2016 MFA / MA Adam Allegro | Razan Adel Almohasen | Vince Baworouski | Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Sebastian Ortiz Cabrera | Francis Calimlim | Natasha Carlos | Jake Jonghun Choi Robin Crofut-Brittingham | Harper Gene Brokaw-Falbo | Yueqi Chen | Srimongkol Darawali Enar de Dios Rodríguez | Suwechha Dhar | Zen Du | Joseph E. Dwyer | Gözde Efe Neil Enggist | İris Ergül | Lusi Fan | Shannon Foreman | Tony Foster | Shane Francis Rebecca A. Frantz | Simón García-Miñaúr | Anna Garski | Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante Yuanlei Gong | Andrea Nicolette Gonzales | Flynn Grinnan | Yi (Grace) Guo Kunlin He | Willow Blue Heaton | Kevin Corbett Hill | Shisi Huang | Jamie Hull Katie Jenkins-Moses | Jaleesa Johnston | Jeff B. Johnston | Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston Sasinun Kladpetch | Christina Marie Klein | Elisabeth Kohnke | Devon Marie Lach Caroline Landau | Becca Levine | Sai Li | Zhanliang Li | Colin Liang | Rose Lou Weilai Lu | Victoria Maidhof | Nick Makanna | William Mantor | Malcolm Mc Bride Cameron Wayne Molidor | Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo | Dana Morrison Juan Pablo Pacheco | Marcela Pardo Ariza | Caitlin Petersen | Shannon Alyse Permenter Nathaniel Record | Laura Rokas-Bérubé | Sara Samano | Guusje Sanders Brian Z. Shapiro | Soraya Sharghi | Lauren Carly Shaw | Adam M. Smet Hitarth B. Solanki | Christie Spillane | Hayley Sutton | Saniya Talhouk | Valerie Thompson Kaitlin Trataris | Ryan Van Runkle | Jackie Valle | Cristina Velázquez Valencia Jeremy Keith Villaluz | Anička Vrána-Godwin | HuiMeng Wang | Yin-Hsiang Wang Yixin Wang | Charlie Watts | Li Westerlund | Julian Wong-Nelson | Yong Xiao Chao Xu | Mitchell Anthony Yee | Nanxi Zhou | Zhengyi Zhu
2016 MFA / MA
1
2016 MFA / MA SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE Graduate Programs 2016 Rachel Schreiber, Interim President Mark Campbell, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Affairs Daryl Carr, Director of Marketing and Communications Maureen Keefe, Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations Hesse McGraw, Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Programs Anthony Molinar, Dean of Students Jennifer Rissler, Interim Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs Espi Sanjana, Chief Operating Officer Anne Shulock, Chief of Staff Claire Daigle, Chair, Master of Arts Department Sampada Aranke, Interim Chair, Master of Arts Department Tony Labat, Chair, Master of Fine Arts Department Laura Richard, Faculty Head, Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Stanya Kahn, Artist in Residence, Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts, 2015 Zeina Barakeh, Director of Graduate Administration Niki Korth, Manager of Graduate Administration Heather Hickman Holland, Director of Operations Milton Freitas Gouveia, Graduate Studio Operations Manager Kedar Lawrence, Graduate Studio Evening Coordinator Greg Kersten, Facilities Manager, Graduate Studios Š 2016 San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco, CA 94133 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-930495-53-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Message from Rachel Schreiber, Interim President
4
Graduate Programs
6
MASTER OF FINE ARTS / ARTIST PAGES Message from Tony Labat, Chair, Master of Fine Arts Department
8 10
Graduating MFA Artists MASTER OF ARTS / THESIS PROJECTS Message from Sampada Aranke,
94
Interim Chair, Master of Arts Department
96
Graduating MA Scholars Collaborative Projects
105
SELECTED PROJECTS
108
ON-CAMPUS EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS Walter and McBean Galleries
122
Swell Gallery
124
Diego Rivera Gallery
125
Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series
127
Graduate Lecture Series
128
PhotoAlliance
129
Concentrate
129
SFAI Remembers Flynn Grinnan
130
Graduate Programs Faculty
132
Board of Trustees
137
Acknowledgements
138
3
MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
This year also marked the opening of residence/SF, a new
This catalogue documents and celebrates the extraordinary work on view in SFAI’s 2016 Graduate Exhibition. In addition
project space run by three current SFAI students, two who are
to participation in the exhibition, symposium, and film
graduating (Kaitlin Trataris and Anička Vrána-Godwin) and one
screening that together comprise our end-of-year activities,
who managed galleries in Los Angeles and New York before
these students participate in Commencement as part of
SFAI and is just finishing her first year (Lauren Licata). Even within the curriculum, experiences extend
their graduation from SFAI. Two words stand out in the above description: graduation
beyond boundaries, such as with this year’s Collaborative
and commencement. Together, they connote that something
Projects. Students worked with late-career artists in the
has ended, and that something else is beginning. Ostensibly,
Bay Area on legacy documentation through a partnership
the idea is that one is leaving the “ivory tower” and joining
with KunstWorks, and, with the collective Will Brown,
“the real world.”
