Medieval and pre-Renaissance Christian paintings, as one observes in artistic representations of humans looking upward and terrified at an omnipotent deity, had a simple message. Humans are plagued by a cosmos that exceeds comprehension. The cycle of birth and death can only be overcome by an orientation to eternity that requires denouncing the world, disciplining the body, and preparing oneself for life after death. Earthly gardens only promised momentary nourishment and reprieve. To the idyllic Garden of Eden, there is no return. As a theme in Western art, gardens flag something we have lost but also aristocratic power, royal hegemony, and leisure: an attempt to overcome alienation.

Thomas Murray’s exhibit “This is Our Garden” consists of twenty-one oil paintings. His work touches on many classical themes in the history of Western art. There is a peculiar gravitas to Murray’s paintings. The title of the exhibit is an invitation to the viewer and visitor to enter the realm of fantasy, one unmediated by techno gadgets that promise freedom but entrap us in endless cycles of passwords, confirmation codes, and dual authentication. Via art, take a moment to breathe and enter paradise, Murray seems to be saying. Lush life and bodies are on display. The facial expressions on the human figures are pensive and serene. The faces are seductive, sensual and welcoming. But also uncanny, haunting, and mysterious.

In aggregate, Murray’s work positions itself in relation to narratives of birth, beginnings, flux, death and innocence. Themes prominent in Christian and Renaissance art. Shame and guilt do not haunt Murray’s work, though. In many of the paintings, human bodies (female, male, non-binary) are unclothed, exposed, and naked. The images, but also the titles of his works, illustrate the connection to a broader classical tradition of fine art: “Adam”; “Prince”; “Eve”; “Thinker”; “Trinity”; “Sentinel”; and “Witness.”

In terms of the influences of other artists streaming through his work, one can detect the subtle presence of Albrecht Dürer (“Adam and Eve”), Titian (“Venus of Urbino”), and Henri Rousseau(“The Dream”). Murray extends the powerful theatricality of their paintings into the contemporary moment.

Tibetan, Florentine and Persian design thematics are evident in many of Murray’s pieces. There is an ambience, a peculiar atmosphere and weightlessness in his paintings, magically surreal.Murray’s technical mastery is evident in all the paintings on display, but thematic content takes precedence over observable brush strokes. The edges of some of the art pieces nonetheless bare the trace of the human hand and fingers holding a paint brush.

Murray’s paintings are influenced by Christian themes. But he is an artist beyond good and evil via the transformation of Christian iconography. His invitation to reclaim “our” garden indicates as much. Our garden is one without Christ, guilt, shame, piety, discipline, and self-denial. Murray depicts “our” garden that welcomes everybody and flags shared humanity, not my garden surrounded by a gate, cameras and attack dogs. Gardens and earthly life are eternal, Murray seems to be saying. In a strange but obvious way, humans are also gardens.

Murray is not an academic artist. He is not in search of disciples and followers who will imitate the master. Traces of authority in his pieces are undermined. Aesthetically, Murray dwells in a world that is open and inviting to everybody. A world that calls into question the aesthetic impoverishment of commodity culture, Christian asceticism and rigid definitions of art in institutions of higher learning. Murray’s “This is Our Garden” is an aesthetic representation of redemption and sharing in the age of popular interest in sasquatch, backyard cage fighting, Joey Chestnut hot dog gluttony events, monster truck rallies and wrestling matches. In this sense, Atlantic City is somehow an ideal location for this exhibit. 

Sometimes Murray takes his aesthetic message and artistic prowess to inmates at South Woods State Prison in Millville, New Jersey, where he frequently teaches. South Woods is not a garden but a 1.3 million square foot correctional complex. Murray’s work with inmates implies that they are invited into our garden. Murray also teaches art at Rowan University. Through art, Murray asks what is our relationship to nature and ourselves? “This is Our Garden” is also a way of asking “what and where is our garden”?

Thomas Murray lives in Glassboro, New Jersey, with his partner, Donna Sweigart, professor of art and design, and their son, Truxton Donnally Murray.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, educator and curator whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures draw the minimalist grid into the register of domestic and handmade labor. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art and Senior Chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1996, with additional appointments at Yale, Cranbrook, Bard's Milton Avery Graduate School, UW–Madison, and Skowhegan. In 2014 she became the first practicing artist selected to co-curate the Whitney Biennial, and served as inaugural artistic director of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in 2018; she also curated the 2016 Portland Biennial. With artist Brad Killam she founded and co-directs the nonprofit spaces The Suburban and The Poor Farm. Her work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, MUDAM Luxembourg, Daimler Contemporary Berlin, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, with museum surveys at MOCA Cleveland and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, she was elected a National Academician in 2019.

Artist, Curator, Educator | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Mr. Perez and the Switchboard in the Utility Closet

Hugh Leeman: Michelle, I want to start with Mr. Perez, your high school art teacher. Who was he, and can you tell the story of how he impacted your life?

Michelle Grabner: Sure. We'd have to go back to the late seventies, Appleton, Wisconsin — Appleton East. Just a little note: I don't think he makes a big deal about it, but Willem Dafoe also went to that high school. We didn't overlap, he was a little older.

As a high school student, I hung out in the art room. There are a lot of students who find their way into learning, into understanding the world, into thinking about how to be social, through the art world. I was also just upstairs from the band room, where I hung out as well.

Mr. Perez taught painting and drawing. I remember he put me in a utility closet and had me paint the switchboard — the electrical switchboard — hard-edge. That made sense in the eighties. I think about that now: it's a little poppy in its feeling, a little industrial. It was clean, it was flat, it was graphic.

He also taught us about history. When I was in high school, I was naive enough to think Perez was French, because I thought all artists came from Paris at some point. He corrected me on that.

But he said something that was important. He had a daughter a little older than I was, who went down to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where I ended up. He said, they have a good art program there, you should think about it. And he was very pragmatic and said, you can teach high school art as well. That was a way of thinking about an art career. It never occurred to me. It never would have occurred to my family that that would be a place I landed. But in his ability to see that this was a place I wanted to be, a place I wanted to live — my body understood the work I was doing, and it would give me a lifetime of joy — he pointed me in that direction.

Repetition, Constraint, and the Overproduction Critique

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the hard edges of what he had you painting. I want to go to your own practice. In your early works, there's domestic pattern painting, and you've said there's a capturing of routine and orderliness — not simply domestic or middle-class signifiers. How has your relationship to order changed as your work moved from painted patterns and gingham into public sculpture and large-scale everyday objects?

Michelle Grabner: That's a super big question. I'll start with process, repetition, and the attention that repetition requires.

Repetition is important in terms of how I think, and come to learn and know the world. But my ability to log in that hard work in the studio — the tedious reproducing of images, whether that's copying, or making dot after dot, grid after grid — really has changed.

As you know, I have three kids. The first was born in '87, and Seal, my youngest, was born in '02. So we've had a household of children for a long span of time, and they require attention. The household requires attention. That was really quite wonderful, because I had to work within — I'm going to call them constraints, but they were joyful constraints — serving and helping the family structure, the needs of children at different developmental stages, while at the same time finding tracts of time to do my own work.

Just recently, my daughter went off to college. And while my husband, God bless him, has profound emotional loss and gets weepy all the time, I'm almost responding in a pathological way to this openness of time. I don't need to be there. She's in college. She comes home during winter and summer. But I'm really grappling with an excessive amount of time that was given over for decades to helping my children.

So you're catching me at a kind of frantic time in my overall practice — not only continuing the work I do, thinking about process and repetition in form and image, but also at a time when I've been making a lot of sculptural work. Different processes, different techniques, a different relationship to making, because I can spend time in different studios to make that work.

And as you know, I've been a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute since 1996. I started out part-time doing grad advising; that turned into a full-time job, which turned into chair of the painting and drawing department. Being at an institution that long does offer you some privileges. When we started out as a young little family, buying a home in Milwaukee for twenty-seven thousand dollars — as economies change, household economies change, and a relationship to those ideas about the domestic changes as well.

Hugh Leeman: That word "constraints" is interesting — constraints often get associated with creativity. When you have no constraints, infinite openness becomes an impediment in itself. Now that those constraints of mothering aren't there, how are you dealing with it?

Michelle Grabner: Sometimes I worry about myself. It's become a little pathological in the amount of production. So I've been shifting my thinking to: what does it mean to be somebody who overproduces? Almost as a critical platform.

I think about it two ways. One, that the overproduction of work is actually critical within the art world, and particularly its marketplace. There's no rarity to my work. That's really important. The idea of repetition — a kind of sameness. Yes, there are slight material differences, but for the most part, again and again and again, being pulled and curious about those minute shifts from one red gingham painting to another. That compels me. But it's also a really interesting and strangely profound critique of rarity within the art world, and how we put value around that which is unique. That's really interesting to me to think about, particularly right now.

The other goes back to attention — my own need to set up a different kind of discipline with this richness of time, cut loose from those typical household experiences. Those two things are haunting me right now. Are either of them true? Are they both true simultaneously? Probably. And there are probably other conditions going on.

Then there's education, right? Being involved in education, thinking about those shifts on all kinds of levels — whether it's a governmental push to undercut education, or how does the art school survive now. Does it take up more of my time? Not so much, but it's fascinating to think about. And I'd like to think about it with the same imagination and possibility — being curious, trying something that maybe will fail — as opposed to being on your back heel all the time. That's how I feel our school, as well as many other schools, is just kind of pivoting to these outside forces. That lack of power is problematic, and it does take up some of my headspace.

The Layer Cake: Curating the Whitney Biennial

Hugh Leeman: I'd like to focus on your curatorial practice. As a curator for the Whitney Biennial, you said in the exhibition catalog that you wanted artists to speak with other people rather than have critics explain from the outside. What was the inspiration?

Michelle Grabner: The 2014 Whitney Biennial was the last biennial in the Breuer Building before it moved to the Piano Building downtown in the Meatpacking District. It was co-curated, but Donna De Salvo called it a layer cake — everybody got a floor. That's very different from past biennials, or biennials since, where there may be multiple curators but it's really hard to get a sense of who's selecting whom. We drew straws and we all got a floor. If you went up to the fourth floor, you knew that work was my selection. The third floor was Stuart Comer, and Anthony Elms was responsible for the second floor. So it was made very clear what kind of ideas, what kind of selection process, each curator was engaged in.

For the catalog, I asked each living artist I included to have a conversation with somebody else. In some cases it was their wife or their partner. In some cases it was a reverend, a person of spiritual capacity. Sometimes it was a fictional person — there was an artist who talked to somebody who was a made-up name.

That was important in terms of breaking away from curatorial authority. I did not have to be the person who teased out not only the meaning of the work, but the arc of an artist's thinking. I did that by selection — and selection is always the hardest part of curating for me — and by a loose organization of the layout of the fourth floor. I really wanted artists to contextualize themselves. They have their own interests. They want to have conversations not just with curators, not just with art critics, not just with art historians, but with other people, other disciplines, other ways of being in the world.

And this is important: biennials, or any group show — even monographic shows, even survey shows — they are not the truth of a full artist's work. They can never present that truth. So if I can empower artists to have a conversation with somebody, maybe we're getting at a truth we wouldn't typically get at in a catalog essay written by an expert or the curator.

Disappointment and What Institutions Forget

Hugh Leeman: There's something intimate about that, which pulls away from commodification. You've said artists are disappointed all the time, and the curator should be more transparent with them. What would a kinder curatorial process look like?

Michelle Grabner: I did say that artists are often disappointed, though the disappointment may not be directed at the curator — I have had loads of disappointment directed at me. We participate in these big public-facing exhibitions as artists, and we have an expectation of a kind of success that has been waning with the biennial, particularly the Whitney Biennial these days. But I also think we're disappointed that it doesn't yield that fullness — the fullness of artists within their making or within their ideas. A group show cannot yield that fullness when you're represented by one or five pieces. That's a tiny sliver of what somebody was thinking about.

What I really regret about the biennial is simply that I didn't have more conversations with the artists about what their expectations were. Not that I could change those expectations, but to hear them, to understand the context. They may have been highly personal. Artists later in their career really wanted this opportunity to yield a different kind of success than just being included. Helping them understand some of the limits of what the 2014 biennial at that point in culture could actually offer.

And then to do some follow-up. Actually have a debrief with the artists. There's a lot of upfront work — everybody who does curatorial work knows that. Both the compensation and the amount of work mean you do it, but it doesn't allow for these other conversations. In my case, once I was done, I just needed a big breath, and I moved on to another project. I didn't do the follow-up. I'm in touch with a lot of artists I included — we've become really good friends, or they were friends going in — but I will argue that institutions should start building conversations with artists as soon as the work comes down, a year after the work comes down.

The Whitney Museum of American Art — the work I did for them, I would do all over again, because I learned so much and I hope artists learned as much. But I still have to pay for annual membership. They've forgotten I was even there in 2015. So let alone how they forget the artists who participated in those exhibitions. It's not only a problem with curators. It's a problem with institutions.

The Churn: Why the Biennial's Pull Is Waning

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the waning interest in the Whitney Biennial. What do you make of that?

Michelle Grabner: That's the art market and how institutions are intertwined with the marketplace. There's a need for the new. The market always needs new material, so it churns quickly.

Exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial depend heavily on galleries to help support framing or production, because the budget for the biennial is relatively small compared to other exhibitions they mount — and this is the case with most major biennials or group exhibitions. So there's a dependency on the market to support that artist if they have representation. That entanglement allows for this churn.

There are also conversations within the institution, to be perfectly frank. We had some of those in 2014 about how do we think about America, the Americas, the United States? How do we think about artists who are no longer with us? How do we think about younger artists? Since 2014, the biennial, with a few exceptions, has really pivoted to younger artists, with a couple of well-respected or overlooked artists — again, who are no longer with us or have had a lifelong practice — but that's getting farther and farther aside. The institution is letting the curator be responsive to the culture at hand. But we've been so frothy lately within the marketplace — it's coming to a bit of a halt now, but the frothiness of recent years really led to that quick turnover, that burnout.

Can I tell you one thing I really love? It was kind of the only public piece in the 2014 biennial — a commission by Tony Tasset, a Chicago-based artist. It's basically multicolored panels with lists and lists of names etched in them — maybe five thousand names of artists, many who had been in the biennial, many who'd had studio visits by biennial curators, many twentieth-century artists. He called it Monument to Artists, because he was acknowledging that hardworking artists do not always land in those exhibitions. He was trying to honor them in a kind of memorial. And paradoxically, he installed it right along the Hudson River in Chelsea — far away from the Breuer Building on the Upper East Side. It was a funny place to drag that conversation, that critique, into the project. That was really meaningful to me, because it did speak to the question you're asking.

