itself in this place, and I think we're about to explode.

About to Explode

Hugh Leeman: That's a powerful statement — about to explode. Is this in a positive way? Because AI obviously has to be weighing on this conversation and its impact on that idea.

Ben Davis: Let's remove AI as a specific thing and move into the realm of what's happening around us. The frequency of change is moving at a speed that's out of our comprehension right now. No one really knows what the world looks like in ten years, or eight, or four — even three or two. It's a wild moment. And this is why this City of Awe moniker, this open-source moniker for San Francisco, makes sense. It's a declaration of who we are and an aspirational calling to who we must be — because the simplest definition of awe is the coexistence of beauty and terror. And that is my everyday in San Francisco right now.

It's so beautiful. I'm in the Marina; I just had a meeting on Crissy Field underneath the gorgeous Golden Gate, with Alcatraz off in the distance — such a magnificently beautiful place. And yet there's a sense of terror coming from the city too. We're in charge of the arc of human consciousness right now. A lot of the decisions being made here are going to have major impacts no one can even fathom. We live in this really special place that has a confluence of incredible talent and more wealth than anyone has ever imagined in one small place. People think dot-com, but that's Mountain View and Cupertino. This is a bigger wave of investment, all in a few zip codes of San Francisco. It's unprecedented, and it's going to be disruptive — it already is — but it also has the potential to be extraordinary. As a human, this is the most incredible time to be alive, as scary as it is.

So I think about creating the shared narrative that we all live in the most important city in the world, and that it's our moral obligation to show the world what civilization looks like when we all choose to live generously together, with an abundance of culture, world-class across the board. Truthfully, I'm freaked out about the world — not just AI, but climate, politics, war, viruses, nuclear war. All the scary indicators are blinking red, with AI pushing the acceleration curve. And the thing is, we're not getting off that ride here in San Francisco. There'll be people who don't want to use it, and great. But to me it's not quite a tool — that's the wrong metaphor anymore. It's part of the creative and cultural tool set for those who want to use it, and we can drive it as much as we put the objectives of humanity in the driver's seat — which is really the expression of culture.

The beautiful thing about creating beauty is there's no reason to do it other than for its own sake, to thrill other humans. There's no economic incentive. The stuff we do has zero corporate sponsorship; we create nothing that requires paid admission. It's all the culture of generosity. I don't know exactly how San Francisco explodes culturally, but I do believe we have the potential to be the Florence of a new Renaissance. Not that we're going to go back and be old-timey — we're going to honor everything, release it, and see what's next.

Hugh Leeman: It's an interesting comparison, Florence and the Renaissance. A lot of what gets missed is that there was a phenomenal amount of crushing, terrible things happening in the fourteenth century, just before — an incredible pathogen killing tons of people, warfare, economic catastrophe for the masses. Maybe some of that is where the rebirth comes from, and where we can pull some optimism. I want to get to you being here in San Francisco of all places. You've dedicated your creative practice to this city for years, yet you've received invitations from Dubai, Singapore — first-class travel, major budgets, huge teams — and you've said no, to go deeper where you live. What have you learned by staying put that you couldn't have learned by scaling out?

Staying Put

Ben Davis: It's a super interesting personal thought exercise to live out. Why not accept those offers? The truth is, they still get me excited when I hear about them — there's a fluttering, like a bird in my chest. But I realize that's the excitement of the ego, and it's not really what I want to be doing. I know I don't want to be the guy making the lights work in a mall in Singapore, no matter the budget. As cool as it would be to work on big things, I don't want to be working for a sheikh or anybody else. I want to stay put and go deep where I live, and see if I can make a difference that actually makes a difference, rather than just express myself in other places.

Saying no to everything has a couple of interesting byproducts. One is that you can't replicate the work — you have to do new things all the time. It's been a great joy to look at the range of what Illuminate does: from the Bay Lights, to the revival of the band shell, to the activation of JFK, to putting a sea serpent in a pond that blows bubbles out of its nose — cultivating this new monumental art form and touching so many of the sacred structures of San Francisco, this tertiary architecture we bring new attention to.

But an even better byproduct is the high-trust network we've been able to create, which lets us short-circuit the process — not unfairly, but to get to the decision-making and make sure we're aligned with the broader mission of every organization we touch: vitality, beauty, equity. We've shown that you can take a system designed to say no and work with people inside it to deconstruct and reconstruct it, from a no to a yes, for the things we want to see in the world — faster, with more fluidity, even decalcifying the system as we move through it. And still, we're not easy people to work with. I'm not. I'm friction and grit all the time, trying to smooth the edges of the system, because our mission statement is that Illuminate rallies large groups of people together to create impossible works of public art that draw out humanity's better nature. The word "impossible" was a conscious choice.

Look at the Bay Lights — to put lights on the side of an interstate freeway, five hundred feet above boat traffic and two hundred feet above cars, was an impossibility. It stayed an impossibility until we worked with twenty agencies around a table to find a way to say yes to that beauty. And then everything changes. Now there are nine bridges on the River Thames that the artist Leo Villarreal has taken on. There are bridge-lighting divisions. Everyone has changed what's possible in the world, and I love that we get to be at the seat of that. What drives it is humans — finding ways to bring their best, to bring the culture of generosity. Bureaucrats taking on two more inches of paperwork with no more pay. Technologists leaning into the challenge of how to make the technology work. And a philanthropic community finding resources no one was planning on spending. There's a real magic starting to happen here when we stay in that culture of generosity and manifest transformation.

Hugh Leeman: You're very well known for the bridge-light projects and the laser projects. I want to go back to before any of this started. In a previous conversation, you traced a lot of your early motivation to the south end of Boston — growing up through the first years of school desegregation, which you called a wound around division that you're always trying to heal. Can you talk about how your light installations speak to that wound?

The Wound Around Division

Ben Davis: It's mostly an unconscious operating system, but what antagonizes me most is systemic injustice. I grew up in it — and not just the redlining that's still inherent in the system, but literally the threat of violence every single day in Boston, for me and my friends. Understanding where you could go and not go because of race, this bizarre notion that there's Black and white and all these divisions in the world.

So when I look at projects, Illuminate's ethos is that we create nothing that requires paid admission. Part of that is simply that there's no barrier to entry. One of the nice things about light — and we don't always work in light; Illuminate is really more about illumination of the human soul — is that it's such a powerful medium when you do it the right way. Something like the Bay Lights or the lasers across the sky: you don't need an art degree, you don't need to know anything. You can be one person standing there, and almost unconsciously reach out and want to grab the hand of the person next to you, because you're feeling a sense of beauty and awe. There's an inherent sense that this is a generous gesture — something morally beautiful about it. This took a lot of work; it's a human triumph for something like this to exist. We get to bathe in that together, and it makes no difference how much money you have in your pocket, what language you speak, who you love, who your God is. All that matters is that you're part of this bigger thing than yourself called humanity.

The piece we just did at the cathedral was amazing to witness. We put twenty-five lasers from the roof of the Fairmont, over Huntington Park, into the twenty-five panels of the rose window at Grace Cathedral, opened the doors, and had music inside — twenty hours of improvisational music over five nights. One of the directions I gave the musicians was: timeless sounds, vocalization is fine, but no words. I didn't want people to have the barrier of words — either not knowing what was said, or knowing and being taken away from their own thoughts. When you get that right, there's a sense that a human being from any time and any place in history — whether Florence in the Renaissance or the Amazon jungle — could walk into that cathedral and drop into "wow." This brings me into natural reverence and silence, into a human ethos where we're all quiet together, with a shared focal point of beauty. Those are magical moments that, to me, heal that wound. It's a beautiful privilege and a gift.

Hugh Leeman: In a previous interview we did live for a group, you mentioned that when large public art projects are discussed, they're often framed around how much money they'll generate for downtown businesses or a neighborhood. You turned that on its head and asked how little — close to nothing — a family of four could spend to have an incredible experience together. Our city talks about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but often focuses, perhaps necessarily, on how much money is being generated. You really hit on something there.

A Family of Four, for Nothing

Ben Davis: This is a deeper concept about generosity. There's a beautiful San Franciscan — if he were a plumber I'd fall at his feet, but he's a choreographer — Alonzo King of LINES Ballet. At one point I heard him give a talk, and he said, "All the universe is lines and circles. All of it." Even as I say it now, it cracks my head open. I can look at the world around me and see it as lines and circles. But I also think it's a metaphor: the line is the transactional relationship, the economy of reciprocity. I give you this, you give me that, we shake hands — you get my user list, I get your logo. Versus the circle of generosity: just releasing.

If we have a city where a family of four can have the most amazing day and night of their life, simply because they're here in the city of awe, everything else takes care of itself. If you make the city that magical, the money will come; everything starts to flow again without the need to justify it. I understand why people do the other thing, and they can continue to. But I want to see this whole other part of us break off — beauty for beauty's sake, radically accessible.

I think there's a backlash coming right now in favor of championing civility. For reasons we can all speculate about, civility in civil discourse has gone. If we champion it — if we create family-friendly public spheres full of safety, joy, and beauty — that's an ethos that spills out into all things. That's part of what it means to be a civilization right now, and San Francisco has the ability, maybe even the moral obligation, to show the world how, through a culture of generosity and care. Love is presence. If you care about the space in the city of awe, the idea that we're all part of something bigger than ourselves means the person planting flowers in front of their house, the person bringing culture out through a podcast, and me putting lasers through the sky are all part of the same energetic field. We support each other; we're rooting for each other's success. That's really tough in the arts, because it's a scarcity mindset for a lot of legitimate reasons, and people are often less generous the closer you get to where you most want generosity. I'm trying to lead by example and see if we can turn the corner — because the most profound form of beauty isn't lasers in the sky. It's people. People, when they can get past their shit, are amazing.

Hugh Leeman: I want to go to that — people when they can get past their shit are amazing. You've spoken about wanting to break the myth of the lone artist and the lone founder, and instead to illuminate the work of everybody, people "working in the sweet spot of their creative genius, generously, toward something bigger than themselves." How do you build a culture where people can sublimate their ego like that?

The Sweet Spot of Creative Genius

Ben Davis: One of the beautiful things about San Francisco is it's a city of under a million people, full of amazing people — even more so now. There's a power of attraction here that's bringing really remarkable, meta-conscious people. They come to find their fortunes, but the fortunate ones find themselves in San Francisco and find a way.

In every conversation with every beautiful human I meet, I pretty much ask three questions. What's your passion — what is it you care about? Then I listen really deeply. I ask what they think is the sweet spot of their creative genius — when are you the greatest thing you can be, doing something so well it makes a difference? And then I ask if they have a fantasy project for San Francisco. The way opportunities are working in front of me now, I feel in touch with the source in a beautiful way. I don't feel like these are my ideas; they show themselves to me because I'm filling myself up the right way and finding ways to engage people in exactly this — everybody working the sweet spot of their creative genius, generously, toward something bigger than themselves. When that happens, the magic spills out. The sum becomes greater than the parts. That's when you reach for the divine, and it extends a hand downward to meet you.

Hugh Leeman: There's an inner dialogue you've had about love and fear. Three months before one of your major projects on the Bay Bridge, before it had even revealed itself to you, you were on Stinson Beach, and you realized almost every decision up to that point in your life had come from a place of fear rather than love. You committed to choosing love whenever you could muster the consciousness to do it. Years on, how has that practice held up — and where do you still catch yourself finding fear as a motivator?

Choosing Love Over Fear

Ben Davis: That's a beautiful, generous question. The reality is I'm in a place now where I feel like I'm in practice almost all the time — and practice just means you keep doing it until it becomes second nature. Of course I still experience fear; I'm always afraid at some level. But I've mustered courage, and courage is just speaking from the heart. The world's been kind to me, truthfully. The more I've leaned into the thing that scared me most, the more the world has opened up with an agency I never thought I'd have access to — meaningful, authentic conversations with so many people, a sense of co-creation produced lovingly with so many talented people. I feel a powerful sense of community and love and connection. I feel in love. I feel in service. Maybe that was the first major step, but I'm doing it all the time, checking myself: Is this the fearful thing? Is this the scarcity mindset? Is this you worrying about you rather than the other? What's the loving choice?

Let me go a little deeper. I had a thought the other day I really like. Someone was saying you can't measure consciousness. But I think all of consciousness might be this: the space you can create between stimulus and response. Something triggers us, and we react — we get mad, we get angry. I typically did, carrying around shame and all kinds of invisible baggage that had me relating to everyone like a threat. But when you shed some of that and create more space, you can notice, "Okay, I'm getting triggered here, but the truth is this person isn't actually doing this." Whether they are or aren't, I have a lot of choices now. What's the loving choice? What's the strong choice? If you can create enough space, you can make a loving choice every single time. And when you do, the world changes around you — your circumstances change, you're speaking from the heart, you're not being defensive.

I also think this is maybe the entirety of what we call free will. All human free will exists between that which comes into us and that which comes out of us, in the space we create to be mindful in that moment. It's a long path to go down before we talk about Illuminate, but I do think this is the primary practice — finding the breath, being at peace with yourself and the world, and then crafting as beautiful a response as you can every single time you deal with other people.

