By Doug Welch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tsitsi Michelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Rod Roland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Organizing as Artistic Practice

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

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

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

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

How the Film Festival Brought Him to the United States

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

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

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

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

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

Naivete, Experimentation, and the Freedom of Not Knowing

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

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

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

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

Art Education Beyond the Silo

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

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

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

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

Using AI and Game Engines in Creative Practice

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

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

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

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

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

AI, Inevitability, and Human Agency

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

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

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

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

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

Myths, Rituals, and Other Ways of Seeing

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

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

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

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

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

The Ideal Outcome of Teaching and Practice

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

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

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

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

Does AI Deserve Sovereignty?

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

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

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

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

Authenticity, Media, and the Politics of Attention

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

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

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

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

Inframundo and the Maya Cosmovision

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

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

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

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

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

What Silicon Valley Could Learn From Big Time

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

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

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

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

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

The Cultural Change He Wants to Provoke

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

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

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

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

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

By Liz Goldner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Run Fast, Bite Hard curated by Anton Stuebner at Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, Mar 14—May 30, 2026

By Hantian Zhang

Donna Haraway is known for thinking through compact figures: cyborg for composite identity, then companion animal for “co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality.” In “Run Fast, Bite Hard,” the exhibition on view at Catharine Clark Gallery through the end of May, with a title drawn directly from Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, artworks in different media gather to illustrate what happens when such concepts move from language into visual form. At a moment when the nonhuman is often imagined through AI, automation, and synthetic intelligence, the show redirects attention toward older entanglements: dogs, deer, cattle, prey, skins, domestication, and loss.

The route through the exhibition is roughly circular, beginning and ending at the vestibule of Catharine Clark Gallery’s clean-lined, modern show space. One of the first works to address the exhibition’s premise is Laurel Roth Hope’s Man’s Best Friend: French Bull Dog II (2026), a walnut wood carving of a dog skull whose gaping eye sockets and nasal cavity appear unmistakably human. At once a fantastical extrapolation and playful speculation on a possible outcome of human-dog coevolution, it offers a bold imagination of the depth our inter-species involvement could take. 

Further in, the bright colors of Marie Watt’s rainbow block-letter works catch the eye. Her two pieces turn address itself into image: illuminated letters cast spilling primary colors, while the meanings of the words, invoking pun and associative thinking, probe interspecies relations. Salutation (2025) looks simpler: the text DEERDEER is rendered in red and blue, the emotional exclamation maintained by pronunciation but unsettled by the replacement of “DEAR.” The text here becomes an address to a different species: an invitation to come closer, a yelp of excitement, or another possibility altogether. In any case, the text presupposes proximity between deer and the caller of “Dear, dear,” the address itself establishing deer and human as companions, at least at the moment of calling.

This direct address can also be found in Jen Bervin’s Sloth (2021). At first glance, it is simply a rectangular piece of white fabric hung on the wall; but the work’s meaning changes once you notice the stitched lettering “sloth.” The silver-colored needlework itself is abstract, so it takes a moment to recognize the word, a delay that feels apt given the animal’s defining slowness. But recognition only prompts further questions: why sloth? Nothing else in the work indicates any association with the hairy, algae-inhabited tropical animal. Is this a blanket made for a dog named “Sloth”? This would be a reasonable explanation, but it also reduces a richer meaning to the mundane. The exhibition is strongest in moments like this, when interpretation emerges slowly rather than being delivered all at once.

Another work built on delayed recognition waits on the other side of the exhibition space: Deborah Oropallo’s Rangeland (2025), a photographic image of cracked land. Here, it takes a moment to recognize that the shape of the photo is cowhide, then another, if you walk up close, to see that the image itself was printed on cowhide. The work then resolves: a ranchland deprived of moisture amidst climate crisis, where the only cattle present are dead and survive only as cowhide. The relationship between our companions is marked by absence, a memory evaporated through the cracks of the dried land. 

Juxtaposed with this lack is the overflowing maximalism one finds in Julie Heffernan’s Self-Portrait as Gatherer (Mirror World) (2017). In it, the barefoot, sack-loaded artist is pulling an ornamented Christmas tree through an ornate interior space not unlike Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. Hunted deer are piled into a small mound on her left, while a scene of political oppression—one that could evoke Nazi soldiers ordering captured Jews to dig their own tombs—is reflected, desaturated, in the mirror behind her. This assemblage of dissonance pushes into absurdism and invokes thoughts not only of companion animals but of human brutality: companion animals are relationships not between singular entities, but cyborgs.

More companion animals and cyborgs appear in the show: mice, lizards, seals, and more abstract fusions of recognizable species. Because there are no wall labels, it takes longer to arrive at interpretations of what one sees. This can feel like a constraint, a disorientation, since companion animals’ complex histories need more clues for unpacking; but it can also feel like a liberation, as if, standing before the work long enough, the stories of coevolution at our core might begin to emerge. The absence of labels is part of the show’s risk. Sometimes it leaves the works too open, turning complicated histories into loose metaphor. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is strongest when the works it gathers make Haraway’s ideas visually convincing.

Born and educated in Scotland, Gwen Hardie built an international career through formative years in London and Berlin before settling in New York City in 2000. Her paintings, rooted in the charged territory between body, atmosphere, and perception, have been presented across the United States and Europe, including recent solo exhibitions at Arden + White, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, Estella Gallery, 57W57 Arts, and Galerie Pugliese Levi.

In 1994, she became the youngest living artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, a milestone that marked her early critical recognition. Her work is held in major public and private collections, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Council, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Modern Collection.

Reviewed by Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, Hardie has received fellowships from Bogliasco, VCCA, MacDowell, and Yaddo.

Gwen Hardie’s exhibition is on view at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, CA, through May 2nd. Learn more here.

Wardell McNeal - strange / familiar at Cañada College, Redwood City, CA is Curated by Emilio Villalba

April 9th - May 14th, 2026

By Kelly Jean Egan

Walking into the gallery, the light hits first. Late afternoon sun cuts across the white walls at an angle, catching the paintings in a way that feels almost accidental. Some colors get sharper, others soften. The walls are stark, but that contrast makes everything land harder. The blues feel deeper, the oranges warmer, and the quieter areas start to glow a bit.

McNeal’s paintings don’t fight the light. They sit in it. Even when the colors are bold, there’s a softness underneath that slows you down. The spacing helps too, nothing is crowded, each piece has room. Together they start to feel connected. You’re not really moving from one painting to the next. It feels more like drifting through them, like something just slightly off from reality.

Wardell McNeal, based in Oakland and represented by pt.2 Gallery, has been steadily developing this visual language over the past few years through a series of solo exhibitions. Shows like A Series of Meditations on the Complexities of Life (2021) and Dreaming with Eyes Wide Open (2022) established his use of stylized figures and shifting, almost unstable spaces. By the time of A Little Room To Bloom in 2023, that language had loosened, opening into more organic forms and less fixed compositions. strange / familiar continues that progression, focusing less on subject and more on perception; how something recognizable can start to slip the longer you look at it. That progression becomes clearer once you return to the room and let the paintings unfold in the light.

In Dream Sequence 2.0, that relationship to light sharpens. Two large, rounded hands frame a small, glowing form at the center, which reads less like an object and more like a source. The palette is saturated with blues, greens, and sharp orange accents, but it doesn’t sit heavily. The paint softens at the edges, especially where the light seems to move outward, diffusing through the composition. Under the gallery’s late afternoon light, those transitions become more noticeable, pulling the work away from something purely graphic and into something more atmospheric. The repeated circular forms across the lower half build a steady rhythm, echoing the central glow without fully resolving it.

If Dream Sequence 2.0 holds its light at the center, empath / impasse lets it spread. The composition opens up, with light moving across the surface rather than staying contained. A striped hand rests over a coiled form, set against suns, orbs, and geometric shapes that feel both constructed and unstable. The color is more forceful with bright yellows, greens and deep blues, but it never hardens. The brushwork keeps it loose enough for the light to shift as you move.

Together, the two paintings feel like variations on the same problem. One pulls inward, the other opens out. In both, light and color do the work of holding the composition together while also quietly undoing it.

In Specters of Time Well Spent, the figure moves forward but never fully settles. At 48 by 36 inches, it holds a strong presence on the wall, especially against the sharp white of the gallery, but it too doesn’t feel heavy. A face anchors the composition, built out of shifting planes of color, with a plant and a glass pulled into the foreground. The structure is there, you can feel it, but the surface keeps it from locking in. Edges soften, colors drift, and the space folds in on itself.

It feels quieter than the other works. Less about movement, more about holding something in place for a moment. Despite its size, it stays relatable, human, and soft. The title fits, it doesn’t read as nostalgia exactly, more like a pause or a moment. The kind of stillness where things feel familiar but slightly out of reach like a found photograph you could swear is someone you know even though you are certain it’s not.

Spiritual Practice pulls things in again, both in scale and feeling. Four figures sit close together, their forms simplified into rounded shapes and repeated circular heads that almost read like halos. They could be friends meeting, or something closer to a quiet form of worship, but the longer you sit with it, it starts to feel more internal than that, like different versions of the self in conversation. Not fixed identities, but shifting states, moving between each other. There’s a sense of looking inward here, of trying to understand something profound. The repetition of forms reinforces that, like thoughts circling, returning, opening slightly each time. It begins to read as a kind of self-examination, where the act of sitting with it gradually widens the space of awareness. The color keeps it alive, moving across the surface so it never settles. It feels less like a scene and more like a ritual or process; something ongoing, shared within the self, and slowly expanding.

What holds the exhibition together isn’t any single image or motif, but the way McNeal lets things remain slightly unresolved. Across the work, forms shift between figure and object, interior and landscape, never fully settling into one or the other. There’s a looseness to that approach, but also a clear sense of control in how the paintings are composed and spaced. The light in the room amplifies it, but the paintings carry it on their own. You leave with the feeling that nothing has been fully explained but that’s part of the point. The work stays with you because it doesn’t close itself off. Its looseness shifts in a way that feels close to life. Whether over a moment or a decade, things change, people evolve, and that sense of movement is visible throughout the work.

This is the fourth exhibition curated by Emilio Villalba, Assistant Professor of Art at Cañada College, continuing a focused and steadily building program at  the school.

By Shrey Purohit

Climate-themed group shows tend to fail in one of two ways. Either the work drifts into abstracted politics that could have been made from a desk, or it leans so hard on its subject that you forget there is an artist in the room. Entropic Landscapes at TINT Gallery avoids both. Michelle Edelman has built a three-artist exhibition around a deceptively simple principle: every piece on these walls was made by someone who went to a place, stayed long enough to be changed by it, and brought a record back.

The artists are Margaret E. Murray, a printmaker who sailed to Svalbard; Polly Townsend, a realist painter who has worked in Antarctica, Death Valley, and the Badlands; and Lisa Kairos, an abstract painter rooted in the Mojave. On paper, those approaches shouldn't work, a realist and an abstract painter with an etcher. In the room, they talk to each other remarkably well. Edelman told me she curates from a running list of artists whose work speaks to her, watching for connections across media. “I loved the idea of having a super realist painter next to an abstract painter, bridged by a printmaker,” she said, “all inspired by places they’d traveled to, where the effects of climate change were evident.” That thoughtfulness is visible in every pairing on the walls.

