For 55 Years, Tom Marioni Has Pursued the Art of ‘Drinking Beer With Friends’
The Deceptive Minimalism of Léonie Guyer at House of Seiko
Rose D’Amato Sees the Signs
Humans Are Just Another Animal in a Dreamlike Wattis Show
Vallejo’s ‘Salad Days’ Begin Again With the Help of a New Artist-Run Gallery
A Fond Farewell to Ratio 3, Closing After 20 Years in San Francisco
Lunch With Artist Mirra Helen is Like Eating With a Friendly Ghost
Newest Wattis Anthology Invites Readers to Participate in Radical Listening
Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ Analyzes Sci-Fi to Argue for Less Racist Futures
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"title": "For 55 Years, Tom Marioni Has Pursued the Art of ‘Drinking Beer With Friends’",
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"content": "\u003cp>Outside of Tom Marioni’s studio on Howard Street, directly facing the great white side of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s cruise-ship-like extension, I find the artist and a few friends smoking cigars. After some niceties, we head inside to begin Marioni’s long-running conceptual piece \u003cem>The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art\u003c/em>, which has taken place on Wednesdays in San Francisco since 1970.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As an artist and curator, Tom Marioni, 87, is perhaps best known for starting the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Conceptual_Art\">Museum of Conceptual Art\u003c/a> (MOCA) in San Francisco, which, in his own words, was created “as an excuse to party.” In 1970, it was the first alternative art space (\u003cem>probably\u003c/em>) in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His inaugural show was \u003cem>Sound Sculpture As\u003c/em>, a concert of actions by sculptors that included Paul Kos’ now-famous \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2012.70/\">\u003cem>The Sound of Ice Melting\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. He also invited a young Chris Burden to do his first-ever performance piece at MOCA, an \u003ca href=\"https://collection.bampfa.berkeley.edu/catalog/19360a98-5587-4885-9910-fc1255a79f01\">“undercover hippie” act\u003c/a> in which the artist had a star pattern stabbed into his chest, shaved his head, then donned a fresh business suit. MOCA closed in 1984.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970525\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970525\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Seven people sit around tables in studio\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-scaled.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The author, center, sits beside Tom Marioni (far right), along with regular attendees of Marioni’s weekly event, ‘The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.’ \u003ccite>(Theadora Walsh)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Today, in Marioni’s studio, there’s an easy formality to the social assembly. Etiquette is paired with hands-on hosting. I’m instructed on where to leave my coat and I watch the regulars assume their positions on purple-topped bar stools running along a handmade, curved bar. Above the bar are seven framed photographs of men I know I’m supposed to recognize.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I sit down at one of the curved brown leather bar booths, which I learn were purchased from a Third Street bar called Breen’s, now gone. Marioni tells me he used to host the event there; NEA funding, he says, meant the beer was free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Breen’s had the longest bar in San Francisco,” Marioni tells me. “It served German food, with a steam table offering sauerbraten every Wednesday.” When Breen’s closed in 1979, he moved the piece next door to the also now-gone Jerry and Johnnie’s and printed credit cards for free beer on meeting days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m a born-again conceptual artist,” Marioni says with a smile while I accept my glass of Pacifico. The sentence spins off like a pick-up line. During the gathering, it is impossible to tell how many times the stories being traded across the table have been told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970536\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970536\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000.jpg\" alt=\"photograph of large group of people sitting, standing, talking, drinking\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1511\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-800x604.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-1020x771.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-160x121.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-768x580.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-1536x1160.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-1920x1451.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An image of a gathering at Marioni’s studio in 2000, from his book ‘Social Art.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For the next three hours, I am audience to the lost art of holding court. I become vaguely concerned while realizing how rarely I actually see people take the formalities of social pleasantries seriously. Structure is required for good conversation and the charming group of seven or so people gathered around the bar really understand this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is illustrated, in part, by several attendees who make up elegant glasses of water, each mixed then served with precisely three ice cubes, gingerly administered with tongs. The median age in the room must be 85, so one imagines there’s a limit on day drinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The act of drinking with friends is approached vivaciously. I enjoy myself entirely as gossip, light philosophy, art polemics, and the schedules of various opera houses across North America are tossed around the room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you remember that woman’s name,” Marioni queries, “I was handcuffed to her for three days?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh! You mean the nun!” Dan Max excitedly recalls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What was her name?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can’t say.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Someone walks in, catches up quickly, and has the answer: they’re talking about \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Montano\">Linda Montano\u003c/a>. We speak briefly of the New York artist Tehching Hsieh, to whom the Linda in question was tied to for a full year in the psychologically wounding endurance performance \u003ca href=\"https://www.artforum.com/events/tehching-hsieh-linda-montano-224861/\">\u003cem>Rope Piece\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, before the conversation turns once again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970526\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970526\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000.jpg\" alt=\"printed text on book page\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1688\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-800x675.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-1020x861.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-160x135.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-768x648.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-1536x1296.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-1920x1620.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A page from ‘Social Art’ shows the ‘Artists’ Credit Card’ that could be redeemed for drinks at a bygone San Francisco bar. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At one point Marioni picks up an invitation to his \u003ca href=\"https://bampfa.org/event/social-art-act-drinking-beer-friends-highest-form-art-tom-marioni\">Jan. 12 event\u003c/a> at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, tied to his 2024 book \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://store.crownpoint.com/products/social-art-the-act-of-drinking-beer-with-friends-is-the-highest-form-of-art-1970\">Social Art\u003c/a>\u003c/em> and then bends down, sweeping a few crumbs onto it with a hand brush, before flicking them off and then extending the card to me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lydi Titcomb, an art collector tactfully bartending (this is in accordance with a strict “no art collectors except in disguise” rule posted behind the bar), has arrived from San Francisco’s mayoral inauguration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was wonderful,” she preens, in an elegant fitted cap and long-stranded necklace. “He invited everyone in for bagels and fresh cream cheese.” The decorum felt performative, pleasant. I couldn’t quite tell if it was sincere or ironic. I thought of Tippi Hedren in the pet store scene that opens Hitchcock’s The Birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is conceptual art, anyway? It has a sort of “if you have to ask, it’s already too late” feeling. I asked every so often anyway. Nothing seemed to count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dan Max, an artist who’s been attending these meetings since the ’70s, jumps in to share a $100 dollar gift card presented to him by his local coffee shop for being “the best customer.” We admire the lamination. Such a card, and its hand-scrawled note of gratitude, could find its way into the framed objects on the wall, which included a matcha whisk carefully paired with a shaving brush and a collection of unusual glass beakers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anything considered with sensitivity, intention or a bit of humor might become a work of art.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970528\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970528\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"crowded shelf with framed and unframed ephemera\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-scaled.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A display of objects in Tom Marioni’s studio. \u003ccite>(Theadora Walsh)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The youngest attendee, and the latest person to be issued a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/DDsiRZPy679/?hl=en\">bartender diploma\u003c/a>” by Marioni is the artist Alberto Cuadros, who alongside Laura Black and MP Knowlton runs \u003ca href=\"https://www.s-a-l-a.org/\">Society of Art Los Angeles\u003c/a> (SALA). Cuadros and Black are in San Francisco to broaden their organization’s scope, in part by drinking beer with Marioni. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of those gathered tell me they came to San Francisco in the ’70s to have a beer with Tom Marioni. If you were interested in conceptual art, it was the place to be. Cuadros, who hadn’t yet gone to art school when he started attending 10 years ago, echoes the sentiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13970309,arts_13969965,arts_13969665'] “What I appreciate most is the link between what’s upcoming and what existed before,” Cuadros says of his first visits to Marioni’s weekly gatherings. “I would get these epic educations from 5:00 to 8:00 and then burst out to Howard Street, and feel like I was tapping into this epic portal to San Francisco.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thinking about Marioni’s project and how they too might imbue everyday life with art, Cuadros and Black have started centering their programming around the concept of a living archive. The organization’s idea is that it’s possible to bridge the past and the present through collaboration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They place an emphasis on ongoing contributions and reinterpretations, Black says, “often involving diverse voices from the community.” Following Marioni’s lead, they hope to open a space downtown that invites people to engage with a non-esoteric and immediate setting for social art. The “art bar” (Cuadros has made several), is a guiding model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Continuity is rare. The recent fires in California remind me of how often we imagine permanence, when really, we’ve built that idea on unstable structures. There have been so many declarations of the Bay Area’s stagnation, but what isn’t moving towards decay?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fact that Tom Marioni has for 55 years been hosting a more-or-less weekly social gathering for friends to drink beer together excites me. A living archive is constituted by presence. It can happen when we gather; it is contained by repeated stories, by conversations, by talking with a friend over a beer.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Outside of Tom Marioni’s studio on Howard Street, directly facing the great white side of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s cruise-ship-like extension, I find the artist and a few friends smoking cigars. After some niceties, we head inside to begin Marioni’s long-running conceptual piece \u003cem>The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art\u003c/em>, which has taken place on Wednesdays in San Francisco since 1970.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As an artist and curator, Tom Marioni, 87, is perhaps best known for starting the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Conceptual_Art\">Museum of Conceptual Art\u003c/a> (MOCA) in San Francisco, which, in his own words, was created “as an excuse to party.” In 1970, it was the first alternative art space (\u003cem>probably\u003c/em>) in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His inaugural show was \u003cem>Sound Sculpture As\u003c/em>, a concert of actions by sculptors that included Paul Kos’ now-famous \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2012.70/\">\u003cem>The Sound of Ice Melting\u003c/em>\u003c/a>. He also invited a young Chris Burden to do his first-ever performance piece at MOCA, an \u003ca href=\"https://collection.bampfa.berkeley.edu/catalog/19360a98-5587-4885-9910-fc1255a79f01\">“undercover hippie” act\u003c/a> in which the artist had a star pattern stabbed into his chest, shaved his head, then donned a fresh business suit. MOCA closed in 1984.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970525\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970525\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Seven people sit around tables in studio\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-scaled.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Booth_2000-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The author, center, sits beside Tom Marioni (far right), along with regular attendees of Marioni’s weekly event, ‘The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.’ \u003ccite>(Theadora Walsh)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Today, in Marioni’s studio, there’s an easy formality to the social assembly. Etiquette is paired with hands-on hosting. I’m instructed on where to leave my coat and I watch the regulars assume their positions on purple-topped bar stools running along a handmade, curved bar. Above the bar are seven framed photographs of men I know I’m supposed to recognize.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I sit down at one of the curved brown leather bar booths, which I learn were purchased from a Third Street bar called Breen’s, now gone. Marioni tells me he used to host the event there; NEA funding, he says, meant the beer was free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Breen’s had the longest bar in San Francisco,” Marioni tells me. “It served German food, with a steam table offering sauerbraten every Wednesday.” When Breen’s closed in 1979, he moved the piece next door to the also now-gone Jerry and Johnnie’s and printed credit cards for free beer on meeting days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m a born-again conceptual artist,” Marioni says with a smile while I accept my glass of Pacifico. The sentence spins off like a pick-up line. During the gathering, it is impossible to tell how many times the stories being traded across the table have been told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970536\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970536\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000.jpg\" alt=\"photograph of large group of people sitting, standing, talking, drinking\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1511\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-800x604.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-1020x771.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-160x121.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-768x580.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-1536x1160.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/SIA2000_2000-1920x1451.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An image of a gathering at Marioni’s studio in 2000, from his book ‘Social Art.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For the next three hours, I am audience to the lost art of holding court. I become vaguely concerned while realizing how rarely I actually see people take the formalities of social pleasantries seriously. Structure is required for good conversation and the charming group of seven or so people gathered around the bar really understand this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is illustrated, in part, by several attendees who make up elegant glasses of water, each mixed then served with precisely three ice cubes, gingerly administered with tongs. The median age in the room must be 85, so one imagines there’s a limit on day drinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The act of drinking with friends is approached vivaciously. I enjoy myself entirely as gossip, light philosophy, art polemics, and the schedules of various opera houses across North America are tossed around the room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you remember that woman’s name,” Marioni queries, “I was handcuffed to her for three days?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh! You mean the nun!” Dan Max excitedly recalls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What was her name?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can’t say.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Someone walks in, catches up quickly, and has the answer: they’re talking about \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Montano\">Linda Montano\u003c/a>. We speak briefly of the New York artist Tehching Hsieh, to whom the Linda in question was tied to for a full year in the psychologically wounding endurance performance \u003ca href=\"https://www.artforum.com/events/tehching-hsieh-linda-montano-224861/\">\u003cem>Rope Piece\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, before the conversation turns once again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970526\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970526\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000.jpg\" alt=\"printed text on book page\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1688\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-800x675.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-1020x861.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-160x135.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-768x648.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-1536x1296.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/CreditCard_2000-1920x1620.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A page from ‘Social Art’ shows the ‘Artists’ Credit Card’ that could be redeemed for drinks at a bygone San Francisco bar. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At one point Marioni picks up an invitation to his \u003ca href=\"https://bampfa.org/event/social-art-act-drinking-beer-friends-highest-form-art-tom-marioni\">Jan. 12 event\u003c/a> at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, tied to his 2024 book \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://store.crownpoint.com/products/social-art-the-act-of-drinking-beer-with-friends-is-the-highest-form-of-art-1970\">Social Art\u003c/a>\u003c/em> and then bends down, sweeping a few crumbs onto it with a hand brush, before flicking them off and then extending the card to me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lydi Titcomb, an art collector tactfully bartending (this is in accordance with a strict “no art collectors except in disguise” rule posted behind the bar), has arrived from San Francisco’s mayoral inauguration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was wonderful,” she preens, in an elegant fitted cap and long-stranded necklace. “He invited everyone in for bagels and fresh cream cheese.” The decorum felt performative, pleasant. I couldn’t quite tell if it was sincere or ironic. I thought of Tippi Hedren in the pet store scene that opens Hitchcock’s The Birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is conceptual art, anyway? It has a sort of “if you have to ask, it’s already too late” feeling. I asked every so often anyway. Nothing seemed to count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dan Max, an artist who’s been attending these meetings since the ’70s, jumps in to share a $100 dollar gift card presented to him by his local coffee shop for being “the best customer.” We admire the lamination. Such a card, and its hand-scrawled note of gratitude, could find its way into the framed objects on the wall, which included a matcha whisk carefully paired with a shaving brush and a collection of unusual glass beakers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anything considered with sensitivity, intention or a bit of humor might become a work of art.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13970528\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13970528\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"crowded shelf with framed and unframed ephemera\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-scaled.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Studio_2000-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A display of objects in Tom Marioni’s studio. \u003ccite>(Theadora Walsh)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The youngest attendee, and the latest person to be issued a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/DDsiRZPy679/?hl=en\">bartender diploma\u003c/a>” by Marioni is the artist Alberto Cuadros, who alongside Laura Black and MP Knowlton runs \u003ca href=\"https://www.s-a-l-a.org/\">Society of Art Los Angeles\u003c/a> (SALA). Cuadros and Black are in San Francisco to broaden their organization’s scope, in part by drinking beer with Marioni. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of those gathered tell me they came to San Francisco in the ’70s to have a beer with Tom Marioni. If you were interested in conceptual art, it was the place to be. Cuadros, who hadn’t yet gone to art school when he started attending 10 years ago, echoes the sentiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> “What I appreciate most is the link between what’s upcoming and what existed before,” Cuadros says of his first visits to Marioni’s weekly gatherings. “I would get these epic educations from 5:00 to 8:00 and then burst out to Howard Street, and feel like I was tapping into this epic portal to San Francisco.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thinking about Marioni’s project and how they too might imbue everyday life with art, Cuadros and Black have started centering their programming around the concept of a living archive. The organization’s idea is that it’s possible to bridge the past and the present through collaboration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They place an emphasis on ongoing contributions and reinterpretations, Black says, “often involving diverse voices from the community.” Following Marioni’s lead, they hope to open a space downtown that invites people to engage with a non-esoteric and immediate setting for social art. The “art bar” (Cuadros has made several), is a guiding model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Continuity is rare. The recent fires in California remind me of how often we imagine permanence, when really, we’ve built that idea on unstable structures. There have been so many declarations of the Bay Area’s stagnation, but what isn’t moving towards decay?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fact that Tom Marioni has for 55 years been hosting a more-or-less weekly social gathering for friends to drink beer together excites me. A living archive is constituted by presence. It can happen when we gather; it is contained by repeated stories, by conversations, by talking with a friend over a beer.