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

By Doug Welch

This Must Be the Place, an exhibition of Jeff Dikio’s collage work on display at the Transmission Gallery, in Oakland, offers a beautiful array of works created from repurposed paint chips; the kind of small rectangular swatches that get distributed free at hardware stores to help homeowners choose a wall color. The exhibition showcases Didio’s skill at creating vibrant, colorful images that represent well-known places in the Bay Area. Small boats in Golden Gate Park’s Stowe Lake, a life guard station on Stinson Beach in Marin, a Victorian home in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and Doelger homes common in the Sunset District and in Daly City – all connect the viewer to places and memories from the Bay Area, past and present.

Filipino-born Dikio, who earned a BA in Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997, has maintained a practice that moves across figurative, landscape, and mixed-media work. This exhibition explores how he treats painting as a negotiation between looking and feeling, prioritizing expressive response over literal transcription. Central to his method is a commitment to ongoing revision — forms and atmosphere accumulate through repeated application and reworking. Many of the works seem as if he’s tackling the same subject, yet upon close examination, the subtle differences and challenges that presents are apparent.

Anyone familiar with the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco or the Westlake neighborhood in Daly City will immediately find the homes recognizable. Probably less known is their origin. Starting in the 1920s, a San Francisco developer, named Henry Doelger, began building affordable wood framed stucco homes in the Outer Sunset neighborhood. They were multilevel with living areas built over a garage. Over the years, his styles shifted but his homes remained practical and well built – as evidenced by their continued ubiquitousness close to 100 years later. His initial home design had a Spanish facade and as aesthetics changed, he changed with them. His homes had names such as “Mediterranean Revival”, “Styleocrat” and “Nantucket,” the details of which are known to Dikio, as all make it into his titles.

These collages have an angular, geometric appearance which seems like a natural consequence of the source material Dikio works with. While the paint chips are often cut to fit the particular needs of the piece, the sharp and distinct lines remain. This sharpness is in part a result of the uniform color of each swatch Dikio uses. Unlike paints where colors can be blended, deepened or lightened allowing the color to slowly and subtly change, when Dikio switches colors, a clear differentiation between the swatches reveals itself. 

One of the challenges Dikio sets for himself is the rendering of shadow, and it is where his mastery of the collage medium, and his understanding of form and composition, becomes most apparent. Shadow in a collage made from pre-colored material cannot be mixed or changed the way paint can. Instead, Dikio must find or select chips whose existing colors approximate the color change that a shadow necessitates, then cut and place each one with enough precision that the viewer sees shadow rather than simply seeing a different shade or hue. 

In Daly City Doelger (yellow and orange), the deep reds and maroons that fall beneath the roofline and along the chimney look convincing, with  the tones shifting just enough to create this illusion of a penumbra. The ability to create this shadow, also adds dimensions to the home. It’s easy to forget that the chimney and the overhanging roof are in reality, one dimensional. That this is achieved without being able to blend pigment materials, through selection and placement of paint chip fragments alone, shows unquestionable talent.

Daly City Doelger (Blue 2), depicts a split level Doelger home common in the Westlake neighborhood in Daly City. The striking bright blue of the home contrasts with the deep hues of the sky. Off white, light and dark grey swatches combine into a driveway. Green bushes press up against the front of the house with a lawn moving into the foreground. Through slightly different hues, Didio creates the illusion of shade and shadows. Darker blue visible immediately beneath the second-floor overhang and on part of the garage door create a late afternoon feel. Angled and overlapping grey swatches are transformed into a window shade through Didio’s precision.  

Stinson Beach Sentinel #3, on a cradled panel shows another object recognizable to Bay Area natives. This lifeguard station offers a multilevel structure, sharp lines and soft pastel colors. He creates a fence around the first level of the structure by using silver or grey swatches that have been cut into very thin, long pieces.  Didio effortlessly creates a blue sky with light clouds – the kind that moves quickly over the sky – sometimes blocking out most of the sun, but never for long. This piece demonstrates that Didio’s showcase technique extends well beyond just making living structures. His ability to render landscape elements is manifest. Below the lifeguard station is subtle shaded sand. Around the station, where the sand is not blocked by the structure, we observe the same sand but areas remain unadulterated. In the background are the mountains and foliage one sees from that beach, with ever so carefully placed color augmentations to reflect what the human eye typically sees.

Stowe Lake #2,  shows a small boat floating on the surface of the body of water in Golden Gate Park’s Stowe Lake. Dikio’s mastery of color and hue gives the surface of the lake varying characteristics. By using aqua, light blue and darker blues, the lake looks deep and pristine. Close to the boat near what is likely the edge of the lake, Dikio uses green and grey. By doing so, he conjures the part of a lake or pond that is more stagnant allowing algae and bacteria to accumulate. Behind the first boat sits a smaller boat and beyond that, Dikio allows the collage to become more abstract – identifying exactly what is represented becomes more challenging - possibly a smaller boat, a dock, or more of the lake. Dikio’s use of ambiguity here adds an element of non-objective abstraction that elevates the experience for the viewer, who naturally looks between recognizable and unknown areas.

This exhibition feels like an homage to parts of the Bay Area that do not automatically scream out for recognition – but that nevertheless are easily identifiable by those who love this place. Dikio’s skillful recreation through his collage of distinct homes and neighborhoods, a small part of an iconic park, and a small but beautiful beach, all feels nostalgic and is impressive to see. He reminds the viewer of the beauty that surrounds us, even in often overlooked places, and he celebrates what close observation can convey to us.

The exhibition is open through June 13. 

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

Don Paul is an artist and author living in New Orleans.

By Don Paul

Jacobo Roa favors Ports as places to live. Ports are places that themselves LIVE.

Ports such as Progreso on the north coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Or a Port such as Playa del Carmen on the Yucatan’s south coast, opposite Cozumel. Or the Port of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ports invite colors. Ports’ sources are multiplous. Ports combine diverse elements. Ports’ tableaus are like a Midway and like Carnivals, changing by the Day, by the Hour and even by the Minute.

Ports are like the varieties of Mexico that Jacobo Roa got to know as a child and teen-ager who accompanied his father, from the Geologic Institute of Mexico City, in lengthy explorations . Jacobo’s father relished company, cuisine and cultures of Mexico’s deeply different indigena. These same years of childhood and adolesence, Jacobo’s mother fed him the latter 20th-century literature of Latin America that’s called ‘Magical Realism’.

Jacobo knew early on that marvels such as the “Ice!” appearing in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s tropical town of Macondo fit “just right” with feats of Pro Wrestlers / Movie Stars such as Mexico’s El Santo and the Blue Demon. They were fantastical phenomena. They each and all figured in a great and deep Show!

Jacobo Roa was born left-handed. He had dyslexia. It was natural for him to write words “backward”—his writing could be read in mirrors. He bridged every day to dream-worlds—worlds of Mexico that were depicted three decades later in Pixar Studio’s “Coco” and Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma”.

He became a Painter as Calling and Vocation. He went to live in Estados that would expand him. Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City and also over one mile high, with its old-money Pinks and Cerulean Blues, attracted him. He studied Surrealists there.

Next, into the 21st century, Oaxaca, its Rufino Tamayo Art Institute, and studying under Juan Alcazar.

From his first exhibition, turn-of-the-century, Jacobo Ro presented multiple Objects, Aspects, and Windows on a bed of many colors. canvas. He was and is crazy about Mexico. Mexico, modern and ancient, remains his galvanic inspiration. His affections and implicit critiques are like mechanical and animal Cornucopias—Shops’ and Bars’ lighting—they too Day and Night—over two decades.

The past few years have brought understandings and fruitions for Jacobo Roa. His latest Show at the Angela King Gallery in New Orleans’ French Quarter reveals a mastery growing mid-career, this third decade of our 21st century.

Two paintings that are alike in their thematic compositions, but that differ dramatically, ‘El Bici Chango’ (The Monkey Bike) and ‘Bici Loro Skull’ (Skull Parrot Bike), display Roa’s gains in aesthetics and affects.

Both paintings have Demon Riders as their focus. ‘El Bici Chango’ is, however, guns his bike through browns and carmines of Mountain Deserts ‘Bici Loro Skull’ suggests the Sea in its pastels. The Riders are surrounded by Figures and Inscriptions that accord with their evident locales. Each Rider and his world are pleasing to contemplate and—as with Matisse—to further imagine.

Another two in Roa’s current Angela King Gallery Show are obviously paired. They emanate from the same ‘Tropical Dancing Club.’

The Cantina with its King of the Juke (its Mr. King9 is a resort for both Dancer and Drum, Rooster and Horn. Again the two paintings differ wildly and yet offer endlessly pleasing fields and elements to enjoy.

A second pair in Roa’s new AKG Show portray New Orleans’ scenes.

Each of Roa’s ‘JAZZ’ musicians—of Guitar or of Trumpet—is a distinct and emphatic Personality. Each is dressed AND surrounded by comely designs, statements and colors.

Roa ventures into Mexican Classics of Identity and Satire with his ’Toro (Mil Amores’.

His ‘Catrin’ speaks from and to the most re-produced image in Mexico’s Day of the Dead, Jose Guadalupe’s drawing ‘La Catrina Calavera’. A Calavera, you may know, is a stylized Skeleton of a recognizable corpse. Millions of Calaveras haunt popular culture, Latin American to Grateful Dead, with their reminders of Mr. D.

Posada’s ‘Catrina’ stirred laughter and controversy when published in a Broadside from Antonio Vanegas Arroyo in 1913.

Ruben C. Cordova’s excellent piece of November 2019 in Texas’ online magazine about art, Glasstire, digs into the still myriad meanings in Posada’s drawing. It’s Meme that’s grown … more MULTIPLOUS (that strange word and would-be nelogism for a happy reality ahead)) than even Sears, Roebuck Women’s Hats in their 1912 Cataloging.

Please see Ruben Cordova’s piece in Glasstire. https://glasstire.com/2019/11/02/jose-guadalupe-posada-and-diego-rivera-fashion-catrina-from-sellout-to-national-icon-and-back-again/

Diego Rivera took up La Catrina, or Catrin, is his 15-meters-wide mural of 1946=47 for the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City. ‘A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park’.

Front and center in Rivera’s Epic-of-History mural are: La Catrina, José Guadalupe Posada, Frida Kahlo, and Rivera as a Boy in Short Pants. Frida with her cocked head touches both Posada and her boy-child husband. Rivera’s Catrina is no caricature of bourgeois pretensions here—her hat is like a coral garden and she wears Rattlesnake Feather Boa and she’s fanged like the Aztec’s most fearsome and immortal Goddess, Coatilcue. (Thanks to Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo for the images image and below, drawn from her study of the Rivera mural on a online page of smarthistory.)

https://smarthistory.org/rivera-dream-of-a-sunday-afternoon-in-alameda-central-park/

Please look back, now, to Jacobo Roa’s ’Toro (Mil Amores).

Look in particular to his 21st-century ‘CATRIN’ beside her marquee

What a load of Myths and Influences the painting’s most central figure carries! How she’s caught between them! The Floral Horn of Romantic Phonograph playing into one ear. An Iberian God-of-the-Sea blowing to her other ear. The Bull of a Thousand Loves (and counting) stolid and implacable beneath her portrait, the Bull’s bulk in profile dominating middle of the painting.

You may want to look more closely at this Katrina or Catrin.

How piquant is her situation! What her eyes see and how wistful they and her mouth are! Yet SMACK atop Coiffure of this Advertising-like portrait is a Five-Point Crown … a Crown of Five Points such as Basquiat gave his pair in ‘Red Kings’ of 1981. A Crown that places Primacy—real Aristocracy of Sensitivity—upon the Beauty and Consciousness of this Perceptive, Wistful Woman.

'Jacobo Roa is steadily growing, growing into brilliant coalescences, becoming an artist who aspires to reaches like Picasso’s and  and Basquiat’s and to breakthroughs of explosive coherence such as De Kooning’s and Georgia O’Keefe’s. He’s now able to assimilate Nations, Icons and Characters into works jam-packed with beauties and stimuli.'

Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, January 17—July 31, 2026

By Hantian Zhang

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco is, according to its website, “nomadic by design and non-collecting by choice,” meaning that rather than maintaining a permanent collection, it presents and commissions public art, then moves on. Both terms imply a certain relationship to impermanence: nothing owned, nothing held, nothing meant to last. This spring and summer, Tara Donovan’s Stratagems and Lily Kwong’s Earthseed Dome take that relationship into the works themselves. Installed in the glass annex gallery of the Transamerica Pyramid Center and the adjacent Redwood Park, the two works share not only a neighborhood but a material logic: both are made, in different ways, of impermanence itself. Yet despite their materials and temporary installation, both arrive with the visual and social force of monuments. They are also neighbors in purpose, each finding a different way to embed itself in the public.

Continuing her signature of accumulating daily objects, particularly disposables like tar paper, Scotch tape, and drinking straws, Donovan erects fourteen columns built from CD discs, a medium so collectively obsolete it has already passed into the register of the throwaway. The columns vary in height, though all exceed a person, and they pick up different tints: green and silver from the original dyes, brown from oxidation and age. Their patterns of accumulation vary, too. Some layer in regular rhythmic protrusions and recesses, like the bracketed eaves of Chinese pagodas. Others present a flat gridwork surface, their accumulations so regular that the columns resemble industrial mesh or woven screens. Still others twist and curve to varying degrees along their height, producing the visual effect of flowing or torqued material. In the glass annex gallery, sunlight enters from different angles throughout the day, and the iridescence changes accordingly. Squinting, you might mistake them for columns of cut glass covered in arabesque intricacies. The twisting ones in particular seem alive under direct light, the surface catching and releasing reflections as you move past. That the sculptures achieve this sense of vitality through a medium now largely regarded as obsolete makes the effect all the more uncanny.

Seen from the glass annex hosting Stratagems, Earthseed Dome reads at first as a hollowed dome arching over the path through the redwood parklet, wide enough to walk through. It takes a moment to notice that the surface twists at the capstone into a Möbius configuration, intrados of one half flipping into extrados of the other. This structure was built onsite, using a 3D printing machine that printed the building blocks of a seed-impregnated soil mix. The blocks are then piled up to create the whole structure, their seams filled with moss. The printed units retain the horizontal ridges of their manufacture. Like the stacked CDs in Donovan’s columns, these repeated layers transform accumulation into texture, making the process of construction visible on the work’s surface. Seen up close, the Möbius twist and layered printed ridges make the structure feel simultaneously engineered and grown, inviting a moment of inspection before one passes through. At the base inside, a mulched planting bed supports ferns and succulents. Though modest in scale, it helps anchor the structure within its surroundings. The reddish mulch echoes the bark of the neighboring redwoods, while the ferns echo the grove’s undergrowth, softening the transition between the printed dome and the landscape around it. 

In close proximity, the pair invites a reconsideration of monumentality itself. A slab of stone, a cast of bronze: monuments are traditionally built to outlast their moment, but this premise is shared by neither Donovan nor Kwong. One builds from a medium already relegated to obsolescence, and the other incorporates living matter that will continue to grow, change, and eventually die. And yet, standing among them, it is not impermanence that first comes to mind. Their height, public placement, and glass- or stone-like appearance invoke associations with monuments: structures addressed to the public and built to be stood before.

On this point, Donovan’s work specifically reminds me of totem poles, which are monuments of a specific kind, marking not a person or an event but a group’s presence to itself. Their verticality is part of the resemblance, but so is the density of surface detail that makes the columns looking less assembled than carved. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), described the totem as “the flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others.” The sacred object works not by transcending the social but by concentrating it, giving a group something to cohere around. Watching people gather around the two works, some admiring the reflections, some inspecting the plants, I found myself thinking less about what the sculptures represent than about what they allow. The clan doesn’t need a totem that outlasts it. The columns catch light, the dome holds its ground, and these are sufficient reasons for people to pause and congregate.

Earthseed Dome goes even further: it invites visitors to take seed packets stacked in its seams home, acting as “human pollinators.” The work thus disperses beyond its site, carried off in pockets. Stratagems will eventually come down too, packed in crates and removed as the exhibition closes. But while both works stand, they do what Durkheim thought totems always did: give a community something to gather around and recognize itself in. The seed packets help. So does the iridescence.