Murray’s etchings are ones I kept returning to, ever since I showed her work at Ingleside Gallery in 2021. Her process has remained the same however the imagery and subject matter has evolved. She works with copper plates using a hard-ground technique combined with heated egg whites, a method that causes the plates to crack in unpredictable ways. Those cracks become the work, whose beauty is in the textural fracture lines standing in for the calving ice sheets she witnessed firsthand in the High Arctic. In April 2025, Murray spent two and a half weeks on an Arctic Circle Residency expedition, sailing through the Svalbard archipelago between the northernmost tip of Norway and the North Pole with twenty-eight other artists. When I spoke with her about the show, she described catching the last sunset of the season and watching the light shift entirely to blue. She talks about the stillness of those northern places with a kind of reverence that’s easy to feel in the prints. A piece like Glacial Melt VI holds that register of something solid becoming something liquid, the transformation recorded in the materiality of the process itself. The entropy isn’t written out, it happens in the making.

Townsend’s paintings are the quietest works in the show, and they reward patience. She paints landscapes pared back to their essentials, modest bands of earth and sky, simplified until the eye has nowhere to go but into what’s left. Her palette is restrained; her compositions are stripped to the parts that matter most. Spirit Level offers a sliver of terrain that feels both radiant and tender, like catching a landscape holding its breath. Townsend has spent time in some of the most extraordinary and difficult places on the planet, a residency in Antarctica in 2023, painting trips to Death Valley and the Badlands, high-altitude work in Mongolia and that directness comes through. These aren’t paintings of landscape as a conceptual or distant place. They’re paintings by someone who stood in these places, looked carefully, and found a way to distill what she saw into something essential.

Kairos takes the exhibition into abstraction, and it works because her process is rooted in the same impulse that drives the other two: go to a place, spend time there, translate what being there felt like. She talked about working in the Mojave, building up an ambient awareness of a place over many visits rather than painting any single view of it. Her paintings begin as improvisational ink drawings on paper, then get mounted to panel and finished with acrylic. The results carry the language of maps and topography, shapes that could be a macro view of a coastline or a micro view of cracked desert ground. Diagonals and crisp interruptions in the picture plane suggest shifts in altitude or time. Color, she told me, is emotional: it corresponds to where she was with the painting, not a literal description of terrain. Threshold sits between landscape and memory, and the longer you look, the more those two things blur.

What holds the show together is that all three artists are making records of presence. Murray’s plates crack because the material does what she wants viewers to see what's happening to the ice. Townsend’s paintings distill because the land she paints asks for that kind of attention. Kairos layers and interrupts because that’s what happens when you try to hold a changing place in your head long enough to paint it. The climate change's message lives in the work as a condition, an experience, something each artist absorbed by being in a landscape under pressure, created in the studio and now shared on a wall.

TINT Gallery has been carving out a specific identity on Gough Street since Edelman opened the space in 2021: contemporary women artists, with a particular ear for technical craft and material invention, and a program that bridges international debuts with Bay Area painters and printmakers. Entropic Landscapes is one of the clearest expressions of that ethos I’ve seen from the gallery, tight curation in a large gallery with three confident voices, and enough breathing room. There’s an artist talk on April 26 during Climate Week, and if you can make it, you should; hearing Murray, Townsend, and Kairos describe their processes in the room with the work will sharpen everything. Even on its own, the exhibition asks the same thing of you that the landscapes asked of the artists who made it: slow down, stay long enough to notice, and trust that paying attention is its own form of response

By Hugh Leeman

What would happen if our screens stopped functioning tomorrow? Would we experience the noun of attention transform into the verb of focus? Would we rediscover the sensory experience of being a human, but come face to face with how disconnected we'd become from the profundity that was always there, seemingly parallel to here, but nowadays more distant than ever? 

California artist Ruth Pastine's Colorscape at Scott Richards Gallery offers a sensorial experience through engaging, vibrating colors on tonally graduated, allover canvases that evoke a sense of intimacy and wonder at color's ability to alter mood. Pastine's paintings construct an environment adjacent to the piece by beveling the artwork's back edge, casting shadows around the work, and creating a subtle sense that one has approached an object framed by the very shadows it casts. Such shadows enhance the sense that light comes from within the canvas itself, turning the paintings into places that could be entered as if perceptual portals into another world. 

While Pastine's colors appear to hover or vibrate by stimulating the rods and cones in our eyes, causing asynchronous stimulation that forces our eyes' photoreceptors to adjust between the signals of light and color and the brain's ability to process them, her results are more spiritual than scientific. Sitting in front of her canvases and staring off into their space creates a sense of motion that summons descriptions of audio-visual hallucinations shared by patients in psychedelic trials, which carry them to states characterized as "my thoughts wandered freely", "I felt a general sense of gratitude", and "I felt open to all emotions". 

Colorscape's canvases evoke mythology's rich history of entrances situated amidst the mortal world, which lead to the beyond. These openings in legendary recounting are said to be accessed by chance, through screen-like veils of foggy mists, where the otherworldly resides parallel to here and now. 

Pastine's canvases act like such screen-like veils, opening into a space parallel to our world of attention-grabbing, dopamine-drenching content, through her colorfield mist, entered with the payment of focus. The artist describes the experience of their creation as "Being in the present moment for the sublime is an understanding of both a terror and a beauty, being confounded by an awe, something much greater than ourselves."  

20th-century art critic Clement Greenberg once noted that, "The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced." For Pastine, those influences call forth modern artists who abstracted light, layered color, and similarly stimulated the rods and cones in our eyes to create spaces both real and metaphysical. For the viewer with imagination and the time to pay focus, the trip is awarded a passage to the phenomenon that could carry us toward the sublime she experienced in making them.  

Red Magenta, Colorscape II, 2026 recalls minimalist light artist Dan Flavin's homage to color field painter Barnett Newman. Flavin's piece, untitled (to Barnett Newman) two, used fluorescent lights to frame a corner where two gallery walls met, constructing a spatial bath of light, distorting our sense of place. In doing so, Flavin pulled the banality of a room's corner towards the realm of a mythological portal. For Pastine, the light ballast appears as blurred streaks of purple that equally frame the viewer's focus towards a levitating magenta colorfield that falls away from the red edges of the artwork, offering us entrance into the distant corners of perception. 

VIOLET (YELLOW), COLORSCAPE, 2026 summons the viewer's attention to its center by framing the artwork's edges in violet, then layering nearly imperceptible yellow that optically blends with the violet to create a hazy purple that skirts the edges of gray. The spatial effects from afar recall light artists James Turrell's construction of space, while her layering of paint to achieve sensorial effects recalls Mark Rothko's allover color field canvases, where color hovers over the artwork as if a misty screen we penetrate to pass from our world into one illuminating the present moment's ability to confound us with awe. 

In 1943, Mark Rothko and fellow abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb, with the support of Barnett Newman, co-authored a letter to The New York Times stating that "art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks." That same year, in a draft manuscript, they waxed equally poetic, "we deny that the world of art has any objective appearance. The world is what the artist makes it." Pastine has made a world that, if we engage, leaves behind the noun of attention captured by the screens of our hands to experience the verb of focus, where the passage through her mist-pigmented screens into the adventure of an unknown world, parallel to here, is unencumbered by any time but the presence of now. 

Maria Jenson is a San Francisco arts leader and the Creative and Executive Director of SOMArts, where she has led the organization since 2016. Under her leadership, SOMArts has expanded public programs, strengthened racial-equity commitments, built public-private partnerships, and presented influential exhibitions such as The Black Woman is God and The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience. Before SOMArts, she founded ArtPadSF and worked on SFMOMA’s External Relations team. Jenson is also a visible arts advocate: she serves on boards including Californians for the Arts, SF Arts Alliance, and Arts for a Better Bay Area, helped push for San Francisco’s 2018 Proposition E arts funding measure, and in 2026 has organized and hosted Artists Live Here convenings to mobilize artists around cultural policy, funding protections, civic participation, and anti-displacement efforts in the city’s arts ecosystem. She pairs institutional stewardship with grassroots advocacy throughout San Francisco.

The following are excerpts from Maria Jenson’s interview, as conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Editor’s Note: 180 letters were mailed to San Francisco’s Mayor Daniel Lurie at the first Artists Live Here event, and nearly 50 at the second event.

San Francisco's Art Ecosystem in Crisis

Hugh Leeman: Maria, you've become a vocal activist in the face of an art scene in San Francisco that is in a dramatic tailspin — closing museums, arts non-profits, multiple galleries, two landmark art schools over the last handful of years. For people who don't know, what is going on with San Francisco's art scene?

Maria Jenson: I had to start with a chuckle because I'm still trying to figure out what's going on with the San Francisco art scene. And I think every other person I speak with — whether they're an arts administrator, an activist, an artist, or people at City Hall or at commissions — it is a time of tremendous change. Currently it's been ushered in by new leadership at City Hall, but I also think this trails back to the pandemic, when that fabric of arts and culture began fraying with each organization that wasn't able to financially hang on. Then there was this long period of recovery for the arts and culture scene in San Francisco that seemed to last longer than most other urban cities, what we would call arts destination cities. Some of the secondary cities — Dallas, Detroit, other places — seem to have rebounded more quickly than San Francisco has.

In this current moment, I think it mirrors what we're feeling nationally — a tremendous amount of change ushered in within the same window of time. That level of complexity is perhaps more than most of us can manage or comprehend. These are interconnecting pieces, especially when you look at what's happening in San Francisco between charter reform, the commission restructure, hiring a new person to manage the merger of three commissions like the Film Commission, Arts Commission, and Grants for the Arts. Just those things in a sentence alone is overwhelming. Cities move very slowly generally, and sometimes we've complained about that and it made sense. But when things are moving at an accelerated rate, it's problematic because we can't catch up with the changes enough to understand what they are.

It reminds me of why we marvel at skilled jugglers who start out with three balls, then add a fourth — you think, oh my god, they can't possibly add another one — then a fifth, a sixth. Those are very skilled people with that talent. But if you think about each one of those balls as a change being introduced, it becomes more difficult to hang on to all of them, and they're all most likely going to fall. What we're looking at right now is how are these balls going to land, and what is that impact going to be?

Charter Reform, Commission Restructure & the Loss of Public Voice

Hugh Leeman: Coming back to that juggling metaphor — you mentioned a restructuring of the commission and charter reform. Can you give a bit of context to what the charter reform is and what the commission restructuring means?

Maria Jenson: I want to say at the start that I am no expert on either. The commission reform follows a fairly reasonable logic — there are too many commissions in city government, too many commissioners, and if someone wasn't making this up, there was actually a commission about commissions. So I understand the need to streamline and to sunset commissions that are not active or functioning.

However, the challenge in the overlap between the charter reform and the commission restructure is this: in the case of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the best part of these commissions is that they provide public access. There's transparency into policy and procedure, and an opportunity for the public to comment on governance — why certain people are getting grants over others, what the criteria is. There's a view into the actual practices and policies of an arts commission.

With the charter reform, the desire is for the Arts Commission to move into what they call administrative code. The difference with that designation is that the public side of the commission's affairs goes away. There's not a public forum for that. For some commissions, maybe that makes sense. But certainly for a commission that is serving the public, anything touching the public deserves the public's voice, opinion, and critique — because that's how the best policies are shaped. If you bring in those that the policy is supposed to serve, they become part of the creation of the policy.