investigated SFAI’s archival holdings to uncover hidden histories that inspired a speculative auction
However, these temporal and spatial metaphors do not
of reconstituted elements of the archive.
accurately describe the careers of many at SFAI. Students
As you can see, SFAI artists inhabit and participate in
here have a long tradition of blurring, muddying, and diffusing the purported distinction between student/alumnus, novice/
the art world—their “real world”—throughout their time as
expert, and amateur/professional. Put more simply, they do
matriculated students. They often begin this work before they
not wait until their diplomas are in hand to put into practice
even arrive here, and surely they will continue it beyond. Therefore, we might say that we need a more flexible
what they are learning in the classroom and studio.
and porous model than graduation/commencement,
Consider a few examples:
ending/beginning. So to the artists and scholars who this
Since the reopening earlier this year of late alumnus and
year traverse that supposed border, I wish you sustained
former faculty member David Ireland’s masterwork, his house
success with all the endeavors that you’ve pursued before
at 500 Capp Street, the majority of docents have been either
and during your time as students, and those that you will
current SFAI students or recent alumni, trained by two SFAI
continue to pursue in years to come.
alumni (Rebecca Goldfarb and Bob Linder) who currently teach at SFAI. The Director of Curatorial Affairs is another recent SFAI alumnus (Diego Villalobos). This flow of SFAI affiliates continues the tradition that David himself started of engaging student artists at the house.
Rachel Schreiber, PhD Interim President
4
GRADUATE PROGRAMS and the program culminates with the MFA Exhibition.
MFA IN STUDIO ART WITH OPTIONAL EMPHASES Questions, curiosity, dialogue, and invention drive the
A robust summer Graduate Lecture Series provides
philosophy of SFAI’s two-year MFA program, which
opportunities for direct dialogue with contemporary artists.
provides a dynamic interdisciplinary context for emerging artists to advance their work, while exploring the
MA
theoretical, sociopolitical, and creative concerns of the
SFAI’s Master of Arts (MA) programs provide a generative
contemporary moment.
context for advanced scholarly inquiry into the ideas,
Student-artists use their own questioning to guide their
institutions, and discourses of contemporary art, challenging
coursework and build the skills necessary to sustain a lifelong
students to expand skills of analysis, questioning, and creative
practice in the arts. Concepts are emphasized over technical
problem solving to prepare for a lifelong commitment to art
proficiency, and artists are encouraged to experiment widely
and ideas. SFAI’s scholars are creative practitioners who work
across media. SFAI’s optional emphasis enables students to
side by side with MFA candidates with one difference—their
focus their interests (if helpful to their work) without being
creative materials are ideas and words.
tied exclusively to one medium.
MA candidates participate in art history and critical theory
Throughout the program, students work independently
seminars, as well as research and writing colloquia; they also
in the studio and in the field; meet with faculty one-on-one
have opportunities for curating, internships, and travel. These
in graduate tutorials; participate in small, faculty-led critique
cross-disciplinary offerings prepare students to cultivate
seminars; and take idea-driven critical theory and art history
an individualized course of study that will lead to the final
courses. They also create numerous projects on their own
research thesis—a book-length work of creative scholarship.
through the relationships they forge here—publications,
The Collaborative Projects provides a forum for students
off-site exhibitions, international collaborations, and place-
to take their work into the public sphere—and to collaborate
making events have all emerged from the graduate cohort.
professionally with their peers—with an exhibition, symposium,
The culmination of the MFA degree is the MFA Exhibition—a
or site-responsive project.
prestigious show, annually acclaimed for its raw, cutting-edge
The final MA Symposium introduces MA graduates
creative output.
to the Bay Area academic community in a highly celebrated public forum.