Dave Eggers, Author, Contrapposto | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Dave Eggers is the author of many books, among them Contrapposto, The Eyes and the Impossible, The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, Heroes of the Frontier, A Hologram for the King, and What Is the What. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing center that has inspired over 70 similar organizations worldwide. Eggers is winner of the American Book Award, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the 2024 John Newbery Medalist, for the most distinguished contribution to children's literature for The Eyes and the Impossible. Eggers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Art School, Chicago, and the Kid Who Couldn't Find the Balance

Hugh Leeman: Dave, long before you wrote this book that pulls readers through all angles of the art world, and years before you became a best-selling author, you went to art school. In what ways do you see your own art school years inside Contrapposto's characters?

Dave Eggers: I was an art student starting when I was maybe ten. I loved drawing, I loved painting, I had art teachers who were very encouraging from a very young age. I started being sent around the Chicagoland area to take different classes and develop. All the way through college, I was a painting major for about a year and a half before my parents and I got a little more practical about things, and I had to switch to a slightly more pragmatic major.

So there are bits and pieces from my early art education that made their way into Contrapposto. Cricket is drastically different from the kind of artist I became — he's incredibly uncomfortable with anything related to the intersection between art and commerce, and he never finds an equilibrium between what he wants to do on the page or on a canvas and what becomes of it in the art marketplace. We all know those people. Sometimes the most talented artist you've ever met has no ability to translate that talent into a living. Cricket is very stubborn — the opposite of pragmatic, the opposite of practical — and he never quite figures out a way to match his talent with the right kind of ambition. His friend Olympia is always trying to drag him into that world, guide him through the intersection of art and commerce, but he's not having it.

As different as Cricket is from me — for my own art practice, I do drawings and paintings and prints to pay the rent on the building at 849 Valencia, where we have various nonprofits. I've been doing artwork for about fifteen years now with Electric Works to help fund ScholarMatch, our college access organization. For me it's the exact opposite of Cricket's experience — it's pure practicality and pragmatism, but also pure joy. There's never been any angst associated with creating art for me. For Cricket, though, there's quite a struggle between what he wants to do and the pleasure he takes in moving paint and charcoal around, and then what becomes of it in the marketplace.

Feral Children of the 70s and 80s

Hugh Leeman: The two protagonists, Olympia and Cricket, are very different from one another in how they relate to art and commerce. But there's a strong parallel in that both figures in the book grow up without a stable father figure, and it shapes who they are and who they attach to later in the story. What drew you to that creative choice?

Dave Eggers: I hadn't thought about that, but you're right — it's quite obvious that Cricket doesn't have his dad in the picture. He has a stable grandfather figure. Olympia is wealthier and has various stepdads and biological fathers and mothers in and out of her life — people in and out of trouble with the law for insider trading and such — but she's kind of feral, often alone in this great Victorian home full of books and paintings and art. Both of them are sort of self-raised to some extent.

A little bit of that goes back to the 70s and 80s, when all of us kids were a bit feral. The vast majority of our time seemed to be spent on our own. We were allowed to roam twenty or thirty miles a day. I remember biking seventeen miles to get records — that was the closest record store, and it was a weekly occurrence. I wanted to honor that kind of self-upbringing. Culturally, you just found your own way. Discovery was entirely on your own.

Olympia is far more worldly, better informed, better read. She'll mention a hundred references and names and books in a ten-minute span, and Cricket has no idea what she's talking about most of the time. But they're both free of any steady parental oversight. That's how I remember the 70s and 80s — your parents were definitely there, but they were very trusting. Free-range by default. They put a roof over your head and fed you, but your daily life was your own. You got yourself to school, got yourself home, worked your own hours, made your own money. I don't remember showing my parents my grades after eighth grade. We were peers, in a way, sharing a home with great mutual respect — but it wasn't the helicopter parenting you hear about now.

Learning to See: Nude Drawing and a Lesson Cricket Passes to His Mother

Hugh Leeman: Cricket starts taking art classes early and gets encouragement from teachers who had moved from abroad to the town near him. He goes on his own to Chicago to take life drawing classes. There's a scene in the book that's heartbreakingly beautiful, where Cricket sits down with his mom, they draw an action figure together, and it's his first time really seeing her as a person. Who are the people in your life who encouraged you, and how do they show up in the book?

Dave Eggers: There are very few direct parallels between actual people in my life and the characters in the book. And unfortunately I never taught an art class to my mother or anyone like that. But I maintain to this day that once you go through an academic training in how to see and how to draw — which I did — I genuinely feel I could teach anybody to draw accurately. There's a canon of proportions, a way to learn how to see, a way to measure and use relationships between different parts of the body to draw in an academic way. It's something I really value having learned, and it's been largely lost. It's very hard to find people who will teach you to draw the way it was taught for many hundreds of years.

Cricket grows exponentially as a young man in his teens, having taken these classes and gone into the city and encountered naked people of all ages. It's a radical thing — you're fifteen, and a middle-aged man takes off a robe and poses naked in front of you. Startling, especially for those of us from the sheltered Midwest. It's startling for about ten minutes. And then after that, it's an aggregation of lines and shapes and curves, and there's work to be done to render it accurately on the page. You grow very quickly. There's a maturity that happens fast when you're exposed to that.

It's the same way that for hundreds of years, apprentices would go off to work with masters at fourteen or fifteen — from the countryside to Ghent or Amsterdam, apprenticing with a Rembrandt or whoever, treated like young adults expected to take on real responsibilities. To such a large extent, it's about learning how to see. Your eyes will always lie to you about what something looks like, how big a head is compared to a body. Learning proportionality, being able to draw accurately — it's quite humbling. And thrilling at the same time.

Wherever you go with art after that — conceptual work, abstraction, whatever you want — I do think learning to draw accurately is a good part of the process, the same way you'd learn musical notes and tone and pacing if you're a musician. So at a certain point, Cricket has grown so quickly and learned so much and had his eyes awakened that he wants to share that with his mother. That touching moment — helping someone you love learn to see.

Carpenter: The Professor Who Rails Against the Cannibalism of Art School

Hugh Leeman: Beyond Cricket and Olympia, there's a powerful figure in Contrapposto — Carpenter. He's effectively a supportive paternal figure and he gets some of the book's most quotable lines. At one point he says: "The dreams of young people artistically inclined are so tragically uninformed. That's the crime of it." If Carpenter were looking at an eighteen-year-old artist in 2026 — with apps, artificial intelligence, massive MFA debt, and an Instagram as their portfolio — what would he find tragically uninformed about their dreams today?

Dave Eggers: Cricket thought that because he knew how to draw and drew well at the academy in his teens, he would just be discovered and flown to Europe and apprenticed to the contemporary equivalent of Rembrandt or Van Eyck. And when that doesn't happen, he's crestfallen. At sixteen, he hasn't been brought to Europe yet, and he's shocked — he just assumed it would somehow manifest itself.

Carpenter is one of Cricket's college professors — a rebel in his classicism, really. Cricket is taken under Carpenter's wing, and Carpenter becomes something of a surrogate father. Carpenter believes in the old methods, and in a pluralistic art environment — but also a forgiving and supportive one. There's a big set piece where he's able to strike down a group of people who are cannibalizing each other — artists, college students, MFA students, and professors doing a group critique, effectively flaying alive a young artist who has a lot of talent but not the theoretical language to explain it. He sees that as the worst kind of environment to bring forth in the art world.

If you go to art school thinking it's going to be this beautiful, happy, delightful place of fellow artists loving and supporting each other — so often it becomes a miserable place where everybody's at each other's throats, seeing it as a zero-sum game where one success comes at the cost of another's. A hyper-competitive, cannibalistic atmosphere, which is just the last place on earth you'd expect that kind of violence to exist.

So Carpenter creates a kind of shadow school out on the prairie, where people can get away from all of that and get back into the pure practice of learning to draw and paint — without competition, without the dominance of specious theories, and more about the pleasure of it, creating beauty and delight. Knowing that these are teenagers for the most part — there will be plenty of time for the misery and the competitiveness later, if need be.

A Hundred Thousand Dollars to Learn Printmaking

Hugh Leeman: You recently wrote an article on art school and student debt in which you stated: "Somehow, though, we went from a model where students paid little to nothing and learned techniques passed down through the centuries, to a system where students pay $100,000 and often learn very little beyond theory." In Contrapposto, you give dialogue to your characters that expresses very similar disappointment. What is the future of the arts in a society with such costs?

Dave Eggers: We're talking about American society exclusively, where we are in this utter madness of spiraling costs of higher education. It seems particularly illogical to charge an eighteen-year-old $100,000 to learn printmaking, or to learn how to draw the figure, or to learn painting.

With Art and Water, we took aim at that. There's a reason a lot of people are fleeing this world and some art schools are not doing well. The model is bloated and unfair — for sure classist and exclusionary. So many people who have the talent to pursue visual art as a career cannot afford to study, cannot afford to continue their education, because it's $100,000 a year. It becomes radically inequitable, and it needs to be upended.

I've visited MFA programs — not in San Francisco, I'll say that clearly — and been genuinely shocked by the quality of the work and the quality of instruction. Hard skills are not emphasized. Sometimes it's three years of vague theoretical mumblings without any rigor or discipline, and kids end up having barely inched their work forward because there is so little emphasis on hard skills. These hopeful aspirants spend so much money and receive so little instruction in return.

My co-founder of Art and Water, J.D. Beltran, when we started planning this, was still carrying $150,000 of debt from her MFA program at the San Francisco Art Institute. In her fifties. Think about how absurd that is. Only the United States would ever think of such a system and then perpetuate it. Elsewhere in Europe, you're not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an MFA. The apprenticeship model worked for five hundred years and should be revisited. And the idea that you need a four-year degree to be able to make pictures is also absurd — this did not exist until the middle of the twentieth century. There was never any emphasis on a piece of paper that determined whether you were a worthwhile artist or not. Artists are supposed to be outside of that system of degrees and imprimaturs.

Hugh Leeman: Is Art and Water a potential template — the way 826 Valencia was copied as a model across multiple cities and school districts? Does it possess a similar potential to answer this bloated, predatory system?

Dave Eggers: I think so. It's very easy to copy. All you need is an empty building. Ana Teresa Fernandez, who's the head of faculty at Art and Water, will be putting together a very detailed year-long program with classes taught by her co-teachers and ten really talented established artists in the city. Students will receive thirty to forty hours of instruction and mentorship every week — which far outstrips anything being done at these $100,000-a-year schools.

Not only that, but they'll be sharing space with these successful artists. If they want to see what Jet Martinez is up to, they just have to walk over and watch. You learn so much by watching, so much by talking while someone is working, so much by just seeing how somebody goes about their business. The art school model has forgotten what its essential goals are. Like a lot of American higher education, it's become a business — fundraising, building new buildings, charging people, students incurring crippling debt for decades.

Every artist we asked to be part of Art and Water immediately said yes. Nobody said no. That told us we might be onto something — that this might be the time to reinvent this model and make it more accessible. And it is replicatable anywhere. Sydney, Berlin, anywhere — you gather ten established artists, give them space, add twenty students. It would work.

Generosity as a Counterforce

Hugh Leeman: You've mentioned 826 Valencia, Art and Water, and beyond those you've given away portions of your own earnings to audiences and causes. What's the importance of sharing and generosity in the arts for you?

Dave Eggers: The artists whose work and careers I admire most tend to stay free. Three come to mind immediately. Kristen Farr, a notable Bay Area artist based in Richmond, just helped build our international library of young authors — miniatures, models, chairs with giant floppy arms that embrace students. If you go into 849 Valencia, you'll see her stamp everywhere. She's brilliant and hilarious and very generous. She gave all that time for free because she wanted it to exist.

My first friend who became very successful in the art world was Marcel Dzama — represented by David Zwirner Gallery now, and Zwirner was with him before either of them became well known. To this day, Marcel will just give you anything. If there's a cause and someone wants a print, a drawing, a painting, if they want him to show up and do a mural, Marcel is always going to say yes. He hasn't become a prisoner of that aspect of the art world that enforces artificial scarcity — only this many works per year, only these venues, all of those rules you see sometimes.

And Tucker Nichols, who's always been one of my favorite artists here in the Bay. He sends mail art to people randomly, whether they ask for it or not. High-end commissions one day, public art for free the next. The people whose work and careers I most admire stay free, stay anarchic, stay free-range rather than letting a gallery tell them how much to produce and when and how.

It's the very best life anybody could ask for — creating visual art for a living. But you still have to remain free. You still have to be able to create whatever you want, whenever you want. Why do this for a living unless you're a thousand percent free? And yet here and there, in little corners of the art world, a different energy takes hold — more mercenary, more controlling, more buttoned-down, and ungenerous.

Bedrooms of the Dead: Art That Disorients and Awakens

Hugh Leeman: There's a part of the book where an art installation is created called Bedrooms of the Dead — the bedroom of Cricket and Olympia's friend Jed, who dies in Iraq, is recreated alongside the bedroom of an Iraqi man's brother who also died in the war. It's intense and beautiful. How did you build that idea?

Dave Eggers: Honestly, I don't remember exactly why or how I came up with that. The installation is on a barge on the Chicago River — I'd actually never been on the Chicago River until about a month ago. It's a show that Olympia puts on. They lost their friend Jed maybe ten years earlier in the first Iraq War, in '91, and they pay tribute to the dead on both sides of the conflict by recreating their bedrooms on this barge in the river.

Why is it on a barge? You could say it's an echo of the Tigris River. But a lot of it is about Olympia's curatorial instinct — she's really good at creating disorienting experiences that take you out of the everyday and awaken you to something else. The most powerful art experiences I've had are often not in a gallery. There's some disorienting factor — art in an unexpected place. So she borrows this barge, it's semi-legal, you have to take a boat out to it, you step aboard, walk into this container that's been decorated this way, and it's all done in the small hours of the night.

I love the idea of art outside of a gallery or museum setting — as much as I love museums and galleries, which I do, I'm there all the time. But I love experiences that say: we're putting this show in a taxi cab going to the airport. Or, speaking of airports, whoever curates the shows at SFO is a master. So well done — random travelers encountering brilliantly curated exhibitions. It's the best art curation of any airport in the world.

That's what I love about Pier 29, too. It's right next to the cruise ship docking bay at Pier 27. I love the idea that passengers pulling their roller bags on their way to Fisherman's Wharf are suddenly confronted instead by the most San Francisco place you can imagine — this anarchic place of visual artists, exhibits, and galleries. I'm always trying to say: you're welcome to this world. We want you here. You don't have to have Clement Greenberg's theories under your arm to understand what's happening here. If artists can say that — if they can say they don't want to be exclusive, they want anyone with eyes to experience what they're doing — then we have something. Then we have an art form that's vital and alive and accessible. Anything that gets in the way of that, any hint of exclusivity, I am at war with.

No Smartphone, No Surrender: On Screens, Reading, and the Oligarchs Who Profit

Hugh Leeman: The character Carpenter says: "We've gotten weaker, less skilled, less competent, and less versatile." It seems parallel to criticisms of today's society — we write less, we read less, we're as distracted as ever. How do we keep people interested in stories, in reading books, in writing? And how do you personally maintain that practice with all the modern world's digital distraction?

Dave Eggers: I don't have as much distraction myself because I've built very high walls around it. I'm talking to you from a landline, because I don't have a smartphone — and I know how distracted I would be if I did.

I wrote a few dystopian novels about the tech world. I did not see the wholesale offering of our free will and souls to AI coming quite so quickly, and it's something I find very upsetting. But I do see, in our international library of young authors, that it's a no-tech zone — all books written by students, typewriters, glue and staples and paper, zine writing classes, lo-fi options across the board. And it's wildly popular. The average kid does not want more tech. So we as adults have to model that and say, let's offer alternatives. Let's have a family reading hour where we're just reading books on paper. Let's give ourselves a diversity of experiences every day.

When you're reading fiction, it should be on paper — you retain significantly more, it's a fundamentally different experience. You should not channel everything through a screen. Whenever we put media that needn't be on a screen onto a screen, we've made a mistake. We've channeled everything through a profit-driven vehicle, and we've given more money to these oligarchs who are tearing down our democracy. When an educator assigns a novel, every kid in that class should be given the paperback. Read a short story in the tub — just give yourself an alternative, a break. It's just a matter of intentionality. We don't have to assume that every last part of our lives needs to be channeled through a screen.

