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

September 10 through October 27, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Pobanz

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

Anya Masnik 

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

Ariana Myers 

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

Celeste (Cece) Escobar 

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

Katharine Wolf

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

Rho Bean

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

Richard Holober

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

Sally Roth

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

Shasha Tao

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

Violaine M'Raihi 

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

Gail Felchle 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installation photographs:

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

A Roborant Review interview by Hugh Leeman

The City of Awe

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

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

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

About to Explode

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying Put

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

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

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

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

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

The Wound Around Division

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

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

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

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

A Family of Four, for Nothing

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

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

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

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

The Sweet Spot of Creative Genius

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

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

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

Choosing Love Over Fear

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

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

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

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

Failing Your Way to Success

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

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

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

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

Transcending the Politics

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

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

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

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

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

Rage, and Its Loving Expression

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

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

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

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

The Light of Humanity

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

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

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

The Birds, and the Science

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

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

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

Grace Light: A Portal

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty as a Civic Instrument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet -- 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CALDER | O’KEEFE

October 3, 2026 – January 24, 2027

Hauser & Wirth

201 Hamilton Avenue

Palo Alto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator | Interview by Hugh Leeman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Michelangelo, Hiding in Plain Sight

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

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

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

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

Hugh Leeman: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Hugh Leeman: And how big is it?

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

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

Rembrandt's Only Still Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two and a Half Rembrandts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Still: Barbara Regina Dietzsch

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the Greatest Draftsmen: Hokusai

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

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

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

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

Below the Radar: The Osaka School

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

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

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

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

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

A Lincoln Conspirator, Out of Time

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

Hugh Leeman: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

A Circle of Serendipity: Muybridge in San Francisco

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

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

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

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

Hugh Leeman: Who was it?

Robert Flynn Johnson: Robert Johnson.

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

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

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

Robert Flynn Johnson: Wonderful. Take care.

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

 By Maria Porges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Liz Goldner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From left to right:

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

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

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

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

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

From left to right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From left to right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

From left to right:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From left to right:

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

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

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

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

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

Fro left to right:

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

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

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

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

Exhibition runs through July 25–October 17, 2026

Amy Trachtenberg: Abstract Objects of Devotion

Andy Vogt: The Ringing in My Eyes

By John Vochatzer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jonathan Curiel

The echoes of war and bloodshed have always inspired artists to create what can be categorized as "anti-war art." And the power of their depictions is usually in the gruesomeness of lives on the precipice, as in Goya's The Third of May 1808, which documents the French military's killing of Spanish resistance fighters. More than 200 years after its creation, The Third of May 1808 is among the art world's most mesmerizing paintings because of its microscopic freeze-frame of hell and horror. What Iranian-American artist Shaghayegh Cyrous does at Telematic Media Arts is no less anti-war and just as profound, albeit through a completely counter-intuitive approach: In a video of dance, music, and movement, performers joyously practice the ancestral traditions of a people who are being killed by their own government and by an external war that shows no sign of abating. 

Cyrous' video work is her reaction to the ongoing events that are devastating Iran. The people we see are doing things that Persians have orchestrated in ceremonies for some 3,000 years. Through Cyrous' video camera, the colorfully clad men and women in "Breathe the Sun" are exhibiting aspects of Iranian culture that are connected to Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic tradition that encouraged dance, song, and mystical displays of revelry. Iran's clerical rulers have essentially banned these kinds of displays in public spaces. Yet at Iranian grave sites in January, after Iranian authorities massacred Iranian citizens, some families openly danced as they remembered their loved ones — a defiant act against Iranian clerical rule, Cyrous says. "Breathe the Sun" is Cyrous' attempt to exhibit that defiance in a San Francisco art space, where visitors can take in two Cyrous videos and surround themselves with physical objects that embody Iran's unique cultural history. 

"In Iran, people are fighting with dancing," Cyrous tells me. "Those dances and that playfulness became our resistance." 

At a time of war when U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to "annihilate" Iran despite knowing little about the depth and beauty of Iran's culture, and a time when popular podcasts like "Diary of a CEO" entertain guests who talk nonchalantly about the idea that the U.S. could still kill millions of Iranians, "Breathe the Sun" is an art-world antidote to the bellicosity and unknowingness that tinges so much of today's mainstream conversations. Cyrous doesn't resort to demagoguery herself. Instead, "Breathe the Sun" is an invitation to slow down and experience the sounds and symbols of an Iran that has always been there for those who know it's there. Cyrous knows because she grew up in Iran and experienced the culture firsthand, even if Iran's education system discouraged her from embracing Iranian art history that happened before the country's 1979 revolution. Iran's historical art forms included colorful portraiture and, in the 19th and other centuries, women dancing. 

A telling example from Cyrous' Iranian education: At Tehran's University of Science and Culture, where Cyrous received her undergraduate degree, she studied Persian miniatures in black and white even though "Persian miniatures are all about color," she said at her exhibit's opening event. "At school we weren't allowed to embrace color." 

Color saturates nearly every part of "Breathe the Sun," especially the colors red and burgundy, but Cyrous' exhibit isn't an exercise of "in-your-face" finger-pointing. Few words are even spoken. Instead, video scenes are connected by intertitles that reference a centuries-old Persian book about Zoroastrian cosmology called the Bundahishn ("Creation"), embodied by the book's belief that men and women were created as equals. Some scenes feature actions that people of Persian descent will recognize, Cyrous says, as with people writing Farsi script on hard-shell eggs, then breaking the egg to understand someone's bad intentions and to "break the curse." In Iran's greatest epic poem, the 11th-century Shahnameh, a feather symbolizes a miraculous rescue and hope, and "Breathe the Sun" features a prominent feather. 

Still, you don't need to be a Persian scholar to get the vibe that emanates from "Breathe the Sun," which is on view through October 31. At the opening event, Abby Chen, Head of Contemporary Art and Senior Associate Curator at the Asian Art Museum, told Cyrous that she related the exhibit's motifs to her cultural upbringing in China. And Chen said she was surprised by the exhibit's "intimate quietness" and its power to reach the "inner self" of art-goers. In fact, Cyrous tells me that she deliberately toned down the upfront political underpinnings of her work. Before her San Francisco exhibit and a companion Los Angeles exhibit, "I was creating more direct political work, but I came to a position that it wasn't helping me, and I thought it wasn't helping the community," says Cyrous, whose entire family is still in Iran. "We need healing. We need to explore who we are. And I was working on Persian mythology for a while — even back in Iran." 

Anyone who's visited Clarion Alley in the Mission District will already know Cyrous' art. In 2015, she painted “In Memory of Forough Farrokhzad, Simin Behbahani, and Simin Daneshvar," a mural that celebrates three prominent women in Iranian literature. Cyrous moved from Iran to San Francisco in 2011 to get her MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts. She lived here for a decade before moving a few years ago to Los Angeles. The dancers and musicians in "Breathe the Sun" are other people in Los Angeles from the Iranian diaspora, and their animated expressions and joie de vivre help drive the exhibit’s visceral power. "Breathe the Sun" has been cathartic for Cyrous, who is mindful that art-goers will connect her exhibit to current events. 

“As an Iranian, dance is illegal in Iran,” she tells me. “Music is illegal in Iran. As an Iranian, no matter what I do, as a woman, whatever I do is political. . . . . You don’t want to have the label of ‘political,’ but it’s in your face. No matter how far you want to run away from it.”

“Whatever choice you make, make it the right one.”

WALK THROUGH WALLS… OR DON’T. It seems like an impossible choice: pass through an impervious thing… or not. The proposal presents itself as one perfectly viable option in contrast to another. The brain sputters, logic stalls: What kind of riddle is this? A metaphor, a psychological trick, a nod to quantum physics? An absurdist joke? What is a wall, after all? And who am I, here, seriously considering the choice? 

“Proof it HAPPENED.”

Eight new oil paintings by figurative artist Phil Hale hang in enigmatically matched pairs. The duos weren’t decided until they arrived at Ryan Graff Contemporary for mounting, partnered in the moment based on intuitive relationships of opposition and association. 

The canvases are raw, frayed, unframed; no placards in sight. In the far corner of the gallery, preparatory sketches on stained, jaundiced paper are collaged behind glass, with fragments of vintage photographs and book spines sparingly attached. 

Silkscreens of the show’s title card have been made on the back sides of English road maps from the last century. On the evening of the show’s opening, Hale delightedly unfolds the maps for gallery guests, pointing out bits of ink bleeding through the prints, remnants of trips painstakingly plotted in the past. Proof of life. 

“I just like it because it’s shitty,” he laughs, holding up a tattered corner. He relishes the chaos of the blemishes, their defiance of time and precision. In his own practice, paint, brush, and canvas collaborate with experience and taste; from moment to moment, the outcome is never known. Control is a death-knell, a flaw can become a windfall.

“We must see reality as it really is.”

Apocalypse is in the air and on the psyche.  

We watch in horror as the most moneyed men on earth insistently trumpet the inevitable obsolescence of organic life, leveraging systems of power and influence to lull humanity into consensual servitude and intellectual surrender. From the comfortable distance of their doomsday bunkers and phallic rocketships they jockey for top spot as the next mecha-messiah, breathlessly speedrunning the death cult’s wet dream, the end times. 

Meanwhile, noise, violence, volatility, and confusion flood our awareness every day. The climate is collapsing, the food is poison, stability is elusive. The animal body reacts, fighting, fleeing, fawning. This confounding mix of signals pits our senses against each other. Information flows more freely than ever before, and yet it swamps us with noxious, disorienting fumes, disconnecting us from ourselves, the reality in which we live, and all relationships within it. 

So it’s a startling thing to see the felt experience of the now in a painting. 

In Walk Through Walls or Don’t 08, a male figure in a stark white Cricket kit thrashes towards an invisible foe while a colossal cow quietly grazes in a field. A pastoral scene punctuated by impotent, performative, misplaced violence. The cow seems untroubled. The man appears more animal than the animal.

To the left is a foreboding counterpart, Walk Through Walls or Don’t 05. Against a stony sky above a Turner-like seaside, mysterious billowing forms seem to stretch up and tumble down at the same time, unfolding and reversing, furrowed like wrinkled skin or nylon parachutes. It feels like witnessing an atomic detonation with no apparent seam between man-made materials and landscape. Nature has subsumed human folly. 