The city charter, as I'm told, is hundreds of pages thick. To wade through all of it would require a certain amount of time. And that's another problem — how much time do we have to really dig into the policies and practices to see exactly what's going to be most beneficial? That's what the arts community has been trying to weigh in on and have dialogue with our city partners about.

Evolution, Broken Models & Who's Missing from the Table

Hugh Leeman: Coming back to the juggling metaphor — the entertainer can't entirely control everything. These balls represent things in society, and change is taking place much faster than the institution can manage. It seems like lots of other industries have recovered, but the arts have not. It speaks to the idea that our institutions and the frameworks we've structured on for more than a century are not evolving with the times. Maybe the real question is — should some of them go away? Should we find some idea of evolving rather than mourning? What does that evolution look like?

Maria Jenson: It's a popular frame of thinking to say everything's broken. People are saying the nonprofit models we've inherited are broken, our funding mechanisms are broken, the way we go about fundraising is broken. This kind of motif has been floating around, and I'd say it caught fire around the pandemic. When you cease operations because of a health crisis, there's suddenly time — and ironically, organizations were able to evaluate what their budgets really looked like, whether they needed that staffing, what different assessments needed to happen. Those were very organic conversations because they involved the whole organization, the whole team, the whole board.

The challenge with what's happening right now is we're missing certain players from the negotiating table. And in the center of that squeeze — the one that never makes it to these conversations — are the artists. We're not leading these conversations with who are generally supposed to be the beneficiaries of a lot of this work, and who are also the ones we point to when we say the arts are going to recover our city. But arts aren't going to recover the city without artists. So why aren't we bringing the artists in to also have some of these conversations?

I think the very process itself needed to be evaluated before entering into an evaluation process — to create enough runway so that the structure for these conversations has the right people involved. Instead, the desire to collapse government, to shrink it, to streamline it has been more of a framework, but not necessarily anything connected to actual people. On paper it looks great, but in execution it's not going to go well because the people who should be sitting at the table are still largely missing.

The State of Emergency Summit & Letters to the Mayor

Hugh Leeman: In February you hosted a State of Emergency Summit for the arts community in San Francisco and the Bay Area. What was the outcome, and what actions have taken place from the conversations that emerged?

Maria Jenson: SOMArts has a history — in fact I think its history was founded on such gatherings and happenings. It has an advocacy heart and was founded by arts activists, artists, and citizens who looked at the idea of a commons as a way of equitably approaching problem solving for a community. I mention that because SOMArts was more of the event host than the lead for this. I just happened to mention to a writer at KQED that it was a state of emergency because CCA had just closed. Then we learned of a cultural center closing. I did receive a little flak from certain people for calling things a state of emergency, which I found a little ironic given that we really were in what I feel is a crisis. And the idea that we can have a crisis and a narrative that we're recovering at the same time — yeah, that's exactly the tension.

The outcomes were better than we expected and more than we had hoped. It was more like a resource fair. Our goal wasn't so much to disseminate talking points or positions — we just set up a lot of different opportunities for people to find their way in, in the most meaningful way to them, to get their voice out there. The letter-writing station was probably the most successful — over forty letters were written to the mayor's office, to the chief policy officer Ned Siegel, to the Pisces Foundation, to Downtown Corp. The letters went out into the community, and I started hearing back from some of these entities that letters had been received.

This is how you create that space where the commons can actually impact and influence these conversations. Most importantly, I think the city and all of these other entities had a chance to get a real, visceral sense that there is a very vibrant, vocal community in San Francisco that needs to be seriously considered as thought partners. I've been seeing how this effort has slowed the roll a little bit on the rush to make all of these decisions around the charter and commission restructure. We are seeing a slight slowing of the process and a little more listening. Getting the people who hold the big tent poles of capital — the stakeholders who drive a lot of the decisions in a city — to actually listen to the arts and culture ecosystem was a takeaway I hadn't really considered deeply, but seeing the response from the people who received the letters was very impactful.

Meeting the Mayor & The Most Immediate Policy Priority

Hugh Leeman: It's impressive, the organization you did on such short notice. I was there that evening — several hundred people, a very passionate crowd. You mentioned the letters written to the mayor's office. Subsequently you had a meeting with the mayor himself. How did that conversation go?

Maria Jenson: I think the letters actually paved the way for that meeting. City mayors are exceptionally busy and getting on their calendars is virtually impossible, especially in a city of this size. So having the entrée of those letters meant I felt like I walked into the meeting with the community present. That meeting went very well. I've never actually had a meeting with a mayor in San Francisco — it was more of a group meeting, on the heels of the Mission Cultural Center closure, so it largely focused on the center directors who had physical buildings. It was an opportunity for face time. I walked in with a proposal of what I felt needed to be addressed most immediately. And I'm really relieved to say that we were listened to. I have heard that there's already been some movement on one or two of the proposed ideas I put on the table that I felt were very important for the city to focus on as soon as possible.

Hugh Leeman: The arts in general have a bit of an over-romanticization with the idea of raising awareness — and raising awareness doesn't do a lot if you don't have people willing to take action. People like yourself have clearly been taking action. One of the biggest words that comes up in this realm is policy. Hypothetically, if you could push a magic button and get any policy passed for the most immediate and pressing needs you're speaking of — what would that look like?

Maria Jenson: The interesting thing is it's not a new policy. Sometimes we think new policies need to be made, and they do — but the city of San Francisco, going back to maybe 1945, has this document organized with the SF Planning Department that laid out the objective of evolving the city from manufacturing into being more of a tourist destination. It's long in this community's history. It's basically a thirty to forty page document that really breaks down all of the different strategies to evolve the city into this cultural destination. We have a lot of roadmaps already — really thoughtful roadmaps. I look back at that and think, this is pretty striking in its resemblance to what we would want to create in this moment.

One of the things most important in terms of policy had to do with getting the hotel tax fund reinstated. The hotel tax fund was first initiated in 1961, I believe, and then changes came and it went back into the general fund. Around 2016, myself and a group of arts organization leadership across the city — all budget sizes, with artists present as well — formed a coalition to reinstate the hotel tax fund, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2018.

So in this moment, what policy needs to be created? I would say what policy needs to be sustained and upheld. That is one of the strongest policies for arts and culture — the funding mechanism. As a city, we don't really have a designated line in our budget that truly articulates a certain amount of money is going to the arts and we're not going to touch it. The only challenge with the hotel tax fund is that it's dependent on the forecast of how well the fund is doing — how many people are booking hotels and coming to conventions. That makes it slightly unreliable, as we saw with the pandemic, when nobody was coming to the city. We did receive a ten percent cut then, but the mayor at the time found a way to backfill that deficit so grants were still whole. We did not have that experience this particular fiscal year when our property grants were cut by ten percent. There was no backfill. It was just a hard landing.

If anything, it's worth doubling down efforts to shore up the policy around Prop E — because it also became a funding source that was tapped for administrative needs from the Arts Commission. We want to make sure the money coming in from the hotel tax plan is going out directly to artists and arts communities, and not used to fulfill deficits the Arts Commission might be experiencing. We're investigating that to get clear on what it looks like.

Tourism, Attention & the Art of Getting People to Show Up

Hugh Leeman: Going back to the policy — the city moving from manufacturing to tourism, funding tied to hotel tax — we're ultimately talking about attracting tourism, and that's where so much of this funding comes from. My understanding is that in the last quarter tourism is almost back to where it was before the pandemic, if not slightly above. But here's what I'm curious about: the arts are often clumped in with the entertainment industry, and I don't know that the arts can continue to compete with entertainment. I can sit in my hotel room and be endlessly entertained by YouTube and social media. What can the arts do to catch the attention of tourism, and of society more broadly? What can artists and administrators do to capture people's imagination?

Maria Jenson: That's a very broad and interesting question, because the same issue you cite for tourists is the same that residents face — the competition of streaming all of your entertainment. But I want to throw in something a little disruptive here, which is that I'm sensing — from my small window on the world — that people also have a growing desire and appetite to be out more, to go out in public. We're seeing attendance levels at events reaching maximums. SOMArts, on average, has a minimum of three hundred people coming to an exhibition. Artists Live Here had over four hundred. What was interesting and instructive about that is that people felt compelled to come out not so much because they wanted to light a torch and burn down City Hall. People needed to congregate with each other — in some ways to mourn some of these losses, but also to think about what we could do together. There's a growing appetite for togetherness.

In terms of what the arts can do — I'm not sure that's entirely the question for arts organizations or artists, because step into any gallery or arts organization across the city and you'll find an incredible exhibition, without comparison. I think it's more about how the city communicates with the rest of the world, telling the story of what exists in arts and culture spaces. One small civic idea: having kiosks where information is found publicly around the city. Some cities are great at that — you're walking down the street, you don't have any plan, something pops up on a screen that tells you tonight this is happening at this place. So much gets lost on a website. No one's really going to websites. If the city could think about even gamifying that — how do we make that part of it very interesting, how do we help people find what's happening in different neighborhoods — I think more visual communication about what's happening in our city would help enormously.

Hugh Leeman: I like that idea. It sounds like an incredible business opportunity — gamifying this, so that if you've come into SFO or you're going to Moscone, it's easier than ever to target people with information, and it serves both the consumer and the producer, in this case the arts.

Maria Jenson: Yes. And what you mentioned about SFO is great — I think those discussions exist somewhere around SF Travel and other organizations. A more overall calendar for the whole city has been discussed. Whether it's at SFO, at BART, wherever people are accessing transportation to get around the city — it'd be great if something said, what's on tonight? It could even be a QR code people grab as they're disembarking from a plane. We're the most technologically advanced city, so we should be able to figure out how to gamify getting people navigating around the city.

The Lightning Rod: Activism, Union Roots & Finding a Voice

Hugh Leeman: In 2019, Maria, you wrote on SFMoMA's online journal Open Space: "I'd like to even be more of a lightning rod for the local arts community. I have learned how to conduct energy from the lofty heights of capital to aspiring artists up and down the avenues of our region. I believe that the Bay Area is the most radical but undercapitalized cultural market in the world." This is a powerful statement. I want to start with the lightning rod element — where does the activist in you come from? Who inspired this?

Maria Jenson: I have no idea. I wish I knew. Eventually, how you were brought up will show up in your life. My dad was a United Auto Worker — I come from a union family. One of my brothers was an attorney who bargained contracts for teachers in a Michigan statewide district. I spent a lot of time at the dinner table listening to either one of them talk about their various strategies and challenges and what they were going to do. My dad used to take me to a lot of union meetings when I was younger, and I was surprisingly interested in them.

But I never really connected the two. I never thought, I'm going to be a union rep, I'm going to be someone who bargains contracts. I went to LA and did anything but that — became a true Angeleno, really only cared about going from spin class to yoga, getting my wheatgrass, checking out an event, next day repeat.

Then moving to San Francisco — I think the difference is LA is a vast geography. I didn't know any of the district heads or anything. I knew who the mayor was; I didn't know who a deputy mayor was. Most people I knew in LA didn't either. And so I moved here, just when the recession was still simmering. I had a gallery in Venice, California for about five years. I started it because I was going to a lot of art events in LA — I'd joined MoCA LA at some fancy membership level because I thought, if it gives you more access to artists, this has got to be interesting. And I was always fascinated when I'd go to these events that everyone was terrified of asking a stupid question, because it's LA and you've got to be cool. The coolest thing is to act like you don't care. So everybody wouldn't even look at the art. But here's an artist actually asking, does anyone have any questions? So I would ask all the stupid questions — how did you get into this, why did you choose that palette?

