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Night Parade with One Hundred Demons - Animated Straw House Accompanied by Double Tails Cat Shapeshifter, 2024
Watercolor and acrylic ink on paper
14" x 11"
Masako Miki (b. 1973 Osaka, Japan) is a multimedia artist whose work ranges from installation and large-scale sculpture, printmaking, watercolor and felting. A native of Japan, she now lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Strongly influenced by craft and folk art of different cultures, Masako remains close to her ancestral traditions, especially those that arise from her association with Buddhist and Shinto beliefs and practices, as well as traditional Japanese folklore.
Framed by Eric Rose Art Services
LYAM 3D, 2009
Color aquatint etching
20" x 27.5"
Kota Ezawa samples imagery from a broad range of sources, including news media, popular cinema, and the history of art, which he then distills into flattened landscapes of pure form. LYAM 3D refigures Alain Resnais's French New Wave film, L'Annee derniere a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), released in 1961. Here, the animated actors are divorced from texture and the camera's presence is replaced by Ezawa's hand, rendering only the essential shapes. Resnais's cinematic masterpiece is stripped clean of any romance or narrative arc, but Ezawa adds the American "oomph of 3D," updating it for a contemporary audience.
Framed by Mark Ryan Fine Art Services
Calendar Girl, 2022
Mixed media resin on panel
20.5" x 20.5" x 2"
ready to hang
Signed by Jeff Kelley on behalf of the Hung Liu Estate
Hung Liu (Chinese, b.1948) was a renowned painter, born in Changchun, China. In 1975, she attended Beijing Teachers College in Beijing, and after that she studied mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. As a young woman, Liu was sent to the Chinese countryside for four years during the Cultural Revolution. Enrolling at the University of California in San Diego, La Jolla, CA, she had to wait four years to receive a passport and finally graduated with an MFA in 1986. Most of Liu's paintings have their basis in anonymous Chinese historical photographs.
In 2003, Hung Liu began working with David Salgado, of Trillium Graphics, to create hybrid works combining aspects of painting and printmaking. Together they developed an elaborate process for embedding images - from Liu's own paintings, historical photographs, traditional Chinese motifs - in layers of translucent resin upon which Liu would then paint in her signature improvisational style. This resulted in a extended body of mixed-media panels that allowed Liu to experiment with process while painting "by other means."
Liu held numerous solo exhibitions in different places, including Foreign Students Dining Hall, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China (1981), Brazos Gallery, Richard College, Dallas, TX (1988), and Andrew Bae Gallery, Chicago, IL (2010). In addition, she has also participated in many group exhibitions in diverse places, such as Winter Palace Gallery, Beijing, China (1978), Asia Society Galleries, New York, NY (1994), and Selby Gallery, Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL (2010).
Liu was an accomplished artist, and over the years, she received many awards, grants, and recognitions. Some of these include the Capp Street Project Stipend, San Francisco, CA (1988) and the Contemporary Art by Women of Color Artists' Award, Guadalupe Cultural Center, San Antonio, TX (1990). Since 1990, Liu was a professor of painting at Mills College, Oakland, CA. She was represented by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York, NY, the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, FL. Liu lived and worked in Oakland, CA.
Rainbow Bridge, 2007
Acrylic and gouache on paper board
10" x 10.25" x 1.5"
Emerging from Huffman's lifelong interest in science fiction, formalist abstraction, and social justice movements, the "Traumanauts" are futuristic beings that travel the galaxy in constant search for home. Huffman began developing the series characters, symbols, and narrative in the 1990s. Combining his notable abstract, gestural style with a decidedly figurative focus, these works present an imagined and safe interstitial space that plays between these aesthetics.
Rainbow Bridge explores an Afrofuturistic landscape disrupting the canon of historical narrative painting with otherworldly horizons. Here, the Traumanat is Jimi Hendrix riffing on his guitar, which churns technicolor waves. The work's title references Jimi Hendrix's posthumously published 1971 album of the same name.
Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
Pathway 1, 2023
Graphite and acrylic ink on book board
30" x 30"
I received my M.F.A. in Book Arts and Printmaking from San Francisco State University and my BA in Literature and Women's Studies at Oberlin College. I live and work in Berkeley, California.
I am an installation artist who works with a variety of materials including wire, used book parts, graphite, found wood and metal. I create bodies of work that explore the interplay between light and shadow, 2D drawings and 3D sculptures, and the way objects and drawings can energize and animate the space around them. My work can be seen at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, the SFMOMA Artist Gallery in San Francisco and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.
My public art pieces are on permanent display at: Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center; Stanford Medical Center in Emeryville; Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City, CA; The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto; the Public Libraries in Hayward and Lafayette; Square HQ in San Francisco; and Guild Row in Chicago, IL. Most recently, my work was placed in the residence of the Ambassador to Kuwait thru the US Department of State's Arts in the Embassies Program. It will be exhibited in Kuwait City thru 2023.
I have done two different artist residencies - one at the Vermont Studio Center and the other the SIM residency in Reykjavik, Iceland - and I have found them immeasurably helpful in developing seeds of ideas. The starting points for recent bodies of work, including "Tending" and the "Burst" series emerged as a result of being set loose in an unknown place and seeing where I landed, what I found there and where I pointed my feet.
Courtesy of Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA
Keep on Going, 2024
Handmade pigments and shell silver on hemp paper
7" x 11.5"
Artist Statement:
I have often seen women applauded and appreciated for the burdens they carry/ the hurdles they overcome as they navigate their lives versus their core value and strength to hold on to hope and to persist. As an offshoot of a previous character who pursues self-love in this toxic patriarchal world, this character is the most current version of her, still going on, still navigating the world around her, still doing it for self-love. The hurdles/hardships she is tied to have become heavier and the chains a bit longer to accommodate the growing challenges. However, as the viewer (us), are we choosing to focus on the obstacles she conquers or the virtues she possesses? Can we celebrate her for her? Can the work be about her no matter what victories, hurdles, burdens she brings with her? Can we value her without knowing or being convinced by her record of triumphs and challenges?
Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman
Framed by Sterling Fine Art Services
Berkeley Buick, 1979
Lithograph on Stonehenge paper
Paper dimensions: 23.25" x 28.5"
Image dimensions: 12" x 18"
Artist Proof, signed
Robert Bechtle was an American Photorealist painter known for his depictions of sunlit streets and everyday life. With a distinctive, non-narrative aesthetic, his watercolors and oil paintings documented friends, family, automobiles, and architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area. "They're all things that I've noticed just living here," the artist once said of his subject matter. "Things that I see on my walk in the morning, or I'm driving by and something jumps out and says, 'photograph me'."
Born on May 14, 1932 in San Francisco, CA, Bechtle studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, graduating with an MFA in 1958. Though his early work was gestural and influenced by the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, Bechtle made a decisive step to produce paintings based on photographs during the mid-1960s. This new approach to painting from photographs, linked him with artists such as Richard Estes and Richard McLean. Today, the artist's work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Bechtle passed away on September 24, 2020 at the age of 88 in Berkeley, California.
Frame courtesy of Sterling Fine Art Services
Untitled, 2024
Paint on paper
Framed dimensions: 14" x 11" x 2"
Printed exclusively for the Kala 50 Art Auction
Barry McGee received his BFA in painting and printmaking from SFAI and was associated with the Mission School, a movement primarily influenced by urban realism, graffiti, and American folk art, with a focus on social activism. McGee's works constitute candid and insightful observations of modern society, and his aim of actively contributing to marginalized communities has remained the same throughout his career, from his days as "Twist" (his graffiti moniker) to his current work as a global artist. Whether it be consumerism or social stratification, McGee has given voice to his concerns through his art, taking on different personas, such as Ray Fong, Lydia Fong, P.Kin, Ray Virgil, and B. Vernon. His trademark motif, a male caricature with droopy eyes, references his empathy for those who identify the streets as their home. His conglomeration of experiences has led McGee to create a unique visual language consisting of geometric patterns, recurring symbols, and the use of the "cluster method," while experimenting with various unconventional media, including glass bottles and other found objects.
Framing courtesy of Mark Ryan Fine Art Services
Untitled, 2022
Oil stick and latex on canvas
18" x 26.5" x 1.5"
Alicia McCarthy was born in Oakland, California in 1969. She is known by her signature style of vibrantly colored, often woven patterns on mixed media panels. Found wood and spray paint are two commonly used materials by the artist. McCarthy is a member of the Mission School, a movement that emerged in the 1990s in the Mission District of San Francisco. The movement encompasses a group of artists who take their inspiration from urban culture of the Mission District, graffiti and street art. The movement is according associated with the use of non-traditional artistic materials and found objects. McCarthy received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007. She has exhibited internationally and has received numerous awards, including the Artadia Award for San Francisco in 2013. Her work is included in a number of important public and private collections, such as the Oakland Museum of California, Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California, MIMA the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York City. The artist continues to live and work in Oakland, today.
Comparsa de Fuego (Fire Procession), 2021
Seven layer serigraph and linocut, ed. of 60
22" x 30"
Political activism has been core to Pavel's upbringing. As a member of the teacher's union in Oaxaca, the artist's mother was at the forefront of the yearly protests with hundreds of teachers demanding for better pay, infrastructure, and supplies.
The visuals of people chanting and marching the streets in 2020, resembled the artist's memories of a protest he participated in 2006 alongside the teachers. The march in 2006 as it was in 2020, demanded a systemic shift.
Last year's protest also gave rise to a decentralized leadership among the protesters which was witnessed in Hong Kong or Black Lives Matter, for example; a philosophy that has guided the teacher's union in Oaxaca for decades.
Printed at Self Help Graphics as part of the residency, "Beyond the Press"
Redemption, from the Interconnected Systems series, 2023
Mixed media dimensional collage
Original digital imagery printed on 100% cotton rag paper, acrylic paint, assorted art papers
13" x 13" x 3"
Framed in a shadow box
When my friend, artist Priscilla Otani, viewed my uncut prints of plant capillary systems, she exclaimed that they looked like meat, flesh, or muscle! I had NOT "seen" that and it took me aback so I pinned them to my studio wall for consideration and regarded them anew as vibrating, pulsing, confrontational beings. Not at all in line with my serene Smith River series or my conscious state of mind, I contemplated what this said about my psyche and how I was reacting to growing global conflict which felt like a meaty, messy, and intractable entanglement. What could I envision as hopeful? I asked myself. Perhaps, a flowering, accompanied by forgiveness, and a sense of healing.
Redemption contains digitally modified original photography of plant capillary systems that are printed on 100% cotton paper at Kala Art Institute. Its center was cut and layered into a blooming structure with a variety of handmade and art papers. The substrate is painted matte black and the "mandala" is floated, ever so slightly, above the substrate.
Courtesy of Abrams Claghorn Gallery, Albany, CA
Cloud Sparkle 2023, 2023
Wire
18" x 15" x 2.5"
I have been drawing with wire for many years. I started with simple forms and methods of joining. I added some natural materials along the way and added thicker wire for 3 dimensional depth. This piece is part of a series of "Sparkle" pieces made when there is too much scrap laying around the studio. This is in contrast with the symmetrical work I usually produce.