Throughout the show, boundaries are simultaneously sharp and nebulous. Organic figures possess an inanimate quality and vice versa. The work jumps between journalistic accuracy and nightmarish ambiguity, awash in a muted, sallow palette of diluted ochres, browns, and greens, with occasional punctuations of brake light red or acid green. The paintings, like reality, feel confronting and slippery.

The viewer probes for story and meaning in the forms, for relationships between them. There are overtones of systemic breakdowns (the poisoned well of toxic masculinity, the existential doomerism of tech oligarchs). But the eye cannot own what it’s looking at. It can’t classify or standardize. Narrative control is futile, passivity impossible. Nothing is linear, nothing is static, not even a ghostly still life of anemic roses sliding off the edge of the canvas. 

And yet there’s electricity in the uncertainty. The paintings have a physical and energetic momentum, a living force as raw as the immediacy of Hale’s preparatory sketches. It’s an aliveness that arises from crisis and discomfort, when doubt becomes a crossroad. 

“Follow the signal.”

With each pair of paintings, Phil Hale lays bare the anatomy of choice. Yes/no, left/right. The work evokes the fleeting moment of overlapping realities, when all the conditions of our being converge to meet and respond to the binary, cutting through the fog of conflicting information and impulses like a laser beam. It’s the point of connection, the sum of ourselves and the whole of the world.

Yes or no, do or don’t? 

Somewhere along the live wire, in that moment of inhalation before the act, a signal flutters in the animal body. A decision is made. A new universe of branching possibilities unfolds; the future is far from a foregone conclusion. Planetary doom of a particular scriptural, tech-driven flavor isn’t destiny, no matter what the oligarchs say. It doesn’t make the pervasive dread go away, or the confusion, but even in the shadow of catastrophic reality the choice remains a source of freedom and agency. It’s the signal of life.

WALK THROUGH WALLS OR DON’T is on view at Ryan Graff Contemporary in San Francisco through October 3rd, 2026.

1. Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (06), oil on canvas

2. Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (02), oil on canvas

3. Phil Hale, Walk Through Walls or Don’t (06), graphite on antique paper, photograph, book cover
   

Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? A Series of Open Questions 08-01-2023, San Francisco and Berlin: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. Edited by Jacqueline Francis and Jeanne Gerrity

Jacqueline Francis and Trina Robinson, The 3.9 Art Collective | Interview by Hugh Leeman

The 3.9 Art Collective is an association of African American artists, curators, and art writers who live in San Francisco and came together to draw attention to the city’s dwindling black population. The 3.9 Art Collective bears witness to this phenomenon and seeks to reverse it by drawing attention to the historical and ongoing presence of black artists in the city and creative expression in its black communities.  Through multiple forms of presentation and outreach, we create and claim spaces to display our artwork; nurture young artists and develop educational programs for students; and write about and curate exhibitions meant to generate productive, cross-cultural dialogues.

Jacqueline Francis is a writer, curator, and occasional artist exploring migration, identity, and cross-cultural exchange through literature, film, and visual art. Her short story collection in progress examines the bicultural lives of Black Caribbean immigrants in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Her works include the film The Visit (2009) and essays “H” Is for Hopsi (1995) and Three Friends (1990). Her projects include Outlook: No Fear (2017–18), What Can We No Longer Pretend Not to Know (2016), and Come to the Table (2017), a collaboration with photographer S. Renée Jones bringing Black San Franciscans together over meals.

Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist exploring time, memory, and migration through materiality, somatic inquiry, and archival research. Exhibitions include Open Your Eyes to Water, a dual-site solo presentation at 500 Capp Street and Root Division, and a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora. In 2025, For-Site Foundation, partnering with the National Park Service, commissioned her film installation for Black Gold: Stories Untold at Fort Point. A 2024 SFMOMA SECA finalist, Robinson has shown at BlackStar Film Festival and Bay Area Now 9. She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts.

What Is the 3.9 Art Collective?

Hugh Leeman: To start us off, what is the 3.9 Art Collective? And can you share some of its history, as well as the important social context that inspired its name?

Jacqueline Francis: Maybe I can start off. The 3.9 Art Collective was established around 2010 by a handful of artists — five — who were responding to a news item in the Bay View weekly newspaper. In anticipation of the census, the newspaper said, with some anxiety, that with all of the exodus patterns in San Francisco — Black outmigration — it seemed like 3.9 percent was going to be the number of Black people in San Francisco. So that's where the name came from: this moment of anxiety, which didn't come to pass. The number never dropped to 3.9. It's around five or six percent now. However, there's a visible sense of people leaving the city for a number of reasons, which makes this number 3.9 still relevant.

Hugh Leeman: Trina, I want to go to you. In a collective named for Black displacement, as Jackie has laid out, how does your migration-centered work speak to 3.9's mission, and what has your own practice brought to the collective?

Trina Robinson: That's a great question. A large part of my art practice is talking about my family's migration to California, beginning around 1906, going back and forth between Chicago and different parts of California. Part of that back-and-forth had to do with cost of living, but I was also very drawn to the whole idea of the California dream — why people come out West, and why African Americans, especially my family, who at some point in Chicago were pretty well off. I thought, why would they come here if they seemed like they were doing well? I wanted to see what it was like here for myself.

I went to grad school here, and after grad school I noticed many people started moving to the East Bay, because you get more space for your housing there than in San Francisco. Almost everyone I knew did that. And I was like, I am not leaving. I had family in San Francisco, and I've been doing everything I can to stay here. I see the struggle in myself and in my family's history. So I'm very happy to be part of this organization, and our interest in why people are staying, how people are staying, why people are leaving, and how we can support those who are here.

The Displacement of the Arts

Hugh Leeman: You hit on a really interesting topic. For people who may not be familiar with San Francisco and the Bay Area — what exactly is happening that's causing such a displacement of the arts and artists?

Trina Robinson: One of the biggest examples I can deeply connect to is housing and affordability. I got my MFA at CCA, and a lot of people were living on campus. Pretty much everybody is now in the East Bay or South Bay, mostly the East Bay. It's wonderful out there. But people were like, I'm not in school anymore, I need a more affordable space to exist. I've seen other artists have to go out there as well, because it's hard to afford a studio and a home in San Francisco. Most people live in really cramped housing here, and you can't have your studio in your home — you can't do both. A lot of people leave for that reason. And now, with all the closing jobs, people leave for other opportunities elsewhere. Everyone I know, for the most part, tries to stay. It's just very difficult.

The Survey and Nexus Bay Area Black Art Week

Hugh Leeman: The two of you, along with a couple of other members, did a talk last fall that laid the groundwork for a research survey connected to an established, nonpartisan research data institution. What were the results of that research?

Jacqueline Francis: So actually, the survey hasn't launched yet. When we talked about it last year, we were still crafting it and working with some very generous data scientists outside of San Francisco who gave us feedback. We finalized the survey this summer. We're planning soft launches this month and next, and then to really go around during the next Black Art Week to get people to respond — it's online. We're glad you asked, because we have a lot to say about its importance, and a lot to share once we start releasing our findings in 2027.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned Nexus Black Art Week. What is this?

Jacqueline Francis: How would you describe it, Trina?

Trina Robinson: It's an incredible event launched by Monetta White from MoAD. It's become a week-long event focused on the Black arts community in the Bay Area — a series of talks, exhibitions, studio tours, and workshops over the course of a week. People have now been traveling to San Francisco from outside to attend. Last year at the art talk we had to launch the survey at ICA SF, we met people who had come from outside California to visit. It seems to be growing much bigger each year. There are parties too — a big party at YBCA — so we can celebrate, get to know each other, and network.

We're excited to bring our survey to this event. I'm part of Black [Space] Residency, and we're going to have the survey come up at our event with a QR code, so people can participate. Part of the survey is about showing the opportunities that are there — we think some people just don't know they exist. We want to pull these resources together and make them clearer and more accessible, and sometimes it's just hard to navigate. We want to help streamline the process and create a better network.

Abundance in the Midst of Scarcity

Hugh Leeman: It's really interesting that you mention resources that people just don't know about — a positive contrast to the scarcity of high living costs and closures. What are some of the resources that people could navigate through?

Trina Robinson: As an artist myself, just knowing the number of residencies that are here — like the one I'm in with Black [Space] Residency, and others throughout the Bay Area — people just don't know, because they're not advertised in a way that's clear. A lot of times it's kind of who you know. So we want to create a network, almost like a central hub, so people can find out where these resources are, learn more about studio space — like Root Division studios, which are quite affordable, and spaces in Bayview. We're also asking where people's zip codes are, so we can know what parts of the city we truly are in. A lot of people have the stereotype that everyone is in Bayview, but we're all over San Francisco. So it might be very helpful to navigate and connect with each other in our various areas. Jackie, do you want to add to that?

Jacqueline Francis: We're thinking about the survey results being a resource for everyone — not only for artists and, broadly speaking, cultural workers who identify as Black people in San Francisco, but also for funders and institutions who are interested in knowing where Black artists are, where they are in their careers, what they need more of. Studio space, the opportunity to afford living in the city — these are concerns for everyone. But they're really, really acute concerns for Black artists in San Francisco.

A Shrinking Collective, a Complex Set of Circumstances

Hugh Leeman: Jackie, you've been with the 3.9 Collective since roughly 2012, and you often speak on behalf of the collective in public. You've noted that the collective was once around twenty members but has since contracted. What does that shrinking membership tell you about the very problem 3.9 formed to name?

Jacqueline Francis: It's a very complex set of circumstances. Part of it is people moving outside of San Francisco — literally beyond the Bay Area to other parts of the country, and in some cases other parts of the world — looking for opportunity, looking to further their careers. Even for people who stay, I think about what it means once you get beyond emerging artist to mid-career or late-career: where do you want to put your energies? Maybe the collective doesn't do everything you want to put your energies into in order to forge a solo career.

I also think about how institutions look to find artists. Sometimes it doesn't seem like institutions are looking for collectives or groups — they're looking for individuals. So a lot of those things inform the numbers, up and down and across different demographics of age and gender, for 3.9 membership over the years.

A Paper Habit She Can't Shake

Hugh Leeman: Trina, before your MFA, you worked in commercial print and digital media at places like The New York Times and Vanity Fair. What carried over from that world into your archival and ancestral practice?

