Season 4: Fall 2017 / Winter 2018
September 21, 2017
Lauren Marie Taylor, And Yet We Are Not Saved
Lauren Marie Taylor is a Bay Area conceptual artist. In 2013 she was the first Artist in Residence at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. In 2015 she was an Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome, through which she worked with the Vatican Astronomical Observatory. Recent projects include collaborative work on the Man in Space Collection at the Walt Disney Family Museum, Satellite Engineering at the California Academy of Sciences, YBCA BAN 7 and a solo exhibition at Southern Exposure on robotics in the Civil Rights Era. She holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, an MEd from Portland State University and an MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts.
Monica Westin, How to be Present — Virtual Bodies at the Museum
Monica Westin is an art writer and historian of rhetoric. She works at the California Digital Library and teaches writing to visual art students at the California College of the Arts. Her places include: the top of Bernal Heights park, the Wikipedia visual editor widget, Central Asia, the #12 Muni bus, and the imaginary places proposed in late antique Greek literature and early Greek novels.
October 19, 2017
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, The Diaspora of the Color Blue
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, an arts educator, an activist, a storyteller and a curator, whose work is informed by her commitment to craft and community, engagement with society, and interest in storytelling and cultural geography. She strives to re-create and re-tell personal and family tales side by side the tales of those that surround her. Branfman-Verissimo has had solo exhibitions at Lago Projects in Oakland, E.M. Wolfman in Oakland and Bolivar Gallery in Los Angeles. She has also exhibited and performed work at Osaka Art University, Highways Performance space, Richmond Art Center, Southern Exposure and the Berkeley Art Museum. Branfman-Verissimo is a member of the CTRL + SHFT Collective and the founder and lead curator at Nook Gallery.
,>Helen Shewolfe Tseng, Secrets of a Southern Goth
Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an artist, designer, and weird wolf witch currently based in San Francisco. She was born in Baton Rouge to Taiwanese immigrants and grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Northern California.
November 16, 2017
Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus, Policing Heteronormativity: Gender and Gentrification in Early San Francisco
Ivy Anderson and Devon Angus recently co-edited the California Historical Society Book Award Winning title, Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute, a work of non-fiction set in Progressive Era California.
Ivy Anderson is one of those people who moved to San Francisco the week she turned 17 and never looked back. After ten years in the city, she found herself armed with an environmental studies degree from San Francisco State University, a job at City Lights Bookstore, and a book published by Heyday. She has worked as a landscape artist, community garden manager, a youth arts educator, a barista, a waitress, a house cleaner, and now, a writer and bookseller.
Devon Angus hails from Colorado, Santa Cruz, California, and San Francisco. He has spent much of his life traveling, working itinerant jobs, and living as a musician, performer, and researcher. After a long time obsession with Russian history and politics, he has found himself drawn once again to a deep fascination with the place from which he comes, California.
Stella Iman Dugall, Black Girls & Natural Hair: A Site of Healing and Cultural Agency
Stella Iman Dugall is a scholar activist and visual artist from San Jose, California. Currently, she is working on her Masters of Arts in Anthropology (emphasis in Visual) at San Francisco State University. Her Creative Thesis Project is a film accompanied with user-guide, that explores cultural and individual motivations, benefits and challenges of wearing hair in its natural state, as felt by a few Black women in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stella Iman's research and visual art projects are inspired by subjects that include identity construction and ritualized practices of Africana peoples; collective consciousness; embodied politics and activism; racialization of beauty; the relationship between mass media and dominant flows of ideas and movements; and structural racism and violence. She also enjoys taking photographs of people, nature and inanimate objects.
January 18, 2018
Martin Pinol, Mole Galleries: A Disputed Assemblage on the Diaoyu | Diaoyutai | Senkaku Islands
Martin Pinol is a librarian living in Oakland, California. They wrote two books of poetry, Mapmaking (2015) and Classification (2016), and play in the band cupii.
Willy Reed, It Just Came Gushing out the Tube! Examining the Latent Function of Frozen Yogurt Interior Design
Willy Reed (b. 1988, San Francisco) is a California based sculptor. He received his BFA from the California College of Art in 2015. Through a diversity of materials, such as ceramic, digital image and molded resins, Reed investigates the constructions and contradictions we understand as the California ethos. His work has been part of exhibitions at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, 99¢ Plus in Brooklyn and The Oakland Museum of California. He is an establishing member of the avant-garde graffiti crew Drugs Crew.
February 15, 2018
Mary Elizabeth Hogan, DEAR MR. KROPELNICKI: Implementing Perpetual Landscapes in West Petaluma
Mary Elizabeth Hogan is a California-based artist working between Petaluma, Oakland, and San Francisco. She is a founder and research fellow of NEW PROXEMIX, a collaborative research network studying closeness and distance. She is currently studying Dutch and French at Berkeley City College.
Jared Stanley, In Memory of My Dumb Friends
Jared Stanley is a poet, writer and artist whose primary interest is in the intersection of lyric poetry, the history of landscape and land use, and the vernacular, ever shifting ground of English as it changes due to immigration, environment, and technology. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Ears, The Weeds, and Book Made of Forest, which won the 2009 Crashaw Prize for poetry. His collaborative artwork has shown widely in California and Nevada. Jared Stanley was born in Arizona, raised, indoctrinated, smoked-out, and dangled from redwoods in the East Bay, and now lives in Reno, Nevada. He has never lived in San Francisco.