FRONT, Cleveland, and the Regional Triennial Problem

Hugh Leeman: You recently published an article in Artforum where you noted your work on FRONT, the Cleveland Triennial. You wrote: "My work on FRONT taught me that for regional triennials to succeed, they must unambiguously reflect, represent, and elevate the self-image of local and regional communities, as well as partnering institutions that support those communities." You go on to note that triennials tend to buckle financially when they don't follow this. So what incentivizes the curatorial reach to not follow the model of representing local communities?

Michelle Grabner: That would be a conversation broader than the hyperlocal. Those conversations are the thing that may connect artists from a different location in the world to Cleveland, or to Milwaukee. Those ideas may be abstract. They may be about ideas of power.

I'm a big fan of the comparative. Putting an artist whose work deals profoundly with figuration and the identity of that subject next to somebody doing that locally — juxtaposing those two works — one starts learning a lot about the subtleties of difference, of place, and of artists. We can think about artistic style and how that shifts, or artistic language and how that shifts. To be comparative is really important.

I get frustrated with that first resentment — that they are not in — as opposed to: what am I going to learn from this work that's coming to my city? Where does it overlap? Where is that difference? Using comparative structures to analyze one's own practice as well as the work coming in. I'm a big believer in those big ideas. That's why I'm attached to art, art-making, artists, and its history — those bigger ideas, and seeing them shift, change, mutate, seeing vocabularies be responsive to that artistic imagination.

But it's exhausting. I was just talking to a friend, a former student, who last year started a biennial in Wisconsin. The first flush of the local audience was: who are you including, and why isn't it more of us? That's disparaging, because there's something to be learned. And it suggests something really important — that the audience, the artists in these regional places, including myself, believe that inclusion in an exhibition like this is a credential. As opposed to some comparative learning going on, to understand a value system, a vocabulary that's in my studio, and have that reflected or sorted out with the work coming in.

I really believe what I said in that Artforum piece. Though as an aside — the most generous and lovely individual who started FRONT International, Fred Bidwell, probably challenges me a little on that. We did represent Cleveland artists, Cleveland-area artists, Midwestern artists. This assessment wasn't new to me. But frustratingly enough, it still wasn't enough. It wasn't that we turned our back on local and regional production — that was threaded in. But it wasn't the premier pillar of the exhibition.

The Unromantic Truth: Jobs, Debt, and Studio Life

Hugh Leeman: I want to go back to being on the back heel. Art education is something you've dedicated decades to. You've spoken practically about jobs, insurance, family, studio life, and you tell your students that having a job doesn't weaken their art practice. When you talk about the less-than-romantic parts of the art world — and we could add incredible student loan debt — how do those conversations go?

Michelle Grabner: With our graduate cohort in painting and drawing, we take the second-years — those about to graduate — on a professional practice retreat. We go to Ox-Bow, an exceptional residency school in Michigan. We take the bus there, we're all staying together in the beautiful wilds along Lake Michigan, and we have people pop in, mostly via Zoom. Sometimes it's a terrific tax person who tells you how to manage your taxes and what's deductible — that's so pragmatic and important. We have collectors talk about what they're collecting. We had a former student who teaches at a community college, because community college teaching is as important and virtuous as teaching at a Research 1 institution. Giving them opportunities to think about how to be in the world with an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

That's a responsibility institutions have these days, especially as we're moving to the new policy where graduate students and undergrads alike — whether you're at Yale or the Art Institute — will have to meet a threshold of income if the schools that produce them want to continue receiving financial aid. That's heavy, heavy on professional practice.

In short, what I end up saying is: you find a way. If you've taken out student loans, you find a way to pay back those student loans. You find a way to pay for your life — whether that's a studio outside your living space, or a studio within it, whether it's healthcare, whether it's the supplies you need. You find a way outside of the art marketplace to pay for those things.

I say that because the capriciousness of the marketplace does not yield an interesting engagement with your own making, with whatever you're thinking about, whatever your practice is. It has a tendency to skew that thinking so it participates within the marketplace. So if you have to be a barista, or if you have to carry the mail, you do that. You don't want to be so precarious — that art market, which we know is precarious, can really undo a relationship to your life, and then you can't practice anymore. So find out what that economic base is. And God bless you if you can develop it right now, because we know that's difficult. But do not entangle the art market into what you need to get your work done, or how you need to live day to day.

How Art Schools Might Change

Hugh Leeman: What if we look at this from another angle — how might art school models be changed to improve outcomes for their students?

Michelle Grabner: There is that pivot to building a curriculum that exposes students to cultural work — whether it's being an art handler. And again, that's precarious, as we know, within culture and within our institutions. There's a lot of support being pulled away because our patron class is changing.

But I don't think this is radical, though maybe it seems unusual to say right now: by having honest conversations with students about the importance of ideas and history and theory and positions — exposure to techniques that have purpose, but not a purpose in the practical world; what they actually have is a deep purpose in elevating the passions of the individual. That's a big swing, which not many institutions are doing right now — toward the virtues of what happens in humanities departments, or the kind of thinking that has happened in art school.

But you have to have an honest conversation by saying: you, student graduating with an MFA — where I had a path to teach in higher ed, that path for you is likely not there. It's thinking through not just betterment itself, but betterment through the humanities: collective thinking, thinking expansively, thinking critically. If those things go away, we're in trouble. But if you're going to art school for a job — as we're hearing and seeing in all kinds of disciplines, people are just forgoing it. They're going right to the workplace, because the statistics tell us you can earn as much money going to a trade school, probably more, than hustling out of school with that MFA and knocking on the door of the market.

Schools should do what schools can do, and that is teach critical thinking, teach relationships to ideas, teach histories. Those things are still hugely important. And clearly not everybody can afford them — so let's just blessed hope that schools start to understand they've overbuilt, and that tuition is obscene and needs to be walked back.

This is where my husband teaches at a community college in DuPage County, just outside of Chicago. That place is flourishing, and he's able to teach art — ideas, foundations, techniques. The majority of his students will not be artists, but it's still important.

Hugh Leeman: If we made a comparative model — the School of the Art Institute costs X, community college costs Y — what are the differences in the education you're receiving?

Michelle Grabner: I'm somebody who's always said those early foundational classes should be taught when one is a junior and a senior. Simple 2D design, simple material processes. So often we get students at the Art Institute who had a really great high school education, an AP background. They come to art school wanting to express themselves, and they do not want to settle into all those foundational languages they feel they may have had in high school. But those are languages. Those are the foundations we carry in our studio every single day. Those are things in the cliché of the toolbox we will never get away from. So I would love for us to revalue those foundations, as opposed to putting them early on where students quickly move through them so they can finally get to those upper-level undergrad classes where they can express themselves. I'd love to flip how schools think about a curricular trajectory through the visual arts — foundations all the way through, or foundations at the end.

We have a lot of students at SAIC who, instead of paying four years of undergrad tuition, are transfer students. They'll go to College of DuPage for two years and transfer to the Art Institute for two. I remember reading a piece in the Times years ago about how prudent it was for a student to take two years at their local community college and then go to Cornell for their junior and senior year — and they have a degree from Cornell University. That's starting to really ramp up. It's a conversation that's always around community colleges: how they think about transfer, the classes they teach, how they'll be accepted into other schools. That seems quite smart.

Complicity, Compliance, and the Federal Loan Changes

Hugh Leeman: The Trump administration recently made major changes to federal direct loans — graduate borrowing limits, Pell eligibility, repayment rules — that will majorly affect art schools, with a stated goal to make schools less debt-heavy and more accountable to students' long-term success. The counterpoint is that it could make graduate art school less accessible, less experimental, more careerist, and more dependent on private wealth. What are the conversations you're having with faculty and students around this?

Michelle Grabner: Right now, our administration is deeply, deeply looking at how to be complicit with these changes. How do we acknowledge and change curriculum so we're in compliance? That's coming from the top.

To be perfectly honest, outside of a few faculty, nobody's bristling. There's fear. There's a "what do we have to do to keep the doors open" situation. And that is exactly what administrations want.

What it ends up doing — these are policies from the feds that want to undergird our economy in traditional ways. If you're spending this money to go to school, and there's debt, but you're not able to then take those credentials back into the workforce and elevate the overall economy, why are we going to subsidize your education? I have huge problems with that. Education and learning — that's an abstraction and a value that has to be embraced. I really bristle at all of these conversations.

I just wish I heard even a little utterance of the alternative. I was reading a review of a new Black Mountain College book coming out. It talks about how these alternative schools — as Black Mountain was, or some of these profoundly liberal arts schools that are barely opening their doors, Hampshire, well, gone — had alternative pedagogy, alternative learning structures. And in the review: the more alternative and the more compelling, and thus when we look back the more importantly historical in terms of a cultural movement — the faster they fall. So there's that working against the whole argument I'm pushing, that these are the things we should strive for. So maybe, hopefully, the smallest institutions can be noted, seen, and supported by the big foundations — the Mellons, the Fords of the world — to really buoy them up and give them a place so they can be adjacent, at least, to what's happening in traditional schools.

Hugh Leeman: The Department of Education frames these loan changes as a way to stop over-borrowing and push schools to lower cost. Is there a version of that argument art schools should take seriously?

Michelle Grabner: Absolutely. Administrative bloat — it's everywhere. On the other side, which is very important, are all those adjuncts who dedicate their lives to teaching but do not hit the hierarchy of full-time status. Godspeed — they've unionized. That means institutions have to be accountable for those faculty who do the good service and the good teaching, to compensate them, to recognize them. That's very important, but it's also very expensive for these institutions that are vulnerable.

So without taking away from our colleagues who are adjuncts and lecturers the protection they deserve and earn — how can we think about a new structure? SAIC should really be doing that. This goes back to the back heel. Instead of being defensive, I want to know where the imaginative thinking is going on. How can we restructure so we can bring those costs down, so we don't have to have that exorbitant tuition? We're just going to have to get smaller — that's maybe what I'm hearing the administrators say. That seems pragmatic, but I'm wondering if there are other ways. Hopefully we're going to start having these conversations this academic year about being imaginative. What does it mean that we can serve our students, not burden them with excessive debt, and still be excellent in terms of thinking about the arts, making, history, and so forth.

Hugh Leeman: You said we're going to have to be smaller. Does that mean layoffs?

Michelle Grabner: Indeed it does, if we're not making our enrollment goals. And right now we're not making our enrollment goals — very simply because our international students are having a very difficult time getting here. They're not being awarded visas. If students aren't being awarded visas, our classes aren't filling. If our classes aren't filling, we're going to have to cut those classes, or move some students into another class, and there will inevitably be faculty who are not able to teach.

Hugh Leeman: And the difficulty with visas for international students is also due to the current administration's policy changes?

Michelle Grabner: Yes, absolutely.

The Myth of Early-Career Income

Hugh Leeman: One critique is that these rules measure the value of art education through early-career income. What is that myth about how artists actually build their lives?

Michelle Grabner: Yes — and it's not okay. That's the policy coming from the feds. But there are other economies we engage in day to day doing the same thing. The art blogs. The marketplace.

The question is: how can one feel — I'll use the word success — fulfilled in the world as an artist, engaged with art, their own making, the past of art-making, the future of art-making, the full range of that potential engagement?

There are so many industries that entwine. Art school being one. The residency industry — the pay-to-play to go somewhere. Even the critical apparatus, which isn't really critical, it's barely journalism, but the constant announcement of ridiculous things like Daniel Arsham's houses for sale — a massive, beautiful home in Manhattan. We're comparing ourselves to these rare exemplary figures who command this attention. You get this in all aspects of culture. So school is a problem, but there are other industries built around the frothiness of the marketplace that burns out very quickly. Social media and Instagram being another one. How does one have all this influence just by being seen through a virtual tiny bit of digital color?

I'm old enough to understand how a museum show, or being in legacy collections, and critical assessment, and the marketplace, and teaching — they were all entwined. They all depended on one another. And now they're atomized. It's all over the place. This is what's really difficult to teach with my grad students. They're always bringing me somebody they found on Instagram that they're really striving toward. But that alone will not yield satisfaction in the fullness. Artists want to be public-facing. That is a kind of public face, but it's not with the object itself.

All of these typical markers used to be entwined, and now they exist all over the place. So what does that mean? It means artists are going to have to first feel very, very comfortable with how they're developing work, how they're thinking about their work. Their daily practice has to feed something so they can create the structure of how they succeed. And that just may be: I logged in eight hours today in the studio, and I also went to my job. That right there is a kind of success. If we start letting all of these industries from the outside shape that, we're going to be perennially disappointed.

Yes, it's great to have professional practice classes. But really starting to have these conversations about how one can integrate this passion we have, this skill set, this craft we honed, into our day-to-day and value that — I think that's the first step. And it's very, very hard, because I can't wake up in the morning without doing this. Everybody has this moment of: what about me? Ridiculous. But that's very hard to navigate — those powerful, all-prevalent industries within culture.

Hugh Leeman: Is the "what about me" the attention economy you're referring to?

Michelle Grabner: Yes — and this is where I'm highly critical of how many schools, maybe our own, think about critique. It's not really critique. Critique is its own discipline. It has its own history. And often — there are a lot of exceptions — I'm concerned that critique is simply a bunch of eyes on work, and that's successful enough, or that makes the artist we're looking at feel okay, that the attention we're giving it is all that's necessary. And schools are sadly calling that a crit. It is not. We may all gather around a work, but there's something else that has to be done. History needs to be given. There are so many forms of critique that can be overlaid. Critique has to be taught. Critique honors the work and the artist, its own discipline, and the work of culture. That's a rigorous kind of attention. I would like a more rigorous kind of attention.

Boredom, Limitation, and the Pale King

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — you've talked beautifully about boredom, even calling positive boredom a kind of contentment. What does boredom do for creativity?

Michelle Grabner: There's a terrible cliché Picasso quote that's maybe a terrible cliché, but it's kind of good — something about inspiration and work. Dedication and work: in that frame is where inspiration often comes from. It doesn't come from above, and then one does the work. There's something inherent. That's not all artists, obviously — people have different relationships to how they manifest a thing or an idea.

This goes back to what we were saying about limitations. Repetition, process — there's something that's going to change. The body will change it. Culture will shift. Conversations and politics will shift, and inevitably, even within the most basic, repetitive making, one will understand it differently. There will be a shift that happens in there.