Hugh Leeman: I like that — the space between stimulus and response being consciousness. You had this massive project with the Bay Lights, and it failed, technically. There was an intense stretch working with a lighting conglomerate that was bought and sold a handful of times. The word you landed on in response was humility. What did the failure teach you that a resounding, trouble-free success couldn't have?

Failing Your Way to Success

Ben Davis: This concept of failure and success is interesting. I'm a constant source of failure. You kind of have to fail your way to success — at least for what we're doing, because we're trying something all the time, taking worthy risks. Often it's small: we'll try this, it didn't work, let's try something else. Keep jiggling the knob, keep spinning the dial, keep unlocking the code. The struggle is part of the beauty. No one's ever heroic because they have unlimited resources — you're figuring out how to do something that's really hard, and that's where the creativity pours in.

To watch the Bay Lights go through multiple rounds of what I wouldn't call failure, but the reality of doing something really hard — we're trying to put complicated, sophisticated electronics on the side of a bridge that vibrates twenty-four-seven, expands and contracts by more than a foot on warm days, gets lightning strikes, high winds, salty air, heavy rain, grit and grime from cars. About the most perverse environment you could create for an electronic installation meant to last. The multinational conglomerate wasn't a helpful player in that, and I'm glad we're now working with Musco — an amazing American, family-owned firm, full of integrity, who care about the project. They've been transformational, because humans always matter. But it was that struggle — the need to take it down, bring it back, even do it again — that solidified both the perseverance and the belief in the project.

I like projects to be temporary. I'd rather have people fight to keep something than fight to get rid of it. You never know if something will be a success, especially a bold thing that's never been done before. The sea serpent in the pond — I think we had a one-year permit; it'll get extended, because it's beautiful. "Lift Every Voice," the words on top of the band shell — Historic Preservation fought me tooth and nail, they didn't want them up there, and they made sure my permit said they had to come down in two years. I didn't lift a finger, and it's been extended for five, and it'll be extended again. It's amazing: when you do something that feels like it should have always been there, the world opens up and creates new possibilities, just from the sheer beauty. So — failure. If someone's not mad at me every single day, I'm probably not doing my job.

Hugh Leeman: [laughs] To that idea of someone being mad at you every day — you've had an expansive series of projects on Highway 1, at the edge of San Francisco between the city and Ocean Beach. Some people are very supportive, some very against. How are you navigating challenges that are not just social, but bureaucratic and even political now?

Transcending the Politics

Ben Davis: I try to transcend the politics. With the Golden Mile in Golden Gate Park — I was outraged. Dede Wilsey does a lot of great things in this city, and I take nothing away from her, but in her mind it was a good use of her resources to spend her wealth to bring cars back onto the JFK promenade. I raised my daughter in this city, and I would have killed for such a space, to have her safely ride her bike. To see someone with all these resources, who can take her cars out to the countryside, take that away from people — it infuriated me, filled me with rage. But that's not going to do me much good.

So I got permission from Rec and Park — not to tell anyone how to vote, but over the course of ten weeks, to show people what they had. The tool wasn't to express our outrage; it was to express such love that the power of attraction would pull people in. And it worked. What was supposed to be a close election turned into a landslide, because literally thousands more San Franciscans, through word of mouth over ten weeks, came out to the JFK Promenade and saw what we had. It was no longer a road for cars that you were allowed to walk on. It was a place for people first. A simple idea. And I did not tell anyone how to vote — I'm an arts nonprofit.

The bureaucratic stuff is interesting. I look at what I'm able to be part of and think, how do I have the ability to do this? It's crazy-making to move into the maw of the bureaucracy and stay with it long enough to create transformation. But I was a bureaucrat for eight years, so I have bureaucratic empathy. If I hear a "no" that's justified, and you can explain why we're saying no to this beautiful thing, we can talk — I'm good. But if it's a no because that's how it's always been done, or because of a law passed during Prohibition that we're not going to think about, that drives me mad, and I'll push back as hard as I can.

For me, bureaucracies are like people. Some are energetic, lean, full of purpose. Others have lost the point and are floating along — doing what they were supposed to do in 1940, but the world has changed around them. So I read the mission statements of these organizations, I understand what they're trying to do, and when I weave together a solution, it's in their favor if they're willing to look at it, consistent with what they say they want. For four years I was a volunteer community mediator. Every Illuminate project is some Venn diagram of many groups' shared interests finding a sweet spot — the Port of San Francisco, Rec and Park, the Arts Commission, the museums, the bike coalition. What are the projects we can all agree make the city a more generous, beautiful place? The activation of Fulton Plaza, that weird little place on our Civic Commons undergoing a transformation. All of Market Street. Things are going to happen here in the next few years. I think Market Street might finally turn the corner.

Hugh Leeman: A moment ago you mentioned the word "rage" — a word our society of filtering and facades rarely says out loud. But you've noted that the honest answer to what motivates you is rage: that you don't get out of bed unless you're pissed off about something, and the practice is holding that rage until you can find a loving expression for it. How do you perform that alchemy — converting rage into beauty — without losing the fire along the way?

Rage, and Its Loving Expression

Ben Davis: The teenage, rageful reaction is easy and immediate, but it's just going to create more rage and chaos around me. It does the opposite of what I want, which is for the situation to be different, not more of the same. So it's like the space between stimulus and response, except I give myself as much time as I need for the loving response to come. With Golden Gate Park, the rage filled me, but the response — down to every artist who put things out there — was to be as loving, and create as much beauty, as we possibly could. We all have political perspectives, and there's every right to express them. But if you really want to win hearts and minds and overcome the force trying to disrupt this, love is the answer.

I can take you through every Illuminate project and show you the loving response in each. The Bay Lights began partly enthralled by the beauty of Burning Man, but also with a question: six months of a city's creative and cultural resources going out to a gated community six hours away in the desert to create a great experience, and then leave no trace. Beautiful — but can't we do this where we live, and let it last longer, and let more people enjoy it? The loving response to that was ultimately the Bay Lights. Imagine if we could do 1.8 miles across the sky, here where we live, and let it be there for everybody.

I often ask, am I an artist, or this, or that? I like to shed those titles and let them land lightly. But where I am now, I do catch visions, and I don't think they're mine — I think I'm an instrument. "Visionary" is an interesting title; it's actually my title at Illuminate, Chief Visionary Officer, and I say it with a lot of humility, because it feels outrageous to say about oneself. But the visions are flowing fluidly now, and I see such possibility, and it's manifesting. There's a bigger moment coming — I can feel it, we all feel it. Everyone here says, "I was called here, maybe for a different reason, but I'm here for a reason, and I want to be part of this." There's a shared energetic field we're all moving into, and it's going to be gorgeous. It's going to be chaotic too — everything all at once. There'll be winners and losers, as there always are in an urban environment. What I love about San Francisco is that winner and loser can flip in a minute if the earth shakes. You never know what's going to happen here.

Hugh Leeman: I want to go to that idea of the visionary. You've created incredible laser projects throughout the city, and you've gone as far as naming the fog — Carl the Fog — as a real artist of this, because the beams don't become anything to our eyes until they hit particulate matter in the air. You've shot them down Market Street over Pride, up through Sutro Tower, off a van at City Hall. What is it about this art form that has so gripped you — and where do you most want to take it that no one's yet seen?

The Light of Humanity

Ben Davis: I'll drop a little vision on your podcast. I just had a great meeting this week with a lovely dude named Charlie Beal, the executive director of the Gilbert Baker Foundation. Gilbert Baker was an amazing San Franciscan — more than I'd even realized. In 1978, over Pride weekend — the very day, by the way, that as a seventeen-year-old I accidentally hitchhiked into San Francisco, and saw this wild city unfurl before me, Harvey Milk and a sunroof going down Market Street — that was the day Baker unveiled the rainbow flag to the world. His original intention, according to Charlie and the things I've read, was that it be a symbol for all of humanity: the full spectrum as the full spectrum of humanity itself. He unleashed it on Pride weekend, and it got picked up by the LGBTQ subculture and moved out into the world with amazing ferocity.

There was a moment when some bow-tie-wearing, pink-shirt Republican gay folks wanted to trademark it, and got a lawyer and started to. Gilbert Baker found out, found his own lawyer, and made sure it stayed open and accessible to everybody — that nobody could ever own it. I love this guy. In 2028, the rainbow flag celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. My fantasy is that Illuminate, in that year, takes the lasers we've been cultivating here — that show this flag so beautifully down Market Street — and delivers it to fifty places around the globe, bringing this light of humanity and going back to Baker's original vision that this is a symbol for all of humanity. The time is right for the reassertion of humanity as its own force. As a gift from the people of the city of awe — zero corporate sponsorship, no need for economic remuneration, but a lot of rich cultural partnership along the way — we deliver this light of humanity to fifty locations around the globe, in honor of Gilbert Baker and in celebration of humanity. I think that would be beautiful.

Hugh Leeman: It's incredible. Your vision is powerful and beautiful, and I've seen the lasers in person — they're inspiring. But there's another side: some have criticized these projects as interfering with bird migratory routes. What's the truth behind this?

The Birds, and the Science

Ben Davis: This is interesting. I've been mindful of it the whole way through — every installation, watching carefully for any unusual bird activity. I've seen zero, over more than thirty full nights, sunset to sunrise. When we did other light installations, I invited the Audubon Society to run tests. I've watched for bug kill — zero; sometimes with stadium lights you see bugs dead all over the place, but no bug apocalypse with this. It's different from the 9/11 memorial lights, where there's some indication birds were swirling, so people sometimes confuse the two. I've looked at the science around migratory birds, and I honor the people who care about this and what they want to see. I'm happy to fall back on any science anyone wants to bring forward. Looking at the lasers and the Bay Lights against migratory patterns, I just don't think these are the harmful things. People can worry about it, I get it — but this is the light that gives, not the light that takes, and there's no indication it's doing harm.

Here's the real indicator. Humans are animals too; we have receptors, we're sensitive to light. There are a lot of light complaints in San Francisco — a neighbor just installed a security light that shines into my bedroom, and every time a raccoon walks past I wake up unless I close the curtain. But for the APEC conference, when there were twenty-one heads of state in town, we put the lasers right down the canyon of Market Street, so close you could practically brush the beams with a broom out your hotel window. Five nights, from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m., fourteen hours a night — not one human complaint about the light. This coherent light behaves differently. We can set up a device about the size of a milk crate on Market Street at the Embarcadero and, if it's clear enough, cast light over the Pacific Ocean ten miles away. It's bizarre. But there's no indication it's creating harm — as long as you're not shining it in someone's eyes. I'm happy to stand by the science. I love people who care about the world around them, including night-sky conversations. Let's have them, rather than getting positional and shutting the wrong things down.

Hugh Leeman: Switching from one light project to another — the lights you've done at Grace Cathedral you've called the deepest thing you've ever done. A place that exists, as you put it, between life and death, where you cried and talked to your father. What happens in that room at Grace Cathedral that doesn't happen with the huge public pieces, the laser beams down Market Street?

Grace Light: A Portal

Ben Davis: A few things happen at Grace Cathedral, and Grace Cathedral is the star of the show. There's the Aura experience, which Illuminate is not associated with — if it requires paid admission, it's not ours. Aura is gorgeous and people should see it, an external projection-mapping of whales flying over your head. Then there's the Grace Window installation, the twenty-five lasers that activate the rose window — beautiful, deep. But the one you're asking about is called Grace Light. It's by the artist George Zisiadis and the composer Gabriel Bold, two years in the making, and it exists no place else in the world.

A powerful beam of light comes down from the eaves and lands perfectly on the labyrinth. A small group is invited in to experience it from two perspectives — one group walking around it while another lies beneath it, then they swap. When you're lying beneath it, you look up into a swirl of beautiful light that keeps moving abstractly overhead, with an original score. As we developed it, I was in the interfaith chapel, with the symbols of the faiths going around the doorframe, and I kept thinking about origin stories — how light is at the genesis of every religion, and even of non-religion; atheism has the Big Bang, still a dependence on light and an explosion. So I thought this was a story of Genesis and birth. Then Dacher Keltner, who wrote the book on awe, came and experienced it, and said, "This is essentially a piece about death." And I thought, oh wow, he's right. As we refined it, people lying beneath it started to have the sensation that it felt like a portal — maybe this is what it's like when you die.

We've created a kind of back door for people in the last weeks of their life to come through, when loved ones felt it was important enough. We've had the whole UCSF neuro-oncology department — people who deal with the specter of death and children dying every single day — come in to process death together and have conversations about it. The reason the piece works so well is that it's extremely thoughtful. George Zisiadis is a beautiful soul who went as deep as a human can go and sacrificed deeply to make it without any ego, and the score is amazing. But what we're really doing is letting people see what's already there. This cathedral is a thousand years of technology stacking up to bring people into awe — flying buttresses creating vaulted ceilings, stained glass letting light pour through to tell stories, pipe organs that fill your chest with resonance and bring you into humility. And then we go back to light again. That's Grace Light. Grace Window takes it another step, where the technology is now coherent light coming into the window with a different kind of energy.