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Every morning, when \u003ca href=\"https://www.leonieguyer.com/\">Léonie Guyer\u003c/a> enters her studio, she tries to trick herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before I cross the threshold,” she says excitedly, her face animated by the thought, “I try to trick myself into thinking that I’ve never been there before. So, when I first see the work inside, I don’t think of it as my work. It’s just the work, and every time I’m seeing it, it’s the first time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guyer’s paintings require tremendous sensitivity before they can come into existence. The shapes that she captures in her works feel preexistent, more like forms she’s been patiently waiting to encounter than representations or expressions of inner thoughts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://houseofseiko.info/present\">Three and Three and One\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, Guyer’s show at House of Seiko, is made up of three watercolors, three paintings on marble and a modest wall drawing painted on-site. The last feels the most alive, perhaps because its simple ovular shape is rendered in dappled shades of crimson. The gentle painting, semi-opaque against the gallery’s wall, seems to pull texture up into its body, drawing out the qualities of wood still preserved beneath the white paint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967365\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967365\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000.jpg\" alt=\"three framed works on paper in white gallery space\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Léonie Guyer’s ‘Three and Three and One’ at House of Seiko. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photo by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Material histories\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There is a bravery to the simplicity of Guyer’s paintings. Each appears to use only a single color; the strokes she makes on her chosen “canvases” are humble in size. The three watercolors on display, gray with oscillating warm and cold tones, enclose diluted expanses of color in tenuous outlines. Their boundaries are both discrete and gentle, vaguely reminiscent of a shark sack, the semi-translucent rectangular capsule that provides a shell for a shark’s embryo. In one watercolor, the form comes to a sharp horn on the side.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her compositions are intimately bound with the material on which she paints. The paper for the watercolors, for example, lived in her studio for 21 years before she felt ready to mark it. During those years, the material wasn’t forgotten, but acted as an ever-present companion, occupying its place in the room as a silent collaborator. As if speaking about an old friend, Guyer happily recounts first encountering the double weight Indian jute paper at the art store New York Central in the early 2000s. With admiration, she describes the traditional process of shaping and drying it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Histories like these are nestled into Guyer’s practice. And San Francisco, Guyer’s home of nearly 50 years, is foundational to her deceptively minimalist pieces. Since moving from Long Island to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Guyer has been a stalwart Bay Area community member.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘Lines like writing’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While she adamantly identifies as a painter, poetry plays a central role for the artist. She’s often provided a visual counterpart to the work poets do with words: freeing the image from the burden of narrative. In 2011, she collaborated with Bill Berkson, matching drawings to his monograph \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/744930\">Not An Exit\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, put out by Jungle Garden Press.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967367\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967367\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1380\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-800x552.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-1020x704.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-160x110.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-768x530.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-1536x1060.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-1920x1325.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Léonie Guyer’s ‘Three and Three and One’ at House of Seiko. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photo by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At House of Seiko, the works on marble, monochromatic paintings crisp against the stone’s mottled grays, can be understood in relation to another community close to Guyer’s heart. Though made in 2024, the marble pieces remind me of \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/02/in-the-place-just-right/\">Gift\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, a 2006 site-based exhibition in which Guyer painted her signature forms on the top floor of a Shaker building, the historic 1829 Brethren’s Workshop in New Lebanon, New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guyer first encountered Shaker gift drawings at San Francisco’s \u003ca href=\"https://fraenkelgallery.com/\">Fraenkel Gallery\u003c/a>, during a sweeping group show they’d hung salon-style. The gift drawing was high, high on the wall and semi-obscured by its position. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she recalls, “the lines look like writing. I could hardly tell what it looked like, but I felt the radiation off the page. It was humming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When she inquired about the piece, the gallery assistant demurred, chancing that the origins were totally unknown. As this was well before the internet, the encounter lived inside the artist’s mind for a long time, tenured in memory, until New York City’s Drawing Center mounted \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://drawingcenter.org/exhibitions/heavenly-visions-shaker-gift-drawings-and-gift-songs\">Heavenly Visions\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, a show of gift drawings and gift songs, in 2001.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years after that, the artist \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13963630/sarah-cain-quiet-riot-anthony-meier-mill-valley-review\">Sarah Cain\u003c/a>, a student of Guyer’s at SFAI, recognized the images in a lecture and connected Guyer with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.shakermuseum.us/\">Shaker Museum\u003c/a>, where Cain’s mother coincidentally worked. The experience with the Shaker aesthetic became so important to her practice that when the Wattis Institute mounted \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/our-program/on-view/la-onie-guyer-form-in-the-realm-of-2018\">form in the realm of\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, a 2018 exhibition of Guyer’s work, they even procured a few actual gift drawings for an introductory vitrine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967368\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967368\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000.jpg\" alt=\"delicate watercolor shape on off-white paper, black shape reminiscent of a cat on marble\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1290\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-800x516.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-1020x658.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-768x495.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-1536x991.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-1920x1238.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Details of Léonie Guyer works. L: ‘Untitled, MHK-48,’ 2024; R: ‘Untitled, no. 117,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photos by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The decorative, handmade gift drawings present language more for its aesthetic qualities than for its meaning. They remind me of how talking is so often less about communicating than keeping someone company. Easy, meaningless chatter does the difficult work of assuring someone “Yes, I am here, I am with you. I’m listening.” The Shaker gift drawings are like that: illustrations of small talk replete in its generosity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guyer’s paintings don’t talk, but they do populate space emphatically enough to offer a kind of companionship. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/susan-howe\">Susan Howe poems\u003c/a> included in a booklet made for the House of Seiko show seem to vibrate in agreement.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Ancient symbols\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Another touchstone for the artist is the Mycenean figurines of ancient Greece. These relics’ simple shapes adhere to a few stylistic properties. The Mycenean bird goddess, for example, always has a long stem and a small squat face that sits above a flattened ceramic circle gesturing at wings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Guyer visits often, sometimes using her recent status as a Guggenheim Fellow to access the exhibition in the off-hours. Its body is striped with simple brown paint, and defined by bowing curvature that leaves a trace of the hands that molded its shape, lending the ceramic an organic, living quality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967369\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967369\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Léonie Guyer’s ‘Three and Three and One’ at House of Seiko. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photo by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Much like her own work, the Mycenean bird goddesses feel symbolic; they adhere to their own secret shorthand. Both her work and the figurines jump out of time, essential and audacious, refusing to be pinned to any specific context. Instead, they feel constantly at home in the present, almost already familiar to the viewer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Form has a meaning — but it is a meaning entirely its own,” writes the 20th-century art historian Henri Focillon in \u003cem>The Life of Forms in Art\u003c/em>, a foundational text for Guyer that shines a specific light on her practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Bodies of pure, essential feeling\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The artist’s oblique, careful paintings turn simple shapes into bodies of pure, essential feeling. Her forms share a consistent style, patterned by their own hidden rules. I offer these considerations of gift drawings and Mycenean figures as just one way to look \u003cem>through\u003c/em> Guyer’s works at the interior logic of the universe from which they spring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The imagist poet \u003ca href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/h-d\">H.D.\u003c/a> says we must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision. We must begin with the sympathy of thought. This intimacy feels alive in Guyer’s work. Each piece is nonrepresentational, it does not point away, or towards something else, but instead pulls the viewer inwards — towards itself, closer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The vitality of Guyer’s work resists interpretation. In this way, her paintings offer the viewer a new encounter, every time.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘\u003ca href=\"https://houseofseiko.info/present\">Three and Three and One\u003c/a>’ is on view at House of Seiko (3109 22nd St., San Francisco).\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Every morning, when \u003ca href=\"https://www.leonieguyer.com/\">Léonie Guyer\u003c/a> enters her studio, she tries to trick herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before I cross the threshold,” she says excitedly, her face animated by the thought, “I try to trick myself into thinking that I’ve never been there before. So, when I first see the work inside, I don’t think of it as my work. It’s just the work, and every time I’m seeing it, it’s the first time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guyer’s paintings require tremendous sensitivity before they can come into existence. The shapes that she captures in her works feel preexistent, more like forms she’s been patiently waiting to encounter than representations or expressions of inner thoughts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://houseofseiko.info/present\">Three and Three and One\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, Guyer’s show at House of Seiko, is made up of three watercolors, three paintings on marble and a modest wall drawing painted on-site. The last feels the most alive, perhaps because its simple ovular shape is rendered in dappled shades of crimson. The gentle painting, semi-opaque against the gallery’s wall, seems to pull texture up into its body, drawing out the qualities of wood still preserved beneath the white paint.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967365\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967365\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000.jpg\" alt=\"three framed works on paper in white gallery space\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-26_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Léonie Guyer’s ‘Three and Three and One’ at House of Seiko. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photo by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Material histories\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There is a bravery to the simplicity of Guyer’s paintings. Each appears to use only a single color; the strokes she makes on her chosen “canvases” are humble in size. The three watercolors on display, gray with oscillating warm and cold tones, enclose diluted expanses of color in tenuous outlines. Their boundaries are both discrete and gentle, vaguely reminiscent of a shark sack, the semi-translucent rectangular capsule that provides a shell for a shark’s embryo. In one watercolor, the form comes to a sharp horn on the side.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her compositions are intimately bound with the material on which she paints. The paper for the watercolors, for example, lived in her studio for 21 years before she felt ready to mark it. During those years, the material wasn’t forgotten, but acted as an ever-present companion, occupying its place in the room as a silent collaborator. As if speaking about an old friend, Guyer happily recounts first encountering the double weight Indian jute paper at the art store New York Central in the early 2000s. With admiration, she describes the traditional process of shaping and drying it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Histories like these are nestled into Guyer’s practice. And San Francisco, Guyer’s home of nearly 50 years, is foundational to her deceptively minimalist pieces. Since moving from Long Island to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Guyer has been a stalwart Bay Area community member.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘Lines like writing’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While she adamantly identifies as a painter, poetry plays a central role for the artist. She’s often provided a visual counterpart to the work poets do with words: freeing the image from the burden of narrative. In 2011, she collaborated with Bill Berkson, matching drawings to his monograph \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/744930\">Not An Exit\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, put out by Jungle Garden Press.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967367\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967367\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1380\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-800x552.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-1020x704.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-160x110.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-768x530.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-1536x1060.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-20_2000-1920x1325.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Léonie Guyer’s ‘Three and Three and One’ at House of Seiko. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photo by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At House of Seiko, the works on marble, monochromatic paintings crisp against the stone’s mottled grays, can be understood in relation to another community close to Guyer’s heart. Though made in 2024, the marble pieces remind me of \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/02/in-the-place-just-right/\">Gift\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, a 2006 site-based exhibition in which Guyer painted her signature forms on the top floor of a Shaker building, the historic 1829 Brethren’s Workshop in New Lebanon, New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guyer first encountered Shaker gift drawings at San Francisco’s \u003ca href=\"https://fraenkelgallery.com/\">Fraenkel Gallery\u003c/a>, during a sweeping group show they’d hung salon-style. The gift drawing was high, high on the wall and semi-obscured by its position. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she recalls, “the lines look like writing. I could hardly tell what it looked like, but I felt the radiation off the page. It was humming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When she inquired about the piece, the gallery assistant demurred, chancing that the origins were totally unknown. As this was well before the internet, the encounter lived inside the artist’s mind for a long time, tenured in memory, until New York City’s Drawing Center mounted \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://drawingcenter.org/exhibitions/heavenly-visions-shaker-gift-drawings-and-gift-songs\">Heavenly Visions\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, a show of gift drawings and gift songs, in 2001.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years after that, the artist \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13963630/sarah-cain-quiet-riot-anthony-meier-mill-valley-review\">Sarah Cain\u003c/a>, a student of Guyer’s at SFAI, recognized the images in a lecture and connected Guyer with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.shakermuseum.us/\">Shaker Museum\u003c/a>, where Cain’s mother coincidentally worked. The experience with the Shaker aesthetic became so important to her practice that when the Wattis Institute mounted \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/our-program/on-view/la-onie-guyer-form-in-the-realm-of-2018\">form in the realm of\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, a 2018 exhibition of Guyer’s work, they even procured a few actual gift drawings for an introductory vitrine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967368\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967368\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000.jpg\" alt=\"delicate watercolor shape on off-white paper, black shape reminiscent of a cat on marble\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1290\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-800x516.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-1020x658.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-768x495.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-1536x991.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-4_2000-1920x1238.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Details of Léonie Guyer works. L: ‘Untitled, MHK-48,’ 2024; R: ‘Untitled, no. 117,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photos by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The decorative, handmade gift drawings present language more for its aesthetic qualities than for its meaning. They remind me of how talking is so often less about communicating than keeping someone company. Easy, meaningless chatter does the difficult work of assuring someone “Yes, I am here, I am with you. I’m listening.” The Shaker gift drawings are like that: illustrations of small talk replete in its generosity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Guyer’s paintings don’t talk, but they do populate space emphatically enough to offer a kind of companionship. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/susan-howe\">Susan Howe poems\u003c/a> included in a booklet made for the House of Seiko show seem to vibrate in agreement.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Ancient symbols\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Another touchstone for the artist is the Mycenean figurines of ancient Greece. These relics’ simple shapes adhere to a few stylistic properties. The Mycenean bird goddess, for example, always has a long stem and a small squat face that sits above a flattened ceramic circle gesturing at wings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Guyer visits often, sometimes using her recent status as a Guggenheim Fellow to access the exhibition in the off-hours. Its body is striped with simple brown paint, and defined by bowing curvature that leaves a trace of the hands that molded its shape, lending the ceramic an organic, living quality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13967369\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13967369\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/House-of-Seiko-Leonie-Guyer-Documentation-24_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Léonie Guyer’s ‘Three and Three and One’ at House of Seiko. \u003ccite>(House of Seiko; photo by Graham Holoch)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Much like her own work, the Mycenean bird goddesses feel symbolic; they adhere to their own secret shorthand. Both her work and the figurines jump out of time, essential and audacious, refusing to be pinned to any specific context. Instead, they feel constantly at home in the present, almost already familiar to the viewer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Form has a meaning — but it is a meaning entirely its own,” writes the 20th-century art historian Henri Focillon in \u003cem>The Life of Forms in Art\u003c/em>, a foundational text for Guyer that shines a specific light on her practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Bodies of pure, essential feeling\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The artist’s oblique, careful paintings turn simple shapes into bodies of pure, essential feeling. Her forms share a consistent style, patterned by their own hidden rules. I offer these considerations of gift drawings and Mycenean figures as just one way to look \u003cem>through\u003c/em> Guyer’s works at the interior logic of the universe from which they spring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The imagist poet \u003ca href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/h-d\">H.D.\u003c/a> says we must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision. We must begin with the sympathy of thought. This intimacy feels alive in Guyer’s work. Each piece is nonrepresentational, it does not point away, or towards something else, but instead pulls the viewer inwards — towards itself, closer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The vitality of Guyer’s work resists interpretation. In this way, her paintings offer the viewer a new encounter, every time.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘\u003ca href=\"https://houseofseiko.info/present\">Three and Three and One\u003c/a>’ is on view at House of Seiko (3109 22nd St., San Francisco).\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "rose-damato-bampfa-mission-chevrolet-sign-painting",
"title": "Rose D’Amato Sees the Signs",