Trina Robinson: It definitely came over as my love of print — even though the biggest part of my art practice is film and video, I cannot get print out of my system. I worked in magazine publishing for so many years. When I worked at Vanity Fair, we'd send the digital files to the printer, and sometimes I'd be on press watching them run. When I got to grad school, I was like, oh, wait, I can make a book, I can make a magazine with my hands, I can make paper. I had the opportunity to make paper from raw cotton with my hands, and just see that form of alchemy take place. That's the through-line, how I've kept the past with my present deeply embedded. I love film so much, but I have a paper habit, a print habit, I can't shake.

Arrival and History: Writing San Francisco

Hugh Leeman: Jackie, you've done a lot of writing and publishing, and there's a short story — "Look Away" — that grows out of your visit to San Francisco in 1987. How does your arrival and history in the city shape the way you write and think about the Black community here?

Jacqueline Francis: Everything is comparative for me. I think about being born and raised in New York City, and having lived in a lot of other places, larger and smaller. So I'm always thinking about myself in all of these different locations, both here in the U.S. and abroad, and also thinking about migration and movement. There are members of the 3.9 Art Collective who were born and raised in San Francisco, but I bring the experience of somebody who was not. So I'm trying to think about all the discoveries I've made about San Francisco and continue to make — because even though I've been here more or less without cessation since 2008, I still feel like every day I'm learning something I had no idea about.

Finding a Language Through Film

Hugh Leeman: Trina, you've told your own personal story publicly on stage, live at The Moth. How does speaking of memory aloud to an audience differ from building it into a physical work — print, video, that paper habit?

Trina Robinson: That's a great question. Before I was a practicing artist, when I was working in publishing and briefly tech, I was obsessed with my story — the fact that I was able to find all these things about my family members. It changed my identity, how I looked at myself in the world, my idea of American history and the history of slavery and how it's taught in this country. It blew my mind being able to know where I came from and their names.

Someone said, oh, just pitch it to The Moth. The first time I pitched it, I was contacted by one of the directors, we talked a couple of times, and then she kind of ghosted me. So I ended up taking a video essay class at SFAI. I brought in an archival box of documents, some original, some copies, and said, I want to make a film. Long story short, I made a film, and it started circulating at festivals. I realized I was able to process everything so much easier visually — it gave me a language I didn't have with vocal language.

I sent the video to that director, and she contacted me again and said, now you have the story. That's when I realized, oh, visually it's easier for me to articulate this kind of trauma. And that's when I did The Moth mainstage, and traveled — Lincoln Center, the Herbst here, Newmark in Portland, other places. It was all because of that film, which gave me the language to process what actually happened.

Investigation, Not Explanation: William J. French

Hugh Leeman: Your practice is effectively excavating fragments of memory and centering on ancestors. You've done something fairly specific to your great-great-uncle, William J. French. How do you decide what to reconstruct and what to leave as a gap, a fold, something left out on purpose?

Trina Robinson: My practice is pretty much about asking questions. I'm not trying to say, this is what happened — my whole practice is an investigation. With William J. French, I really wanted to understand: yeah, he passed for white. You could just say, oh, he's this guy who passed for white and took off, and then there was a big scandal when everyone found out. But I wanted to know more than the why — I wanted to know how he lived, because he still stayed in contact with my family members while he was passing, which ultimately is what undid him. If you pass, you pretty much take off. But he kept in contact.

That led to so many other questions. Why did they come to California if they were so well off in Chicago? Some of them dined with P.B.S. Pinchback at their homes. The parties they threw were written up in the society pages — in the Appeal in 1889, P.B.S. Pinchback was at the house, and it talked about the women wearing diamonds, listing what all the women wore. So I thought, why would they come all the way out here? That's why I wanted to look into it.

Now I'm looking into other stories of westward migration — James Beckwourth and people in the Lake Tahoe area. I'm obsessed with California, because people don't think about African Americans who migrated here, for many different reasons, well before 1900 or shortly thereafter. There are the people who were enslaved and became part of the Gold Rush and fought for their freedom, and pioneers like James Beckwourth. So I'm just asking questions about migration.

Making Race: The Problem of "Racial Art"

Hugh Leeman: Jackie, there's a book you published — Making Race — that interrogates the category of what qualifies as racial art in America. When you look at the work coming out of the 3.9 Collective today, how does that historical framework help you see it more clearly?

Jacqueline Francis: To be clear, the book is about the problem of the idea of racial art — that is to say, in the 1920s and 1930s, audiences, predominantly mainstream white audiences, expected artists who were Black to make something that looked very different from their non-Black peers. That happens with a lot of different artists — artists who identify as women, or Chinese, or gay and queer. There's an expectation that there's a mainstream category called art, and then all these other things that modify it.

So when we talk about what we do in the 3.9 Art Collective, it's not that we're saying this looks different in terms of medium or practice. As is the case for all artists, it's very specific to your experience and your interest. I speak for myself — I'm not saying there's anything that qualifies as the way all Black artists work. I would never make that statement. What I'm trying to talk about is the way it seems so important, both critically and to some makers, to say, yes, this is what is different. This term "Black art," which is not necessarily one I personally use, seems to be very important to a lot of makers, and certainly to people who write about their projects.

Hugh Leeman: What do you attribute that to — the importance of it to them, where it's not a term you're necessarily connected to?

Jacqueline Francis: I think it's the moment we are in history. It's part of where people see, not only in this country but maybe elsewhere, a sense of both despair and yet simultaneously a resistance — saying there are things they feel are so evidently clear in terms of histories of anti-Blackness, and pushing back against anti-Blackness that's institutionalized, not just personalized by individuals. So there are people using that phrase, Black art, as a way of self-empowerment in this moment.

The City as Material: Staying to Uncover the Stories

Hugh Leeman: Trina, you've said your proximity to the ancestors you depict is the foundation of your practice, and that you couldn't make this work if you left San Francisco. How does this specific city function as material in your art?

Trina Robinson: Because my ancestors — William French lived here in San Francisco. He came here in 1913 from Chicago, and eventually crossed the color line when he joined the military at the Presidio. He's buried in the cemetery there. It was a big court case, because they weren't going to let him be buried there when they found out he was Black. But they eventually allowed him to be buried with full military honors.

I'm drawn to uncover his story, because he was pretty much erased from my narrative. My mom had never heard of him growing up — she knew about all his ancestors, but not him. I look at him almost like my partner in crime. He's kind of redeeming, making up for what he did. That's why I feel like I can't leave — I feel like we're here doing this together. There are parts of his story, like the actual circumstances of his death, that I still want to look into.

Being in California, but specifically San Francisco — I also want to talk about how African Americans who came here had the American dream just like everybody else. They wanted to come out here, go to the beach, be around sunshine, pick their flowers, rest. Of course there was struggle, like always. But that's not what our lives were fully.

We had a screening for my film Go West, and I remember people got up and started testifying about their family's migration story. It was unexpected, and one of the most incredible moments of my life — to see people get emotional talking about when their family first came to California, the businesses they started, the history. I'm now applying to make additions to that film and do an oral history project, because it was really a testimony. That's what I need, and why I won't leave — this is where my stories are.

Collecting the Oral Histories

Hugh Leeman: Tell me about the oral histories. What would you be doing with those, and who might be contributing?

Trina Robinson: At that event at the Bayview — I think it's the Bayview [Opera House] — we had an outdoor screening, and people stood up and started identifying when their parents or ancestors came, the businesses their great-grandparents had started. Someone was saying, all the money their ancestors had made, some of it was spent and they want to build it back — where the homes were that they first built.

So with the oral histories, I'd like to collect those individual stories. I want to do a grant, finish the part of the film I didn't get to, collect more archival video footage of African Americans in California, and maybe partner with the San Francisco Public Library. I could start with those people who spoke up.

Protecting the Healing at the Core

Hugh Leeman: Your work has been described as a way to "release the trauma that lives inside," and also as celebrating forgotten moments. As your profile rises as an artist, how do you protect the intimacy and healing at the core of that practice?

Trina Robinson: I had an amazing show at 500 Capp Street with a piece that focuses on a document listing my enslaved ancestors. It's called Liberation Through Redaction — I redact every word that has nothing to do with your humanity. When you put your work out in the world, the audience has their time with it, and you have to let that go. There were beautiful moments of hearing people connect to it and talk about their family's migration.

There were also a couple of weird moments where people were posing with it, putting it on Instagram, and not acknowledging me as the artist — like it was a "slavery to freedom" spectacle for some people. That showed how much education there still needs to be. But it's worth it, because the healing is happening. The act of making that document, the laborious process, the planting of the tall grasses — that's somatic work. There's a soundscape related to my family's migration, field recordings from Kentucky to my family's property in the rural Central Valley of California. I want people to have an immersive experience that transports them.

When I've seen other people have a healing reaction — when they feel transported in that space — that's why I do it. I used to have a whole other life, and I gave it up, because this is what I have to do.

Curating as Advocacy

Hugh Leeman: Jackie, you're also a curator. You've curated Where Is Here? at the Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Sargent Johnson show, and Fight or Flight — foregrounding Bay Area Black artists navigating precarity. In what ways is curating a form of advocacy, similar to what the 3.9 Collective is inspired by?

Jacqueline Francis: Curating is about being in conversation with artists, trying to learn what they're interested in — not only the work they talk about making, but ultimately the work they are making. I hope the exhibitions I'm part of not only show the work, but raise questions and create ground for conversation. We often talk about artworks as things that start conversations that are hard to have otherwise. Standing with an artwork, being in a screening, participating in social practice — these are things art can do: create the space to ask questions about things we might otherwise feel frustrated reading or talking about in the abstract.

The one for the Museum of the African Diaspora was about how artists who identify as people of African descent can make work about the diasporic experience without the figure of the body — to talk about movement, historical or migratory. Fight or Flight at the Museum of Craft and Design was about movement in and outside of San Francisco, because of people's affinity to the city. And the historical exhibition I did with the Huntington: Sargent Claude Johnson was an artist born in the 19th century in Boston, who made his way to San Francisco in the second decade of the 20th century to study art. Another migratory figure, moving voluntarily here for something he saw as promise and potential, and lived the rest of his life here until he died in 1967. With curation, I want people to think about these histories, these questions, these practices of art-making as something worth thinking about in our everyday lives.