So boredom. All these academic books about boredom came out — I'm putting a pin in around '08, after the economic collapse. It's what we didn't have. We were revving up with our screens and social media and the speed of the digital world. So boredom was the other to that. This is the cultural condition — what is the other to that? Boredom. And all of a sudden there's lots of interesting writing on boredom and the conditions of boredom and how that yields and plays within creativity.

So in short: limitations and boredom — I see them as two structures that help one slow down and linger and assess within their thinking, within their practice, within their making. And boredom — David Foster Wallace, I always bring him up — he really did tease that apart, particularly in the novel he was writing when he died, thinking about being an IRS agent in Peoria.

Hugh Leeman: Or is that Infinite Jest?

Michelle Grabner: No, Infinite Jest — he set the stage with Infinite Jest, and that was absolutely no boredom. Everything — whether it was a drug, or tennis, or Canadian militants — it was always about distraction. That was about a life of distraction. The Pale King was the other. They're the beautiful bookends.

Hugh Leeman: Michelle Grabner, thank you so much.

Michelle Grabner: Hugh, thank you. And thank you to anybody listening to this, putting up with my babbling. You're a delight. It was great to talk to you.

By Liz Goldner

This summer’s Pageant of the Masters, with its theme, the “Greatest of All Time,” celebrates six centuries of art masterpieces, presenting work from many different eras and styles. The theatrical spectacle features 40-plus renowned paintings and sculptures, most with real people inhabiting their artistic counterparts, on the stage.

The Pageant evolved organically in the art colony of Laguna Beach, which attracted artists from all over the country and beyond. Artists moved there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the magnificent weather, coastal scenery, landscapes as subjects of their artwork, and especially for the camaraderie with like-minded creatives. As the town evolved, performances became important occurrences at get-togethers and gallery openings, leading to the Pageant of the Masters.

Performed for two months every summer, the Pageant combines fine art with intricate theatrical engineering, and with volunteers who pose as characters in classic, modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures. The models inhabiting the living pictures or “tableaux vivants” wear elaborate make-up, wigs, headpieces and cleverly constructed clothing to facilitate their art personas.

Supporting these volunteers are detailed background scenes from the original paintings, created by professional artists. With models posing in front of these scenes, re-creations of well-known works of art, framed, with stage lighting, are produced. When viewed from the Pageant’s expansive Irvine Bowl amphitheater, the audience beholds astonishing larger-than-life pictures that overflow with vibrancy. This aspect is also true of the sculptural pieces. Completing the complex production is a large construction crew, a live orchestra, and narration detailing the stories behind the art pieces.

These two-hour performances are derived from amateur theatricals performed during the Victorian era. These events featured party-goers posing as their favorite art characters within large picture frames. In the original 1932 Pageant, titled “Spirit of the Masters Pageant,” volunteers posed as “Mona Lisa,” “Whistler’s Mother,” and other well-known subjects. The volunteers walked down Laguna Beach streets, holding large frames around themselves, leading onlookers to the newly formed Festival of Arts. The Pageant evolved to become a complex production, presenting works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bruegel, da Vinci, Botticelli, Manet, and modern and contemporary paintings. 

The “Greatest of All Time” Pageant theme hearkens back to its roots, featuring world-famous art pieces. The show begins with sculptures by Michelangelo and paintings by Johannes Vermeer (“The Music Lesson,” 1665, and “Art of Painting,” 1668). Marble masterpieces, including a stage-wide re-creation of the majestic “Trevi Fountain,” 1762, in Rome, are accompanied by music by Ottorino Respighi: “Pines of Rome,” 1924. 

These are followed by masterful Impressionist artworks: “Le Déjeuner sur L’herbe” by Claude Monet, 1866; “The Dance Foyer at the Opera,” 1872, by Edgar Degas, with live models holding complex dance poses; and “Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881,” by Pierre-August Renoir. When the latter painting is displayed, a French accented voice, representing the artist, says “To me, a painting should be something pleasant and pretty, yes pretty.” The work, on view at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., is a colorful, sunlight-infused work of a party on the Seine River, embodying the quintessential Impressionist style, and lifestyle during the Belle Époque. 

Vincent van Gogh’s “Morning, Peasant Couple Going to Work,” 1890, is an expression of the artist’s reverence for rural laborers. One of his most luminous paintings, “The Starry Night,” 1889, depicting the view of the sky andstars from his asylum room during a sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village, is featured. A magnificent replication of the work is displayed across the Pageant’s entire screen. 

Pablo Picasso, one of the most prolific painters who ever lived, according to long-time narrator Richard Doyle, appears on the Pageant stage by an actor playing him, with voice-over by a Spanish-accented man. He talks about his celebrated paintings and about his several wives and lovers. When discussing his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khokhlova, an elaborately dressed woman, personifying her, dances vibrantly onto the stage.

Special attention is given to Picasso's 1907 “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Presenting five sex workers, with African, Iberian and tribal-inspired masks, in a red-light district of Barcelona, it was one of the artist’s first paintings to employ fractured spaces. As one of Picasso’s most famous works, its cubist style influenced artists for many decades. 

Picasso’s iconic 1937 painting “Guernica” is then thrillingly displayed across the show’s entire screen. Representing the fascist bombing and obliteration of an ancient Basque town during the 1937 Spanish Civil War, the anti-war painting conveys fractured versions of injured bodies, abstract horrified faces, bulls, horses, and birds. The bombing of Guernica was carried out by Nazi German and Fascist Italian forces supporting General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces.

The Pageant’s second act begins with an actor playing the world-renowned 20th century artist Norman Rockwell in his art studio. As he talks about his inspiration from common people for his art, four of his Saturday Evening Post” covers, 1917-21, are depicted. With the titles, “Boy in the Mirror,” “Champ,” “Necessary Height,” and “Rivals,” they artfully present the insecurities of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys, 

His “Picasso vs. Sargent,” 1966, in his finely wrought realistic style, illustrates the contrast of 1960s female styles and tastes. One woman in a black coat and heels is perusing a traditional painting by John Singer Sargent. Alongside her, a younger woman in jeans and boots is admiring a more contemporary Picasso painting. 

Rockwell’s “Glen Canyon Dam,” 1970, illustrates the Arizona dam that severely damaged the Colorado River’s ecosystem, altering the Indigenous Navaho landscape, its farming and herding capabilities. The artist included in this Western-style painting a Native American family observing the project’s detrimental impact on their people. President Ronald Reagan is quoted as saying, “Norman Rockwell painted the people and events of six decades of American life with compassion and humor.” 

Other art pieces in the second act include a stage-wide rendition of the “Lincoln Memorial,” 1922, designed by Daniel Chester French; Winslow Homer’s “Snap the Whip,” 1872, of nine young boys playing in a field; and David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist,” 1972, of Hockney staring at a man in a pool. Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl, 1949, is deeply symbolic and surreal, as it conveys many layers of entwining embraces. The Earth (Mexico) is holding Frida Kahlo, who is compassionately holding a nude Diego Rivera who is sleeping blissfully in her arms.

The Pageant’s concluding art piece, “The Last Supper,” 1495-1498, by Leonardo da Vinci, is a continuation of a decades-long tradition of presenting it at the Pageant. But an aged da Vinci first appears on the stage, questioning if the painting is worth showing. Then Andy Warhol, who silk-screened “60 Last Suppers” 1986, appears on the stage, encouraging him to exhibit it. This dialogue by two art superstars, who lived millennia apart, connects Renaissance devotional art to modern art and celebrity culture—a feature epitomizing this production’s expansive theme.

The curtains open to reveal a magnificent living rendition of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” with heavily made-up actors, set to the music “Meditation,” about a spiritual awakening, from the opera “Thaïs” by Jules Massenet. As the audience leaves the Irvine Bowl, they are reveling in the glory of having seen and heard about the details of some of history’s greatest artworks. Many people I spoke to were also captivated by the production’s unique pageantry of marrying art history with theatrical illusion.

The Pageant of the Masters Director is Diane Challis Davy. Dan Duling is the scriptwriter. Richard “Butch” Hill is the Technical Director. The show runs nightly until September 4, 2026.

By Hantian Zhang

There are two ways to read the title of the exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco: an exhibition about the craft of making moving images, or one about what craft has made of the moving image. The first reading is not a stretch, as editing, color timing, and the physical labor of slicing and splicing footage are all forms of embodied, specialized knowledge; a show called Video Craft could easily have been about them. Video Craft turns out to be an exhibition of the second kind. Across its galleries, moving-image media keep getting pulled into craft’s orbit: a sixteen-millimeter documentary turns into a quilt, home movies get cut up and rewoven as patchwork. For a culture that lives increasingly on TikTok and Instagram, an exhibition like this reminds us that craftsmanship still has a claim. To the extent that video gets included, it is for demonstrating ways it gets reconfigured through craft.

Among the works that literally feed video into craft, Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Arts and Crafts in American and Peruvian Weaving (2016/2025) exemplifies this one-way flow by weaving strips of 16mm polyester film into a square quilt. The films are two documentaries from the 1980s, one about arts and crafts in America, the other on Peruvian weaving, both thematically apt for their new use. The artist cut the film into segments of different lengths and then threaded them together using translucent polyester thread in a courthouse-step pattern, a quilt pattern of blocks of symmetrical stripes on alternate sides of the center square. As one film was brown-tinted and the other blue, the artist placed the film segments in a symmetrical pattern, mimicking the color alternations of a real wool quilt. When the film quilt is backlit, the images on the film become visible, and the work resembles finer needlework: each frame is almost identical to its neighbor except for small alterations, together creating an intricate, tessellating pattern. In making use of the film’s color and image this way, the moving image disappears into the craft object.

A few other artworks play on similar ideas. In RGB (2021), Sarah Rosalena weaves red, green, and blue yarn into a rectangular piece of fabric, mimicking the fundamental building blocks of digital color and display. Greg Climer’s Animated Quilt Film (2016–2022) extends this logic to motion, assembling thirty-six cotton quilts, eighteen of which are on view at the show, to animate five seconds of animation showing two men kissing in a park. The contours of the figures arise not from drawn lines but from patches of color, and the imprecision is part of the point: the embrace registers first as shape and hue, only secondarily as the two men it depicts. The theme of the movie resonates with the history that the medium carries: quilting has long served as a vehicle for queer memorial, most visibly in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Climer’s work inherits this association even as it puts quilting to a new use.

This pattern of rendering the digital, or the moving, in craft’s terms gives the exhibition its coherence. While first appearing as a counter example because it is not a craftwork but a video, Ahree Lee’s Bojagi (Memories to Light) (2015) actually shows what this logic would look like when taken to its limit. The artwork is a fifteen-minute video. In it, the artist assembles archival Asian American home movies into a digital bojagi, the traditional Korean patchwork wrapping cloth used as gift wrapping in weddings and in Buddhist rites, often gifted from mothers to daughters before marriage. The footage is cut and recombined, borrowing its editing logic from Korean textile piecing. The result no longer reads as film in the usual sense: the screen is divided into four quadrants, each further divided into four, simultaneously showing the same imagery distorted and flipped left to right and top to bottom. The final work is an abstract, kaleidoscopic dynamic that refuses any coherent narrative. What is lost here is legibility itself: the imagery is no longer recognizable as imagery, not merely unplotted but unseeable as the footage it once was. The artwork is thus not a counterexample to the exhibition’s dominant logic but a case of the logic’s complete realization. Here, craft’s reorganization of video does not just borrow the moving image’s material; it dissolves the image’s claim to being an image at all.

Lauren Kalman’s to have or to hold … (2021–2024) would also look like a counterexample at first glance, as both craft and video are constituents of the artwork. A group of six large ceramic vessels sits on black pedestals at chair height, each bearing strange distortions on its surface. An accompanying three-channel video reveals their origin: the artist presses her body against the unfired clay, distorting its form before firing. The finished vessel also gets rotated in the video, allowing the viewer to trace the contact points between body and clay. The video here is thus mostly documentary, with no formal ambition of its own; it is not, any more than the others, an instance of video’s craft coming into view. Without the recording, the objects appear enigmatic; with it, they become traces of a specific encounter between body and material. The ceramic needs the video to disclose its process, and the video needs the ceramic as its subject. In forming one pillar of the mutual dependence, Kalman’s video deviates from the one-way-flow logic not by reversing it, but by entering into dialogue with craft.

On this point, Kalman’s work recalls a passage in Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which the cultural critic describes the imprint left by a hand in clay as emblematic of artisanal production, the trace bearing an unmistakably individual mark that lends the craftwork its aura. Benjamin contrasts this with mechanically reproduced media such as photography and film, whose images can be endlessly replicated and thus detached from their original context. Yet Benjamin was equally fascinated by the camera’s ability to disclose aspects of reality inaccessible to ordinary perception. What Kalman’s work achieves is to hold both observations and retain the best of the two media: vessels preserve the aura of bodily contact, while the video reveals what that contact looked like. The vessels retain the physical trace of the encounter with the body, and the video captures and keeps its temporality. 

Here, the show’s prevailing one-way logic turns out to be not an oversight but an expression of where it is being staged. A craft museum is built to notice craft. Kalman’s vessels suggest what a fuller dialogue between video and craft might look like, but even there, the dialogue tilts toward craft’s terms: it is the ceramic, not the video, that remains the true subject. Given that video and the image have become so pervasive these days, the show’s one-way logic starts to look like craft’s insistence that touch, slowness, and the trace of the hand still have a claim. Benjamin watched cinema unsettle the conditions of artistic production; Video Craft suggests that craft, a century later, still finds ways old and new to hold its ground.

Oscar Villalon is the editor at the San Francisco literary journal ZYZZYVA, winner of a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2022. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere, including the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Penguin Random House).

Managing Editor, ZYZZYVA | Interview by Hugh Leeman

What Is ZYZZYVA?

Hugh Leeman: Oscar, for people who may not know, what is ZYZZYVA, and can you share a bit of its history and background?

Oscar Villalon: ZYZZYVA is an independent nonprofit literary journal headquartered in San Francisco, publishing since 1985 — that's when the first issue came out. It was founded by editor Howard Junker, and its intention was to publish poets, writers, and artists living on the West Coast, which was defined as Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii.

The reason was that Howard and like-minded people — the people who would eventually be on the board, the donors — felt that folks living out here just weren't getting the attention they merited from publications outside the region, namely New York, but just in general. Attached to that was a sense of necessity: we needed some sort of journal out here in which all these different people in the literary community could see each other. A platform for all the incredible writers and poets and artists out here.

Why a Literary Journal Matters in the 21st Century

Hugh Leeman: There's a nobility in that 1985 idea of giving props to people who, by a simple tyranny of geography, aren't near New York. But bringing it to today — what is the importance of a literary journal in the 21st century?