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"headTitle": "Rose D’Amato Sees the Signs | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Rose D’Amato shows me a photograph she took of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/old-mural-mission-district-18535614.php\">recently uncovered sign\u003c/a>, hand-painted in the 1930s, advertising six-cylinder Chevrolets on what used to be the Mission Chevrolet Co. building. In the picture, a pool of water in the neighboring construction site doubles the wall, reflecting the painting back upon itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I went over the other day and someone had tagged ‘teach more history,’” says D’Amato, who is taking a break from working on her large-scale mural at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, aptly titled \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://bampfa.org/program/art-wall-rose-damato\">Mission Chevrolet\u003c/a>\u003c/em>. D’Amato’s Art Wall will be on view Aug. 7–Dec. 15, 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She directs my attention to a video feed projected over a portion of her stenciled plans to recreate the Chevrolet sign on BAMPFA’s wall. Super 8 footage, shot by the artist, slowly excavates the now-weathered Chevrolet Six sign, layering the present and its jumbled context on her reconstruction of the sign’s past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This 100-year-old billboard just got exposed, and on the other side of the city kids are burning down Waymos,” D’Amato says. “Getting confronted by this huge image from the past puts this all in perspective.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her work, D’Amato takes that “history” tag to heart. Her paintings show a reverence for San Francisco’s past by recreating and preserving ephemeral vestiges of place. But she also embraces the live, undulating context of the city’s present. It’s an approach few pull off quite as well: honoring the past without bending to nostalgia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962155\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962155\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Person stands with back to camera looking up at large mural on wall\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato sees her mural ‘Mission Chevrolet’ for the first time without any scaffolding in front of it at BAMPFA. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The language of landscape\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Rose D’Amato (who formerly worked under the name Lauren D’Amato) has called San Francisco home for the past 12 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since arriving to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute, she’s been involved in many of the city’s art scenes, apprenticing at New Bohemia Signs; running her own small sign business; perfecting her form as a pin-striper; holding Kustom Sunday community nights to adorn friends’ cars, boats and windows with painted roses; and teaching hand-lettering classes at California College of the Arts for the past four years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13890818,arts_13841135']D’Amato is deeply attuned to the particularities of San Francisco’s signage, which lend each part of the city a distinct character. In industrial Bayview, where she lives, large, bold signs meant to be read from the freeway have a certain functionality. Many of her favorites are painted by a friend and neighbor, Bob Dewhurst. Dewhurt’s signs, D’Amato says, “are practical and utilitarian, with sharp forms that reflect that use. They look like they could be Ed Ruscha paintings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In pedestrian-filled neighborhoods like the Mission, a human-scale style takes precedence. “Script signs show personality in an extreme way,” D’Amato says. Her understanding of San Francisco is of a landscape filled with different visual languages — all in constant flux.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>D’Amato is particularly drawn to signs that have transcended their original use. “I like liquor store signs,” she says. “The material they are painted on is acrylic so the actual substrates of the signs crack and fade quickly and they get replaced frequently. I try and pay attention to those because they are rapidly taken down.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962154\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962154\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED.jpg\" alt='Person holding metal tool box with \"SPARKY\" on it' width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato shows off her tool boxes at BAMPFA on Aug. 6, 2024. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Sculpting words with paint\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After spending a contemplative year at Headlands Center for the Arts as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.headlands.org/artist/lauren-damato/\">2023–2024 Tournesol Award recipient\u003c/a>, D’Amato is at a stage of her career where she’s ready to translate her many technical skills into a singular expressive style. She’s spent a decade balancing professional sign painting with her work as an artist, and D’Amato has closely considered the nebulous filament that delineates the “decorative arts” from those “fine arts” which don’t need to be qualified. The arbitrary division is troubled by her work, which speaks both languages fluently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This facility is currently on display in D’Amato’s two-person show at Gallery 16, \u003ca href=\"https://gallery16.com/exhibitions/everybody-knows-this-is-someplace\">\u003cem>Everybody Knows This Is Someplace\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, where her works find a fitting conversation partner in the textile canvases of fellow sign painter Jeffrey Sincich.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the show’s opening, early evening light seeping through the gallery’s windows gave the exhibition a disorienting feeling, washing the space in a warm, blinding orange. It was difficult to surmise the perimeter of the gallery space, and this was fitting, as many of Sincich and D’Amato’s works replicate the exterior of buildings. Sincich, especially, leans into trompe l’oeil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13957410']D’Amato’s paintings in \u003cem>Everybody Knows\u003c/em> are mostly made with shades of mauve and brown and thick, black lettering. They abstract signage, doubling or patterning language in a way that sculpts words into forms free of semantic expectations. The beveled edges and layering feel revelatory, like an impressionist painter who suddenly considers cubism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s a big thing I want to do,” D’Amato says, “show signs as something separate from their actual function. Abstraction focuses on form, their beautiful hand-made aspects.” In D’Amato’s paintings, I see the exterior world atomized through her eyes, her unique way of seeing and responding to the signs of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as the artist is guiding our attention to hand-painted signs, she’s making transparent the physical labor that goes into their construction. At the Gallery 16 show, Sincich and D’Amato invited friends and fellow sign makers to exhibit their own work, underscoring the community necessary to sustaining an art practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962156\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962156\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato holds her pin-striping brushes at BAMPFA. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Local lineages\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When the Chevrolet Six billboard was exposed in December 2023, it drew immediate interest from San Francisco’s greater sign painting community. D’Amato and her friends checked in on it, marking the way its context continually changed through heavy rains and bouts of graffiti bombing. Their interest, D’Amato says, “showed me that they would have enjoyed to paint it.” At BAMPFA, she’s invited friends and fellow sign painters to letter with her, making the act of replication a communal one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='news_11975756']This group effort feels like a direct descendent of the work of the Mujeres Muralistas, a collective formed in 1970 by Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, Patricia Rodriguez and Irene Perez while they were students at SFAI. They worked to expand ideas of what could constitute street murals in the Mission, insisting that alongside overtly political imagery, their depictions of beauty, both in its cultural manifestations and in portraits of women, played a radical, needed role. One of their first murals was a celebration of Pacos Tacos, now-shuttered, which the Mujeres Muralistas feared would lose business to a newly opened McDonald’s at 24th and Mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We had the freedom to paint whatever we wanted,” wrote Patricia Rodriguez in an essay for \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mujeres_Muralistas\">Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, “and we chose the beauty of women and their Mexican and Latino cultures.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That group would influence another Mission artist and sign painter I can’t help but associate with D’Amato’s practice: Margaret Kilgallen. Drawing from her immediate environment, Kilgallen’s paintings are somehow both elegiac and invigorating, insisting on the presence of rapidly disappearing traditions like folk art, craft, and the hand made. Her canvases reflect genuine encounters of place, and allow the disjointed forms and juxtapositions characteristic of a city to share space in her kaleidoscopes of language.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962153\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962153\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Person smiles sitting on wooden stairs with painted mural behind \" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato poses in front of ‘Mission Chevrolet’ at BAMPFA. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“I love Margaret’s work,” D’Amato says, “She takes a form that already exists — like slab-style Western letters — that relates to the traditions she’s interested in and uses it to create her own image and identity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It wasn’t just about signs, or typography,” D’Amato adds. “She was using them as a meeting point to talk about all the places that inspired her, the people, the subcultures. I feel like I relate to that. I’m a car enthusiast, pin-striper, a sign painter. There are meeting points.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, D’Amato decided to start going by her middle name, Rose. Rather than anything approaching a reinvention, the change holds space for the many lineages that have shaped D’Amato’s perspective, and continue to sustain her practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Inventing stillness\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When Mission Chevrolet Co. was built, it replaced \u003ca href=\"https://bernalwood.com/2013/11/22/a-history-of-the-former-mctigue-harness-shop-on-mission-street-as-shared-by-his-great-great-grandson/\">McTigue Livery\u003c/a>, one of the city’s last saddle shops. “I wonder,” D’Amato considers, “Did the people on horses going to get saddles have the same gut-wrenching feeling as I do seeing the Waymos on the freeway?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco is a unique battleground when it comes to technology’s encroachment on our sense of place. The city’s past is constantly circumvented by the present’s demands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s human to clamor against life’s impending change — to invent stillness from a world in motion. But to actually locate that relief is rare. In D’Amato’s paintings, which reflect the city back upon itself in tripping lines of recognition, this stillness is found, in deep reserve.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Rose D’Amato’s work is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in ‘\u003ca href=\"https://bampfa.org/program/art-wall-rose-damato\">Mission Chevrolet\u003c/a>’ Aug. 7–Dec. 15, 2024.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Her show with Jeffrey Sincich, ‘\u003ca href=\"https://gallery16.com/exhibitions/everybody-knows-this-is-someplace\">Everybody Knows This Is Someplace\u003c/a>’ is on view at Gallery 16 (501 Third St., San Francisco) through Aug. 31, 2024.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "‘Mission Chevrolet’ Honors a Nearly 100-Year-Old SF Sign | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Rose D’Amato shows me a photograph she took of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/old-mural-mission-district-18535614.php\">recently uncovered sign\u003c/a>, hand-painted in the 1930s, advertising six-cylinder Chevrolets on what used to be the Mission Chevrolet Co. building. In the picture, a pool of water in the neighboring construction site doubles the wall, reflecting the painting back upon itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I went over the other day and someone had tagged ‘teach more history,’” says D’Amato, who is taking a break from working on her large-scale mural at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, aptly titled \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://bampfa.org/program/art-wall-rose-damato\">Mission Chevrolet\u003c/a>\u003c/em>. D’Amato’s Art Wall will be on view Aug. 7–Dec. 15, 2024.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She directs my attention to a video feed projected over a portion of her stenciled plans to recreate the Chevrolet sign on BAMPFA’s wall. Super 8 footage, shot by the artist, slowly excavates the now-weathered Chevrolet Six sign, layering the present and its jumbled context on her reconstruction of the sign’s past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This 100-year-old billboard just got exposed, and on the other side of the city kids are burning down Waymos,” D’Amato says. “Getting confronted by this huge image from the past puts this all in perspective.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her work, D’Amato takes that “history” tag to heart. Her paintings show a reverence for San Francisco’s past by recreating and preserving ephemeral vestiges of place. But she also embraces the live, undulating context of the city’s present. It’s an approach few pull off quite as well: honoring the past without bending to nostalgia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962155\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962155\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Person stands with back to camera looking up at large mural on wall\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-10-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato sees her mural ‘Mission Chevrolet’ for the first time without any scaffolding in front of it at BAMPFA. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The language of landscape\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Rose D’Amato (who formerly worked under the name Lauren D’Amato) has called San Francisco home for the past 12 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since arriving to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute, she’s been involved in many of the city’s art scenes, apprenticing at New Bohemia Signs; running her own small sign business; perfecting her form as a pin-striper; holding Kustom Sunday community nights to adorn friends’ cars, boats and windows with painted roses; and teaching hand-lettering classes at California College of the Arts for the past four years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>D’Amato is deeply attuned to the particularities of San Francisco’s signage, which lend each part of the city a distinct character. In industrial Bayview, where she lives, large, bold signs meant to be read from the freeway have a certain functionality. Many of her favorites are painted by a friend and neighbor, Bob Dewhurst. Dewhurt’s signs, D’Amato says, “are practical and utilitarian, with sharp forms that reflect that use. They look like they could be Ed Ruscha paintings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In pedestrian-filled neighborhoods like the Mission, a human-scale style takes precedence. “Script signs show personality in an extreme way,” D’Amato says. Her understanding of San Francisco is of a landscape filled with different visual languages — all in constant flux.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>D’Amato is particularly drawn to signs that have transcended their original use. “I like liquor store signs,” she says. “The material they are painted on is acrylic so the actual substrates of the signs crack and fade quickly and they get replaced frequently. I try and pay attention to those because they are rapidly taken down.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962154\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962154\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED.jpg\" alt='Person holding metal tool box with \"SPARKY\" on it' width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-08-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato shows off her tool boxes at BAMPFA on Aug. 6, 2024. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Sculpting words with paint\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After spending a contemplative year at Headlands Center for the Arts as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.headlands.org/artist/lauren-damato/\">2023–2024 Tournesol Award recipient\u003c/a>, D’Amato is at a stage of her career where she’s ready to translate her many technical skills into a singular expressive style. She’s spent a decade balancing professional sign painting with her work as an artist, and D’Amato has closely considered the nebulous filament that delineates the “decorative arts” from those “fine arts” which don’t need to be qualified. The arbitrary division is troubled by her work, which speaks both languages fluently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This facility is currently on display in D’Amato’s two-person show at Gallery 16, \u003ca href=\"https://gallery16.com/exhibitions/everybody-knows-this-is-someplace\">\u003cem>Everybody Knows This Is Someplace\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, where her works find a fitting conversation partner in the textile canvases of fellow sign painter Jeffrey Sincich.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the show’s opening, early evening light seeping through the gallery’s windows gave the exhibition a disorienting feeling, washing the space in a warm, blinding orange. It was difficult to surmise the perimeter of the gallery space, and this was fitting, as many of Sincich and D’Amato’s works replicate the exterior of buildings. Sincich, especially, leans into trompe l’oeil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>D’Amato’s paintings in \u003cem>Everybody Knows\u003c/em> are mostly made with shades of mauve and brown and thick, black lettering. They abstract signage, doubling or patterning language in a way that sculpts words into forms free of semantic expectations. The beveled edges and layering feel revelatory, like an impressionist painter who suddenly considers cubism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s a big thing I want to do,” D’Amato says, “show signs as something separate from their actual function. Abstraction focuses on form, their beautiful hand-made aspects.” In D’Amato’s paintings, I see the exterior world atomized through her eyes, her unique way of seeing and responding to the signs of San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as the artist is guiding our attention to hand-painted signs, she’s making transparent the physical labor that goes into their construction. At the Gallery 16 show, Sincich and D’Amato invited friends and fellow sign makers to exhibit their own work, underscoring the community necessary to sustaining an art practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962156\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962156\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-11-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato holds her pin-striping brushes at BAMPFA. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Local lineages\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When the Chevrolet Six billboard was exposed in December 2023, it drew immediate interest from San Francisco’s greater sign painting community. D’Amato and her friends checked in on it, marking the way its context continually changed through heavy rains and bouts of graffiti bombing. Their interest, D’Amato says, “showed me that they would have enjoyed to paint it.” At BAMPFA, she’s invited friends and fellow sign painters to letter with her, making the act of replication a communal one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>This group effort feels like a direct descendent of the work of the Mujeres Muralistas, a collective formed in 1970 by Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, Patricia Rodriguez and Irene Perez while they were students at SFAI. They worked to expand ideas of what could constitute street murals in the Mission, insisting that alongside overtly political imagery, their depictions of beauty, both in its cultural manifestations and in portraits of women, played a radical, needed role. One of their first murals was a celebration of Pacos Tacos, now-shuttered, which the Mujeres Muralistas feared would lose business to a newly opened McDonald’s at 24th and Mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We had the freedom to paint whatever we wanted,” wrote Patricia Rodriguez in an essay for \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mujeres_Muralistas\">Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, “and we chose the beauty of women and their Mexican and Latino cultures.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That group would influence another Mission artist and sign painter I can’t help but associate with D’Amato’s practice: Margaret Kilgallen. Drawing from her immediate environment, Kilgallen’s paintings are somehow both elegiac and invigorating, insisting on the presence of rapidly disappearing traditions like folk art, craft, and the hand made. Her canvases reflect genuine encounters of place, and allow the disjointed forms and juxtapositions characteristic of a city to share space in her kaleidoscopes of language.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13962153\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13962153\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Person smiles sitting on wooden stairs with painted mural behind \" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/240806-ROSE-DAMATO-MD-04-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rose D’Amato poses in front of ‘Mission Chevrolet’ at BAMPFA. \u003ccite>(Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“I love Margaret’s work,” D’Amato says, “She takes a form that already exists — like slab-style Western letters — that relates to the traditions she’s interested in and uses it to create her own image and identity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It wasn’t just about signs, or typography,” D’Amato adds. “She was using them as a meeting point to talk about all the places that inspired her, the people, the subcultures. I feel like I relate to that. I’m a car enthusiast, pin-striper, a sign painter. There are meeting points.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, D’Amato decided to start going by her middle name, Rose. Rather than anything approaching a reinvention, the change holds space for the many lineages that have shaped D’Amato’s perspective, and continue to sustain her practice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Inventing stillness\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>When Mission Chevrolet Co. was built, it replaced \u003ca href=\"https://bernalwood.com/2013/11/22/a-history-of-the-former-mctigue-harness-shop-on-mission-street-as-shared-by-his-great-great-grandson/\">McTigue Livery\u003c/a>, one of the city’s last saddle shops. “I wonder,” D’Amato considers, “Did the people on horses going to get saddles have the same gut-wrenching feeling as I do seeing the Waymos on the freeway?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Francisco is a unique battleground when it comes to technology’s encroachment on our sense of place. The city’s past is constantly circumvented by the present’s demands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s human to clamor against life’s impending change — to invent stillness from a world in motion. But to actually locate that relief is rare. In D’Amato’s paintings, which reflect the city back upon itself in tripping lines of recognition, this stillness is found, in deep reserve.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Rose D’Amato’s work is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in ‘\u003ca href=\"https://bampfa.org/program/art-wall-rose-damato\">Mission Chevrolet\u003c/a>’ Aug. 7–Dec. 15, 2024.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Her show with Jeffrey Sincich, ‘\u003ca href=\"https://gallery16.com/exhibitions/everybody-knows-this-is-someplace\">Everybody Knows This Is Someplace\u003c/a>’ is on view at Gallery 16 (501 Third St., San Francisco) through Aug. 31, 2024.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Humans Are Just Another Animal in a Dreamlike Wattis Show",