The Circle Was Prescient. The Reality Is Worse.

Hugh Leeman: In 2013, you published The Circle, later adapted to film with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson. For a guy calling from a landline, that novel feels strikingly prescient — warnings about oversharing, surveillance, the erosion of privacy, corporate power, democratic vulnerability. How do you see society, culture, and the arts changing under the increasing pressure of tech?

Dave Eggers: I got here in '92 from Chicago, and after a year I was sharing office space with Wired Magazine and Boing Boing, working in South Park where so much of the early tech world was happening. So I sort of got to live a lot of that through osmosis. But I was always a skeptic — what I consider a certain type of Chicago skepticism, where we're not early adopters, we're the last adopters, because we see everything as inherently suspect until it's proven otherwise. I thought even email was a joke that nobody would ever really want to do. So I've never been right about any of my predictions.

But having that distance from it allowed me to write about it and speculate on a worst-case outcome of where we were in 2013. And so much of that has come true and gotten much worse. What I've always been most interested in isn't the companies' motives — those are always going to be profit-driven and sometimes terrifying — but more our willingness to adopt these technologies knowing that they're profit-driven and terrifying.

In The Every — the follow-up — there's a character who keeps creating worse and worse technologies and apps and algorithms, thinking at some point the public will say, that is way too far, that is enough. And yet it never happens. After thirty-three years here, I've still been shocked again and again. You see some horrifying new app, some horrifying new idea, and you think there's just no chance anybody will go for this. And people quickly adopt it. It continually surprises me, continually shows how little I know about human nature.

The only power any of these companies have is power that we've given them. You don't have to order anything from Amazon. And yet everybody does — every day we give Jeff Bezos money, and then we don't like how he and Zuckerberg and Apple and Google give tens of millions to political figures who then enact policies that hurt millions of people. And then we turn around and give them more money. It's a very strange cycle.

The great thing is that when people do act on their outrage, things change very quickly. These companies don't want bad publicity. They back away fast when people stand up. The same people who will protest against an oil company or a university are never protesting in front of the gates of Google or Apple or Amazon, which do far more damage. I think these companies get a pass that they absolutely should not be getting.

ChatGPT Is Plagiarism. Full Stop.

Hugh Leeman: You loosely referenced large language models like ChatGPT as machines that write for us. As a published author, and someone who's dedicated enormous energy to teaching youth how to write through 826 Valencia, what are your views on large language models?

Dave Eggers: There is no safe usage of AI in anything creative, in the humanities. When I first heard a very smart kid say, about four years ago, that he only uses it to help generate ideas, I said: you are one of one. There's only been one of you in the history of humankind. You are an unprecedented creature with a brain unlike any other brain that ever existed. Only you see things as you see them. Whatever you write about, however you express yourself, is the most original thing possible. But you need to do so without interference. You cannot cede your mind to an unthinking machine. You cannot give your voice to a computer. You cannot have an algorithm speak for you.

That's the end of humanity, period. The moment you have a machine speak for you, you have left the human race. You've given up your humanity card. You've become half machine, and that's fine if that's what you want — but you've definitely left the rest of us.

Teachers I know have to spend enormous time policing AI now — it's made their jobs so much harder. Their remedy is to ask students for rough drafts, handwritten drafts, messy drafts. Nobody wants polished AI slop. And once you relieve students of the feeling that they need to produce something vaguely polished, maybe they can get back to expressing themselves.

I was recently at an international school in Potrero Hill — mostly kids who've been in the country less than three years. We were working on poems about their lives and home countries. They were writing beautiful, handwritten work. Radically different forms, pure joy. But the teacher told me afterward that she'd moved to paper and pencil specifically because these students — who are just learning English and desperately want to produce something polished — are among the first to immediately go to ChatGPT. It's so sad that wanting to catch up means letting a machine write for them. Thank God this incredible teacher is fully committed to making sure their authentic voices are heard.

As for the plagiarism dimension — it's a hundred percent plagiarism. AI companies have trained their models on authors' work without permission, consent, or knowledge. I'm part of a number of lawsuits against these companies for stealing our work. I do hope they are made to pay, because it's morally right.

The great thing about publishing contracts is that they all have plagiarism clauses — the author has to assure the publisher that every word in the book was generated by them. Anything plagiarized means the book gets destroyed, pulped, pulled from shelves, and the author can be sued. It's fraud. So no aspiring or established author should think there's a shortcut there. Nobody wants to read that. And you are in serious legal jeopardy if you let a machine write for you.

The term "AI art" is an oxymoron — it doesn't make any sense. Only humans can create art. If a human didn't create it, it's not art. Call it AI-generated imagery, call it whatever you want. The only living organism on this earth that can create what is actually art is a human being.

The Drawings in the Book: Ten Artists, Two Models, One Soul

Hugh Leeman: To close us out — Cricket and Olympia, and so many of the richest scenes in your book, take place in the atelier, with a nude model and people sitting there with charcoal and paper, depicting what they see. And there are actual drawings in the book. What's the story behind those?

Dave Eggers: There are two sections of drawings. One is a number of different figures drawn in an art class, credited to Cricket — to show the kind of academic drawing you do as a student, and how radical an act it is for a fifteen-year-old to walk in and suddenly be drawing naked fifty-year-old men and sixty-year-old women, trying to depict these very complicated figures and the emotions in their faces. How strange and how extraordinary it is to see a teenager taking all that on — and doing it so well.

I recommend figure drawing to anybody at any age. When you see the strength and vitality of the human body at any age — whether it's an eighty-year-old or a twenty-five-year-old — you still see this glowing, inspiring musculature and life emanating from every pore. Even if you feel like you can't draw a line and you know nothing about anatomy, you should do it, because it's such a revelation.

The second section of drawings is at the very end of the book — depictions of two older figures, which I won't identify. That was done at a beautiful studio up on 23rd Street in Noe Valley, run by Michael Markowitz, where I used to go for figure drawing sessions. We asked about ten Bay Area artists to draw from two models who were representing these characters at a certain age. I really wanted to show these two figures from the perspectives of all kinds of artists — to see how drastically differently people meet the same two humans in front of them, and yet capture some essential, shared emotion in the relationship between them.

The styles are all over the place, but they all capture the same soul. No matter how different the drawings are, these are clearly the same two people — something very common and powerful in their expressions and the way they interact with each other. It was an experiment that paid off.

Hugh Leeman: Dave, of everything we've covered today, what's something we haven't covered that you'd like people to know?

Dave Eggers: I think you covered it really well. Thanks for thinking deeply about so many of these issues. It's genuinely refreshing. And I'm grateful to you for taking the time.

Hugh Leeman: Dave, thank you for sharing the book with me. Parts of it felt like reading stories from my own life and from people I've known intimately. It's beautiful. Thank you for your time.

Dave Eggers: Thanks so much, Hugh.

Roland Petersen at 100 - A Life in Painting 

Studio Shop Gallery - Burlingame, California 

May 8 - 30, 2026

By Kelly Jean Egan

There are few privileges greater than reaching one hundred years of age, and fewer still than arriving there with one’s creative faculties not diminished but actively engaged with pertinent aesthetic questions related to form and color. To stand before Roland Petersen’s paintings at Studio Shop Gallery during the celebration of his centennial is therefore to encounter more than a retrospective. It is to share, however briefly, in the rare continuity of a life still in dialogue with art. One leaves not only aware of Petersen’s longevity, but quietly grateful to witness a body of work that remains unfinished in spirit and alive in its sustained art making.

The exhibition itself avoids the sentimentality that often shadows centennial celebrations. Petersen’s paintings do not lean on age for significance or ask to be viewed as the final chapter of a long career. Figures gather beneath umbrellas, stretch across landscapes and move through spaces shaped as much by composition preferences as by a suggested narrative. Pattern, shifting light and fractured planes give even the most relaxed scenes a quiet energy that spill into the ambiance of the gallery. What stays with you is the sense of someone deeply engaged in looking, experimenting and finding joy in the act of painting.

While Petersen’s paintings are often situated within the Bay Area Figurative tradition, this exhibition suggests a practice never entirely confined by the designation. The influence of Hans Hofmann, with whom he served as a studio assistant in the early part of his career, remains visible in the push and pull of color, shifting planes and carefully negotiated space, yet Petersen employs these formal concerns toward distinctly personal ends. His compositions hold abstraction and figuration in productive tension, allowing landscape, still life and human presence to intermingle without settling fully into any single mode. What emerges across the galleries is not an artist departing from Bay Area Figuration so much as one deepening its possibilities, extending its vocabulary through decades of sustained experimentation and an unwavering commitment to the pleasures and complexities of looking. Many of the later picnic paintings are rendered with harder edges and tighter realism, suggesting that Petersen has slowly moved to more recognizable iconography, just as Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown did later in their careers. Yet, Petersen continues to explore the checkerboard and geometric patterns which these outdoor compositions offer.

The exhibition's breadth also makes visible how Petersen’s relationship to painting has evolved over time. In Chair and Man (1958), made during a period when Bay Area Figuration was reshaping the possibilities of postwar painting, the figure feels caught between observation and abstraction. The work carries the qualities of that era; the searching and testing of how human presence might fit into increasingly expressive spaces. Petersen’s newest painting, Sun Bathers (2026), manifests from a very different place. The work is less concerned with negotiation and more confident in itself. The atmosphere feels open and the arrangement at ease, as though decades of painting have already answered weighing questions while making room for new ones to emerge. If Chair and Man is a reflection of an artist working through the tensions of a particular moment in history, Sun Bathers suggests something quieter and perhaps harder won; a painter fluently at leisure within his own language. 

Petersen’s picnic paintings perhaps best reveal the particular world he has spent decades building. In Farm Picnic (1968) and July Luncheon (1967), people gather across carefully arranged spaces where leisure, landscape and structure exist in quiet balance. Umbrellas, tables, horizon lines and patches of color guide the eye across the surface, building movement through the paintings without ever forcing it. Lines stretch and intersect, sometimes dividing space and sometimes gently holding it together, allowing the image to feel both composed and alive. The choice of subject is likely about how it renders the opportunity to make each of his paintings a combination of still life, landscape, and portrait. All three elements are present in each of these compositions which he then combines with abstract and color field areas with recognizable subjects. The scenes never become overly ordered or sentimental. There is pleasure here, certainly, but also a gentle distance, as though Petersen is less interested in documenting a social occasion than in observing the rhythms and relationships that unfold within it. 

That sensibility carries forward into Picnic in Paradise, where the atmosphere shifts but the underlying curiosity remains. The later work feels lighter and more spacious, perhaps more dreamlike, yet it still holds onto Petersen’s fascination with gathering, arrangement and the subtle ways people occupy a shared space. Across these paintings, one begins to understand that Petersen’s picnics are never simply about recreation. They are carefully built worlds where line, color and companionship unfold together at their own pace. The composition itself challenges meaning for a viewer. Figures are interspersed in the composition, except for a cluster of three persons seated at a table in the lower left of the painting, mostly standing alone and usually wearing a wide brim hat. They don’t exactly appear lonely, and yet they are solitary within a multi-person placement throughout the picture plane. In many respects it captures the very individual lives we lead even when among other people we commune with. Sunlight and a candy-cane assortment of colors make the painting pop with a brightness that keeps it from being melancholy.

Petersen joins a rare company of artists who remained actively engaged with painting at or beyond one hundred years of age, among them Wayne Thiebaud, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Carmen Herrera. In Thiebaud’s case, the parallel feels especially close, not only in longevity but in their shared relationship to California and the Bay Area’s artistic landscape. Yet these comparisons ultimately feel secondary when moving through Petersen’s exhibition. In a rapidly shifting art world, there is something quietly powerful about witnessing an artist’s continued service to their practice and commitment to self-expression, not as performance or preservation, but as necessity. Petersen once remarked, “When I paint, I’m in heaven.” The statement lingers throughout the exhibition. Whatever legacy these works continue to build seems almost incidental to the act itself. The paintings do not feel made for posterity or even for our approval, but from a more private and enduring impulse: gratitude for the ability to create at all, and the simple need to keep discovering what painting might still reveal.

* all photos courtesy of Studio Shop Gallery

A Letter to My Daughter From an Occupied City

By N Stern

You, my daughter, who was born in the 100th bloom of the cherry blossoms on the tidal basin in Washington, D.C., loves to return to the city of your birth. It's a natural instinct, a homing instinct, nostalgia and memory and what we label "Predator pride," homage to the samurai codes of the science fiction film series and its "Yautja" species.  These are the waters from which you emerged, red-hued and laughing/screaming into the Americas, our America, one nation, under G-d, with liberty and justice for all - though not all at the same time.

So we find ourselves revisiting the tidal basin during a rain-deluged April, huddled for shelter beneath the brutalist Minecraft caverns of the USDA, where you buy an “I ❤️DC emblazoned umbrella from the ice-cream trucks that line Independence Blvd. - and I, in the words of the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, "collaborate" with nature - getting soaked to the bone.

We are soggy and slick by the time we glimpse the  bronze shoulders of Thomas Jefferson, his domed memorial marking the gateway to the basin.  The trees are barren, windswept clean and raw - the only blossoms you witness are floating in the gutter beneath the (James) Wilson Arch, which rises a majestic 14m above the street.  

Seeking respite from the Potomac's rising tide, we make our way up, far from the canals and railways and docks that once held sway to slave auctions and fetid river swamp-scent. Young National Guardsmen sip corruscating neon Gatorade, their conscripted duty, these Guards at the Raj, to slouch tall against the opprobrious visage of fearless leader which drapes 3 stories yon from the columns of the Department of Justice - its scales crooked, Il Duce's scowl pained as Ian McKellen's Richard III.  

We pause for a first-person photo, middle-finger raised.

A reminder: The District is an occupied city. Keep your head down, your collar up, your Umbrella movement 雨傘運動 shield aloft.  Keep the liberation of your imagination close, your future hopes furtive against the flags which whip against the storm.

It's a short walk to the National Portrait gallery - more guardsmen at the steps.  Admission is (yet) free, the former patent office a sanctuary of light and cool against the damp and cloud-dark.  The banners here celebrate Anna Mary Robertson Moses, nee Grandma.

Your eye is drawn to memory and spectacle, Nam June Paik's Electric Superhighway, the States, our states - how many have you lived in? - States which flicker in cathode ray splendor - America as Wonkavision.  Adjacent a spinning pillar of LED light, Jenny Holzer's Babel/ing ("For SAAM," 2008) truisms still true, this cyclone of white light/white heat sweeping us like Dorothy into a cocoon of velvety darkness, carpeted benches, a theatre of stillness, a theatre of still-truth.

Sir Isaac Julien's LESSONS OF THE HOUR (2019) beckons us across five screens, early in the loop of a 28:44 run time.  Mesmerized, immersed.  We sit, sit still, and in Bellow's parlance, "I saw and I saw."

a man leading a horse

a regal man

a gentleman in british empire red velvet/then colonial indigo blue

A gentleman, this gentleman, Frederick Douglass,spine straight conjured by RSC actor Ray Fearon, his voice-over musings culled from the orator’s "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” and "Lectures on Pictures," and the eponymous 1893 address.

his fingertips trace the knotted bark of a serpentine tree, a hanging tree. 

A song in my head, Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" channeled by Nina Simone channeling Bettye Lavette channeling Billie Holiday.

He/and we are minotaurs in the tangle of American primeval boscage, the Loblolly Pine, the Sugar Maple, the majestic Chestnut Oak.

Sit, I say.  We are going nowhere.  You are theatre-mode silent.  You are already hooked.

Time and memory bubble and seafoam wash across the screens - the wonder wheel of LESSON OF THE HOUR is Julien's elliptical fluidity of then and now, Douglass's musings on the freedom of thought and his sojourns across the ocean an umbilical from then - to - now (and back again.) 

Douglass's July 4th colliding with our looming sestercentennial, fireworks onscreen bloom over the shipyard ramparts of Fells Point (now) skyscrapers illuminated in potassium chlorate retinal burns, cotton fields and magnesium wool - strontium nitrate and barium and burnt copper mirrored in Baltimore City harbor of his education and awakening.

the myopic drapery and regalia of the photographer's studio, adjustable stools and trompe l’oeil oil cloth backdrops

Douglass never smiles, his laser-gaze a political choice, a counter-revolt against the tyranny of the image, as he says..