When I moved to San Francisco and asked, what do I like doing? I love these low-threshold events for people to experience art. Art Pad immediately brought me into city politics, especially around partnerships — I wanted to partner with the Arts Commission, the museums, various groups. Then just getting permits. And I started getting more and more involved. Then I moved to SFMoMA, which was a whole different level of interaction with those same commissions — more policy conversations that I was becoming privy to, put on point to attend certain policy meetings on behalf of the director. Because I was proxy, I wasn't allowed to weigh in, so I did a lot of deep listening — listening to this group of arts leaders fight for funding. I thought, I didn't know that people at the museum level had to fight for funding. So then ABA started up and I became a member.

Hugh Leeman: Tell people what ABA is.

Maria Jenson: ABA — it's not the band, just want to be clear on that — stands for Arts for a Better Bay Area. It's not really a non-profit organization. It's a collectively run group of folks who pay attention to the policies happening at City Hall or the policies that need to be created. It serves to inform the public via white papers, opinion papers, town halls, mayoral debates. So I was toggling between those two things, and somewhere in that window of time I just started getting surprisingly interested in how this city functions and what it really requires just to do something as simple as be an artist or be an arts administrator.

The Most Undercapitalized Cultural Market in the World

Hugh Leeman: In that same 2019 piece, you mentioned that "the Bay Area is the most undercapitalized cultural market in the world." Seven years later, here we are — amongst the richest cities and regions in the entire world, but the arts sector doesn't seem to reflect this. What do you make of that?

Maria Jenson: There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is to look at what the art market in San Francisco actually is. When I arrived, we were at another one of the boom-bust cycles — the bust side of things. When I launched Art Pad, it was in response to that time when the smaller independent galleries — the really cool galleries that make up what's vibrant about San Francisco — were starting to shutter. Along with that, the really awesome artists coming out of those spaces.

Art fairs are economic engines. The reason I liked doing a smaller independent one is because, in my thinking, it wasn't about the fair and how great it is — it was more like, it's great to create a platform where the commons can engage. I'd gone to Art Basel Miami for maybe twelve consecutive years, almost studying it as a hobby. Not so much watching how the main fair grew, but what happened in the surrounding areas and neighborhoods as a result of having this fairly well-capitalized project. What I've discovered is collectors and people who buy and deal art love a public arena to do this work. It's sport for some of these people — it's a treasure hunt.

San Francisco lacks a sustained feeling that there are collectors actively going to galleries. We don't have, in my opinion, what's known as an art market — who's really buying art here comes down to just a handful of people.

When I launched Art Pad, one of the things people thought might happen was the launch of Twitter, which had launched about a year and a half before Art Pad. I was told Twitter should become a partner, so I knocked on their door and had a meeting. Something very telling — when I set foot in the office area, there was no art on the wall. Gigantic walls, and I only saw one piece of artwork. In looking back, there wasn't an embrace of arts and culture by tech. There wasn't any type of brokering of a partnership — they got their tax-free deal, and that was it. Tech's not known for their embrace of arts and culture. Since then, certain inroads have been made, but it's still not a full embrace, not championed enough.

There's a moment right now where, with the launch of the Downtown Corporation — largely focused on downtown recovery — one of the things I've been thinking about is that line needs to extend beyond downtown and start including arts and cultural organizations outside of that particular zone of interest. If we can be part of these larger public-private partnerships, we might be able to create more of a market. Market making is not easy — it's a false thing in a way. How do you organically or intentionally make that happen? These are conversations that need to happen at the city level, at the very top. The people who hold incredible relationships and partnerships need to broker conversations between those in the arts and those who can capitalize and fund this. For one part of the city to recover is not a full recovery — it's a partial recovery. And the smaller things launching in different places need to feed into a much broader, healthier ecosystem. That isn't going to happen the way we're doing it right now. We need a public-private partnership relationship, somehow.

Matchmaking: Who Owes a Responsibility to the City?

Hugh Leeman: I like the idea of partnerships — a collaboration that's symbiotic. I want to go back to when you started at SOMArts. You've talked about Art Pad, working at SFMoMA. In 2016, you did an interview just as you were taking over as director of SOMArts, and you asked rhetorically: "How do we make collaborators and partners of those people who we feel owe a responsibility to the city?" With ten-plus years of hindsight — how could you answer that today?

Maria Jenson: I believe these things need to initiate from the top and tunnel down. Because it's at the street level where there's all of this incredible art production taking place — the literal creation of paintings and all kinds of work. It's very active. But when you think about city governments, you think about the hierarchy and the power structure. I'll speak for myself — we don't always have access to name-your-building billionaire here. We don't have access to name-your-well-financed equity group here. But the city holds those partnerships and relationships, especially the current administration. And so it is a responsibility of the city to do what I like to call matchmaking. What are the needs of the arts community and who are the aligned partners that we can broker relationships and conversations with?

For most of us, our emails would not get read by the people we feel could be great partners — we don't have access. This is fundamentally a question of access. I've mentioned publicly on a panel that this is something the city really actively needs to be engaged with. Call it partnership, call it collaboration. I say matchmaking because you really are trying to match the capital and interests of someone with organizations and artists.

If we could get the city on board with understanding that public-private partnership comes with access, comes with an introduction, comes with the understanding that yes, the city can't fund all the things that need funding, but it's engaged with so many people who are so well-capitalized that it should be able to broker those conversations.

And here's the thing — for too long in San Francisco there's been this self-consciousness that constantly looks at New York or LA for measuring itself. But how did LA become LA? How did LA become an arts destination? When I lived in LA, no matter which neighborhood — Silver Lake, Venice, Santa Monica — there was always a geographic tug of war about which side of town had the coolest art things happening. What changed all of that was when the Gettys launched Pacific Standard Time. That was the game changer that made LA an arts destination year round. It softened the idea of boundary and borders. No longer was there a geographic tug of war. It was the greatest equalizer — they flooded the field with capital, and that gave everybody a chance to produce and create, with very few strings attached.

What we're missing in San Francisco is akin to that — not a Getty person, but an institution, a collaboration between institutions and those with equity funds, to put together that type of funding that says, let's create our own thing here, let's support as many people as we possibly can. Something like that would really create what we're looking for in terms of market-making, in terms of being a tourist destination, in terms of moving away from art being viewed only seasonally.

Radically Transforming the World

Hugh Leeman: I want to ask one final question. I was reading a piece in preparation for our interview, and at the end you cite Angela Davis's quote as a source of personal inspiration: "You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time." If you succeeded in radically transforming the world, what would it look like?

Maria Jenson: Thank you for bringing up my favorite quote of all time. To start — it would look accessible. It would look accessible and open to all, and it would be creating the type of commons that we're currently missing. Our common spaces are actually deteriorating. It would be a place where you have multiple points of entry, a place where you can shapeshift — you can go from writing to painting to producing. It's a very free and open space.

It would feel like maybe San Francisco did in the sixties and seventies, which we're always trying to get back to — that place of fluidity. Things would be more in flow. There would be fewer restrictions and more possibilities for the city to feel more like a bit of mercury — it can break off and atomize and go in different directions, and it can collect itself in wild interpretations somewhere else. That would be a radical change for the city in this moment, especially as we're feeling it move more and more towards private art, private spaces, private restaurants. Everything's private now.

Hugh Leeman: Maria Jenson, thank you so much.

Maria Jenson: Thank you, Hugh. This was great.

By Patrick James Dunagan

The first public art work in San Francisco I ever came across with any awareness of it as such (aside from the Vaillancourt fountain at skater mecca EMB plaza on my first visit in the late 1980s) was Jim Dine’s “Big Heart on the Rock” (Bronze, 1984) tucked up along the pedestrian path of Pacific Ave between Davis and Front streets among red brick office buildings just down from Jackson Square and only a short stroll away in fact from EMB plaza. That’s the path I always approached it from, after walking along the bay to then turn west heading back into town, passing Dine’s “Heart” making my way up into North Beach invariably bound for City Lights, Vesuvius and Specs.

Dine’s done a whole series of hearts, another one that’s a favorite of mine is his painting “Blue Clamp” (1981) regularly on view in SFMOMA’s second floor galleries. There’s apparently no connection between Dine’s “Heart” and the annual Hearts in San Francisco collections which are publicly displayed in Union Square and around town before being auctioned off to benefit SF General Hospital. These claim to be inspired by Tony Bennet’s iconic “I left My Heart San Francisco” which in turn I suspect also has no connection to Dine’s work. As he takes the sentimental and drags it back to its place curbside from where it crawls forth into our lives.

Some might pass Dine’s “Heart” every day without stopping to consider its place in the city’s life. How in its raw unsettled mettled manner of resting atop “the rock” it offers passersby the chance to reflect on just being, hanging around…as poet Gregory Corso put it “Standing on a street corner doing nothing is POWER.” That’s what Dine’s getting at. Physical dynamics of bodily health taken for granted everyday. We breathe and move about because of the heart pumping along inside our chest. As all living things do. Stop awhile, have a rest and consider that.

Several years later I came to hear of Joan Brown’s “Pine Tree Obelisk” (1987) and upon looking up the address realized that the site of its location, Sydney G Walton Square at 21 Front St, was the very same park adjacent to the red brick where Dine’s “Heart” rests.

A long time fan of Brown's earlier works, particularly her collaborations with her second husband sculptor Manual Neri (which in fact share a similar gnarled surface to Dine’s “Heart”) and her own early constructions such as Untitled (Bird), 1957-1960, I was rather disappointed when first checking out her “Obelisk”, yet this later work of Brown’s continues slowly to grow on me. There’s something totally Californian about this column challengingly rearing up against San Francisco’s downtown sky.

Brown enlists key emblems of the San Francisco Bay Area: the ever present seagull soaring atop the obelisk’s crown while the column’s shaft is embossed with the towering pine tree with bay water regulars the crab and the shrimp adorning the base. Totems of the locale which as a San Francisco native she was quite intimate with.

Complimenting the inclusivity of Dine’s “Heart” (i.e., everybody’s got one) Brown’s “Obelisk” offers an everyday specificity centered on San Francisco itself. Presenting familiar critters framed in a bright display of color.

Appreciation for Brown’s use of bright lively colors and the upbeat vibe of her imagery arrive haunted by the knowledge of her death beneath a falling turret as she was installing another obelisk in India just three years after this one’s completion. Delivering an eerie shadow of premonition to the work’s otherwise cheery disposition.

At the center of the square is French sculptor Francois Stahly’s “Fountain of ‘Four Seasons’” winner of the 1962 Golden Gateway Sculpture Competition. This was the inaugural work dating back to the Square’s creation as part of the Golden Gateway redevelopment project led by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

It’s unclear what may have doomed the prolonged functionality of the fountain. Perhaps it does come to life on occasion. As it is, its dry spires are fittingly reminiscent of overly tall rounded out stone cacti.

Off to the far left in the above image may be seen George Rickey's “Two Open Rectangles” (1977) yet another sculpture in the park. The distance of the shot is not meant to denigrate his work or anything, the exclusion of a closer photo and lack of any further attention given to the work is simply due to the fact I have never previously noticed it. (Wikipedia also includes Benny Bufano's “The Penguins” among its listing of artworks in the square; this is strange since it stands kitty-corner across the street from the Square’s southeastern edge in front of the shopping plaza. Where it might be said to be observing things from afar.)