What a Collective Can Do That an Institution Can't

Hugh Leeman: Oftentimes, if one's not in the art world, we think of it as some massive institution — you have to go to this museum, that's where art happens. But you've moved between grassroots collectives — 3.9, the Queer Cultural Center, a deanship at CCA. What can an artist collective like 3.9 do that a large institution structurally can't?

Jacqueline Francis: In terms of size, vision, objectives, and goals, there may be overlap with an institution. But as is the case in life, people move at different speeds. They prioritize things differently and leave aside things that aren't urgent, or that they cannot do. That's true whether it's the 3.9 Art Collective and a museum, or someone doing another thing in their life as their work. These are things that are part of the everyday that may be crowded out, or may seem especially unique or esoteric when we think about art and culture — but that's something everyone is doing. Even with social media or the internet, we know we're visual, we're interested in experiences. It's not just inside of buildings that this thing called art exists.

How Place Changes the Work

Hugh Leeman: Trina, you've had a dual-site show — Open Your Eyes to Water — and your Fort Point commission, both putting your work in charged historical sites tied to water and migration. How does the specific place where you install the work change its meaning?

Trina Robinson: Liberation Through Redaction was originally supposed to be at a Root Division site, but we got the opportunity to be in the parlor at 500 Capp Street — a beautiful historic space where you can see how the history has been preserved. Having it in that parlor room changed the meaning of that show for me forever. It revealed layers I wasn't even fully aware of. Because it was in a home, it brought out the level of domesticity with my ancestors and the institution of enslavement. It made it very much more real — imagining my enslaved ancestors in these homes, their pathway to freedom, then making their own homes as free people. David Ireland preserved that house in a way where you can see the history, see the cracks.

Same with the piece at Fort Point — Charles Young. Having it in a historic military fortress, an open-air space with an actual connection to the military, made it much more grounded in terms of Charles Young's military career, but also the Buffalo Soldiers coming to California. He was from Kentucky, like my family, so all these beats connected with my family, and it made it come to life. You could feel the ghosts in that space, because it's a Civil War–era fort. I couldn't have had that show any other place.

The Closing of CCA

Hugh Leeman: Earlier we spoke about the challenges of staying in San Francisco, and the mention of CCA, which you're both deeply connected to. What does the upcoming closing of CCA mean to you both personally?

Trina Robinson: Maybe I'll go first, because I'm the one who's gone now, and Jackie can close it out since she's going to be there to the end. I'm no longer there — I was part of that round of layoffs at the end of the summer. I thankfully did get a job teaching a class at SF State. It's devastating. My last show had four or five other artists who participated in an installation with an altar — they all went to CCA in the graduate program.

I understand people are saying there are all these other institutions, and that's true. There will be spaces opening up with classes and workshops — thank goodness. But I'm praying there's going to be a way for people to get at least a certificate program, some kind of accreditation connecting them to higher education. It's going to be such a sad void to have the last art school close here.

Jacqueline Francis: I'll leave it to everything that's been said in the press, but there will be a new art school run by Vanderbilt, opening in fall of 2027. The relationships I've built here — teaching at CCA for almost eighteen years — will be sustained if they're intentional. I never look at a commencement and say those are the last moments I'll ever see a graduating student or a colleague, because I know from my own experience going through school that I'm in touch with my mentors and my peers. That's sustained even with the closing of an institution. I look forward to being part of this active year of 2026–2027 at CCA, where we're offering classes, programs, and exhibitions, and preparing students to either graduate in spring of 2027 or continue their education elsewhere. And we look forward to artists being part of the next art and design institution here in San Francisco.

How Should the Collective Be Remembered?

Hugh Leeman: To pull things full circle — Jackie, as both a member and an art historian, how do you want the collective's work documented and remembered? What's the archive of 3.9 you'd want to exist fifty years from now?

Jacqueline Francis: It has to be a multi-platform strategy. I hope there'll still be an internet fifty years from now. I hope some of the ephemera and the visual documentation of exhibitions will be available in print material and in a San Francisco Public Library archive, or maybe one at an institution. It also has to exist in community archives — we're in a city with centers like the African American Art and Culture Complex, as well as the museum of the African diaspora. I think it has to exist in many different sites, so it's less in danger of being forgotten or dissolved. I hope it lives in people's conversations and memories, and in oral histories with the artists of the 3.9 Art Collective — both present and emeritus members.

Hugh Leeman: And Trina, you're one of the newer voices in a collective whose founding dates back to 2010. What do you hope to carry forward from them, and where might you push things that 3.9 hasn't yet gone?

Trina Robinson: I'm very happy to be part of a project that's research-focused — I'm a research-based artist, so that's part of my art practice. I'm looking forward to activities like this survey, and what we can do with the research once it's completed. The fact that 3.9 was founded through questions about data — I'm looking forward to what we're going to do with the data we collect, and how we can be involved with the city in helping answer questions for artists, and for those who could fund artists and other cultural workers. And on the visual side too — what exhibition opportunities there are in tandem with the data collection and research. There's just so much potential.

Hugh Leeman: Trina Robinson, Jacqueline Francis — thank you both so much for taking the time to share on 3.9 and beyond.

Jacqueline Francis: Thanks for having us.

Trina Robinson: Thank you.

There are places we remember more beautifully than they probably ever were. The light is softer, the water clearer, the flowers more abundant, and whatever discomfort may have existed has quietly fallen away. Chris Hayman’s paintings in Fragmented Horizons at Studio Shop Gallery feel a little like this. They are a feast for the eyes without the gluttony, more sophisticated picnic than banquet, as though someone planned a birthday around the theme of a spring garden adventure. Bodies of water appear between passages of color, pathways seem to lead somewhere just beyond reach, and fields of flowers stretch into spaces that are recognizable without belonging to anywhere in particular. Hayman is not offering us a landscape so much as the feeling of one, the way we might want our best memories to appear after time has softened their edges.

Paired with Hayman is Rob Strati, whose work produces a surprisingly similar longing through an almost opposite visual language. Where Hayman’s landscapes loosen and dissolve, Strati’s feel precise, calculated and geometrically astute. Fragments of antique and vintage porcelain become the starting points for elaborate ink drawings that extend their existing imagery far beyond the broken edge. The result can feel like a three-dimensional rendering of a place briefly imagined, strangely tangible despite never having existed. Together, the artists make an unlikely but convincing pairing. One allows a landscape to drift toward memory while the other builds outward from what remains of something broken, yet both leave us wanting to enter the worlds they have made. In Fragmented Horizons, place becomes less about where we have been than where we imagine ourselves being.

Hayman’s relationship with landscape is unsurprising considering that she lives on a farm in Northern California, surrounded by livestock and the natural environment that continually feeds into her work. Before turning her attention primarily to visual art, she trained as a classical pianist and was involved in theater and dance, influences that perhaps still surface in the rhythm and movement of her compositions. She earned a B.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland and an Art Education degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she began what she has described as her “investigation in painting.” Working in oil on canvas, Hayman is particularly interested in space and in the energy created between forms, often using thick texture and contrasting color to push and pull areas of the painting. She has described landscape as entering her work intuitively, which feels important here. These are not places meticulously recorded from observation. Nature provides the vocabulary, but Hayman rearranges it according to feeling.

Landscape’s Rapture stretches across six feet of canvas, giving Hayman enough space to create a landscape that feels expansive. Oil paint is worked across the surface with varying degrees of pressure and weight; thicker passages sit beside areas that feel pulled, scraped or quickly brushed into place. The marks remain distinct enough that we can follow the movement of her hand. Greens push into flashes of pink and yellow, blue opens up what appears to be water, and white brings moments of light and relief. Hayman does not use these elements to tell us exactly where we are. Instead, they behave more like the pieces of a place we retain after leaving it. A patch of sunlight, the color of flowers, the shimmer of water or the density of a garden can survive in memory long after its layout has been forgotten. The painting seems to understand that distinction. Its beauty comes not from clarity, but from giving us just enough to feel that we have been somewhere like it before.

There is something even more enveloping about Earthly Delight. Hayman builds the painting through accumulation, but the surface never feels labored. Marks overlap, disappear beneath one another and re-emerge elsewhere, giving the impression that the landscape is still growing while we look at it. Her use of oil is important here. Its physical weight allows some forms to rise from the canvas while other passages remain loose and open, creating a sense of depth without relying on conventional perspective. It makes looking at the painting feel less like standing before a view and more like being somewhere within it. Perhaps that is where the “delight” lies. There is no urgency to understand what every mark represents, only the pleasure of wandering through them. A clearing can become water, a cluster of paint can become flowers, and then both can return to being paint again. Hayman leaves enough uncertainty for the viewer to finish the experience themselves, and in doing so taps into something familiar: our tendency to make the places we love a little more beautiful each time we remember them.

If Hayman allows the landscape to loosen until feeling takes precedence over place, Rob Strati approaches that same uncertainty from the opposite direction. His Fragmented series began with an accident, when a porcelain plate inherited from his wife’s late mother was broken. Unable to throw it away, Strati eventually began drawing outward from what remained, extending the plate’s existing imagery beyond its fractured edge. That impulse has since developed into a practice using broken antique and vintage porcelain as both material and starting point. Strati studies the imagery already present on each fragment and continues its visual language in ink, sometimes with an almost obsessive precision. Yet the process is less predetermined than the finished works suggest. He does not begin knowing exactly where these scenes will lead. The fracture establishes a boundary, but also an opening, and it is from there that Strati begins to imagine what might exist beyond it.

That expansion is particularly striking in Fragmented in Blue with Fishermen, Astronomer and Scholars and the much smaller Dreams of Blue Delft, Windmills and Dutch Sailing Ships. In both, the original porcelain occupies only a fraction of the finished composition, yet somehow establishes the scale of everything around it. In Fishermen, Strati carries the blue decoration outward into an improbable world of boats, water and architectural forms, eventually sending the drawing upward into increasingly sparse lines, symbols and shapes. Below, water spills from the broken plate as a waterfall, as though the scene held within the porcelain has quite literally escaped its boundary. Dreams of Blue Delft performs a similar trick on a far smaller scale. A fragment of blue-and-white porcelain opens into windmills, sailing ships and water, its imagery continuing so naturally into Strati’s ink drawing that it takes a moment to determine where one ends and the other begins. There is extraordinary precision in both works, but their appeal is not limited to technical skill. Strati takes something physically small and broken and gives it distance, atmosphere and seemingly endless possibility. The empty paper becomes part of that illusion. It is not a void to be filled, but room for these little worlds to breathe and, perhaps, for us to imagine what else might exist beyond them.