“As to the moral and social influence of pictures, it would hardly be extravagant to say of it what Moore has said of ballads, ‘give me the making of a nation’s ballads and I care not who has the makings of its laws’. The picture and the ballad are alike, if not equally social forces. One reaching and swaying the heart by the eye, the other by the ear.”

a lectern, a lecture hall, a lecture —

douglass faces the amphitheatre in his thrall, in a spell, like a firing squad, a trial, muttonchopped gents of the 19th Century elbow-to-elbow patched next to a jury in contemporary garb, the 20th and 21st.

The alta borghesia, the patron, the awakened.

another potassium <flash> the image immortal.  

The tyranny of the Daguerreian apparatus.

'Daguerre, by that simple and all-abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery. Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs, and electrotypes, good and bad, now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings. Man of all conditions may now see themselves as others see them.'

Time is a memory, time is (of) the essence, time is the warped bow of the wood on the peeling red barn.

the calcium phosphate exoskeleton crunch of Douglass's footprints

as they traverse the Wuthering height cliffs

and beachfront of the Isle of Skye.

"Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way into the world."

We sit for a cycle then another, my daughter, born in the 100th bloom of the cherry blossoms, the student of 8th grade American history, the constitutional duty desecrated by its outsourcing to a YouTube series you were bursting to share with me, your filmmaker father; "The Story of Us" — where else can an American teen learn the sacred text of her nation from a notorious rogue's gallery of historians (Diddy, Martha Stewart, DJT, John Lassiter, Garrison Keillor.)

You've learned more about America from LESSONS OF THE HOUR. We depart beneath a suspended staircase of Tommy Smith's raised golden fists ("Bridge," Glen Kaino, 2013–2014)

When you were mere months old, the university where I taught, named for our nation's father, once the site of the city's meridian, once a Civil War hospital, where Walt Whitman nursed the casualties — where the English department staff ladies said, bring the baby, bring the baby — there you are my daughter, in a pram, posed in a polaroid before the people's house.

Now the East wing is rubble, a desecration, a méprisant crime against L'enfant's design. In synagogue you are taught to face East, for East is Jerusalem, or East is Eden, and East of Eden is the Land of Nod, of Exile.

The sun shines upon your old neighborhood, this New Jerusalem, the U Street corridor, the "Chocolate CIty" of Duke Ellington and Roberta Flack, of Ben's Chili Bowl, of Ethiopian injera and Jamaican callaloo. Past the 17th street Stivers rowhouse which was our neighbor, built in slave ballast brick by Frederick Douglass, where he lived until his death.

"There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than all the people in these United States, in this very hour."

G-d bless you, my daughter, G-d bless our republic.

You bear witness to these LESSONS OF THE HOUR.

To the triumph of Frederick Douglass, the manumission of the image.

Will Riding In is a distinguished curator, art historian, and potter who dedicated his career to amplifying Indigenous voices and safeguarding Native North American material culture. Currently serving as the Curator of Collections and Engagement at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Riding In excels at building vital collaborative partnerships with tribal communities to ensure museum collections are ethically vetted, accurately documented, and properly represented.

His impactful museum practice includes co-curating and reinstalling the prestigious Indigenous American Art galleries at San Francisco's de Young Museum. Rooted in a deep, multigenerational artistic legacy, Riding In is an active Pueblo potter. He creates traditional hand-built pottery utilizing natural micaceous clay harvested directly from the earth and fired using outdoor wood and manure techniques.

Riding In's professional philosophy is heavily influenced by his family. His maternal aunt, Eudora Montoya, famously led a 1970s revival of traditional pottery techniques at Santa Ana Pueblo. Furthermore, his father, a foundational Pawnee scholar, established the American Indian Studies program at Arizona State University. This powerful lineage inspires Riding In to transform institutional practices, reverse historical colonial injustices, and passionately advocate for the proper indigenization of museum spaces.

The following are excerpts from Will Riding In’s interview as conducted by Hugh Leeman

A Grandmother, a Revival, and a Living Legacy

Hugh Leeman: Will, your grandmother is the subject of a documentary in which, nearly half a century ago, she leads a revival of traditional Pueblo pottery techniques for Pueblo women. Can you give us some context on the cultural significance of that revival, what she meant to you and your family?

Will Riding In: Eudora Montoya was my mother's aunt — in a Native way, she's like my grandmother. She taught a revival pottery class to a group of women in Santa Ana Pueblo in the seventies. She taught them where to get the clay, how to process it, how to process their own materials, and how to do the outdoor firing. Growing up, my mom had several of her pots around the house — small ones and larger ones. And now I see her pots all over Santa Fe, at galleries and auctions. Even though she's no longer with us, her legacy still lives on through her pottery that collectors are still seeking out.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the outdoor kiln and collecting clay in nature. We often think of pottery studios as having electric kilns and commercially prepared clay. Can you talk a bit more about the traditional approach?

Will Riding In: I’m a potter myself. I was taken under the wing of Clarence Cruz from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in northern New Mexico. I was a grad student at UNM, and I saw there was a course offering for Pueblo Pottery. Already having worked with clay growing up, I thought, why not? Learn from a different mentor.

It was through his class that I learned where to get different clays I wasn't used to — specifically micaceous clay, where there is naturally occurring mica in the clay body. Those are really ideal for utilitarian wares because of the mica, it acts as a heat conductor. He showed me where to get the clay, how to harvest it, and how to process it. That learning experience was really critical for my artistic career — having a new mentor and learning to process different types of materials completely ignited my interest in pottery again. When I was rolling my coils and hand-building, it just came like second nature.

I just before and during Covid, but after Covid passed — around 2021 or 2022 — I had all these finished pots from the clay we had harvested. He was doing a firing at the Poeh cultural center in Pojoaque, NM. , so I brought several of my pots, and we fired outdoors together. For Pueblo pottery, the traditional way is firing outdoors with wood and or manure. The manure ignites fast and reaches a high temperature. That's how many Pueblo potters have traditionally fired their pottery.

Hugh Leeman: Your grandmother made a living at Native art markets, including the Santa Fe Indian Market. Can you give some context on the cultural and artistic significance of those markets?

Will Riding In: The Santa Fe Indian Market (Southwestern Association for Indian Arts) has been around for over one hundred years. It's a way for artisans to sell their artwork. It's branched out to include more contemporary arts as well. When it first started, artists were selling traditional art — jewelry, leatherwork, paintings,  and pottery. From what I hear from my aunts, people would be lined up outside my grandmother's booth when the show started, waiting to buy her pots. She had quite a following of collectors.

A Ball of Clay and a Life Set in Motion

Hugh Leeman: Besides your grandmother, your aunt plays an instrumental role in inspiring you at a young age. You told me in a previous conversation that she gave you a ball of clay when you were young, and in no small part, set a lifetime of dedication to the arts in motion. Who was your aunt to you?

Will Riding In: My aunt's name is Laura Peña, and she was one of the potters in our family. She gave me a ball of clay when I was somewhere between eight and ten years old, and that was really a life-changing event. As a child, I was always drawn to mud, to the earth. When it would rain, I'd go outside and make little bowls with the mud. When my aunt gave me that ball of clay, she showed me the basics — how to do coils, how to do pinch pots. She shared where to get the clay and what we put into the clay to make it stronger. She was referring to the temper, which helps strengthen the clay body for firing.

After she gave me clay, I was making pinch pots, little figurines, rolling coils on my own. And when I was done, I would just crush it and start over again, reusing the same clay. With clay, it never really dries out permanently. When it would lose its moisture, I'd just add water, let it sit for a few days, andcontinue to make..

Having her pottery and my grandmother's pottery in the house, I thought to myself: One day I want to do something like that.

Moving from the Reservation to the City — and a Father Who Built Something Historic

Hugh Leeman: You have this multigenerational influence — your grandmother, your aunt, these women around the house literally putting clay in your hands. On the other side, your father becomes a major source of inspiration. Your older siblings grew up on the reservation, and you were the first not to. You move with your dad to the city, and he goes on to found the American Indian Studies program at Arizona State University in the nineties. What was that process like for you?

Will Riding In: We moved around a lot because my dad was in school — our family went from New Mexico to California and then to Arizona. When we got to Arizona in the nineties, he had accepted a faculty position in the Justice Studies department, and that's where he began his career at ASU. After a few years, he was able to recruit other individuals — Manny Pinofrom Acoma Pueblo, Myla Carpio (Jicarilla Apache/Laguna Pueblo), and a few others — and he established the groundwork for developing that program. They were really some of the leaders in American Indian Studies at that time, with strong academic figures like my dad, Cal Seciwa from Zuni Pueblo, Carol Lujan (Diné), and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) from South Dakota, an author and well-known scholar. ASU in those early years of AIS produced this strong foundational cohort of Indigenous scholars who went on to inspire probably thousands of students — Native and non-Native alike.

Hugh Leeman: I can hear the emotion in your voice around that. What did you learn from your father?

Will Riding In: My dad recently passed in November of last year. I've been thinking about him a lot. What he inspired me to do — he's been a huge advocate for me to continue museum work. Growing up, my dad was a historian who worked closely with our tribe, the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. He was going to museums constantly, doing consultations with the tribe. Sometimes I got to go on his travels with him. I grew up around museums, seeing beautiful artwork, but also seeing the historic materials. encouraged me to be an advocate for Native peoples — to, as he would say, keep fighting the good fight. Which I interpret as fighting for what you believe in.

As Native peoples, we've endured a lot — systemic racism, colonization. Being in museum spaces is an opportunity to reverse some of those injustices and to Indigenize spaces. My role as a curator now is to work closely with artists and Indigenous communities, because there is a long history of museums not consulting with tribes or disseminating knowledge that was never meant for public consumption. I see my role as working closely with tribes to avoid those unethical situations.

My dad saw the dark side of museums in the nineties and even before. I read something of his recently where he described going to an institution and seeing a display of Native American human remains. That was a pivotal moment in his life — he knew he wanted to fight to get those kinds of exhibitions off public view. He was an advocate for Indigenous peoples all over, pushing for collaboration and consultation with tribes so that those types of materials wouldn't be on public display.

But I also saw museums shift. Even in grad school, I could see them trying to be more inclusive of Indigenous voices. Museums can be a place for Native peoples — a source of inspiration for creativity, a resource for communities. My role as a curator is to bridge those communities with museums and collections, and show that museums can be a resource. 

NAGPRA and the Fight for Indigenous Remains

Hugh Leeman: Your father was an advocate for NAGPRA and the repatriation of Indigenous remains from museums. Can you share some context on what NAGPRA is and the history of Indigenous remains and their repatriation?

Will Riding In: NAGPRA is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990. It was passed because tribes were dealing with museums displaying burial items, human remains, and items of cultural patrimony— really, without consultation, without even notifying communities about what was on view. In the early years of museums, collections came from archaeologists, self-proclaimed archaeologists, anthropologists going into Indigenous communities, and either taking items outright, doing excavations without the knowledge of communities, or coercing people into selling items. A lot of those items ended up in museums, which would then put them on display without notifying the source communities.

Tribes and Native activists were deeply upset by that. Many of these things were already buried in the ground — people dig them up and put them on view.. It's a desecration of sacred sites and burial sites. Those are the human rights issues that people like my dad were trying to address.

Dropping Out, a Hidden Storage Room, and a Career is Born

Hugh Leeman: You initially dropped out of school altogether. You end up working an entry-level job at the Heard Museum, where you meet Marcus, an Indigenous curator and Comanche man, who reveals a hidden aspect of the museum — the storage that guests never see. This changes your perspective on art, museums, and life. Tell me about Marcus and what he introduced you to.

Will Riding In: I started working at the Heard Museum in 2015. I had dropped out of my master's program in public health and went back to Phoenix, where I took this job in admissions. I met Marcus while working at the front desk. One day, he asked if I wanted to go see the collections, and I said sure — I had never seen them before.

We went, and I got to see pottery from my mom's side — from Santa Ana Pueblo. I was amazed by the collection they had, not only from Santa Ana but from many communities in the Southwest. Their contemporary Pueblo pottery collection was so extensive. That sparked my interest immediately.

Then Marcus was working on an exhibition, and sometimes during my lunch I'd go see what was happening behind the scenes. I watched him take a room with four white walls and transform it into something with a completely different ambiance. He was able to create a mood through the objects, through the art, in the exhibition space — with lighting, colors, text panels, and with exhibition text. Watching that exhibition come together showed me how one person can take art and create a whole new emotional world around it. That's when I really understood how powerful art is. Each piece has its own story, and when you put them together in an exhibition, it tells a much larger story than any single label could. The two are deeply complementary.

That experience made me want to get into curatorial work. I worked at the Heard for a year, then came back to New Mexico. I applied to UNM and got into the museum studies program. I did my practicum at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, helped with the deinstallation of their permanent exhibition, received a fellowship at UNM's Maxwell Museum working with the ethnographic collection, and eventually went back to the Heard one summer to work with Marcus again — traveling pretty much all over the Southwest with him, running programs to create art workshops for tribal communities. The workshops were traditional art forms specific to those communities. 

Museums as Places of Gathering

Hugh Leeman: From a curatorial perspective, you've noted that museums need to see themselves as places of gathering, and that there's an opportunity to do better than they have historically. What does that higher aspiration look like?

Will Riding In: Museums are shifting toward being less solely collections-focused and more of a place that can hold conversation. You're seeing a lot of museums get really creative with public programming, which is a way to draw new audiences to the institution. And you're seeing a lot more community-based exhibitions where curators are working with Indigenous communities and putting the Indigenous collaborators' voices at the forefront.

That's a total shift from older museology practices, where the curator's voice — and specifically, often a non-Native curator's voice — dominated. Now you see exhibitions like Grounded in Clay, which has been on a national tour and is now at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. That exhibition had over sixty Pueblo collaborators who were able to tell their own story about the pieces of pottery they selected for the show and what that meant to them. You're getting a whole new perspective on the art — not just the historical context, but what this art means to the community today.

Cultural Preservation at the Confluence of Artistic Evolution

Hugh Leeman: As an artist, you were part of reviving traditional Santa Ana pottery techniques that nearly vanished in the middle of the twentieth century. What is the tension between cultural preservation and cultural evolution?

Will Riding In: There are potters who are still continuing the traditional art form — maintaining those traditions within their community. And then there are some potters who are using traditional methods but doing very innovative work, showing what pottery can be. Virgil Ortiz from Cochiti Pueblo is a great example — his form and the storylines behind his work are really innovative. JeffSuina, also from Cochiti, similarly. And Kathleen Wall from Jemez Pueblo is doing incredible sculptures using traditional clays. So it's slightly different from what people might assume comes from the community, but they're still using traditional methods. Evolving from the foundation rather than departing from it.

Carved Stories: The Wheelwright, Honyouti, and Boarding School History

Hugh Leeman: You've called the Mavasta Honyouti show at the Wheelwright Museum — Carved Stories, done in collaboration with the Honyouti family — a milestone in your career. The show touches on dark corners of America's past, specifically the boarding school era. Can you talk about this show, what it touches on, and how it connects storytelling and art?

Will Riding In: I curated Carved Stories at the Wheelwright in 2024. When I started at the Wheelwright, the director had already told me the museum had purchased the Coming Home series of master carvings — sixteen low-relief plaque carvings in cottonwood, which is a traditional medium for Hopi people. The story recounts his grandfather's boarding school experience, visually telling the account of a child being forcibly taken from his home and sent to an off-reservation boarding school.

The plaques show him being removed from his family, put on a wagon for several days, and arriving at the boarding school frightened and scared. You can see all of that human emotion in the carvings. The story addresses the US government's assimilation policies — boarding schools designed to take children from their homes, displace them from their culture, and assimilate them into mainstream society. These kids were forced to get Euro-American hairstyles. Their hair was cut. They were issued new clothing. Mavasta’s grandfather, Clyde, for instance, was issued government clothing upon his arrival at boarding school — you can see that in one of the plaques. In the next scene, he was given his English name by someone who pointed at a name on a chalkboard, which was Clyde. At that time, Hopi was his primary language. English was the foreign language.