Courtesy of the Artist
Cascade 12.12.23, 2023
Acrylic ink on synthetic paper
14.75" x 11.5"
framed
I use water-soluble acrylic ink, brushes, squeegees and sponges on synthetic paper. Combined, they have possess an unpredictable nature that informs and shapes the direction of my work.I have an impulse to open with a broad upward strokes as high as it can be pulled. Where the feathery stroke ends becomes an arena with counterpoints filled with down rushes, traversing undulations of crisp sponged edges on a non-porous synthetic paper which reverts to the original white surface - a surface beset with unexpected and risky challenges.This smooth surface can completely wipe away the ink in an instant and erase all history. Then I have to begin again without a ghost or trace of the original foundation. On its way to becoming something, the painting is always poised on an edge of failure. These works often take days to resolve. Sometimes just a small passage is all that remains after an entire day. Other times the entire painting will be lost. A small misstep may result in an enormous shift in direction. I constantly watch these paintings collapse with a shock of loss, yet trust I will find my way back. The process is often indeterminate and its' conclusion, more like a surrender.This is where I find the painting's definitive beauty.
Courtesy of Dolby Chadwick Gallery
V1:2, 2017
Photopolymer intaglio
Edition 4/12
Paper dimensions: 10" x 8"
Image dimensions: 2" x 2"
VI:2 is part of a series, In The Studio, where I tried to capture the quieter and more fleeting moments of reflection that happen in the studio. These moments inspire me, percolate through my subconscious and ultimately help inform my work.
"Signal Hill", 2024
Textile
27" x 20.5"
Hanging rod on back
The joy of flight; the exaltation of youth; a celebration of a black life that matters.
Habibti Cosplaying as Palm, 2023
Glazed stoneware
21" x 8" x 4.5"
Inspired by Mesopotamian votive figurines, they're contemporary interpretations that mesh pop culture, fashion and funk!
Enclosure VI (Testing the Water), 2021
Photopolymer intaglio and chine colle
Image dimensions: 5" x 8.5"
Framed dimensions: 11.5" x 14.5" x 1"
Enclosure VI is part of a series of diptych prints which include elements from the natural and built environment that indicate boundaries - concrete edging, the surface of water, building facades. These observed and spatial subjects are paired with less defined spaces that indicate planning and design - the printed page, mis-registered color layers, graphs, grids. With these pairings, I am interested in phenomena at the edge of my vision, and the transitory spaces of moving from inside to outside, from contained to open.
Untitled, 1997
Tea bags and wax
8" x 15" x 2"
Visualization, transformation, and presentation
These pieces began in 1997 while my studio was located in West Oakland. It was always cold and I drank endless cups of tea. I started to save them and bring them into my studio.
At this time I was working with alternate materials, objects, things picked up on walks, and dipping them in wax. The wax transformed them. They became another object and allowed me to see them in a new way.
Courtesy of Transmission Gallery
LITTLE KING, 2023
Acrylic
12" x 9" x 1.5"
unframed, on finished, clean cradled panel
Painting is thought of as a flat art form. It isn't, of course. In this piece I played with pushing the piece into the viewer's field to create a little inescapability from a particular political moment.
It's Not Too Late, 2021
Paper, pencil, and acrylic paint
11.25" x 21"
Libby Black is a painter, drawer, and sculptural installation artist living in Berkeley, CA. Her artwork charts a path through personal history and a broader cultural context to explore the intersection of politics, feminism, LGBTQ+ identity, consumerism, addiction, notions of value, and desire.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with such shows as "California Love" at Galerie Droste in Wupertal, Germany; "Bay Area Now 4" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; "California Biennial" at the Orange County Museum of Art; and at numerous galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Black has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA; and Spaces in Cleveland, OH. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, and The New York Times. She received a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2001. Libby is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.
Courtesy of Libby Black
Palace of Memory, 2014
Archival digital print, ed. of 5
37" x 37"
Framed
These prints began with drawings of a rapidly moving river. Many drawings were combined to make the first River Scrolls. They evolved into these complex, fountain-like forms and were a point of departure for the Palace of Memory paintings which followed.
Natural Oron, 2022
Stitched raffia, ink, collage, on mitsumata
8" x 8"
Framed dimensions: 10" x 10" x 0.75"
This piece is from a large series of stitched raffia on mitsumata. Starting with small 7x5" pieces, over years the series evolved to include other sizes, some quite large, as well as pieces mounted on panel or other types of paper. This piece also includes ink and collaged stitching on mulberry paper.
Materialia Lumina Print Portfolio, 2022-23
28 prints from across the globe featuring a variety of printmaking, photography, calligraphy, & handmade paper techniques
13" x 9.25" x 2.5" (closed box - some prints fold out to other dimensions)
Materialia Lumina is the fourth portfolio project produced as a generous collaborative effort in support of The CODEX Foundation's publications program. Twenty-eight international artists have contributed their illuminated works to this assembly/exchange portfolio.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:Denise Bookwalter, Ken Botnick, Sarah Bryant, Julie Chen, Jan & Crispin Elsted, Gwen Harrison & Sue Anderson, Sarah Horowitz, Ellen Knudson, Patricia Lagarde, Clemens-Tobias Lange, Sara Langworthy, Russell Maret, Suzanne Moore, Didier Mutel, Felicia Rice, Francois Righi, Gaylord Schanilec, Veronika Schapers, Leonard Seastone, Robbin Ami Silverberg, Johannes Strugalla, Barbara Tetenbaum, Tricia Treacy, Two Ponds Press & Stephen Hannock, Claire Van Vliet, Till Verclas, Ines von Ketelhodt & Peter Malutzki, & Richard Wagener.
Courtesy of The CODEX Foundation
Pine Tree, 2023, 2024
Archival pigment print
Image dimensions: 8" x 10"
Framed dimensions: 16" x 20"
This image is from an on-going book project examining my family's relationship with place, language and loss.
Joshua Tree National Park, California (#4), 2014
Daguerreotype
Framed dimensions: 11.75" x 13.375" x 1.5"
Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. As a child who immigrated to the US from war-torn Vietnam in 1979, the memories and trauma of his diasporic experience serve as the foundation for his investigative practice. In his highly acclaimed series of chlorophyll prints, Danh uses photosynthesis to print portraits from the Vietnam War era directly onto the surfaces of the leaves. Danh is also noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape. His work has been collected by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He is an associate professor of photography at San Jose State University.
Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco
Shopper, 2023
Oil on canvas
13" x 13" x 2"
maple strip frame with 1/2" front facing side
My work investigate ideas about place, belonging and family. I employ expressionistic mark-making, line, color and shape to create structures that may recall familiar forms or landmarks. Built from loosly-knit grids, these forms can be perceived as both sturdy and precarious, static or in motion, open or closed. These dualities mirror the bonds connecting us to each other and the places we call home.
The Ice House at Mt. Vernon, 2019
Kiln formed glass
11" x 14" x 0.25"
Cheryl Derricotte is a visual artist and her favorite mediums are glass, paper and textiles. Originally from Washington, DC, she lives and makes art in San Francisco, CA. Her art has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, MerciSF and the San Francisco Business Times.
From July 17-21, 2024, Cheryl will be a Visiting Artist at the Museum of Glass (MoG) in Tacoma, WA, commensurate with her work in the ground-breaking MoG exhibition, "A Two Way Mirror: Double Consciousness in Contemporary Glass by Black Artists." Prior to MoG, Cheryl served as the Spring 2024 Marva and John Warnock Artist-in-Residence/Visiting Professor at the University of Utah, Department of Art and Art History. She is 2023/2024 Kala Art Institute, Municipal Artist-in-Residence for the City of Berkeley's Climate Equity Pilot Program. In 2022, Cheryl was named Inaugural BIPOC Artist-in-Residence at the Corning Museum of Glass: The Studio.
Cheryl was an inaugural Emerging Artist at the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2015/2016, on the occasion of the Museum's 10th Anniversary. She became known for bringing the images of formerly enslaved people to life through the medium of glass. In 2021, she was awarded the commission to develop a monument to Harriet Tubman at the transit-oriented development Gateway at Millbrae Station, the first sculptural tribute to the abolitionist in glass. Entitled "Freedom's Threshold," the monument was unveiled on March 16, 2023. The work in Kala's auction, "The Ice-House at Mount Vernon," is based on a historic drawing and portrays two people who were enslaved on founding U.S. President George Washington's plantation.
Courtesy of the Artist and re.riddle Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Deer Tracks, 2024
Woodblock edition print
36" x 36"
This work is part of a larger series entitled the 'Meandering' Series that investigates typeface as design elements as it relates to a new series of poems the artist is cultivating. Nicole's practice includes the exploration of woodblock printing, artist books, poetry, and collage as a means to reflect landscape, language and memory.
Tuck, 2012
Oil on panel
7" (diameter) x 2.5" (depth)
Pattern is integral to my work, both in form and content. From my earliest creative endeavors, pattern acts as both structure and metaphor to create a place where sensuality and order meet.
Discarded, mass-produced fabric items inspire carefully crafted works in oil or gouache, countering the ever-increasing pace at which these types of items are produced and consumed. The Curtains series focuses on one item: a polyester curtain from Goodwill Central Texas in Austin, Texas. As an act of reverence, it is painted to scale.
The mass-produced items integral to my work are infused by an exploration of visual thinking. It is my hope that the unseen labor of thought, combined with my labor-intensive process, will produce works with a particular materiality, so that meaning can unfold slowly over time. The paintings, balanced between representation and abstraction, recast what may otherwise be overlooked as banal into singular poetic experience.
Chase the Morning Sun, 2022
Letterpress/Pressure Print (unique)
22" x 17"
Improvising and experimenting through chance and choice, this work evolved as a collage of the seen and the unseen. The series of unique prints focused on the nuanced and shifting layers of my recent existence.The isolation of the pandemic combined with loss and grief infiltrated my art practice. I was experimenting with forms and layers to peer through as I was peeling back the curtain of emotion that had enveloped me. The colors shifted from mournful blues to brighter shades as my grief lightened. I have continue to work on this print series with changing forms and colors. My environment continues to exert pressure on me and the gravity of loss comes and goes. This way of working - being both prepared and flexible while letting the materials guide me - remains transformative.
21.08.17.01, 2021
Watercolor on paper
10" x 10"
Watercolor has long been the medium of choice for Nicole Phungrasamee Fein. With a meticulous hand and singular focus, Fein challenges the conventional use of watercolor. Luminous veils of color and pattern become fields centered within the square. Droplets intermingle on paper, creating dense composites of color.
Courtesy of the Artist and Hosfelt Gallery
Spring Meadow II, 2024
Acrylic on framed panel
8.75" x 8.75" x 1.25"
Ready to hang with included cleat
Using flat color and simplified shapes, I seek to isolate relationships in the landscape that hold an emotional resonance. This painting is based on an observational sketch made of a Sea Ranch house peeking up from behind a tree.
Courtesy of Qualia Contemporary Art
Shadow Within, Naoshima, 2023
Intaglio
18" x 24"
This work is a part of my Mingei series, which examines art objects made by ordinary people during the Edo period in Japan. I continually ask myself what it means to incorporate and reimagine Mingei in today's modern art context; this question allows me to creatively bridge a gap of over four hundred years and shed a new light on a tradition not only time-honored, but time-bound as well.
Crest From Below, Tahoe Tree Line 5, 2018
Color pastel on wax on panel
10" x 10" x 1"
On panel, unframed
Seeing though a veil of captured dots, & the processes to integrate photo imagery is something I came to early in my printmaking practice. Seeking out techniques & materials (both traditional & emerging) to add to my image making vocabulary, I've been drawn to that edge between print tradition and naive innovation ever since.