"headTitle": "Humans Are Just Another Animal in a Dreamlike Wattis Show | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Upon entering Rodrigo Hernández’s \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/our-program/on-view/rodrigo-hernandez\">with what eyes?\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, one is required immediately to navigate the show’s installation, a series of maze-like walls and enclosures, erected like stage props around Hernández’s sculptures and hand-hammered steel reliefs. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here, the fabricated white walls seem cast as white walls, dwarfed amusingly by the Wattis’s warehouse exhibition space. The Mexico City-based artist has restructured the building to play at an art gallery, both investigating and exposing this peculiar brand of architecture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each of Hernández’s works are, from certain angles, obscured by the installed mise en scène. At the center of the exhibition, he has painted an elevated surface with nested rectangles rendered in semi-opaque, industrial colors. A passageway splits the painting in two.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13951417\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000.jpg\" alt=\"White walls and half walls divide space with passageway at center, painted horizontal surfaces visible\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13951417\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rodrigo Hernández, installation view of ‘with what eyes?,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(Nicholas Bruno)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I think immediately of \u003ca href=\"https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights?artists=josef-albers&page=1\">Josef Albers\u003c/a>, who I accidentally call Joseph Beuys, which Diego Villalobos, the show’s curator, notices and tactfully corrects. Villalobos suggests that in a Latin American context the sculpture might remind a visitor of the angular shadows and dense color fields of architect \u003ca href=\"https://www.barragan-foundation.org/works/career\">Luis Barrágan\u003c/a>. The composition is modern, holding all of modernism’s vague scientific implications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While working on the exhibition, Hernández looked to the philosopher David Peña-Guzmán’s book \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220093/when-animals-dream\">When Animals Dream\u003c/a>\u003c/em> as inspiration. \u003cem>Do\u003c/em> animals dream? This question is Peña-Guzman’s sincere undertaking, and yet it is impossible to definitively answer. The metrics are wrong, the language doesn’t translate; we lack the capacity to speak to animals. This is not a question made in their terms. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To formalize such a query entails reducing information to its most basic components: What is an animal? What is a dream? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This ethos feels true of the exhibition as well, which leaves one wondering what exactly a sculpture is, what constitutes a painting, and how those categories ever got defined. The necessity of twisting and craning your body to see the works in \u003cem>with what eyes?\u003c/em> adds a time-based component to these questions, suturing frames and complicating narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13951418\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000.jpg\" alt=\"White wall with three embedded and lit metal reliefs\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13951418\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rodrigo Hernández, installation view of ‘with what eyes?,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(Nicholas Bruno)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Beyond Hernández’s architectural — and for me, quite philosophical — labyrinth are stainless-steel reliefs, embedded and lit within more of the installation’s white walls. In each relief, Hernández has cut long, bowing lines that sketch chimpanzees in various states of rest and anguish, the surfaces textured using an array of different-sized hammers. The effect touches on art history, briefly conjuring \u003ca href=\"https://www.moma.org/artists/1168\">Jean Cocteau’s line drawings\u003c/a>, but then eclipses that and stretches further back, to the mark making of early systems of language. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13951260']Hernandez’s rhythmic hammering dapples the steel. During my visit, my striped blouse is disassembled by the stainless steel’s reflective quality, unraveling in microscopic patterns as I shift my weight from side to side. This hallucinatory animation plays out before a docile chimpanzee, gazing past me languidly, with bedroom eyes. And perhaps for the first time in my life, an artwork makes me feel shy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was surprised, then quickly convinced, when Villalobos told me that writer and playwright Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Not,_Winter\">If Not, Winter\u003c/a>\u003c/i> was another point of inspiration for Hernández.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carson inserts brackets into her translation of Sappho’s poetry, of which only fragments remain, to hold space for lost or illegible portions. In her introduction, Carson suggests the brackets as “a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write.” Suddenly the white walls dividing Hernández’s exhibition, defining interiors and exteriors, are recast. They, like brackets, hold absence as a material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13951419\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18.jpg\" alt=\"Painting of bat's head resting on its wing on white wall\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1067\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13951419\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18.jpg 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rodrigo Hernández, ‘you burn me,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(Nicholas Bruno )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>On one of the Wattis’ far walls (which feels farther than usual due to Hernández’s added architectural elements), hangs a soft, simple painting of a bat with its head resting on bended wing. It’s rendered in a just-off manner, too self-possessed and unstylized to be a cartoon. At the same time, it’s too ethereal and perfect to be real. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The strange bat with its wide, omnipotent eyes undercuts the complexity of the exhibition. Suddenly, there’s an answer to that impossible question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By taking literary material as a starting point for the physical and philosophical elements of his work, Hernández is able to focus, almost perfectly, on formal expression and inquiry. Embracing an indirect mode of expression, his work is personal, a sort of real-time staging of his own interpretations of Carson and Peña-Guzmán’s writing. At the same time, it endlessly invites other perspectives. Maybe \u003ci>with what eyes?\u003c/i> is the artist’s attempt at an “anti-show,” a show with space for everything you ever wanted him to make. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Rodrigo Hernández’s ‘\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/our-program/on-view/rodrigo-hernandez\">with what eyes?\u003c/a>’ is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts through Feb. 24, 2024.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Upon entering Rodrigo Hernández’s \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/our-program/on-view/rodrigo-hernandez\">with what eyes?\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, one is required immediately to navigate the show’s installation, a series of maze-like walls and enclosures, erected like stage props around Hernández’s sculptures and hand-hammered steel reliefs. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here, the fabricated white walls seem cast as white walls, dwarfed amusingly by the Wattis’s warehouse exhibition space. The Mexico City-based artist has restructured the building to play at an art gallery, both investigating and exposing this peculiar brand of architecture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each of Hernández’s works are, from certain angles, obscured by the installed mise en scène. At the center of the exhibition, he has painted an elevated surface with nested rectangles rendered in semi-opaque, industrial colors. A passageway splits the painting in two.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13951417\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000.jpg\" alt=\"White walls and half walls divide space with passageway at center, painted horizontal surfaces visible\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13951417\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-2_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rodrigo Hernández, installation view of ‘with what eyes?,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(Nicholas Bruno)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I think immediately of \u003ca href=\"https://www.albersfoundation.org/art/highlights?artists=josef-albers&page=1\">Josef Albers\u003c/a>, who I accidentally call Joseph Beuys, which Diego Villalobos, the show’s curator, notices and tactfully corrects. Villalobos suggests that in a Latin American context the sculpture might remind a visitor of the angular shadows and dense color fields of architect \u003ca href=\"https://www.barragan-foundation.org/works/career\">Luis Barrágan\u003c/a>. The composition is modern, holding all of modernism’s vague scientific implications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While working on the exhibition, Hernández looked to the philosopher David Peña-Guzmán’s book \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220093/when-animals-dream\">When Animals Dream\u003c/a>\u003c/em> as inspiration. \u003cem>Do\u003c/em> animals dream? This question is Peña-Guzman’s sincere undertaking, and yet it is impossible to definitively answer. The metrics are wrong, the language doesn’t translate; we lack the capacity to speak to animals. This is not a question made in their terms. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To formalize such a query entails reducing information to its most basic components: What is an animal? What is a dream? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This ethos feels true of the exhibition as well, which leaves one wondering what exactly a sculpture is, what constitutes a painting, and how those categories ever got defined. The necessity of twisting and craning your body to see the works in \u003cem>with what eyes?\u003c/em> adds a time-based component to these questions, suturing frames and complicating narrative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13951418\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000.jpg\" alt=\"White wall with three embedded and lit metal reliefs\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13951418\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-7_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rodrigo Hernández, installation view of ‘with what eyes?,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(Nicholas Bruno)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Beyond Hernández’s architectural — and for me, quite philosophical — labyrinth are stainless-steel reliefs, embedded and lit within more of the installation’s white walls. In each relief, Hernández has cut long, bowing lines that sketch chimpanzees in various states of rest and anguish, the surfaces textured using an array of different-sized hammers. The effect touches on art history, briefly conjuring \u003ca href=\"https://www.moma.org/artists/1168\">Jean Cocteau’s line drawings\u003c/a>, but then eclipses that and stretches further back, to the mark making of early systems of language. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Hernandez’s rhythmic hammering dapples the steel. During my visit, my striped blouse is disassembled by the stainless steel’s reflective quality, unraveling in microscopic patterns as I shift my weight from side to side. This hallucinatory animation plays out before a docile chimpanzee, gazing past me languidly, with bedroom eyes. And perhaps for the first time in my life, an artwork makes me feel shy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was surprised, then quickly convinced, when Villalobos told me that writer and playwright Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Not,_Winter\">If Not, Winter\u003c/a>\u003c/i> was another point of inspiration for Hernández.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carson inserts brackets into her translation of Sappho’s poetry, of which only fragments remain, to hold space for lost or illegible portions. In her introduction, Carson suggests the brackets as “a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write.” Suddenly the white walls dividing Hernández’s exhibition, defining interiors and exteriors, are recast. They, like brackets, hold absence as a material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13951419\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18.jpg\" alt=\"Painting of bat's head resting on its wing on white wall\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1067\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13951419\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18.jpg 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/RH_with-what-eyes-18-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rodrigo Hernández, ‘you burn me,’ 2023. \u003ccite>(Nicholas Bruno )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>On one of the Wattis’ far walls (which feels farther than usual due to Hernández’s added architectural elements), hangs a soft, simple painting of a bat with its head resting on bended wing. It’s rendered in a just-off manner, too self-possessed and unstylized to be a cartoon. At the same time, it’s too ethereal and perfect to be real. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The strange bat with its wide, omnipotent eyes undercuts the complexity of the exhibition. Suddenly, there’s an answer to that impossible question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By taking literary material as a starting point for the physical and philosophical elements of his work, Hernández is able to focus, almost perfectly, on formal expression and inquiry. Embracing an indirect mode of expression, his work is personal, a sort of real-time staging of his own interpretations of Carson and Peña-Guzmán’s writing. At the same time, it endlessly invites other perspectives. Maybe \u003ci>with what eyes?\u003c/i> is the artist’s attempt at an “anti-show,” a show with space for everything you ever wanted him to make. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Rodrigo Hernández’s ‘\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/our-program/on-view/rodrigo-hernandez\">with what eyes?\u003c/a>’ is on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts through Feb. 24, 2024.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Vallejo’s ‘Salad Days’ Begin Again With the Help of a New Artist-Run Gallery",
"headTitle": "Vallejo’s ‘Salad Days’ Begin Again With the Help of a New Artist-Run Gallery | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or four years, \u003ca href=\"https://www.lisarcralle.com/\">Lisa Rybovich Crallé\u003c/a> called the number on a vacant storefront just a few blocks from her home in Vallejo. While out on daily dog walks, she sometimes slipped paper notes into the building’s mailbox, lined by yellow and maroon tiles. This May, after years of one-way phone tag, she finally got a call back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13933420']Initially more curious about the building than intent on starting a gallery, the space’s interior quickly shifted Crallé’s intentions. Originally built as a barbershop by the current owner’s grandfather, the building has had a myriad of subsequent identities, including a cafe and a tax preparer’s office. The building’s large front room, defined by its impressive storefront window, suggested the possibility of an exhibition space. A tucked-away nook, down a long hallway, could become a small shop, where friends and local artists could sell their work, and in the back room Crallé envisioned a new home for her own art studio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://personalspace.space/\">Personal Space\u003c/a>, currently the only contemporary art space in Vallejo, opened its first show, \u003cem>Salad Days\u003c/em>, on July 30. Quite by chance, it was the 20th anniversary of Crallé’s first experiment with curation. Back in an almost mythological San Francisco, the artist and a friend, Albert Herter, were given a soon-to-be-demolished grocery store in Hayes Valley for a year — rent-free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a giant space with a turquoise-and-white checkerboard tile floor and huge ceilings … we turned it into a gallery and a performance space,” Crallé remembers. While open, they hosted a number of group shows and performances, including a packed set by Johnathan Richman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933744\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933744\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A white gallery space with works on the wall, a life-sized standee of a young man and colorful sculptural works on white pedestals. \" width=\"2000\" height=\"1497\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-1020x763.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-768x575.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-1536x1150.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-1920x1437.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An installation view of ‘Salad Days’ at Personal Space, with work (from left to right) by Abel Rodriguez, Keith Boadwee, Phyllis Yao, Karen May, Reniel del Rosario and Takming Chuang (on pedestals). \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Personal Space)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As an artist, Crallé has exhibited her work with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, UC Davis’s Manetti Shrem Museum and galleries both near and far. With this experience comes a learned awareness that the blue-chip gallery system is, in her words, “fucked and it doesn’t need to be.” Commercial galleries are notoriously vague when it comes to money, creating a culture in which it’s crass to be straight forward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Personal Space, artists keep 70% of sales and the gallery covers all shipping expenses for non-local artists. With more external funding, Crallé is hoping to adopt a model in which artists get 100% of sales. It’s just one of the many ways that the artist is drawing on her own experience to create a gallery that offers an alternative to hierarchical or exclusionary conventions in the art world.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘Some of the best art in the Bay Area’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The gallery is small, with the distinctions of a living room — curved archways and a hallway that pulls the eye deep into the space’s interior. It feels smaller with the crowd that showed up to see \u003cem>Salad Days\u003c/em> on its opening. Constantly pressed against others, I couldn’t help but overhear two college-aged women discussing \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/mariaguzmancapron/\">Maria Guzmán Capron\u003c/a>’s sculpture, \u003cem>Eat Me\u003c/em>, a languorous figure leaned back to peacock a gingerly affixed fabric crotch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933748\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933748\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000.jpg\" alt=\"At left, a drawing of a polaroid of two women in tank tops with writing around the border against gray background, at right, a sewn sculpture of a figure reclining\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1395\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-800x558.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-1020x711.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-768x536.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-1536x1071.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-1920x1339.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Abel Rodriguez, ‘Fotos y recuerdos: Mrs. Goofy & Mrs. Sombra, Oct. 27, 2000,’ 2023; Right: Maria Guzmán Capron, ‘Eat Me,’ 2018. \u003ccite>(Left: Courtesy of the artist; Right: Courtesy of Deli Gallery)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Do you think it means, like, \u003cem>you know\u003c/em>,” one young woman shyly asked. The other shrugged and pointed across the room at the cartoonish spread legs of an anthropomorphic frog caught in the act of showering a second laid-out, cigarette-sucking amphibian in piss (a painting by Keith Boadwee). My eyes drifted to the side, towards Cliff Hengst’s delicate watercolor, which shrouds the words “Help Me Make it Through the Night” in an oceanic blue. All of a sudden, it was achingly sexual.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://niadart.org/karen-may/\">Karen May\u003c/a>, an artist at \u003ca href=\"https://niadart.org/\">NIAD Art Center\u003c/a> in nearby Richmond, arrived at Personal Space early, favorably checking out her piece in the show. In it, a gingerly rendered face covers an advertisement for a Steven Shearer show on a page cut from an art magazine. The porous quality of the painting is at odds with the intensity of the figure’s stare, which communicates something between horror and omnipotence. Crallé used to work at \u003ca href=\"https://www.creativityexplored.org/\">Creativity Explored\u003c/a> in the early 2000s and has frequently collaborated with \u003ca href=\"https://creativegrowth.org/\">Creative Growth\u003c/a> and NIAD.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Honestly,” she says, “I feel like some of the best art in the Bay Area, and maybe the world, is coming out of those centers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a brief time during the opening, the party was out of water, but well stocked in natural rosé. People happily crammed into the hot cement outdoor space advised thirsty friends, “Why not just have wine?” \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/villagevallejo/\">Village Vallejo\u003c/a>, the pop-up wine project supplying the pours, hopes to open a brick-and-mortar store soon. In fact, they put in a rental application to move in next door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933858\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Four musicians set up around a table play while people watch from foreground and behind a fence; at right, a large crowd is seen from overhead\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1287\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933858\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-800x515.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-1020x656.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-768x494.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-1536x988.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-1920x1236.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left and right, the scene in Personal Space’s yard during the ‘Salad Days’ opening. \u003ccite>(Jessalyn Aaland)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the opening, my conversation with musicians Geoff Saba and Jennifer Williams, who together form the Oakland band \u003ca href=\"https://gossimer.bandcamp.com/album/mountain-misery\">Gossimer\u003c/a>, was interrupted by the arrival of an impressive plate of shrimp. Saba told me about past visits to Vallejo, where he used to go to parties with his cousins and meet “lots of creative, artistic folk that didn’t seem like they had a public outlet.” With Personal Space, which plans to highlight Vallejo-based artists, Saba is hopeful that the gallery will amplify the voices of local artistic communities during what he characterizes as “a recent influx of out-of-town interest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13933766']Ambient computer music began to ink into the backyard, as Chaz Bear and Anthony Ferrero from the band \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/toro-y-moi\">Toro y Moi\u003c/a> turned nobs by the space’s red wooden fence. Cole Pulice, in what seemed like an improvisational set, blew the saxophone alongside. I snuck back inside during the set. With the gallery emptied out, I found myself pulled towards \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/abel_rdgz/\">Abel Rodriguez\u003c/a>’s photo-realistic charcoal and conte drawing of two women, one in shades, the other staring directly at me. Their forms are outlined by the recognizable white border of a polaroid, marked decisively with the artist’s handwriting, communicating a reflexive authority in defining the composition’s narrative. Rendering a photograph by hand is tender, materially intimate — one imagines the care the artist took to represent their likeness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two women, Rodriguez later shared with me, are his younger sisters, and the photograph was taken in the ’90s, a time when he and the people he knew were trying to define their own identities. “After the photograph is pulled out from the Polaroid,” he says, “when you take your marker and sign it, marking that point of ‘I’m here, and this is who I am, and this is who I’m with, and this is the date.’ That point of ‘I’m here, I lived.