Oscar Villalon: It still functions the same way. The idea is to create a platform for a literary community to get their work published, seen, and appreciated, and therefore to support them. A journal like ZYZZYVA is so regionally specific — and now even more so. Originally the idea was to platform West Coast poets, artists, and writers; now it's to platform California poets, artists, and writers. We still publish people from all over, but in the main we want to highlight folks from the Golden State.

Why? It's important for people to see what's happening around them — to see what they're already a part of, the richness of their community. So the mission of a literary journal is not only to support the people you publish by bringing them to readership, but also to enrich the lives of the readers, so they can see what's happening around them. Art is being made all the time. Literary art is being created all the time. This is exciting. You are part of an evolving thing, and I think that can be greatly beneficial.

Hugh Leeman: With that shift from Alaska-down-to-Hawaii toward focusing more on California, is there still inclusion for someone from Iowa or Texas?

Oscar Villalon: Yes, we do publish them. But here's the idea: it's not just about publishing you, it's about supporting you in other ways — events. We do a lot of events, probably more than any comparable literary journal. So far in 2026 we're almost up to a dozen events, and we're still in July. The next step to supporting you is bringing you out to a reading and putting you in front of an audience, literally building some sort of fellowship, some communion, with our readers where we live.

So we absolutely will publish people from outside, but I can't extend to you the full benefit of being published in ZYZZYVA if you're in search of community. When we publish people from outside the region, they tend to be a little more established — they already belong to a literary community. It's like inviting a special guest to the party: look who's dropping by, what a special visit from so-and-so who normally lives in New York but is stopping by to hang out with us today. It's not that we don't want to publish people outside the area — it's that I feel we can't fully support you as well if you're outside the region.

Hugh Leeman: So you're creating a community about genuine connection, as opposed to simple publication. Is that fair?

Oscar Villalon: Yes — though I'm not creating it so much as surfacing it. It's there. The community just needs to see each other to coalesce. My thinking is that ZYZZYVA becomes a locus around which the community can gather, see itself, and hopefully thrive and drive further. We're certainly not the only organization making things happen, but every little bit helps.

The Values Behind the Journal

Hugh Leeman: In a previous conversation you told me a literary journal is a small marker of what you value. What are those values?

Oscar Villalon: Possibilities. In terms of values, I'd say what we'd call the humanist values — empathy, rule of law, self-knowledge, self-awareness, the pursuit of enlightenment. But in terms of the idea behind it, it's one of possibility. The idea of becoming. The idea that we are evolving, that things aren't static, that they need not be the way they appear right now. What literature does is open your mind to the possibilities — literally, other ways of living, other ways of being, other ways of seeing the world.

Taking Over and What Had to Change

Hugh Leeman: Several years ago you took over as managing editor. When you took over, what were the things you said, "this needs to stay the same," and what did you say, "we need to change this"?

Oscar Villalon: When I became managing editor, I was working for the editor, Laura Cogan. We were on the same page about what needed to change. Where ZYZZYVA was when we were tasked with running it, and where we wanted it to be, came down to the variety of writing, maybe even the quality of the writing — it felt to us like it was lacking in excitement. We wanted to reshape it in our image. That's why you don't necessarily want the same editor running a journal for years and years with their stamp on it — sometimes you want someone who sees things differently, to shake things up. Times change. Different leadership.

One of the big things we did was introduce interviews — lengthy interviews. We didn't do those before. We also opened it up to outside contributors; it had been very strictly West Coast writers. Going back to the analogy of the party, we wanted to invite people in whose work our readers would enjoy, even if they didn't live on the West Coast. And the events — so many events. That was by far the biggest change once Laura Cogan became editor and I was managing editor. At one point we were averaging nearly twenty-four events a year — at least two a month — while publishing the journal three times a year and doing fundraising, with just three full-time staffers at the time. A lot of work, but important, necessary work.

The Ideal Reader in a Rent-Controlled Apartment

Hugh Leeman: You've described the ideal reader to me before as someone living in a rent-controlled apartment, who knows that's how it's going to be forever — an aspiring writer or artist, maybe a social worker, maybe working for a nonprofit. That's a very specific ideal reader. What inspired the focus on them?

Oscar Villalon: Because I don't think of literary community, or the pursuit of a literary career or literary interests, as something that should be tied to income. I don't like the idea of creating something where people feel they're pressing their nose up against the glass, aspiring to get in — not in terms of quality, like "one day I could write a story good enough for the journal," but in terms of class. Another class of people, one I may never be part of, for a variety of non-negotiable reasons: your ethnicity, your race, your degree, what field you work in.

What I want to do — and I hope this resonates — is create a journal for people who made a value choice: the reason I'm living in the rent-controlled place, the reason it's sometimes a financial struggle, is because I've chosen one thing over another. I chose, let's say, meaning over lucre. It's a way of saying, I recognize you as a fellow bohemian, and I want to create a journal I think you would like. Because for me, San Francisco — in spite of all the wealth, all the shiny things, all its outsized power — its beating heart is still the bohemian one. It's about beauty, about culture, still very much about possibilities. I want to recognize that.

Hugh Leeman: Given the massive displacement of the creative class over the last ten years or so — the artists, writers, poets, dancers — do you see your target audience dwindling?

Oscar Villalon: No, and I'll tell you why. Even though those are the people I'm thinking of when I put out the journal, there are so many more people who, out of economic necessity, have to take jobs that pay well — because they have a family to support, or crushing needs that can only be addressed financially — who would also very much like to be part of that. The journal is open to them too. It's for the people who had to take that route, understandably, who have to work for a living to make a good amount of money because they're trying to create wealth and comfort for their family. I get it. But at the same time, recognize that life is elsewhere — that this isn't the sum of it, that there's more going on.

Hugh Leeman: In other words, the sum of life is not the accumulation of cash.

Oscar Villalon: Right. You do that to take care of your material needs, but what are you going to do about your spiritual, intellectual needs? Hopefully a journal like ZYZZYVA becomes, for those San Franciscans, a balm — something that reminds them of their humanity, reminds them of their agency, reminds them that our time is short, but that the world is still incredible and mysterious.

Naming the Place Where It Hurts

Hugh Leeman: We spoke before about how Western civilization is under incredible pressure of change — in the shadow of catastrophe, of authoritarianism, of fascism — and that people want answers at these times. What are the answers people are looking for?

Oscar Villalon: It boils down to one question: why do I feel the way I do? Let me frame it a little. We go through life thinking things and feeling things, and we lack the vocabulary to express them to ourselves, let alone to others. What the literary arts do is provide you with that vocabulary. So you can name the place where it hurts. You can name that itch, and now you know where to go and scratch.

In these times of utter confusion — of astonishment and bafflement and anger and sadness and fear — it's more important than ever to be able to express what you're thinking and feeling. This prevents you from falling into the traps of other people who are going to express it for you, who are going to say, "here's what's wrong with you." Spending time with a novel, or with poems, or with a collection of lyrical essays gets you closer to something true, which reminds you of your humanity. And when we talk about possibilities, with possibility comes hope. If you're reading, say, the literature that came out post–World War I, or post–World War II, particularly in parts of Europe and the Americas, there might be something in there to help you make sense of all this.

The other thing it does is remind you that you're not alone. Part of that process of providing vocabulary is through examples of people who've gone through what you've gone through, felt what you've felt, seen what you've seen — that indeed nothing is new. It only seems new if you don't know about other lives.

Hugh Leeman: That idea that you're not alone is powerful — in the shadow of the loneliness epidemic, and thinking back to the Spanish Civil War, where I believe Franco banned people from gathering in coffee shops, because that's where revolutions begin. On the flip side of that: if you really want to control people, you make them feel isolated. Like, no, you're the only one feeling that.

From Irrelevance to Relevance

Hugh Leeman: An undercurrent to everything we're discussing is relevance. You told me that when you took over, you wanted to make ZYZZYVA relevant again. What did that journey from irrelevance to relevance look like?

Oscar Villalon: By that I meant increasing the readership, making it something exciting people would want to see again. What happens is you get caught in a rut — the last issue looks a lot like the one before it — and you risk losing their attention. You could get to the point where you're serving the same meal. So you want to create surprise. Not that the high quality is the sameness — it's asking, are we repeating things? Are we not trying anything different, in terms of people writing in different styles? Can we mix it up, so that when readers encounter the journal, they walk away having engaged with something they otherwise never would have.

The other thing I meant by relevant: we have such a high caliber of poets, writers, and artists in our region — San Francisco, the Bay Area, California. It's an embarrassment of riches. Let's showcase them. Let's show people all these amazing talents working right now, writing about this shared experience of life, that they may not otherwise know about, or that they may find validating. That's what I mean by relevant.

Hugh Leeman: That implies ZYZZYVA is not a monologue but a dialogue. What have readers taught you that changed how you edit or what you publish?

Oscar Villalon: They don't teach us directly — we don't do polls. But what they've shown is increased patronage. For the last two years or so, our subscription numbers have steadily gone up. It's a trickle, but they're going up, in a way they hadn't in a while. Our events are very well attended — and we're seeing something really remarkable and hopeful: young people at our events. That's how we read them, and we say, we must be doing something right.

At the end of the day, we judge the reader because we think of the reader as ourselves. Between myself, our senior editor Manjula Martin, our associate and assistant editors — Andrew David King, Annie Dominici, Chiara Bercu — we create the vibe, along with our production designer, Justin Carter. That's important to mention: yes, I'm the editor, but this is in collaboration with all the journal's other editors. We put our heads together, we figure out what we think is going to be good, and we trust each other. In some ways it works like a band — everyone contributes something, and hopefully the sum is greater than the parts.

The Border, Belonging, and the Value of a Citizen

Hugh Leeman: Turning to your own writing — in your piece on Aida Hernandez, you described the border as something that can make a person fully part of a community and yet alien to it, while asking whether the story of the undocumented is really about the value placed on Mexican American futures. How do you see that idea applying today?

Oscar Villalon: That question has become more urgent, and the answer more stark, than ever. Let me back up. When you think of what ICE has been doing, when you think about the wages of Latinos compared to other US demographics, when you think about their near invisibility in popular media — Mexican Americans alone are thirty-five million people, that's ten percent of the country, and if you include Latinos as a whole it's closer to twenty percent — yet we barely register as a blip on the radar of US popular culture. In English, I should say. We certainly have our own popular culture, which is bountiful and commercially successful. But in US popular culture in general, we're hardly there.

This raises the question: what exactly is the value to us of being a US citizen, compared to other groups? When you're living in a constant state of what feels like siege — worried about the birthright citizenship ruling, with all these things coming at you — it forces you to think about what it means to be an American. The Black experience in this country is very helpful in figuring out what that might mean: what does it mean to be essentially a second-class citizen? That's something still worth thinking about when your schools are so poorly funded, when folks doing agricultural work are exposed to all kinds of pesticides and develop cancers. How much are we valued? Is my citizenship worth as much as yours?

This administration has made pretty clear what they believe our status to be — that at best you're going to be second class, if they have it their way. There'll be some exceptions, maybe if you're Christian evangelical they make room for you, but even then I don't buy it. I don't think you'll be fully, quote-unquote, one of them.

Hugh Leeman: In your El Paso essay, you address Mexicanos, Chicanos, Latinx directly, shifting between English and Spanish. What does that bilingual prose allow you to say emotionally, politically, even communally, that English alone does not?

Oscar Villalon: It becomes an opportunity to explore, on the page, different ways of being. In this case, it allows you to reflect how you actually think. The biculturalism, the bilingualism — it's not so much code-switching, not turning a lamp on and off where you're this or you're that. It's actually a combination, and the percentages vary. Sometimes when you're very upset, that combination can be at least fifty-fifty, if not seventy-five/twenty-five Spanish. Other times it's the opposite.

I also wrote it that way because I wanted to present what felt to me like an honest accounting of the emotions many of us were going through at that moment. In the wake of that horror, unabashedly embracing one's Mexicanness — and then the surprise: yes, I may speak the King's English, but how about that, I'm also this. We're complicated. Complex, I should say.

Precarity, Wealth, and the False Protection of Money

Hugh Leeman: Years ago you wrote a piece titled "Letter from San Francisco," addressing abandonment, economic fear, undocumented labor, and illness — a sense that there's no real net underneath people. How do you see that condition of precarity today, especially in San Francisco with the after-effects of the pandemic, housing instability, and economic inequality?

Oscar Villalon: It's even more extensive — and add to that precarity not just the economic one but the political one. The anxieties felt around that time are exponentially greater now. With all the vast wealth coming in from AI, it only further heightens how many people are struggling. What might have changed is that we're not looking at it anymore, the way we did some years ago. I think we've perhaps normalized it.

But when you look at the success of all these democratic socialists elsewhere in the country, people are seeing what they're seeing. In San Francisco it's harder to say — the gleam does blind you, if you choose to let it blind you, from what's actually there. What's important is that my fellow San Franciscans recognize that with every leap in quote-unquote progress — which seems to only mean filling somebody's coffers with gold — we still have a lot of work to do. We have to start considering what it looks like to work together, to be in community, to sustain a good society — to give a nod to Lyndon Johnson. And I think this is true for the whole state of California: things like healthcare, education, and housing are not things you should ever be skimping on. Those should be non-negotiable.

Hugh Leeman: You've mentioned alternative ways of being throughout our conversation. Tell me more about what those look like.

Oscar Villalon: Chief among them: how do I want to use technology? What does it mean to contribute to society? When we talk about other ways of being now, they all boil down to other ways of being a good citizen, other ways of being helpful to your community. What's going on now doesn't seem to be fruitful, so what are other ways of improving where I live? That idea — that meaning is found in being of service to others, not just in doing what's quote-unquote good for you — might be the paradigm being looked at. If there's a paradigm shift, it might be from "I acknowledge it's a dog-eat-dog world, so I will accrue as much wealth and power as I can to protect myself and mine" — to instead: maybe the best way to address that is to help others as much as I can, to be in service to others as much as I can. That's how we get out of any dire straits we're in. And once you do that, your entire outlook changes.

Hugh Leeman: It's really hard to ask oneself to be in service to others when your worldview, since childhood, has been to accumulate capital and strategically leverage debt to your own benefit.

Oscar Villalon: Absolutely. Here's the thing. Life is nothing if not about moments of love, of fear, of sadness, of pain. These are the ingredients that shape a life. And anything you do to avoid those things in an extreme, destructive way deforms you. "I can't feel love, because love compromises me, love means I'm loyal to people, and that'll mess up my ambitions." "I can't feel pain, because pain means I'm weak" — but if you never feel pain, you never grow. Sadness, same thing. Fear, same thing. If you never allow these things to humanize you, it deforms you. You can't live under that sort of protection. It's a false protection. Money seemingly allows for it, but it really doesn't.