For my current work I developed a lo-fi printmaking method. Utilizing digital technologies, hobby-grade fabrication machinery, & industry plastic materials I have been able to produce highly detailed pochoir screens in plastic, & use them to build up non-editioned monoprints of photo halftones, using in soft pastel on poured wax surface. It provides a unique ground to play at the boundaries of printmaking, photo imaging and drawing.
The Crest from Below, Tahoe Tree Line series focuses on the fading light through roadside tree tops. This is a unique view that is caused by the permanent path of a paved road through seemingly wild lands. Over time the trees morph around our laid asphalt and offer these crescent shaped landscapes to those who move along them. Reduced silhouettes that rely on delicately implied details and hold saturated colors of light along the edges. A contrast of dusk's blinding highlights against the darkened tonal forms of the passing forest.
Untitled, 2015
Silkscreen, drawing, and collage monotype
22" x 18.5"
My inspiration comes from my interest in giving new meaning to everyday, used objects and materials, and making the common and discarded, uncommon and precious.
I like to combine various print media such as: monotype, screen-printing, linocut, and cyanotype; using and reusing materials such as paper, wire, and fiber, - in order to create my mixed media art.
I have always thought of my work as improvisation, a matter of responding to what I have just created with the materials.
My approach to making art is as a gradual process, elements arising organically out of their interactions with each other, sometimes leaving traces even when they are covered by later additions.
I experiment with different materials, substances, and techniques, trying to push the limits, in order to open to the viewer to explore and become emotionally engaged with the art.
Frame courtesy of Atthowe Fine Art Services
Summer, 2023
watercolor, gouache on paper
9" x 13"
Pivot Series, 2023
Graphite drawing with metallic ink, colored pencil
31" x 25" x 2"
This drawing combines stasis and movement. The detailed graphite drawing with embossed lines and color pencil is contrasted with the spontaneous swipe of two arcs of metallic ink.
Courtesy of Sheila Ghidini
Thread and paper
18" x 18"
Weaving together the lines of art, craft, and design, the common thread in my work is thread. My main process is hand-sewing thread into paper, creating intimate works that play with thread as line, and invite us to see thread in new ways. I honor handwork, intuition, and play, and through the language of thread, hope to offer more joy and presence with the sensual world around us. This piece was inspired by the Marin hills that green in springtime.
Untitled, 2023
Softground etching, chine colle
11.5" x 11.5"
Framed in a custom hardwood frame with plexiglass
In 2022, I watched the hills catch fire near my adopted home in Crockett California. Since then I have witnessed them evolve from scorched black earth, to bright green spouts, to tall dry grass. And back again. Growing up on the East Coast, I am fascinated with grass in the West, from plastic astroturf to native rye. Although there are tens of thousands of species of grass, like the floor that we walk on, its ubiquity causes invisibility. My recent projects both question and appreciate grass for its perennial adaptability, varied cultural significance and fragility. Etched or in metal through the soft ground process, I'm interested in re-making delicate materials strong, as they truly are. A lawn in the suburbs is a class signifier. A golf course is a sponge for water in drought. A rolling green hill becomes kindling come fire season.
Morning Hour, 2016
Woodcut, collage
Framed dimensions: 25" x 22"
Image dimensions: 22.5" x 19.5"
I have been working with biomorphic images in both painting and print over the course of the last several years. To me biomorphic images seem to manifest the fundamental essence of living things, evoking the constant movement of organisms within themselves.
My paintings create complex, intertwining networks that sometimes look partly human, partly vegetable. I hope I have succeeded in shaping some kind of crossbreed of the two. There is also an ambiguity to the images that hopefully allows for broader interpretation.
To the contrary, simplicity is what I focus on when I make a print. The images in the prints are lean and stripped down compared to my paintings. The minimal elements in my prints do directly correspond to the layered shapes I work with in the paintings but achieve a very different effect.
The surface of the printed image has always attracted me. I feel that there is a sort of tension on the surface of a print. The result of the printing process is that only what is necessary is retained on the paper, nothing more, and nothing less. It is different from what is painted even when the same color is used. Colors in prints do not just sit on the paper; rather they go deep into the paper. I like the unified surface and physical appearance that the printmaking process can convey.
My interest in printmaking is shifting from making simple images to constructing repetitious forms and patterns by applying more and more layers of color and shape. I want to add emphasis to the structural patterns that are derived from the accumulation of simple units. I want the forms to pass from the geometric to the plastic. I want to weave a sense of time and space into that structural pattern. That would be a very affirmative achievement for me.
-Takuji Hamanaka New York, 2005
Ochre Hills, 2022
Linocut
Paper dimensions: 13" x 13"
Framed dimensions: 16" x 16"
This work continues my practice of exploring abstracted landscape imagery. The edition of 25 was printed on a letterpress at In Cahoots residency in 2022. This print is numbered 2/25.
Sam Wearing Three Mobius Strips as a Hat, 2016
Woodcut, drypoint, hand painting
Image dimensions: 15" x 11"
From the series, Fascinators, in which the sitters are wearing mobius strips and other mathematical or paradoxical figures as hats. These forms could only be worn and held convincingly in the two-dimensional world of the print, though the surrealism is not immediately apparent. Combinations of woodcut, drypoint on copper, and hand painting, the flatness of the figures contrasts with the dimensionality of their headpieces and a narrative begins to open up between the adorned female figures and the mobius - a physical manifestation of abstract or invisible concerns. Themes that arise include recurrent and paradoxical thinking, the age of reason, communication, femininity, and the choices we make that define identity and our own realities.
Frame courtesy of Eric Rose Art Services
Untitled, 2021
Digital pigment print
20" x 15" image, 22" x 17" paper
unframed
Through an expansive exploration of self-portraiture, my work weaves together strategies of performance and studio photography to point to the tensions found in the evolving discourse about gender and sexuality. It situates my own body in a performative role to widen queer representation and disrupt the dominant ideology of masculinity.
See Saw, 1983
Etching
30" x 22"
Archana has dedicated 50 years to nurturing Kala's mission of supporting artists as an international residency program rooted in the local community and a forum for ideas. Archana and co-founder Yuzo Nakano created a unique space for artists to share artmaking equipment, exchange ideas, be in dialogue with one another, and experiment with technology, media, and techniques. With their vision and Kala leadership they have had a profound influence on generations of artists and artist communities while steadily making work in their Emeryville studios.
Archana's studies and art practice include printmaking, sculpture and painting, art history and philosophy. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein especially left a long impression in her creative mind. Her studies overseas and interactions with artists and art communities from around the world have also inspired her artistic endeavors.
Archana Horsting's artwork invites viewers to create their own meanings and interpretations in the same way she has encouraged so many artists at Kala to follow their passions and discover or rediscover new directions in their work. Her creative energy has a powerful ripple effect and has touched thousands of artists over the last five decades.
Frame courtesy of City Picture Frame
Ideal Toy, 2022
Flashe and acryla gouache on canvas over panel
24" x 18"
I make geometric paintings that reference found graphics like board games, puzzles, book covers, calibration patterns and optical illusions. Drawn to imagery that may serve a utilitarian function, but inadvertently doubles as art, my acryla gouache and Flashe paintings use hard-edged graphic qualities and color combinations that often result in scintillating optical effects. These pieces don't conceal their origins, but playfully build their own systems of self-contained logic that are pleasurable to untangle. 'Ideal Toy' is named after the company that first made Rubik's Cubes and came about while tiling my bathroom.
Soledad, 2018
Acrylic paint, ink, and fabric on wood panel
20" x 24" x 2"
Fascinated with hauntingly sublime and sometimes threatening landscapes, my work is a study in environmental transitions. Inspired by geologically dynamic locations, I'm captivated by the effects of weather and the ways light can distort perception. The paintings draw from the natural environment in the West, dramatic, ever-changing geology and diverse weather as catalyst. In my work I process the natural manifestations and surprising juxtapositions I've observed by physically composing and manipulating painted materials. Beginning with painting directly on fabrics the painted areas are dense and saturated while in others the pigments seep, splash and drip. The various fabrics are cut and reassembled, creating striated compositions. These painted fabric bands are offset to produce fragmented forms that mimic the kinetic energy of natural processes. Bringing together congruent and contrasting painted sections, these discontinuous bands suspend and intertwine different moments--the remnants of experiences, separated by time and definition, are fused in layers of paint. The disjunction of forms allows for multiple perspectives at once, simultaneously capturing the seen and unseen, what is above and below ground, what is ahead and what is behind.
Courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery
Salt Study (Alviso), 2016
Acrylic on hand-cut watercolor paper
My abstract landscape work references western landscapes that have endured human interventions. I continue to work with hand-cut paper as a way to express the ephemeral nature of the landscape as well as what is taken from the landscape. In this case, the crystalline shapes of the cuts reference salt extraction in the southern San Francisco Bay.
Work #6. The Oddities of Marbling Garden series, Saffron On the Hill, 2022
Marbling, watercolor, and gold paint on paper
Marbled papers decorated manuscripts and books, throughout the history of book-making. Marbling- a plant-based printing method from late medieval Iran- uses natural pigments, solution, and oil. As a printmaker, I have found this old technique as a new "territory" to portray nature from historic, medicinal, visual, and cultural angles in diverse contexts in my work,
In creating my prints I will treat the patterns as less conventional to allow room for content and additional visual elements. The patterns suggest turmoil and fragmented landscapes alongside the hand-written healing properties of plants in Persian, which have double meanings and cultural connotations.
The name of the series is inspired by the 13th c. manuscript, The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence (Ajayeb al-Makhluqat va Gharayeb al-Mowjudat) written by Qazwini, the celebrated medieval geographer and natural historian.
Sneak, 2018
Ink on panel
Drawn freehand, using a meditative practice of markmaking and growing from the center, this drawing is a typical example of my work. It has waves of shape and movement and the title references how a storm or wave might sneak up on you. All of my work is inspired by the forms and phenomenon of nature.
Courtesy of the Artist and Dolby Chadwick Gallery
Strong Ties #7, 2022
Found wood, house paint
24" x 24" x 1"
"Strong Ties" is an ongoing series of assemblages handmade from discarded wood. Using a simple construction method, pieces of wood are attached and held together with other scrap pieces. A design is created from the functional placement of these connectors. The series intersects minimalism's smooth logic of reductive geometry and color with materials that have organic form, texture and a narrative history. Asking questions about the exploitation and waste that economic systems create, it demonstrates the importance of maintaining a strong solidarity--a care network--to protect ourselves and our authentic human relationships.
"Sinead O'Connor" Rest in Power, 2023
Mixed media
10.25" x 10.25"
Miriam Klein Stahl is a Bay Area artist, educator and activist and the New York Times-bestselling illustrator of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide . In addition to her work in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, paper-cut and public art, she is also the co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School where she's taught since 1995. As an artist, she follows in a tradition of making socially relevant work, creating portraits of political activists, misfits, radicals and radical movements. As an educator, she has dedicated her teaching practice to address equity through the lens of the arts. Her work has been widely exhibited and reproduced internationally. Stahl is also the co-owner of Pave the Way Skateboards, a queer skateboarding company formed with Los Angeles-based comedian, actor, writer and skateboarder Tara Jepsen. She lives in Berkeley, California with her wife, artist Lena Wolff, and their daughter and dog.