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Vallejo’s ebbs and flows\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Despite growing up in San Francisco, living in Oakland, and frequently visiting relatives in Martinez, I’d previously only been to the Six Flags in Vallejo and had very little knowledge of the city’s history — or for that matter, its present. Speaking with Crallé and Rodriguez, I learned that in 2008, Vallejo became the largest municipality in the country to declare bankruptcy, and subsequently has suffered quick bouts of financial recovery and collapse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Downtown was devastated by the pandemic, Rodriguez tells me. “We saw a peak, and then a huge decline. It’s an ebb and flow that happens with these small cities, especially without funding or city support for cultural engagements,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez felt this personally. In 2015, he opened \u003ca href=\"https://www.elcomalitocollective.com/\">El Comalito Collective\u003c/a> in downtown Vallejo with his partner Edgar-Arturo Camacho-Gonzalez. Together, they turned it into a community resource with art supplies, free workshops and visiting artists. The project is currently on hiatus, a result of the pandemic and a rent increase on their building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just in the 12 years I’ve lived here,” Crallé reflects, “the place has changed quite a bit.” Vallejo has always been a city where artists live: the reclusive conceptual practitioner Howard Fried has long called the city home, \u003ca href=\"http://www.re-sound.net/\">Re:Sound\u003c/a> has run an experimental music and film series on Mare Island since 2015; and, most famously, Vallejo is the hometown of many extremely famous musicians, such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/e-40\">E-40\u003c/a>, H.E.R. and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/sob-x-rbe\">SOB X RBE\u003c/a>. But the pandemic saw an uptick of artists relocating from San Francisco and Oakland to the “Up Bay.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933742\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933742\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A group of adults stand in loose circle in a lush yard\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kim Frazar-Blantz (at far left) speaks to a group of participants in a writing day at Winslow House, led by Jennifer Williams, in red. \u003ccite>(Sea Snyder)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Everyone I spoke with who’s made the move is acutely aware of the thin line between contemporary art and gentrification, of the relationship between “revitalization” and towering condos. Artists in the Bay Area, especially those who do public programming, seem to be hardened experts, experienced with counteracting the unintended effects of opening art spaces. Kim Frazar-Blantz, who recently started \u003ca href=\"https://www.winslowhouseproject.org/\">Winslow House Project\u003c/a> in Vallejo, an artist residency in a storied Victorian farmhouse, is reticent to claim any definitive knowledge of the place. Instead she’s curious, but respectful and conscientious. As a long-time resident of the Bay Area, and someone who previously had a gallery in West Oakland, she seems all too familiar with the relationship between the arts and gentrification.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, it is a genuine joy to see new art spaces opening in Vallejo. Winslow House offers an incredible resource to artists, inviting them to meditate on the site-specificity of its locale and make work inspired by the physical environment. Village Vallejo has ambitious ideas for event programming and aims to create an inviting scene, where people can find temporary reprieve with a glass of wine. And Personal Space seems well positioned to become a vital artistic hub, as it dismantles false hierarchies between hyperlocal and international contemporary art.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the opening, it was impossible not to feel the importance of the gallery. I watched neighbors run into each other, teachers and community activists meet and people from all kinds of scenes intermingle; I even met former students of Crallé’s excited to volunteer and support the burgeoning space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933747\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933747\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Four adults stand smiling and laughing in a gallery space, one holds a bouquet in a vase\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left to right: Lisa Rybovich Crallé, Amy Owen, Chris Thorson and John Davis at the ‘Salad Days’ opening. \u003ccite>(Jessalyn Aaland)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Perhaps I’m biased, but I’m convinced the Bay’s particularity germinates exceptionally good artist-run spaces. There’s an impermanent quality that invites experimentation, not because of bold and prestigious ambition, but because the pressure is low and because it’s transient — both immediate and always precarious. There’s no easy path to institutionalization, wealthy people here don’t particularly support the arts, and many of the artists eschew pretension. It’s a region of perpetual salad days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I shared this half-formed thought with Crallé. “I feel like what you are criticizing in terms of the careerist, capitalist, commercial end of things comes from a scarcity mentality,” she says, “that there is only so much money, only so much fame available for people to squabble over, and that is such a limiting perspective. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s not helpful to live with as a driving force. Artist-run projects are flipping that on its head, and being like, well what if there’s plenty?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s much more interesting to ask than, “How do I take the most?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘\u003ca href=\"https://personalspace.space/exhibitions/salad-days\">Salad Days\u003c/a>’ is on view at Personal Space (1505 Tennessee St., Vallejo) through Sept. 10. The gallery is open Sundays 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and by appointment.\u003c/i> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">F\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>or four years, \u003ca href=\"https://www.lisarcralle.com/\">Lisa Rybovich Crallé\u003c/a> called the number on a vacant storefront just a few blocks from her home in Vallejo. While out on daily dog walks, she sometimes slipped paper notes into the building’s mailbox, lined by yellow and maroon tiles. This May, after years of one-way phone tag, she finally got a call back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Initially more curious about the building than intent on starting a gallery, the space’s interior quickly shifted Crallé’s intentions. Originally built as a barbershop by the current owner’s grandfather, the building has had a myriad of subsequent identities, including a cafe and a tax preparer’s office. The building’s large front room, defined by its impressive storefront window, suggested the possibility of an exhibition space. A tucked-away nook, down a long hallway, could become a small shop, where friends and local artists could sell their work, and in the back room Crallé envisioned a new home for her own art studio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://personalspace.space/\">Personal Space\u003c/a>, currently the only contemporary art space in Vallejo, opened its first show, \u003cem>Salad Days\u003c/em>, on July 30. Quite by chance, it was the 20th anniversary of Crallé’s first experiment with curation. Back in an almost mythological San Francisco, the artist and a friend, Albert Herter, were given a soon-to-be-demolished grocery store in Hayes Valley for a year — rent-free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a giant space with a turquoise-and-white checkerboard tile floor and huge ceilings … we turned it into a gallery and a performance space,” Crallé remembers. While open, they hosted a number of group shows and performances, including a packed set by Johnathan Richman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933744\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933744\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A white gallery space with works on the wall, a life-sized standee of a young man and colorful sculptural works on white pedestals. \" width=\"2000\" height=\"1497\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-800x599.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-1020x763.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-768x575.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-1536x1150.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Salad-Days_02_2000-1920x1437.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An installation view of ‘Salad Days’ at Personal Space, with work (from left to right) by Abel Rodriguez, Keith Boadwee, Phyllis Yao, Karen May, Reniel del Rosario and Takming Chuang (on pedestals). \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Personal Space)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As an artist, Crallé has exhibited her work with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, UC Davis’s Manetti Shrem Museum and galleries both near and far. With this experience comes a learned awareness that the blue-chip gallery system is, in her words, “fucked and it doesn’t need to be.” Commercial galleries are notoriously vague when it comes to money, creating a culture in which it’s crass to be straight forward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Personal Space, artists keep 70% of sales and the gallery covers all shipping expenses for non-local artists. With more external funding, Crallé is hoping to adopt a model in which artists get 100% of sales. It’s just one of the many ways that the artist is drawing on her own experience to create a gallery that offers an alternative to hierarchical or exclusionary conventions in the art world.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘Some of the best art in the Bay Area’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The gallery is small, with the distinctions of a living room — curved archways and a hallway that pulls the eye deep into the space’s interior. It feels smaller with the crowd that showed up to see \u003cem>Salad Days\u003c/em> on its opening. Constantly pressed against others, I couldn’t help but overhear two college-aged women discussing \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/mariaguzmancapron/\">Maria Guzmán Capron\u003c/a>’s sculpture, \u003cem>Eat Me\u003c/em>, a languorous figure leaned back to peacock a gingerly affixed fabric crotch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933748\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933748\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000.jpg\" alt=\"At left, a drawing of a polaroid of two women in tank tops with writing around the border against gray background, at right, a sewn sculpture of a figure reclining\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1395\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-800x558.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-1020x711.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-768x536.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-1536x1071.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Rodriguez_Capron_2000-1920x1339.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: Abel Rodriguez, ‘Fotos y recuerdos: Mrs. Goofy & Mrs. Sombra, Oct. 27, 2000,’ 2023; Right: Maria Guzmán Capron, ‘Eat Me,’ 2018. \u003ccite>(Left: Courtesy of the artist; Right: Courtesy of Deli Gallery)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Do you think it means, like, \u003cem>you know\u003c/em>,” one young woman shyly asked. The other shrugged and pointed across the room at the cartoonish spread legs of an anthropomorphic frog caught in the act of showering a second laid-out, cigarette-sucking amphibian in piss (a painting by Keith Boadwee). My eyes drifted to the side, towards Cliff Hengst’s delicate watercolor, which shrouds the words “Help Me Make it Through the Night” in an oceanic blue. All of a sudden, it was achingly sexual.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://niadart.org/karen-may/\">Karen May\u003c/a>, an artist at \u003ca href=\"https://niadart.org/\">NIAD Art Center\u003c/a> in nearby Richmond, arrived at Personal Space early, favorably checking out her piece in the show. In it, a gingerly rendered face covers an advertisement for a Steven Shearer show on a page cut from an art magazine. The porous quality of the painting is at odds with the intensity of the figure’s stare, which communicates something between horror and omnipotence. Crallé used to work at \u003ca href=\"https://www.creativityexplored.org/\">Creativity Explored\u003c/a> in the early 2000s and has frequently collaborated with \u003ca href=\"https://creativegrowth.org/\">Creative Growth\u003c/a> and NIAD.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Honestly,” she says, “I feel like some of the best art in the Bay Area, and maybe the world, is coming out of those centers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a brief time during the opening, the party was out of water, but well stocked in natural rosé. People happily crammed into the hot cement outdoor space advised thirsty friends, “Why not just have wine?” \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/villagevallejo/\">Village Vallejo\u003c/a>, the pop-up wine project supplying the pours, hopes to open a brick-and-mortar store soon. In fact, they put in a rental application to move in next door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933858\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Four musicians set up around a table play while people watch from foreground and behind a fence; at right, a large crowd is seen from overhead\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1287\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933858\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-800x515.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-1020x656.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-768x494.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-1536x988.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Music_Crowd_2000-1920x1236.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left and right, the scene in Personal Space’s yard during the ‘Salad Days’ opening. \u003ccite>(Jessalyn Aaland)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the opening, my conversation with musicians Geoff Saba and Jennifer Williams, who together form the Oakland band \u003ca href=\"https://gossimer.bandcamp.com/album/mountain-misery\">Gossimer\u003c/a>, was interrupted by the arrival of an impressive plate of shrimp. Saba told me about past visits to Vallejo, where he used to go to parties with his cousins and meet “lots of creative, artistic folk that didn’t seem like they had a public outlet.” With Personal Space, which plans to highlight Vallejo-based artists, Saba is hopeful that the gallery will amplify the voices of local artistic communities during what he characterizes as “a recent influx of out-of-town interest.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Ambient computer music began to ink into the backyard, as Chaz Bear and Anthony Ferrero from the band \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/toro-y-moi\">Toro y Moi\u003c/a> turned nobs by the space’s red wooden fence. Cole Pulice, in what seemed like an improvisational set, blew the saxophone alongside. I snuck back inside during the set. With the gallery emptied out, I found myself pulled towards \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/abel_rdgz/\">Abel Rodriguez\u003c/a>’s photo-realistic charcoal and conte drawing of two women, one in shades, the other staring directly at me. Their forms are outlined by the recognizable white border of a polaroid, marked decisively with the artist’s handwriting, communicating a reflexive authority in defining the composition’s narrative. Rendering a photograph by hand is tender, materially intimate — one imagines the care the artist took to represent their likeness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two women, Rodriguez later shared with me, are his younger sisters, and the photograph was taken in the ’90s, a time when he and the people he knew were trying to define their own identities. “After the photograph is pulled out from the Polaroid,” he says, “when you take your marker and sign it, marking that point of ‘I’m here, and this is who I am, and this is who I’m with, and this is the date.’ That point of ‘I’m here, I lived.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Vallejo’s ebbs and flows\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Despite growing up in San Francisco, living in Oakland, and frequently visiting relatives in Martinez, I’d previously only been to the Six Flags in Vallejo and had very little knowledge of the city’s history — or for that matter, its present. Speaking with Crallé and Rodriguez, I learned that in 2008, Vallejo became the largest municipality in the country to declare bankruptcy, and subsequently has suffered quick bouts of financial recovery and collapse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Downtown was devastated by the pandemic, Rodriguez tells me. “We saw a peak, and then a huge decline. It’s an ebb and flow that happens with these small cities, especially without funding or city support for cultural engagements,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rodriguez felt this personally. In 2015, he opened \u003ca href=\"https://www.elcomalitocollective.com/\">El Comalito Collective\u003c/a> in downtown Vallejo with his partner Edgar-Arturo Camacho-Gonzalez. Together, they turned it into a community resource with art supplies, free workshops and visiting artists. The project is currently on hiatus, a result of the pandemic and a rent increase on their building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Just in the 12 years I’ve lived here,” Crallé reflects, “the place has changed quite a bit.” Vallejo has always been a city where artists live: the reclusive conceptual practitioner Howard Fried has long called the city home, \u003ca href=\"http://www.re-sound.net/\">Re:Sound\u003c/a> has run an experimental music and film series on Mare Island since 2015; and, most famously, Vallejo is the hometown of many extremely famous musicians, such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/e-40\">E-40\u003c/a>, H.E.R. and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/sob-x-rbe\">SOB X RBE\u003c/a>. But the pandemic saw an uptick of artists relocating from San Francisco and Oakland to the “Up Bay.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933742\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933742\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A group of adults stand in loose circle in a lush yard\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/WinslowHouse_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kim Frazar-Blantz (at far left) speaks to a group of participants in a writing day at Winslow House, led by Jennifer Williams, in red. \u003ccite>(Sea Snyder)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Everyone I spoke with who’s made the move is acutely aware of the thin line between contemporary art and gentrification, of the relationship between “revitalization” and towering condos. Artists in the Bay Area, especially those who do public programming, seem to be hardened experts, experienced with counteracting the unintended effects of opening art spaces. Kim Frazar-Blantz, who recently started \u003ca href=\"https://www.winslowhouseproject.org/\">Winslow House Project\u003c/a> in Vallejo, an artist residency in a storied Victorian farmhouse, is reticent to claim any definitive knowledge of the place. Instead she’s curious, but respectful and conscientious. As a long-time resident of the Bay Area, and someone who previously had a gallery in West Oakland, she seems all too familiar with the relationship between the arts and gentrification.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, it is a genuine joy to see new art spaces opening in Vallejo. Winslow House offers an incredible resource to artists, inviting them to meditate on the site-specificity of its locale and make work inspired by the physical environment. Village Vallejo has ambitious ideas for event programming and aims to create an inviting scene, where people can find temporary reprieve with a glass of wine. And Personal Space seems well positioned to become a vital artistic hub, as it dismantles false hierarchies between hyperlocal and international contemporary art.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the opening, it was impossible not to feel the importance of the gallery. I watched neighbors run into each other, teachers and community activists meet and people from all kinds of scenes intermingle; I even met former students of Crallé’s excited to volunteer and support the burgeoning space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13933747\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13933747\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Four adults stand smiling and laughing in a gallery space, one holds a bouquet in a vase\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/Lisa-Amy-Owen-Chris-Thorson-John-Davis_Jessalyn-Aaland_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left to right: Lisa Rybovich Crallé, Amy Owen, Chris Thorson and John Davis at the ‘Salad Days’ opening. \u003ccite>(Jessalyn Aaland)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Perhaps I’m biased, but I’m convinced the Bay’s particularity germinates exceptionally good artist-run spaces. There’s an impermanent quality that invites experimentation, not because of bold and prestigious ambition, but because the pressure is low and because it’s transient — both immediate and always precarious. There’s no easy path to institutionalization, wealthy people here don’t particularly support the arts, and many of the artists eschew pretension. It’s a region of perpetual salad days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I shared this half-formed thought with Crallé. “I feel like what you are criticizing in terms of the careerist, capitalist, commercial end of things comes from a scarcity mentality,” she says, “that there is only so much money, only so much fame available for people to squabble over, and that is such a limiting perspective. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s not helpful to live with as a driving force. Artist-run projects are flipping that on its head, and being like, well what if there’s plenty?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s much more interesting to ask than, “How do I take the most?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘\u003ca href=\"https://personalspace.space/exhibitions/salad-days\">Salad Days\u003c/a>’ is on view at Personal Space (1505 Tennessee St., Vallejo) through Sept. 10. The gallery is open Sundays 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and by appointment.\u003c/i> \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A Fond Farewell to Ratio 3, Closing After 20 Years in San Francisco",
