With a New Space, MarinMOCA Brings North Bay Art Front and Center

For many San Franciscans, myself included, Marin is a mysterious, majestic place with hidden pockets of culture and community, all nestled in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais. But there’s a rich history of accomplished artists in the area — and a generation on the rise. The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, with a new exhibition space in San Rafael, is aiming to bring North Bay art front and center.

MarinMOCA San Rafael is a satellite location of the Novato museum, which has programmed exhibitions and housed artists’ studios at the former military base of Hamilton Field for nearly two decades, mostly with volunteer labor. The San Rafael space is, for now, just a gallery, on the ground floor of an office building the museum quickly designated as an unmissable art space by painting the façade bright pink. If all goes to plan, San Rafael’s burgeoning Downtown Arts District will likely become MarinMOCA’s full-time home.

“[The museum] has made many attempts to renegotiate its lease with the city of Novato, but at this point we’re realizing that, in terms of our public facing mission, another location is probably better,” says recently appointed MarinMOCA Director Jodi Roberts.

Programming will continue in both locations through at least the end of this year. The museum’s lease in the San Rafael location is good through October 2025, at which point Roberts hopes to have found a larger, permanent home. The museum will remain free and continue its artist membership program after the move. While Roberts’s sights are set on increasing MarinMOCA’s cultural impact, local artists are the key to doing so.

“There are so many artists who have had meaningful, productive periods in the North Bay,” Roberts says. “We want to put those stories out there and develop the history of how the North Bay has been a real touchstone for artists throughout the Bay Area.”

MarinMOCA San Rafael’s inaugural exhibition, Opening the Mountain circles a lineage of North Bay artists. Marin’s history of affordability, its natural spaces and proximity to San Francisco, have inspired multiple generations of artists to make their home there. This range of ages and backgrounds is reflected in the exhibition, from the artists included to the curators behind it. Veteran curator Natasha Boas and recent college graduate Asha McGee selected a refreshing mix of 23 decorated and rising artists for the show, including Adeline Kent, Chris Johanson, Saif Azzuz and Daisy Sheff, all with some connection to Marin.

“Both know this place well enough that they are able to pinpoint a historical moment and understand how that resonates,” Roberts says of the curators.

Many of the young artists come from McGee’s social circle.

“I’ve seen their art grow over the years,” she says. “I grew up seeing my dad [the artist Barry McGee] do shows and always bringing in his community and friends, which influenced me a lot. The idea of bringing everybody up with you and also paying homage to how much your community has affected your work or your life.”

For Boas, the show expands beyond geographical location to encompass that sense of art historical genealogy.

“I really don’t see this as a Marin show,” she says. “All the artists in the show have much larger audiences and geography is not the focal point — it is, rather, the jumping off point. It’s really about a certain kind of art-making, exhibition-making and kind of representation and practice that is tied to a generative community.”

The theme of intergenerational relationships is present throughout.

Anabel de Vries’s suite of black-and-white photographs of maternal care hang opposite Stella Kudritzki pictures of a group of young girls playing and posing for the camera. Alice Shaw’s riffs on Chinese brush painting — photographic prints of flowers on gold leaf — hang beside her mother Martha Shaw’s diffuse landscape paintings. Another direct mother-daughter relationship is present in the inclusion of stylized landscape paintings by McGee’s late mother, Margaret Kilgallen.

Still, the landscape shines as a strong inspiration throughout the show. A pair of Adaline Kent drawings, showing charcoal infinity symbols cascading into waterfalls, flank a Untitled (Mountain Meadow) (all 1944), uniquely colorful and figurative for Kent’s typical drawing style. The artist, who was a mainstay of the interwar San Francisco art scene, spent most of her spare time in the nature of the North Bay. She also had generational ties — the city of Kentfield is named after her family.

Nick Gorham and July Guzman’s more recent oil paintings offer abstract, deeply felt interpretations of the land, evoking a recognizable feeling of the sublime in West Marin’s natural environment. And Ashwini Bhat’s abstract ceramic sculpture, a twisted vessel form, Self Portrait as California Landscape says it all: the landscape is as much a place we inhabit as something that inhabits us.

The exhibition shares its title with a book about a Zen ritual walk around Mount Tamalpais undertaken by Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen in 1965. The show feels like a similar ambulation of the region; it’s a roving survey of all the vantages and vistas the place had to offer, and an opportunity for introspection on that legacy.

For McGee, both the sense of community, and of place, relate to the future as much as to the past and present.

“I think the Bay Area is ripe for the taking right now,” McGee says. “We’re at a point that feels very pivotal. Are we going to pick this community up and say, ‘We’re all together in this and we’re going to restore the Bay Area to what it used to be?’”

Opening the Mountain answers McGee’s question with a resounding yes. At least from the Marin artists. But will the rest of the Bay Area take note of the rumblings from beneath the mountain?

“It’s time for Marin to take its place as a cultural hotspot,” Roberts says. “It’s been that historically, it just hasn’t been recognized — and that’s the role that a cultural institution can play.”

‘Opening the Mountain’ is on view at MarinMOCA San Rafael (1210 Fifth Ave., San Rafael), through Dec. 21, 2024.