Painting Time: Moments, 2020
Archival digital print on photo rag
22" x 26" x 1.5"
Framed and matted
Carol Ladewig is a painter best known for her ambitious "Painting Time" series, beginning with "Year in Color 2011" in which she painted one 6 x 6-inch color field painting each day and assembled them into a concrete expression of the passing of a year's worth of time. This was the centerpiece of a solo exhibition at Slate Contemporary in Oakland and accompanying catalog "Painting Time" (2013). This work represents the essence of an art practice rooted in diaristic writing and drawing, reflecting Ladewig's interest in memory and everyday lived experience, and draws from a profound engagement with pigment and color-mixing.
Continuing through 2020, Ladewig experimented with differing approaches to this laborious, serial method of constructing a painting. These began with more abstract, process-based methodologies, including "Year in Color: Lunar Phases" (2012) and "Painting Time: Season, Winter 2016", recently featured in the article "Time is an Object" (American Scientist, September/October 2023), which addresses the physical nature of time.
Painting Time: Moments July 2013 is a archival digital print on Photo Rag. In 2013 the panels (5"x 5" of varying depths) were mounted on a panel in the shape of each month.
Cold Spring II, 2020-21
Laser-cut woodblock, monotype and inkjet printing
39" x 22"
"Cold Spring II" is one of 8 pieces from The March of Time (2020-21) series : The work reflects the changes of nature throughout the year one of COVID-19 in increments of time, as observed by my partner and I taking daily neighborhood walks. Each piece was created by laser cut woodblock, inkjet printing and monotype.
Hard Stack, 2017
Hydrocal, fiberglass, pigment, epoxy clay, wood, acrylic, varnish
15" x 7" x 2"
I begin each project by investigating a utilitarian object that no longer functions as intended. Either the item is already obsolete, broken and abandoned-or I break it myself. In this way, I disassociate the object from habitual ways of relating to it. Reconstructing it based on innate characteristics-I attempt to defamiliarize and confuse myself (as well as my audience) in order to reset its value, a value that is usually abstract or impalpable.
In the "Heavy Foam" series, I start with foam inserts (polystyrene, polyethylene, etc.), which have been purposefully designed to coddle electronics, appliances and other delicate items for safe transport. Because these materials only exist for the objects they're built to protect, they are discarded once the valued item is removed. Curtailing this cycle of obsolescence, I re-cast them using gypsum cement, supplanting their airy disposability with weight and reframing them as objects in themselves.
Backyard 513, 2023
Watercolor on Arches paper
20" x 50" x 0.5"
By magnifying that which is small and temporary in nature - flowers, grasses, moths, dead birds and other ephemera become powerful reminders of the beauty and healing power of nature in the urban environment.
Half a Pony, 2023
Silkscreen
12" x 16.5" unframed dimensions
17" x 22" framed dimensions
Heike Liss and Soffia Saemundsdottir have been collaborating for the last 10 years. Their latest project is a series of limited edition prints based on Heike's photographs and Soffia's paintings. "Half a pony" was conceived during an artist retreat in Reykjavik and printed at the Icelandic Printers Association in November 2023.
Double Gourd Vase with Yellow Growths, 2016
Porcelain
17" x 13" x 8" inches
Ceramics as a material is a contradiction in itself - of being both hard and fragile. I'm interested in my work embodying the contradictions of being Asian American, of being both invisible and hypervisible, at times attractive and repulsive, foreign and familiar.
I am a ceramics-based artist who manipulates traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to explore how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity.
Blue Cat, 2023
Mixed media collage (aquatint etchings with acrylic)
16.5" x 12.5" x 2"
My work has always been inspired by my love of being outside in wild places. It is not just the calming escape it creates, but the curiosity and desire to know what inhabits each place. In my current work I have been creating individual etchings of the plants and animals that live near my home in Northern California. Instead of editioning my etchings in a traditional way, I have instead been using the etchings as a base to build new landscapes. Where I have been closely paying attention to the shapes and locality of species in my etchings, I have become much looser in the way I collage and color them. I hand cut each plant out of the paper and then reassemble them on panel to create new worlds. In some of the worlds I reference narratives and folk tales I imagine could happen, but with local animals as the characters. Some collages reference scientific articles I have read about animal behavior and ecology. In other collages, I set the animal gaze out toward the viewer in judgement. And in others, the pieces are simply about the magical feeling of being in a wild space.
Gas Pump, 2002
Acrylic on digital print on canvas
26" x 26" x 2"
This is one of a series of digital prints made at Trillium Press, Brisbane, CA in 2002-2003 (currently known as Electric Works, San Francisco, CA). They were based on vintage handkerchiefs I was collecting and painting juxtaposing images on. In this case, I painted the gas pump onto the print using acrylic paint. These fit into my practice overall in terms of using contrasting images that would not normally be seen together.
Courtesy of the Artist and Anglim/Trimble
Bask, 2024
Semi-transparent colored packing tape on panel
20" x 16" x 1.5"
I make perceptually-charged geometric abstractions that move the eye, heart and mind. My work engages ideas of aliveness, multiplicity, and relationality, and is inspired by the shimmering radiance of nature, resting in the present moment awareness of meditation, and the pleasures of a body in motion. As a Parent Artist Residency awardee at Kala, I brought my signature use of semi-transparent colored packing tape from Mexico into printmaking. From there, I have continued to expand my practice through site-specific murals and painting with and acrylics in order to further explore questions of scale and materials.
Photo I Didn't Take #52, 2017
Unique cyanotype print
Framed dimensions: 10" x 12"
Image dimensions: 5" x 7"
For more than two decades, Oakland-based 'marksearch', led by cultural researcher, artist, and literacy educator Sue Mark, has been designing interactive opportunities for communities to amplify and preserve neighborhood narratives in Oakland, across California, nationally and internationally. Photography and writing are both critical research tools.
Courtesy of marksearch (the artist)
California Landmarks: 37.85325, -122.28914, 2024
Photopolymer intaglio and watercolor on Rives BFK
10" x 13" x 1"
My work explores communication technology through a lens of personal experience and anxiety. Prints, artist's books and installations look at how information is delivered, accessed and perceived. Photographs of landscapes with cell towers addresses our need for constant connection and explores a history of the west and our built environment.
Binocular Rivals: Concentric, 2022
Acrylic paint on panel, screen printed anaglyph 3D glasses
6" x 6" x 1.5"
My practice is driven by the ever-expanding potential of drawing and by the elasticity of perception. Committed to the in-person viewing experience, I aim to produce singular works whose full effect can only be witnessed first-hand. These days I am especially compelled by the double-edged nature of visual cognition, a tool for efficiency and survival yet rich with pitfalls and glitches: as it fills in missing information and discards unwanted data, the brain is, in effect, constantly drawing. Both as a producer and observer of images, it is within these faulty and often hidden areas of seeing that I find the most excitement.
In my latest project, I engage the effect of anaglyph 3D glasses through red-and-cyan drawing installations and smaller works on panel. The contrasting high-chroma hues clash and collide, generating a potent vibration to the bare eye. When seen through 3D glasses, the image flickers relentlessly between background and foreground, positive and negative space, and flatness and volume. As each lens masks its corresponding color, the brain fails to integrate the picture as a complete whole. The resulting effect, disorienting both in a physical and psychological sense, is compounded by the spatially ambiguous compositions. In my own way, I seek to bring to life the uncertainty, exhilaration and potential lurking within our visual processes.
Flow No 30 - Color, 2023
Acrylic, coffee, ink, and embroidery on canvas
Unframed dimensions: 10" x 10" x 1.5"
Framed dimensions: 11" x 11" x 2"
Monika Mayer is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Berkeley. She grew up in a rural area of Germany where she was exposed to a rich tradition of textile craft and making from a young age. Drawing inspiration from nature and personal experiences, Monika's multidisciplinary practice is based on experimenting with everyday materials, texture, pattern, color, and repetitive mark-making. Working across a broad range of media, including canvas, paint, inner tubes and soccer balls, Monika creates abstract two- and three-dimensional work. She often incorporates traditional textile techniques such as knitting or embroidery in unusual ways to give her artwork additional color and bring it to life. Her approach is experimental, her creative process intuitive and iterative, often layering techniques to create organic textures and dimensions. Monika recently joined Mercury Twenty, an artist-run gallery in Oakland.
'Flow No 30' is the latest piece in a larger series where Monika is experimenting with coffee, acrylic paint, ink, and stitch on canvas. The piece emphasizes fluidity and flow while maintaining a balance between looseness and control.
Giverny Revisited II, 2016
Oil on mulberry paper
Paper dimensions: 17" x 17"
Image dimensions: 12" x 12"
Signed and numbered on back
This monoprint is from a series of 12 pieces printed at Russell Janis Studio in Brooklyn, NY They accompanied an exhibit titled Summer's Eve NY.
Printed by Janis Stemmerman
Autumn, 2019
Acrylic, graphite, on wood panel
14" x 31.5" x 2"
Nevada, 2023
Photopolymer etching, monotype
22" x 15"
Nevada is from a series of prints whose ultimate goal is a map for each of the 50 American states. I've begun the series with the places where I have lived or spent significant time. While visiting with relatives in Carson City when our children were young, we would often drive out in the desert to look for wild horses or visit old mining towns. I endeavor to create a merger of map imagery and landscape to explore the relationship of location, history and personal memory.
Hex, 2022
Japanese paper and brass
14" x 21" x 2.5"
This work was the start of my Buckminster Fuller series.
promise (halcyon), 2022
Ink and UV inkjet print on paper
21.25" x 15.5"
Ranu Mukherjee's contribution, promise (halcyon) is part of an ongoing series of ink drawings on printed mulberry paper. Mukherjee works with Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California, to print abstract patterns, created from images of ecological and feminist activism, onto and through jamdani sari cloth. In this series she depicts birds, fruits, flowers and cakes above floating hands. She considers the physicality of touch, breath and longing in a world marked by shifting ground and continuous aftermath.
Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Wendi Norris
goji and maguro surfing, 2014
Hand ground minerals on silk mounted to panel
12" x 12"
This piece was made during a period from 2014-2019 where I worked with Gojira as an alter-ego.
L.A. Shoe Store, 1987
Archival pigment print, printed 2024
Image dimensions: 13" x 19"
Framed dimensions: 28" x 22"
Richard Nagler received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in political philosophy graduating Magna cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He fell in love with art serendipitously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art which is close to campus. While studying painting at the California College for the Arts, Richard began using photography as an aid to his oil paintings by projecting slides on canvas. Gradually the slides he was taking began to find a central place in Richard's attention. He began photographing exclusively almost 45 years ago with two primary areas of focus. He began photographing the streets of downtown Oakland, California, while simultaneously photographing the people and architecture of South Miami Beach, Florida.
The work in South Beach led to his first book of photography, My Love Affair with Miami Beach (Simon & Schuster, 1991) which was done in collaboration with the Nobel Prize winning Yiddish author, Isaac Bashevis Singer. His second book was published four years later, Oakland Rhapsody: The Secret Soul of an American Downtown (North Atlantic Books, 1995) with introduction and poetic contributions by MacArthur Award winning author, playwright, and poet, Ishmael Reed.
Both books received wide critical acclaim. Nagler continued broadening his photographic pursuit by looking for and recording accidental juxtapositions of people and their milieu around the world. This work led to his third book of photography Word on the Street (Heyday Books, 2010) which was introduced by Peter Selz, a renowned art historian and former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
His fourth book, Looking at Art/ The Art of Looking (Heyday Books, 2014) was introduced by celebrated author and publisher Malcolm Margolin and was the recipient of much recognition including the Non-Fiction Book Awards Gold Prize in Photography, National Independent Book Award for Excellence in Photography, The Indie-Fab Book Awards Gold Medal in Photography, and first prize in photography at the Beverly Hills Book Awards, along with other honors.