All we're doing is adding photons and sound waves — literally nothing else to the space, other than the few things that let you see and experience it anew. It's a celebration of the cathedral. I don't care whether something is art or not — I love art, all of it, but I'm not an art snob; I just want things that move people. I don't know if this is art, but man, does it open you up, and it opens all of us up at the same time. When you're with a group of people and you're all open, there's a kind of permission to cry, to smile, to look each other in the eye, to pat each other on the shoulder. With Grace Light you're scrunched shoulder to shoulder, almost touching, lying on a marble floor — this leveling act, the humility of death. You're on a hard slab together. It's great, it's crazy, it's beautiful.

Hugh Leeman: There's something profound about bringing people together to have conversations around death — the one thing we all share equity in, that every one of us is on a slow march toward, and almost never talk about. Creating that space, bringing in the UCSF neuroscientists and people in their final weeks, is phenomenal. As a final question, to come full circle: a through-line of our conversation today has been beauty. You've said you're more committed than ever to beauty as an organizing principle — beauty to make the difference that needs to be made in San Francisco. To some, "beauty" sounds like decoration above the couch to match the carpets. For you, how does beauty become a serious civic instrument?

Beauty as a Civic Instrument

Ben Davis: It's funny — I couldn't care less what anyone thinks about it. Beauty gets dismissed in art because it feels cheap or available, but people don't know. Watch what happens when you really work to create beauty — not just on the surface. Illuminate has ten guiding principles, and the first is "Be beauty bound: create beautiful expressions from surface to core." The way we make a project is full of integrity; there's a beauty in every aspect of it that's about human beauty, moral beauty, generosity. When you get to the place where people feel that — and yes, beauty is subjective, terror is subjective, it's all subjective, but there are common elements — you can witness it, in the making and in others around you. I have absolute faith in it.

There's a habit in a place like San Francisco to virtue signal — it's a way to get your art funded. I care about this group, I care about that issue — it's all good, let it happen. But there's a bigger thing going on. Every time you virtue signal, you inherently polarize. I'm not saying it's bad to do, but the whole system is designed around it: if it can hold our attention, it can open our wallets, so there's a system built to pull us to one side. This is an ancient philosophy around polarity. If you can kick and swim and fight your way back to the center, that's where possibility exists again. I want people to kick and fight their way back to a shared sense of beauty, humanity, humility, and awe — so we can be less dogmatic, more pragmatic, take agency from the place we live, and create powerful beauty in every aspect of the way we choose to live.

Hugh Leeman: Ben Davis, thank you for the beauty you've brought to our city, and the conversations that happen around your projects and beyond. I appreciate you making time to share today.

Ben Davis: Thank you so much. The people who love and care about me say I need to be public speaking more — so thank you for the opportunity, and I'll just keep going.

Often, an encounter between two people can pass nearly unnoticed, so fleeting it may not even be recorded as forgotten. Sometimes, in company of friends or colleagues, two people meet and sparks fly. Common experiences and passions ignite relationships that ring clear and true. Then again, occasionally, there are meetings of individuals who sense underlying affinities that hold a mysterious recognition of essence.

How a friendship between Georgia O’Keefe and Alexander Calder, two artists of divergent life paths, blossomed and flourished calls for reflective consideration.

In a newly opened gallery space in Palo Alto, the current Hauser & Wirth exhibition points to parallel deployment of formal elements and an abstracted language of landscape and nature.

O’Keefe relinquished the relentless intensity of New York City for the quietude and serenity of New Mexico. Her renderings remained two dimensional, her paint applied as smooth and thin as skin.  Calder moved east and west, crossed oceans and seas, crossed languages and cultures. His arena was four dimensional from the drawn to the built to movement through time.

And yet -- 

Georgia O’Keefe painted buildings that reached to scrape the sky. She painted mountains to expand across horizons and cradle the sky. She painted flowers to exude the fresh breath of sky.

Alexander Calder drew through space. He made etherial sculptures that flew through space. He made sculptures that, planted to the ground, reached to grab through space.

The shared sensibilities of artists who see the space in which life passes through, and then rests –this shared vision of the unseen —felt and understood— this can form a bond of deep connection. It can engender a friendship grounded on mutual recognition.

Rooted in nature, in organic forms, the shape of things may be the most immediate element to grasp in the pairings of the works of Calder and O’Keefe. Calder’s suspended biomorphic shapes can echo surrealist vocabularies in striking graphic black or, even, drenched in primary color. Rib-shaped elements can line up to recall skeletons or roots or flower. Just so, O’Keefe can present a similar abstracted shape as a repeated element rendering mountain formations. The curving, voluptuous beauty of shape pulsates across the canvas and envelops the viewer.

The voluptuousness of  painted flowers extending to the edges of a canvas, as in O’Keefe’s Dark Iris #2 (1937) or Jonquils #2 (1936), is mirrored in the energy of Calder sculpture bursting with a radiating reach.

Calder, in bronze, asserts associations in works from 1944 such as The Flower and Whip Snake. The found object, the encounter with nature, the witnessing of the effects of time –all imbue the work of these two artists who find different paths of expression yet retain a shared empathy.

It is in the space-between that these artists are united. This forms a unifying element: in the unseen of a pelvis bone open to speak of life and death; in the unseen space between moving objects shifting their relationship. It is the air that blows smooth the skeleton, the stone, the mountain. It is the air that propels, reconfigures and animates, that draws the ever-changing shadows.

Two artists, thousands of miles apart, wander through landscapes. In the east the odd stick or stone or feather catch the eye. Birds or scurrying squirrels call and rustle marking the air. In the southwestern desert the quiet of day holds skeletons and snake skins and flowers. As the sun sets the cooling night brings an orchestra of insects and birds and winds. The artists’ hands scoops up fragments. They collect and treasure, model or imbed bits and pieces of this material world. The artists’ vision carries it forward, transforms, and renders its essence.

There is a supreme constancy in the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe: landscapes of rocks, mountains, and sky that stretch with an even-paced centrality evocative of a secure embrace.

The sculptures of Alexander Calder can stand their ground or glide and dance, or hold a humorous promise of laughter. For each artist the other reflecting a common sensibility, beauty, and a resonating spirit.

Traces: a silver brooch, postcards sent from France, small tokens of sustained warmth –  all offering a notion of unique connection.

CALDER | O’KEEFE

October 3, 2026 – January 24, 2027

Hauser & Wirth

201 Hamilton Avenue

Palo Alto

The visual commonality between classical Chinese ink wash paintings and abstract art has long been noted by artists, scholars, and art viewers alike. Some of the bolder, inkblot-filled compositions from the Chinese genre have drawn comparison with Abstract Expressionism and analysis of modernity, as seen in the scholarly works of Jonathan Hay and Wu Guanzhong. In parallel with this speculative dialogue, Jeana Zhenyu Zhang’s paintings navigate style, medium, and culture in her solo exhibition, Arising and Passing, at VillageOneArt, New York.

Based in New York, Zhang’s works might strike the impression of invoking the longstanding tradition of American abstract paintings. Her Rockery series (2025) arrived at the middle ground between the spontaneous drips of Jackson Pollock and extravagant wash of James Whistler. Strips and blots of black paint dominate the canvas, but far from a pastiche of the predecessors, Zhang builds her own visual lexicon by opting for acrylic paint as her main medium. Taking advantage of the liquidity of acrylic, Zhang applies a thin layer of paint and floods the canvas with gradients of paint wash. Shades of black overlap each other to create a composition reminiscent of tumbling clouds or surging waves. As if attesting to the fluidity of the material, the acrylic paint under Zhang’s paint brush flows almost like ink. 

The verisimilitude is Zhang’s intended orchestration. Born in Dalian, China, Zhang was classically trained in Chinese paintings, proficient in both ink painting and calligraphy. Though the formation honed her techniques, the academic orthodoxy later became a constraint on her artistic individuality. Her pursuit of idiosyncrasy eventually brought her to the US, first to study oil painting at the California College of the Arts, then mixed media at the Parsons School of Design. Still, classical Chinese elements concern her. In addition to the abstract, her venture into figurative paintings likewise harbors an evocation of ink. The paintings series Drifting and Flowing (2026) and Leaves to Dust (2026), along with the standalone work As Reflection (2026), all thematize lotus realized with baimiao, a classical Chinese painting technique that draws only the outline of figures and objects without filling in colors. The two Drifting and Flowing paintings, in particular, take the vertical form of Chinese scroll paintings.

The bold and creative use of material is where Zhang’s long-pursued individuality shines most. In Savoring, a small-scale series of lotus paintings, Zhang applies gold leaves on the background, adding metallic shimmers to the optical effects. Her interest in mineral materials leads her to concoct her own medium by adding metallic substances to acrylic paint, which turns the paint heat sensitive. The paint changes color in accordance with the degree of oxidization and temperature. Green boasts the strongest presence in her works, while violet and red-brown are more discreet, interspersed among the more prominent colors. Zhang sometimes would even use hot water to catalyze the chemical reaction for the sake of variety, but how it turns out remains out of her control. The embrace of unpredictability is reflected in another small-scale series of studies with a Buddhism-inspired title, Karmic Encounter (2026). Contingency dictates the color scheme of these nine wood paintings: green and yellow once again wrestle each other for the spotlight, but a closer look will reveal the subtle brown and mauve hue in the mix. The overall tone is further meddled by Zhang’s signature drips of black paint, but instead of acrylic, it is ink that makes up the abstraction of the series. The series is a callback to Zhang’ artistic roots and an unexpected point of reference to the beginning of Zhang’s journey.

The desire to break free from a rigid system does not equate to forgoing the past. Zhang is always conscious of her roots in Chinese artistic training. It appears that she views the evolution of her art as a constant loop of the old and the new feeding into each other and eventually morphing into something that is distinctly hers. The exhibition title, Arising and Passing, speaks to this notion. More context is provided by the alternative Chinese title of the exhibition, 葉脈, which stands for “leaf vein.” In an interview with IMPULSE magazine, Zhang mentions that the veins become more conspicuous when the leaves wither. Decay and then reborn, Zhang shapes her art through the progression of the cycles of life.

Extending her longstanding interest in vegetation, trees take the spot of Zhang’s latest interest, as seen in the nascent arboreal delineation Knot of Circumstances (2026). Trails of dripping paint resulting from gravitational pull run over the familiar golden background of green wash and black contour. Taking over the composition, a burl-covered tree trunk of what appears to be a noble tree is unlike other works in the exhibition. The central message remains faithful to Zhang’s core: Much like the burls, which are plant callus induced by wounds or diseases, her art is constantly growing anew by conviction and by chance.

I admit it: I’m the one who missed the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA. Having read “Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa” recently, there’s no show I’d rather see, so I’m kicking myself. My consolation is that a whole new layer of San Francisco art history has come in to focus for me, from the mosaic she worked on with kids at Alvarado, (where I now have a 1st Grader), to the inspired vision and years of advocacy she provided to the public arts High School, the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (where my daughter is now a freshman). What a life! And what a realization I’ve had, how much this city, and my own personal experience of it, has been touched by the force of Ruth Asawa.

So it’s no surprise, I suppose, that the artist behind “STRYBING”, a recent show of Linocut prints at the Birdhouse Gallery is acclaimed architect William Bondy, a longtime colleague of Ruth Asawa’s husband, fellow architect Albert Lanier. 

Are you hip to “Strybing”? I was not. But I'll bet you know the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. It was originally named Strybing Arboretum after Helene Strybing donated the funds to build and plant it, the San Francisco voters of the early 1900’s having rejected the public financing measure. Thank you Helene - there is no more magical place in the city than San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum.

How about the art of the Linocut? Can you describe how a Linocut is made without watching a YouTube video? I could not - or at least couldn’t without fumbling through vague ideas about image transfers and confusing the Linocut with the lithograph, which of course means confusing the relief print with the planographic, chiseling into linoleum with drawing on a stone.  

My first impression of the 18 Linocut prints William Bondy is showing at the Birdhouse was how dark and sinewy they are, like spiderwebs glimpsed in moonlight. Scanning the wall, the labyrinthine lines flutter, swimming in a sea of black ink. It’s disorienting at first, seeing scenes of lushness rendered so stark, and it takes a minute to adjust to the extreme desaturation. 

And so I reoriented. These prints are based on plein-air sketches from the Botanical Garden, after all, and like the Botanical Garden, which indulges our temperate climate by cultivating nearly 9000 different kinds of flora from all over the world, William Bondy’s Linocuts depict an extraordinary variety. It’s clear why he’s drawn to drawing there: if your art is inspired by nature, the Botanical Garden is a gift that keeps on giving.

Among the many things I have no proclivity for, but wish I did, is the identifying and naming of plant-life. In these linocuts, I recognize the bamboo, at least - but thankfully for this viewer, the real art here is not the academic rendering of nature, but rather orchestrating the symphonic complexities of naturally occurring shapes and forms. And what’s so striking about these Linocuts is how by abstracting these scenes into black and white negatives we can see the foundations beneath the form, like an x-ray of natural beauty.

It’s hard not to think of the influence of Van Gogh when viewing the works in STRYBING. They are created in the same spirit of depicting, while freely interpreting, nature. They are alive with surface tension, the mad marks of the busy brush working around vigorous, circuitous bends and flows. A breeze rustles the leaves; a school of fish changes directions. I’m not certain, but perhaps there’s even some of the same flora Van Gogh painted present here, clippings from Provence growing wild in our arboretum.  