Fragmented in Blue with Flying Dragons, Pandas and Cranes in Mountains and Fragmented in Red with Minarets, Felucca and Griffin in Flight push this relationship between object and imagination further. Here, separate pieces of porcelain appear almost suspended within the drawing, with Strati using ink to bridge the physical gaps between them. In Flying Dragons, creatures and mountainous forms move between fragment and paper while fine lines shoot outward from the broken pieces, giving the composition the strange depth of a three-dimensional rendering. Minarets creates a different atmosphere in red, its sailboat, palms and distant architecture extending from the porcelain into a scene that feels both historical and invented. What is fascinating is that Strati never tries to hide the damage that made these works possible. The jagged edges remain plainly visible; wholeness is not restored so much as reconsidered. There is something quietly spiritual in that gesture. A break, usually understood as an ending, becomes the point from which another world begins. Looking closely, the fragments start to feel less like remnants of something lost and more like portals, carrying a small piece of one place into another that could only exist through imagination.

Perhaps the most curious thing about Fragmented Horizons is how quickly the actual places cease to matter. Hayman gives us landscapes that feel remembered before they have been lived, while Strati builds worlds from objects whose first lives have already ended. Somewhere between the two is the peculiar human habit of filling in what is missing. We improve a memory, imagine what lies beyond a path, reconstruct what has broken, or become nostalgic for somewhere we have never been. By the time you leave the exhibition, the horizon in its title feels less like a line in the distance and more like that restless space between what is there and what we add ourselves. Hayman and Strati leave plenty unfinished. Thankfully so. A world completely explained is rarely one worth getting lost in.

Paintings for Lou is an exhibition of Michelle Fernandez’s paintings currently showing at And Friends, an art gallery and shop in the Pleasure Point neighborhood of Santa Cruz. Across the exhibition, borders, stars, and abstract shapes appear again and again. Working with oil, primarily oil sticks, and adding sand to several pieces, Fernandez moves between works that are quiet and controlled and others that are dense and overwhelming. Despite these differences, the paintings feel very connected, in part because of the shapes and symbols that repeat throughout the show.

The title piece, Painting for Lou, a 36 x 48 inch work in oil stick and sand on canvas, splits into two distinct areas.  On the left, a large enclosed area sits inside a black-and-white checkerboard border, holding several oversized, simplified forms. The large blue shape could be a wave, or perhaps a river or path moving through a landscape. On the right, a grid of smaller compartments holds its own shapes and colors, some are possibly plants, trees or mobiles akin to those that Alexander Calder is known for, while others are more resistant to identification. There is something naive about these forms without them being immature; a sense of playful innocence perhaps? The checkerboard border separates the large forms from the smaller, compartmentalized ones and gives the piece the feeling of things being sorted and kept.  The title names someone the viewer doesn't know, without explaining the relationship to Fernandez. It suggests something personal, while leaving enough unknown for the viewer to find their own meaning in it.

Overflowing Gently #2, a 24 x 30 inch oil-stick painting on canvas, handles the same idea but from a different angle. Twelve irregularly shaped color blocks are arranged into a loose grid, each holding a single simplified form, maybe a bird or plant, and other geometric shapes, are rendered in bold, varied color. The grid holds its form without feeling rigid, again embodying a sense of playful naivety. The blocks are uneven, the borders slightly off-true, the forms inside them not quite flush with their edges. The title's apparent contradiction, overflowing, yet gently, is reflected in the painting itself: controlled without being rigid, full without spilling over.

Burn Out abandons containment almost entirely. The 12 x 16 inch work in oil stick and sand on paper is dense with overlapping shapes.  Reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks, and oranges press directly against one another with no dividing structure between them. Forms surface and vanish, making it difficult to separate one shape from another. The painting feels less ordered, as if Fernandez returned again and again to the same surface, adding and covering as she went. The title works, to some degree, against the visual energy of the piece. Burn Out implies depletion, but the painting feels energetic and almost restless. Perhaps the title refers less to a loss of energy and more to a loss of control. There is a freedom in that disorder that feels very different from the more contained works in the show.

That accumulation reaches its clearest form in Killing Time, an oil painting on paper, 9 x 12 inches. The painting is made up of swaths of impasto in varying colors, some solid, others mixed and transitioning from one color to another. The surface is almost entirely covered in hundreds of small, thick marks, no single one significant on its own, but together making up the whole image. There’s no picture to extract from the surface, only the process of making it, one mark after another. The title brings another possibility into the work. The accumulation could come from restlessness, from having time and not quite knowing what to do with yourself, so you keep making. But repetition can also be meditative. The same action performed over and over can quiet the mind and become soothing in itself. Set beside Painting for Lou, the contrast is clear. One separates its forms into bordered compartments, while Killing Time allows everything to build and blend together. One contains, while the other accumulates.

Across the show, Fernandez returns to stars, borders and familiar geometric shapes without giving them a fixed meaning. A star can simply be a star, or it can hold something more personal; abstraction leaves room for both. There is something charming and whimsical about these repeated forms and the boldness of her color, but there is also a deeper feeling beneath them. The paintings move between order and disorder, the recognizable and the abstract, leaving enough unexplained for us to make our own connections. Paintings for Lou is playful without being slight, and personal without shutting the viewer out. It is a show that rewards spending time with it, allowing the shapes, textures and small details to slowly reveal themselves.

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Ian Kimmerly exhibits over a dozen large paintings at Dolby Chadwick Gallery ranging in size from 38 x 44 inches to the two largest 72 x 120 inches (double panels), with most of the works measuring 60 x 72 inches. The oil on canvas paintings are immediately compelling and showcase an aesthetic style Kimmerly has been exploring for a number of years, seen here in his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, where representational and abstract processes are integrated to make the fully realized works of art. 

Looking closely at the paintings one can see identifiable figurative imagery sitting beneath the layers of abstraction. Large swaths of paint cover images Kimmerly has rendered, then arranged, in a collage-like manner. While the source of the imagery isn't easily discernible, one cannot help but feel as if they're looking at something familiar. Parts of faces, landscape traces, and other images are intentionally placed, in some cases compartmentalized throughout the backdrop. The countenances peer through layers of paint on the canvas, giving the viewer an impression they are watching an old film reel through an oblique lens, one that has been compromised with age. An involuntary nostalgia is triggered as one thereafter looks at the whole and imagines testimonial elements communicating with the fresh, final layer of bold paint. 

In “Changeable Like The Sea” (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches, 2026) Kimmerly presents discernible faces and people striding along a boulevard. In “An Overview” (oil on canvas, 72 x 120 inches, 2026) we see hands, fingers, and human visages, evoking architectural features. “Words Also Vanished” (oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 2024) offers us glimpses of terrain. And in “Turning The Sky” (oil on canvas, 46 x 40 inches, 2024), Kimmerly presents us with the closest he gets to a traditional landscape, with clouds and building structures on the top and bottom of the canvas. The latter, where the colors are muted yet prominent against representational elements, conveys a clear demonstration of time and place, linking the composition to what feels like a particular day, ensconced in nature.

What does it mean to render representational images behind dominant abstract marks? In many respects it allows narrative to cohabit, as the obliterated familiar is partially erased and thereby lost. It tells us that we live in simultaneous moments and places, because the past coexists with the present, and we shouldn't be able to solely focus on one. In most cases there is a haunting effect in how Kimmerly’s imagery is blurred, reminiscent of Gerhardt Richter’s exploration of visual perception. Kimmerly works within multiple layers of paint, the first apparently consisting of the images he has sourced from various magazines and the like. The complex and textured layering creates a richness in service toward the final composition, integrating the disparate painting components into something intentional and necessary. Any ambiguity opens a subjective relationship to the work of art. There are liminal spaces between each layer inviting an unsettling yet transformative emotional quality to arise. In some cases the visages portrayed and which are still discernible are quite emotive. Somehow they evoke known people and places where the viewer stands as a witness before a moment comprising wholly of chance. Kimmerly invites us to consider the multiplicity that constitutes a single life. 

Impermanence and the interpretation that pertains to visual awareness is implicated in these art works. How fleeting moments can be captured by photography, then rendered onto a canvas, then obfuscated to communicate the unsettling nature of being. Kimmerly’s paintings are a response to the prevalence of mass media images, with the essential conceit being his reappropriation of them for his own accord. Somehow he makes them more authentic and participatory by offering them to us in this reconfigured way and in the process offering us a dreamlike narrative or landscape in which to ponder our relationship to everything around us.

The thick, bold brushstrokes of paint are placed last on the canvas in a method lacking strict symmetry. There is usually a wandering stroke visible which suggests uncertainty and invites speculation. The eye searches for meaning darting between representational and abstract forms. These paintings have a lasting quality with a sophistication achieved precisely because they are not overtly balanced. They both convey the emotion and architecture of paintings by Franz Kline. But Kimmerly's visual mashup offers us something less calming and zen-like and more akin to modernity’s chaos. The askew-marks make the paintings. They convey humanness. They reveal a painter messing with a surface, trying to push it to share a collective consciousness, at a time of intense social upheaval. 

The exhibition title is taken from the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. In her 2019 Nobel Lecture, Tokarczuk presents the idea of a “fourth-person” perspective which deemphasizes what are often insular, individual viewpoints in favor of something elevating the whole. She offers a perspective involving a narrative which can simultaneously embody the viewpoints of each character thus offering a broader and more comprehensive understanding of how a story is interconnected. Tokarczuk writes "all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us." Like Tokarczuk, Kimmerly invites the viewer to experience a holistic “fourth-person” perspective when viewing these paintings. “Some quieter melody” is Kimmerly’s nod to the calming effect a fully-realized narrative can deliver. 

Life is a series of choices and accidents. Peering toward visual clues Kimmerly scatters throughout, and underneath the composition, he leaves the overpaint of abstractions to announce an impediment that both invites interpretation and seeks resolution. During a life well-lived, we each collect snapshots we store in our memory, composed of something akin to short, yet meaningful, episodes. Regardless of the source material, the viewer tells the story they see and feel, and thus, Kimmerly’s images convey something of the human experience as they promise reconciliation with the past. 