The story follows his grandfather from being taken from home to being released from boarding school around thirteen or fourteen years old. But the story ends with hope — the final plaque shows his grandfather in his fields, happy, with corn stalks behind him. Even after everything he faced, he went on to live a full life as a traditional Hopi person.

The exhibition was closely connected to the children's book Mavasta wrote and illustrated, called Coming Home: A Hopi Resistance Story. He used the carvings as illustrations. What I did in the exhibition was add historical context that a children's book didn’t go into.

This was a deeply collaborative process. I worked closely with him, his younger brother Kevin, and their father Ron — all carvers. We commissioned a few additional pieces from the family for the show. I worked with the graphic designer, Kevin Coochwytewa, who is Hopi and Isleta Pueblo, who brought the exhibition together visually. My dad contributed some of the editorial work. And we worked with a filmmaker from Acoma Pueblo, John Sims.

As an ethical researcher and curator, since I was addressing Hopi history, I reached out to the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, informed them about the exhibition, sent them the exhibition text, and received their blessing. They also allowed me to use a historic photograph that Mavasta recreated in one of the plaques — showing a group of Hopi men who had been sent to Alcatraz Island because they refused to send their children to boarding school. I was given permission to include that photograph in the exhibition.

A Father's Blessing

Hugh Leeman: The show inspired Hopi classes to travel four-plus hours to see it. And your father — a towering figure in your life — came to see the exhibition. As you stood there in the museum and watched him move through everything you had collaboratively brought to life, what were you feeling?

Will Riding In: When my dad came for the opening, he went through the exhibition and read every object label and text panel. Then he came out, took a deep breath, and told me, "This is probably the best exhibition I've ever seen. The content is all there. Good job. And I'm not just saying this because you're my son."

He said it was the best exhibition he'd ever seen because of the process — working with the family, working with the community, bringing in an Indigenous filmmaker and a graphic designer. To hear those words from him was the highlight of my life. He had been involved with museums for so many years, often critiquing them. He knew the museum setting deeply. And hearing that from him was such an honor.

That was the moment I thought: this is my process, and I need to continue it. If it's not me who does this work, who else is going to do it? I feel an obligation to continue — to produce Indigenous-led exhibitions, to create culturally appropriate content. Past museum practices have sometimes revealed knowledge that was not appropriate for public consumption. As an Indigenous curator, I won't do that. I consult with the communities I'm working with to ensure the information is appropriate.

Mavasta brought his students from Hopi, which is four and a half, five hours away to see their his work in the exhibit. — Watching their faces light up, seeing how proud those kids were of him — those are the moments that remind me that exhibitions have the ability to really change people's lives.

Hugh Leeman: Shortly after the exhibition, your father became sick. You went to see him at the hospital, and you shared a story with me previously that I'd love to hear again. What did he leave behind with you?

Will Riding In: My dad was in Vietnam and was exposed to Agent Orange. He was diagnosed with a rare form of bone marrow cancer and had been in and out of chemo and radiation. In November of last year, he passed.

In those last days, I was telling him about the work I was doing — that I was fighting hard to continue in his footsteps, producing culturally appropriate exhibitions, doing collaborative work the way he had done it. And I told him I had started to do NAGPRA work too. He smiled at me and gave a fist bump and said, "Good job. Keep fighting the good fight."

That was something he would say to students, to others in the field of American Indian Studies, and the museum world. There's more work to be done. Continue it. I just told him I was following in his footsteps and that I was trying to be like him.

What Will Riding In Hopes You Take With You

Hugh Leeman: For someone who may know nothing about Indigenous arts or the Wheelwright Museum, where you're the curator, what do you hope to leave with them?

Will Riding In: I hope that when people come into my exhibitions, they understand that as a Native curator — as a Pueblo person, as an artist — I'm presenting the exhibition through my lens, and I'm providing a perspective that might be different from other exhibitions they've seen. I work closely with the artists, and sometimes their families, and the content they're receiving is from a Native perspective, culturally appropriate, and genuinely reflects those communities.

I want people to really learn something about Native peoples when they leave. I feel that exhibitions have the opportunity to provide that educational component. In Santa Fe, with its high rate of domestic and international tourism, even if one thing is learned — one new understanding of what Native art is and what it can be — more than likely that person is going to tell their friends about it. As long as they leave with one thing, that's great with me.

Hugh Leeman: Will Riding In — keep fighting the good fight. I admire what you're doing. Thank you so much.

Will Riding In: Thank you.

Memento Vivere- Remember to Live

By Doug Welch

Memento Vivere, Remember to Live, is an exhibition of Sonia Gill’s collage work currently being shown at the Transmission Gallery, in Oakland California. The show is open through June 6. A graduate of California College of the Arts where she studied painting and earned a BFA, Gill utilizes paper to make her works. Repudiating brush and oil based paints in making these collages, they nevertheless retain the language of painting; Gill’s brush strokes come in the form of pieces of paper. Instead of mixing paint to find the right color, she searches her trove of materials for the right hue and value. Gill’s process can be slow and painstaking, she layers instead of mixing, she experiments and replaces until her piece is complete.

The exhibition is described by the gallery’s advanced publicity as “an homage to the quiet enduring moments that define human life: reading together, tending to small rituals, routine tasks and moments of reflection.” Spending time with these subtle and rich collage works conveys a reminder to look past all of the busyness and noise of our modern lives, and to slow down. Gill brings precision, detail, form, nuance and realism to her collage-paintings. She invites the viewer to look carefully and search for the details that help define what constitutes representation, movement, and mood.

In the collage-painting, “Gotta Keep Moving”, a 9 x 12 inch paper on canvas, a man pushes a wheelbarrow along a garden path with yellow and gold cut-paper leaves from a Redbud tree appearing to explode upward in the upper center of the composition. The clarity of the scene is striking considering the medium she uses — remnants of images, pages from magazines and found scraps. Impressively, Gill energetically animates these fragments into convincing representational forms. Movement is everywhere — in the posture and stance of the figure, in the depiction of the scatter of the leaves, in the lush green foreground pressing toward the viewer. We don’t just see a man and a wheelbarrow but also the wind blowing the leaves, the fence posts warping with age, and a path being created. Gill’s strength is making all of this look easy; she has a command of forms and is able to cut fragmentary imagery and repurpose it in furtherance of creating a new image that has more in common with traditional painting than the mash-up of forms we typically associate with collage.

The paintings, as Gill prefers to refer to these collages, represent transformation, flexibility, and re-creation. The fence posts initially appear as if the printed material used had been designed for that very purpose – to represent fence posts. However, looking closer, strands of hair, remnants of text, different hues of brown both glossy and matte all become apparent in the source material. Below the fence posts, a human hand is identifiable, along with other non-discernable images, joined together to create a path for the focal subject: a man and his wheelbarrow. Gill’s work causes us to ponder how images are constructed. She teaches us that text can become leaves or part of a wheelbarrow, magazine pages depicting people can become walkable paths, images of tree foliage can become grass – or how image fragments become a man’s face, his jacket, his hand or his hat. It is part of our nature to instinctively categorize, identify, and seek identifiable imagery. We are constantly free associating to related and similar ideas and visual impressions. To some degree, Gill does something similar, but makes the process tangible. She does it carefully, intentionally and skillfully – it is not automatic or unconscious – it’s the opposite. By bringing seemingly unrelated fragments together into identifiable scenes and images, her art allows us to contemplate the role we all play in constructing our reality. 

“Burning Man”, is a 12 x 9 inch paper on canvas collage-painting. In this piece, a man is working near a burning pile of dead flora.The fence and the background have a playful quality. The man’s face and the fence post almost blend together, with some of the  pickets transitioning from grey and white to muted blue, yellow, orange, and red. In the background a possible structure stands beside an open field or an elevated landscape or possibly a mountain. The open nature of the background contrasts with the very detailed central figure – a man wearing gloves and holding the wooden handle of his tool. He is leaning forward, or at least, moving in a back and forth direction. His front leg is planted protecting him from getting too close to the fire, as he adds fuel to it with his rake. His back foot is partially lifted giving him power and flexibility to move – even the creases in his pants are visible. This last detail captures Gill’s understanding that what might seem to be a minor feature (textile folds) can animate the picture conveying a profound sense of realism and hence, believability in the image.

Gill’s exhibition repeatedly shows her ability to create scenes of life that are full of life. She creates detailed and beautiful scenes from fragments of printed material, transforming randomness into something intentional, something seemingly unrelated into something connected. 

“Minor Miracles, 36 x 36, collage on canvas shows two young children taking a bath while an adult watches over them. One of the children gently and trustingly looks up at the man. In this small image alone, the idea of paper as paint becomes obvious – creating the sweet look of a child is possible here because Gill turns pieces of paper into paint. The other child, probably a year or two older, sits in front looking down toward the water. His shadow appears on the wall beside him. His back is created from images of trees and nature. The details continue, the man in this scene is wearing a vest or sleeveless sweater and a white shirt, his leg is bent at the knee and is partly created from an image of the cosmos, and even the color of his sock is identifiable. There is much left unsaid as well. Gill leaves ample space for imagination and wonder. The wall beside the boys is yellow, purple and grey. It has text and lines and undefined shapes. What it represents is up to the viewer. It could be the future coming into better focus or still determine what it will hold. Or it could simply be a contemporary design on the bathroom wall.

Looking closely at this piece, one detail stands out. For the young boys’ heads, Gill used paper with, what appears to be, intense photographic images depicting the aftermath of the Civil War battle of Antietam or Gettysburg.  Images showing bodies strewn on a battlefield is certainly a commentary, but deciphering what is being said is elusive. Could it represent general trauma from the past, whether generational or individual? Is it about the sacrifices that have been made for these young boys to be in their specific moment? Or is it simply to present the darker color of these boys’ heads? At a minimum, it spurs curiosity and a desire to learn more. Using paper as paint can seem to add limitations or challenges that an oil or water based paint will not have. However, this image used by Gill to create these young boys’ heads, reveals a very unique and powerful quality of paper paint. Alternative messages or meanings can be conveyed, not just from the forms created but from whatever image exists on the paper, even in its new fragmentary state.

A visit to Transmission Gallery this week will be more than worth it. Each piece is a scene and within each scene, an unknowable number of details reveal themselves. Gill has put together an impressive body of work, each inviting further exploration into what the essential details are to make something recognizable and in that process of inquiry, she raises questions about how we construct our reality.

Confrontation and Introspection in Redacted, the current exhibition at Ivester Contemporary 

Co-curated with Matt Diehl

By Grey Dey

“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” -Nina Simone

Two profoundly engaging California-based artists, Carlos Ramirez and Emilio Villalba, have been pertinently paired together in the current show, Redacted, on view at Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas. Both are first-generation, Mexican-American artists addressing the crises of living under authoritarian surveillance in the United States today. They are staged in an opposite dialogue with each other. Deploying a mixed-media methodology to collaged images and assembled sculpture, Ramirez interrogates the double standards between U.S. democratic ideologies and the brutal systemic inequalities played out daily across our country. Villalba’s current acrylic works maximize painting’s ability to reveal commonly masked, hidden interiorities. They reflect the psycho-spiritual cost of coping with today’s local and global atrocities while still being expected to survive and participate in daily society. 

Ramirez’s work is grounded in protest and resistance to the racist subjugation of immigrant laborers and native populations. The current work on view directly confronts the domestic violence unleashed through I.C.E. raids throughout the U.S. Raised by immigrant parents from Mexico, and criss crossing the U.S. as they searched for work, Ramirez is intimately familiar with migrant farm-worker’s experiences. In some of his works in Redacted, the acronym “I.C.E." is plainly written, and in others, it is insinuated through context and signifiers. 

In S.pooky S.hit, we see a white, European monster, Dracula, who, like all colonial empires, sucks the blood from his victims while laughing “ha ha ha.”  Significantly, his speech bubble is heard, while other speech bubbles that emanate from BIPOC characters in Ramirez’s works are blank. The voices of the colonized are not heard. Going further, Ramirez uses redaction bars across their eyes and mouths, devaluing their humanity.  Low number price stickers dot many of the works, reiterating the low value of the labor of the low valued immigrant workers. But a militant row of old ice picks, that are used to break up ice, stand in defiant unity, spelling out “fuck ice” on their handles. They stand on an illustrated stretch of land that says, “my ancestors are here.”

In Three Letter Word, we see a kind of attack or police dog overlapping a nostalgic mid-twentieth century cocktail party. The terrifying dog is reminiscent of police dogs set on Black Civil Rights protesters, and I.C.E. targets today. The white wives in the party are toasting their masked I.C.E husbands. These black masks are the new cowardly white hoods of anonymity that white supremacist authoritarianism hides behind. There is a second idealized image of a white picnic. Together, the images imply that the only ones benefiting from I.C.E. are white, middle to upper class, capitalists. A sticker on the ice bucket reads, “to do nothing is to be complicit,” declaring that to mingle with the perpetrators, to laugh off or ignore the injustice they inflict, is to participate in their egregious agenda.

  There is a sadness in Ramirez's work, but also an empowering warning that this is the last time that our government will be used as a weapon of racism and division. There is increased solidarity in the mobilization of the civil rights movements in the U.S. across demographics since the summer of 2020. And in works such as the recent molotov cocktail series, and the earlier, 2019, Ghetto Kachina From Outer Space, Ramirez speculates on the effectiveness of grass roots organization and resistance futures. The tarantula on Tarantula Azules #2, Jarritos molotov, suggests that a single bite may or may not do much, but seen in the context of his prolific molotov series, multiple bites are a real danger. The U.S. flag being burned to set off the hand held bomb is a declaration that empires come and go, but we were always here, like the native tarantula, and we survive you.

His assemblages can evoke the charm of antique children’s toys or vintage Mexican sign paintings, but a closer look at the components reveals the more sinister readings. The pop aesthetic in Ramirez's work is not the superficial, 1960s, New York brand of pop art, but a more local, rural, and Mexican American tradition deeply rooted in that culture. Ramirez scavenges and collects ephemera and objects that resonate with what he wants to communicate about his experiences with racism and disenfranchisement. His work utilizes scrapped pegboards, dowels, wood, and children's stickers and figurines. All forms of discarded detritus and forgotten clippings are materials for his metaphors and insights. His incorporation of distressed paint and wood, along with beaten up tins and bottle caps signal resilience in spite of abusive treatment over time. In Where Is The Power Source, we see an image of a young, promising child behind a cage of wire mesh. Were his 1st place ribbon, favorite hat, and disney stickers lost during his abduction? Or does he sit, hiding in his home, waiting for his Father who will never return from work at the Home Depot? 

In Mexican Batman, there is the American Revolutionary flag that reads “Don’t Tread On Me,” with the coiled and ready-to-strike rattlesnake that is native to the Californian desert Ramirez calls home. But the white settler colonizers who demanded that liberty 250 years ago are now inflicting abhorrent treatment on U.S. BIPOC and immigrant populations. But this time the cartoon hero fighting for justice in a corrupt and cruel system is wearing a traditional Mexican moustache. The “Future Voter” sticker signs that the outcomes will turn politically one vote at a time. In Prison Industrial Complex, the prisoner prays in his cell that contains votive candles, and white European settler-colonial religious icons. There is even a photo of John Lennon, who like Jesus, advocated for peace. An old newspaper ad pitches, “Cash For Your Warhols,” further separating Ramirez’s work from the capitalist art market complicit in the classism of wealth disparity.

 Villalba’s works in Redacted take a look at a psychological form or redaction, one that most of us have experienced at some point. This is the redaction of inner turmoil from public view. But today we are not living under any ordinary circumstances. The U.S. we live in today is a rising  authoritarian state that subjects entire populations to violence and fear. And for many, the stress of being targeted or having family that might be, or have been, looms daily. How do we carry on with our work, our relationships, our survival, and still maintain any sense of normalcy? So many of us are split in two: the presentable self at home, and in the world, and the hidden self barely holding on. 