Just down off a path on the opposing side of the fountain from Dine’s “Heart” and facing off against Brown’s "Obelisk" in the distance on the far hill is Marisol’s “Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe” (cast bronze 1982). Having never walked over to the area before I had never come across it until just recently. There’s such the quiet intimacy to the work in this setting I’m sure many others easily pass by it hardly ever taking note it’s there. Like the young blonde walking her small dog who hesitantly smiled at me as I fumbled about with my phone snapping some pics of O’Keeffe perched atop a treestump stick in hand a pair of her chow chows faithfully flanking her.

Marisol gives us the O’Keeffe of her later final New Mexico years capturing the gnarled readiness and sturdy durability which mark the artist’s visage in the abundant photographs and film footage from the period when O’Keeffe had become a living legend. A pragmatic symbol of the integrity of the disciplined artist.

Marisol’s leaving off of the chiseled features in all their rawness, along with giving a purposively unfinished block-like form to O’Keeffe’s body, echoes and complements the grittiness of Dine’s “Heart” just a stone’s throw away.

While O’Keeffe’s close up paintings of flowers are among the hallmarks of Modernist art recognizable to many North Americans her name most likely is not. Her visage is even less so. Marisol, Dine and even city native Brown are likely artists unknown to many of the city’s residents (let’s not even mention Stahly). Few ever bother to stop and stare at their works.

The Square’s small enough with so few hindrances blocking your view that it is possible to stand in several different spots and easily distinguish each of these works from a distance as you turn about. My own preference is always to just be passing through. Then it’s continually as if a surprise to find one’s self next to these works observing how patterns of light strike them as in and out of passing cloud shadow they emerge at times wet from showers or fog while at other times they bask in sunlight as sunbathers lounge about and here or there a ball or two gets thrown back and forth. Among dog walkers, lunchtime workers and the random athletic trainer workout in progress I make my way from here to there. Enjoying what the eye sees as the feet carry on.

January 17–April 26, 2026

By Kelly Jean Egan

There is a kind of unruliness to Maija Peeples-Bright’s work that feels immediate, bold, crowded and a little mischievous, but the longer you stand with it, the more deliberate it becomes. Animals multiply, patterns press up against one another, surfaces thicken and swell with color, and what first reads as exuberant quickly reveals a careful, almost methodical construction. The paintings, sculptures, and textiles don’t simply celebrate whimsy; they insist on it, building entire worlds out of repetition, texture, and a refusal to leave any space unconsidered.

Peeples-Bright came of age within the irreverent orbit of Northern California’s Funk scene, though even there her work feels particularly light on its feet. After arriving in California from Latvia as a child where her family had fled the upheaval of World War II, she eventually found her way to UC Davis, where a painting class with William T. Wiley rerouted her from mathematics toward art. That shift seems fitting; her work carries a kind of internal logic, but one that favors play over order. While she is often folded into the Funk narrative alongside artists like Wiley, Roy De Forest, and David Gilhooly, Peeples-Bright resisted the neatness of that designation. With David Zack, she was central to what became known as Nut Art; a looser, more unruly framework that made space for the absurd, the decorative, and the deeply personal without needing to justify itself. The Rainbow House, which the two established in San Francisco’s Alamo Square Historic District, became a gathering point for that spirit: part studio, part social experiment, and wholly committed to a way of working that refused to behave.

The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art exhibition gathers these threads into something vivid and immediate, less a retrospective than a fully inhabited world. Paintings, ceramics, and textiles move easily between one another, each carrying the same visual language while testing how far it can stretch. Surfaces are dense but never heavy; color is saturated without collapsing into noise. What emerges is a kind of continuity, not just across mediums, but across time, where earlier impulses and later works feel in conversation rather than in sequence. The installation reinforces this, allowing objects to echo one another across the space: a painted leopard slipping into a textile form, a ceramic figure holding the same offbeat posture as one rendered in oil. Rather than isolating disciplines, the exhibition leans into their overlap, making clear that Peeples-Bright’s practice was never about medium so much as it was about building and sustaining a particular kind of visual ecosystem.

In Sun of Beast over Clowder Clouds and Alligator Sea, everything is turned up, the color, texture, repetition but somehow it still holds together. The surface is thick and built up, almost sculptural, with glitter and raised forms pushing the image outward. Bands of animals move across the canvas: elongated yellow figures above, clusters of smaller leopards and tigers in the middle, and a dense, swirling field of alligators below. It’s busy, funny, and a little overwhelming at first, but the longer you look, the more controlled it feels. The repetition isn’t random, and the color never slips. It’s playful, but it’s also precise. One feels transported into otherworldliness, not as a spectator but as a participant.

‍ ‍Lotus of Love Says Hare to Love moves differently. Instead of stacking the image, it spreads out. A red hare stands upright at the edge, facing a loose gathering of animals and forms that feel more like a scene than a pattern. The surface is still thick, still worked, but the composition breathes more. The humor is quieter here, it's less about repetition and more about how these figures seem to acknowledge each other. At points, the painting even slips past its own edges, with forms pushing beyond the canvas so that the animals themselves start to act as the border. It’s a small shift, but it matters; it suggests that these worlds aren’t meant to stay contained. Seen together with the 2025 painting, it becomes clear that Peeples-Bright wasn’t just filling space with energy. She knew when to pack it in and when to let it open up, and both feel just as intentional.

The shift into sculpture feels less like a departure and more like the paintings stepping off the wall. In Flamingo Flames, the “beasties” fully break free from the surface. A cluster of flamingo-like forms twists upward, their long necks looping and leaning into one another as if they’re mid-conversation or caught in some shared joke. The glaze is thick and glossy, colors bleeding into each other, reds, pinks, oranges, so the whole piece feels alive and slightly unstable in the best way. It’s messy, tactile, and joyful, but not careless. The way the forms stack and balance shows a clear sense of structure underneath all that movement. Even here, where things feel most improvised, nothing actually falls apart.

IRIS You SplenDOED Love takes a different approach. Instead of clustering, it builds upward. A central figure holds a kind of canopy, part flower, part wing, part drawing made solid, hovering above a base crowded with smaller animal forms. The piece feels more staged, almost like a totem, with each section doing something slightly different. Painted lines sit on top of the form rather than dissolving into it, bringing drawing back into the object. It’s still playful, still full of odd pairings and small surprises, but there’s a bit more separation between parts. Together, the two sculptures show how easily Peeples-Bright moves between chaos and structure, sometimes letting forms pile up and tangle, other times slowing things down and giving each element its own space.

What lingers is not any single image or object, but the way Peeples-Bright allows joy, humor, and discipline to coexist without hierarchy. There is a lightness to the work, but it is not casual. It is built, considered, and sustained over time. You begin to sense that what might first read as instinct is actually something closer to trust, a deep familiarity with her own visual language that lets her move freely without losing structure. The exhibition holds that balance carefully. It gives space to the play without flattening the rigor behind it, and in doing so, it offers a fuller understanding of an artist who has spent decades following her own logic, regardless of where it fits within or outside of established movements.

To see this many works gathered together feels rare, and quietly significant. It is not overwhelming, but it is generous, and it stays with you in a way that is both immediate and lasting. The exhibition runs until April 26, 2026. 

(L) Emil Lukas Knockamixon Merge #2395, 2026 acrylic on canvas over wood panel 48 x 48 x 2 3/4 in

(R) Gwen Hardie Caribbean Sea, 01.15.26, darkest indian red on turquoise, 2026 Oil on canvas 16 x 16 in 

Paintings Without Image

By John Zarobell

If abstract art—emerging in the first decade of the twentieth century—broke away from the idea that painting has to represent what we see like a window on the world, by the second half of the twentieth century artists had divested themselves of the idea that painting has to produce any recognizable image at all. The paintings by Gwen Hardie currently on view at Dolby Chadwick Gallery and the works by Emil Lukas at Hosfelt Gallery start from this repudiation of image and explore how to take painting into new territory. While the works of Hardie explore color and light in a manner devoid of form and material trace, Lukas retains a physicality in his works, which are neither pictures nor always paintings. The presence of both of these exhibitions in San Francisco right now allows for careful study of the evolution of abstract images in the twenty-first century.

When looking at a painting, or a series of them, by Hardie, one perceives color emanating from a square form as if one were looking at a block of colored glass illuminated and therefore glowing. The squares of pigment on canvas seem to hover on the wall as visual phenomena and there is no trace of their being made. I had to ask the gallery attendant if they were painted with a brush (they are) because there were literally no brushstrokes visible. It is almost as if the paint just settled there. The works are based on a transition between two colors, usually grey and another stronger color, such as violet, blue or green. The result is a sense of one color fading into another near the edges of the canvas but the effect is resolutely visual. No matter how close you get to the paintings, they do not disclose anything but color. Since they are made of oils, the colors are wonderfully rich and the transitions are nuanced with the most extreme subtlety. If one imagines that there is one color in the background and another in the foreground, that effect is really in your head or perhaps “in your eyes” is more accurate. Hardie plays with the way our optic nerve perceives, suspending its normal operations so that something else, something spectral in my view, can emerge.

The point is not that Hardie is somehow calling up ghosts by not showing us anything. Rather, her work opens the door for viewers to encounter a visual experience that is not fixed on identification of the material world, which is how our vision is usually engaged. When paintings do not represent, what do they do? They provide another means to see. Hardie manages to suppress the question of what we see so that we can just look. This could be misconstrued as art for art’s sake, in other words a self-referential experience in which a painter traps a viewer in an endless loop. In fact, Hardie’s paintings are surprisingly liberating.

Gwen Hardie Caribbean Sea, 2026 Oil on canvas 16 x 128 in 

The titles, at least of the multi-canvas works (Hardie calls these “Sequences”), are sometimes suggestive (Arc of the Sun, Caribbean Sea) so there is also some indication that there is more here than meets the eye. Caribbean Sea (2026) is a sequence of eight small canvases, each sixteen by sixteen inches, that range from dark blue to light blue suffused with grey. There is a tonal shift here that will make anyone who has ever been an art student recall Josef Albers and his endless Homage to the Square series, in which colors are juxtaposed to produce sometimes surprising optical effects. Albers was trained at the Bauhaus, where he became an instructor before moving to the United States and teaching at Yale. Color theory was an important part of the curriculum there and his paintings are perceived as experiments in color that provide, in an almost scientific sense, evidence for a more sophisticated understanding of its properties and characteristics. Hardie’s paintings echo Albers’ experiments but each component (square canvas) demonstrates a movement between two colors, so when they appear as a series, there is a double movement, a transition from one canvas to another just as there is a transition in each canvas.

Arc of the Sun, Venetian Red (2025) also explores the development of color across eight canvases but these components are slightly larger, twenty by twenty inches. This double title tells us both the color that is being explored, as well as providing an ostensible subject that is being represented. But one cannot look at the arc of the sun; one perceives its arc only indirectly, over time. So, the first thing this title tells us is to slow down and not look for meaning directly. It emerges, as both an experience of light, and a memory of what the light was before, also implying that it will change in the future. Without time it is hard to grasp this work.