Ian Kimmerly’s “Some Quieter Melody” runs through September 26, 2026 at  Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco.

We often forget that the process is an important creative act. We hyperfocus on the final product, what it signifies or carries. The medium is simply a vessel to tell this story; to usher meaning and finality to any work of art. 

Acts of Making on view at Pamela Walsh Gallery in Palo Alto, CA, celebrates and asks us to bear witness the artwork’s gestation as much as the final product. Three guest artists accompany seven gallery artists in conversation about materiality and how the physicality of a work of art carries as much significance as its ephemeral vision. We are asked to pause, sit closely with each work, and celebrate its becoming.

Upon entering the warm and bright gallery space, the texture and depth of the two-dimensional artworks on view are apparent. There is a luscious quality to the work on view while simultaneously showcasing the artists’ manipulation of material, commitment to craft, and the art of making. 

For gallerist Pamela Walsh, it is important to bring together artists driven by experimentation and the physical act of making. Many of the artists in the exhibition use identical materials to achieve polar opposite results. Brought together, the seemingly opposite works of art complement and play off one another in the space. It is a joyful parade of artful making, pleasing to the eye and evoking a curious childlike wonder. The crux of the exhibition is a belief that creation, its laborious process, is inevitably tied to the finished work. 

Take Land&scape (V 4.0), oil on canvas, by Miguel Gelabert. From afar, the hushed tone of a horizon hangs in the background of the work. Upon closer inspection, the brushwork, a deliberate method of making a gestural stroke with every turn of the brush, creates a hazy, dreamy landscape. Gelabert pays homage to his coastal hometown, Blanes, Spain, crafting paintings that depict nature as an extension of the spiritual realm. The glow and hazy horizon are achieved through a beautiful, repetitive brushstroke, creating illusion and depth. An act of making as much as seeing, Gelabert’s wavy brushstrokes and disappearing horizon do not serve as a backdrop–instead, they are a meditation on our internal world–a place where memory, emotion, and perception emerge. 

Gustavo Ramos Rivera’s Pedazos de Cielo (Pieces of Heaven), oil on canvas, utilizes paint as a method for evoking memory and nostalgia. Ramos Rivera’s abstract works are deeply connected to his personal iconography of family, nature, and community from growing up in a small Mexican border town. The language he’s created, utilizing paint on canvas to create abstractions, is heavily influenced by his Mexican heritage and postwar abstraction.

Beyond oil on canvas, several artists on view manipulate material to showcase the depth of their process. Dying Light 15, 2024, a mixed-media work by Miles Bennett, showcases craft–the art of the loom–in full display. As if hung off the loom itself, the slacked thread holds exuberant color and depth. Never intended to be stretched, Bennett celebrates the material by displaying it softly against the wall, hanging gently so each thread woven creates an illusory tapestry of color and texture. Committed to exploring the intersection of gesture and the inherent properties of any given surface, the final product is the process.

Continuing this throughline, Raul de la Torre’s Of Such Frail Thoughts Its Thread Is Often Broken, 2020, acrylic and embroidery on canvas, deconstructs painting down to its core. By deconstructing the surface, he weaves embroidery through its center, adding depth and structure. The lines are blurred between painting and object, dismantling a traditional canvas and creating a surface for repair. Like Bennett, the process of making–from destruction to rebirth–is the root of the artwork’s ethos.

Pushing the boundaries of what paint can be is front and center for Australian artist Craig Waddell. Down the Way - Self Portrait, 2019, involves layer upon layer of paint. Thick, deep, guttural brushstrokes dominate the surface of the soft linen canvas. Waddell’s passion for the tangible characteristics of paint is on full display in Acts of Making , showcasing oil as a medium in and of itself: heavy, vibrant, and powerful. Although painting landscapes and flowers were not part of his practice for many years, since the passing of two dear friends, the depiction of flowers is heavily prevalent in his work, demonstrating a commitment to honoring those who have passed while serving as a memento mori for the living. 

Immediately to the left after entering the gallery, stands a small mixed-media work, Jubilee by Fresno-born and raised artist Fernando Reyes. The formation of paper cut-outs throughout the white canvas is a tribute to the methodical act of making art. As each cut-out is placed and adhered to the canvas, the work slowly becomes alive. Each fragment is a significant component of the overarching materiality of the final work. Reyes shows us that the act of making is an art form in and of itself; an often playful, bright, and expansive aspect of the creative process.

Each artwork on view ties together the sheer beauty and awe of the act of creation. As each artist experiments, manipulates, or interrupts the medium, a playful yet intentional message underlies each: the final artwork cannot be without the process. Therefore, the process of making is the truest form of artistic creation. Acts of Making reminds us to enjoy the physicality of the artwork as much as its meaning. 

Performance stills: Copyright © Dread Scott 2020, photographer: Soul Brother. The work on this page is not licenced by Creative Commons and may not be used without permssion.

White Male Running is part of a billboard project organized by Art At a Time Like This and Save Art Space

Dread Scott is a visual artist whose works is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this.

His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He was a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.

In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community-engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.

Artist Dread Scott, Interview By Hugh Leeman

Propelling History Forward

Hugh Leeman: Dread, in preparing for our interview today, I came across different instances where you said some version or another of "I make revolutionary art to propel history forward." After nearly four decades of making art, what does forward mean to you now, and how has your understanding of what art can actually propel changed?

Dread Scott: Well, that's a good question, and I'll say guilty as charged — that's been my tagline for a while. I do think it's really important to have a vision of a radically different future, and my work hopefully helps people envision that. The world as it is has a tiny handful of people that control the wealth and the knowledge that humanity as a whole has created. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's causing a tremendous amount of suffering. In short, capitalism is a nightmare, and America and its particular vision of it is causing tremendous horror. Right now we're seeing a war in Iran that the United States and Israel launched. We've seen a livestreamed genocide in Gaza that without U.S. backing wouldn't actually be happening. We've seen cuts to USAID that have led to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. And you could go on and on — and this is just very recent history in a country that was founded on slavery and genocide.

So looking at the United States and the world as it is — and knowing it doesn't have to be that way — I make art to help people confront the horrors that are at the root of this society, not just America, but America as a particular concentration of it, and then imagine how the world could be radically different and far better.

As for what art can do to propel history forward, I think that's a question a lot of people need to confront: both how history moves forward, and how art can play a role in that. For progressive or radical or revolutionary people, the world we have now is not the one that those of us who participated in Black Lives Matter, or in the "we are the ninety-nine percent" moment, were hoping and dreaming for. And certainly for those with roots going back to the sixties and seventies — the Black Panther Party, revolutionary organizations — this is not the world people were fighting for. There's a real question of whether you can get to a better world, a world without exploitation and without oppression. I think that's possible. I don't think we're at the end of history.

These are particularly tough times, particularly dark days, and it may get worse. But there hasn't been a period in history where artists haven't tried to stand for a better future and fought for it. In the midst of rising fascism, Picasso did Guernica in direct response to the fascist bombing of a civilian population. Billie Holiday did "Strange Fruit" in the midst of tremendous racial oppression, and it became a harbinger of the civil rights movement. Art at its best has heralded a future that's better for humanity — though not all art does that, and not all artists. And you have to get a little bit of synchronicity and luck for when your art can align with social movements that can actually change things. I don't think it's the art by itself that changes the world, but there also hasn't been any social movement of progress that I've known of that hasn't had art as a vital component of it.

The Questions Confronting Humanity

Hugh Leeman: You've said there are key questions you ask yourself about what is confronting humanity, and that this becomes a kind of guideline for what you create. What are those questions?

Dread Scott: One of them, which has been an arc of what I've done for a while and that I'm coming back to, is patriotism and nationalism. Those are increasingly coming to the fore. The question of who is and who isn't an American — the United States right now is waging a war, splitting up families, deporting people who have been productive members of society for decades. It's targeting ordinary people and driving a wedge between those it claims should be here and those who shouldn't. It's attacking LGBT people, with a special edge on attacking trans people, saying, "You're not really part of the body politic. You're not real Americans." So the question is: do you view America as basically a force for good, or as a historic problem? As I said, it's a country founded on slavery and genocide. The founding ideals and conception of this country are not something liberatory.

Now, many of my friends, my audience, my colleagues don't share the view that America is fundamentally the problem. A lot of people right now are trying to get Democrats elected, hoping that can stand up to the fascism Trump is consolidating, hoping for a return to some ideals — progressive liberal democracy or something. I think we should dream a lot bigger than that. If our dreams are rooted in founding documents written by enslavers and friends of enslavers, that's actually not that visionary. It's not that lofty. And if we're rooting for a society that at its base has capitalism — private ownership and accumulation of wealth determining what gets produced, not whether people need housing, clothing, medical treatment, or education, but profit — then I think people have to look beyond that to get to a society we actually want to live in.

A slightly different question from national identity is race, racism, and racial oppression, which has been a consistent thing I've looked at. You can't understand America without understanding race and racism, and you can't understand the modern world without it. The position of Black people in U.S. society, but also globally, raises huge questions. You can look at it through the prison system, through the police force, and through the amazing culture Black people have created. The culture that so many people appreciate — that I've benefited from tremendously and been part of — is Black culture. So looking through the lens of race, racism, and white supremacy, but also the tremendous culture that has been forged, is something my work looks at a lot.

And there are other foundational questions. As fascism gets consolidated, the position of women in society is increasingly to the fore. The U.S. government has made it very difficult for women in many states to have access to reproductive care. That's a huge question. I haven't addressed it a lot in my work, but it's something I think about, and I ask myself whether it's something I need to focus on more.

The Professional Troublemaker

Hugh Leeman: A thread that runs through so much of what you've done is summed up in a word — the troublemaker. You've joked that you're a professional troublemaker, that you get paid to be one. What's the value to society that comes from the troublemakers?

Dread Scott: If you have a society based on exploitation and oppression, it's good to have people trying to change that — to be fearless and courageous in standing up to it. There were court jesters who had the freedom to make fun of the king. This is somewhat apocryphal — I don't know the real history of court jesters in medieval European society — but the story is that if other people said what the jesters said, they might lose their heads, while the jester, if he played it correctly, could shine a light on society.