OPTIONAL MFA EMPHASES Art and Technology/Film/New Genres
DUAL DEGREE MA/MFA
Painting/Photography/Printmaking/Sculpture
SFAI’s Dual Degree MA/MFA program is designed for students whose practices cross the boundaries of art and scholarship.
LOW-RESIDENCY MFA IN STUDIO ART
The Dual Degree equips students to engage theory, history,
SFAI’s Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Art
art, and culture at their points of intersection. It consists of:
program offers the rigor and artistic community of the full-time program in a flexible format ideal for individuals who wish to
(1) An MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art
advance their creative work while maintaining a professional
(2) An MFA in Studio Art with Optional Emphases
career or personal commitment.
(Art and Technology, Film, New Genres, Painting,
Over three years, student-artists work with SFAI faculty
Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture).
during intensive eight-week summer sessions in San Francisco, and independently through mentored,
The culmination of the program is participation in the MFA
off-site, one-on-one study during the fall and spring
Exhibition after the second year, and completion of a written
semesters. During the summer, students in the program
thesis, as well as participation in the Collaborative Projects by
have studio space in the Graduate Center and access to all
the end of the third year.
of SFAI’s facilities. Summer sessions combine critiques, art history and critical studies seminars, visiting artist lectures, and individualized tutorials to create a comprehensive studio- and research-based curriculum. Students participate in Summer and Winter Reviews in San Francisco each year,
6
7
MFA ARTIST PAGES
2016 Graduate Exhibition Title Suggestions From Graduating Students |
84,668 |
Crux
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Insight
Insignia |
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THESIS
|
Point
Valance
Varncosis
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Varnication |
| |
Vernianity |
Viscellanies |
Vryptography
|
|
Vosmos |
|
| |
|
Vistory |
Vryptos
the
Vergineering
|
|
Vilosophy
Vostume
Vebt |
|
Vrand
VuperVupreme
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Vew |
Sante |
|
|
| |
SFAI
the
| |
Vascism Vemocratic
|
Vermistry |
Victation
|
Vivliography |
Vreed
Wikipedia
Can’t
Vreation
Möbius
Varminology
Vidol)
|
Place
Epi-Centre
|
Vircumstance
Hour
of
is
Veizure
or
What
Out
Traversing
|
(
|
Quiet
Varometer
Viterature
|
the
Vergriculture
| |
In
Nuclei=SFAI
Art
Vransportation
Vynthesis
Epi-Center
|
Vicon Viology
Vita
|
Vanufacturing
Varnivore
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En(title)ment
varnishing
Vefore
Vernisdiction
Visual
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Continuum
Tomorrow
Vamnit!
|
|
NucleUS,
of
|
between
Reviving act
|
Varnipire
Vercanto
Villoionare
|
The
Vechnology
In
Nucle-US,
Departure |
|
Sage
Burning
Detonation
Vascist |
Repeat.
Visage |
Vernimals
a
|
Axiom
Emphatic
am
2016
of
Veaceout
Vensationalism
of
EXHIBITION
|
Vastronomy
|
I
Rinse.
Unpacked
Vonderer
|
|
Ratio
Departure
Lather.
Pivot
MFA
Vignal
Aspect
Homo-Vernishiance
PiercinNG SFAI
|
Departing |
Genesis
|
Anthrovarnian
Vironment |
Volklore
|
Vromise Tell
You
Tony Labat Chair Master of Fine Arts Department
8
9
ADAM ALLEGRO Born
The physical space we interact with on a daily
Hollywood, California, 1982
basis is both dynamic and unpredictable. As a photographer working on the streets, I often feel
Education
isolated from the city that surrounds me—an
BS Political Science,
outsider peeking in. I observe people and their
United States Naval Academy, 2005
interactions with and within their surrounding space in an attempt to better understand my
MFA Studio Art,
own experiences. I am interested in how motion
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
speaks to the subconscious and how the sublime nature of stillness complements the
adamallegro.com
former in an urban setting.
10
Between (No. 5) 2015 Archival pigment print 12 x 18 inches
Stars 2015 Mixed materials Dimensions variable
RAZAN ADEL ALMOHASEN Born Saudi Arabia, 1989 Education BS Digital Media Arts, NewSchool of Architecture & Design, 2012 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 behance.net/Razancoco
What if trampolines would extend
What if paintbrushes were our shoes.
over homes. I do not understand communications. I do not understand reflection. What if you could live multiple lives. What if onions grew on clouds. I think somehow, some way, it is all I do not understand space.
magical, and I choose art as my country.