If your whole point is to accrue wealth so you'll be sheltered and comfortable — that's the most superficial step. Protect you from what? That's why when you look at someone like MacKenzie Scott, you think: you can reach a certain level of material resources where you're set, and after that it doesn't matter. That's why you see someone like her giving away all that money. You don't need all that. It's not going to make you happy. It seems so obvious. And this is why the literary arts can be an affront to others — because it's a very low-budget, low-fi way of questioning what your worldview may be all about. And not only questioning it, but maybe making you feel some conviction that what we're talking about might be a better way to live. It's being conscious of how you're living, the choices you're making, and what you might be sacrificing.

Those Children Are Your Children Too

Hugh Leeman: You mention wealth as a superficial boundary, but it does reinforce challenges here. The San Francisco Unified School District is deeply challenged even on a national scale, and yet we're in an extremely wealthy city. To some extent, once I pull Junior out of the public schools and into private school, I have no vested interest in seeing the public schools thrive. If I can afford bespoke medicine, what do I care if others can't afford health insurance? Wealth creates insulation, and a potential blindness that borders on sociopathy.

Oscar Villalon: It can, absolutely. But this is the part that's so isolating: you are part of a society. Those children are your children too, believe it or not. Because those children are going to grow up, and one day they will encounter your child — and then what? There's no getting out of this. Like the man said, five to one, one to five, no one gets out of here alive. You cannot be apart from your fellow man. You think you can, but you cannot. It's going to boomerang back.

You know a good way to combat fascism? A highly educated populace. How do you do that? Put some money into public schools, where the vast majority of kids are going to go. Those are your future voters. Otherwise you're creating an anti-democracy. So here's how I'd look at it: if you want to send your child to a private school to get the finest of the finest, fine — I don't begrudge you that. But your wealth should also be such that you can pay your taxes to keep the public schools going and nice — meaning a solid education, great facilities, teachers who are paid and happy to be there. You need to do both. It's not one or the other. And I guarantee you, if you do both, there's no problem.

Young People and Physical Media

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned young people picking up ZYZZYVA more and more, which is a holy grail across the arts — everyone from museums to galleries says, "I have no idea how to engage young people." There was a report under the Biden administration on the loneliness epidemic, and one fascinating finding was that some of the loneliest people were those in positions of power, because everyone around them only pretended to be their friend — our relationships had devolved into a transactional nature.

Oscar Villalon: I don't think it's just us. I'd expect this to be happening to other literary journals too. As a general observation, young people are gravitating more toward physical media. We're a print journal. This is strictly anecdotal, but every time I visit family in San Diego County and we stop by a Barnes & Noble, it's packed — always — and mostly with young women, who seem to be having a great time. Something's going on.

I could see how, if you were in your late teens or early twenties, being quite sick of it all and wanting to find other mediums to be entertained or to make sense of things — why not through books, printed journals, or even physical media like DVDs, LPs, CDs? All these things that take you offline. It's important we don't forget that everything we call wonderful and exciting and new was created by people who are definitely not young anymore. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was just a lad — he's no longer a lad. The children born into this world have no investment in any of it. This is as incredible to them as television was to me. And how did I feel about TV? It sucked. At some point I just stopped watching, because it's brain-dead. I could see the same happening with young people and technology — social media, streaming — where they say, I'm just not completely jazzed about this. What else is out there?

Look at the success of movies like Weapons and Sinners — they had an internet route to them, audiences knowing the directors through YouTube, but where did they go see them? Not online. In movie theaters. Sold out. Blockbusters, both of them, theaters packed with young people who enjoyed the experience of being crammed together in one place, which is communal. Something may be afoot, Hugh. ZYZZYVA may be one of the beneficiaries, I hope — but it's definitely not limited to us.

The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — I read that you value writing that relates to the present while touching on ideas of love, death, work, children, parenting, "eternal things." What current predicaments are you most interested in seeing writers illuminate now?

Oscar Villalon: Two things. One: one's own culpability in the state of things. And two: one's own hopes and ambitions and perceptions of how things could get better. Both at once. There's a lot to explore. As the old saying goes, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk — wisdom only manifests after the disaster, and in the aftermath is where we try to sort out what went wrong. What was my role in this? And how can we prevent it? I don't mean strictly as a policy paper, but in terms of the human condition. What is it about us that makes us vulnerable to predation, to fascism, to authoritarianism? What is it about even those who would be opposed to all these things — their own failures, personalized? People you'd otherwise look up to, the César Chávezes of the world.

That kind of serious examination is what I'd hope to see more of, because we need more of it. But it requires a certain erudition, in terms of what books you're reading, what research you're doing — a certain mindset in how you engage with the world. It's the trick of being both here, in the present, in the specific, and at the same time inhabiting the universal — seeing how other people live, how they think, or where we sit in history. This boils down to your own life: you weren't just born and the world started. We're part of a continuum. Things happened way before you got here, and you'll spend your life trying to make sense of that and how it's affecting the way you live now. And at the same time you have to live your life, experience all these things, and figure out how you're contributing to a future, or how you're making sense of what a future might be like.

What can we do? This is why I talk about possibility. What little tweaks can we make — if not on a social scale, then on a personal scale — to be better? To find some sort of peace, to find the ability to live within your own skin. There's a parallel between being able to live within your own skin and being able to live within your own society. We don't want to keep deluding ourselves, lying to ourselves to make it to the next day, that everything's going to be okay if it's not. And if things are not going to be okay — whether personal or public — what can we do about it? Is there anything we can do? Literature is often asking questions, not providing answers, but even asking them is important. To have that conversation — this is why we see each other, why we gather, why we go to readings and author conversations, why we're all here. We're all trying to suss these things out. I think that's the nature of life. I really do.

Hugh Leeman: Oscar Villalon, thank you so much. I appreciate what you've shared, and thank you for what you do.

Oscar Villalon: Thank you, Hugh. I appreciate it.

By N Stern

You've walked this path a thousand times, off the zen reverie and cradle rock of the El, down the rusted honeycomb steps, over rain-specked sidewalk, past the patinated bronze lions, gatekeepers of the dreaming. You once shot b-roll on these steps - permitless - because that's the Chicago way - the cinematographer grinning, the actor in shades, lest he tempt the lenses of the Japanese tour group obsessed with his early, funny dance/dance revolution. 

In your past, the Arts of Asia gallery is a transitional artery, five millennia never touched by contemporary art - you're either ascending toward Chagall's stained glass harlequin - or descending from O'Keeffe's Sky Above Clouds IV. 

Honey blonde wood, a rail yard glimpse of the Millenium Park skyline, a diorama of a city within a city. A university classmate used to save on train fare by hopping the freight line and riding the rails to the switchyard below. The ghost of Woody Guthrie taps your shoulder and you stop in your tracks.

It's not supposed to be there, Starbursts of color, shimmering hoards of gold and silken green and deep-dyed cerulean.  You sense movement in the corner of your eye - or is it trompe l’oiel.  A landscape, no a dreamscape, in 70mm Cinemascope, where birds alight, trees sway in slow disco, verdurous, serpentine, as invasive as Jeff VanderMeer’s terroir.  

100ft+ wide, 21 panels of automobile enamel firework glimmering over acrylic liner on gemstone-imbued gesso. Raqib Shaw's PARADISE LOST (2009-25). Framed by Buddha(s) and the Goddess(es) Durga, Kali, and Hariti. Your spider sense tingles, your hand reaches for your camera, but iPhone algorithmic color cannot touch Shaw's palette. You are shoulder to shoulder with the instagram masses who drop the veil of selfie stick Narcissus and just..

Breathe.

Wisdom of the crowds.

There are no accidents - Shaw's work in conversation with O'keefe's. On Sky Above Clouds IV she writes:

“I painted a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide—it kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night as I had to be finished before it was cold—I worked in the garage and it had no heat—Such a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.”

21 years in creation, for Shaw it was an art school dare then a single panel, then a saga:

"It was just a flight of fancy, but then as they say words do have their own spirits"

PARADISE LOST whispers in conversation with O'keefe (and Hockney, and Bosch and Edo screens.)

It screams over the formal tomb-silence of limestone and bronze, yet never monopolizes the conversation - you are beckoned into the hospitality of Abraham's tent, opened on four sides, anointed by the scent of mint tea, and candied delights - stuffed dates and Nankhatai, Nutty atta laddoo that stains gold leaf across your tongue.

Milton’s Paradise Lost never (quite) fades, never leaves the party early or for long. Not in psychology, nor socio-political predicaments of state. Orlando Reade's "What in Me is Dark" (Astra House, 2024) shouts out Milton's influence upon Jefferson and Eliot and Heidegger and Arendt.

It's the atheist's favorite codex.

Never out of style, Reade notes how "Satan contemplates his minions’ prospects in hell “like a tech chief executive contemplating child labourers in a mineral mine”.

It's no wonder Roger Avary has announced an AI film adaptation. 

Shaw's panels are both sequential and oblique - you flashback to a screening where filmmaker Michael Haneke (Cache, The White Ribbon) dismissed the linear tale, the geometric directness of a Newton's cradle strike - praising instead the elegance of the "banked" billiards shot.  The clack of wood and chalk on resin echoes through Shaw’s mise-en-scene, offering eras past and present, kaleidoscopic and pixel keen.

Shaw's tales a paean to the lives never lived and the lives best lived. A middle-aged yearning to understand and a punk youth fever to belong. “This is not just my story,” Shaw explained. “It is the story of each of us, and the story of our times.”

His enemy is complacency and puny thought.

His enemy is your old boss at a comic book company who thought graphic novels and movies were identical in form and perception.

(No - film unspools in axis of time and defined space - the graphic novel grants permission to linger.)

Shaw invites you to linger. To sit on carved wood or the window beam. Traverse 20 years and dynastic Mahabharata tales. Peter Brook's version runs 9 hours on stage, 3 on screen. 

Shaw entreats you to take your time.

You (and he) instantiate the Main character energy painted into every frame. You are the monkey king you are the trickster you are the deceived. You are then and now and never (and forever.)

You are the train at every station (and the one that never stops.)

For every paradise lost /another found.

In Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," urban scions seek to construct a bridge to the future - Shaw has succeeded where your dog-eared paperback failed.

Exit, pursued by a Kashmiri Himalayan black, Ursa mosaiced into this epic.

Your eyes narrow in the peak Midwestern sun, skyscrapers as high as an elephant's eye.

Keep passing the open windows.

And don't awaken the lions. 

Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost, 2009–25, automobile enamel, acrylic liner, and gesso on panel, 21 panels, more than 100 feet wide. Curated by Madhuvanti Ghose, Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art, Arts of Asia. Alsdorf Galleries (141–142), Art Institute of Chicago. Generous support provided by Usha and Lakshmi Mittal. On view through Nov. 15, 2026.

I was strolling through Asheville, North Carolina, as one does in the slow-rolling southern states where heat, history, and memory seem to rise from the sidewalks, and wandered into Momentum Gallery. Inside, a group exhibition titled What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience unfolded like a quiet chorus of voices. Among them, the works that stopped me cold were by Pam Longobardi: fiercely painted environments that speak to the collision between the natural world and global consumer culture. Her deliberately “messy” brushwork becomes a call-to-action, reminding us of the labor still required to clean up our planet. The narratives threaded through her paintings urge us to recognize our responsibility to the imperiled landscapes we inhabit. She asks us the question: Will society face the financial burden of the environmental crisis and will each of us fully own our responsibility? 

What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience asks us to consider our responsibility to artistic practice in a world under strain. The six artists here move through themes both intimate and expansive—environmental stewardship, inner landscapes, the passage of time. Their works invite viewers to look closely and enter into conversation, finding echoes of their own experience within each artist’s narrative and conceptual frame.

Eremocene III (transmute) churns with turbulent, painterly forms, evoking catastrophic cycles of weather.

Not included in this exhibition is one of Longobardi’s installations composed from the ocean plastics she gathers. In 2006 she founded the Drifters Project, her global, community-driven art initiative, after coming upon immense amounts of plastic washed onto remote Hawaiian beaches and other distant shores. Since then, she has mobilized thousands of participants to reclaim and reposition tons of debris, transforming it into the raw matter for her gallery and museum installations. Ocean plastic becomes the substance through which her activism is released. Longobardi suggests that art’s purpose is not only to make us see but to make us care…a call to attention and empathy in the face of accelerating ecological crises. The interiority that drives making abstracts is different from the public, collective processes of gathering plastic and building installations, work that demands managing people, physical labor, accumulation, and ecological witnessing. She describes making paintings as an “antidote” to the challenges of work with the Drifters Project. Yet the message running through both practices remains aligned. 

"I view the paintings as an antidote to the plastic work, but still wholly part of the Drifters Project. They are visualizations of vast forces of collision between natural processes (such as chemical patination of copper) and industrial human-made products (like plastics, acrylics, resin, and oils) that are happening around the world, all shrunken to the manageable scale of a painting space. Through these works, I’m able to control the outcome and nature always comes out on top." - Pam Longobardi

Longobardi also showed a handful of tiny collages made from devalued currency…a shift in pace and scale. These miniature worlds feel controlled and intimate. They carry a quiet poignancy unlike her larger, more turbulent works.

(L) Island of Refuge (red spire underground electricity); devalued currency collage on paper, 11 x 14 in., 2017 (R) Island of Refuge (purple waterfall green fossil); defunct and devalued currency collage and paint, 11 x 14 in., 2017

Pam Longobardi’s practice moves fluidly among painting, photography, and installation, all in service of examining the psychological ties between humans and the natural world. Her work unfolds within a larger conversation about globalism and conservation. Based in Atlanta, she recently retired as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University.

The What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience exhibition reminds us that art is both a mirror and a mandate. The works press us to see our own entanglement with a world under strain. Pam Longobardi’s practice makes that entanglement unmistakable. Her interactions with the world are physically and emotionally difficult, yet they reveal how creativity can shoulder responsibility…how it can turn witness into action. We’re asked not only to look, but to reckon with the mess we’ve created, and find ways to solve it.

Works by Pam Longobardi and the other artists in the What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience exhibition are showing at Momentum Gallery, 52 Broadway Street, Asheville, North Carolina through August 29, 2026.