I also think people like Richard Pryor, or musicians like The Clash, cause trouble for oppressive ruling classes but are vital for people raising their heads and asking, "Do we have to continue to live like this?" The Clash and Public Enemy saved my life. I never met Joe Strummer. I was fortunate enough to meet Chuck D when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It wasn't the personal relationship that mattered — it was having musicians saying, "Look, you're not the one who's crazy. The society is messed up." That was really important to a young me.

It is largely young people who change the world. Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King were kids. Malcolm X was young when he was leading people into the streets to change systemic oppression that had been around for centuries. People thought that was crazy, but that vision enabled millions to stand up. Marx and Lenin were young when they changed the world. It's not that older people don't play a role — I've got gray hair, and I hope to contribute what I can — but historically it's young people who look at the world and say, "Things need to change. We do not want to inherit the world our forefathers gave us." And people who say that, at whatever age, cause trouble for those trying to maintain society the way it is.

Right now there's tremendous focus by the government on shutting down dissenting ideas, because they matter. There are pro-Palestinian students facing deportation, students who've been imprisoned. There's a Latino immigrant who did absolutely nothing wrong and ended up in prison in El Salvador, and said, "I've done nothing wrong. I've appeared in your immigration courts." He sued the government — Kilmar Ábrego García — and the government kept coming after him, because it was making trouble for them to enforce a program that has some support but that a lot of people are upset by. It's why in Minneapolis people stood up. When ICE was going into Minneapolis, they didn't back down voluntarily — they backed down because people stood up. That was a lot of trouble for the government, but it's the kind of trouble that inspires other people to stand up and say, "We don't want to live in a society where people have guns pointed at them in their cars for asking to see a warrant." That's the kind of trouble that's needed when a society is moving in an authoritarian and fascist direction.

More Aspirational Ways of Being

Hugh Leeman: You compare the artist to the court jester — presenting new ways of being that are more aspirational than simply getting some Democrats elected. What are some of those other ways of being, as you see them?

Dread Scott: I look at a world where there's tremendous wealth and an opportunity for everybody to have a decent life — relative freedom of movement, health care, shelter, clothing, food. And the thing standing in the way of it is capitalism. Something as simple as insulin doesn't get to people, not because drug companies can't produce it cheaply, but because it's profitable to keep the prices high. America spends more per capita on health care than any country in the world, yet the health outcomes are worse. That points to a profit motive baked into the way the American system delivers health care. Everybody knows that's not a good thing, except the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, and some of the politicians.

You could provide health care for people. You could provide food. There's food left to rot because it's not profitable for the growers to get it to people. It's actually profitable to have the corn rot in the fields — and that's criminal. There are people who are homeless while buildings sit vacant, and more affordable homes could be built but aren't. I don't think it would be easy, but it would be very possible. England has been a capitalist society for several hundred years, but seventy years ago they created the National Health Service, which meant that if you got sick, rich or poor, you could see a doctor. That doesn't happen here.

There are people who have literally walked to the United States from Honduras. They work hard, they contribute to their families and to society. They build the buildings we're in, they cut the lawns, they cook our food, they bus our tables. And they're under threat just because they crossed a line drawn in the sand. That's nuts. The aspiration is a society where everybody could contribute what they can and take what they need. That would be a wonderful society to live in — one increasingly working to overcome the differences between mental and manual labor.

Humanity has reached a point where a lot of the ways we're living are outmoded and obsolete. Wars are being fought over strips of land — and it's not just the U.S. Russia is bombing Ukraine, Israel is attacking Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, and you can look at Congo or Sudan. It's so that small groupings of people can control wealth and knowledge that humanity as a whole created, and it's causing tremendous suffering. We could get to a world where humanity is caretaker of the planet. The first couple hundred years of industrialism damaged the planet, and now we're facing a tremendous ecological crisis. How do we collectively solve that — in a way that overcomes the differences between societies, rather than telling people in the Maldives or the Amazon that they're just going to have to suffer? The people in Brazil and Peru didn't cause the problem, but they're suffering directly from it. How do we say, "We all live on earth, and we're responsible as sentient beings for making the planet better," including for the other species affected by our decisions?

What Is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag?

Hugh Leeman: You've tapped into the contentious nature of this moment in one of your most controversial works, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, where the audience didn't just observe the work — they had to negotiate an American flag laid on the ground, stepping on it or around it, and there was a book where people could write their response. When you go back and look at those responses, do you see them as documentation of the artwork, as a separate collective work, or as an archive of how Americans understood patriotism at a particular historical moment?

Dread Scott: It's kind of the latter, but also something slightly different. That work is an installation for audience participation, and the audience is actually part of the medium — part of the artwork. The responses people have, both physical and written, are part of the work, so the audience that came before is part of the artwork for the people who come after. It is a window into what people think of the United States at the particular moments when it's been shown. The work was made in 1988 and became the center of controversy in 1989, with exhibitions around 1989 and 1990. It's a window into what people thought of the United States, of patriotism, and of conceptual art made by an unknown art student.

But it's more than a window. The work gives ordinary people — whose ideas about the United States are normally written out of the conversation — a place to speak. At the time I made it, there was a lot of talk about patriotism; George Bush was literally campaigning in flag factories. People were starting to wear flag pins. But the people in the housing projects, the ghettos, and the barrios didn't have their views made part of the evening news. In What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, you had all sorts of people — including those who felt victimized by the United States, as well as visitors and immigrants — able to talk about it.

For example, one woman wrote, "I'm a German girl. If we Germans carried on about our flag the way you all do, we'd be called Nazis again. I think you make too much trouble about your flag." That's an insightful comment from someone looking at the United States from the outside. Or someone from the housing projects who wrote that the police shot their brother and then kicked over his body to make sure he was dead, and said, "Thank you, Dread Scott, for this opportunity" — that the U.S. flag stands for oppression, and that the cop wore a flag patch on his arm. Those voices — people who are the victims of American policy — don't often have the freedom to talk about patriotism the way George Bush did. This work put those voices forward. Not my voice, but the voices of all sorts of ordinary people — including people who wrote that I should be killed and that my family should be made to pay for the bullets. There were very proud, patriotic Navy SEALs who literally threatened my life. These books talk about all of that. The work is a record, and I'm glad it exists — but it's also a living, breathing, functioning artwork that, when it's shown again, has some of the same force it had when it was first made.

Courage, Luck, and the Boundary of What's Necessary

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the threats to your life. In a widely circulated TED Talk you gave years after the piece, you spoke about courage, luck, vision, and the boldness of action — describing how you continued with a photo shoot while people protested outside and threats were being made against your life. How has your calculation of that boundary of what's necessary changed from that young artist to today?

Dread Scott: First off, I'm still trying not to be a martyr. I don't want to get killed for my art, and so far so good. But the important thing is that there's a lot of untimely death in this society — some of it for people's views, but a lot of it just because this society is unjust. Look at the Sean Bells, the Trayvon Martins, the George Floyds of the world — people going about their business whom the police killed. Look at people who are victims of someone who can get a gun and walk into a school or a house of worship. Look at people who die because they can't get access to health care, food, or shelter — immigrants who died not because they were deported by ICE, but because they were left out in subzero temperatures in summer clothing. This is an unjust society that causes tremendous suffering.

I look at it as vitally important for those of us with relative freedom. I was a middle-class kid; I got trained as a middle-class person. I know how to read books and think about the world, and as an artist I have the relative luxury to read, look at movies, listen to music, think, and make art about it — and to have a disproportionate effect on society. So if you recognize that the world is unjust and you have this relative freedom that most people in the world don't have, do you stand by and say, "Isn't it cool that I have the freedom to make art — maybe I can make enough for a nice car"? Or do you say, "It's an accident of history that I am who I am, and I'm going to use my work to help people change the world"? I've chosen the latter.

But if you criticize the United States in a way that becomes threatening to it, this country reacts with violence. Look at how it attacked the Black Panther Party. Look at how certain artists were hounded — not necessarily directly killed by the government, but their lives made very difficult. Or something not as innocent as how Basquiat was treated, where people around him thought it was great to have this young Black dreadlocked genius and kept giving him drugs even as he was falling apart, because they could keep making a profit. The government didn't directly kill him, but the logic of the art world snuffed out a brilliant artist far too young.

So I have to speak truth to power as best I can and, hopefully, keep my courage when threats come. When I made A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday and it was shown at Jack Shainman Gallery, the gallery and I received threats. Other works have brought threats too. I keep saying, "I stand by the work" — but getting galleries and museums to also stand by the work is a challenge. Coming back to What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, I think that work is profoundly relevant right now, but it hasn't been shown in the United States for about twenty years. I've tried — including with museums that own my work — and we haven't been able to find a place willing to do it. Honestly, any institution that did would quite correctly understand that this president would probably be criticizing them and calling for them to be defunded, and there would be people who'd try to harm the museum, including the docents, security staff, and curators. So it's not a light decision. It's not just me saying, "I'm willing to stand for my work, come what may." I need sections of the art world willing to take those risks too — and sometimes they're even more on the front lines than I am, because the people sitting in the gallery are the easy targets while I might be in another city. It requires conversations with a range of people to have this work out there. But I think it's vitally important to society.

Room to Dissent: A Question for Younger Artists

Hugh Leeman: You've talked about censorship and the threats around this work — financial and physical — and about the historical importance of young people in movements. Do you think younger artists today have enough economic and institutional space to dissent genuinely, or has professionalization made it harder to take the kinds of risks your generation could take?

Dread Scott: Every generation finds a way to rebel, to speak out, to dissent. It's certainly more economically challenging to make art now than when I was in my twenties and thirties — but when I was in my twenties and thirties, it was harder than for the generation before. There are interviews with Richard Serra where he talks about living in a loft in SoHo, walking out one day, seeing a ton of used tires, and hauling them up — a year's worth of art-making materials. That New York doesn't exist; it didn't even exist when I moved here in 1992. You hear about how Warhol and Basquiat lived — that wasn't there when I arrived. There was a certain freedom people had. But let's not be overly romantic about it. You read Baldwin, and he talks about being really poor while doing some of his best writing.

A lot of young people in New York are probably living with three, four, five other people — in Williamsburg, Bushwick, the Bronx, Washington Heights — and working forty or fifty hours a week, which doesn't leave a lot of time to make art. But they'll figure it out. The bigger question for young people, whether they're visual artists or musicians or poets or theater makers, is: where do you stand? Do you plant your feet among the people and figure out how to make art that speaks to these times? Can you do it powerfully? And can you get lucky enough to reach an audience? You have to make good art, but then you also need a little luck. When What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? was made, it was always a really good work, but it required a specific alignment of the stars to become the national touchstone it became.