And Van Gogh - like Bill Bondy - was a draftsman first - a dedicated, disciplined true believer in the power of our perception to manifest in the steady-handed drawing of line. He’d probably have made a decent architect! It is certainly compelling that an architect like William Bondy, someone who has spent their life considering the mathematical aspects of space and material requirements of structure, would find both solace and release in depicting the comparatively berserk density of a garden in bloom.

Perhaps he’d identify with my friend who used to say, as we drove out of the city to go weekend hiking in Muir Woods, “We need a break from all these 90 degree angles, man!”. 

The more time I spent looking at these prints, the more I realized the degree to which my physical proximity to the work changed the perceived compositions. I found there’s a sweet spot, two steps back from the wall, where the nature being depicted appears most present and raw. Another step or two back and the complexity condenses into tangles. And examining too close-up, the linocut gouge-marks take on a rounded artificiality, like a photoshop tool, distinct from the organically responsive vicissitudes of pen or brush.

Adjusting to stay in that sweet spot where the elements appear most alive is a small price to pay for the enchantment of Bondy’s teeming, enveloping, shadow-work pastorals. Ruth Asawa would, no doubt, approve.

‍ ‍Robert Flynn Johnson is an American curator, art historian, author, and collector best known for his long association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For nearly thirty-two years, he served as Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the museums’ department of prints, drawings, and photography. During his tenure, Johnson helped develop the Achenbach into one of the country’s leading collections of graphic art, encompassing approximately 90,000 works. He retired in 2007 and was named Curator Emeritus. Johnson has organized numerous exhibitions and published extensively on prints, drawings, photography, and artists including Edgar Degas and Lucian Freud. His books include Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers and The Face in the Lens. An active collector himself, Johnson has assembled significant holdings of drawings, prints, anonymous photography, and works connected to Degas, bringing the perspective of both curator and collector to his scholarship.

Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Hugh Leeman: I'm here with Robert Flynn Johnson, collector and curator of the works we're going to be looking at today. Robert was curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for thirty-two years, and we're going to walk through a handful of the works he acquired for the collection. Robert, before we start, give us a bit of context on the importance of collecting — and the difference between collecting as an individual versus collecting for a museum.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Thank you, and thank you for being here. First I want to say that collecting for a museum is both an honor and a responsibility, one I took very seriously during my career — because I knew that long after I was dead and gone, the works of art I acquired would be representative of what I was able to bring to the collection during my time as curator.

There are various criteria for collecting for a museum as opposed to collecting for yourself. A private collector can collect purely according to their own love of art. They can collect just one artist they like very much, or one subject, or one medium — watercolor, drawings, whatever. But for a museum, you have to take in the fullness of the whole collection. So the first thing I did when I was hired away from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1975 to become curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco — the largest print and drawing collection west of Chicago — was to study what we already had. I couldn't collect for the collection unless I knew what was in it. I spent months studying it in depth.

One of the things I found was that we had almost one hundred thousand works of art, most of them acquired by a man named Moore Achenbach. Achenbach was an enthusiastic collector, but something of a magpie: if he could find a very good impression of an important work, he'd buy it — but if he could only find a mediocre impression, he'd often think, "that's good enough," and collect it anyway. So certain artists were represented by superb impressions and others by mediocre ones that really weren't museum quality. I had to note which artists we didn't yet properly represent, and go out in the future to acquire better works for them.

There are five criteria for a work of art coming into a collection. First, quality. Second, condition — it can be a beautiful impression, but if it's damaged, that's not good enough. Third, availability — you can't buy works that aren't for sale. Fourth, appropriateness to the collection — a letter by Mozart might be a wonderful thing to own, but we don't have a music collection at the Achenbach, so it would be inappropriate. And fifth, price — you can't buy what you can't afford, so I always had to tailor my acquisitions to the money I had.

There are also two kinds of purchases. Retrospective purchases are famous, usually expensive works not yet in the collection, where you simply have to spend considerable money. Anticipatory purchases are different. All contemporary art is anticipatory — in a sense you're a venture capitalist, buying a young artist in the hope they become important. But what's interesting is that works by old masters and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists can also be anticipatory, because those artists fall out of fashion. In the 1980s there were beautiful works by older artists that were simply out of style, and I was able to acquire them at nominal prices. In 2026 they're considered quite important and quite valuable. So you collect anticipatorily not just in contemporary art, but sometimes in earlier works that are out of fashion yet important.

I was there for thirty-two years with limited funds. The Achenbachs gave us their collection plus an endowment that produced, at most, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That sounds like a lot, but when you're collecting across the whole field — old masters, nineteenth century, eighteenth century, contemporary, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures, artists' books, photography — it doesn't go far. I was often criticized for buying works inexpensively, a few hundred dollars here and there, because I found them below the radar of the art market. People said, "Robert Johnson's frittering the money away." But my view was: if I had a hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn't buy one hundred-thousand-dollar work. I'd buy one in the fifty-thousand range, one in the twenty-thousand range, one in the ten-thousand range — all serious retrospective purchases — and with the remaining twenty thousand I'd buy whatever good, important things came along, even if they were inexpensive. Because once a work is matted, framed, and on the wall, nobody knows what you paid for it. If it's museum quality, it deserves to be there. I always saved significant funds for certain works, but I stayed open to opportunities and adventurous purchases. So let's take a look at the first one.

A Michelangelo, Hiding in Plain Sight

Robert Flynn Johnson: I acquired this in the year 2000. I was at an art fair in New York, vetting the fair — going around before it opened to make sure everything was properly ascribed to the artists it was supposed to be by. I came to a dealer friend from Boston who had this particular drawing on the wall. I took one look and knew exactly what it was. I asked, "Is that who I think it is?" They smiled and said yes. Then I asked the important question: "Is it available? Is it for sale?" They said yes — the fair hadn't opened, so no one had seen it except the dealers and me. So I reserved it.

I called the director of the museum, Harry Parker. This was before the internet, so I couldn't send him a picture. I described it and said we had the money — could I buy it? And unbelievably, he said no. I said, "Why?" He said, "It's too inexpensive. If it's by that artist, it couldn't be any good, or it would cost much more." I was shocked.

So I called Dodie Rosekrans, one of the museum's trustees and a dear friend, and explained that it was a Michelangelo drawing — not a Madonna or a holy scene, but a working drawing, inscribed by him, ordering a piece of marble from one of the quarries, probably for a sculpture. An absolute working drawing. Its provenance was impeccable: it came from the Count Buonarroti, from an album descending through the Buonarroti family, direct descendants of Michelangelo, and was given to a Lady Percival in 1842. I said, "Harry Parker's turned it down. Would you buy it for the collection? You have to trust me, because I can't send you a picture — but if you don't say yes, it'll be sold immediately." And she said yes.

When I got back to San Francisco, she'd paid for it. And I went to her and said, "Dodie, can you do me another favor? I know you bought the Michelangelo for yourself and it's yours. But could you give the museum a chance to buy it from you and reimburse you?" She was such a lovely person — she said yes. I presented the drawing to the committee, and we acquired it. One reason I think Harry turned it down: do you know the price, in the year 2000? Seventy-five thousand dollars.

Hugh Leeman: Wow.

Robert Flynn Johnson: For a Michelangelo drawing that was not only drawn but inscribed — a working drawing. When I look at it today, it looks like a Joseph Beuys, like some avant-garde German drawing of the 1970s or '80s. Would I have preferred a beautiful Madonna's head? Of course. But that would have been seventy-five or eighty million dollars, and we'd never have been able to acquire it. Lyndon Johnson once said politics is the art of the possible. Art acquisition is the art of the possible, too. I'm very happy it's in the collection — but if it weren't for dear Dodie Rosekrans, willing to give up her acquisition so we could buy it instead, it wouldn't be there.

Hugh Leeman: It's an incredible story — turned down by Parker, then acquired through a trustee. When you finally showed Parker what it actually was, what was his response?

Robert Flynn Johnson: He allowed it to go ahead, and he was pleased it went into the collection. I'll give Harry a bit of a pass — he was very busy building the new de Young Museum, distracted by many things, and he simply couldn't believe a Michelangelo drawing could cost only seventy-five thousand dollars. One of the things about drawings, especially old master drawings, is that they were made without the intent to sell. They weren't finished works of art; they were means to an end, not ends in themselves. Michelangelo never made this as a presentation piece for display — he made it as a working drawing. It's a little like the difference between a recording of George Gershwin playing Rhapsody in Blue and a recording of Gershwin composing it. So many works in the collection were never intended to be framed and hung. As someone once said about drawings, they're like reading an artist's mail.

Hugh Leeman: Before we move on — what are we actually looking at here? It almost appears there's a stamp or a stain on it.

Robert Flynn Johnson: That's melted wax. The drawing was put into an album back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with red wax dripped onto the page and the drawing stuck on. They didn't have Scotch tape in those days. So that's what that is.

Hugh Leeman: And how big is it?

Robert Flynn Johnson: It's eight inches wide by two and a half inches high.

Hugh Leeman: Incredible to think you're seeing a little way into the mind of a true genius. I appreciate you sharing it. Let's move on to the next piece — a seventeenth-century work by Rembrandt. What's the story behind how it came into the collection?

Rembrandt's Only Still Life

Robert Flynn Johnson: It's an interesting one. Anybody who knows anything about seventeenth-century Dutch printmaking knows this is a ne plus ultra work of art. It is the only still life Rembrandt ever made in any medium, as far as I can recall, and his only still-life etching. This is 1650. It's the equivalent of Rembrandt making an etching of a moon rock — if something had come back from the moon in 1970. It's a shell from the South Pacific, which was about as far from Holland as you could possibly imagine. Seeing that exotic shell was an absolute curiosity to Rembrandt in the 1650s. He was a magpie collector, fascinated by all sorts of creatures. Once, someone brought an elephant to Amsterdam, and he sketched it and later used it in the background of an etching of the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden.

This print has always been one I adored. What's interesting is how modern it looks — like a Morandi etching, or an Edward Weston photograph. It doesn't have a seventeenth-century feel at all. My chance to acquire it came in 1997. I went to an important dealer in London who showed me a big blue hardcover catalogue of Rembrandt etchings. I went through it and put my finger on a few pages, the works I wanted prices for. The dealer said, "I'm sorry, but we're selling the collection as a whole" — which would have meant millions and millions of dollars. I told him most major museums — San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, the Met — already have Rembrandt etchings, so we wouldn't be in the market for a whole collection; we'd already own half or two-thirds of it.

The next year he called with good news: the owner had decided to sell the works individually. There was one caveat — the National Gallery of Australia had first dibs, because they were doing a Rembrandt show. So they bought what they wanted. And when the rest became available, this one — the shell — was still there. That was exactly the one I wanted. It was the most expensive print I ever bought for the collection: one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. But it was an absolute masterpiece. And here's the strange thing — the National Gallery of Australia bought their Rembrandt prints, yet this is the only one whose subject came from the South Pacific, near Australia, and for some reason they didn't buy it. Good luck for us. Last year, for the first time in almost thirty years, another impression of this very rare print came up at auction and sold for over a million dollars.

Hugh Leeman: It's really interesting, because I've always been a fan of seventeenth-century Dutch work — I think of still lifes, tulips, and of course Rembrandt. But I'd never put the two together: that this is a still life by Rembrandt, and how rare that is. It never crossed my mind that Rembrandt essentially never did still lifes, even surrounded by an emerging collector class that was doing them constantly. And it speaks to this world of expansion and colonization — these objects being brought back, and here he is fascinated by them, from the elephant to the seashell.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Exactly. There were plenty of seashells on the shores of the Netherlands — commonplace, he didn't bother with those. But this shell he'd never seen before. It came from some seafarer who'd gone all the way to the South Pacific and brought it back as a treasure. Many artists made successful careers doing nothing but still lifes in seventeenth-century Holland. But Rembrandt was a humanist — we know him for his poignant portraits and biblical subjects; that's where his heart led. He obviously couldn't resist etching this wonderful shell that came into his possession. It's a jewel, a one-off. There's nothing like it in Dutch seventeenth-century printmaking.

Hugh Leeman: I want to move to another piece, also connected to Rembrandt — and to one of his pupils. Tell us about it, and how it came into the collection.

Two and a Half Rembrandts

Robert Flynn Johnson: When I came to San Francisco, we didn't own any Rembrandt drawings. We had some fairly good Rembrandt prints, but no drawings. Over the years I acquired two original Rembrandt drawings for the collection — an early drawing of an old woman, and a very rare one in which Rembrandt copied an Indian Mughal miniature. Then I acquired this drawing by one of his pupils, Constantijn van Renesse. I jokingly say that over my years at the Achenbach I acquired two and a half Rembrandt drawings — and the half is this one.