Villalba’s work in Redacted says much about what that feels like. Whether we are at home or in the office, surrounded by screens in both, as in The Office, we put our best self forward. On the monitor of a zoom meeting,  we see the white complected face,  maybe one of the bosses, looking like nothing is affecting them and that they are duly performing their responsibilities.  But in the office we see workers struggling with their emotional composure. Villalba’s subjects are common workers, artists, and families coping in a mundane, everyday world. But they are represented in compositions that are melting and portray the  more emotional  needs of human beings. Relationships, social lives, domestic and work surroundings, all struggling to hold together and  to maintain themselves so as to be socially integrated.

Villalba has never shied away from taking enormous risks in reinventing his relationship to painting. And in Redacted, we are privileged with possibly his most personal work to date. For this exhibition, Villalba has chosen acrylics on paper, and to productive effect. The application is wet into wet, made all the more challenging by the rapid drying time of the acrylics. This forces the painter to work fast and deeply focused if the painted surface is to remain unified. Villalba has demonstrated time and again that he can paint anything in any technique. But the choice of wet into wet acrylics invites a complication that keeps the work fresh and energized. These canvases are handled with a mastery that comes from long hard-won experience.

The subjects and objects retain their separation while passages outside and within them slip between un-legibility and clarity, not unlike navigating the reality of living with today’s current events. He is not afraid of being at times messy in these works in order to stay honest about his technique. He is never afraid of pushing readability for the animating freedom of his brushwork. The occasional passages of unraveling add a sense of precarity to the gravitas of the work. But Villalba's depth of skill and handling of the paint rescues each ambiguity from allowing the painting to fall apart. We can follow the flows and turns of his gestures in the beyond impasto thickness of the paint. The visual tactility of the heavily applied acrylics maintain a glossy wetness, almost inviting us to reach out with our own hands to squish it.

Villalba’s ability to simultaneously challenge our perception and convey his humanity is revelatory. The figures and surrounding objects in his compositions are in a frozen flood like the Pompeiian victims of Vesuvius. Only this time the petrifying ash is the psychosis of dissociation. Villaba’s subjects are momentarily stuck in the burning urgency of trying to process ongoing socio-political violence, the day-to-day survival for most of us, and the increasingly convoluted existential crises. We see this most clearly in World On Fire. This is seen in his commitment to painting his immediate surroundings and intimate relationships. We see Human Beings trying to continue cultivating intimacy and meaning in their personal lives. In Painter In Studio, the artist continues to paint while being strangled by an enormous ball and chain. The darkness of this anxious atmosphere is all painted over with a cheerful, sunny yellow.  If we let Villalba take us there, we can feel our own vulnerability, and the importance of love in our lives. After all, our loved ones are struggling too.

Villalba’s works in Redacted are raw, to say the least, but they are also vibrant and alive. He abandons all notions of the hierarchical, elevated position of the artist in society or the medium of painting in culture. He makes no effort to flatter his subjects, but instead includes them in his deeply felt experience. The neo-expressionist compositions are inherently crude and tender in their existential angst. They question the role of painting in today’s breakneck race towards techno-capitalism and consumer cultural production, and the pressure to keep up with it all in order to survive. Emilio resists the robotic, easily consumable, capitalist cultural production and its reduction to entertainment. His work is confrontationally analog. It is existentially real. It speaks in eons rather than sound bites. Villalba returns painting back to the earliest human recognition of the expressive qualities of materials. The work oozes with the primordial potential of Creation itself.

In these new works, Villalba questions the purpose of painting, both as a profession and as a medium. What are the arts when we live in a time where the arts are co-opted into venture-capitalist philanthropy that signals an empathy with our conflicted zeitgeist, but doesn’t implement or invest in any real and  effective change? What does an artist need to do to reflect  times and call out for systemic change. Villalba has chosen risk to address these questions. Risk in technique and shifting content. He acknowledges the power of art to redirect perception and critical thinking though subtle nods to art history. We see Picasso’s bald head and signature striped pullover in Painter In Studio, and a Matisse odalisque in Painter And Model. We even see Van Gogh’s empty chair in Self Portrait With Cat. Villaba’s work in Redacted is filled with courage and resolve.

There is a call and response between Ramirez’s and Villaba’s works. Ramirez’s's cages, especially in Where Is The Power Source, where the grid is a wire mesh cage, and the title points to the power grid and who controls it. In Emilio's Candles, the grid also creates a trap we are all caught in through the inter/net and digital surveillance. The candles represent hope for a way out, but juxtaposed against the grid, also remind us that things were not always as they are now. Ramirez’s work carries  the responsibility we have to resist inequity and not be complicit. Villaba exposes the psychological weight of coping while all this plays out in our lives. Ramirez offers strategies and frameworks of resistance, while Villalba brings our shared existential crisis to light. Would that we all have the brave commitment that these artists exhibit and that Ivester Contemporary and Matt Diehl support.

Grey Dey holds an MFA from UIUC’s School of Art and Design, and is currently a PhD in Art History at UIUC                                                                     

By Robert Brokl

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s tribute to their storied Henri Matisse portrait of his wife, Amélie, signaling the launch of the Fauvist movement, is meaty yet enigmatic, and the show’s appearance at this moment in time is intriguing. Locally, tourism is down, the commercial gallery scene is gloomy after a series of closures, and a telling reminder of the numerous art school disappearances is the San Francisco Art Institute’s elegiac memorial show, also on view at the museum. Perhaps even more pertinent to the museum’s planning is the ballyhooed opening of the new $724 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designed by Swiss starchitect Peter Zumthor. New York Times critic Holland Cotter notes the street-vaulting, sprawling, all-on-one-level building is “advertised by the museum as a stand-alone work of art itself, a 110,000-square-foot piece of habitable sculpture” with the trendy layout organized not by more traditional, art historical means but by a “view of art as a mingling of art and influences ever on the move.”

So what’s SFMOMA, also lacking the encyclopedic collections of institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Museum of Modern Art, and with its own 2016 $305 million Snøhetta expansion now a decade old, to do?

Their smart solution is to double down: highlight a crown jewel of its collection, from its debut to contemporary influences, and key to both the birth of modern art and the museum’s own origins. The exhibition was organized at SFMOMA, with the City its only venue, under the direction of Curators Janet Bishop and Maria Castro, the latter formerly with SFMOMA and now at the Met. The helpful catalog includes essays detailing the role of fashion at the time, Gertrude Stein’s poetry, and contemporary artists paying homage to the painting in their own manner.

SFMOMA has lovingly recreated the Paris 1905 Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais, where the Femme au chapeau shared space in Gallery VII with fellow “Wild Beasts,’ aka Fauves, a critic’s term, not necessarily pejorative, that struck. The numerous Salons were wildly popular, theatrical events, drawing crowds to be entertained and see the latest: the 1905 Salon d’Automne drew twelve thousand viewers the first day, more than five thousand the following day. Press and magazine coverage extended not just to the art but the latest fashion in clothing and hats. And controversy, then and now, is not necessarily a bad thing—it attracts crowds and builds reputations. Recent notable “scandals” include the 1999 Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, pilloried by Rudy Giuliani, and the 2011Hide/Seek exhibition at the Smithsonian.

Gallery VII is recreated approximately, with wainscot and wallpaper designed by local artist Ondrea Vicklund, replicating the fabric wall covering shown by archival photographs of the 1904 salon. Potted plastic palms add to the effect. The paintings, by all the Gallery VII artists, if not all the same work included in the Salon, are grouped by artist and are hung in single rows, not “salon style,” with sculptures by Albert Marque in vitrines. Not surprisingly, 121 years on, present-day museum goers may wonder what all the fuss was about. All of the paintings are representational, primarily figures or landscapes, and while many are highly-colored or reflect avante-garde styles of the day like pointillism, only work by Matisse, his friend Andre Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck exhibit the explosive charge that launched Fauvism and the careers of its proponents. The others— Charles Camoin, Pierre Girieud, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Ramon Pichot, and Jelka Rosen (the only woman in the grouping, and whose works are scattered)—are museum-worthy, if not extraordinary. 

Femme au chapeau depicts Matisse’s wife Amélie, age 33, wearing an elaborate hat likely of her own making, holding a fan, and gazing unperturbably toward the viewer. She’s no coquette, in the painting or in life. A skilled milliner and hat maker, she had a reputation for being assertive as young girl and had her own millinery shop in a fashionable part of Paris. Matisse and other artists depicted her at work, and wearing kimonos. She was a major contributor to the household income—Matisse had yet to sell paintings, and made scant money doing commercial  art. To further complicate their lives, Amélie’s parents had been implicated in a notorious Ponzi-style scandal and while her father was vindicated in court, they were implicated nonetheless. Amélie’s shop and Matisse’s studio were searched, leaving both of them feeling raw and exposed, and not prepared for the controversy generated by the Salon.

But Matisse persevered, rejecting the safety of convention. The jarring greens and yellow on Amélie’s face, along with the simplification and deliberately unfinished look, were startling provocations. The pose, featuring the upper body of the figure, echoes Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife—Matisse venerated Cézanne. Matisse ventured into abstraction even more with La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water, 1905. Amélie wears a kimono, indicated by its deep blue and white pattern, but otherwise indiscernible in a swirl of bright daubs and dashes. Open Window, Collioure, 1905, is also rather pointillist, loose shapes and flat design, a window but no depth, now familiar from so much reproduction, and unabashedly beautiful.

Derain’s paintings are the most aligned with Matisse, colorful (orange and red predominate) daubs and areas of blank canvas, as in Fishing Boats, 1905. Vlaminck was a self-avowed anarchist, and his paintings, evocative of Van Gogh, are swirling, energetic, and defiantly unconventional.

It wasn’t just Matisse’s luck that he was the break-out star of the exhibit, Femme au chapeau generating the most attention, but Leo and Gertrude Stein arrived on the scene and bought the painting. They had moved to Paris from their home in San Francisco. Wealthy and independent, their brother Michael back in San Francisco managed their finances, based upon real estate, investments, and ownership stake, apparently, in the Market Street Cable Railway Co. Leo had developed an interest in art and a taste for collecting, Gertrude had left John Hopkins University, ending her quixotic medical studies, and knew little about art. But they soon filled their apartment with their latest purchases, creating a de facto museum of modern art and drawing curious visitors. The demand was so great for Saturday night viewing, hampered by candlelight illumination, that requests for return visits by daylight proliferated. 

To thicken the plot, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso living in Paris is drawn to the Steins, and their largess, and is intrigued by Matisse’s break-through paintings. The Steins began to acquire Picasso, and soon introduce him to Matisse, thus inaugurating a fruitful if contentious friendship. A companion resource to Femme au chapeau is the Art of Rivalry by art critic Sebastian Smee, who analyzes the Picasso/Matisse dynamic—competitive and beneficial yet toxic, they remained respectful to each other over a lifetime, if at a distance. Picasso wins Gertrude over during the famously slow progress painting her portrait, 90 sittings in all she later claimed.  Meanwhile, Michael Stein and his wife Sarah had moved to Paris and also began to collect art. Smee identifies Sarah Stein, a fashionista, as a “penetrating, persuasive woman, (who) was as avid for knowledge about art as Leo, and it wasn’t before long a current of competition began to run between her and her sister-in-law Gertrude…At Sarah’s impassioned urging, Leo bought Woman with a Hat for 500 francs.” 

Gertrude dramatized the contest between Matisse and Picasso and egged them on, and when the Steins parted ways and divided their collection, Leo and Gertrude aligned with Picasso and Michael and Sarah took up with Matisse. They bought Femme au chapeau from Leo in 1915, installed the painting in their Le Corbusier-designed modernist house outside of Paris, and took it with them when they returned to the U.S., settling in Palo Alto in 1935.

Picasso became the more public face of modernism, Matisse at a remove from the white hot attention. As Smee writes: “The new movement (Cubism) caught quickly. Matisse, stuck out in front of the classroom, did his best to ignores the rising, insubordinate chatter at the back. He preferred to keep on advancing his own agenda, delving deeper and deeper into the new enchantments of saturated color, expressive decoration, and a new kind of monumental simplicity. In the process, he produced some of the greatest works of his career—and indeed of the entire century. But by around 1913, he could no longer ignore the hubbub. Gushing invention, Picasso and Braque had established themselves with astonishing speed as the new leaders of a pan-European avant-garde.”

Matisse’s sublime, decorative work is newly back in fashion, as Carol Vogel notes in the New York Times: “Call it the Matisse moment. This spring (has) come a global surge of highlighting the master of color and pattern. James Rondeau, director of the Art Institute of Chicago agrees, ‘Matisse once famously said painting is like a good armchair…And in these troubled times, that appears to be exactly what the public is craving.”

The exhibition proceeds with artists exploring the theme of women in hats, including a 1908 Vlaminck portrait with the same title, and the unusual 1934 painting by the underrated Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi, which depicts a still life with a black and white reproduction of Femme au chapeau.

Femme au chapeau is also a take on patronage and ownership. Three strong-willed, far-sighted  woman are responsible for San Francisco’s own iconic, modernist Mona Lisa. After Michael and Sarah Stein’s move to Palo Alto, the SFMOMA connections to the painting began— Grace Morley, the founding director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (which became SFMOMA) showed work from the Stein collection including Femme au chapeau in 1936, just a year after the museum’s founding. Femme au chapeau remained in their hands until after Michael’s death, when Sarah sold the painting to her friend, Elise Haas, in 1948. Elise was married to Walter Haas, of the Levi Strauss fortune, but an important collector in her own right, and passionate about modern art. She served as SFMOMA trustee, and became the first woman to become board chair. The gallery devoted to her collection, donated to the museum, is a great addition to the show, but unfortunately not included in the catalog. The collection seems personal, not trophies, and includes a sensational Emil Nolde flower watercolor, Henry Moore drawings, small Georgia O’Keefe and Marsden Hartley paintings, and more.

The exhibit concludes with contemporary responses to Femme au chapeau, and here the selections seem more arbitrary, except for the stunning trio of Bay area Figurative paintings.  Bishop writes: “The regular opportunities that local painters had to see Femme au chapeau at the SFMA throughout the 1950s coincided with the emergence of the region’s first distinctive artistic style: Bay Area Figurative art.” Hard to argue with that, but one could make the case that  the Society of Six, based in Oakland, have claim to being first, and their paintings were on the office walls of Oakland Museum of California Curator Paul Mills, when he collaborated with David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff on his seminal 1957 Bay Area Figurative show. The  grouping includes Diebenkorn’s Woman in Hat and Gloves, from 1963, depicting his wife Phyllis morphing into an abstract Ocean Park painting, the heavily troweled impasto Joan Brown female nude, Girl Sitting, 1963, with wild fauve colors, and the classic David Park Mother-in-Law, 1953-54, from his middle period before the bravura brush work took over. Her face is mostly an ocherish green, topped with amusing daisy hat, bright sunlight above, and shadows beneath the brim. The painting is wry, sarcastic but affectionate, perhaps an oddly subversive take on the Eisenhower 1950s.  

Here the connections are personal, too. Diebenkorn, a Stanford student, had first seen Femme au chapeau and other Matisses on a visit to Sarah Stein’s Palo Alto house in 1943, and Park, working as a teenage apprentice to sculptor Ralph Stackpole in San Francisco, saw Matisse in 1930 when he visited Stackpole’s studio on a visit to the City in 1930, on his way to Tahiti.

Any quibbles aside, Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal accomplishes what a  show of this sort needs to do—turn the spotlight on a familiar artwork from its collection that viewers have been looking at for years, and get them to really see it. 

Luigi Mangione wears bulletproof vest for court appearance as lawyer complains about actors ‘playing him on TV’, Just Jared, 21 February 2025, 2025, colour pencil on paper, 14 × 21 cm [framed 27 × 34 cm]

Removal of the statue of Queen Wilhelmina from Independence Square, Paramaribo, Suriname. 1975. right: visual artist Stuart Robles de Medina. Stichting Surinaams Museum. Archive nr. 20–162, 2024, acrylic on canvas, metal scaffold, 320 × 232 cm

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, boards a C-17 cargo plane at Hamid Karzai International Airport on 30 Aug 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2021, acrylic on wood, 56 × 43 cm

Bambi. Directed by David Hand (supervising a team of sequence directors), Walt Disney Productions, 1942,  2019, graphite on paper, 21 × 18 cm [framed 49 × 46 cm]

Xavier Robles de Medina is a Surinamese artist born in Paramaribo in 1990, living and working between Berlin and Paramaribo. Working at the intersection of visual art and research-based practice, his meticulously crafted works explore post-colonial memory, queer subjectivity, and the constructed nature of historical and political imagery.