There are young people making really interesting work, but I'm old — I don't know them that well. There are young rock and rebel musicians doing interesting things, but there isn't the cultural zeitgeist there once was — no Jimi Hendrix or counterculture, no Public Enemy, no intellectual avant-garde like the one that gave rise to the Constructivists or the Mexican muralists. I don't see that right now. But that just means the twenty-five-year-old who's going to change the world hasn't changed it yet. This system is creating people who are making interesting work about these times, and they're not people with gray hair like me. I haven't given up — I'm going to do everything I can — but there are young people doing kick-ass stuff, and I just don't know yet what it is, because it hasn't become the thing.

Being a Father, and the Urgency of the Work

Hugh Leeman: You're at a transformational stage in your own career. In a 2016 video discussing police killings, you said, "I have a son and I fear for him," and made clear the concern extended beyond your own family. How has being a father affected your sense of what is urgent in your work, and the kind of future you want art to help make possible?

Dread Scott: Being a dad is a much more direct connection to trying to make a different and better world. You see through a different lens the world you're leaving to younger people. When the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown killings happened, and there were potential trials for the murderers, I had to sit with my kid and say that I both couldn't tell him how to survive an encounter with the police and couldn't promise there would be justice if he were killed. That was very painful. In the midst of that, Bruce Springsteen came out with "American Skin (41 Shots)." It was painful to feel something of the horror that Mamie Till, Emmett Till's mother, felt knowing her child was going to the South before he was lynched — knowing your kid is going to an area where they do not value Black life, that he could be lynched, and that the horrors I knew about America could be visited on my child. You have to admit you can't protect your kid. And that's very hard.

There are people all over the world who've feared for their children throughout millennia — disease, hunger, war. We're not special in that. But where preventable death isn't common anymore, having the state be responsible for hunting people with Black skin is really tough. It creates more urgency for making art and contributing to political movements that make a better world. There was a real desire to look more directly at the horror that is America and help other people understand it — and understand that the world hasn't always been this way and doesn't have to remain this way forever. That kind of change in history sometimes takes perspective, stepping back.

Being a father, I've also learned from seeing the world through my kid's eyes. My kid graduated from college right during COVID and was entering a workforce where nobody was getting a job — where the few people working were "essential workers," basically people who weren't wealthy enough to avoid high-risk employment. My kid was initially working in a grocery store with a lot of exposure. I've seen how their generation looks at questions of gender differently than when I was growing up. And I've learned from how younger people look at the activism my generation did. A popular refrain among younger activists is thinking about self-care. I think that can sometimes go a bit overboard, but older people can learn a lot from younger people saying, "You guys got burned out, and it became a toxic environment because everything was all-on, everything was the most important thing in the world, and you didn't take care of your emotional and physical needs." Some younger people, including my kid, recoiled from that even as they were dedicated activists during Black Lives Matter — not wanting to repeat the mistakes they thought my generation made.

Defending the Flag: The New Work at YBCA

Hugh Leeman: You've got a show coming up in San Francisco, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — The Body Politic — and they've commissioned a couple of works. What are the new works, and in particular, tell me about Defending the Flag.

Dread Scott: Defending the Flag is one of the main pieces. It's not the first time I've returned to U.S. patriotism and the flag, but it's the most significant return to that question since What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? When I made that earlier work, I thought I basically got the question right and didn't need to come back to it. And yet, both what's going on in the world and how I'm looking at it now make me want to return to this question more directly.

Defending the Flag is a performance piece with a U.S. flag on a pole, guarded by a person dressed in military uniform holding a replica of an M4 carbine — the standard-issue rifle the U.S. military uses. It will be a prop weapon, but it will look very much like the real thing. If an audience member gets too close to the flag, the guard will assertively take control of the situation and tell them they need to step back, that they're defending the flag. It'll be a jarring experience, because when you go to an art gallery you're not used to seeing soldiers, and you're not used to them interacting with you. You might see a docent, who's supposed to be quiet — this is the opposite of that. There's an element of violence in it. Even though we absolutely know neither the performer nor the audience will resort to violence and no one will be harmed, it's a meditation on what patriotism is and how people look at the flag, the state, and the government. At the end of each performance — it'll probably be performed twice a week during the run — the flag will be ceremonially folded and placed inside a safe in the gallery.

Part of the motivation is that when What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? was the center of controversy, a lot of veterans claimed they had special access to patriotism and to the flag — that their forefathers had died for the flag — and they were, in effect, defending it in trying to suppress my artwork. So I figured, let's literally physicalize the absurdity of defending the flag: not talking about the rights or the society we'd want, but the absurdity of mounting a military defense of the U.S. flag. I'm taking that experience from almost forty years ago and addressing it directly.

That's not the only work in the exhibition. There's another new commission called Life, Death, America, a set of body prints — about twenty-eight to thirty of them, the way David Hammons did body prints — assembled into a big mural that'll be fifteen feet by thirty-six feet. Each person is individually printed and then assembled into the mural: people of different ethnicities, nationalities, sizes, genders, and ages. Some look very small because they're young; some look much bigger because they're old. Some are in suits, some look like artists, some like athletes. It's a diverse cross-section of society that lives in the United States and has ties to places around the world — some of the people are Iranian, some are Palestinian. Because of the printing technique — a residue of the person on canvas, coated with powdered graphite — everybody becomes a similar tonality. If somebody has dreadlocks, those remain as cultural signifiers, but all of our skin pigmentation becomes black or dark gray. So the piece reduces our differences even as those differences remain visible for the observer.

I'm making it at a time when the background of so much conversation is death — the million-plus people who died of COVID in the United States, people worried about being killed in a mass shooting, people with family in Palestine, people from Iran facing a U.S. war, people worried about family separations in a way that almost feels like death because they may never see their loved ones again. Death is the background of what a lot of this work is about. Because of the technique, the figures have an ethereal, almost ghostly quality. So the work shows both the strength and vibrancy of a diverse, complicated, nuanced society, and the fact that people are thinking about death.

Hugh Leeman: Dread Scott, thank you so much for making time to share these ideas.

Dread Scott: I hope you got something usable. As I said, I do tend to talk in paragraphs — you may have to cut this down. But I hope you enjoyed the conversation, and I hope we talked enough about the art, and not just the politics, to get something interesting.

Entering Birdcage Cafe, you are met with a flourish of emotive works by Jiayue Li. They appear almost immediately among the warm light, small tables, plants, trinkets, vinyls and everyday movement of the café. Hung at different intervals and scales, the works do not command the space so much as inhabit it. Li’s figures, gather, read, stare outward, and fold into one another, their expressions moving between introspection, amusement, melancholy, and something harder to place. There is a quiet familiarity to them. Without the physical and psychological distance of a conventional gallery, they begin to feel less like figures placed on display and more like people already present: friends at another table, someone half-listening to a conversation, or even fragmented reflections of oneself. The intimacy of Birdcage seems particularly suited to Li’s world, allowing its surreal distortions to feel strangely grounding.

Born and raised in Chengdu, China, Li began drawing at the age of six, encouraged by an early art teacher who took her students into fields, villages, and parks to draw from life. She later studied at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai before completing an MFA in Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, developing a practice that moves between art, illustration, and design. Her work has frequently been described as dreamlike and surreal, qualities immediately recognizable here in the repeated faces, disembodied heads, shifts in scale, and unique relationships between figures and objects. Yet there is a precision beneath the strangeness. Working in mediums including colored pencil and oil paint, Li’s practice has explored womanhood, identity, and emotion, while her softness of line and palette allows otherwise ordinary moments to slip gently away from reality without ever becoming entirely unfamiliar.

Carousel makes Li’s interest in multiplicity clear. A procession of female heads replaces the horses of the familiar amusement ride, each similar enough to suggest the same person yet subtly altered in expression, orientation, and mood. Li has described these faces as representing different sides of being a woman, but the repetition also captures something more universal: the many versions of ourselves that coexist, contradict, and continually circle back upon one another. This becomes more intimate in Alter Ego, where three closely related figures press into the same small frame. Whether companions or versions of the same person, their closeness blurs the distinction between them. Together, the works suggest that identity for Li is neither singular nor fixed, but something continually negotiated between who we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, and the versions of ourselves that others encounter.

Midnight Reading draws Li’s surreal world back toward something quieter and immediately relatable. A woman lies immersed in a book while a cat rests across her body, its weight and warmth almost tangible despite the exaggerated proportions within the piece. Her elongated legs extend beyond the frame, but the mild distortion feels less important than the intimacy of being awake with a book and an animal while the rest of the world sleeps. Seen within Birdcage, that familiarity becomes even more pronounced. The work feels less like a scene being observed than a private moment one might recognize from one’s own life, reinforcing how easily Li’s figures slip between imagined characters and reflections of ourselves.

Recollection II turns memory itself into a collection of fragments. Scattered across the page are planets, a key, fruit, beads, a feather, a pair of lips, an eye, and other small forms, seemingly unrelated objects given equal weight by the simple act of remembering them. Memory rarely preserves a complete picture; instead, it holds onto random details while allowing others to disappear. That same logic seems to inhabit At Dusk, where two figures overlap so closely that their bodies and faces almost begin to merge, as though one person is being remembered through another. Together, the works suggest recollection not as an accurate return to what happened, but as something continually reconstructed, where people, objects, and emotions become entangled with the way we remember them.

Perhaps what makes Li’s work feel particularly at home at Birdcage is that it is allowed to exist alongside life rather than apart from it. Over breakfast or coffee, her figures become strangely companionable, like friends pulled into conversations dissecting the night before: a date, too many drinks, something said, something regretted, something still being worked out. There is humor, melancholy, and self-consciousness in these women, but also enough ambiguity to recognize something of ourselves in them. Li’s surrealism does not remove us from the everyday; it bends the everyday just enough to reveal how strange our inner lives already are. At Birdcage, surrounded by conversation, companionship, and the movement of people coming and going, that distance narrows further. Her figures are not simply being looked at. For a little while, they seem to be sitting among us.

Jiayue Li’s exhibition at Birdcage Cafe remains on view through September 30.