It was done around 1650; I acquired it in 1988. It's a copy of a Rembrandt drawing now in the Morgan Library in New York. What's interesting is the subject: it's after the Fall. They've eaten the apple, and Adam and Eve are being cast out of the Garden of Eden — you can see a little devil behind the tree. Adam is depressed at being cast out, and Eve stands over him, consoling him. But in Van Renesse's version, Eve stands with her breasts exposed. In Eden, before the Fall, her nakedness would have been natural and beautiful. But now that they've been cast out, she's supposed to be embarrassed by it. So Rembrandt — the teacher, in the interest of accuracy — quickly drew a few ink lines over Eve's body to show that her arms should be covering her breasts. It's a correct drawing by a pupil, corrected by the master. This isn't the only drawing of its kind; there are a few others in museum collections around the world. Rembrandt scholars have absolutely attributed the correction to Rembrandt himself.

Hugh Leeman: Incredible. So the part I'm circling would be her forearm, and this other portion, almost a vertical rectangle, would be her other arm — and that's Rembrandt saying, "You need to make an adjustment here, because her arms would be covering her breast."

Robert Flynn Johnson: Correct, absolutely. It's after the Fall, and he's just being accurate, correcting his pupil's drawing. Again, this was never meant to be sold or seen — a working drawing by Van Renesse, with Rembrandt simply correcting his pupil.

Hugh Leeman: When you come across something like this out in the marketplace, what's the feeling? How does it manifest, that sense of "this is something we need to have"?

Robert Flynn Johnson: First, let me be correct: I am not a Rembrandt scholar. I did not discover that it was corrected by Rembrandt — that was already known when I acquired it. For the museum, it had to be by Van Renesse, a Rembrandt pupil. Rembrandt had many excellent pupils — we have works by Ferdinand Bol and others in the collection, and they're very good. The quality was fine, the condition was fine, and the appropriateness was fine, because we had a Rembrandt collection. To my mind it was fascinating as a teaching piece, and it was relatively affordable precisely because it was by Van Renesse, not Rembrandt. Had it been a Rembrandt drawing, it would have cost a fortune.

There's a favorite quote of mine, by Woody Allen: "Ninety percent of success is showing up." As a curator, I didn't buy any of the works we've seen so far on the West Coast. I had to go to London for the Rembrandt shell, to New York for this drawing and the Michelangelo. I bought contemporary works on the West Coast, but for the older works I had to travel to New York three or four times a year, and to London and Paris twice a year, because that's where the art was. Sometimes I'd miss a work, sometimes I'd come across one — but I had to be there. The works of art didn't come to me.

Hugh Leeman: Thank you for that context. This is one of the things I love about the art you bring to life — this insight that it's more than meets the eye, that there's teaching and learning embedded in the piece itself. Let's go to another work you acquired, from the first half of the eighteenth century, by Barbara Regina Dietzsch of Nuremberg. It reminds me, at first glance, of a still life from a century or two before. What's the context for seeing this in eighteenth-century Nuremberg?

Nothing Still: Barbara Regina Dietzsch

Robert Flynn Johnson: Will Rogers said everybody's ignorant, just in different subjects. When I came to San Francisco I had certain specializations, but I was by no means an expert in all things. Suddenly I was faced with the Achenbach, which collected everything — old masters to contemporary, artists' books, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures, and later photography. Coming from Baltimore, I had a good knowledge of Italian and Northern Renaissance art, nineteenth-century art, early twentieth-century and contemporary art, and photography. But I wasn't particularly strong in Italian Renaissance, or eighteenth-century art, or Japanese prints, or Indian miniatures, or artists' books. So I had to educate myself on the ground to cover those areas.

In the case of Barbara Regina Dietzsch, this was an artist I wasn't familiar with. But my dear friend, the artist and collector Joseph Goldyne, owned several of her works, which I admired in his private collection. Once I learned how masterly she was, I kept my eye open for them. About nine years after I arrived, in 1984, I was able to acquire this piece. I'm also very pleased, in retrospect, that it's by a woman artist. I didn't seek out Barbara Regina because she was a woman — I was looking for her because she was good. One of the things I've tried to do over the years is be aware of works by women and by people of color — but always works of genuine museum quality, not simply to fill a quota.

If you look at it: it's a still life, but nothing in it is still. There's a butterfly in midair on the left, a dandelion in the process of floating apart, half its petals gone. A snail crawls up one of the stems; another butterfly rests momentarily in the lower right corner. The work is full of motion. It's a gouache — opaque watercolor on vellum — and it's amazing. And yes, it harks back to Dutch seventeenth-century still-life painting.

Hugh Leeman: Is there a chance this is referential to the ephemerality of life, the vanitas tradition of the seventeenth century? The butterflies have such short lifespans, the dandelion is blowing away — everything lost to the wind and to time. What do you make of that?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Of course. The butterflies give you the brevity of life. The dandelion, whose seeds are floating off to land and regenerate, gives you the potential of new life. And the snail crawling up the stem gives you the sense that life is a struggle. You can make all sorts of associations to the human condition through a work like this. Absolutely.

Hugh Leeman: We've been looking at European art, from Michelangelo to the Rembrandts. Now we go to the other side of the world — to an artist nearly everyone knows, Hokusai, and his wave. But here we have something totally different. Give us some context.

One of the Greatest Draftsmen: Hokusai

Robert Flynn Johnson: This is a Hokusai brush drawing, so it's a unique work of art. I acquired it in 1994, and I love to tell the story. I was sitting with some fellow print and drawing curators, and I said, "I just bought a masterpiece by one of the greatest draftsmen of the last two hundred years for thirteen thousand dollars." They said, "No, you didn't." I said, "Yes, I did." "No — it can't be a good drawing, or it's in bad condition." I said, "No, it's a great drawing by one of the greatest draftsmen of the last two hundred years." They started scratching their heads: "It couldn't be Cézanne... couldn't be Degas... couldn't be Delacroix... couldn't be Ingres... couldn't be Picasso." Finally they gave up and asked, "Well, who did it?" I said, "Hokusai." And they said, "That's not fair — he's Japanese." I said, "So what if he's Japanese? Is he not one of the greatest draftsmen of the last two hundred years?" And they grudgingly had to agree.

So there it was — this great drawing of a horseman by Hokusai, for thirteen thousand dollars. And again, like so many of the drawings I've mentioned, it was never meant to be framed, hung, or sold. It's a stream-of-consciousness drawing. You'll notice there are two other drawings on the same sheet, going in different directions — the figures on the left run completely opposite to the horseman in the middle. This is just Hokusai expressing himself on paper.

I should say something about the Japanese print collection. When I came to San Francisco we had a quite good one — some very good Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Sharaku. But we had no Hokusai drawing. And drawings matter: someone once told me you can have a very good Rembrandt print collection, but the Morgan Library or the British Museum will always have a better one, because they've been collecting for two or three hundred years longer than you. But if you buy a Rembrandt drawing, or a Hokusai drawing, you're buying a unique work. If there's a traveling show of Hokusai or Rembrandt, they'll have to borrow your drawing, because it's unique and no other institution has it. That's what gives drawings their particular value to a collection.

Hugh Leeman: One of the greatest draftsmen of the last couple of centuries — I love that framing. I want to stay in Japan and go to another work you acquired, from the Osaka School, the middle of the nineteenth century. For people familiar with the much better-known Edo counterparts — what is the Osaka School, and who are we looking at here?

Below the Radar: The Osaka School

Robert Flynn Johnson: I'll be honest — when I came to San Francisco I liked Japanese prints, but I was no expert. Two people were very important to my education as a curator. One was the late Roger Keyes, a great Japanese print scholar who helped educate my eye. The other was a dealer named R.E. Lewis, over in Marin County, who specialized in old master prints, Japanese prints, and Indian miniatures.

When I got to the Achenbach, I found our Japanese collection was quite good — Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro — up until around 1850, but almost nothing after. Part of that was the prejudice of American collectors. James Michener wrote a famous book, The Floating World, his great tome in praise of Japanese prints. But in it, Michener goes out of his way to say there were no good Japanese prints after about 1850 — that everything after Hiroshige and Hokusai was essentially garbage. Of course, he was wrong. So one of my roles was to fill in the collection after 1850. R.E. Lewis was a great help: he had beautiful impressions that were readily available.

I acquired this particular print in 1976, less than a year after I arrived — for about one hundred and twenty-five dollars. For nothing. And it's an exquisite print. When I saw the price, I said, "Ray, why is this so inexpensive?" He said, "People don't appreciate Osaka prints because they're from Osaka — not Edo, not Tokyo — so they're less valued, even though the print quality is exquisite." This is a kabuki actor, shown within a faux frame — a Japanese print within a frame, all of it made in woodcut. The quality is absolutely exquisite.

And I didn't buy just this one — I bought about forty of these prints over a couple of years, for very little. I remember bringing them to the acquisitions committee, and some trustees said, "Are you wasting our money on these cheap prints?" I said, "No — in terms of quality and importance these are very valuable. They've simply been undervalued. We're buying them below the radar." About three years ago there was an exhibition at the Achenbach of our Japanese prints, from the early days up to the early twentieth century — about one hundred and fifty works, and over half were works I'd acquired. Essentially all the works after 1850 were mine for the collection — Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi, and other masters of the late nineteenth century, now considered quite important, but in the 1970s and early '80s considered not important at all. We acquired them anticipatorily, and I'm very proud of that.

Hugh Leeman: Thank you for that. I love Japanese Edo prints, and you mentioned The Floating World — but I had no idea about the Osaka School until this work you introduced me to. So thank you. We've been in Europe, then Japan. Let's round things out with a couple of works from the Americas. The first looks, at first glance, like a striking portrait with incredible contrast — but there's something beneath the surface, something that gives us insight into American history, the Civil War, and conspiracy. Tell us about it.

A Lincoln Conspirator, Out of Time

Robert Flynn Johnson: First of all, if you knew nothing about it, you'd say, "My God, this looks like a nineteenth-century Gap t-shirt ad."

Hugh Leeman: Sure.

Robert Flynn Johnson: A very handsome young man with dark hair, in a short t-shirt against a plain background. You'd ask, "Who is this? What is this about?" Well — you can barely see it at the very bottom of the photograph, but his hands are manacled. This is one of the Lincoln conspirators. This is one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His role was to go to the house of William Seward, the Secretary of State, and murder him at the same moment Booth was shooting Lincoln. He did burst into Seward's house, ran up the stairs to his bedroom, and tried to kill him. Seward was saved only by the fact that he'd been in a carriage accident a week earlier and had broken his collarbone — he was wearing a cast up to his chin to immobilize it. So when Lewis Powell came at him with a knife to slash his throat, the blade struck the plaster, and he was unable to kill him. Powell ran, Seward survived, and Powell was eventually captured.

Here he is after his arrest, wearing his manacles, posed against the turret of one of the ironclad gunboats in the Potomac. The Lincoln conspirators weren't held in a Washington jail, for fear it would be stormed and they'd be lynched, so they were kept on the ironclads in the middle of the river to protect them from rioters. Powell was tried, convicted, and hanged, along with Mary Surratt and two other conspirators — four in all — after Booth himself was killed. But the photograph has this dreamy quality, in such contrast to the savagery of the man's actions. And another interesting thing: this beautiful photograph, by Alexander Gardner, was in the collection of Robert Mapplethorpe, and we acquired it at auction after Mapplethorpe died.

Hugh Leeman: I love that last detail about Mapplethorpe — because I have to admit, when I first saw this, knowing nothing about it, I thought, "Oh, it's a Mapplethorpe." And then you tell me it actually came from his collection. Incredible.

Robert Flynn Johnson: It doesn't look like a nineteenth-century photograph. It looks out of time. One interesting thing about nineteenth-century photography: ninety-nine percent of it was either scientific or documentary. Very few photographers set out to make an aesthetic photograph. When Gardner took this, he took it as documentation — he was documenting one of the Lincoln conspirators. But because he was such a great photographer, he couldn't help making it a beautiful aesthetic object as well.

Hugh Leeman: This is wonderful, Robert. We've gone around the world — from Europe to Japan to America. I want to close with one final piece that brings us to San Francisco, where you and I find ourselves today: a Muybridge work that lets us see the city from inside a house. Give us some context on its importance, and what we're seeing.

A Circle of Serendipity: Muybridge in San Francisco

Robert Flynn Johnson: This was a discovery of mine. The photograph came from Paris. I was there in 2003, visiting a French photography dealer friend, and he had an album of one hundred and twenty albumen photographs of San Francisco — of three properties: a house at 605 O'Farrell Street in San Francisco, a summer house down in Menlo Park called Heart's Ease, and more. San Francisco, then as now, gets foggy and cold in summer, so a person wealthy enough to own that beautiful city house also had a sunny summer house in Menlo Park — and was rich enough to own the Buena Vista Winery up in Sonoma as well. Clearly very wealthy.

The album was like a time capsule of a person of means in the nineteenth century — the furniture, the rugs, all the accoutrements, and the buildings they owned. A couple of the photographs even showed reflections of the photographer in a mirror. When I asked the dealer who took them, he said he didn't know — it was anonymous. I asked the price: twelve thousand euros, because it was beautiful quality but unattributed. So I called Harry Parker and said, "Harry, there's an album in Paris, twelve thousand euros — I think I can get it for ten. Even if we never find out who did it, it's an amazing time capsule of San Francisco in the 1870s." He said, "Okay, go ahead."