Nagler's work has been been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Artforum International and Color Magazine. His photographs are included in many private and public collections including the de Young Museum, San Francisco, the Magnes Museum, Berkeley, the Oakland Museum, the Jewish Museum, New York, and Beth Hatefutsoth, Tel Aviv, among others.
Nagler is also a reviewer of books on art and photography for The New York Journal of Books.
Courtesy of the Artist and George Krevsky Gallery
Location in Unknown Circle, 2017
Archival pigment ink on canvas
35" x 35" x 2"
Yuzo Nakano is a graduate of Tenri University and Tokyo Gendai Art Institute, Tokyo, Japan. He studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris where he met Archana Horsting and together they founded Kala Art Institute in 1974. His work has been exhibited in commercial and public galleries throughout the world including the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, where his work is part of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. In 2014, he received a Bay Area Visionaries award from Southern Graphics International Conference.
Nakano's life itself is a journey of art. In his statement he describes his experience of traveling the world in the late 1960s and the impact that had on creating an international artist community. He has had a profound influence on future generations of artists and artist communities.
"I attended a large collection of Picasso's etchings exhibited in Tokyo in the late 1960s. The profound beauty in black and white inspired me to make my own etchings. I looked for an artists' etching workshop, but I found none. After searching for months, I learned of Atelier 17 in Paris. In 1970, I left Yokohama for Vladivostok, then rode the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow, then went to Paris via Vienna, a journey of languages, peoples, colors, sounds, rhythms, landscapes of emptiness and density, and with enduring influence on my art."
By making his art Nakano pursues three basic human desires: reproducing one's experiences, recording (storing) them, and transmitting them to other people. These three goals animate his life. Through building Kala's community, he and Archana created a space for the artists to share artmaking equipment, exchange ideas, be in dialogue with one another, and experiment with technology, new media, and different techniques. They modeled how to work across disciplines and created a space that to this day nourishes creative power. Nakano's work traverses diverse media, including painting, printmaking, mixed media, music composition, multimedia performance, and digital media.
In Nakano's own words: "my artistic activities physically extend my own abstract concepts of place, a location in space and time. Each work of art provides instantiation, a reproduction of my experience, stored for a moment, for communication to others. Simultaneously, it produces its own unique experiential data that feed back to me, informing and influencing the abstract concepts that guide future works."
There & Not There, 2014
Intaglio, screen printed charcoal powder, blind-emboss letterpress
14" x 18" x 1"
nif responds to materials, research and the senses, to develop shifting scenes that explore where place and perception meet. The 'here and there' series layers fine-line etchings with variable silkscreen drawings, and, in this particular print, letterpress. The fixed and repeatable qualities of the mediums are disrupted with translucent, migrating and unpredictable techniques, to re-consider the accuracy, reliability and complexity in the simultaneous experiences of observing detail, the momentary, and memory.
Dustless tin-dlen, 2022
Screenprint on paper
These photographed forms were made by the artist from clay harvested at multiple data centers throughout the deserts of the American West. The forms were then fired, photographed, scanned, printed, xerox-copied, scanned, printed on transparency and then screen printed. I am interested in the transformation of earth materials that operate in the analogue while referencing the digital, pulling back and forth between the two vernaculars in an entangled digital ecosystem.
Blue Heron, 2023
Acrylic, water soluble pastel and block print on cradle board
9" x 12" x 0.75"
This piece was inspired by a blue heron sighting by the Russian river on a late summer day. The work incorporates my love of pattern and observations of the natural world.
Starburst, 2020
Ink on dyed paper
11" x 11"
My work encompasses a broad palette and wide range of media: from muted to vibrant colors and tones, from pen and ink drawings to paintings, murals, and public installations. Each piece employs intuition and intention to push the limits of minimalism and representation. This work, "Starburst" exemplifies my interest in ways repetition, geometric patterns, and mathematical marking or mapping contain an inherent capacity to evoke represented subjects in the viewer.
Horizon, 2020
SC #465, 2024
Acrylic on canvas, sewn
14" x 11" x 1"
I make my work using simple, direct processes; painting colors onto canvas or fabric, cutting shapes from the painted material, then sewing the shapes onto a canvas background. When finished, I stretch the piece on a stretcher bar. This piece fits that model.
Twenty Questions, 2020
Digital fine art print
16" x 16"
I have worked with the combination of image and text throughout my career. Twenty Questions represents my preoccupation with what we learn, and how we learn it; with how we belong in the world, and with the unanswerable questions we face every day.
superplant - wild radishes, 2019
18" x 12"
flower of love for child of bomb (S1), 2023
Acrylic on panel
12" x 9" x 2"
This is a new series that responds to current conflicts and offers an empathetic gesture to casualties of war, especially the children effected by this. Flowers of love for children of bombs.
Courtesy of the Artist and Marlborough Gallery
Soft Friday, 2018
Oil on canvas with a walnut frame
16" x 19"
Stuart Pittman's diaristic paintings are rooted in a modernist abstract vocabulary with a decidedly contemporary twist. Both the titles and the specific forms are inspired by events and moments from his life both inside and out of the studio. The deliberately asymmetric shapes and meticulously crafted frames are a nod to the artist's humorous and loose approach to a seemingly formal practice.
Courtesy of the Artist and Traywick Contemporary
untitled (Time is Knots on a String 27), 2021
micaceous watercolor on 300lb Fabriano hot press
30" x 22.5"
This ongoing series,Time is Knots on a String, is about time, cycles and nuances. The title reflects the evolution of time, charted as a series of moments/ events to the current form and the way that contemporary humans use it. How time is flexible, and ultimately a construct. The 12 sections relate of course to hour, months, astrological signs and cycles, as well as rays stretching out infinitely. At first the lines seem hard and mechanical, but watercolor shows the nuances of the hand, pressure, and saturations. Additional layers of paint and mica in some of these watercolors to reflect further time slippages.
Courtesy of the Artist and K. Imperial Fine Art
Study #8, 2021
Mounted relief print
Recently I have begun to incorporate the printed surfaces of found objects into my practice: metal platters, wood, cardboard....each with a narrative of cuts, scrapes and nicks that hold a rich history of use. Once printed these material records of memory appear brighter, richer and shimmering, the imperfections highlighted. I seek to celebrate these frailties by embracing rather than concealing, begging the question: what damaged parts of us deserve adornment as opposed to disguise? The wood is a work table from Kala that was being replaced, I was lucky enough to snatch it and print it!
Equal Rights, 2021
Vintage Purse and Electroluminescent Wire
13" x 11" x 4"
Equal RightsPower of the Purse (Series)
I chose purses as my canvas as a way to marry the powerful, politically-charged language of today's resistance with representations of women's modern economic power and the possibilities for change that come with it. For me, the use of purses from the mid-twentieth century also calls back to that critical era in the women's movement and reminds us how much power we have to effect meaningful change.
The Power of the Purse series title is a call to action for women, and men, to redouble their efforts to fight the growth of moneyed privileged and show up at the polls.The purses are meant to be carried and serve as small-scale political billboards. The text on each purse is created using an Electroluminescent wire that is lit up using batteries and a small electronic driver that can be set to constant or flash mode.
This body of work is rooted in my formative years growing up in Berkeley, California, during the 70's, where I was exposed to the women's movement. It is also a continued homage to my father, Allan Pred, who inspired the feminist in me at an early age.
Courtesy of Michele Pred and Nancy Hoffman Gallery
Mouse #4, 2021
Fabric, thread, wire, and mixed media
4.75" x 2.25" x 5.5"
Recently I have felt a desire to connect with the materials and subject matter in a more intimate way, especially since the start of the pandemic. The isolation of that period made me very reflective. It felt as if the world were becoming smaller, shrinking around me, and I responded by making works that were attempts to find a sense of focus and intimacy in that sense of smallness.
Adiumentum (600mg Pain), 2022
Found necklaces, epoxy resin, Ibuprofen 600mg tablets, hardware
Adiumentum is a Latin noun meaning help, assistance, support, means of aid. This work orbits those things we've come to count on to help us cope. How will we make it through another day? For this series, the artist's or a close friend's personal medication and pharmaceutical debris have been cast in resin and suspended from found necklaces.
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY
BRICK 122, 2023
Mixed media on paper mounted on clay brick
7.75" x 3.75" x 2.375"
The Brick Project is my act of resistance to the recent construction of additional wall along the US - Mexico border. This body of work is comprised of 452 bricks that have been transformed into sculpture - works of art that eliminate the brick's original function as a building element used to construct walls. These bricks, one created for every mile of new wall, are meant to stand alone. They are independent and autonomous, and incapable of ever being symbols of division.
Bougainvillea Bract, 2017
Unique photogram, gelatin silver print
20" x 16" x 1"
In my ongoing series, "The Secret Life of Plants", I create photograms: photographs that are made without the use of a camera. This 19th century process has an immediacy, rawness, and truth that is not found in images created with a camera. Utilizing plant material akin to film negatives, I project it onto photosensitive paper via an enlarger. My work seeks to spark a sense of wonder, inspiration, and imagination within the viewer. And it is a subtle way to ask people to be aware of natural environments that surround them. My work serves as a visual testament to the interconnectedness of man and nature, urging a deeper observation of the intricate beauty existing in the world around us.
Comme un Mouton, 2019
Linocut engraving
23.5" x 31.5"
I am currently 100% focused on linocut engraving, printed on an antique press in my studio in Honfleur, France. The maximum run is 30. I hand color each work. The inspiration for my imagery comes from the sights and sounds of the Normandy countryside, the harbor, and architecture of Honfleur. Also I often use a "play on words" to juxtapose images and create the title.
Psych. 101, 1997
Soapground and sugarlift aquatints with hardground and chine colle. Somerset white paper
Image size 15" x 15"
Paper size 23.75" x 22.5"
Edition of 30
Well-established as a printmaker, Carnwath brought a decided mastery to her first project with Paulson Press. These new prints record her working processes of observing, absorbing and expressing, in playful and seductive terms, the intricacies of human experience. This, combined with the improvisation of printmaking, resulted in an exciting group of prints that bring familiar content to different resolutions.
In Psych 101 the pattern is printed in a sage green and covers most of the image area. Underneath this rich field, a wide apricot-colored border surrounds a central off-white square of gampi paper adhered by chine colle. Inside the square are two figures, a boy and a girl, taken from a reproduction of an original 1950s drawing of Dick and Jane that she discovered in a newspaper. Carnwath's recognizable hand-written words reveal them as "sister" and "brother." Other details such as text asking "What is your birth order?" further animate the lively dialogue about sibling relationships.
Courtesy of Paulson Fontaine Press
Framing courtesy of Sterling Fine Art Services
Loop Knot 1, 2009
Color spitbite aquatint, and softground etching with drypoint and chine colle
35.5" x 31"
Amy Kaufman's paintings explore a visual language of pattern based abstraction pushing the relationship between linear repetitions, blocks of color, broad loops and the grounds on which they are carefully placed. The works are studies of scale, proportion, color and media. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, CA; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and United States Embassies in Hong Kong and Singapore. She is represented by Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, CA.