By Liz Goldner

During the Golden Age of Hollywood (early to mid-20th Century), an important aspect of filmmaking was the painting of scenic backdrops, especially for picturesque movies. As the producers desired those backdrops to appear as “real” places, the film studios intentionally concealed the fact that they were created by hired artists. Most of the artists, who worked long hours on them, often on high scaffolds, were not credited for their work. 

Those circumstances resulted in tensions between the workers and the film studios, and ultimately in strikes, including the 1945 Hollywood Bloody Friday, by artists who resented the poor working conditions and inequities in wages and recognition. Conditions improved somewhat over the years, as they continued devoting their talents to the industry.

A magnificent example of the artists’ contributions is the painting of an Austrian town, “Backdrop for The Sound of Music” (1965). This 18-by-25-foot scene is displayed along a gallery wall in “Staging California.” The backdrop contains several majestic buildings and churches, nestled among the mountains, along with translucent materials inserted into the building windows, allowing light to shine through. Yet only Los Angeles artist Emil J. Kosa Jr. was credited for this work, even though five other artists had worked around the clock to create the scene.

The contributions of these talented artists, who were trained in the techniques of French and California Impressionism, became essential aspects of filmmaking during Hollywood’s Golden era. Indeed, this exhibition contains several movie clips featuring scenes painted by artists. These include “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939, with Dorothy dancing along the Yellow Brick Road, surrounded by the magical painted Land of Oz; and Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” 1959, with Cary Grant viewing the hyper-realistic Mount Rushmore. As the National Park Service would not allow the filming of actors climbing Mount Rushmore, the scene was so deftly constructed at MGM Studios in Culver City that many viewers believed they were seeing the actual monument.

Local artists also transported moviegoers, via painted backdrops, to locations as diverse as the Swiss Alps, Siberia, the South Sea Islands, the Sahara Desert and the New England Coast. Many artists were well acquainted with foreign landscapes thanks to their immigrant backgrounds, international travels, or art education in Europe.

Most studio painters had been fine artists before they worked on films. But unable to make decent livings with their art, they obtained studio employment for financial stability. They continued to work on their own paintings in their spare time, exhibit them and even win awards. 

The acquisition of many magnificent paintings in this exhibition occurred last September when the UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art merged with the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA). Events preceding the merger began in 2017 when the celebrated Gerald E. Buck Collection of 3,200 19th and 20th century California artworks were donated to UC Irvine. Dr. Stephen Barker, formerly dean of UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, proclaimed back then that the Buck Collection, with art by Larry Bell, Tony DeLap, Lorser Feitelson, Gilbert Lujan, Helen Lundeberg, Agnes Pelton, Peter Voulkos and many others is, “The greatest collection of California art that nobody has seen.” 

The University soon resolved that the Buck Collection, along with the Irvine Museum's collection of California Impressionism (that had also been gifted to them), would become the genesis of a UCI museum, with a building to be erected on its campus, to be called the Institute and Museum of California Art 

In spite of valiant efforts, a museum structure to house those valuable works did not materialize, and the UCI collection was displayed for several years in a 6,000 square foot gallery in Irvine. Then last June, to the surprise of many in the art world, a proposed merger of Langson IMCA and OCMA was announced, with the expectation that the new entity would be located in the OCMA building in Costa Mesa. After months of plans and negotiations, the merger went through, and “Staging California” is the new venue’s first exhibition containing many pieces from the Buck Collection. Of the 50 art pieces on display, there are also works from the former Irvine Museum collection, from OCMA’s permanent collection and from loans. 

The exhibition reveals the talent and technical expertise of artists who made their livings at film studios. “Untitled,” after 1932, by Paul Grimm (who painted virtuosic versions of clouds and overcast skies for films) is in this show. The painting illustrates sunlight and shadows illuminating a mountainous landscape. It contains detailed brushwork of the dessert foliage leading to the mountains, and the ridges and striations of the mountains, which are visually echoed by the sky and clouds above. Its luminous atmosphere captures the spirit of classic California Impressionism. 

Dong Kingman’s background—he was born in Oakland, CA, raised in Hong Kong, and lived in both countries—and his work painting scenery for films including “Flower Drum Song,” 1961, influenced his personal artwork. While his paintings often contained cultural influences from the U.S. and China, his watercolor, “Along the China Coast,” 1965, is located in his beloved Hong Kong. As a major piece from the Buck Collection, it contains boats and people nestled among bushes and trees, with a village in the background, and a luminous body of water. The painting reflects the type of detailed graphic artwork that Kingman engaged in for the film industry.

Arthur Grover Rider’s “Untitled (Taos New Mexico),” after 1918, also from the Buck Collection, expresses magical Southland light, which is endemic to California Impressionism. Yet the painting captures a classic Taos scene with its scorched earth, low-slung adobe buildings and hillsides. Two other paintings in this show, expressing the grandeur of California’s purple-appearing mountains, are Warren Newcombe’s “Winter Ploughing California, Calabasas,” 1931, and Emil J. Kosa Jr’s “How Marvelous Thy Works,” after 1928. 

A surprising piece in this show is George Gibson’s “Marche de Fleurs, Nice,” 1943-45, likely painted during a trip abroad. This depiction of a village in Southern France, with people, homes, shops and potted flowers, is closer in technique and subject matter to classic French Impressionist paintings.

“Staging California” is a diverse and delightful exhibition, presenting an amalgam of film clips and paintings from a highly creative period in Southern California. It reveals how early Hollywood’s compelling and popular films depended in part on fine artists’ work shaping the viewers’ perceptions of our world. The show has further importance, as many paintings from the Buck Collection, now on display, have been in storage for years, with art lovers yearning to see them. The exhibition at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art runs until October 4, 2026.

“…I try to believe in The Cross.

…But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.” -Anne Sexton, 1962

By Grey Dey

When I walked into Moth Belly Gallery for Joel Hernandez's At Least We’re Damned Together, I felt like I was walking into a really fun, sassy party. There on the walls were so many delightful and startling characters, sculpted in paper mache, looking right back at the viewer and, at times, even playing a kind of peek-a-boo. Faces emerge from masks and eyes peek through clouds and over water. So many characters and stories in exuberant colors, and faces full of lively expressions, greet you like entering an ebullient masquerade. But after my initial impression of celebratory color and charming style, I began to see the layers of interiority and critique. Childhood memory and innocence, magic and shapeshifting, and adult pleasure and demise, all intermingled throughout this playful exhibition.

     I was fortunate on a recent visit to San Francisco to catch up with Hernandez on a day when he was available for visitors to the gallery. I was able to spend a considerable amount of time with him discussing the show. Hernandez grew up in a Mexican border city, Nuevo Laredo, in the state of Tamaulipas, directly west of Lorado, in lower Texas. After some years in Indiana and Texas, he ultimately settled in San Francisco for the last 11 years, building his studio practice in the Mission District.

Fun video of the artist playing with the work in the studio: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ5UFPfITE9/

He told me of the powerful impression made on him in his childhood by the local artists of Nuevo Laredo, who set up shop just as you cross the border from Texas. These artists were heroes for Hernandez and reappear in his ongoing mastery of hand-crafted paper mache and color palette. His personal takes on many of these regional, cultural themes and subjects carry these influences and artistic traditions forward into contemporary contexts, without sacrificing the value of personalized work made with care by hand. We see Hernandez honoring one of these artists in the piece, Hungry for Food. The title is echoed in his Instagram comment referring to this piece and another similarly constructed piece, Hungry for Riches.

“The golden statue was inspired by all of the AI billboards around town that try to convince you to not hire humans. I wanted to create two people at different spectrums. One that is happily creating art, culture and color. The other, encouraging you to not hire humans therefore stopping human growth, creativity and all things only humans can make… -The artists are hungry for food and the CEO is hungry for wealth.”

Hernandez told me that the faces in the pedestal represent the many individuals in today’s world who are aspiring to those riches and trying to climb to the top. The figure cloaked in gold is hiding the opportunist individuals behind this corporate AI takeover who disregard the global and societal harm in its wake. We never see the people behind the onslaught of AI content.

In Hernandez’s art we see the ubiquitous influences of Catholicism infused into Indigenous and regional Mexican visual traditions. But that cultural colonization is subverted through Hernandez’s critique of religious and cultural dogmas that do not allow for his contemporary, multicultural,  Queer experience. Queer liberation and self realization often facilitates additional  insights around other agendas of institutionalized oppression such as racism and classism. In Two Little Homos Whispered In My Ear, Hernandez flips the metaphor of having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. This time, the (Queer) subject is reclaiming society’s demonizing, rejecting the moral binary, and choosing for themself who they will choose to listen to. As Hernandez said to me, “we control the narrative!” 

In the title piece, we see the empowered, flippant disregard of hegemonic threats. Like the quote above from Sexton’s poem, With Mercy for The Greedy, religious metanarratives fail to maintain their stranglehold in modern contexts. Today it is difficult to reconcile these colonial and contradictory belief systems with the atrocities witnessed everyday. We are left to create our own world views that reflect our experience today. From an interview with Brandon Joseph Baker he states:

"The title [At Least We're Damned Together] was inspired by a piece that I made a long time ago where a snake swallowed two men, but the men inside the snake were relaxed and smoking a joint. It’s about the idea that we can find silver linings in difficult moments. I think that’s the mantra that we’re all in right now, trying to find the upside and the positives in a dark moment in society."

We see another example of this critique in Learning When To Quit. The palmistry hand is painted with a board game template, replacing life-line wrinkles, that warns of ambitions for success turning to excess and ruin. We see a gay couple optimistically beginning their life together to create a loving home. To continue playing beyond that goal includes ignoring warnings to “stay here” and “turn back!” The journey then slides into the pathos of temptation and self destruction, sacrificing time and simple pleasures to the unquenchable desire for more. This results in ultimately losing everything. The yellow brick road need not go all the way to Oz.

The game and the hand are decorated with milagros (small, golden charms that serve as placeholders for prayers, hopes, and gratitude,) Loteria (a Mexican game similar to Bingo but sometimes used as an oracle) and Tarot cards, along with other symbols representing the mysterious forces that often complicate our life choices and confound our worldview. The sleeve cuff morphs into a collar and the hand stands in for the head, revealing the pressure and confusion of sorting all of this out.

While other works also incorporate milagros, several works reference iconography from contemporary global pop culture, layering them into historical Mexican cultural contexts. In Aye Carumba, we see a heart shaped face of a Mexican man emerging out of a stylized Bart Simpson head. The title of the piece confronts how U.S. audiences need comedic, slapstick, and often dehumanizing filters to process non-eurocentric and non-white-supremist references, in order to consume them as entertainment. In The Simpsons, a layer of innocence-as-camouflage is added in the form of a young boy co-opting the Spanish exclamation. All the while, we are reminded of the origins of the phrase through the winking Hispanic face. In Happy Gooble, we see an adult face, (probably a self portrait,) peeking through a beloved childhood TV character covered in toy replicas of Gooble’s friends on the show. The face is remarkably emotive, expressing the simultaneous feelings of nostalgia for uncomplicated youth, and gratitude for friends throughout the trials of adulthood. 

Inserted, now and again, are paintings, the subjects no different from the paper mache sculptural pieces that populate most of the show. Hernandez told me that they were portraits of previous sculptures he would have liked to have seen in this show of works made during the past year. He told me that he identifies as a painter and sculptor, but primarily as a storyteller. We can plainly see the narratives in some of the pieces mentioned above. But for some, it helps to see the pieces installed in relationship to one another to recognize a story. For example, in the pieces Remembrance, Quopo, and Blue Devil, Hernandez commented on Instagram that:

“With these three in particular, I wanted to make a triptych of what it felt like being stuck between nostalgia and being carefree. Living in the now and living in the past.”

At Least We are Damned Together is an emotional body of work. Not in a manipulative or pedantic way, but in a more honest and generous sharing of a spectrum of feelings shared with the viewer. A holistic offering from an artist capable of acknowledging this range within himself. Again, the overall impact on me entering the space was one of delight, but ultimately bringing to mind a quote from The Drama of The Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, "The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.” Let Hernandez’s work inspire us all to continue making art as resistance to our perilous times. As he relates in his artist statement:                 

“I like to think that there are better days ahead, but I’m also too aware of the difficult shared emotions we’re all going through given the chaotic times in which we live. Anger and despair can sometimes feel like waves crashing over our heads, and at the same time, joy and love can feel equally strong and important in these moments. In a time that feels like we’re facing crisis after crisis alone, I want people to know we are experiencing this together, and to hold on to loved ones. All we have is each other.”

‍ ‍At Least We are Damned Together is a powerful example of an artist’s ability to reclaim the language of the colonizers, and transform the violence of the oppressors. In Hernandez’s deft hands, these injustices become resistance through humor, beauty, and care that refuses to forget who we are and the communities we are a part of.

Through July 25th

All photos, @brandonjosephbaker brandonjosephbaker.com courtesy www.mothbelly.org

Enrique Chagoya is a Mexican-born American painter, printmaker, and educator whose work has become a major voice in contemporary political art. Born in Mexico City in 1953, he studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before earning a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1987 to 1990, he directed San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza, and he later became a professor in Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History. Chagoya is widely recognized for codex-inspired works, prints, and paintings that remix Mesoamerican imagery, pop culture, colonial history, and political satire. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Design, Stanford’s Dean’s Award in the Humanities, and a Tiffany Fellowship. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Whitney, and other major institutions.

Artist & Educator Enrique Chagoya | Interview by Hugh Leeman

The Closing of Anglim Trimble and a Perfect Storm

Hugh Leeman: Enrique, after years of being represented by Anglim Trimble Gallery, the gallery has recently closed. What was the reasoning, and what effect has that had on you as an artist?

Enrique Chagoya: It's a series of events that have been taking place in the context of the art market in general, and with this gallery in particular. The original owner, Paula Anglim, passed away about ten years ago. She left her son Philip in charge, and thanks to him the gallery stayed open, along with some of the people who had worked with Paula — in particular Ed Gilbert, her gallery director for many years. It was doing okay, though it was hard to sustain through various changes. They moved from Geary Street downtown to Minnesota Street Projects, which was a big move, and eventually took a second space downstairs. It was doing well from around 2016 until it closed last year.

Ed Gilbert died around COVID, in 2021 or 2022 — he got cancer, unfortunately — and he left the gallery in charge of Shannon Trimble. So the name changed first from Paule Anglim to Anglim Gilbert, and then, when Ed passed away, to Anglim Trimble.

Then things began to happen with COVID especially. COVID was a major storm in the art world. Suddenly galleries had no traffic, hardly anybody was buying art, the economy went down. Museums lost attendance, restaurants closed, all businesses were down. It was a huge storm, and that was one element complicating the market.