When I got back to San Francisco — where, unlike in Paris, I had access to reference books — it took me ten minutes. I checked two Bay Area artists of real quality it might be by: Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Ten minutes, and I figured out the album was by Eadweard Muybridge — and that the two reflections in the mirrors were, in fact, unintentional self-portraits of Muybridge. Obviously, had the Paris dealer known it was by Muybridge, it would have been much, much more expensive. I took a hunch: even anonymous, it was worth ten thousand euros. That it turned out to be Muybridge is just amazing.

And one last element. This album was clearly brought from San Francisco to someone in Paris as a gift. And guess what the name was of the person who owned the house, the vineyard, and the place in Menlo Park?

Hugh Leeman: Who was it?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Robert Johnson.

Hugh Leeman: There's an incredible circle of serendipity for you.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Something out of the Twilight Zone. And I'm happy to say that when we bought it, a dear friend and collector contributed significant funds toward the purchase — so the album went into the collection in part in my honor. My name has always been associated with it. Wonderful serendipity, and I'm very proud of it.

Hugh Leeman: Robert, that's beautiful — thank you for sharing it. I love how you bring these works to life by telling the context and the story. Years ago I was renting an audio guide in a museum, and it said: if you really want to understand what's happening on the canvas, you have to look at what was happening off it. You've done that beautifully today. You acquired thousands of works over the years, and we've gotten to about eight — but let's make a time to do this again, because the stories are incredible. Thank you so much, Robert.

Robert Flynn Johnson: Wonderful. Take care.

Gladys Nilsson, “Gleefully Askew”, at the Crocker Museum - July 19-November 29, 2026

 By Maria Porges

Selected from six decades of painter Gladys Nilsson’s prolific and highly inventive career, the works in “Gleefully Askew” include dozens of paintings in multiple media, a gallery of prints, videos of her mural work and much, much more. Nilsson, now 86, is a quintessentially Chicago artist: a member of the legendary Hairy Who, a group of six figurative painters who all graduated from the city’s School of the Art Institute in1966. She has spent all but a few years of her working life far from California. Why, then, I wondered, is the artist’s first career retrospective taking place at the Crocker Museum, an institution committed to collecting and presenting work by artists connected to the Golden State?

The answer is both complicated and simple. It begins during the eight years between 1968 and 1976, when-- having relocated West for her husband Jim Nutt’s teaching job at Sacramento State-- Nilsson was living in a Sac’to ranch house, painting in a bedroom and raising the couple’s son Claude. Pregnancy and then parenting had led Nilsson to change her medium to watercolor (and later, acrylic), eschewing the toxicity of oil paint and its various solvents.

Far from having quit working after childbirth-- a frequent fate for women artists in that not-so-distant time-- Nilsson remained hugely productive. During the California years, her work was exhibited nationally and internationally, in a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1973); in the São Paulo Bienale (also ’73; traveled to Chile and Mexico), as well as in shows in San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago—and at the Crocker (another solo show, in 1969). It would not be the last time she would show there. Her work was included in group shows in 1972, 1976, 1981, 2010 and 2022. Thus deep ties were forged between artist and institution.

Even before her stay in California, Nilsson had already received substantial recognition for her work, showing with the Hairy Who in various venues (including SFAI!), as well as winning first prize in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity in both 1967 and 1968.  “Very Worldly,” her award-winning work in ‘67, measures over six feet wide and is painted on the reverse side of Plexiglas—a technique investigated around the same time by some of her fellow Hairy Who artists, including her husband Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum. The centerpiece of the first gallery, it’s filled with a teeming, roiling mass of figures-- exhibiting a horror vacui that Nilsson’s work would continue to explore.

Several works from the Whitney show (one of the first given to a woman artist at that institution) can be seen here. Inventive in both format and content, these include both very large paintings and a suite of diminutive works framed with ready-made embroidery hoops. The size and shape of the latter are sometimes described as ‘witty responses’ to the big ponderous rectangles favored by the (male) art world: as reclamations of traditional women’s work and craft practice. Maybe so. Their content definitely subverts traditional gender roles, making jokes about the kind of behavior women were supposed to be modeling, as well as about the traditionally virtuous content of embroidered samplers prepared in advance of virginal marriage. Using acrylic paint to mimic dashes of thread, Nilsson fills the space of compositions like “Little Ape” with figures of parent and child, simplified to bean-like forms with elongated, loopy arms that reveal Nilsson’s affection for Olive Oyl, Popeye’s cartoon spouse, watched by the family on Saturday mornings in the Sacramento rancher. 

In “To of Them,” though, there is definitely some kind of phallic activity taking place… or are those just balloon animal-like limbs? It seems reasonable to assume that, more often than not, something racy is going on in Nilsson’s hilariously, exuberantly sexed-up compositions.  

In the Whitney’s installation as described in the catalogue, the embroidery hoop paintings were interspersed among the larger works, offering a bold contrast in scale. For some inexplicable reason, the Crocker show groups them together behind a slab of Plexiglas—presumably, to protect them from some kind of viewer predation, but it’s a shame nonetheless. Still, the centerpiece of the Whitney show was surely the massive diptych titled “Dipped Dick: Adam and Eve After Cranach” (1971), presented here in magnificent isolation. Inspired by Cranach the Elder’s portrayal of mankind’s fall from grace as Eve plucks an apple and offers it to Adam, Nilsson’s version is full of color and pattern and a giant cast of squirming biomorphs, their phallic heads and limbs intertwined. Eve seems to be stroking the grinning serpent with one hand as she readies herself to lob the apple to Adam’s with the other. Between the two- identifiable as humans mainly by their skin color-- a massive orange-colored tree connects the two compositions, a device Nilsson would use again in later diptychs.

The unruly women and men, not to mention the fantastic range of genital-adorned creatures, depicted in Nilsson’s paintings suggests a challenge to any binary notion of gender. Like many other Chicago artists of her generation, her cast of characters draws freely and perceptively from a wide range of influences, from Surrealism to Outsider art, James Ensor and George Grosz to Hieronymus Bosch and Fernand Léger . Other sources have included comics, cartoons and indigenous Australian bark paintings, which inspired a series of works in silver ink on black paper in the early ‘70s.

There are many exceptional works, but I spent a long time examining a diptych from 1986 that seems both different from many of her paintings and, at the same time, epitomizes her gift for reinterpreting seemingly-unlikely works from art history. Inspired by a building site in her suburban neighborhood, Nilsson borrowed deftly from a series of pictures by Léger featuring construction workers inside a Cubist matrix of lines and architectural grids. In Nilsson’s mesmerizing diptych “Léger Faire” (a wordplay on the expression laissez-faire), men, in the painting on the left, and women, on the right, perch in and on a spare, colorful framework of girders.  

Nilsson manipulates not only their noodly, active figures but the space in which they are working, radically shifting the scale of workers seemingly occupying the same girder in a way that (mysteriously) recalls the reduced-scale representation of wealthy donors in religious paintings of the Middle Ages. Hilariously, the men on the left are untroubled by their giant phalluses as they go about their work-- though they seem to be aware of the women grinning at them from the adjacent frame, dressed in what look like bathing costumes from the ‘40s.

 Gladys Nilsson, Rounding Rosie's Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance, 2024. Charcoal, graphite, chalk, marker, wall paint, 108 x 416 in. Installation view, south wall in Alive & Kicking: Fantastic Installations by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Gladys Nilsson, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine 

One of the most compelling aspects of the exhibition is Nilsson’s increasing ambition in terms of scale as she has aged. This has included ever-larger works on canvas, such as Gleefully Askew (2019), a diptych measuring seven feet high by over nine feet wide. Nilsson has also planned and executed wall murals. Projects including temporary works at Colby College, the Art Institute in Chicago as well as at the Menil collection in Houston have given her the opportunity to spread out, so to speak. A video of her working on one of these is entrancing.

A personal favorite, however, might be “Shooing” (2023), a diptych with a combined overall size of 60 x 100 inches. It doesn’t say so in the catalogue, but to me, the subject appears to be Cinderella, being offered the shoe–thus the punning title–  that will determine her future. But it’s a Cinderella with a mop of gray curls, like all of the other figures in the painting. Nilsson’s women have gracefully, humorously aged with her.

By Liz Goldner

California Bounty at the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana extols the beauty, glamor and prosperity of the Golden State in the early 20th century. The exhibition's historic plein-air landscapes, scenic paintings, portraiture and still lifes are drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. Many of these paintings are on view in the Fluor Family Gallery with its magnificent ceiling murals and mission style architecture.

Historically, after California achieved statehood in 1850, it was regarded as the last American paradise, attracting individuals and businesses from across the continent. After completion of the transcontinental railway in the 1870s, railroads and developers began promoting the region for its climate, beauty, exotic Spanish history, and tourist attractions. Numerous people came westward in the 1880s, a trend continuing into the 20th century. 

The visual arts played a significant role in the perception of California as idyllic and abundant, including the work in “California Bounty.” Many of these paintings were acquired by the Bowers in the 1970s, when several SoCal museums, unaware of their unique beauty and value, were auctioning off collections of this work. 

While the museum has displayed these important paintings and related objects for decades, this exhibition of nearly 100 art pieces is its largest California display to date. The show has no end date and will remain on view for the pleasure and edification of the many people who visit it. 

The fountainhead of the exhibition is the many early 20th century plein-air or California Impressionist paintings, illustrating coasts, seascapes and canyons. Painters working in this style used the light, broad brush strokes and pure, bright colors of their earlier French counterparts. Yet the California version concentrated on the magic Southland light to depict bucolic landscapes. Several artists came to California from Europe and other parts of the United States, as Impressionism evolved to post-impressionism, cubism and other modern movements. 

California Impressionism (late 1880s to 1930s) differs from French Impressionism (1860s to early 1900s) in several ways. The French version focused on narrative scenes in streets, cafes, train stations and the countryside, with artists depicting these with broad brushstrokes and dissolving forms to capture the light. The California plein-air style concentrated on the magnificent unspoiled topography, employing more figurative shapes, while portraying the shimmering Southland light and atmosphere.

Among the landscapes on view at the Bowers, “South Sierra Lake, ” c. 1935, by Edgar Alwin Payne is dramatic and colorful. The nomadic artist spent long sojourns in mountainous regions, working on his paintings. This masterpiece illustrates brightly colored mountains, darker geological masses and an alpine lake in Bishop, California. 

William Wendt’s “Trees, They Are My Friends, ” 1936, a sweeping portrayal of a Southern California landscape, features Eucalyptus and other trees. Wendt, who was considered the dean of Southern California plein air painting, influenced his artist contemporaries to employ impressionist techniques to depict the spiritual nature of the land. He also stressed the importance of locations and the shapes of the land when creating the paintings. 

From the 1930s on, artists across the country were depicting everyday scenes in towns and cities, while describing the changes occurring in our civilization—as part of the American Scene Painting movement. It represented a distinctly American approach to art, and a reaction against modern art movements, proliferating in Europe at the time. California artists soon adopted this art style in what became known as California Scene Paintings. 

This figurative style, infused with color and harmonious composition, emerged from California’s rapidly developing culture, which included immigration and the growth of the film industry. While all works from this movement in this Bowers show are painted with oils, other artists, including many working for the film industry, created scintillating scenes using watercolors. 

Frank Coburn’s “Olvera Street, ” 1928 is a compassionate portrayal of the renowned Mexican marketplace; the location of the first Mexican settlement in Los Angeles. The painting captures the serenity of the tree-lined marketplace with a flower shop, restaurants, and musicians, many wearing sombreros. “Ideal California Day, ” 1921, also by Coburn, depicts a large nursery with abundant blooms, sunshine and with elegantly dressed women admiring the flowers. Los Angeles at that time featured a proliferation of flower shops with plants available from all parts of the world. The shop in this painting was at the corner of Vermont Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.

“Summer Night,” 1925 by Aloys Ludwig Bohnen portrays elegantly dressed guests—probably in San Diego where the artist lived—at a lavish gathering in a eucalyptus grove. Lit by lanterns, the painting exemplifies the glamorous lifestyle of that time. 

The most illustrative works in this exhibition are portraits, showcasing the diversity of California residents. Many early portraits are of landowners of Mexican ethnicity from the state’s 19th century rancho period. By the turn of the century, with the influx of Japanese and African American people into Los Angeles, and Chinese people into San Francisco, portraits reflected that diversity. 

Charles Percy Austin’s “Three Spanish Figures, ” c. 1915, presents a man wearing traditional Spanish clothing—a headscarf, cummerbund, sandals, and serape. Alongside him, an elegant woman wears classic Spanish-influenced attire. A third figure appears to be her lady-in-waiting, with an apron and a large jar on her head. This lucidly staged scene also features an elaborately attired horse and purple mountains. 

“Marguerite, ” c. 1909, by California artist Guy Rose, is one of the Bowers’ most treasured art pieces. This portrait of a beautiful woman wearing a colorful kimono, serenely reading a book, was painted while Rose was living in France—where he was a fixture of the American art colony in Giverny.

Supporting these paintings are murals painted onto the gallery ceilings in 1932 by European artist Martin Syvertsen. Illustrations include Spanish padres meeting with Native Americans, and a cowboy avoiding a charging grizzly bear. Another mural shows a wagon train of pioneers crossing the dusty desert expanse en route to California, and miners celebrating the discovery of nuggets of gold, before the majestic Sierra Nevada. Also depicted are the bells of San Juan Capistrano. 