The Birth of Horus, 2024
Acrylic, flashe, collage, pigmented ink, dental floss on canvas
24" x 20"
Gregory Rick was born in 1981 and grew up in South Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts in 2019 and graduated from Stanford University with an MFA in Art Practice in 2022. Developing a historical imagination and fondness for drawing stories, Rick collapses history while confronting personal trauma. His works exist as reflections of his personal experience, while in dialogue with the wider world. Rick has received the Combat Infantry Badge, the Yamaguchi print making award, the Nathan Oliviera fellowship, and the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award and has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States.
Rick's work comes from my personal experience but is not entirely personal. Where myth gives voice to the underbelly, the lumpen in tandem displaying the familiar and grandiose. His work tethers together seemingly opposing ideas as he teether's between the personal, the historical and the political. He paints on a shaky historical line cemented in humility and conviction and occupies his pictures with characters who serve as archetypes in conjunction memory and self-exploration reflecting on the absurdness and monumentality of history.
Courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery
Memory Index: Black Gathered Silk Mourning Bonnet, 2023
Photopolymer intaglio printed on handmade paper from Oblation Papers in Portland, OR, letterpress
11" x 14"
The photopolymer intaglio print "Black Gathered Silk Mourning Bonnet" is part of a series of images called Memory Index that capture a migration story through objects that could have belonged to the artist's ancestors. This specific piece imagines a moment following the extended family's initial migration from Kentucky to Chicago in 1866 after the death of the artist's great-great-great grandfather in 1873. I imagine his wife wore a mourning bonnet like this one. Now a free woman living in the North, she was able to always express herself in ways, even through fashion, that she was unable to do in the past. It is printed using bone black ink using an etching process on the artist's handmade paper to permanently mark the memory so this moment in time won't be forgotten again.
Courtesy of the Artist, Trina Michelle Robinson
Rotor, 2023
Bronze
13" x 19" x 4"
I make sculpture. The process and results make me happy. I keep things simple. I'm focused on the making, the success and failure, the opportunity to share the result of my explorations.
Courtesy of Jack Fisher Gallery
ARMS, 2021
Acrylic and collage on birch box
Part of a small series of pieces which took a definitive deep worked color and minimalist collage efforts to depict action and relationships.
Study, 2024
6" x 8" x 1.5"
Ready to hang - cradled wooden panel with wire
The critical and creative components in this painting use digitized slide film taken in the 90s in Pamir, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan as a link between the artist's past and the present.
Great Egret, 2023
Screenprint
44" x 60"
The Great Egret has been said to symbolize new beginnings, peace, grace and partnership. Here, we see the Egret against a blue sky, with the image superimposed over innumerable human faces. The number 8,056,560,887 was the world's population on the day the print was completed.
Image from a photo by Jeff Peterson
American Avocet, 2022
Colored scratchboard
6" x 6" x 1"
Scratchboard Portrait of Hung Liu, 2021
Scratchboard
5" x 5" x 1"
23.533.507-GWSP, 2007
UltraChrome K3 giclee print on Epson Enhanced Matte paper
Image Dimensions: 23.5" x 33.5"
Pink Fluorescent Paver, 2024
Aquatint etching printed in hand made fluorescent ink
20.5" x 15"
Courtney Sennish is a printmaker and sculptor based in the Bay Area, CA. She is inspired by architecture and the built environment. Her imagery examines found color, shape and texture.
Wasp (After Merian), 2022
Acrylic and mixed media on found art historical reproduction
19.5" x 14.5"
Sherwood's work addresses intersectionality, feminism and art history through the lens of disability. Her life and art completely changed when she had a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44, which paralyzed the entire right side of her body. After a period of recovery, she returned to painting with a newfound vitality. Forced to relearn to paint with her left hand, she discovered that she "became a more fluid and urgent left-handed painter," and adopted a more gestural painting style by working flat and pouring paint directly onto her canvases.
Most recently, Sherwood has been developing a series she calls Brain Flowers, exploring the transient nature of existence. They are painted on the backs of reproductions of classical paintings, formerly used as instructional aids at UC Berkeley. These still lives are based on post-Impressionist and 17th century Dutch flower paintings and incorporate the artist's own fMRI scans as flowers.
Bendy Men #6
23" x 15" x 0.5"
I have been using engineer's human stencils for more than 10 years in my imagery. In the Bendy Men series I explore monochromatic shades of ink with a heraldic spread of sun rays behind
All things Maud and Manet, 2012
Reductive woodcut with stencils
Image size: 15" x 20"
Framed size: 23.5" x 28"
Maple wood frame
All Things Maud and Manet is a tribute to a wildly intelligent, playful, cunning, affectionate and demanding cat who lived with my husband and me for over twenty years until she could no longer see and lost her joy in life. It broke our hearts to lose her.
In making this print, I began by looking at other artists and poets who found the cat to be a source of interest, Among them, I found Rembrandt, Durer, Kiki Smith, Felix Valloton, William Kentridge, Warhol, and many others who celebrated or explored the subject of cats. Among them, Pablo Neruda's words in "Cat's Dream" and Edouard Manet's etching of a cat nosing a flowering plant (Le Chat et Les Fleurs) both rang a bell for me. As in many of my other prints where images from art history are referenced, I used the Manet to link this print of our cat, Maud, to the continuum and - not to be too Maudlin - to keep her memory alive.
Like most of the prints I've made in the last sixty or so years, All Things Maud and Manet is a reductive woodcut that relies on a build-up of translucent colors, surface detail and woody textures. I fell in love with this medium early on and haven't found anything to compare with it's potential for expression.
Sashiko Color Meditation, 2020
Watercolor and embroidery on paper
Paper dimensions: 5" x 5"
Framed dimensions: 6" x 6"
This watercolor was painted as a prompt for The Color Meditation Deck released in 2022. It's inspired by a traditional sashiko pattern - shippou or seven treasures.
Courtesy of the Artist and Walter Maciel Gallery
Pink with Green Square, 2003
Monotype
Most of the time I believe in the power of words to convey an emotion thought or idea. That is true except when it comes to discussing or explaining or describing A R T, which by its very nature uses many skills that are beyond or removed from words.
I can say I paint because it is a way of understanding life.
I can also say that I paint order to reign in personal demons.
I can say I paint to express experiences of personal sorrow, grief, isolation and joy. This would all be true but at the same time fiction, a book with confusing, ambiguous prose. I paint to see what I want to paint. I create a world that is drenched in color, light, forms, patterns and textures. I paint to learn what I can and cannot do.
I paint and give a nod to the words akin to someone waving at a tornado full of bombastic fragments. These particles all swirl around and finally settle down quietly to contemplate a visual poem. The poem itself lacking all words.
The Defender, 2023
Photopolymere guavre, photolithography, chine colle
The Defender, is a part of a series in which Jessica and Shanna explore the importance of work done by queer, trans, and non-binary women of color within their communities that is often invisible and underappreciated. The figure is of Malaya Tuyay, a Filipinx artist, activist, and community organizer. This powerful portrait highlight's Mayala's strength and commitment to supporting indigenous activism in the Philippines through organizing networks in California, as well as her work preserving and studying the traditional Filipino martial artform Kali. The machete she holds was gifted by her own Kali teacher.The Defender was completed at Pyramid Atlantic Center print studios, during their Denbo Publishing Residency in August 2023.
Solitude - China Basin, 2012
Etching and aquatint
25" x 32" x 1"
Framed in black Nielsen metal
I feel moved when sunlight touches an object in the afternoon and visualize the space around me. I walk out and wander around to observe shapes of shadows. I realize that shadows make spaces visible. I find myself in the spaces enjoying architecture delineated by sunlight. Buildings and their shadows are layered and blended together creating momentary beauty of colors and shapes. These scenes are temporary, and will change or disappear in the next moment. They are very precious because their occurrence is the unique combination of a place, sunlight, and the precise moment I happen upon the scene - like an eclipse. I worked on printmaking for a long time. The printmaking process is reminiscent of the relationship between light and shadow. Etching and aquatint help me express my interest towards light and shadow by using rich tones of black and white. The graphic nature of black and white leads me to lines and shapes found in architectural elements. Once I eliminated color from my work, I found myself drawn to the exploration of space itself. My work became about the physicality of three-dimensional space.
Petit Bookshelf with Monet Vase, 2021
Hand-cut vinyl on panel
24" x 24" x 2"
framed, ready to hang
Petit Bookshelf is a small version of t.w.five signature hand-cut vinyl larger bookshelves series. The bookshelves are made of colorful books and art objects that are carefully crafted and put together. Some of them are also personally created according to the collectors requests of their favorite books and artists. Each one of them are uniquely created.
Courtesy of the Artist and SB Fine Arts Gallery
Pensando en La Revolucion, 2008
Juan R. Fuentes is a graduate of San Francisco State University. He has taught at the Mission Campus/City College SF, the California College of the Arts, Oakland CA and was visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute's print department. Juan was also director of Mission Grafica at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts.
Inspired by the Chicano Movement and mentors Rupert Garcia and Malaquias Montoya, Juan has dedicated his art as a cultural activist to supporting and being part of a global movement for social change. His silkscreen posters and relief prints have addressed many issues as they relate to communities of color, social justice, racism, and international struggles for liberation.
Cosmos-scene A-11, 2022
Intaglio, monotype
Image dimensions: 7.75" x 7.75"
Paper dimensions: 18" x 15.5"
Many great minds have been captivated by the concept of a single unifying principle that governs the all that is our universe, a principle in which all things are connected by a universal truth. While we often associate this inquiry with the sciences and philosophy, it is also an important influence in the arts. I have long been intrigued and inspired by the concept of a unifying principle and have been creating artworks in which the concept is interpreted through shape, color, and spatial relationships. I create works in which elements function like organic building blocks: atoms form a molecule, molecules form a compound, compounds form a cell, cells form an organism, and so on. The marks, lines, shapes, colors, and textures that are the basic language of my work form a kind of network structure-a system of interconnected nodes that seem energized by their interaction within the network. In the interdependence, synergy, and the flow of meaning and significance within these networks, there is subtle and profound beauty.
Framing courtesy of SFMOMA
How Do we Interpret the Now, 2023
Acrylic ink on panel
20" x 16"
Borrowing from the language of textiles, this work weaves together thought and phrase. Using a structure of repetitive gestures and integrating a loose textile-like approach, each utterance and musing playfully brings the text into rhythmic arrangements of color.
Valley, 2014
Acrylagouache on paper
15" x 22"
This is an older piece but it still reflects my interest in color palettes/schemes and shapes within my compositions, as well as approaching mundane or dark aspects of life with some humor (depending on your sense of humor).
Cock block with hearts and a flower, 2023
Graphite on paper
11" x 17"
Graphite drawings of animals and plants have been the mainstay of my subject matter for many years. The animals, in particular, represent friends, family and myself. The body language displayed by the three peacocks in my piece: "Cockblock with hearts and flower", represent a love triangle. Reciprocated and unreciprocated. The heart shaped negative spaces formed by the necks of the three birds are meant to be a subtle nod to love that is "cheesy" or "made up" just to get what one wants. The interloper with the flower is super rude. These ideas and a touch of humor are all very human, yet the animals embody human thought so well when drawn.
all up and down the beach, 2024
ink and colored pencil on Yupo
12" x 9"
My focus for this work and series is on the physical and emotional landscape and the chaos and beauty of everyday life.
Etching with chine colle
20" x 26" x 1"
This piece is within my body of work collecting images of shared spaces.
Red Tailed Hawk, 2020
Wood engraving
Image dimensions: 7.5" x 4.5"
Paper dimensions: 14" x 10"
This is what I've been doing for the last 44 years.