This is my personal opinion, but every time there is a recession, there is a concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Many businesses go bankrupt and are absorbed by larger ones — the big fish eats the small fish. That happened with COVID, and it happened in 2007 and 2008, when all the financial institutions needed to be bailed out. I felt it myself. My sales went down big time. I used to make as much income from art as from teaching at Stanford, and that changed in 2007 — it went down to maybe a third, and very spotty. The economy never really recovered from 2007 to 2009, and all of this has created an unstable situation in the art market. A lot of the middle-market or mainstream galleries went out of business around then.

But business has been very good for the high end, and it still is — especially for auction houses. A few auction houses in the US, Europe, and China — less than a dozen altogether — control about fifty percent of all global art sales. The rest is managed by private galleries or dealer networks. Thirty years ago, people could live off their work. Today, I admire artists who live off their work alone, because it has to be super stressful. The market goes up and down even if you're a branded artist. It's not stable for anybody.

Hugh Leeman: As an established artist, how did the Anglim Trimble closing specifically affect you?

Enrique Chagoya: All of these contexts created a perfect storm. Many galleries closed. Anglim Trimble closed — the director, Shannon, was exhausted, he complained all the time that he was tired and didn't have the energy to keep it going, especially because the times were more demanding. But in pretty much the same week or month, Rena Bransten Gallery also closed, or became more of an online gallery. Jack Fischer closed. Altman Siegel closed. Four galleries all of a sudden.

The way it affected me is the way it affected most artists in any of these galleries. Suddenly there's a surplus of artists and less supply of galleries able to sell art. This is my wild guess, because I haven't seen research on it, but it's a matter of numbers — fewer galleries, more artists whose work is perfectly acceptable for the middle-of-the-road market. At this point, because the market isn't great, it's very hard to find a replacing gallery. You'd be very lucky to have your work accepted by a gallery you find respectful of it — a gallery that really promotes the artist and pays you on time. I have friends who lost money from galleries. Some lost money and art when the gallery went bankrupt and never got either back. Horror stories.

The Most Invisible Censorship Is the Market Itself

Hugh Leeman: Let's talk about this, because it's beyond just local. In a previous conversation I mentioned to you that the gallery system, from my perception, has always been unfair, and no one wants to talk about it because they're afraid of being canceled socially by that very system. So they prefer to stay in a bad relationship because that's better, in their opinion, than being single. And you said, yeah, I agree with you. For someone who has shown at museums around the world, can you give listeners context? How does the gallery system function, and what's so unfair about it?

Enrique Chagoya: It's hard to generalize, and I'll be careful not to, because there's a spectrum of galleries from scary and terrible to amazingly great — with the amazingly great being the minority, and I'm talking from the artist's point of view, not from the perspective of profits.

I was extremely lucky to have somebody like Paule Anglim, because she knew a lot of collectors of difficult art. Not all galleries deal with difficult art — especially today, they prefer safe art, art that doesn't have a political opinion or a sense of humor, because they have to pay the rent. The more eccentric collectors are a minority.

To answer your question — in general, it's a fifty-fifty partnership on sales. In an ideal relationship, the gallery represents the artist's interests, promotes the work to collections, museums, and biennales, stores the artwork, sells year-round, and connects the artist to curators. For that, they keep their fifty percent. It can be a beautiful partnership in an ideal world. But one thing is the ideal world, and another is an economy that goes up and down.

Some galleries are run by independently wealthy owners who don't worry so much about sales — they pay attention to the quality of the art. Paula had many artists who didn't sell, but she liked the work, and eventually those artists became big names — like Lynn Hershman Leeson. Paula believed in the art. That couldn't happen with a gallery that needs to sell every show to stay open. I remember Paula trying to promote my work to other galleries in New York, and they wrote back admiring her for taking risky art. I love Paula forever for that. Reaching out to other galleries is an unusual move — most galleries don't do it. "Some even resent artists finding another gallery out of state, and they demand a cut of the fifty percent of the other gallery's share of the sale. Paula didn't do that, except a small ten percent on the first show, then she left me alone with my gallery in New York, George Adams, and my gallery in Phoenix, Lisa Sette."Paula was the exception. It's a very tough world for making a living as an artist from art sales alone.

And you don't want to be painting things you'd hate. As an artist, you might not want to do anything you don't feel passion for, regardless of whether it sells. But if you start calculating whether something will sell, whether it will alienate people, you're going to be a very unhappy artist — especially if you start selling what you don't like to paint.

Censorship, Bias, and the Frida Kahlo Record

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the "safe artist," and you've never been that. You've been censored not just in the United States but in France. There's even a circumstance where your artwork was destroyed by someone who broke into a museum and took a crowbar to it because it bothered them. What are your thoughts on censorship in the arts and freedom of speech today?

Enrique Chagoya: There are many forms of censorship — and maybe some people don't talk about this much, but I think the most invisible type is actually the art market. If you study what sells, who sells it, for what prices — which artists, women or men, artists of color, European white artists, African American artists — you're studying what sells and for how much.

Just to give an example: the recent Frida Kahlo painting that sold for fifty-four million dollars was a record price for any female artist ever. Yet people weren't celebrating it, because male artists from the same period — say, a Surrealist of similar quality and the same size — sell for at least twice, if not three times, more than Frida Kahlo's painting. That's a bias from the collectors themselves, who tend to be male, maybe business people. I don't want to stereotype who buys art — it could be somebody money laundering, I have no idea.

Hugh Leeman: Do you think, in Frida's case, we're looking at a self-supporting, vicious cycle? That a lot of the people buying are an investment class, and if Frida Kahlo doesn't sell for as much, it's harder to inflate the value and manufacture more value in it, compared to a Mark Rothko — so it becomes a hard cap ceiling on some artists?

Enrique Chagoya: Exactly. The market itself shows biases — and not only in auction houses. Any artist who makes a big statement gets it in the face. Think of Daumier, who went to jail more than once for making funny cartoons of the king. He was censored by the art market and by the king. But I'm beginning with the most invisible one, that hardly anybody thinks about. People say, oh, that's just supply and demand. It's not just supply and demand. Supply and demand is affected by branding. Some brands bring more demand even if the art itself is no better or worse. If you have a handkerchief where Picasso made a doodle, it's a hundred thousand dollars because Picasso did it. If I make a masterpiece on a handkerchief, nobody's going to pay a hundred thousand dollars, no matter how great it looks."

The branding is biased. Whether an artist shows in the Venice Biennale, which is a branding biennale — the Biennale in Havana is not going to bring an artist to a Gagosian Gallery. There are branded galleries. A mega gallery in New York versus a community gallery here — a solo show in each has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the work and everything to do with the branding value of the name. And because there's unequal branding in gender, cultural background, and content, there's a selection, and it tends to be unidirectional. By definition, discrimination means choosing. So if it's choosing one type of art over another, my question is: is that censorship? It feels like censorship to me. The thing is you're just left out. And then you can go to more direct censorship, where you're left out by more direct means.

Hugh Leeman: It seems like the art world is, in some ways, inherently a world of gatekeeping — and that gatekeeping is what allows this very unique economic engine to function, in which it manufactures objective value on a subjective quality like beauty, for a product that has no real value. Canvas and paint has no value, but you can make it worth millions if you get enough people believing in it.

Enrique Chagoya: "Yes — the aesthetic value versus the exchange value. They're opposites. The aesthetic value is something spiritual, for lack of a better word, because I'm not religious — an element of subjectivity from the inner world of a human being that is invested in the work. Most artists really invested in the work don't even think about sales; it's the last thing they want to think about, because it's alienating and takes over your practice. The material part is the opposite — idealism versus materialism. They can be a partnership, but it's delicate, and the main power is the material world.

Frida Kahlo never sold anything close to a few thousand dollars in her lifetime, let alone fifty-four million. Even her estate doesn't benefit from it. Same with Van Gogh, who barely sold anything, and now a Van Gogh goes for a hundred nineteen million. He was a struggling artist most of his life, supported by his brother Theo. There's an unequal exchange between power and creativity, where the artist gets the short end.

Back in 1973, the collector Robert Scull bought many Rauschenberg paintings for a thousand or two thousand dollars each, then flipped them a few years later for hundreds of thousands — one he'd bought for two thousand he flipped for a hundred fifty thousand. He made a few million; Rauschenberg didn't get a penny. When Rauschenberg complained, Scull just laughed and said, "I made your art more valuable, be thankful." And Rauschenberg answered — I saw it on video — "Well, you buy my next painting, okay?" Of course that never happened. He and James Rosenquist tried to get a bill through Congress requiring artists to receive royalties from all sales. The auction houses lobbied against it and it lost by a few votes. But in 1977 California created the Royalty Act, giving artists five percent on sales in California. That was the practice for a few years, until an appeals court struck it down in 2018. So we don't have that benefit anymore. In other creative industries, artists get royalties — if somebody writes Harry Potter, the writer becomes a millionaire from royalties.

Retiring from Stanford and the Weight of Academia

Hugh Leeman: After years of teaching at Stanford, you've decided to retire at the end of this academic year, summer of 2026. What was going on at Stanford that influenced you to retire?

Enrique Chagoya: Things change over time, especially the amount of commitments academia takes from you. Stanford was very supportive of my work — it gave me an amazing studio. When I started thirty-one years ago, in 1995, it was before the internet exploded. Email was just beginning. We had one faculty meeting every three months, just six or seven of us over a lunch break, and then I had the rest of the week to work on my exhibitions in my studio space. It really supported my career.

But there's a point where things began to happen, and moving fast forward to today — I have at least double the work, maybe triple, that's how it feels. Monthly faculty meetings, joint faculty meetings. Sometimes we have meetings to prepare for the meetings. We have to be on many committees — promotion committees, DEI committees, committees for murals on campus — because that's part of what you do to get promoted, from tenure track to tenure to full. You have to play more roles. Some of us become director of the art practice area, some become chair. Imagine all that administrative work where you don't have time to make your art. By the time you get to the beautiful studio, you don't have the energy — or even the time — to do the work.

Hugh Leeman: Were all these extra meetings enhancing education outcomes for the students?

Enrique Chagoya: Some of the meetings are productive, I have to say. But we're biting off more than we can chew. And now there are more cuts. This was maybe not news publicly, but the university endowments got their taxes catapulted. Endowments are what bring new faculty, pay for medical and technological research, and pay tuition for our grad students — our grad students don't pay tuition, they're paid for by an endowment. All these endowments used to pay one percent taxes. This administration raised them to twenty percent. That, in itself, is another form of economic censorship to me.

Hugh Leeman: So the raising of endowment taxes has a clear effect on the university's financial capability. You mentioned Stanford has started laying off adjunct teachers. Is that connected?

Enrique Chagoya: Yes, one hundred percent connected — less money to hire people. We had to get rid of quite a few lecturers. Many adjunct faculty could not be reappointed. People on scholarships, PhDs — I worked with somebody from neurosciences to prepare one of my classes, and the PhD student lost their scholarship. I ended up paying them from my research account, otherwise I couldn't have taught the class. All of this happened because the taxes were raised and the NEH grants were eliminated. Grants for the sciences, for medical and neurological research, were basically cut. There's an ideology that the sciences are too threatening to the values of the new monarchy trying to develop in this country. They don't want science — they want conspiracy theories, religion, extremism. They see universities as places where independent thinking is too threatening, including the sciences, even though the sciences benefit everybody, including the people doing the censorship.

So censorship is happening through economic measures that punish people who don't align with the government's policies and cultural brainwashing — and from there into actual censorship, like what happened with the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center. The Smithsonian censored a painting by Amy Sherald, where she painted a trans figure as the Statue of Liberty. I'm glad she refused to have a whole show based on that kind of censorship. That's another layer. Beyond the economic censorship there's cultural censorship — the culture wars against LGBTQ people. And what are they replacing DEI with? The opposite. Non-diversity. Inequality and exclusion. I don't know why the Democratic Party doesn't call it what it is.

Hugh Leeman: When you say they're becoming "woke" themselves — who is "more pure than thou" in this case?

Enrique Chagoya: The conservatives are being more pure than the liberal-minded. Because if you recall, the term "woke" was born from the left, criticizing other leftists who were too politically correct — more politically correct than you, that's very woke. That's how it started. And now the ultra-right is appropriating the language of the left to attack the left, which is very skillful. But the problem in our political system is that the Republican Party is already appropriated by the MAGA crowd — loyalty to the president like a cult of personality — and the other party has become Republican-light, always wanting to reach across the aisle, not wanting to be too radical.

The Devastation of CCA, SFAI, and the Bay Area Art Scene

Hugh Leeman: You've connected the funding cuts at Stanford, the laying off of adjuncts, and your own decision to retire. That's not getting the same headlines as the closures of CCA and SFAI. What are the long-term implications at Stanford, and adding the closing of CCA and SFAI, what are the implications for the Bay Area art scene?

Enrique Chagoya: They are devastating. There are fewer artists coming out of the Bay Area now. The closing of the San Francisco Art Institute and CCA was also affected by COVID. The Art Institute was already in financial trouble before COVID because it overexpanded with a building at Fort Mason, and when COVID arrived they had no students, especially foreign students from Asia and Latin America, and no income. That was a major blow. That's when people wanted to sell the Diego Rivera mural — I protested that sale. It created a conflict within the faculty and staff that ended tragically with the school closing a couple of years later. Same with CCA, little by little running out of money, affected by a bad economy and a shift toward programs pushed by parents paying astronomical tuition who want their kids in professions that can make a living. Not the arts, because the arts are now riskier than ever.

It's a cycle that affects the supply of artists and the culture in the Bay Area. I hope I'm wrong — I'd love to be wrong — but I think a lot of people now go to the East Coast to study art, and artists are moving out of the Bay Area because things are getting very expensive with the new tech boom and the AI explosion in San Francisco. I see it in graduate applications, where the art really lacks strength on concept and development, unlike other years, because a lot of artists are no longer coming from places like CCA or SFAI. So the quality of artists arriving in academia seems affected by all of this.

I hope it eventually shifts, because art existed before art markets. There's an industry that comes from art, but without artists there would be no auction houses, no galleries, no art historians, no art programs in academia. Without the artists, none of this art industry would exist.

Art as a Way to Keep Your Humanity

Hugh Leeman: In our previous conversation you mentioned a sense of hopelessness, even beyond the art world — a hopelessness in the world right now. What do you tell your students, and what would you tell people, to reclaim their sense of hope?