Digging deeper, exploring the colors as they transition from left to right, I felt that everything I knew about color was being questioned. The first point disproven here is that color takes form. Here it is resolutely formless, despite being on the surface of an actual canvas. Another expectation I held is that one color would either blend into another or form a contrast but it is hard to find the blending from red to grey because they seem to exist simultaneously on the surface. Further, the tonal intensity of the transition is not as expected. Spend some time looking at paint colors on strips in a hardware store, and you can guess what a color looks like if you mix in some grey to lighten it, but those rules don’t seem to hold here. The darkest square on the left is a strong violet, nearly brown, albeit with a lighter center. There is a big jump from there to the next square, red at the core with grey edges. The grey modulates the color experience, changing not just the tone, but the density of the optics. By the time you get to squares five and six, when pink jumps to blue, the red has given way to grey but grey now appears as blue. The series suggests an arc because the lightest tones are in the middle of the series. What we seem to witness is the portrait of a day’s light. What a viewer can discover is that light does not change in expected ways and colors do not capture light consistently. Colors are not matter in Hardie’s works, but ephemera–something spectral. The more you try to look for color, the less you see it.

Lukas’ work plays with color and light in a very different way. If you see his works in reproductions on a screen, there are major similarities. A work like chandelier hallucination #2385 (2026) looks very much like a painting of a white center on a blue ground but, in fact, it is a visual product of thousands of threads stretched across the surface of a painted rectangular wooden frame beneath. The density of color which appears to be, like Hardie’s, modulated with the greatest subtlety, is in fact the result of the build-up of threads of many colors which read collectively as blue. Lukas is playing with color theory, to be sure, but his delivery turns out to be shockingly physical and very finely wrought. The labor of building the object is resolutely visible and the magic of discovery is not suspended in paint, but confirmed in matter.

Hosfelt is showing two kinds of constructions in the current exhibition—one which the artist calls “Thread Work”, already described, and the other is “Lattice Works”, which are both made in the same way. Once again, I had to ask the gallerist how these are constructed in order to understand them. Lukas starts with a painted canvas, of varying sizes, and then sets an aluminum grid made of small empty circles on top of the canvas, into which he inserts acrylic paint. So, a final work, like canopy #2400 (2026) might look like a nebula from outer space from a distance but upon closer inspection, small dots, approximately half an inch in diameter, cover the surface of the painting in various colors, some of which do not fit in well and so strike the viewer as distinct from a distance. They appear to sit on the surface until you get close and realize that the whole surface is covered with colored dots that sit on the surface. Lukas is not projecting ephemera here so much as optical effects. Comparing Lukas to Hardie is like comparing Op Art (Vasarely) to Color Field Painting (Rothko). Yet the art historical categories obscure what is happening in both of these shows. Hardie and Lukas are both experimenting with the optical experience of color but the absence or presence of materiality in their works provides very different off-ramps for the viewer. While the works of both artists reward slow looking and encourage careful apperception, the works of Hardie move beyond the eye and out of the body while Lukas’ works reveal the juxtaposition between optics and materiality, nevertheless upsetting our expectations. Both artists train us how to look so that we might truly see.

The following are excerpts from Griff Williams’ interview conducted by Hugh Leeman.

Editor’s note: this interview was recorded in front of a live audience at Pier 70 in San Francisco, California. This event was presented by 3RD ST CREATIVE ARTERY

The Collapse of San Francisco's Art Ecosystem

Hugh Leeman: We have an audience that's deeply connected, if not affected by the headlines that have been grabbing San Francisco artists and arts professionals' attention. The closure of CCA, your alma mater SFAI, multiple galleries closing, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts closing. With those ideas in mind, we have the attention of people on the surface level — but beneath the surface, what is going on that is contributing to these closures?

Griff Williams: Did you guys come here thinking I was going to have those kinds of answers for questions like this?

I'll answer the question by way of reminiscing. What's happening in San Francisco currently is a function of a long time coming — events that have been sown here for many, many years. The real estate crisis, the fact that around the first dot-com bubble, artists were moving out of San Francisco in the early two thousands because it was too expensive. The idea that artists are still here is quite remarkable to me. One of the reasons they continue to be here — aside from the older generation getting lucky and being grandfathered into home ownership or rental properties they could afford — was that we had art schools bringing young creative people here. The fact that SFAI was this wild, dysfunctional, beautiful, chaotic thing that existed longer than my home state of Montana was a state. Mills College, CCA, the Art Institute — they had this magnetic quality for young people who wanted to come study and be immersed in a community of creative people. I can't tell you what the loss is ultimately going to mean for San Francisco. I think it's catastrophic, and I don't think we've even begun to witness the fallout.

I know there's faculty from CCA here tonight. I taught at both CCA and SFAI after graduating, and there was this community. I'm in the process of writing a book about Richard Shaw, and the strength of the communities that were developed through these art schools is remarkable. They were also a stepping stone, a mentorship program, an opportunity for people to find employment in other industries. When Gallery Sixteen started in the early nineties, San Francisco was at the nexus of all of these creative enterprises — commercial photographers, graphic designers, nascent web designers, folks working in curatorial practices, non-profits, illustrators. These were opportunities for people to come out of art programs and find employment, stay in the area, and mentor the next generation of creative people. The strength of that is quite remarkable. I am the recipient of that kind of generosity and largesse from the community of people that preceded me. The exhibition I just curated of Jim Melcher's work — I felt deeply moved and honored to be able to platform the work of somebody who had done so much for my own career. These are the kinds of small, real human gestures that build art communities. And the center of those communities were the art programs. Without them, we're in trouble.

Hugh Leeman: I want to pull on that thread a little further. You mentioned the early two thousands and a big displacement of artists. There's a long-running narrative — if not something almost clichéd — that San Francisco has always been a boom-and-bust town, always been expensive, always been precarious for artists, and that this time is no different. But from what you're writing and saying, it sounds like a very different set of circumstances.

Griff Williams: I don't think we've ever seen anything like this. We've never seen a collapse of all of the major art school programs and museums simultaneously. The de Rosa announces it's going to sell its property. The Contemporary Jewish Museum. You go through the list of losses in the last couple of years, and I don't think anybody with their eyes open can see it as anything but a magnificent collapse of an ecosystem.

The beauty of San Francisco was that it was never a commercial center for selling artwork, but it had this remarkable ability to nurture creative people who wanted to make a home here and live outside the context of the market-driven concerns of New York or LA. That's a gift — for artists who decide to choose a different sort of path through the arts. San Francisco was a remarkable incubating, nurturing community. Yes, it was expensive. Most big cities are. But this one had a remarkable diversity in terms of the communities of creative people who lived here, all of whom had signed up for a slightly different route through a creative life. Anybody that really wanted to make it big commercially was not going to stay here. It was a self-selecting environment.

Trickle-Down Never Reached the Arts

Hugh Leeman: Something particularly compelling about this moment compared to previous displacements — anyone who's been investing over the last several years knows the Nasdaq has been booming, and most of these companies are based right here in San Francisco. Historically, regardless of the era, when you have a booming industry it almost always trickles into, if not floods into, luxury sectors and cultural and arts sectors. We're not seeing that. What do you make of that?

Griff Williams: Well, that was what Ronald Reagan wanted us to believe. It never trickled down. It never does. The truth is we have private museums being built all over the nation, all over the world, on the back of private wealth. We aren't publicly endowing institutions anymore — they're being built by private donors. The Geffen Center. Our museum's expansion is based on the development of a collection around private wealth. It's not really a question of whether the trickle-down effect reaches the arts community — it never has.

My conversation with Mayor Lurie recently was basically to suggest that the arts community was invisible to him. And I think this is an important conversation to be having about what the future of San Francisco should look like. The idea that giveaways to corporations and tax benefits — the allowances of a city that would let forty percent of its commercial space lay empty since the pandemic — seems appalling to me.

The Chronicle asked me to write an op-ed when CCA announced it was being consumed by Vanderbilt. The piece was framed around the mayor's announcement that it was a great day for San Francisco — that we were going to trade twelve hundred art students for twelve hundred STEM students. That basically tells you all you need to know. The art students are invisible to the powers that be. These kids are going to come out of school without job prospects and without being visible to the people who claim the only way a city grows is to grow or die. There has always been another route. The route was set many years ago when I moved to San Francisco because it gave you the allowance to be weird, to find your own way. This corporatizing of everything has become the real problem. The fact that we're witnessing a mayor announce the closure of a hundred-year-old esteemed arts institution as a great day for San Francisco tells you a whole lot about who's in power and what their value systems are.

The Op-Ed, The Mayor's Call & The Art World's Invisible Community

Hugh Leeman: I want to dig into that a little deeper. You wrote an op-ed published by the San Francisco Chronicle directed at Mayor Daniel Lurie. Almost immediately after it publishes, he calls you. Walk us through that conversation and how it affected the way you understand the mayor, the city, and this crisis.

Griff Williams: If you really want to know the story — I was in bed when he called me. Walking around in my underwear. He literally called almost immediately after the op-ed was published. To his credit, he called. I grew up in a political family. My father was a congressman from Montana — a Democrat winning in a red state, serving Montana for twenty years in a place where Democrats weren't supposed to win. I know what it means to take responsibility. It's difficult to be the constant brunt of public vitriol, and he could have ignored the op-ed and moved on. He didn't. For that reason he deserves some credit for facing the dissent in the community. There was a fair amount of it. Through the outpouring of comments on social media in response to that article, it was clear it had tapped a nerve. The mayor's office thought so too. We've had a couple of conversations since and are planning to meet.

What specifically needs to be addressed with the mayor is an important question, because the arts ecosystem — and this isn't news to anyone here — is a varied thing. It's not one entity. What works for commercial galleries does not work for non-profit entities. The folks that don't have gallery representation and those who do move through the world in very different ways. The political reality tends to look at the arts as a monolith, as if there's going to be one person who speaks for all of it. But the film industry and the studio painters are doing entirely different things and need entirely different conversations with the powers that be. It's a complicated system.

The mayor's decision to announce this new position overseeing all the arts agencies — my phone was blowing up with people saying I should apply for it. Does everyone who texts me hate me? Is this the worst job in the history of the universe? At a time when the mayor is laying off staff and non-profits around the city are losing significant portions of their operating budgets, the arts are going to be low on his priority list. That's just the reality.

The Mythology of the Glamorous Art World

Hugh Leeman: You've said that despite all the glossy magazine coverage, very few dealers and very few artists ever make any significant money. Yet this mythology of the glamorous art world is remarkably durable. Who does this mythology serve, and why does it seem like there's no real puncturing of it — and now it seems like this ignoring of reality has started to implode around us?

Griff Williams: The luxury market in general is the same thing — whether it's a Gucci watch or a Tiffany ring, they're advertising to the same small audience. Art Forum does that very thing. Everybody in this room who raised their hand as an artist or art professional knows the glossy magazines don't reflect their experience in the arts. The commercial business of the arts has always functioned in this little bubble. You see it at the art fairs — galleries desperately trying to keep up with the next guy.

The art fair became a phenomenon in the early days of Gallery Sixteen. We were participating in fairs around the world, in many of the major ones, and felt as though we had to keep doing them to stay relevant and keep our artists visible. What we realized was that we were making the fair organizers wealthy, and they didn't really care whether we were there or not. They were going to fill the booth with the next guy. We also realized there's way too much supply and way too little demand. There's a million kids coming out of grad school thinking that Art Forum is proving to them there's a market for the work they're making in their graduate programs — and there just fucking isn't. It creates this hamster wheel that everybody's on, trying to feed a perspective-buying public that really doesn't exist.