Courtesy of Richard Wagener
Three Plus, 2023
Woodblock print on Suzuki paper
Edition of 5
44" x 14"
What inspired me to become a printmaker was the desire to make multiples. While in the MFA program in painting at Columbia I had studied etching with Tony Harrison (also the teacher of Kathan Brown in England) and woodcut with Seong Moy. I had made a few woodblock prints in the first fifteen years after I left school but it was only in the early 1980's that making prints became an important part of my artistic life.
I had early on developed a consistent strain of black and while work on paper. And it was when I realized that I wanted to make certain images more accessible to people that I found returning to woodblock printing was a natural fit for me. It was not a long step from my ink drawings to my prints, and that step allowed me to refine my images as well as to introduce another element of chance (the wood and its printing accidents).
I welcomed the extended periods of carving after the very intense and spontaneous method I had developed in my drawing. I thought of myself as a painter who made prints, not as a printmaker per se. I never was a good enough printer to feel that I could do it better than a professional printer and I have since then always worked in collaboration with printers.
Tone of Nasturtium, 2017
Multiple color etching with chine colle
Kazuko Watanabe is a graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Art University and has taught classes on printmaking at both the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and the University of California, Berkeley. Her multiple-color intaglio prints are meticulously crafted in a way most printmakers shy away from due to the inordinate amount of time and patience needed for this particular medium. She handles these stubborn metallic plates with such ease and subtlety that the viewer is generally unaware of the fantastic craftsmanship that is employed to generate beautiful abstract compositions and delicate color gradations.
Ms. Watanabe was the recipient of The 1999 Library Fellows Award from The National Museum of Women in Arts Foundation in Washington D.C. for her bookmaking.
Blackboard Series, 2012
Watercolor and ink on paper
Framed dimensions: 16" x 13"
Paper dimensions: 12" x 9"
William T. Wiley was a contemporary American artist. Maintaining an eclectic practice that has been associated with the Funk Art movement, Wiley incorporated drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and filmmaking into his work. His paintings act as an aggregate and are composed of a wide range of obsessive marks, materials, and mediums, frequently layered on top of a map or other information-coded images. Often featuring illustrations of fantastical universes, his works contain both historical literary references and integrate geometric abstraction. Born in Bedford, IN on October 21, 1937, he earned both his BFA and MFA from the California School of Fine Arts shortly before joining the UC Davis Art faculty in 1963, where he would instruct and influence prominent artists like Bruce Nauman. Wiley enjoyed widespread acclaim and success, participating in both the Venice and Whitney Biennials in 1980 and 1983, respectively. His work is held in many important collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The 2009-2010 exhibition "What's It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect," offered a comprehensive retrospective of Wiley's career.
Unfolding Flowers, Building Bridges, 2024
Collage with hand-cut paper
29" x 28.5" framed dimensions
This collage is part of an ongoing series of works by Lena Wolff that are improvisations on American quilt patterns and forms. The piece is made with hand-cut papers, using tactile, hand-driven processes that are similar to the work undertaken by quiltmakers when cutting and assembling cloth.
Courtesy of Lena Wolff and Sarah Shepard Gallery
Monkey's Uncle, 2023
Wool, cotton and polyester quilt batting, thread, wood
17" x 9" x 0.25"
30" x 9" x 0.25" including thread tendrils
I create sculpture, fashion, and performances to investigate the everyday presentation of the self, how we shapeshift as we navigate social roles, and the visual cues we choose to signal identity and belonging. Considering the role of upbringing in self-fashioning, this piece is part of an ongoing series based on family portraits and ancestral altars. Monkey's Uncle is an abstract textile work made from remnant fabric, quilt batting, and thread tendrils. I'm repurposing fabric and materials from my fashion designer days, translating my simple thumbnail sketches into three dimensional forms while striving to keep as much as I can of the spontaneous quality of the hand-drawn line. The drawing is traced repeatedly in various processes: chalked onto the fabric surface, then stitched, slashed, cut out, and slathered with paint. Monkey's Uncle was a part of the installation in my 2023 performance of A Proper Monkey.
Spare Scissors, 2023
Paper
4" x 9" x 1"
Imin Yeh is an interdisciplinary and project-based artist working in sculpture, installation, and participatory events. Her projects use Print Media as a technical tool for realizing the ambition of large-scaled work and Print as a conceptual strategy for exploring free, exchange, and craft based economies. The projects utilize repetitive handcraft and mimicry as a strategy for examining the issues around the unseen labor and production that lies behind our many unconsidered everyday objects. Recent exhibitions include the San Jose Museum of Art, Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco). She has been an Artist in Residency at Montalvo Art Center (Saratoga, CA), Blue Mountain Center (New York), Sandarbh Artist Workshop (Partapur, India), and at Recology San Francisco. Yeh is the recipient of a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
The Use of the Useless, 2024
Recycled weathered redwood, walnut, fluorescent paint
1.5" x 15" x 10"
The work was created by using the scrap wood from my previous project "Treadling a Lost Journey" for which I had constructed wooden wheels using aged redwood from the structural frame of an abandoned greenhouse.
Lifevest, 2024
Oils on panel
24" x 24" x 1.75"
In the last couple of years I have gotten back into painting after working in graphite for many years. Life vest was one of the first pieces I did when I got back into it. Based on a photo of a childhood life vest of mine, it's a piece i've done multiple times and in multiple mediums over the years. It's full of memory and metaphor for me. Switching mediums takes time, refamiliarizing yourself with different tools, processes and materials. Going from the tonal world of graphite to the mind boggling infinite world of color. This piece helped me stay afloat at the beginning of that journey.
In Memoriam Ryuichi Sakamoto, 2023
Diptych
Multi-layered archival pigment print on aluminum panel
Diptych dimensions: 15.375" x 29.5" x 1"
Single panel dimensions: 15.375" x 14" x 1"
The artwork originated from an ink painting that was created in memory of the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto on the day he passed in March 2023.
Rouge Allure, 2024
Gouache on paper
I make work that looks at consumer culture, commercial imagery and marketing materials in new contexts. What is our relationship to consumption, how are we motivated by it and how does marketing define our idea of value?
The color schemes I use in my work are taken from commercial products where color is used as a tool to captivate the senses and attract consumers. This piece, based on lipstick packaging, uses a red, gold, and black palette in repetitive, lines drawn across the page. The uneven lines show subtle changes in hue, weight and density revealing my own hand movements. The piece uses elements from the world of glamour and beauty to show the allure of natural features and flaws.
Here As One, 2018
Silkscreen monoprint
14.75" x 11"
Harnessing her skills as animator, Sarah Klein infuses her work with a sense of motion, capturing fragments of drawings, collages, patterned paper, and color swatches and organizing them into dynamic, layered compositions. Her works are characterized by a visual playfulness and vivacity, which lends a palpable energy.
Brawl/Cloud, 2023
Gouache and watercolor on paper
29" x 23"
Weare attended Falmouth College of Art in Cornwall, England and studied printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London where he received a A.R.C.A (Associate of the Royal College of Art) in 1963. He then taught at the central School of Art and Design (London).
In 1962 he traveled across the United States with a group of students. Weare drew his way across America state by state, producing a series of terse prints that were so deeply personal as to be an intimate diary of the nation. He briefly returned home, but, after graduating, found himself in 1963 as a postgraduate student at the University of Iowa, studying printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky.
In the ensuing years Weare married American artist Sally and became a U.S. citizen, taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1970 he moved to Northern California to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts and, in 1971, started teaching at Sonoma State University in Cotati, California where he became a professor, teaching art and printmaking, and from which he retired as Professor Emeritus in 2000.
Simon's self-dialogue, from the series, Mirrors of Happiness, 2023
Type-C print
In spring 2021, I joined the re-entry through the arts program at Planting Justice-an urban farm and nursery in Sobrante Park, the easternmost area of Oakland, CA.
Throughout the project, my medium format film camera captured people working in the nursery and surroundings. By the middle of 2023, over 100 film rolls had been exposed, and the resulting images unveiled a tapestry of artistic representation-people and places directly captured throughout the process, cyanotype prints emerging from images, stencil cutouts shaping familiar faces, painted renditions born from those stencils, and moments where individuals encountered their own portraits in wood.
Sphere No. 75-76, 2023
Diptych dimensions: 14" x 6" x 3"
Single dimensions: 6" x 6" x 3"
Multi-media concrete sculpture with natural element (moss) in half dome shape. The pieces can be display as sculpture or wall piece.
The Sun, The Moon, And Everything In Between, 2017
Monoprint
15" x 11"
I have an inherent fascination with planets and a deep love of circles. This work marries the two while being true to my favorite color palette and my need to layer elements.
Rescue, 1993
Image size: 4.5" x 5.5"
Paper size: 11.5" x 11.5"
edition 28/50
My work follows in the tradition of history and narrative painting documenting current and fictitious events using myth and allegory. The human condition, modern-day romance and political issues are often explored. Voyeurism, a longing to 'be someplace else' and a sense of places and events remembered are recurring themes.
Patriarchy is Dead (Red), 2023
Beer and watercolor monotype
I often use satire to address unwelcome societal systems or values that should be retired. This funeral wreath indicates the death of patriarchy, and it's about damn time. I used Guinness beer to prime the plexiglas plate that I watercolored, allowed to dry, and later printed onto damp watercolor paper. Note the limp phallic forms in the center of each flower...
Courtesy of Kathy Aoki
Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe, 2014
Screen print on BFK
Image dimensions: 18" x 21.25"
Paper dimensions: 22.5 x 30"
A play on the title of a fantastic pop song by Burt Bacharach, Do you Know the Way to San Jose. I often take liberty with song lyrics and titles, passages from books, and lines from movies I love for titles. The title of this piece is a mash up with a song I love and a place that I have been infatuated with for much of my life. The composition was perhaps subconsciously inspired by the New Mexico flag design - it was not on the front of my mind when I made this sketch, but it was clear to me once I had made it. At the time I began to make this piece I had not yet visited the Land of Enchantment. The color of the background was inspired by images I had seen of the New Mexican sky. I finally made it to New Mexico in 2022 and it holds up to everything I could have imagined. I long to be back, forever enchanted. In the meantime, this piece will tell me how to get there.
Hombre II, 1976
32" x 24"
Ducmanh, sometimes known as The Duke, was born in Hanoi, Vietnam but moved to Paris as a young man. He worked as a graphic designer whilst painting. Although taken up by the art dealer Rene Drouin, his artistic career took off when he decamped to New York in April 1965. He gained a Rockefeller foundation grant and the Allan Stone Gallery soon accepted and began to show his work. Ducmanh's style mixes the calligraphic and abstract; like other Vietnamese artists in exile he benefited from a greater freedom to experiment than those who remained at home. The Allan Stone Gallery in New York still holds his work and last exhibited Ducmanh in a mixed show in 2004 called "Group". Ducmanh lived in Ireland from 1974-76. He is well known for his irreverent and iconoclastic attitudes as well as for some provocative writing.
At the End of the Updates, 2024
Glazed Ceramic
11" x 18" x 10"
Nathan Lynch was raised in Pasco, Washington an agricultural community in the shadow of Hanford Nuclear Power Plant. The futility of this environmental contradiction gave Lynch an acute sense of location and deep appreciation for irony. In the five formative years after graduation Lynch worked as the prop master for a local community theatre, the effects of which are still being realized in his current body of work. His concerns for political conflict and environmental upheaval are filtered through notions of absurdity, hand fabrication and the dramatic devices of storytelling.