The murals document the historic early 20th-century period when architects and decorators created nostalgic and evocative interiors. The murals present meaningful and relevant backdrops for this important exhibition that brings viewers back to a halcyon time in California.

A new sun has risen in the Crepe Myrtle section of Yerba Buena Gardens. Titled, in part, 13°N, 122°E, a reference to the geographic coordinates at the center of the Philippine archipelago, the newly-installed art work consists of an amber-colored acrylic dome that glows from within during daylight hours, Philippine time. Created by Filipino artist collective mumu with lighting design by Sol Light Studio, the work was conceived as a way to honor the Filipinos displaced by the construction of Yerba Buena Gardens as well as the Filipino community currently centered in SoMa.

Philippine Sun (13°N, 122°E) takes on its most dramatic form after dark. Placed at the intersection of Third Street and a path leading into Yerba Buena Gardens, the glowing half-orb, elevated above street level and surrounded by cascading water and hanging greenery, appears to beckon one into a magical realm. During daylight hours, a more subdued dome acts as an anchor to a quiet section of the Gardens; around it, individuals read, sunbathe and FaceTime, often alone.

The urge to inquire “what time is that there?” of a distant interlocutor linked by phone or video chat is probably universal. By illuminating at Philippine sunrise (which occurs, at the end of the September, at around 2:45 in the afternoon here) and going dark at Philippine sunset (currently around 2:45 am here). 13°N, 122°E attempts to concretize the feeling of being out-of-sync with far-flung family and friends. In two tries, I was unable to see a clear difference in the dome’s lighting before and after Philippine sunrise, a disappointment that may be due to the slowness of the programmed sunrise lighting sequence (scheduled to be sped up in coming weeks), competition from ambient light, or both.

Determined to see the work’s lighting transform, but non-plussed about traveling to the Gardens during San Francisco’s wee hours to catch Philippine sunset, I was excited to learn from Neha Sivaprasad, founder and principal of Sol Light Studios, that the work’s lighting also undergoes programmed changes during San Francisco sunset.

I arrived at the Gardens slightly before San Francisco sunset (as indicated by the iPhone weather app); the dome appeared to be unlit. Then, just before sunset, the hemisphere turned a somewhat darker amber. Thinking that might be everything, I turned away. About ten minutes later, as dusk deepened, I glanced back at the piece and found the hemisphere glowing an intense amber, ringed by bright yellow. A passenger in a car sitting at a red light on Third Street rolled down her window to compliment the work: “so beautiful.”

The work’s connection to the Philippines can be sussed out via knowledge of the Philippine flag, which contains a sun, or through the nearby banners inspired by the colorful sails of Philippine vintas. Still, a marker with text explaining the work would be helpful.

Philippine Sun has clearly been designed for its site. The work’s mirrored base reflects the trees and buildings around it as well as the amber dome above it The hemisphere itself, when not fully lit, reflects neighboring buildings and, if you look closely enough, cloud movements. The arched upper windows of two neighboring terra cotta buildings echo the dome’s shape; perhaps it was punched out of one of them.

The seeming simplicity of the work is the result of a huge amount of effort–from the manufacture of the dome in Thailand, to the coatings applied for glossy good looks, lighting fixture invisibility and graffiti resistance to, especially, the innovative interior metal cage that allows the LED lighting strips inside the dome to cast a sourceless, even glow.

A second art work, Jennifer Steinkamp’s It’s a Nice Day for a White Wedding, has also been installed at Yerba Buena in recent weeks. The digital animation, projected on the Humboldt building at the intersection of Yerba Buena Lane and Market Street, features flowers and inflorescences (groups of flowers) waving, as if in a field. Although the red-tint at the center of the piece is vaguely reminiscent of blood, the work, owned by SFMOMA, remains anodyne, with no clear connection to its location. Every four minutes or so, Yerba Buena promotional material and logos for each of the funding sources are shown.

Current City budget priorities mean that much of the public art in San Francisco is at least partially privately funded. Both of the works discussed here received funding from the Yerba Buena Partnership, a private Community Benefit District, in addition to City funds. That the works diverge radically in their aesthetic appeal, connection to community, and interaction with their setting, is, I believe, a positive thing. Contra the Big Art Loop example, private funding need not spawn sub-par public art. Fittingly, whereas Philippine Sun is expected to become a permanent installation, the projection of Steinkamp’s piece is planned to take an hiatus on December 3 and, after resuming on December 14, finish on January 15, 2027.

David Ireland lived at 500 Capp Street for over thirty years, and the house is filled with his conceptual art installations and sculptures. Ireland purchased 500 Capp Street in 1975 and made the run-down Victorian not only a site for artistic production, but also an artwork. After stripping off the old wallpaper, Ireland emphasized the building wall’s cracks and imperfections by sealing them with polyurethane, giving the space an amber glow. After he died in 2009, Ireland’s house was rescued by artist friends and supporters who thought that 500 Capp Street should be preserved. Paul Greub, the former occupant of 500 Capp Street, was an accordion maker who ran his business out of his home for 45 years, and his hoard of old jars, old brooms, old chairs, and old lamps provided Ireland with a treasure trove of readymades and inspiration.

The David Ireland house is a unique setting for two concurrent shows, Abstract Objects of Devotion, featuring the work of Amy Trachtenberg, and The Ringing in My Eyes, featuring the work of Andy Vogt. Both artists share with Ireland a love of recycling, simple materials, and the beauty found in what is lost, forgotten, or overlooked. In the entry hall, Trachtenberg has an installation of found objects: A beautiful swoop of woven hair nets, an oriole’s bird nest from her yard, and a flattened distressed silver colored box found in the parking lot of her studio building. There is an installation of a line of twelve branches, ten painted madrone branches, and two branches cast in bronze that is called 12 Bars. 12 bars can refer to 12 bars of music, keeping time, chord progressions, the color wheel’s 12 basic hues, and the 12 lunar months. Also in the entry way is Vogt’s Searching for the Door, an uneven pile of recycled lath wood anchored to a steel frame hung on the wall, a small sculpture where a section of an acrylic mirror is embedded in concrete, and two cyanotypes imprinted with images of small models of his sculptures. Both artists had permission to remove some of Ireland’s works and leave others. Guest artists are not allowed to permanently alter the house in any way by drilling or nailing into the walls, but must use existing holes.

From left to right:

1. Amy Trachtenberg, Various Studio Objects, 2026, gold-leafed paper, hairnets, and Orioles nest. Dimensions variable. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

2. Amy Trachtenberg, 12 Bars, 2026, Madrone, aluminum and gouache paint, and cast bronze, 42 x 23.5 x 2.5 inches. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

3. Andy Vogt, Searching for the Door, 2026, wood, atomized steel, 50 x 50 x 18 inches.

On the first floor is a dining room with a long table which was used for the many dinner parties Ireland hosted there. On the walls are several collages and a painting on porcelain by Trachtenberg, and lined up on a table are Ireland’s dessert glasses with dollops of concrete ice cream. There is a cabinet of Vogt’s untitled small rust drawings where nails or pieces of metal rust through colored plaster. Throughout the house, several cabinets are filled with Ireland’s own work, knickknacks, and as well as Greub’s jars—filled with sawdust or other materials gathered in the house’s reworking. At the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor, Vogt has a sculpture that he made specifically for the show titled Ear Drum. He wanted to engage with the phenomenon of sound and vibrations in the house in a tactile manner. His small curved piece uses the structure of an eardrum, but is cast in concrete and worked by hand while drying.

In the second-floor hallway, you encounter Vogt’s piece called Still Ringing. It is made from lath wood and concrete. According to Vogt, the sculpture simply fell into place and collapsed into a triangle shape as he attempted to install it; smaller installations of lath wood are sensitively placed, determined by the architecture of the hallways and the rear parlor. The negative and positive spaces created by the spacing of the lathe installations create three-dimensional drawings. The back parlor has an installation next to a window called One Eye; Vogt says it reminds him of a human face. Thin pieces of repurposed wood form a V shape in front of the window, with one small red light installed behind. Looking up in the center of the room has a cyanotype of one of his sculptures cut into 4 sections underneath Ireland’s chandelier of suspended blow torches, Fire Drawings, as if they were afterimages. In the rear hallway is a piece called Energies #1 #2 that balances lath diagonally from the top of a doorway molding to the ceiling of the hallway.

From left to right:

1. Andy Vogt, Ear Drum, 2026, concrete, 11 x 13 x 1.75 inches.

2. Andy Vogt, Still Ringing, 2026, salvaged wood lath, concrete, 32 x 10.5 x 7 inches. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

3. Andy Vogt, One Eye, 2026, salvaged wood lath with red light, 106 x 37 x 29 inches. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

4. Andy Vogt, Energies #1 and #2, 2026, salvaged wood lath balanced, dimensions variable.
   

Describing his process for making his small concrete sculptures, which are located throughout the house, Vogt said,

“The concrete works are textural transfers from (hand-made wooden) molds… (After the) concrete is poured into the molds and hardens… the final casting retains the wood grain texture from the molds as well as color and toning from mineral paint and steel powder that I often add…”

Vogt’s use of cyanotypes, originally used for architectural drawings, seems like a natural extension of his interests in architecture, afterimages, light, and process. He placed small models of sculptures directly on a paper surface treated with a light sensitive chemical and exposed it to sunlight, and the areas where the sun shined directly turned dark blue. The shadows cast by the sculptures developed in a range of lighter blues, creating three-dimensional reversed images.

Trachtenberg’s piece in the front hallway is called Everything Is At Least Three Things: The One You See, The One You Know and The One You Remember. This deeply personal piece is about the loss of her hair during cancer treatment. A regimented grouping of seventy small balls of human hair is placed in seven tight rows of ten on the top shelf of a rusted metal cart. The center shelf of the cart is heaped with soil dug out of her backyard. Ireland’s dung like wall pieces made out of balled up wallpaper are stuck to an adjacent wall overhead, and one of his simple metal lamps illuminates the cart. This piece has an unsettling mix of beauty and terror. For Trachtenberg, this piece is both personal and broadly political, evoking her Jewish family ties to memories of the Holocaust, her illness, and the unfolding daily horrors of war in the Middle East and Ukraine.

In the front parlor, there is an installation called Shrine in the doorway where Trachtenberg has vertically stacked a collection of lost or abandoned single shoes that she collected from the street. Ireland placed a reflective copper etching plate over one of the windows. There is a vintage tape recorder on the floor where Ireland’s recorded voice describes what you used to be able to see from the covered window. Adjacent to the window is her large silver painting called Say alabaster, say paradise, which is oil paint and enamel on unstretched Belgian linen. The linen was gifted to her in France where she lived for six years as a young artist. The painted lines in the painting are created by folding the linen many times and stiffening the folds with glue. The painting has a silvery moonlit surface echoing Ireland's copper window piece. Highlighting her magpie aesthetic is her piece hung in the lightwell, in the middle, somewhat elevated, where a twisted tail pipe is combined with a bicycle tube, kelp, rope, and metal thread. The twisted pipe reminded her of a body in motion.

From left to right:

1. Amy Trachtenberg, Everything is at least three things: the one you see, the one you think you know and the one you remember, 2024-2026, human hair, magnets, soil, copper plate, and painted steel cart, 46.5 x 36 x 21 inches. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

2. Amy Trachtenberg, Shrine, 2026, shoes and steel rod, 91.5 x 15 x 15 inches. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

3. Amy Trachtenberg, Say alabaster, say paradise, 2026, acrylic and enamel on linen, 84.5 x 60 x 7 inches.

4. Amy Trachtenberg, In the middle, somewhat elevated, 2026, metal, rubber, kelp, rope, and metal thread. 69 x 15 x 16 inches.

In the bedroom, Vogt’s Ever Diametric is made from an acrylic mirror that has part of the back scraped away so that light can pass through but also be reflected. The mirror hovers in a V-shape over the bed, casting shadows on the walls, lit by an ellipsoidal LED spotlight that is focused and shaped to illuminate a small mirror mounted on the wall. Also in the bedroom is a small concrete wall piece called Cove Corner Break and two cyanotypes with several layers of colors. Next to the bed, Trachtenberg places an offering of colored cullets (glass pieces used for remelting) in an aluminum strainer.

In the guest bedroom is Trachtenberg’s Awash, featuring an ornate metal headboard that she found on a beach in Southern California many years ago. The headboard is turned upside down with a collection of photos and found objects that she plans to change out during the course of the exhibition. Aesthetic Crush is a found bundle of sanding belts that created a beautiful loop shape. One Clare is a double portrait on a found piece of wood made with enamel paint, cut out words, ink and human hair. Ireland has several pieces in this room: an untitled spray foam piece that looks like a human head or large fungus stuck in a concrete base, a small sculpture which takes its shape from concrete poured in a corner, and a basket of dumbballs, his signature handmade concrete balls.