Robles de Medina has exhibited at Art Basel Paris and Art Basel Hong Kong through Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, and his work has been included in major international institutional exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Cobra Museum of Modern Art, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, and the 14th Dakar Biennale. In 2025, he was awarded the Krull Arbeitsstipendium and a Mondriaan Fonds Artist Project Grant, and undertook residencies at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in Milan and the Art Encounters Foundation in Timișoara. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Fondation Francès Paris, and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.

The following are excerpts from Xavier Robles de Medina’s interview conducted by Hugh Leeman.

A Grandfather, a Monument, and a Nation Being Born

Hugh Leeman: Xavier, in 1975, Suriname, where you are from, gains independence from the Netherlands, and shortly thereafter your grandfather is commissioned to make public art that will support the cultural narrative of a new nation. How has your grandfather's art and role in constructing that public narrative impacted how you see your native Suriname?

Xavier Robles de Medina: I have to correct you slightly — my grandfather was making public sculptures before independence, in the 1960s and early 1970s, and continued after independence, but he actually moved to the Netherlands about five years after independence, so that chapter wasn't as long-lived as people might assume.

To answer your question: his legacy — not just in public monuments, but in education, in painting, as a person — had a really big impact on me. I knew him as a family person who really enjoyed cooking Surinamese staples. But he was already living in the Netherlands when I was growing up, so there was always this binary: on one hand he was this warm grandpa figure, and on the other hand I knew he had a reputation, a legacy, as a famous artist. As a kid, you just can't properly process that. It wasn't until only a few years ago that I began to truly contextualize what his legacy has meant in the history of art and in the history of Suriname's independence.

The research I did for my book, Pengel, really gave me a whole other perspective. I knew his contribution was huge and extremely important, but the process of making that book — publishing information around the sculpture he made in 1974 — gave me an entirely new level of understanding.

Hugh Leeman: You say his contribution was huge. What was his reputation, and what specifically were those contributions?

Xavier Robles de Medina: When I was little, he was a professor at the teacher training school, so many of my elementary and high school teachers had been taught by him. They would all ask me whether I was the grandson of the famous artist. But fame has a different meaning in Suriname, which has a population of half a million people. I had no idea what that really meant, and I think it means something quite different in the context of Suriname compared to Europe or the US. He was famous in that context — but he's still basically very obscure internationally, which is part of why I wanted to publish the book.

The sculpture he made in 1974 depicts Johan Adolf Pengel — a towering figure in Surinamese 20th-century history and a major advocate for independence from the Netherlands. The sculpture stands in front of the Presidential Palace, so essentially everyone who visits Suriname has seen it, and everyone who lives there definitely knows it. But I'm not sure many people understand how it was made, or even who made it.

The first thing my grandfather would state about this work is that it was the first and the last bronze monument to be fully produced in Suriname. That sounds like a simple elevator pitch, but what was involved was extraordinarily complex — there was no infrastructure for bronze casting at the time. He had not only to create a 3.5-meter sculpture, which is enormously complex in itself, but also to set up a provisional foundry from scratch.

My grandmother — who is really one of the central figures in the book, and a co-author — was hugely important in the production of this work. Aside from my grandfather being relatively obscure internationally, my grandmother would be even more so, and yet she did so much of the hidden labor: accounting, managing, budgeting. So much of the research I did was around the practicalities of money, because the budget was extremely low. My grandfather had to take a year off from his teaching job and essentially produced this artwork without an income. It was an enormous accomplishment that I think most people don't fully realize.

Post-Colonial Memory and the Education Independence Made Possible

Hugh Leeman: Your grandfather straddles this world — a colonial Suriname under Dutch possession, and then a post-colonial world you were born into not long after. In your own artwork, you've told me you focus on post-colonial memory. What does that mean to you personally?

Xavier Robles de Medina: It's a very complicated idea, because I don't have any subjectivity other than the one I inhabit through being born when and where I was. I only know my own perspective.

What I came to understand — through projects with audience involvement in Suriname, through being close with my parents and grandparents, and especially through writing the book with my grandmother — is the enormous difference in perspective between someone born before independence and someone born after. I entered an educational system that was essentially completely unbound from colonial restrictions. I only realized how significant that was once I spent time in the Netherlands as an adult.

I was raised with an awareness of, and taught about, the history of slavery and colonization — specifically Dutch colonization. These aren't new or strange issues for me. But when I moved to the Netherlands, I found that many of my peers had basically no knowledge of colonial history, and hardly knew anything about Suriname at all. I'm almost proud to say that I wasn't really taught much about the Netherlands growing up. That's diametrically opposed to the education my grandmother and even my father received — a completely Dutch curriculum, in the tropics, learning about the four seasons, singing songs about wintertime without having any idea what winter actually is. Knowing everything about the Dutch royal family, celebrating Queen's Day. I grew up with none of that.

The impact of growing up in an independent Suriname compared to a colonial Suriname is basically impossible to measure. Some of the effects of colonization are so subconscious.

An Introverted, Artsy, Gay Kid Who Resisted Art for Years

Hugh Leeman: I want to go back to your genesis as an artist. In a previous conversation, you described yourself as an introverted, artsy, gay kid, and that art was a kind of refuge for you. How did you begin to find art — or did it find you? And what was the journey toward identifying yourself as an artist?

Xavier Robles de Medina: It's a really long, complicated process that I'm still going through.

As a very young person, I always just wanted to be making things. I was curious about how art was made — especially movies and music, which I was obsessed with as a kid — and I would intuitively always be drawing. I didn't grow up with my grandfather living in Suriname, but we had a lot of his art books that he left behind when he moved. I grew up with his photo album documenting the making of the Pengel sculpture, and also books about his favorite artists — 19th and early 20th-century European painters and sculptors, but also ceramics, West African sculpture, origami. He had so many interests, and I benefited from all the books he left behind.

That was really important, because I had many friends who were creative, but it's very hard to stick with art in a context where it's almost impossible as a profession. I think one of the main reasons I ended up pursuing it is because of all those influences — growing up with my grandfather's art around the house, and with an awareness that he was someone significant in society. That made the barrier just a little bit lower to enter this creative field.

But it's become one of the most important narratives I tell myself: I've spent more than half my life in Europe and the States working in the art world. Observing peers who grew up in London, New York, or Amsterdam — who grew up with museums, who grew up with the idea that art is cool and celebrated — I didn't have that at all. Art was not cool in my context. It was something I resisted for a very large part of my life, until I really just felt I couldn't resist it anymore. And honestly, I'm sometimes still resisting it. I have very complicated feelings about pursuing it, because it requires a lot of privilege — and that's a complicated conversation in and of itself, but especially in the context of Suriname.

Takashi Murakami and the Crash Course in the Art Market

Hugh Leeman: After leaving Suriname, one of the places you end up is New York City, where you work as a studio assistant for Takashi Murakami. You said it was a huge learning experience about the magnitude of the contemporary art market. What was the art market to you before you started there, compared to after?

Xavier Robles de Medina: The art market — I don't know if I even now fully understand what it is or involves. But I definitely gained a much bigger perspective working in New York for several different artists, ranging across stages of career development — some quite young and early, some very established.

Before New York, I'd been living in Savannah, Georgia, studying at SCAD. My sense of what an art career looked like was probably shaped by my grandfather's model, which was almost entirely commission-based. He made commission portraits and public monuments, logos, graphic design, facade ornaments. That was how I probably went into university thinking about art — and then through SCAD, I got a more industrial sense of things: advertising, film, textile — fields where you study and get employed. The contemporary art market, to me, was either very abstract or something I basically knew nothing about.

Then in New York, I attended my first art fair and immediately got this crash course in what the art market looks like in a city like that.

Hugh Leeman: As someone from Suriname, where the idea of contemporary art carries no particular social status or cultural cool factor, you end up working day-to-day in the studio of Takashi Murakami — who for all intents and purposes represents the pinnacle of commercial contemporary art. What were you learning about yourself in that environment?

Xavier Robles de Medina: I realized how much of the work ethic encouraged in the studio resonated with me — specifically how ordinary and regular it actually is. You show up at 9AM on time. The whole painting team does morning exercises together, then everyone collectively cleans the studio, and then you're assigned a task and you try to complete it as efficiently as possible. It's like a corporate job, which I kind of enjoyed.

It's also how I was raised. My dad is a dentist — he wakes up at the same time every day, goes to work, is very responsible in that sense. There's nothing bourgeois about it. I think if you don't have that background, you might imagine being an artist is entirely about freedom and emotion and expression. And that's certainly part of it — but another part is just showing up and doing the work and being professional. Contemporary art, for better or worse, has placed an enormous emphasis on professionalization, especially at the emerging level. That's not always healthy, but if you have those skills, they can help you tremendously.

Luigi Mangione and the Mirror of the Media Landscape

Hugh Leeman: A recurring figure in your recent work is the realistic portrait. One of these figures is Luigi Mangione, the man being tried in the United States for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in Manhattan. Mangione has become a kind of folk hero, amassing over a million dollars in legal defense donations and enormous public support online. What has so compelled society — and you — about this story? And what does it reveal about the common consciousness of contemporary culture?

Xavier Robles de Medina: It's a very layered question. I can't speak for all of society, but I noticed on the internet — the portion of society active on social media, YouTube, comments sections — this incredible and also very bizarre outpouring of something I wouldn't quite call empathy. Adoration, maybe.

What struck me immediately was that this clearly touches on so many urgent ideas: wealth inequality, corporate greed, corruption. But the only reason it catches people's attention at the scale it did is because the supposed shooter is — hot. Very good-looking. And I think that says something extremely specific about the dynamics of our media landscape, something so obvious it almost doesn't need to be said.

That was my initial interest — and my motivation for making these works. It captures the tension of so much contemporary culture: on one hand, everything that is genuinely urgent and pressing about contemporary experience. On the other hand, something completely absurd. And I wrestle with what Mangione actually is as a public figure. Is he a celebrity? Something else?

The more time I've spent with these images, the stranger they've become. You never hear his voice. He's delivered to us at enormous scale, and there's a market for these images — thousands published over the past year and a half — and yet what do we actually know about him? Apart from four or five words he shouted at the paparazzi, I've never had any deeper insight about him beyond how he looks. That's also why I chose to approach the works the way I did — very matter-of-fact renderings of his face in colored pencil. It's entirely about the surface.

Hugh Leeman: You've written that Mangione appears not as a monumental figure, but as someone suspended between presence and erasure, shaped by the pressures of late capitalism — and that the drawings become meditations on the tension between visibility and disappearance. What is that tension in contemporary culture?

Xavier Robles de Medina: It hints, first of all, at the idea that capital punishment was raised as a solution in this case. But more broadly, it's the tension between someone who is so enormously present in our media landscape and simultaneously almost entirely absent. You can know a public figure's face in intimate detail and know nothing whatsoever about them. That says something wider about what it means to know someone, or to idolize someone. The surface is everything, and the surface is all we're given.

Queen Wilhelmina, Independence Day, and the Show Business of History

Hugh Leeman: Beyond Mangione, you focus on the constructed nature of images and of the past. In one particular painting you depict the removal of the statue of Queen Wilhelmina from Independence Square in Paramaribo. The viewer sees a realistic painting of construction straps wrapped around a massive sculpture being removed from public view. What is the cultural significance of this image?

Xavier Robles de Medina: It's a continuation of the research I did around my grandfather's involvement in the independence process and in making the image of independence. He was invited to art-direct Independence Square for Independence Day from the Netherlands. He made several significant decisions — one of which was to remove the colonial sculpture of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and to replace it with a large flagpole that would raise the first Surinamese flag on Independence Day.

He also decided to place the Queen Wilhelmina sculpture just a few meters further down the road, beside Fort Zeelandia — the oldest colonial structure in Suriname, a fortress overlooking the Suriname River. That was an extremely clever decision. You don't simply erase — you relocate and recontextualize.

There's a constructed element to how that photograph was taken, and there's also this enormous event — independence — which is both history-making and, in a sense, show business. The way you stage it matters enormously. My grandfather's relationship to that idea — the overlap between art and show business, his tendency to engage with politicians and public figures — has a pop art dimension that I don't think people have fully recognized.

Pop art was the art of his time. It was the 1960s and early 1970s when he was making these monuments. And even before the Pengel sculpture, he was commissioned to make a monument to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — which ultimately didn't get funded, so he completed the sculpture and the government simply backed out. But learning the background of how he worked — he would gather every possible image of Martin Luther King he could find, cover his entire studio with them, then order the speeches on vinyl and listen to them while he sculpted — that's such a vivid image, and one I completely relate to. When I was painting my work on Aaliyah, I did the same thing: I got obsessed with her interviews and her music.

I don't know that I'm comparing Aaliyah to Martin Luther King. But what I feel strongly about is the element of empathy — the sincerity in how I approach these subjects. A lot of contemporary artists engaging with pop culture are making some kind of ironic statement about a celebrity or about pop itself. I think what my grandfather did, and what I do, comes from something genuinely unironic. Maybe even painfully unironic.

The Last Soldier Out of Afghanistan

Hugh Leeman: There's another painting you made — U.S. Army Major General Christopher Donahue, Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division — where the viewer, through the grainy lens of night vision goggles, sees him on an airstrip. Like much of your work, it's highly charged with socio-political tension just beneath the surface. What was it about this image that compelled you? And what does it say about the constructed nature of reality that certain images carry?

Xavier Robles de Medina: This image particularly touches on the constructed nature of history — how history can be composed through media. It can't be a coincidence that the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan ended up walking exactly in the center of the frame of that night vision camera. I didn't change anything about the framing — he really just was walking in the middle. Maybe it's pure chance, but there's an element to it that is almost too good to be true. The image has a perfect, monumental quality that made me think about it obsessively.

And then there's the weight of what the image is actually about — this disastrous departure of the United States from Afghanistan, and this being the final gesture of it. The monumentality of that moment, filtered through a grainy green night vision aesthetic. History framed as cinema.

Democracy, Trauma, and the Inescapable Intimacy of Small Nations

Hugh Leeman: Over a three-year period you lived in Zimbabwe during a time of incredible tumultuous change — contested elections, a revolution, the rise of democracy. You drew parallels between Zimbabwe and Suriname. You've also seen the beginning of a democracy firsthand as a child. If you were to make a series of artworks on the state of democracy today, in the places you've lived since leaving Suriname, what might those look like?

Xavier Robles de Medina: I can only speak to it from specific contexts. In Europe, and especially in Germany where I'm based, democracy seems technically still intact — but we've seen the limits of freedom of speech driven to a breaking point, and that will probably continue to haunt the cultural landscape for years.

In Suriname, the context over the course of my life has largely revolved around Dési Bouterse, who led the military occupation in the 1980s and then became president in the 2000s. He's an extremely difficult historical figure. He was eventually accused of being behind political killings on the 8th of December — what are known as the December Murders — the execution of fifteen men who were protesting or speaking out against the military occupation. So much of Suriname's political landscape, while Bouterse was alive, was shaped by that tension, and the case was not resolved until very recently — just before his death, actually.

We're only just coming out of that era. And I think it's a trauma that people — especially older people — may not even realize they carry. There's a kind of self-censorship that happens a lot in Suriname, where people are simply afraid to say certain things around politics. And on top of that, it's a very small society, which makes everything even more complicated.

In a large society, you can find your political tribe and largely stay within it. You can create bubbles for yourself. In Suriname, you're eventually going to have to navigate your political opposites, because the country is just too small to avoid it. You have to engage with the entirety of society if you want to function within it. That forced engagement is both a burden and, I think, something valuable — it's harder to fully demonize someone you inevitably know.

As for Zimbabwe — I had an incredible time during the residency there, and I have opinions based on what I experienced, but I wouldn't want to speak on it with any confidence. I don't feel I know enough to do it justice.

Hugh Leeman: Xavier Robles de Medina, thank you so much for your time.

Xavier Robles de Medina: Thank you!