As a sculptor and performance artist, Lynch has made collaboration and experimentation major components of his practice. Recent projects include Doubledrink - a two person drinking fountain for Headlands Center for the Arts, Dead Reckoning at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and nest module design for the Wedgetailed Shearwater on Oahu . At the University of Southern California Lynch studied with Ken Price, and later earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. Lynch is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Ceramics Program at California College of the Arts.
Upside Down Abstraction, 2019
Mixed media on wood
15.5" x 22"
Jordan King creates kaleidoscopic paintings that reveal vibrant interpretations of the world. Abstract in form, King often attributes very specific titles to his works, like "Freaky Woman" or "Different Shades." He also decodes and pays homage to abstract masters like Miro and Kandinsky as part of his practice. His compositions demand steady exploration, during which biomorphic forms, new geometries, and recognizable elements emerge. Faced with King's work, the density and complexity of his compositions invite deepened modes of observation by the viewer.
Courtesy of Jeff Hill
Untitled, 2013
13.5" x 17.5"
Sallie Williams has been a featured Creative Growth artist, exhibiting in a group show at Parklife Gallery in San Francisco co-curated by Stephen Goldblatt.
Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is a leader in the field of arts and disabilities, establishing a model for a creative community guided by the principle that art is fundamental to human expression and that all people are entitled to its tools of communication.
The Creative Growth Studio is home to over 140 artists who work in a variety of media. Facilitated by professional artists, the studio provides artistic support, high quality materials, and space for painting, drawing, ceramics, woodwork, fiber arts, printmaking, and digital media.
Pre-peformed, 2024
Oak, nylon cord
Here and Now
Monoprint on paper with pencil and watercolor pencil
Here and Now refers to the moment of creation, the response to the print pulled off the press. Something more can be coaxed from the silhouetted marks. A tiny universe emerges from the undulating forms.
Briones Reservoir, 2020
reduction woodcut
Image dimensions: 12" x 24"
Framed dimensions: 18" x 30"
Created during the shut-down of the pandemic, the reservoir was the view I had from my house and this is the first of a series I did of Briones. I have always worked from close observation, trying to distill the essence of my subject. That is my intent for all my work in general - a distillation of both the mundane and sublime spectacles of nature.
Let Me Tell You, 2019
Image dimensions: 6" x 6"
Jen Cole was a printmaker based out of the Bay Area, CA and artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute. She worked as a fine arts printer for ten years after completing her graduate work at San Francisco State in 1985.
She was a vital part of Kala's creative community. Having been an artist-in-residence for years, sold work through Kala's art sales program, and taught workshops at Kala sharing her practice and process with students at Kala.
Framing Courtesy of SFMOMA
Accumulations, 2022
Aquatint etching
11" x 15"
I am a printmaker and mixed media artist based in Oakland, California. I moved here from Hawaii to pursue a degree in graphic design but quickly realized that wasn't for me and ended up earning my BFA in printmaking from the California College of the Arts in 2011.
Untitled (I need you i), 2022
Monotype on paper, oil based ink
8.5" x 11"
My overall practice is based in drawing and collage as a means of making and unmaking self portraiture. This work emerged from a deep meditation on the color midnight blue and nets as reoccurring motifs to think through various social & personal relationships to Blackness and queerness.
Courtesy of nkiruka oparah
Orchard Study Series 34, 2023
Framed dimensions: 21" x 17.5"
Nancy Genn is a painter and sculptor with a long career. She has been known as an abstract expressionist. Throughout her career she has used influences from Asia into her work.The artwork included here was inspired by the orchards of California.
Untitled, 1966
Sumi ink on paper
28.75" x 23"
The son of Japanese immigrants, Matsumi Kanemitsu was born in 1922 in Ogden, Utah, but spent his childhood with his grandparents in Hiroshima, Japan. He moved back to the United States in 1940 and joined the U.S. Army in 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor soon led to his arrest and confinement in detention camps.
Devastating as that experience must have been, Kanemitsu began drawing with art supplies provided by the American Red Cross and eventually made his way to Europe as a military hospital assistant. After his tour of duty ended in 1946, he stayed in Europe for two years, studying with Fernand Leger in Paris, meeting other prominent artists, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and visiting art museums.
Kanemitsu returned to the United States in 1949 and plunged into New York's postwar art scene, famously populated by artists such as Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, John Chamberlain, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and dealer Leo Castelli. But as a student of Japanese painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League, he also kept in touch with his cultural heritage.
In the early 1960s, apparently ready for a change of scene, Kanemitsu moved to Los Angeles, which became his final home. His first major accomplishment was a suite of prints that translated sumi painting techniques into lithography. The project was funded by a 1961 Ford Foundation grant to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop-- founded by artist June Wayne-and was documented in the film "Four Stones for Kanemitsu."
With extraordinary skill and versatility, Kanemitsu also became a teacher, at Chouinard Art Institute from 1965 to 1970 and at Otis Art Institute from 1971 to 1983. Nicknamed "Mike" by his friend, painter Jackson Pollock, Kanemitsu is often identified as a second generation Abstract Expressionist, but his artistic legacy is bicultural, embracing Japanese ink painting traditions as well as American Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.
Untitled (Homage to Robert Rauschenberg, Automobile Tire Print, 1953), 2023
Ceramic
7" x 9.75" x 2"
Reniel Del Rosario is an artist that primarily uses ceramics, quantity, and satire to discuss themes of commodification and value. His projects range from interactive mimicries of consumer establishments, reimaginings of artifacts, and imperfect copies of already-existing objects. He holds a BA in Art Practice from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a 2019 recipient of the Center for Craft's Windgate-Lamar fellowship, a 2022 SFMOMA Artists Soapbox Derby racer, and has been featured in writings such as ARTFORUM and Bon Appetit Mag. His work has been exhibited internationally through traditional and alternative venues such as West Coast Craft, Meta Open Arts, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Catharine Clark Gallery, other places Art Fair, Load Na Dito, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Jane Lombard Gallery, and simply on the public sidewalk.
Concentric Waves, 2024
Steel
20" x 8" x 4"
Ben Trautman is an artist living in Oakland. He has a Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley and has done several public art projects and museum installations located in the Bay Area, Philadelphia, and Calgary. He is currently developing a new body of work focused on interior mobiles, wall pieces, and drawings.
2023 Bath, 2023
Acrylic on arches
Seeing the Mystery, 2024
20" x 20"
Monotype on paper produced exclusively for Kala 50 by Magnolia Editions Paper Makers
Printed by Kala studio artist, Max Valentine under the direction of Squeak Carnwath
untitled (two stacks), 1997
Etching chine colle
Image size: 7.75" x 10"
ed. 9/50
One of the most influential American ceramicists of the twentieth century, Peter Voulkos (1924-2002) was celebrated for a radical approach that fundamentally transformed the field. His avant-garde forms and techniques defied midcentury craft norms, and he reinvented the medium by combining wheel-throwing with slab-building, traditional glazes with epoxy paint, figuration with abstraction, and by building large-scale ceramic structures with complex internal engineering. He explored other media as well, and developed distinctive bodies of work in painting, bronze sculpture, and prints, but continually he returned to pottery forms to demonstrate their endless potential for experimentation.
SOE (Save Our Earth), 2006
23.125" x 17.25" x 1"
A true maverick, Marin artist William T. Wiley (1937 - 2021) created thought-provoking art with an idiosyncratic style that defied classification for over 50 years. Incorporating layers of narrative with a host of recurring symbols and characters, he expressed an enigmatic imagination, often calling attention to critical issues of the times through drawing, watercolor, paint, found objects, printmaking, film, and performance art. Rife with pointed societal commentary and witty personal musings, this exhibition brings together works dating back to 1970 that illuminate broad interests ranging from war, politics, the economy, and environmental concerns to literature, art world trends, Zen philosophy, and more.
Wiley attended the San Francisco Art Institute (then the California School of Fine Arts). Soon after graduating in 1962, he began to teach at UC Davis, where he enjoyed a long and colorful career, inspiring and collaborating with such notable artists, students, and friends as Bruce Nauman, Robert Hudson, and Robert Arneson, who together would become anchors of the Bay Area Funk Art movement in the 1970s. In the late 1960s, Wiley purchased land in Woodacre along San Geronimo Creek, where he lived and worked for most of his long career. His work has been featured in museums across the nation and can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; among others.
Ways of Seeing, 2024
Alchemy, 2024
Make it Pretty, 2024
pausas envueltas, 2024
Ceramic, copper wire, paper, ink wood, and acrylic paint
6" x 17" x 11"
The line drawing on paper anchors the four sculptural ceramic pieces, positioned on the drawing to create a topographical map of sorts. The copper wire is a continuation of this line drawing, wrapping itself around each piece, connecting and expanding within. The piece is titled in Spanish "pausas envueltas" which means "wrapped pauses". How do we navigate through the landscape, whether physical or emotional?
tres pensamientos, 2019
Gouache and ink on paper
This drawing is part of a series of works about talismans and nature. These forms are wrapped with colorful cords, holding together wishes and declarations, ready to be released. The piece is titled in Spanish "tres pensamientos" which means "three thoughts."
Siena Series #75, 2010
Oil paint and graphite on wood panel
17" x 17"
For many years I have been interested in the beauty and quality of line and have used painting as a medium to explore this interest.
Early Spring Burst, 2003
Mixed media on paper
43" x 41" x 2"
FMV $4,000.00
Tanja Softic explores questions of communication, migration, and cultural identity in her paintings and mixed media work on paper. She was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and later moved to America, spurring an investigation of personal and global belonging within her work. Her abstracted scenes simultaneously partition and overlap each other in a frenzy of web-like lines, creating a visually delicate and emotionally jarring atmosphere.
Softic lives and works in Richmond, VA, where she is a Professor of Art at the University of Richmond. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Sarajevo and earned her MFA in Printmaking from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Ino-Cho Paper Museum in Kochi, Japan; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA.
Homenaje a Lydia Mendoza, 2008
Screen print
Emmanuel Catarino Montoya, a descendent of Apache and Mexican heritages, was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on April 16, 1952.
According to Montoya, the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, the master printmakers and muralists of 20th century Mexico and Latin America, and the Federal Art Project Works Progress Administration in North America during the 1930s and 40s, influenced his style. When he was a young artist living in San Francisco in the 1960s, Bill Graham's rock concert posters, with their splashing, colorful imagery and flowing text that represented the art and music of the time, had a major impact on the art he was producing.
Emmanuel Montoya taught printmaking, mural painting, and drawing throughout California for thirty years. He completed numerous public art commissions for the Mission Branch Library, San Francisco; the international terminal at the San Francisco International Airport; the College of Fine Arts at San Francisco State University; Whole Foods Market in Cupertino, California; and the Alameda County Arts Commission. The Graphic Works of Emmanuel C. Montoya was presented at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Spring 1988. In 2014, he received the Kala Art Institute's Master Artist Award in recognition of his contributions to the fields of art and art education.
Montoya is represented in the collections of the La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; and the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, Texas.
Absence, 2016
Pigment Prints on Hahemuhle German Etching fine art paper
4" x 6" print/ 13"x 13" framed
Absence, is a meditation on the in-between spaces of belonging. Bodies, individually or in groups, are cutout from landscapes, cityscapes, homes, displaced. What remains are layered fragments of place, intimate spaces they once occupied, weaving strands of each space into creating reflections of a place once called home.
Courtesy of AG Galerie, Tehran/ London
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