From left to right:

1. Andy Vogt, Ever Diametric, 2026, projected LED spotlight on altered acrylic mirror, 11.5 x 6 inches.

2. Andy Vogt, Cove Corner Break, 2024, concrete, 19 x 11 x 0.75 inches.

3. Amy Trachtenberg, Awash, 2026, wrought iron, photographs, found objects, 61 x 54 x 7 inches.

4. Amy Trachtenberg, Aesthetic Crush, 2026, Sandpaper and cloth strap with buckle, 34 x 13 x 2.5 inches. Photograph by Alan Bamberger.

5. Amy Trachtenberg, One Clare, 1994, Enamel, paper, human hair, photo, ink and plastic on wood panel, 20 x 14 inches.

Trachtenberg’s collage Abstract Objects of Devotion (1990 to 2026), with collaged words and old wallets on felt, is hung over David Ireland’s desk next to Ireland’s photo of Marcel Duchamp. There is an assemblage by Trachtenberg called Leverage where a large piece of orange cushion foam is pierced by an upside-down steel chair that belonged to Ireland. Above is Ireland’s The Swiss Fold, a cardboard box painted in the colors of the Swiss national flag and on the floor, another of Ireland’s poured corner sculptures. In the closet is Trachtenberg’s Dreaming with One Eye Open II, a vintage French children’s bed with cobalt cullets attached with wire.

Vogt’s Becoming a Memory is located on an outside patio. A heavy door appears to be floating at an angle, impossibly held in place by thin pieces of lathe wood. Vogt rescued some of the original Victorian doors in the storage area before they went to the dump. Becoming a Memory symbolically functions as a doorway to dreams, memories, while giving us access to other worlds.

From left to right:

1. Amy Trachtenberg, Abstract Objects of Devotion, 1990/2026, Mixed media, collage, and wallets on felt paper, 25.5 x 35.5 inches.

2. Amy Trachtenberg, Leverage, 2026, Polyurethane foam on D.I. ’s borrowed steel chair and Mason jar, 59 x 29 x 5 inches.

3. David Ireland, Swiss Flag, N.D., enamel paint on cardboard, 37 x 27 x 10 inches.

4. Andy Vogt, Becoming a Memory, 2026, discarded door from 500 Capp guest bedroom, poplar edge, paint, salvaged wood lath, 80 x 95 x 28 inches.

Downstairs is the more recently remodeled Paule Anglim Archive Room, which has clean white walls. A number of personal artifacts from Trachtenberg’s home and studio line a table and shelves: bones, shells, kelp and skulls, architectural shards, embossed book covers, hair, wire and headless plaster figures, found text, and studio notes. During the course of the show, she plans to move them around, and perhaps some of the arrangements may develop later into sculptures, collages or installations. There is also a pile of letters between Trachtenberg and Ireland on the table recounting their lives, travels and projects. They were close friends and shared a similar sense of humor and love of the quotidian. Against one of the walls is her new series of collages titled Plein-Air Elegies, made up of the handwritten signs and texts found on the sidewalks around Mission and Capp Streets where she had studios for decades. There is a cardboard sign made by “starvinmarvin” and a photo of Marvin. Marvin lived unhoused in San Francisco’s Mission District, and like her collection of lost and abandoned shoes, his sign and photo points to the precarity of human existence.

Fro left to right:

1. Amy Trachtenberg, Plein-air Elegy I, 2026, Leather, cloth, spray paint, plastic tape, found paper and photograph, 33 x 18.5 x 2 inches.

2. Amy Trachtenberg, Plein-air Elegy II, 2026, Found cardboard and paper, ink, pencil, staples, foil, plastic tape, spray paint, and newspaper, 36.5 x 17.5 x 3 inches.

3. Amy Trachtenberg, Plein-air Elegy III, 2026, Found paper and cardboard, photographs, metal, wire, staples, and thread, 34.5 x 15.5 x 2 inches.

Trachtenberg, Vogt and Ireland echo each other’s impulses and humor. Ireland was consumed by the reverberations of the houses and the detritus left by its former resident. Vogt’s use of concrete and wooden laths, and his rescue of one of the house's abandoned Victorian doors, shares Ireland’s preoccupation of the house as a metaphysical puzzle to be decoded and reimagined. Vogt’s show title The Ringing in My Eyes refers to both the physical and the worlds outside our sensory experience, as he explores the liminal spaces between light, memory and architecture. Like Ireland, Trachtenberg’s hunt for found objects that resonate with her sensibility, and her absurd poetic juxtapositions of materials, have a devotional quality and humor drawn from rhythms of everyday existence. I found both shows moving and intriguing. The David Ireland House is haunted, inviting, revelatory, mysterious, beautiful, and absurd. It is like a stage set waiting for the actors to arrive and start the performance.

Exhibition runs through July 25–October 17, 2026

Amy Trachtenberg: Abstract Objects of Devotion

Andy Vogt: The Ringing in My Eyes

By John Vochatzer

I first learned about the student exhibit The Story That Writes Itself at San Francisco’s premier corrupt-real-estate-mogul-disguised-as-an-art-school The Academy of Art University from an Instagram post advertising the opening on August 6th (although they mistakenly, and humorously, called the exhibit The Art That Writes Itself in the text of the post). The exhibit was curated by the Academy’s Executive Director of the School of Photography Timothy Archibald, who also teaches the course “AI for the Visual Artist.” At a time when most of us are being inundated daily with horror stories about the threats of AI–and in San Francisco where the malaise is at an all-time high and we’re constantly swarmed by AI advertisements everywhere from bus stop shelters to billboards–I found it a curious decision to host a generative AI art show amidst such a climate. 

Unable to make it to the opening reception (which appropriately took place as part of the now-under-new-management First Thursday Art Walk, currently being bankrolled by the primary benefactor of San Francisco’s new AI-powered surveillance state himself, Mr. Chris Larsen), I took a walk over to 688 Sutter Street a few days later during the business hours advertised online. To my surprise, a sign on the door informed me that the gallery was closed to the public all summer. I called the number on the sign to inquire about the possibility of seeing the exhibit by appointment, and was called back the next day and told that the only time to see the show would be during the following First Thursday Art Walk, set to take place September 3rd. 

Eager to actually see the exhibit before writing this review, I waited out the month for the one opportunity I might have, only to learn the day before that they had deinstalled The Story That Writes Itself and that a new exhibit was going to be on display for that First Thursday Art Walk. My first reaction was disappointment, and uncertainty as to whether I could (or should) proceed with writing a review for an exhibit that I didn’t in fact see–but after thinking about it for a while, I surmised that it was fair, and perhaps even appropriate, considering that none of the artists featured in the exhibit actually made any of the “art” (which will henceforth be referred to as “slop”) themselves. The entire process of generative AI relies on speculation, and I therefore see no issue with basing this review off my own speculative assumptions gathered from the few pieces of slop from the exhibit I was able to find online. 

Before proceeding, I should also clarify that my criticisms are not necessarily directed at the students (who may or may not know better) but rather at instructors like Timothy Archibald, and at the Academy of Art University as an institution, for facilitating and normalizing the cognitive offloading of creativity onto AI, and for their attempts to legitimize such asinine garbage as "art." And truth be told, these students already have it bad enough considering most of them were likely duped into enrolling in this sham of a school in the first place and are incurring mountains of debt for a d-list education that includes courses on making AI slop (and that’s if they are even among the small percentile of those that make it through to graduation). 

Of the little bit of work I was able to see from The Story That Writes Itself, the first word that comes to mind in trying to describe it is "banal." Banality, however, connotes human mediocrity–which this literally mindless drivel does not fully or accurately entail. What lays at the core of the work is therefore more akin to a simulacrum of banality, and as such it supersedes all previous thresholds of human banality and becomes something so banal the English language has yet to develop the vocabulary to describe it.

Much of what I’ve been able to gather about The Story That Writes Itself I gleaned from this post from Archibald on Instagram where he (or perhaps an AI bot) talks about his experience at the opening, and appears to be making some sort of shallow, meandering attempt at self reflection–which, much like the work in the show itself, falls short of any substance. Archibald talks about being confronted with some of the ethical ramifications of AI, and like most proponents of these new technologies, his predominantly non-answers are tinged with both apathy and laziness. The images in the post in turn appear to be mostly AI-generated slop depicting homelessness on the streets of San Francisco, while in contrasting slides an avatar of Archibald enjoys the comfort and exclusivity of the art opening he curated. While I’m unsure whether it was actually featured in the exhibit, the 17th slide of his post features a piece of slop I’ve come to regard as emblematic of the entire show. 

This particular slop (like much of the rest of Archibald’s post) is set in a dystopian version of San Francisco that I wish I could say was a caricature of our city but is unfortunately all too representative of the blight and disparity we are currently facing at the hands of the tech industry and the ensuing gentrification brought to our doorsteps. The setting of the image is one very familiar to downtown SF–abject human misery and street-level crises amidst a sea of corporate branding and the cold disregard of the surrounding metropolis. Only here we additionally have the tired pastiche of superimposed pop-culture icons such as Garfield, Charlie Brown, and Darth Vader in the foreground, along with the brightly lit facade of a gallery where The Story That Writes Itself is on view. 

My assumption is that this image was an attempt at irony or self-awareness about the ethical dubiousness of exhibits like The Story That Writes Itself, but the end result only comes off reeking of both indifference and mockery. The inclusion of the mainstream pop-culture menagerie seems to harken back to some of the pop surrealism of the ‘90s and early 2000s, but lacking any of the depth or originality of its predecessors. In short, just about everything about this slop is about as tasteless and soulless as you would expect from "art" being made by AI at the Academy of Art University.

Featured within this image (on an exhibition sign behind the gallery window) is an image of the first graphic I had seen for The Story That Writes Itself–the one that was used for the online flyer and promotions by the school. It shows a worm’s-eye view depiction of a young Black woman, clad in a voluminous yellow puffer and semi-translucent moon boots–both the angle of the shot and her elongated legs make her appear towering and empowered, and the overall vibe is of a slightly futuristic Adidas advertisement. As to why this was chosen for the flyer image, I couldn’t say, but considering the student who prompted it does not appear as either Black or femme, I suspect it may have been an attempt at tokenism or racial shielding to deflect some of the criticism Archibald no doubt feared this exhibit might receive. 

The only other image I saw from the exhibit was of Darth Vader eating a Happy Meal in a retro McDonalds, and I can only assume the rest of the collection was more of the same–trite, nonsensical pop-culture jargon plagiarized off decades of advertisements and other imagery stolen by AI companies. The title of Archibald’s course (and the subheading of the exhibit) “AI for the Visual Artist” would seem to imply the exploration of AI as a tool to supplement artists’ pre-existing practices, but the little bit of work I managed to see from The Story That Writes Itself shows no indication of being anything other than generic, low-grade, generative AI slop. 

The question we are now left with is what exactly are the justifications used by professors like Archibald and other AI advocates for its being so thoroughly implemented in the arts? There are of course those who genuinely see the technology as groundbreaking (and view those who oppose it as small-minded luddites). I would agree that exhibits like The Story That Writes Itself are indeed groundbreaking, but only in that they represent milestones in society’s gradual offloading of human thought, ingenuity, and imagination onto machines–which may complete certain tasks like art-making and creative writing with more speed and efficiency, but with absolutely none of the spirit. The other brittle defense of AI lays in claims to its inevitability, and the notion that we all must eventually succumb to the so-called coercive laws of competition. This says to me nothing other than that you subscribe, or at the very least concede, to this extractive culture in which profit is God and every person is left to fend for themselves as our human era gradually destroys life on earth as we know it. It would be remiss of me to describe the individuals who use this excuse as anything other than what they are–cowards and assholes. 

I can see, however, why it might be easy for a white, middle-class college professor like Timothy Archibald to maintain such a complacent attitude about AI, as they will likely be among the last to feel the devastating effects that it will wage upon society in the coming decades. The job losses to automation, the widening income gap, and the destruction AI and data centers are wreaking on the natural world will be first and most harshly felt by lower income communities, people of color, and the global south. And to anyone who views the advent of these technologies with a more utopian optimism, I would say that one honest look at the greed, recklessness, and dishonesty of those steering the ship ought to be enough to dispel illusions of any sort of hopeful outcome when it comes to the future of AI and its entwinement with life on earth. 

I will end this review by addressing the students who participated in The Story That Writes Itself, and anyone considering taking the course “AI for the Visual Artist” or other such similar shams by grifters like Timothy Archibald–it’s not too late to change course. Like many, I did my experimenting with generative AI when it was in its infancy, before knowing and understanding the narratives surrounding the harmfulness and moral precariousness of these technologies. Even then, those experiments came with a strong uneasiness not just about whether they were good for me as an artist, but whether they were good for art in general–and now, a few years later, I can confidently say they are not. 

You are artists and you do not need the help or assistance of corporate plagiarism machines like Midjourney, ChatGPT, or Claude, and it’s only with your refusal to succumb to the false narratives of their inevitability that we can protect human creativity and, more importantly, protect the future of our species and our planet. Perhaps at some point the narratives around AI will shift, its governance will be in more responsible hands and its trajectory won’t be so laden with theft, wastefulness, and destruction, but as of right now I truly and sincerely doubt it. 

*Reminder to the reader, the sentiments and opinions expressed in each of the reviews are solely that of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of the publication or its editors unless otherwise stated.