Enrique Chagoya: What I've been saying lately is: you have to see the arts as a way to keep your humanity. Not necessarily a way to make a living, but a way to develop your creativity as a human being who, among other things, makes art. As humans we're a complex of many versions of ourselves — writers, curators, theoreticians, some into economics like myself, or cultural anthropology. Eventually everything connects to your creativity, to your art. That's what I tell my students.

Even if you go into mechanical engineering or computer science, the only thing that's going to save you from AI Armageddon is the humanities. Because we think not only with our head but with our gut — they say the gut is the second brain — and that's nothing you could create in a robot. You cannot create the living experiences we have as social beings. Our consciousness is an experience, like language — we didn't invent language, we inherited it from our social experience. In your lifetime you get heartbroken, you get super happy, you lose a friend or a relative to illness, you grow older, you lose and gain many things. That drama affects the way you think, the way you invent, the way you discover new knowledge. If you work in computer science and don't study all of this, you'll create a boring, mechanical way of thinking. You might get all the information written about a subject when you ask a question — including the conspiracy theories, all mixed together — and AI is going to be a sycophant. It's always going to agree with you. It's never going to say, I don't know. It just makes up stuff. It sounds really good, but it's not informed by the life experience we have through biology. I don't know if we'll ever program that, because we'd have to give biology to a machine — a heartbreak, a family, children.

Hugh Leeman: We've become obsessed with efficiency, and forgotten that the most profound things in life are not efficient — love, human connection, creativity. I want to read something you said to me: "You have to feel that you need to make art as it humanizes us. Being a poet, a painter, a musician, you have to do it because there is an element of joy. If you feel guilty, even better. Focus on the benefits of thinking visually. The arts are about improving our neuroplasticity." Tell me more about this neuroplasticity, and the benefits of the process.

Enrique Chagoya: The humanities improve everything we do. Even in mechanical engineering or computer science, you'll make more complex work — the creativity is in the planning. Arts develop that creativity, and that develops what's called neuroplasticity. I learned this teaching a class on art and neuroscience last year in collaboration with a neuroscientist, Clara Bacmeister, a fifth-year PhD student. I did a lot of research and found a book called Your Brain on Art, by two writers from Johns Hopkins who have a neuroarts lab (Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross). They research very seriously the effects of art on stressful mental conditions and the role of art in healing — how art can be a way to deal with anxiety, depression, PTSD. Though I caution my neuroscientist friends that that's true as long as you don't have a deadline, because once you have a deadline it becomes very stressful — you can't even sleep.

We visited places like Creativity Explored in San Francisco and Creative Growth in Oakland, and saw the exhibitions at SFMOMA that included their work, along with NIAD from Richmond — artists who made amazing art. These places in the Bay Area were some of the first in the whole country, if not the world, to use art to give meaning to the lives of people who are neurodivergent. We loved it. One of my students from that class is now going to work at Creativity Explored — Sisely DeLisi, a great student.

Neuroplasticity is something we all have, and it develops with experience. It's a condition we have for life, so we can keep learning and absorbing new experiences, hopefully until the end. It affects our whole human health, because it connects to all our systems. When you have a healthy mind, you have a healthy body.

So I designed exercises connecting color to meaning. For instance — don't think about it — what would be your color for pain?

Hugh Leeman: Red.

Enrique Chagoya: Red, okay. And your color for joy?

Hugh Leeman: Yellow.

Enrique Chagoya: Great. And neutral?

Hugh Leeman: Green.

Enrique Chagoya: Green, okay. I gave a list of these binaries — fear, courage, neutral; noisy, quiet — and everyone made a chart of colors. Then I play mostly contemporary music with no lyrics, music that isn't popular, because I don't want anybody recognizing it, so I did a lot of work to find something new. Then we all — including myself — make compositions translating the sound into a color that reflects the emotion the tone gives you. We did this collaboration across two classes, and both times it was like a meditation experience. We all enjoyed the practice and ended up doing really interesting work.

The Profundity of Uselessness

Hugh Leeman: I love this idea. So much of what we've talked about circles around negativity and hopelessness — and so much of that is market-driven, connected to making a product. What you're describing now is the profundity of process. There was art long before there were art markets. I think of our deep ancestors making images on cave walls, most of which weren't even being seen — deep in caves. There was something ritualistic about it, allowing people to connect not just with each other and themselves but with something bigger than the self, that we might today call God. And this idea of color with emotion is almost like synesthesia, translating sound to a color, to a human connection.

Enrique Chagoya: Exactly. I even talk about synesthesia because I have it — with the days of the week. To me this is why we make art. Not only because it makes us feel good, but because it's healthy for your mind, and that's why it makes us feel good. There's a point where you get hooked and you cannot stop doing it. It pays you back. That's why we make art. If somebody's suddenly interested in showing or selling your work — okay, that should be the byproduct, but not the end of the art or the artist. And if that never happens, you'd better find another way of income. We all have to. A second job — teaching, being a curator, an art critic, an art historian. Or inventing a new way for art to be distributed beyond the art market, which would be a good creativity challenge for all of us.

There's a reason we make art, and it's very positive. It's about play — play without being self-conscious, without expecting anything. If you don't like what you did, paint other things on top of it until suddenly it happens. In my case, I make satirical images that make me laugh, and I don't care if they don't sell. I should care! But I hope I don't get canceled for that. The other thing I've been doing is the art with my students, which has no purpose — it's for no museum, no gallery — but it ended up making a beautiful statement of color. We studied abstraction, like Sonia Delaunay and her circles, and did something in that direction, but without thinking about anybody or making any statement — just listening to music and translating it into whatever subjective colors we feel.

With my own synesthesia — you could ask me ten years from now and it's the same — Sunday is a Kelly green, dark but bright. Monday is a light creamy yellow. Tuesday is a dark red, red red. Wednesday is yellow. Thursday is an earthy orange. Friday is a bright orange. Saturday is white. I think there are connections to my childhood — Sundays were the park, so I see green. Saturday was the only day I took a shower, so it's white. Monday is like the moon — in Spanish it's lunes, and luna is moon. Martes is Tuesday, and Mars is Marte — so I imagine Mars red, the red planet. Miércoles would be Mercury, Wednesday — though Mercury isn't yellow, somehow it became yellow. Thursday is Jueves or Jupiter. Viernes, Friday, I think is Venus. Saturday would be Saturn, and I don't have a reason to make Saturn white. But again, all of this is useless.

Hugh Leeman: Enrique Chagoya, I love the uselessness of this — and I connect it to the idea of play. Maybe the profundity of life is uselessness, and the absurdity of our marketplace is its obsession with usefulness. Thank you so much, Enrique.

Enrique Chagoya: On the contrary — thank you.

By Wei Huang

“I was never an outsider to anything,” this proclamation by Martin Wong (1946–1999), written in all capitals in an undated notebook now part of the collection of New York University, preludes Margo Machida’s catalogue essay for the exhibition Martin Wong: Chinatown USA at Wrightwood 659, Chicago. The insider-outsider dynamic has long been a favorite approach to Martin Wong and his art, so much so that the artist himself had to address it. A gay Chinese American, Wong grew up in the San Francisco Chinatown and later moved to New York in 1978, where he involved himself with the Black and brown community in the Lower East Side. He shunned the mainstream art world of the city and instead grew into one mainstay among artists, writers, performers, and graffiti communities often excluded from the mainstream art world.

The works displayed at Wrightwood 659 are largely informed by this transitional period and the subsequent time in Wong’s life from the 70s to the 90s, most of which would not have been shown to the public until 1993 at New York’s P·P·O·W gallery. The appeal of these paintings is evident. Occupying the third floor of the museum are his most extravagant paintings of the San Francisco Chinatown, defined by indigo hues and golden contours, while his most celebrated works, composed with the brick walls and the Black and brown dwellers of New York, populate the fourth floor.

Here one could easily characterize Wong’s perspective as an outsider’s lens. In his Chinatown paintings, Wong boldly employs some of the most stereotypical iconographies. In Jackson Chow Mein (1992), from the title, the dragon that takes up the majority of the canvas, to the neon restaurant billboards with Chinese and English written over, and the three Chinese caricatures in the foreground, this painting epitomizes the part of Wong’s artistry that critics and scholars such as Lydia Yee like to label as “self-orientalism,” a form of resistance against the Western gaze through the reappropriation of racial stereotypes. This interpretation, which charges Wong’s art with social and political consciousness, has been gradually challenged by scholars like Marci Kwon, who argues that the characterization itself is still flattening Wong’s œuvres that are so hard to be contained, as corroborated by the immense capacity of Wong’s artistry showcased in this exhibition. In Portrait of Mickey Piñero Tattooing (1988), Wong depicts his collaborator and romantic partner Miguel Piñero in a prison setting.

The two first met at a performance on the Lower East Side, where Piñero was cast in a crime-themed exhibit for his incarceration history. As active as Wong was in the Loisaida (a Spanish-English hybrid alias of the Lower East Side), coming from a middle-class background and having never been incarcerated, Wong straddled the threshold of the Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) community he loved so deeply, half in yet half out.

Despite his vehement rejection of the outsider status, Wong was at times ambivalent about his position in the world in which he indulged himself. In an interview with Machida in 1989, just a decade before his premature death from AIDS-related illness, Wong admitted that he investigated Chinatown from “an outsider’s view,” while his gaze at New York’s East Village was his own. The Chinatown paintings on display, though mostly created after he moved to New York, predominantly thematize the San Francisco Chinatown after dark, except for Canal Street (1992), featuring two pagodas erect against the New York City night sky.

Wong certainly felt affinity to the aesthetic of Chinatown, but the dearth of New York Chinatown in his œuvres paints a more complex picture of his attachment to the “Chinese Heritage.” The Manhattan Chinatown, just adjacent to the Lower East Side, never seemed to become integral to Wong’s vision. His depiction of the San Francisco Chinatown, on the other hand, is concocted with memories of the physical place and archives, as he acknowledged that the Chinatown on his canvas might resemble the one in 1938.   

The exhibition also presents Wong’s personal collection, ranging from work created by graffiti artists to Chinese antique artworks. Wong specifically drew inspiration from the Chinese scroll paintings, which culminated in his venture into the vertical format and the text-based form of painting, exemplified by A Meating of the Bored of Education (1971). In a widely circulated quote from a 1984 interview with Yasmin Ramirez, who curated Wong’s seminal  retrospective that ignited the contemporary interest in Wong at the Bronx Museum in 2015, Wong articulated being a “Chinese landscape painter……If you look at Chinese landscapes in the museum, they have writing in the sky. They write a poem in the sky and so do I.” The popularity of this quote, also featured on the label of this exhibition, is hardly surprising, as it serves as the perfect pretext to tie Wong back into the genealogy of Chinese art history and highlight his sense of Chinese identity.

Enticed by this art historical narrative still, curator of the show Yasufumi Nakamori treads lightly on the identitarian issue, acknowledging that Wong “occupied a complex position in regard to his identity.” For one who so assiduously traced the strokes and structures of the Chinese characters on the Chinatown billboards, Wong did not seem to concern himself too much about the language. He never learned Chinese, nor did he ever set foot in China. His interpretation of the inscribed poems on Chinese paintings as writing in the sky betrays a sense of exoticization. The auto-romanticization creates the illusion of “self-orientalism,” but this sense of political militantness proves incongruous with Wong’s unabashed use of racialized and eroticized imagery of Black and brown subjects  in his art and his fetishization of them that has since been problematized by by art historians such as Shanté Paradigm Smalls and Ramona Ngin, whose critical engagement with Wong’s role in the New York Hip Hop scene and his obsession with the incarcerated supplements our understanding of Wong's complex life and art.

Ever so rebellious, how do we grapple with this character of a man? Circling back to Wong’s interest in the Chinese characters, it inhabits only the most formalistic level. He attends their strokes with the same meticulous manner as he assembles the constellation of the stars and the American Sign Language (ASL) that so often ornate the backdrop of his pictures. Fantastical are his painted worlds, Wong cited social realism as his influence and characterized his Chinatown paintings as “straight documentation” with the help of photographs and memories. Displayed in the archive vitrine, a monochrome snapshot of the San Francisco Chinatown from 1958 stands out salient in this regard, as it captures the familiar nighttime when neon billboards, pagoda-like architecture, and streetlights in the form of lanterns are the most glamorous. He was never simply retrieving Chinatown as a concept, but a Chinatown from his childhood, the real life.

Operating on this rationale, Wong reinserted his child-self back on his canvas. In Clones of Bruce Lee (1992), a cheeky self-insert can be detected on the terrace on the proper left of the painting, where a small child peeks outside the window, unmistakably meeting the viewer’s gaze. Likewise, in Chinese New Year’s Parade (1992-94), Wong’s childhood persona takes up the central foreground of the work in Rückenfigur, facing a kaleidoscope of Chinese iconographies of a dragon (which is an exact recreation of a dragon prop in a photo of Richard Nixon at a San Francisco Chinatown parade) and Peking opera performers. When an avatar is absent, Wong’s body remains latent. Heaven (1988), a tondo consisting of nothing but a circular brick wall, is punctuated by the dark hole at the center of the canvas. An anus, a window for illicit transactions, a glory hole, one night of cruising, the plain brick wall assumes a surrealistic façade but constructs the very real world Wong lives in.

Martin Wong’s painted world is his manifested psyche, a self-mythologizing realm that keeps on expanding. A disciple of the world he lives in, his art occupies a certain liminal space between political and apolitical, where his faithful rendition of his lived environment is politicized much more than the artist’s intention: the Black and brown individuals, the carcerality, the Chinatown, the queer life. His art contains his entire world, and maybe that is why he was never an outsider to anything.

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

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

Somewhere to Be: Dark Comedy as Truth-Telling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Love Letter to Immigrant Families: Feeling Seen

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

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

Powerless and Powerful: The Child in the Back Seat

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

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

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

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

Being of Service to the Conversation

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

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

Hugh Leeman:  You're a storyteller.

Christy Chan:  Yeah. Yeah.

Innocence as Currency: The Child's Moral Weight

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

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

Inside Out: Censorship and the Right to Speak

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

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

Dear America: Bypassing the Bureaucracy

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

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

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

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

Fainting Couch: Who Gets to Rest?

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

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

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

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

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

The Complete Narrative and the Power to Participate

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

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

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

Christy Chan:  Thank you. Thank you so much.

 By Samantha Hull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vibrato of Memory

By Jan Wurm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Deborah Bishop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

63 x 17 x 17 in

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

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

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

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

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

Installation view of 615 Broadway exhibition, Seaside, CA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belonging and the reverberations of ancestral labor

By Tsitsi Michelle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Olin Marcus Johanssen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wall That's Part of Us

By Erik Recendez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Garrett Caples

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

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

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

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

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