By Matt Gonzalez

Narrative painting promises to convey a story – or at minimum, a pivotal scene that celebrates a virtue or value worthy of honor. In his practice, painter Grey Dey presents a variation: instead of asserting a universal truth, he invites viewers to assemble a chronicle from the fragments that resonate with their own experience. Because Dey doesn't insist on a single account, he needn't make his paintings overly accessible. He invites the audience to collaborate, offering only an eccentric set of intentions and icons as a point of departure. 

Now a PhD student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dey holds the notable distinction of being one of the last students at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2022 who later transferred to complete his undergraduate degree at California College of the Arts, an institution now also transitioning toward closure. He landed on his feet at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Art & Design and recently presented an MFA thesis exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum. His MFA exhibition, which ran from April 11 – 25, presented 12 paintings, ranging in size from 14 x 11 inches to 6 x 10.5 feet, showing enormous achievement and promise.

The lighting and staging seem contrived, yet believable. The clouds have parted revealing an intimate moment between two lovers who have weathered many things together. The green foliage in the background, coupled with the almost halo effect of TM’s straw hat, suggests fertility, representing harmony and growth. A single light source offers us the golden hour, when the sun is low in the horizon, making light warm and soft. Only the bottom left of the painting is obscured by a shadow, noticeably not touching either figure. Dey captures the magical quality of Fire Island, specifically the predominantly LGBTQ+ residential community there, known as The Pines, where the pair spend their summers. It’s an instant while they tend to their own garden literally and metaphorically. He wants to convey how very unbreakable this couple's love of one another continues to be.

Dey’s largest painting in the exhibition is also one that he has been thinking about for the last 15 years; the “Penthesilea” painting was a dream of his to paint. The basic arrangement was first conceived in sketchbooks. At first he believed his proposed rendering was grounded in history. Later he discovered that his favorite story from the Trojan War was largely apocryphal; yet this disappointment turned to opportunity as there were fewer constraints dictating the subject matter. The essential plot is that Paris seeks out the Queen of the Amazons to beseech her to join the Trojans in their effort to repel the Greek invasion; Penthesilea agrees and will later be killed by Achilles in single combat. The story is included in the now lost Aethiopis, an ancient Greek 8th-century B.C.E. epic poem composed in dactylic hexameter, part of the epic cycle recounting the Trojan War. Among the earliest artifacts we have, specifically related to Penthesilea, is the Exekias Amphora (6th century B.C.E.), a black-figure, terracotta vase painting of Achilles slaying the Queen of the Amazons. The story itself has been retold and altered over the centuries, with great liberties taken, which Dey is only too eager to further.

In “Paris Petitions Penthesilea” we see Paris, barefoot, wearing skin-tight pants, on his knees prostrating himself as he asks Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons, to oblige the Trojans. Paris is the son of King Priam who, depending on who you believe, either kidnapped Helen or caused her to willingly fall in love with him (the latter a result of Aphrodite’s influence) and abandon her marriage to the king of Sparta, thus sparking the Trojan War. Known for his vanity in classical mythology, Dey depicts Paris without letting the viewer see his face, he is literally covered by his lengthy hair; in effect, depriving us of his beauty. In Dey’s version, the most beautiful man in the world – according to many ancient accounts – holds the leopard-skin cape he wore in a famous scene from Book 3 of Homer’s Iliad at the moment of his proposal; Dey wants us to focus on this object. In the Iliad story, Paris steps out from the Trojan ranks as the two armies face one another, the leopard skin slung over his shoulders. He bravely challenges any Greek warrior to a single duel to settle the dispute once and for all. When Menelaus, Helen’s husband, steps forward to accept the challenge, Paris turns pale and disappears. Homer describes his change of heart, "Just as a man stumbles on a snake in some mountainous ravine.” (Richmond Lattimore translation). In fairness to Paris, his willingness to leave Troy to find other combatants to join their effort does take some bravery. He is also depicted in ancient texts as a skilled archer. Yet, Dey uses this artifice, the offering of the very article of clothing that represents a moment of cowardice and embarrassment as the snapshot from which to view Paris as he beseeches Penthesilea. One can only wonder if deception is being offered, as he freely gives someone else his shame. Symbolism abounds in Dey’s version because later, Penthesilea will wear the leopard skin when she is killed by Achilles, so it augurs her demise.

The Penthesilea painting offers a visually colorful ensemble of things to look at. A temporary encampment scene, part circus tent, part trailer park, it suggests an unruly and nomadic existence. We see men on bicycles, a wild assortment of costumes, and a large tent resplendent with glitter. Importantly, Paris and his two escorts are the only men in the painting (with the exception of a satyr). We can’t see their faces, but they appear scantily clad, suggesting they are naked and objectified. Dey presents the Amazon warriors in an imaginative rather than literal way. They are marvelous with glitter accents on their wigs and clothing conveying a magical aura. They embody lesbian separatism and qualities of queer utopia; they are an army of fierce women-only warriors, isolated from patriarchal institutions and mainstream society, who appear to be building an autonomous culture. However, their queer sanctuary does appear either in flux, evident by its improvised condition, or Dey is emphasizing the community’s need to remain vigilant amid changing societal dynamics. One clear message of the chronicle is that men need and want to utilize these women’s strength; the Trojan men have come begging for their help.

Left to right in the painting we see many icons important to the LGBTQ+ community assembled in this queer haven: Cher, who was a 1970s feminist icon, is presented with a peregrine falcon perched on her gloved hand; Miss Piggy, the Muppet diva character, rides pillion on a motorcycle piloted by an anonymous lesbian warrior; Marsha P. Johnson, the transgender activist who played a pivotal role in the Stonewall riots, glances about to see if the Trojans are being followed; Tina Turner, the post-apocalyptic queen in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, stands alert with her fellow warriors; Grace Jones, whose visage is taken from the cover of her 1985 album Slave to the Rhythm, which famously features an elongated open-mouth cry, is Queen Penthesilea; Siouxsie Sioux, the “Godmother of Goth” who fronted the post-punk Siouxsie and the Banshees, is astride a satyr holding a riding crop; and finally, well-known for appearing in many John Water’s films, Diva, the underground drag queen with her exaggerated and arched pencil-thin eyebrows, is sexually fisting the woodland creature. This final vignette is important since in Greek mythology a satyr is half-man and half-goat, known as a rowdy and lustful companion to Dionysus, the god of wine and debauchery. Dey depicts the satyr as captured and tame, wearing a BDSM muzzle, while being sexually violated as if to say, “Now the tables are turned.” The other Amazon soldiers are anonymous, with an almost Star Wars–stormtrooper quality about them, donning helmets with pointed “knife” ears.

Classical mythology gives us one reason Penthesilea accepts Paris’ request to aid the Trojans which has nothing to do with the efficacy of his plea. She seeks redemption, which is only attainable through death in battle, for accidentally killing her sister Hippolyta, in a hunting accident. This veiled element of the story adds another complex layer of deception that Dey likely relishes obscuring.

The title of the show, Reckoning, suggests a judgement of sorts. We can feel that dynamic throughout the paintings, yet it also speaks to Dey’s interest in assessing what he describes as the contemporary patriarchal, capitalistic, white supremacy which obstructs the utopian ideal, or at least aspirational exemplar, he can imagine. Dey seeks to oppose any agenda of erasure in his community and proudly celebrates what is akin to self-liberation.

Other paintings showcase related themes. In “The Stadium,” Dey conflates the modern sports stadium with elements of the Roman coliseum. He uses reference to homoeroticism, which we saw in the Penthesilea painting, to present contact sports as being fundamentally about male bonding and intimacy. In “Daisy Chain,” and “Turkey Day Game,” team sports and military conscription are offered as repressed queer urges or possibilities that Dey manifests as being quite obvious. For him, these activities are the pretense from which to engage in same-sex activity. Eroticism is inherent in contact sports, where violence and sensuality intersect. He isn’t interested in depicting sports to tell a narrative about an exciting ballgame. For Dey, the football player is a modern gladiator who gets to pretend to be hetero-masculine, all the while exploring his true sexual orientation.

Dey also seems to be commenting on the exploitation of people of color in sports, or at least highlighting their prominence. From a young age, depicted in “Daisy Chain” as a baby being scooped up by a player wearing an ancient helmet with a transverse crest of horse hair, there is a belief in many disadvantaged communities that these activities are the sole route to upward mobility. Dey asks us to consider whether that reflects intergenerational exploitation.

Another group of paintings presents self portraits with crosses and clown faces. Dey recounts going to see bands in the early 1980s Boston hardcore scene and being violently targeted in the mosh pits. He references the heteronormative facade he adopted to blend into the prevalent cisgendered standards. Despite this, he was too outrageous even for this rowdy and aggressive, pushing and slamming crowd. The target paintings, “Cross Addicted” and “Target Face” are about reclaiming the shame of being a victim in these settings. Many figures wear tight-fitting hosiery and make-up that obscures specific facial details while conveying a deep loneliness. These pictures are Dey’s effort to come to terms with those memories.

This exhibition resists didactic certainty. Interpretation remains open as Dey places signifiers before us that lean in distinct directions. His honesty lies in queering the narrative, thus making it his lived experience. Dey asks “Why paint if I’m not going to paint me?” This is the ultimate authenticity he offers the audience. It’s a raw intimacy featuring himself. Yet, he recognizes a viewer will have to engage the paintings with their own ethos. This doesn't diminish the work but rather universalizes it and invites others to wrestle with symbols and themes they may not otherwise encounter. 

There is a wonderful dichotomy between detail and restraint in these paintings. In many compact areas Dey goes further and embellishes particular elements. In other places he relies on discipline to say less. The paint alone, particularly in the sports paintings, gives off a color field experience, where the disbursement or pigment catches the eye and helps the viewer celebrate the inventive quality of the composition. Gay masculine themes abound, but they do so without feeling like these paintings are only for the LGBTQ+ community. These pictures are not restrictive in that sense. At a time the individual is fighting to be noticed, where new things are rarely a departure from the past, these paintings convey the arrival of a painter who has found a way to elevate tangible scenarios with myth-making vignettes and painterly brush work. Dey is crafting important paintings and questioning everything about the expectations placed on a gay man in this particular moment in history. He meets the occasion by reinvigorating the self and amplifying community. 

City Hall, San Francisco, Jan 15—Jun 18, 2026

By Hantian Zhang

To see Moving San Francisco: Views from the SFMTA Photo Archive 1903 – Now, the exhibition organized by the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Photo Department & Archive, you enter City Hall, pass crowds of newlyweds waiting for photos beneath the grand staircase, then descend to the ground floor. In the hushed quiet, a hundred photographs, most of them black-and-white, line the long corridor there, guiding visitors deeper into the building and also the city’s past.

The exhibition’s main concern is the history of San Francisco’s public transportation system, and it approaches this history from a broad perspective that goes beyond passengers or the experience of transit itself. Many of the photos direct attention to the labor, maintenance, and construction that allow the city’s movement to function in the first place. For many San Franciscans today, interaction with the Municipal Railway (MUNI) may consist only of tagging a Clipper card before swaying from point A to point B, but photos of the exhibition take viewers behind the scenes, attending to the workers and infrastructure that sustain those ordinary passages through the city.

In Bill Owyang’s Cable Splicing at Washington Mason Cable Car Powerhouse (1981), four workers gather around a thick steel cable, engaging in the specialized process of cable splicing: untwisting strands of steel before reweaving them together into a continuous loop. The men lean backward in unison, using their body weight to counter the cable’s resistance, their formation resembling a tug-of-war. Their uniforms are stained, as are the floorboards beneath them, suggesting the routine nature of the work. The photograph thus captures not only physical exertion but a form of maintenance that remains invisible to passengers riding the cable cars aboveground. What appears seamless at street level depends upon such constant behind-the-scenes labor.

Construction recurs throughout the exhibition as another form of movement. Streets repeatedly appear torn open and rebuilt: Market Street becomes a construction site for the Embarcadero BART station; Collingwood Street opens again for work on the Twin Peaks Tunnel. In Horace Chaffee’s Construction of J Line Street Tracks Looking East from 22nd Street and Church Street (1916), newly laid tracks curve along the hillside in a loose S-shape, engineered to accommodate the terrain’s slope. Three workers stand with their backs to the viewer, inspecting the tracks as retaining walls rise beside them. The wooden houses in the photo remain recognizably San Franciscan, though smaller details—like clotheslines stretched between buildings—belong to forms of urban everyday life that have largely disappeared.

Other photographs capture the changing forms of MUNI vehicles and equipment over time. In Marshall Moxom’s Muni Overhead Line Department Crew on Tower Truck (1947), an earlier version of the tower truck appears, before the larger fire-engine models more familiar today. A collapsible ladder rests on its flatbed besides coils of cable and electrical equipment. The vehicle’s compact design suggests a different stage in the development of the city’s transit system.

Interspersed among the photographs are small wall plaques displaying comments from San Franciscans reflecting on MUNI. In one, the author Lia Smith shares her fondness for MUNI: “… Muni vehicles lift my spirits, remind me of what’s important, provide rich entertainment, and are opportunities to interact with a diversity of my fellow San Franciscans.” Here, “moving” expands beyond transportation into something emotional: memories of daily commutes, familiar routes, moments of connection. Public transit emerges not merely as infrastructure but as one of the systems through which residents experience belonging to the city itself.

The exhibition at times broadens its understanding of movement even further. A photo of the collapsed City Hall after the 1906 earthquake, its dome ribs still standing but the infill all gone, reminds the viewer that the infrastructure is built for a city that itself was on the move. This broader understanding of movement becomes especially resonant because of the exhibition’s location inside City Hall. When I visited, polling stations had been installed along the corridor where the exhibition was held. The juxtaposition felt unexpectedly apt: the exhibition’s photographs reveal the systems and labor required to keep a city moving, while the polling stations pointed to another system through which the city politically reorganizes itself. Passengers rarely think about cable splicing, and voters rarely think about the logistical machinery surrounding an election, but both become visible only when they fail. This parallel might not be part of the exhibition’s design, but it serves as an apt reminder that the most resonant contexts are sometimes the ones curators don’t plan for.

By the end of Moving San Francisco, “moving” no longer refers simply to transportation. The exhibition expands the term to encompass labor, reconstruction, memory, and civic participation itself. What initially appears to be an archival exhibition about transit thus becomes a broader meditation on the unseen systems that allow a city to keep going. To curate an exhibition, it turns out, you don’t need to arrange everything in advance.

By Jonathan Curiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Sarah Poisner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Massachusetts to the Battleground State of Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maiden Voyage and a Great-Grandfather's Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austin Art Agency: Supporting What's Already There

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

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

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

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

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

The Broken Grant Writing Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Exploitative Bargain Between Big Tech and Creative Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Success Actually Looks Like

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Ivester: Thank you so much.

By Hantian Zhang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jonathan Curiel

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

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

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

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

Among the conveyor belt of artworks that give Hit By News a "must see" status:

• Bedri Baykam's "Kennedy Slain on Dallas Street," a 1997 work that's a spray-painted whirlpool of newsprint, acrylic paint, scribblings, and street-art dissonance that revolves around the Dallas Morning News' front page that reported John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. Baykam, a Turkish artist who studied at the California College of the Arts, is a kind of Rauschenberg accolate who should be better known in American art circles."Kennedy Slain on Dallas Street" is displayed next to other Baykam canvases that are equally adorned into dreamlike states of color, conflict, and overlapping layers of newsprint, paint, and juxtaposed strangeness.

•  Anne Lise-Coste's "Professionalism Is Killing Art," a 2008 work that also uses newsprint in a profound way: As the backdrop for a painted skull and crossbones and the very words of the artwork's title. A French artist with a graffiti mindset, Lise-Coste makes art that turns her social commentary into the equivalent of artistic "STOP" signs that you can't look away from.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rat Fink, Hot Rods, and Getting Struck by Lightning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trap of Photorealism

Hugh Leeman: When did it turn into art?

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

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

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

Six Rejections and the Birth of Something New

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a Home in TB Nine

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

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

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

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

Magic Realism and the Inexplicable

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

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

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

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

Pinocchio, Clowns, and the Cadence of Stupidity

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

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

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

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

Four Fellowships and the Art of Applying

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

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

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

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

The Closing of CCA and the Future of Art Education

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

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

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

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

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

A New Chapter: Push-Ups and Hustling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Gonzalez: Your welcome.