I was thirty-two years in with Gallery Sixteen. All those years of going to art fairs — we would see clients from San Francisco in Miami. They could have easily bought the work from us at home. They never walked into Gallery Sixteen. They would buy work but send their art consultants to make the decisions for them. What we realized was that we were creating a forum for all of you — for artists and for people who needed a community to gather and commune around difficult ideas, hear live music, do all the things. That was the real audience. Not some imaginary buying public. Sooner or later that stuff trickles down to collectors, because they're always wanting to participate in whatever happens to be fashionable. But to be honest, we make our own scenes. What is required to make a healthy arts community is more interesting to me than what is required to find a buying public.

The fact that Gagosian and all these dealers pop in, dip their toe in San Francisco's gold rush mentality, and when they realize there aren't buyers here they bail — what is left is all of us. And there is strength in numbers. San Francisco has always had this thriving, youthful mentality of trying to make something out of nothing. Storefront windows and garages. This punk, DIY ethos that has driven the community here. It drives all healthy arts communities everywhere.

Wondering why the billionaires from Palo Alto aren't buying from your gallery — Dave Hickey used to say it's like asking your mother's garden party friends whether your artwork is good. Why do you care? The extreme wealth in the Bay Area is never going to find its way to Bay Area galleries. The dealers they're going to buy from are the vetted dealers in New York. It's like the stock market — if you want to be in the stock market, you're not going to go to Fred down the street to trade stocks.

Modernizing the Gallery Model Without Selling Out

Hugh Leeman: I want to tap into some future-forward alternatives and potential ideas for action. You're describing a gallery model based on scarcity and the manufacturing of value and prestige, while today's economy functions on access and attention. What needs to change, and how do you modernize this model without just turning every gallery into a content production machine?

Griff Williams: Not every gallery is going to be a content production machine. Every gallery is going to be a reflection of the artists they work with. Galleries function best when they're advocating for the artists they work with, and not basing those decisions strictly on what's financially in their best interest. We used to show artists for years and years and never sold a thing — ever. But we were committed to what they were making, one hundred percent believing in their creative voice.

There's always been this mythology that there's one horse in the stable that pays all the bills for the rest of the gallery artists. To a certain extent that's true — there is a little bit of a Ponzi scheme system in the gallery universe. But the main thing is that the voices of these creative people are heard in the gallery programs.

San Francisco has had an interesting community of art dealers. When I came up, it was largely women who drove the gallery program here — Paula Anglim, Rena Bransten, Ruth Bronstein, Diana Fuller. I was really lucky to be mentored by some of these women. They all had a sense that they were tending a garden — that they were not operating in the same spheres as New York galleries. The clients trafficking in Manhattan galleries were not buying in San Francisco. If you think about tending a garden, your responsibilities are different. They treated it that way. There were legendary artists in those programs. But most of them would probably have told you they made the choice to stay in San Francisco not because they were making a lot of money doing it.

Art and Water, New Models & What Can't Be Replaced

Hugh Leeman: The potential for a new model — New York Times bestselling author Dave Eggers has a new project called Art and Water, and you're listed on the website. I went and listened to a panel discussion. What exactly is Art and Water?

Griff Williams: I don't know. I honestly can't speak to it because I don't fully know. I've had conversations with Dave, and Dave and I have kind of different opinions about what's needed in art school right now. I think he looks at it as a revival of a kind of academic model, a sort of apprentice-artist format with academic training that he sees as valuable in ways I don't entirely know. What the big picture is going to look like, I can't say. They have incredible people involved — really amazing artists. But what it's ultimately going to evolve into, I don't know.

What I do know for certain is that it is not a replacement for the loss of SFAI and CCA and Mills College. It's not a replacement for those things — nor is whatever Lorraine Jobs is doing with the Art Institute. These are residency programs. They're going to be beneficial to a very small, select group of people. And that's great. I'm all for people trying stuff. Good for them. I hope it's fantastic. I hope it becomes extremely successful. But it doesn't replace what we're losing.

Is SF Back? Permits, Robots & the DIY Ethos

Hugh Leeman: I want to go back to something you mentioned — the conversation with Mayor Lurie starts in your underwear, in bed. You've since had another conversation, you're getting ready to meet. He seems very energetic, at least at creating Instagram content with "SF is Back." I want to go to that idea for you. Is SF back? And if not, what would it take? I want to add that it seems like a bit of a "Make San Francisco Great Again" thing — maybe going back to a romantic past isn't what we should be looking to.

Griff Williams: It's sloganeering, and it's fine. Maybe he sees his role as a booster and that's it. I'm sure the cafes and burrito shops he's standing in front of are benefiting in some way, and that's all great. The mayor's out there rallying attention for small business, and I think that's terrific. But at the end of the day we still have these big gaping holes.

This is a bit of an aside, but last weekend I was with Mark Pauline from Survival Research Laboratories. I was reminiscing about the difference between San Francisco during the heyday of SRL and now. We're probably sitting on a site where they did a robot war. The idea that you could do those remarkable public events — here we are in the age of microaggressions, and these unsanctioned events where a gigantic robot is slinging hot meat into crowds and breathing fire under the highway would absolutely not fly now. Those were the events that defined when I first arrived in San Francisco. I wasn't necessarily a great fan of robot wars, but I was a fan of the fact that the fucking thing was happening. The energy that required — all the machinists and gearheads who had to get together to make this happen, that Pauline would go out and present in this dystopian, Mad Max kind of performance under the highway — it was a remarkable and thrilling thing.

Art doesn't get made by getting a permit from the city. It gets made by somebody going in and turning their garage into an exhibition space that somebody from the local art school is going to write about, and some magazine is going to pay attention to. It builds from the ground up. It's not a trickle-down system. It's community based. It all comes from young people trying to do something on their own, just following their ideas.

There are definitely aspects of that that still exist in San Francisco. There are young people starting places all the time. The vibrancy of the San Francisco Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Project will tell you a little about where the energy is. But San Francisco doesn't look much like it did. The fact that we're sitting in this building — I think that robot breathed fire on me in this parking lot at some point.

Galleries as Community Centers & the Grow-or-Die Philosophy

Hugh Leeman: You've said previously that galleries at their best function as community centers. What can these do-it-yourself, garage-type, community-center-type aspirations do now that larger institutions focused on permitting aren't able to do?

Griff Williams: Don't just ignore the institutions. You have to find your people and serve them — you work for them. The only thing I wanted to do when I started Gallery Sixteen was be around other artists. That was the whole motivation. Nowadays we'd have tech guys come into the gallery asking, what's your exit strategy? What the fuck is an exit strategy? I'm in a brick-and-mortar art gallery. This is a life. It's not a career plan. I don't have an exit strategy. There's no parachuting out the back door when I sell it to shareholders for more money than I paid. It's insane.

There's one perspective that everybody tries to bring the art world up to — this grow-or-die philosophy. What if it wasn't that? What if it was about healing? What if it was more about attending to the community that is there and the needs of that community? Wouldn't that be a more remarkable way to approach civic responsibility?

Even in the arts, we're always aspiring to something else. When I first got here it was, oh, we're not New York, we need to be more like New York. Now you've got the largest contemporary art museum by square footage in the nation here showing K-pop. Is that serving the art community? We need to demand more of the people in institutional authority — whether that's the mayor, whether that's the director of the museum. If it's not serving the folks, say so.

When I got into it with the mayor on my cell phone, the conversation was about: you don't see us. The creative community is invisible. He grew up as a billionaire. His family has done some amazing philanthropic work, no question. But how could he know what's going on here? He wouldn't. So we have to explain it. We have to be more vocal, more precise about the requests.

The things that are good for the art community are also the things that are good for the working poor. This isn't really about what's good for artists as much as it is about what's good for people in need. If you believe the luxury brand magazines like Art Forum to tell you what the art world looks like, you don't know what the fucking art world looks like. Go to the Noonan Building, go to those studios. Most of the people — even the ones known by name — probably have a side gig and are thrilled because they make enough to continue doing it. That was the only thing that mattered to me. I wasn't trying to get rich with the gallery. I was trying to get my artists paid and keep going, because it had an important role in the creative ecosystem. If galleries are showrooms for high-priced shit, they're not doing their job.

How the Arts Community Organizes as Civic Infrastructure

Hugh Leeman: Earlier in our conversation you mentioned the word monolithic — that's effectively how City Hall and the mayor treat the arts. And then we're talking about K-pop at SFMoMA and the luxury sector. How does the arts community organize itself as essential civic infrastructure and not a luxury sector that's asking to be saved?

Griff Williams: The organization part is a tricky one. I grew up in a political family and I know what it takes to organize people, and the arts don't do it well. Most politics on the left don't do it well either. Part of this is because they're thinking people — they all have slightly different views and they don't follow in lockstep. They don't speak with one voice. The things that are important for the arts community — the lay person would look at it and go, okay, the arts is everybody that makes art. But most people that make art require different ways to exhibit the work. Maybe they don't exhibit the work at all. Maybe it's grant-based, maybe it's education, maybe the side hustle is teaching. The idea that everybody needs one thing out of a civic organization is hard, because it isn't one thing.

There have been some efforts — the folks at SOMArts and others have been trying to organize, using themselves as a central location to build a larger conversation. I think that's helpful and I hope it continues. I'm certainly willing to help. But it's difficult because there are so many competing interests. We're not really speaking with one voice.

The Side Hustle, the Schools & What Comes Next

Hugh Leeman: You've mentioned this idea of the side hustle, and the so-called big-name artists who so many of them have a full-time job teaching other artists how to do what they do. We've created a system that's self-replicating — making more people who have debt, making more people who teach other people how to do this. And now these institutions are going away. What's going to be the side hustle for some of these people, and what happens?

Griff Williams: I don't know. It's all so new. The fact that all of the schools are gone — we're just in shock. I don't know what the answer is. The obvious reality is that people are going to move. The artists who were working at the art schools and who need to continue working and aren't at retirement age are going to have to find jobs elsewhere. What I started out talking about — the era of San Francisco I came into — there was an opportunity to find work across many different disciplines. The side hustle was much broader than it currently is. For young people now, it's just going to drive people out. They're going to find their way elsewhere.

The film I made a few years back, Tell Them We Were Here, we were finishing the edit during the COVID pandemic. At the time I was deeply, deeply disappointed with San Francisco. I saw a lot of folks in the creative community — friends, artists, writers, musicians — decamping for other cities. We were editing this very dark ending to the film. Tucker Nichols' voice appears at the end, and Tucker was talking about this really beautiful thought — I don't care if San Francisco isn't the place anymore. I just want it to exist somewhere for creative people. If it's not here, it should be wherever it is. Find that place where you can show up without a plan, where you don't have to have your career path mapped out, but you can go and figure it out. And as long as that place exists, we're going to be okay.

My son, who was helping me with the film, said you can't end it this way — it's too dark, people are going to walk out. And at that time, CCA was still a thing. The Art Institute was still a thing. They hadn't closed yet, and I was already feeling that way. He said it's got to be hopeful. We have to turn it. And we did. We found this way to end the film that I think is beautiful. But that sentiment was there five years ago.