"headTitle": "A Fond Farewell to Ratio 3, Closing After 20 Years in San Francisco | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>On March 7, the Mission District gallery \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/\">Ratio 3\u003c/a> announced its permanent closure. “The time has come for us to close the gallery and explore other creative endeavors,” read the Tuesday email announcement. In an interview, gallery founder Chris Perez said future plans for the gallery’s space at 24th and Mission will be revealed in the coming months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ratio 3 represented artists such as Barry McGee, Takeshi Murata and Ryan McGinley, as well as the estate of Margaret Kilgallen. The gallery has shown over 182 artists in its 20 years of exhibitions, and has been central to various Bay Area visual art scenes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Ratio 3 opened in 2003, it was in a room in Perez’s apartment at Guerrero and 21st Street. The first show was \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/mark-shetabi-the-anxious-journey/installation\">an installation by Mark Shetabi\u003c/a>, who built a hallway and small room inside of the 11-by-13-foot room Perez, his roommate, and his boyfriend had dedicated to the gallery. Through a peephole, at the end of the hallway, you could see two oil paintings. They sold the piece to a local collector. Perez says he thought, “Huh? I guess we can keep doing this!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925947\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925947\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Wood floored gallery with large framed photographs on white walls\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An installation view of Ryan McGinley’s show ‘Life Adjustment Center’ at Ratio 3’s Stevenson Street location in 2010. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Early possibilities\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After graduating from California College of the Arts, Perez worked as a curatorial assistant to Larry Rinder at the Whitney Museum in New York. It was there that he met Barry McGee, who traveled to install Margaret Killgallen’s work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perez also met Ryan McGinley during his New York years. “One day, I was walking in Chelsea and saw the old Printed Matter bookstore,” Perez remembers. “I walked in and saw this little Ryan McGinley book published by \u003ci>Index Magazine\u003c/i> and I thought, this is really interesting.” He emailed the publisher for the artist’s contact and made plans with McGinley to do a studio visit. With pen and notepad in hand, he climbed through Dan Colen’s room to sit on McGinley’s bed; the artist pulled boxes of photographs out from under Perez’s perch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Ratio 3 has put on five solo exhibitions of McGinley’s work, each one marking a specific moment in both the artist’s career and Bay Area art history. The haunting pop band Girls, fronted by Christopher Owens, played \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/ryan-mcginley-life-adjustment-center/installation\">McGinley’s second opening\u003c/a> in a quintessential late-2000s scene. The gallery was so crowded that Perez and his team pulled the speakers out to the street for the assembled crowd. It was raining, lightly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everyone was so young,” Perez remembers, “the possibilities in life seemed endless.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925944\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925944\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Wood floored gallery with eclectic mix of wall work, sculpture and video\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1440\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of ‘Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding’ at Ratio 3’s Stevenson Street location in 2008. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Carrying on vital work\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>By this time, the gallery had moved from the apartment to its second home on Stevenson Street, an orphaned half-block between Valencia and a freeway off-ramp. Kiki Gallery, the ephemeral and unmatchable curatorial project of Rick Jacobsen, which closed in 1995, had been just a block away from the new spot. In 2008, Chris worked with the artist Colter Jacobsen and writer \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13859939/remembering-kevin-killian-poet-playwright-and-artist-who-gave-us-courage\">Kevin Killian\u003c/a> to curate a show honoring Kiki’s legacy and Rick Jacobsen’s work. It opened on Pride weekend.[aside postID='arts_13883032']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was one of those shows that you kind of knew was important,” Perez says, “Not just for the art, but for the people.” In the press release for \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/kiki-the-proof-is-in-the-pudding/installation\">Kiki Gallery: The Proof is in the Pudding\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, it says that Kiki, as a noncommercial space, was a key player in the “nascent Mission School movement, giving it a homocore dimension and a political edge.” Ratio 3 has, in many ways, carried on this vital work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the years Ratio 3 has opened a number of shows during Pride weekend. Last year, they stayed open late to inaugurate a retrospective of the feminist filmmaker and photographer Barbara Hammer that rivaled institutional presentations of the artist’s work. In 2015, they showed Hal Fischer’s \u003ci>Gay Semiotics\u003c/i>. It was the first time the work had been presented in San Francisco in over four decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925948\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925948\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Large gray photograph of white shapes and lines adhered directly to white gallery wall\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Miriam Böhm’s ‘Detail IV,’ 2016 in the 2016 show ‘Vanishing Point.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Attuned to space\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If the gallery has an aesthetic, it’s one of minimalism, clean lines, and pronounced experimentation with space. “It’s evolved, but essentially I like circles and squares,” Perez admits, recalling the early influence of Ellsworth Kelly’s \u003ci>Red Blue Green\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_11430961']In the 2015 show \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/11430961/minimal-lines-fill-maximum-space-in-ratio-3s-vanishing-point\">Vanishing Point\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, his curatorial proclivity reached an affecting apotheosis. It was a conceptually based group show made up of single works from Fred Sandback, Feliz Gonzalez-Torres and Sol LeWitt, and a selection of pieces from Miriam Böhm and Mitzi Pederson. The result was a meditation on space and mark-marking, both subtle and all-consuming. Looking through documentation of some of the gallery’s 122 shows, the gallery used to have a motto: “Ratio 3: Bringing vastness to the mind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consistently, shows at Ratio 3 are attuned to space and to the labor of creating exhibitions. Perez, gallery director Theo Elliott and other staffers transform the gallery to suit each show, taking pride in a willingness to tear down walls, design exhibitions, build screening rooms, carpet the gallery — whatever needs to happen for the work to feel right. “I’m a curator at heart,” Perez says, “I love creating installations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925943\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Darkened gallery with musicians, projected image and person in sound booth with mic\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A performance of Amie Siegel’s ‘Winter’ in the exhibition ‘High Noon’ in 2019. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Always located in the Mission, from Guerrero, to Stevenson, to its third and final location at 24th and Mission, Ratio 3 has been a touchstone for numerous periods of artmaking, scenes, friendships and movements in the cacophonous neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the beginning of the pandemic, the gallery’s registrar and artist liaison, Haegen Crosby, curated a show of Bay Area painters, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/bell-weather-picture-garden/works\">The Bell Weather Picture Garden\u003c/a>\u003c/i>. He worked primarily with younger, less-established artists to share a fecund, percolating creativity with the city. One got the sense of a new and emerging scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I have a lot of love for San Francisco,” Perez says, resolutely, not goaded into bitterness about the myriad ways the city’s changed, “It’s been an advantage to not have the financial pressure of a bigger city, and to be able to take time. The gallery’s roster, the space it has cultivated, and the community fostered grew slowly, organically, and over the course of years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925946\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925946\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Square abstract paitning with blocks of green and red color on light gray background\" width=\"1200\" height=\"1200\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-768x768.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Daisy May Sheff’s painting ‘Faint, Faint is My Track,’ 2021, included in the 2021 group show ‘Bell Weather Picture Garden.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In many ways Ratio 3 has been an access point for contemporary art in the Bay Area, consistently putting on shows with art historical significance and institutional levels of presentation. This almost reads like an obituary. Forgive that. It’s just that it is sad Ratio 3 will no longer be a space to visit in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saturday, March 4, was Ratio 3’s last day. They held a closing event for the artist \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/james-sterling-pitt-ways/overview\">James Sterling Pitt’s show of ceramics\u003c/a>, a concert by musicians Danny Paul Grody and Rich Douthit, who gave the space ambient, attentive harmonies. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/CpYUpThyMiy/?\">Instagram announcement for the event\u003c/a> ended coquettishly, “Thank you San Francisco!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When asked how he felt in those final hours, Perez said it was like waking from a long beautiful dream: “Art affords you that. It can go in any direction and it can go in any way. I’m lucky to have shared this dream. Now I’m rubbing my eyes, and I have to go pee.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>On March 7, the Mission District gallery \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/\">Ratio 3\u003c/a> announced its permanent closure. “The time has come for us to close the gallery and explore other creative endeavors,” read the Tuesday email announcement. In an interview, gallery founder Chris Perez said future plans for the gallery’s space at 24th and Mission will be revealed in the coming months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ratio 3 represented artists such as Barry McGee, Takeshi Murata and Ryan McGinley, as well as the estate of Margaret Kilgallen. The gallery has shown over 182 artists in its 20 years of exhibitions, and has been central to various Bay Area visual art scenes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Ratio 3 opened in 2003, it was in a room in Perez’s apartment at Guerrero and 21st Street. The first show was \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/mark-shetabi-the-anxious-journey/installation\">an installation by Mark Shetabi\u003c/a>, who built a hallway and small room inside of the 11-by-13-foot room Perez, his roommate, and his boyfriend had dedicated to the gallery. Through a peephole, at the end of the hallway, you could see two oil paintings. They sold the piece to a local collector. Perez says he thought, “Huh? I guess we can keep doing this!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925947\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925947\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Wood floored gallery with large framed photographs on white walls\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/RMcGinley-Installation-LifeAdjustmentCenter-11_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An installation view of Ryan McGinley’s show ‘Life Adjustment Center’ at Ratio 3’s Stevenson Street location in 2010. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Early possibilities\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After graduating from California College of the Arts, Perez worked as a curatorial assistant to Larry Rinder at the Whitney Museum in New York. It was there that he met Barry McGee, who traveled to install Margaret Killgallen’s work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perez also met Ryan McGinley during his New York years. “One day, I was walking in Chelsea and saw the old Printed Matter bookstore,” Perez remembers. “I walked in and saw this little Ryan McGinley book published by \u003ci>Index Magazine\u003c/i> and I thought, this is really interesting.” He emailed the publisher for the artist’s contact and made plans with McGinley to do a studio visit. With pen and notepad in hand, he climbed through Dan Colen’s room to sit on McGinley’s bed; the artist pulled boxes of photographs out from under Perez’s perch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Ratio 3 has put on five solo exhibitions of McGinley’s work, each one marking a specific moment in both the artist’s career and Bay Area art history. The haunting pop band Girls, fronted by Christopher Owens, played \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/ryan-mcginley-life-adjustment-center/installation\">McGinley’s second opening\u003c/a> in a quintessential late-2000s scene. The gallery was so crowded that Perez and his team pulled the speakers out to the street for the assembled crowd. It was raining, lightly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everyone was so young,” Perez remembers, “the possibilities in life seemed endless.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925944\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925944\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Wood floored gallery with eclectic mix of wall work, sculpture and video\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1440\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/kiki01_1200-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of ‘Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding’ at Ratio 3’s Stevenson Street location in 2008. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Carrying on vital work\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>By this time, the gallery had moved from the apartment to its second home on Stevenson Street, an orphaned half-block between Valencia and a freeway off-ramp. Kiki Gallery, the ephemeral and unmatchable curatorial project of Rick Jacobsen, which closed in 1995, had been just a block away from the new spot. In 2008, Chris worked with the artist Colter Jacobsen and writer \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13859939/remembering-kevin-killian-poet-playwright-and-artist-who-gave-us-courage\">Kevin Killian\u003c/a> to curate a show honoring Kiki’s legacy and Rick Jacobsen’s work. It opened on Pride weekend.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was one of those shows that you kind of knew was important,” Perez says, “Not just for the art, but for the people.” In the press release for \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/kiki-the-proof-is-in-the-pudding/installation\">Kiki Gallery: The Proof is in the Pudding\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, it says that Kiki, as a noncommercial space, was a key player in the “nascent Mission School movement, giving it a homocore dimension and a political edge.” Ratio 3 has, in many ways, carried on this vital work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the years Ratio 3 has opened a number of shows during Pride weekend. Last year, they stayed open late to inaugurate a retrospective of the feminist filmmaker and photographer Barbara Hammer that rivaled institutional presentations of the artist’s work. In 2015, they showed Hal Fischer’s \u003ci>Gay Semiotics\u003c/i>. It was the first time the work had been presented in San Francisco in over four decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925948\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925948\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Large gray photograph of white shapes and lines adhered directly to white gallery wall\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Vanishing_Point-019_1200-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Installation view of Miriam Böhm’s ‘Detail IV,’ 2016 in the 2016 show ‘Vanishing Point.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Attuned to space\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>If the gallery has an aesthetic, it’s one of minimalism, clean lines, and pronounced experimentation with space. “It’s evolved, but essentially I like circles and squares,” Perez admits, recalling the early influence of Ellsworth Kelly’s \u003ci>Red Blue Green\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In the 2015 show \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/11430961/minimal-lines-fill-maximum-space-in-ratio-3s-vanishing-point\">Vanishing Point\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, his curatorial proclivity reached an affecting apotheosis. It was a conceptually based group show made up of single works from Fred Sandback, Feliz Gonzalez-Torres and Sol LeWitt, and a selection of pieces from Miriam Böhm and Mitzi Pederson. The result was a meditation on space and mark-marking, both subtle and all-consuming. Looking through documentation of some of the gallery’s 122 shows, the gallery used to have a motto: “Ratio 3: Bringing vastness to the mind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consistently, shows at Ratio 3 are attuned to space and to the labor of creating exhibitions. Perez, gallery director Theo Elliott and other staffers transform the gallery to suit each show, taking pride in a willingness to tear down walls, design exhibitions, build screening rooms, carpet the gallery — whatever needs to happen for the work to feel right. “I’m a curator at heart,” Perez says, “I love creating installations.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925943\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925943\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Darkened gallery with musicians, projected image and person in sound booth with mic\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/ASiegel-Installation-Winter-Ratio_3-020_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A performance of Amie Siegel’s ‘Winter’ in the exhibition ‘High Noon’ in 2019. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Always located in the Mission, from Guerrero, to Stevenson, to its third and final location at 24th and Mission, Ratio 3 has been a touchstone for numerous periods of artmaking, scenes, friendships and movements in the cacophonous neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the beginning of the pandemic, the gallery’s registrar and artist liaison, Haegen Crosby, curated a show of Bay Area painters, \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/bell-weather-picture-garden/works\">The Bell Weather Picture Garden\u003c/a>\u003c/i>. He worked primarily with younger, less-established artists to share a fecund, percolating creativity with the city. One got the sense of a new and emerging scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I have a lot of love for San Francisco,” Perez says, resolutely, not goaded into bitterness about the myriad ways the city’s changed, “It’s been an advantage to not have the financial pressure of a bigger city, and to be able to take time. The gallery’s roster, the space it has cultivated, and the community fostered grew slowly, organically, and over the course of years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13925946\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13925946\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Square abstract paitning with blocks of green and red color on light gray background\" width=\"1200\" height=\"1200\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-800x800.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-1020x1020.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-160x160.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/R3DMS004_1200-768x768.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Daisy May Sheff’s painting ‘Faint, Faint is My Track,’ 2021, included in the 2021 group show ‘Bell Weather Picture Garden.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Ratio 3)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In many ways Ratio 3 has been an access point for contemporary art in the Bay Area, consistently putting on shows with art historical significance and institutional levels of presentation. This almost reads like an obituary. Forgive that. It’s just that it is sad Ratio 3 will no longer be a space to visit in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saturday, March 4, was Ratio 3’s last day. They held a closing event for the artist \u003ca href=\"https://www.ratio3.org/exhibitions/james-sterling-pitt-ways/overview\">James Sterling Pitt’s show of ceramics\u003c/a>, a concert by musicians Danny Paul Grody and Rich Douthit, who gave the space ambient, attentive harmonies. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/CpYUpThyMiy/?\">Instagram announcement for the event\u003c/a> ended coquettishly, “Thank you San Francisco!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When asked how he felt in those final hours, Perez said it was like waking from a long beautiful dream: “Art affords you that. It can go in any direction and it can go in any way. I’m lucky to have shared this dream. Now I’m rubbing my eyes, and I have to go pee.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Lunch With Artist Mirra Helen is Like Eating With a Friendly Ghost",
"headTitle": "Lunch With Artist Mirra Helen is Like Eating With a Friendly Ghost | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>I hand over my phone and wallet to receive a pencil carved from soft stone, a chalkboard and a sparsely drawn map marked with just two points, the \u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art\u003c/a> and an expensive-looking French-Japanese restaurant in the Mission called Bon, Nene. At noon I will meet the Wattis’ Capp Street Project artist-in-resident \u003ca href=\"https://hmirra.net/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Mirra Helen\u003c/a> for lunch, which I’ve been told I am welcome to spend in complete silence. The gallery is picking up the tab. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every day from Jan. 27 to May 27, Helen intends to have lunch with one person at Bon, Nene as the public component of her Capp Street Project residency, which she calls \u003ci>set lunch towards speechlessness\u003c/i>. These meals will not be documented or compiled. On the \u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/calendar/january-25-march-17-2022\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">project’s website\u003c/a> the artist advises that there should be no expectations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Established in 1983 by Ann Hatch, the Capp Street Project was the first residency in the United States to focus solely on the creation and presentation of new work. In 1998, it became part of the Wattis. Hosting artists like Barbara T. Smith, Mona Hatoum, Kara Walker, Mike Kelley and most recently, Raven Chacon, it’s been open, unrestrictive and experimental from the start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910688\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Gray building with white sign and intense shadows\" width=\"1200\" height=\"823\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910688\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-800x549.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-1020x700.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-160x110.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-768x527.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The starting point for ‘set lunch toward speechlessness,’ the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in Potrero Hill. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Mirra Helen’s work is well-suited for such an environment. Grounded in minimalism, it spans mediums—including weavings, written pieces and Trisha Brown-like instructions for movement—and has been shown at places like the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and the Whitney in New York. Much of her work deals with scored encounters or invited assemblages. It is conceptual, often about choreographing attention or experience. One of Helen’s most evident influences is John Cage; it seems her practice is about a mentality rather than a material. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, the walk from the Wattis itself seems integral to the art experience—ambulating has played a major role in Helen’s practice. Playing along, I attempt an almost performative reverie by listening for the sounds of the city, noticing engravings in cement and making sequences from shop signs. Following the stripped-down map, I find myself on a pedestrian bridge above U.S. Highway 101. I stand for a while in its center, stunned to discover a new angle from which to see my city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This respite wears off when I arrive at the restaurant about 20 minutes before the artist. Waiting without a phone or book is uncomfortable. I can’t help but feel ignored by San Francisco’s residents, sleek people in exercise clothes walking by with greyhounds and hypoallergenic poodles. The dogs approach me while their owners tug them away, not troubling to acknowledge my existence. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I tell this to Helen when she arrives and she is quiet for a long minute before responding, matter-of-factly, that I might be a ghost. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910689\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Concrete walkway lined by high fences recedes into distance\" width=\"1200\" height=\"845\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910689\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-800x563.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-1020x718.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-160x113.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-768x541.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The passageway between Potrero Hill and the Mission, over the traffic of the freeway. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Wearing a long green coat and matching green socks, Helen herself looks slightly elfish. Wrinkles around her mouth instantly convey a history of wide, beaming grins. I barely have time to notice this before the artist is smiling at me, silently revealing her own matching soapstone pencil and chalkboard. These are then put aside and never thought of again. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Helen orders a hot sake. I have a green tea. We sit through five minutes of silence. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps because she senses my discomfort, she speaks. “At my best,” she says in a quiet, patient voice, “I am a friendly ghost.” Then we are in silence again. Helen sheepishly looks down and disappears, reveling in the thought. I consider what it means to be a ghost, and note the strangeness of having a comfortable amount of time to think while sitting with a stranger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I finally say that I’ve rarely felt like a ghost. The closest I came was when I lived in a foreign country, and spent months surrounded by an unknown language. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When our tofu dishes arrive, Helen offers a definition of beauty. She says it is when something exists just as it is, without interference. That’s not my operating understanding of the word. I think of beauty as an ephemeral quality, or a force to be applied to the world’s constant decay—an illusion or a brief miracle. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I don’t interrupt. I want to hear how the thought relates to her art practice. And though I inquire, I never find out: Helen artfully talks around her practice and I get through the whole lunch without gaining any understanding of the work she makes. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910690\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200.jpg\" alt=\"An outdoor patio structure on a residential street\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910690\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The setting for the lunch: the Bon, Nene restaurant at the corner of 21st and Alabama in San Francisco’s Mission District. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With the meal as the public component of her residency, Helen avoids sharing any new art. Or, if the lunch itself is her piece, she is making nothing but a sort of presence, one that is mediative without being didactic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I ask if we are in a performance and she rejects the description, but then tarries, saying everything is a performance, or nothing is. Either way, the word has no meaning. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the table next to us a man is sitting with a woman and her newborn baby. It’s difficult to understand how they know each other. They speak constantly, asking about work, respective spouses, vacation plans, new furniture acquisitions, the man’s dog and the woman’s child. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At our table, something very different is happening. “I won’t be asking you any questions,” Helen cautions at the outset of our meal, “but please don’t take it as a sign of disinterest. I just don’t believe one learns about another through exchanging information.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think back to my walk, when I passed dozens of new housing developments. The structures felt at odds with the streets, which were sparse and unfriendly—emptied out. For the very first time it occurred to me that the demand for condos in San Francisco comes from the needs of solitary people who want to live alone. In this era of technology and the isolating reality of the pandemic, social life has often meant little more than the exchange of text messages, leaving comments or writing posts. Almost every day I open my phone and flick through photographs of people I don’t know, I read their thoughts in an endless scroll. All the information amounts to nothing. We feel more alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910691\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Woman walks behind orange barricades under scaffolding of building\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910691\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Construction on Alabama Street just north of Bon, Nene. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Helen asks if I’ve heard the saying “Not knowing is the most intimate.” I haven’t, but now it feels like the key to understanding her project. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her motivations for using language—which we agree can be isolating, meaningless or sublime—are unusual. Throughout our conversation she questions everything and often contradicts her own statements. Helen seems invested in stripping language of its hold on communication, making it something looser, less precise. Maybe the idea, in itself, that language is not a way of learning about another person is what the conceptual artist is stressing with her lunches. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the meal is finished, Helen stands up briskly, almost bows and thanks me for lunch. I make the return trip to pick up my belongings, accompanied by the ghost of Mirra Helen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Mirra Helen is the Capp Street Project artist-in-residence through July 10. A few spots for lunches are still available. \u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/calendar/january-25-march-17-2022\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "For her Capp Street residency, the conceptual artist is sharing meals with strangers, conversation optional.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>I hand over my phone and wallet to receive a pencil carved from soft stone, a chalkboard and a sparsely drawn map marked with just two points, the \u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art\u003c/a> and an expensive-looking French-Japanese restaurant in the Mission called Bon, Nene. At noon I will meet the Wattis’ Capp Street Project artist-in-resident \u003ca href=\"https://hmirra.net/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Mirra Helen\u003c/a> for lunch, which I’ve been told I am welcome to spend in complete silence. The gallery is picking up the tab. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every day from Jan. 27 to May 27, Helen intends to have lunch with one person at Bon, Nene as the public component of her Capp Street Project residency, which she calls \u003ci>set lunch towards speechlessness\u003c/i>. These meals will not be documented or compiled. On the \u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/calendar/january-25-march-17-2022\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">project’s website\u003c/a> the artist advises that there should be no expectations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Established in 1983 by Ann Hatch, the Capp Street Project was the first residency in the United States to focus solely on the creation and presentation of new work. In 1998, it became part of the Wattis. Hosting artists like Barbara T. Smith, Mona Hatoum, Kara Walker, Mike Kelley and most recently, Raven Chacon, it’s been open, unrestrictive and experimental from the start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910688\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Gray building with white sign and intense shadows\" width=\"1200\" height=\"823\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910688\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-800x549.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-1020x700.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-160x110.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Wattis_1200-768x527.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The starting point for ‘set lunch toward speechlessness,’ the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in Potrero Hill. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Mirra Helen’s work is well-suited for such an environment. Grounded in minimalism, it spans mediums—including weavings, written pieces and Trisha Brown-like instructions for movement—and has been shown at places like the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and the Whitney in New York. Much of her work deals with scored encounters or invited assemblages. It is conceptual, often about choreographing attention or experience. One of Helen’s most evident influences is John Cage; it seems her practice is about a mentality rather than a material. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, the walk from the Wattis itself seems integral to the art experience—ambulating has played a major role in Helen’s practice. Playing along, I attempt an almost performative reverie by listening for the sounds of the city, noticing engravings in cement and making sequences from shop signs. Following the stripped-down map, I find myself on a pedestrian bridge above U.S. Highway 101. I stand for a while in its center, stunned to discover a new angle from which to see my city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This respite wears off when I arrive at the restaurant about 20 minutes before the artist. Waiting without a phone or book is uncomfortable. I can’t help but feel ignored by San Francisco’s residents, sleek people in exercise clothes walking by with greyhounds and hypoallergenic poodles. The dogs approach me while their owners tug them away, not troubling to acknowledge my existence. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I tell this to Helen when she arrives and she is quiet for a long minute before responding, matter-of-factly, that I might be a ghost. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910689\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Concrete walkway lined by high fences recedes into distance\" width=\"1200\" height=\"845\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910689\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-800x563.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-1020x718.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-160x113.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/PedBridge_1200-768x541.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The passageway between Potrero Hill and the Mission, over the traffic of the freeway. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Wearing a long green coat and matching green socks, Helen herself looks slightly elfish. Wrinkles around her mouth instantly convey a history of wide, beaming grins. I barely have time to notice this before the artist is smiling at me, silently revealing her own matching soapstone pencil and chalkboard. These are then put aside and never thought of again. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Helen orders a hot sake. I have a green tea. We sit through five minutes of silence. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps because she senses my discomfort, she speaks. “At my best,” she says in a quiet, patient voice, “I am a friendly ghost.” Then we are in silence again. Helen sheepishly looks down and disappears, reveling in the thought. I consider what it means to be a ghost, and note the strangeness of having a comfortable amount of time to think while sitting with a stranger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I finally say that I’ve rarely felt like a ghost. The closest I came was when I lived in a foreign country, and spent months surrounded by an unknown language. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When our tofu dishes arrive, Helen offers a definition of beauty. She says it is when something exists just as it is, without interference. That’s not my operating understanding of the word. I think of beauty as an ephemeral quality, or a force to be applied to the world’s constant decay—an illusion or a brief miracle. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I don’t interrupt. I want to hear how the thought relates to her art practice. And though I inquire, I never find out: Helen artfully talks around her practice and I get through the whole lunch without gaining any understanding of the work she makes. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910690\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200.jpg\" alt=\"An outdoor patio structure on a residential street\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910690\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Restaurant_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The setting for the lunch: the Bon, Nene restaurant at the corner of 21st and Alabama in San Francisco’s Mission District. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With the meal as the public component of her residency, Helen avoids sharing any new art. Or, if the lunch itself is her piece, she is making nothing but a sort of presence, one that is mediative without being didactic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I ask if we are in a performance and she rejects the description, but then tarries, saying everything is a performance, or nothing is. Either way, the word has no meaning. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the table next to us a man is sitting with a woman and her newborn baby. It’s difficult to understand how they know each other. They speak constantly, asking about work, respective spouses, vacation plans, new furniture acquisitions, the man’s dog and the woman’s child. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At our table, something very different is happening. “I won’t be asking you any questions,” Helen cautions at the outset of our meal, “but please don’t take it as a sign of disinterest. I just don’t believe one learns about another through exchanging information.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think back to my walk, when I passed dozens of new housing developments. The structures felt at odds with the streets, which were sparse and unfriendly—emptied out. For the very first time it occurred to me that the demand for condos in San Francisco comes from the needs of solitary people who want to live alone. In this era of technology and the isolating reality of the pandemic, social life has often meant little more than the exchange of text messages, leaving comments or writing posts. Almost every day I open my phone and flick through photographs of people I don’t know, I read their thoughts in an endless scroll. All the information amounts to nothing. We feel more alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13910691\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200.jpg\" alt=\"Woman walks behind orange barricades under scaffolding of building\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13910691\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Construction_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Construction on Alabama Street just north of Bon, Nene. \u003ccite>(Sarah Hotchkiss/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Helen asks if I’ve heard the saying “Not knowing is the most intimate.” I haven’t, but now it feels like the key to understanding her project. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her motivations for using language—which we agree can be isolating, meaningless or sublime—are unusual. Throughout our conversation she questions everything and often contradicts her own statements. Helen seems invested in stripping language of its hold on communication, making it something looser, less precise. Maybe the idea, in itself, that language is not a way of learning about another person is what the conceptual artist is stressing with her lunches. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the meal is finished, Helen stands up briskly, almost bows and thanks me for lunch. I make the return trip to pick up my belongings, accompanied by the ghost of Mirra Helen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Mirra Helen is the Capp Street Project artist-in-residence through July 10. A few spots for lunches are still available. \u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/calendar/january-25-march-17-2022\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Newest Wattis Anthology Invites Readers to Participate in Radical Listening",
"headTitle": "Newest Wattis Anthology Invites Readers to Participate in Radical Listening | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>“Get acquainted with the envelope,” tamara suarez porras quotes Trinh T. Minh-ha in “Of Castles in Spain”—a poem anthologized in the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s newest publication, \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/buy?id=27,1202\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/a>\u003c/em> With those words, she’s invoking the importance of speaking and listening subjectively, suggesting a consideration of the physical properties to which language is bound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The table of contents for \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> is wrapped around its soft-bound cover. It’s an envelope of sorts, containing texts commissioned and selected from artists and writers like Astria Suparak, Christina Sharpe, Wendy Xu, Frantz Fanon, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and many more.[aside postID='arts_13879482'] \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The anthology is published as a culmination of the Wattis’s year-long public program “\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/view?id=711\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Trinh T. Minh-ha is on our mind\u003c/a>.” Interrupted by the pandemic, the first half of the curatorial project entailed lectures and performances, a film series (that went digital last March) and focused engagement with the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha: filmmaker, writer, composer, artist and longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trinh is perhaps best known for her 1989 documentary film \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kanopy.com/product/surname-viet-given-name-nam-vietnamese-wom\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Surname Viet Given Name Nam\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, which presents interviews with Vietnamese women on the aftermath of the war, but her artistic practice is not easily curtailed to one category, or even a list of categories. Her interdisciplinary approach is poetic and orchestral, regardless of the medium she is working with. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13899605\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13899605\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Why are they so afraid of the lotus?’ 2021. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“When things touch each other, that has certain results,” says Kim Nguyen, the Wattis’s curator and head of programs, who co-edited the anthology along with Jeanne Gerrity, deputy director and head of publications. “In-between spaces aren’t empty and they aren’t vacant,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nguyen’s embrace of indeterminability is evident in the anthology itself, which takes the form of a kind of montage; a choir of voices placed in kinetic proximity. Writers, artists and poets are bound together in the pages like threads in a spider web. Authors in one section reference works written by other contributors, netting a space for shared attention and providing a transcript of collaboration. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the filmmaker Sky Hopinka’s “The Center of Somewhere,” a meditative text on his relationship to Indigenous representation as a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luise Mission Indians, Hopinka writes, “What is urgent is what exists beyond myself and my experience.” Expanding that thought, he considers that his sense of self comes from “many threads being woven together to attempt to form and ritualize something less clear.” This sentiment, which could easily be a line from one of Trinh’s films, feels like a guiding parameter for how to read the anthology. \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> makes its statement through correlated texts rather than a single given thesis. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fred Moten considers the montage as a radical technique for putting images in dialogue with each other in his book \u003cem>In The Break\u003c/em>. He invokes an idea of Trinh’s, “the multiple Oneness in Life,” that she introduces to speak to the complexity of her own identity as it is re-conferred across languages, nationalities, and social spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 2019 talk entitled “Lovecidal,” which Trinh gave at the Wattis, she introduces the idea of “vernacular architecture,” which, she puts poetically, ‘breaks within here and there.” Vernacular architecture feels like the right name to use to describe Renee Gladman’s \u003cem>Paragraphs\u003c/em>. Skeletal drawings, at once image and text, function between architecture and scribble. Each image-poem is made up of language that inhabits its physicality fully, and, if considered with Trinh’s thinking, insists on opening up a liminal space that still resists permanency. Gladman’s drawings are neither here nor there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trinh has written often about the diasporic experience, as a Vietnamese person living outside the country for most of her life, and how it relates to a sense of time. The feeling of displacement, of being out of context, has an eerie relevance during the pandemic, as for the past year everyone in this country was asked to make alienation routine. Public space in the Bay Area transformed dramatically. New access and new barriers punctuate the city, and both the capacities and limitations of convening digitally loom over social gatherings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What use is you and me together in a room?” Steffani Jamison asks, rhetorically, in her piece on Lorraine Hansberry’s “What Use are Flowers?” which expands on Hansberry’s eponymous unpublished story, in which a hermit survives the end of humanity and finds himself in the peculiar position of trying to describe the utility beauty once held to the planet’s few surviving children.[aside postID='arts_13893493'] \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe Trinh, who often poses questions without anticipating an answer, would respond with a line from the opening narration in her 1982 film \u003cem>Reassemblage\u003c/em>: “I do not intend to speak about … just speak nearby.” This sentence resounds with a commitment to physical proximity, to the making of shared space. The use of “you and me together in a room,” in this case, is that it means that someone is there to listen when you speak. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This anthology is in many ways an invitation to listen. It’s an invitation to participate in a radical, engaged form of listening that takes on the labor of actively receiving others’ speech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13899607\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13899607\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from Astria Suparak’s ‘Asian Futures Without Asians’ featuring a geisha robot in ‘Ghost in the Shell,’ 2017. \u003ccite>(Courtesy the artist and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Distinctly Asian and Asian-American experiences are given space in \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> An editorial choice was made to place these experiences in conversation with and in proximity to people speaking from other positions. This is only fitting; Trinh often makes the point, in her work, that being decentered—for example being marginalized by a country that embraces white supremacy as a national mythology—can become a point from which to make connections and build intimacy. Being decentered allows for language to be complex. Fragmentation and plurality can constitute a site of solidarity. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To return to the envelope, the late multidisciplinary artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (whose \u003cem>Chronology\u003c/em>, a series of never-before published black and white photographic works, is included in the anthology) impressed black type on the lips and folds of fifteen envelopes in her 1976 artwork \u003cem>Faire Part\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Trinh, Cha is known for emphasizing multiple meanings and estranging language by drawing attention to the role context plays in making meaning. One of the envelopes in the series is inscribed with acrobatic letters that, translated from French, spell out “the form of action is nothing less than transformation.” If reading is the action and an anthology of texts is the form, then \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> is nothing less than transformative.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "‘Why are they so afraid of the lotus?’ is the culmination of the Wattis’s year-long consideration of artist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“Get acquainted with the envelope,” tamara suarez porras quotes Trinh T. Minh-ha in “Of Castles in Spain”—a poem anthologized in the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s newest publication, \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/buy?id=27,1202\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/a>\u003c/em> With those words, she’s invoking the importance of speaking and listening subjectively, suggesting a consideration of the physical properties to which language is bound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The table of contents for \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> is wrapped around its soft-bound cover. It’s an envelope of sorts, containing texts commissioned and selected from artists and writers like Astria Suparak, Christina Sharpe, Wendy Xu, Frantz Fanon, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and many more.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The anthology is published as a culmination of the Wattis’s year-long public program “\u003ca href=\"https://wattis.org/view?id=711\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Trinh T. Minh-ha is on our mind\u003c/a>.” Interrupted by the pandemic, the first half of the curatorial project entailed lectures and performances, a film series (that went digital last March) and focused engagement with the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha: filmmaker, writer, composer, artist and longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trinh is perhaps best known for her 1989 documentary film \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kanopy.com/product/surname-viet-given-name-nam-vietnamese-wom\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Surname Viet Given Name Nam\u003c/a>\u003c/em>, which presents interviews with Vietnamese women on the aftermath of the war, but her artistic practice is not easily curtailed to one category, or even a list of categories. Her interdisciplinary approach is poetic and orchestral, regardless of the medium she is working with. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13899605\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13899605\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Why-are-they-so-afraid-of-the-lotus_-Courtesy-of-the-Wattis-Institute-for-Contemporary-Arts-3_1200-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Why are they so afraid of the lotus?’ 2021. \u003ccite>(Courtesy Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“When things touch each other, that has certain results,” says Kim Nguyen, the Wattis’s curator and head of programs, who co-edited the anthology along with Jeanne Gerrity, deputy director and head of publications. “In-between spaces aren’t empty and they aren’t vacant,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nguyen’s embrace of indeterminability is evident in the anthology itself, which takes the form of a kind of montage; a choir of voices placed in kinetic proximity. Writers, artists and poets are bound together in the pages like threads in a spider web. Authors in one section reference works written by other contributors, netting a space for shared attention and providing a transcript of collaboration. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the filmmaker Sky Hopinka’s “The Center of Somewhere,” a meditative text on his relationship to Indigenous representation as a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luise Mission Indians, Hopinka writes, “What is urgent is what exists beyond myself and my experience.” Expanding that thought, he considers that his sense of self comes from “many threads being woven together to attempt to form and ritualize something less clear.” This sentiment, which could easily be a line from one of Trinh’s films, feels like a guiding parameter for how to read the anthology. \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> makes its statement through correlated texts rather than a single given thesis. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fred Moten considers the montage as a radical technique for putting images in dialogue with each other in his book \u003cem>In The Break\u003c/em>. He invokes an idea of Trinh’s, “the multiple Oneness in Life,” that she introduces to speak to the complexity of her own identity as it is re-conferred across languages, nationalities, and social spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a 2019 talk entitled “Lovecidal,” which Trinh gave at the Wattis, she introduces the idea of “vernacular architecture,” which, she puts poetically, ‘breaks within here and there.” Vernacular architecture feels like the right name to use to describe Renee Gladman’s \u003cem>Paragraphs\u003c/em>. Skeletal drawings, at once image and text, function between architecture and scribble. Each image-poem is made up of language that inhabits its physicality fully, and, if considered with Trinh’s thinking, insists on opening up a liminal space that still resists permanency. Gladman’s drawings are neither here nor there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trinh has written often about the diasporic experience, as a Vietnamese person living outside the country for most of her life, and how it relates to a sense of time. The feeling of displacement, of being out of context, has an eerie relevance during the pandemic, as for the past year everyone in this country was asked to make alienation routine. Public space in the Bay Area transformed dramatically. New access and new barriers punctuate the city, and both the capacities and limitations of convening digitally loom over social gatherings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What use is you and me together in a room?” Steffani Jamison asks, rhetorically, in her piece on Lorraine Hansberry’s “What Use are Flowers?” which expands on Hansberry’s eponymous unpublished story, in which a hermit survives the end of humanity and finds himself in the peculiar position of trying to describe the utility beauty once held to the planet’s few surviving children.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe Trinh, who often poses questions without anticipating an answer, would respond with a line from the opening narration in her 1982 film \u003cem>Reassemblage\u003c/em>: “I do not intend to speak about … just speak nearby.” This sentence resounds with a commitment to physical proximity, to the making of shared space. The use of “you and me together in a room,” in this case, is that it means that someone is there to listen when you speak. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This anthology is in many ways an invitation to listen. It’s an invitation to participate in a radical, engaged form of listening that takes on the labor of actively receiving others’ speech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13899607\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13899607\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/06/Asian-Futures-Without-Asians-A-geisha-robot-in-_Ghost-in-the-Shell_-2017-Astria-Suparak_1200-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from Astria Suparak’s ‘Asian Futures Without Asians’ featuring a geisha robot in ‘Ghost in the Shell,’ 2017. \u003ccite>(Courtesy the artist and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Distinctly Asian and Asian-American experiences are given space in \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> An editorial choice was made to place these experiences in conversation with and in proximity to people speaking from other positions. This is only fitting; Trinh often makes the point, in her work, that being decentered—for example being marginalized by a country that embraces white supremacy as a national mythology—can become a point from which to make connections and build intimacy. Being decentered allows for language to be complex. Fragmentation and plurality can constitute a site of solidarity. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To return to the envelope, the late multidisciplinary artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (whose \u003cem>Chronology\u003c/em>, a series of never-before published black and white photographic works, is included in the anthology) impressed black type on the lips and folds of fifteen envelopes in her 1976 artwork \u003cem>Faire Part\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Trinh, Cha is known for emphasizing multiple meanings and estranging language by drawing attention to the role context plays in making meaning. One of the envelopes in the series is inscribed with acrobatic letters that, translated from French, spell out “the form of action is nothing less than transformation.” If reading is the action and an anthology of texts is the form, then \u003cem>Why are they so afraid of the lotus?\u003c/em> is nothing less than transformative.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ Analyzes Sci-Fi to Argue for Less Racist Futures",
"headTitle": "Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ Analyzes Sci-Fi to Argue for Less Racist Futures | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Clocking in at under three minutes, Astria Suparak’s video \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/astria-suparak\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Virtually Asian\u003c/a>\u003c/em> is a fecund proof of concept for what could be an entire feature length film in the form of an illustrated essay. Made with materials clipped from an ongoing research project on the science fiction culture industry, the resulting collage creates a highly affecting argument on the erasure of Asian people from the canon. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The work is part of Berkeley Art Center’s digital exhibition \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/the-option-to\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">The Option To…\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, launched while the space was closed due to the pandemic, which includes commissioned projects by Bay Area artists Kimberley Acebo Arteche, Roya Ebtehaj, Feral Fabric, Dionne Lee and Adia Millett.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suparak’s piece is immediate and her voice, narrating the words, is melodic and compelling. The over-dubbing of her acerbic observations on blockbuster films is a compelling prelude to other iterations of her work that will appear in fragments across digital platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>American science fiction films are often guilty of what media theorist Wendy Chun calls “high-tech Orientalism.” The term originates in \u003ca href=\"https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article/24/1%20(70)/7/58411/Introduction-Race-and-as-Technology-or-How-to-Do\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Chun’s essay\u003c/a> “Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race,” which includes a reading of William Gibson’s \u003cem>Neuromancer\u003c/em>, a book credited for creating the term “cyberpunk.” Looking at the crude assemblage of Asian cultures, objects, and practices casually mixed together to build the dystopian future that Gibson’s white characters inhabit, Chun writes that “high-tech Orientalism is a process of abjection—a frontier—through which the console cowboy, the properly human subject, is created.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13893500\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13893500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A still from ‘Virtually Asian,’ featuring a cityscape with holographic geisha on top of a skyscraper in ‘Ghost In The Shell.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In a similar line of thought, Suparak writes that “Asians are used as scenery in white-made media, as a shorthand to indicate a ‘multicultural’ or ‘foreign’ place. But foreign to whom? Asians have been on record as living here since at least the 1600s, before the U.S. even existed.” In \u003cem>Virtually Asian\u003c/em>, this critique overdubs footage of white protagonists in science fiction films walking past holograms of Asian women. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Racist histories feed right into an inability to imagine less racist futures. It is here that Suparak’s work intervenes, insisting on creative depictions of a future in which white American myths no longer dominate the collective imaginary. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many of the racist tropes that white filmmakers bolster come out of the colonialist attitude exhibited in phrases like ‘The world is your oyster,’” writes Suparak. Such sayings, she says, are emblematic of “the privilege to travel unfettered around the world and the white entitlement to pick and choose whatever catches your fancy from cultures that aren’t your own.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Suparak’s video essay, she emphasizes the importance of visual representation, noting that the American culture industry is just beginning to retell stories from the past that include people of color. “In order to imagine the future,” she insists, “it’s important to reimagine the past more accurately.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Virtually Asian\u003c/em> is just one shard of a larger research project that examines over 40 years of American science fiction cinema and television from a critical lens. The presentations of her results are diffuse: the video at Berkeley Art Center, a forthcoming ontological essay on the conical hat, troughs of materials culled from fan sites and military wikis, illustrated essays, screenshots from \u003cem>Bladerunner\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Ghost in the Shell\u003c/em> and a possible series of GIFs. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13893499\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13893499\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A still from ‘Virtually Asian’ featuring holographic Japanese women in ‘Ghost In The Shell.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has long represented a fantastical idea of American futurity. Whether it be as the final frontier of western expansion, the unlimited wealth of the gold rush, the progressivism of the 60s, or, as of late, the site of high-tech innovation. Upholding each of these American myths requires the erasure of certain people; it requires that one story gets told at the expense of myriad alternative histories. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Berkeley Art Center, the precarious nature of physical space in the Bay Area—and who has access to it—is an organizing principle for curation. Executive Director Daniel Nevers emphasizes that with a distinguished building (designed by architect Robert Ratcliff) in an incredibly expensive city, he feels it is important to redistribute that resource to local artists whenever possible. With \u003cem>The Option To…\u003c/em>, Nevers wanted to give artists money and the freedom to create whatever they like so that living and making art in the Bay Area could feel, if only temporarily, a little less precarious. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a question, during COVID-19, of whether our digital platforms will cohere into more accessible online communities or splinter us into endlessly algorithmic pods. This becomes especially relevant as many of the changes we’ve made in the last year feel increasingly permanent. The turn to digital exhibitions, for example, seems unlikely to go away. Nevers has already planned a second \u003cem>The Option To…\u003c/em> digital show, which will take place regardless of local reopening plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With social encounters reduced by shelter-in-place orders, the politics of digital representation grow more and more important. The recent string of hate crimes against Asian people, which are motivated by many forms of racism, are being exacerbated by digital misrepresentations. The potential for violence imbued in science fiction films that present dehumanized versions of Asian people is clearly pressing. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The less utilitarian approach to composing digital worlds, modeled by the Berkeley Art Center’s hands-off curation and suggested by the arguments in Suparak’s work, feels like a possible escape from the algorithms. Instead of a high-tech future designed to tell white American stories, instead of a pressing cohesion that insists on one national mythology, \u003cem>The Option To…\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Virtually Asian\u003c/em> make an argument for complex, non-rigid and diverse sequences of media that cohabitate in the present moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Watch ‘Virtually Asian’ online via the Berkeley Art Center. Details \u003ca href=\"https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/astria-suparak\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Clocking in at under three minutes, Astria Suparak’s video \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/astria-suparak\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Virtually Asian\u003c/a>\u003c/em> is a fecund proof of concept for what could be an entire feature length film in the form of an illustrated essay. Made with materials clipped from an ongoing research project on the science fiction culture industry, the resulting collage creates a highly affecting argument on the erasure of Asian people from the canon. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The work is part of Berkeley Art Center’s digital exhibition \u003ci>\u003ca href=\"https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/the-option-to\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">The Option To…\u003c/a>\u003c/i>, launched while the space was closed due to the pandemic, which includes commissioned projects by Bay Area artists Kimberley Acebo Arteche, Roya Ebtehaj, Feral Fabric, Dionne Lee and Adia Millett.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suparak’s piece is immediate and her voice, narrating the words, is melodic and compelling. The over-dubbing of her acerbic observations on blockbuster films is a compelling prelude to other iterations of her work that will appear in fragments across digital platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>American science fiction films are often guilty of what media theorist Wendy Chun calls “high-tech Orientalism.” The term originates in \u003ca href=\"https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article/24/1%20(70)/7/58411/Introduction-Race-and-as-Technology-or-How-to-Do\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Chun’s essay\u003c/a> “Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race,” which includes a reading of William Gibson’s \u003cem>Neuromancer\u003c/em>, a book credited for creating the term “cyberpunk.” Looking at the crude assemblage of Asian cultures, objects, and practices casually mixed together to build the dystopian future that Gibson’s white characters inhabit, Chun writes that “high-tech Orientalism is a process of abjection—a frontier—through which the console cowboy, the properly human subject, is created.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13893500\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13893500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_If-you-neglected_screengrab_Suparak_1200-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A still from ‘Virtually Asian,’ featuring a cityscape with holographic geisha on top of a skyscraper in ‘Ghost In The Shell.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In a similar line of thought, Suparak writes that “Asians are used as scenery in white-made media, as a shorthand to indicate a ‘multicultural’ or ‘foreign’ place. But foreign to whom? Asians have been on record as living here since at least the 1600s, before the U.S. even existed.” In \u003cem>Virtually Asian\u003c/em>, this critique overdubs footage of white protagonists in science fiction films walking past holograms of Asian women. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Racist histories feed right into an inability to imagine less racist futures. It is here that Suparak’s work intervenes, insisting on creative depictions of a future in which white American myths no longer dominate the collective imaginary. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many of the racist tropes that white filmmakers bolster come out of the colonialist attitude exhibited in phrases like ‘The world is your oyster,’” writes Suparak. Such sayings, she says, are emblematic of “the privilege to travel unfettered around the world and the white entitlement to pick and choose whatever catches your fancy from cultures that aren’t your own.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Suparak’s video essay, she emphasizes the importance of visual representation, noting that the American culture industry is just beginning to retell stories from the past that include people of color. “In order to imagine the future,” she insists, “it’s important to reimagine the past more accurately.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Virtually Asian\u003c/em> is just one shard of a larger research project that examines over 40 years of American science fiction cinema and television from a critical lens. The presentations of her results are diffuse: the video at Berkeley Art Center, a forthcoming ontological essay on the conical hat, troughs of materials culled from fan sites and military wikis, illustrated essays, screenshots from \u003cem>Bladerunner\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Ghost in the Shell\u003c/em> and a possible series of GIFs. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13893499\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1200px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"750\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13893499\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/VirtuallyAsian_charade-of-diverse-future_screengrab_Suparak_1200-768x480.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A still from ‘Virtually Asian’ featuring holographic Japanese women in ‘Ghost In The Shell.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy the artist)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has long represented a fantastical idea of American futurity. Whether it be as the final frontier of western expansion, the unlimited wealth of the gold rush, the progressivism of the 60s, or, as of late, the site of high-tech innovation. Upholding each of these American myths requires the erasure of certain people; it requires that one story gets told at the expense of myriad alternative histories. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Berkeley Art Center, the precarious nature of physical space in the Bay Area—and who has access to it—is an organizing principle for curation. Executive Director Daniel Nevers emphasizes that with a distinguished building (designed by architect Robert Ratcliff) in an incredibly expensive city, he feels it is important to redistribute that resource to local artists whenever possible. With \u003cem>The Option To…\u003c/em>, Nevers wanted to give artists money and the freedom to create whatever they like so that living and making art in the Bay Area could feel, if only temporarily, a little less precarious. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a question, during COVID-19, of whether our digital platforms will cohere into more accessible online communities or splinter us into endlessly algorithmic pods. This becomes especially relevant as many of the changes we’ve made in the last year feel increasingly permanent. The turn to digital exhibitions, for example, seems unlikely to go away. Nevers has already planned a second \u003cem>The Option To…\u003c/em> digital show, which will take place regardless of local reopening plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With social encounters reduced by shelter-in-place orders, the politics of digital representation grow more and more important. The recent string of hate crimes against Asian people, which are motivated by many forms of racism, are being exacerbated by digital misrepresentations. The potential for violence imbued in science fiction films that present dehumanized versions of Asian people is clearly pressing. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The less utilitarian approach to composing digital worlds, modeled by the Berkeley Art Center’s hands-off curation and suggested by the arguments in Suparak’s work, feels like a possible escape from the algorithms. Instead of a high-tech future designed to tell white American stories, instead of a pressing cohesion that insists on one national mythology, \u003cem>The Option To…\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Virtually Asian\u003c/em> make an argument for complex, non-rigid and diverse sequences of media that cohabitate in the present moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Watch ‘Virtually Asian’ online via the Berkeley Art Center. Details \u003ca href=\"https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/astria-suparak\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
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"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
"city-arts": {
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"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
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