What gives me hope is places like Graham's Last Straw — shout out to Last Straw — and all the young people trying to make interesting things happen with their community here. We should be pulling for them and supporting them. For everybody who can spend money in these institutions, these little local spots, artist-run spaces — do it. Show your support with your resources. It's the only way they're going to continue to exist.

Art as a Gift to the Future

Hugh Leeman: Griff, as a final question before we go to the audience — I want to read you a quote and ask you to speculate going forward. You've said: "The best thing human beings have ever done with their time on this earth is to make music, art, and culture. Art is a gift to the future." So if someone listening to our conversation in the future hears this ten years from now, what do you want them to know that we did?

Griff Williams: San Francisco has been home to so many remarkable, creative, beautiful people. The history of San Francisco's art community is rich and varied and incredible. The young folks that are here and trying to make their voices heard give me hope for the future. What we don't do well as a community is recognize our past — learn from it, understand who we are now by virtue of the relationship to what previously existed and the folks who have been here.

The last few projects I've been working on have been retrospectives, and I've really had to dive into the history of the Bay Area. It's heartbreaking and beautiful. It's a place that carved itself out — despite the fact that the commercial realities were against it, despite the fact that the critical attention was against it — and made community despite all of that. That's the biggest gift we can take from it. To remind ourselves that we have the power to do whatever we want. We can control these things. All these little corner shops and little art galleries and little events that get developed by young people need to be supported. They are gifts to the future.

The Internet, Community & the Death of Presence

Hugh Leeman: This pulls into the thread of what you're hitting on with young people and new culture. In a previous interview, I asked you what you would recommend young artists do, and your answer was essentially — put the damn phone down. Someone here is asking your thoughts on the pros and cons of the impact of the internet on the current art world.

Griff Williams: I think it's a disaster. I think it's the worst thing that's ever happened to the art world. The phone and the internet are the death of creativity. I say this while sending missives out on Instagram, but the thing is that stuff goes out into the ether and you have no connection to who's responding to it or who saw it. That is not a community. A community is built around people who show up — like you guys in a room, having conversations with human beings, whether you agree with them or not. You network face to face. My kid asks me, how did you ever find your friends? We had a phone on a cord attached to a wall and you actually talked to a human being.

Pre-internet in San Francisco, there were ten weeklies in the Bay Area. Two daily newspapers with two full-time art writers, a full-time film critic, a theater critic. All the weeklies had art writers. Dave Eggers started out writing art reviews for the SF Weekly. So what does that mean? You're a weekly newspaper. You work for the Bay Guardian. You have to go to the place you're reviewing. You have to introduce yourself to the person who runs it. You have to have a conversation about the artist. You have to find out what's coming up next. You might eat at the place next door. That's the way communities get built. That's how you understand how people's trajectories through time evolve — and they went on to do this other thing, and then that. The internet and Instagram have become what young people think is a replacement that offered more possibility. The unlimited nature of the internet was going to provide more possibility and more opportunity for writers. And it's done exactly the opposite. All the weeklies and newspapers are gone.

The beauty of Roborant Review starting in the midst of all this is a shining example of what I'm talking about — people just deciding it's needed and doing it. Maybe it isn't going to make any money, but here's what's going to happen: it's going to put all of these people in motion. Folks who have a desire to write or get more connected to the art scene have a reason to do it because they're going to be writing a review for Roborant. It rallies a different kind of real-life community in the face of all of this other stuff.

Real Creativity Is Political

Hugh Leeman: There's a quote you've shared — real creativity isn't performative, it's political. Someone's asking: what is the role of the political and politics on art? Are they related?

Griff Williams: Of course. People think politics is just going to vote. Politics is the fact that we're here right now. We're all choosing to be here because of a value set. The politics are the fact that I had a gallery with an open door, free, that allowed people to come in and vent and rage and listen to things. These are all political acts. You're platforming ideas. Any time you advocate for or platform ideas that are obscure, that's a political act. It isn't simply about red states and blue states — it's also about your PTA. These are choices we're making on a local level.

If you're an artist, there has to be somewhere in there — even if you don't feel this way as a person — an optimism. In order to get through making the thing you're making, you have to feel optimistic about the possibilities. The fact that this is going to go off into the world — maybe it's going to be a failed experiment, maybe a dead end — but there has to be an optimism built into it to be able to get through the thing. Every aspect of the arts is based on this internal notion that we all believe in something. And that's political. Our belief systems are driving all of our decisions, whether they're artistic or political. I don't see any separation between the two.

Expanding the Map: East Bay, Davis, Sacramento & Beyond

Hugh Leeman: This person is asking about inclusivity of other places. Part of the problem and part of the solution we've been discussing tonight — could part of that solution be to include the East Bay, Davis, Sacramento, San Jose, and beyond, given some of the cost challenges and beyond?

Griff Williams: Of course. When I talk about the Bay Area, I honestly don't know exactly where the demarcating lines are. But this is the thing about the Bay Area art scene — personal space in Vallejo, all these little spots that pop up in the most unlikely places doing the things you're rooting for. Maybe they move there because it's cheaper, maybe because they believe in that community. Larry Rinder, who used to be at BAM/PFA, used to say the problem with the art scene in the Bay Area is you can't see the forest for the trees because there's so much going on — but it's all kind of hidden and very much driven by specific identities. It's not a movement-based art community. Everybody's kind of doing their own thing. That's the beauty of it, but it also makes it extremely difficult to codify. Nobody in Oakland or Vallejo or Berkeley — I'm in Sonoma — is excluded from this. Cool things can happen wherever there's energy and commitment to make cool things happen.

What to Do When You Leave This Room

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — this person is asking about organizing, about political action. In an hour this event space will be mostly empty. Most people will be back home, and the statistics tell us most of them will be looking at their phones. What should people do? If you could push a magic button and say, everyone leaves here tonight and starts doing this one thing to organize in their community — what does that look like?

Griff Williams: In the old days we'd go door to door with leaflets and send things by mail — a strategy everybody used to employ. It certainly doesn't work anymore. But being part of a list — my gallery's mailing list was a platform for news, information, ideas, and directions. Connect with the organizations you believe in. Give your email to Sarah. It doesn't matter which one — there are so many arts organizations, and the ones that appeal to me might be slightly off-putting to you. But you're going to find your scene, and those are your people. Organize those folks.

This event right here is a good start. The fact that this is happening — this is the maiden voyage for Sarah on this lecture series. I think it's a great idea. I hope more of them happen. It's also a way to start to mobilize political discourse. So you're already doing it by being here.

Hugh Leeman: Griff Williams.

Griff Williams: Thank you. Thank you guys.

Hugh Leeman: Thank you all very much.

The title of the show is overtly psychological, and upon entering, the viewer is plunged into the artist’s personal mythology. On the first wall to the left is a series of five paintings and two masks depicting a small, child-like figure (an inner child) alongside a devilish mask, set against saturated green, blue, and yellow backgrounds. The mask is primarily worn by a monstrous, muscularly bulbous figure, though in one elevated painting, it appears on the childlike figure, as suggested by white sleeves.

Compared to the paintings on the adjacent wall— and even to the surface treatment of the ceramic masks further back— these works possess a less explicitly tactile surface. However, they compensate —almost working double time— to establish a dense and active iconography. The relationship between the two figures, while rendered with playful innocence, produces a visceral unease. If this were a tragedy or horror narrative, one might expect the smaller figure to lose a limb when the ominous companion removes the mask. In one of the central works, the protagonist paints a self-portrait in which they hold a gun to the devilish figure, introducing an explicit threat of violence. Why must the protagonist rehearse this act?  

Despite this tension, the overall communication of the seven works is energetic, sustaining a visual dialogue through gesture and touch between the two figures. The viewer can infer that the roles of mask-wearer and mask-maker are being handed off.

The three works on the adjacent wall do not immediately relate to the first cluster; their layering and stylistic treatment feel distinctly different. Yet as a bridge between the earlier scenes of mask-making and the back area’s multiplicity of masks, these broadly abstracted faces— pushed to the edges of their rectangular supports— read as masks themselves, operating on a different register within the artist’s universe. Beneath each singular face, a sea of smaller faces, recognizable by Goku’s distinct eyes, fills the ground with a restless, diffuse agitation . They may also resonate with what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described as the ‘Protean Self’: the range of identities we hold and synthesize into a flexible, singular sense of self. In a broader moment shaped by defensive certainty, the ability to entertain multiple selves can seem less like strength than risk.  Outwardly, spaces for ambiguity appear scarce, doubt is treated as weakness, and openness rarely galvanizes on command. Such pressures can isolate the deeply human desire to weigh carefully—even the voices within us.

To examine the masks in the back section is to encounter both the breadth of the artist’s creative capacity and the force of a productivity that doesn’t shy away from personality or emotion. While the masks remain consistent within a general size and shape range, their surface textures and internal structures vary dramatically. Returning to one of the initial paintings— depicting the two figures constructing a mask behind a set of metal garbage cans— it is reasonable to assume that at least some of the rich patinas were achieved through Raku firing.

Compared to the other two-dimensional works, the masks hang low enough on the wall to invite thoughts of touch, to prompt consideration of what it might feel like to wear one. While no figure in the paintings directly hands the viewer a mask, the intimacy of the back space brings the viewer into the narrative implicitly: what would it be like to take on the role handed off through the wearing of one of these masks? 

(L) Goku Mcafee, King’s Burial Mask, Glaze & Glass on Terracotta, Gas Fired, Dimensions N/A 2026  (R) Goku Mcafee, Pearl God Mask, Glaze on White Clay, Gas Fired, Dimensions N/A 2026  

This is work that invites reflection on the conversations one holds with inner contradictions, demons, or competing positions, and how those internal dialogues are translated into outward presentation. From a Jungian perspective, this is the concept of the persona: a social mask that conceals aspects of the self. But this is not the full extent of what Mcafee presents. There is a deeper vulnerability at play: an invitation into the dialogue of the creative process itself, not only in art-making but in the ongoing effort to align inner and outer life in relation to others.

In an economy of accelerated signals, where meaning is compressed into moments, this work resists that exchange. It asks the viewer to linger- not for polish, but to confront the labor of negotiating the self behind the mask. This is the psychological and conceptual task holding the exhibition together; without it, the body of work risks fragmenting into discrete mediums and stylistic sections .

The work is presented in a way that supports this slower engagement, offering a genuine opportunity to commune with the pieces. To demand that each work relate to every other in a succinct, digestible way is a flattening impulse to impose on this exhibition. Instead, Mcafee allows for something less resolved but more vital: the visible transformation that occurs through exploration.

What Matters: Together Us

By Gabrielle Selz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jonathan Curiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hubie Jones, Writing & the How's Notes Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability, Hidden Bias & the Personal Board of Directors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artists as Gatekeepers of Truth

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

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

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

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

Community, Belonging & the Student Who Couldn't Stay

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

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

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

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

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

The Rising Cost of Art Education & Universal Access

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

David C. Howse: Say that again.

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

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

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

CCA's Closure, Legacy & Honoring 120 Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leading Through Fire: The Personal Weight of This Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Broader Crisis in Higher Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transition, Not Decline: The Future of Arts & Culture

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

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

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

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

AI as Medium, Not Just Tool

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

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

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

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

What's Next: Leading by Purpose, Not Momentum

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

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

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

David C. Howse: Thank you for your questions.