What if a star could fit in my pocket.
P.S. I love the smell of caramel popcorn.
I do not understand cells.
11
VINCE BAWOROUSKI Born
My current body of work is inspired by Robert
Burbank, California, 1963
Smithson’s view that an artist works in three modes. The first is the science fiction, the cold,
Education
the metal, the steel, the inorganic. The second
BA Cinema/Photography,
is the value and craft. The last is the horror film,
Southern Illinois University
the blood, the organic. This exhibit represents
Carbondale, 1994
my venture into Smithson’s final mode. Once sheltered within, I present my recovery from
MFA Studio Art,
turbulence as the blood.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 baworouski.com
12
3 of 15 years 2015 Medium dry debossed/ embossed paper 50 x 18 inches (each)
ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO Born
As an artist of mixed Pakistani and Lebanese
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Damascus, Syria, 1990
descent, I see my body caught in the middle of
Muslim’s Burden 2015 Performance
complex identity politics formed by centuries of Education
colonialism and exacerbated by contemporary
MAH History of Art,
international politics. In my work I explore issues
The University of Edinburgh,
of state violence, and how that violence resonates
Scotland, 2010
in our collective memory, how it forms and shapes communities, and by extension, how it
MFA Studio Art,
affects the individual.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 zaliartandphotography.com
13
Forgotten Brothers Channel 1 2015 Video collage 6:30-minute loop What If We Kill Them . . . 2015 Collaborative mural with Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo Dimensions variable
SEBASTIAN ORTIZ CABRERA Born Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, 1987 Education BA Plastic Arts, University of Puerto Rico, 2012; Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, Fine Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, 2013 MFA Studio Art,
Through an “anthropophagic” attitude toward art,
(Left to right)
I have embraced the term “Zombie Formalism”
Y con esta todos fueron felices! 2015 Mixed media on canvas 93.25 x 60.125 inches
and set out to produce paintings that are false, grasped by “coloniality,” and curated with a “tropicalist” gaze. As if selecting pieces with tunnel vision, a narrative is presented within the wrong means. Together with found and personal objects, as well as the intervention of space, I show painting to reveal a fragmented story bathed in the light of the Caribbean Sea.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 ortizcabreraseba.com
14
En el mismo “loop” desde 1990 2015 Mixed media on canvas 60.25 x 48.125 inches
FRANCIS CALIMLIM Born
I am exploring the feelings of displacement
(Left to right)
Quezon City, Philippines, 1989
bred from my experiences traveling from one
Anonymous 006 2015 Ink on cardstock paper 6 x 4 inches
home to another, between the United States Education BFA Multimedia, San Diego State University, 2011 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
and the Philippines. The physical and mental shock of feeling like an outsider in both homes is partnered with anxiety, intrusion, and curiosity. This has led me into alleys of interrogating the hyphen between Filipino-American—negotiating with its history that only further reveals the blurriness and complexity of identity.
franciscalimlimart.com
15
Ana Teresa F 2015 Ink on cardstock paper 6 x 4 inches
NATASHA CARLOS Born
I create layered imagery by repeatedly visiting
New York, New York, 1987
the same site and recording my relationship to the landscape. Each visit is an opportunity to dive
Education
deeper into the layers of a location. The familiar
BA Public Communication,
visual markers navigate me as I revisit a site.
American University, 2009
Those landmarks reconnect me to the landscape while enabling me to look beyond and uncover
MFA Photography,
new elements of the site.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 natashacarlos.com
16
Self-Portrait (Site A) 2015 Acrylic inkjet print 16 x 24 inches Self-Portrait (Site B) 2015 Metal inkjet print 16 x 24 inches
JAKE JONGHUN CHOI Born
The primary objective of my art, design, and
Seoul, South Korea
research is to historically, culturally, socially, and technologically investigate the humanity
Education
and spirituality of bidirectional and interactive
BS Environmental Science
media—or other bilateral communication
and Ecological Engineering,
methodologies—which redefine and expand
Korea University, South Korea, 2013
human-human or human-world relationships, and to discover the artistic, creative, and
MFA Design and Technology,
innovative possibilities of their intellectual,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
cultural, and practical applications.
jonghunchoi.com
17
The Cosmic Flow 2015 Interactive art Dimensions variable
ROBIN CROFUT-BRITTINGHAM Born
My paintings are influenced by myths, legends,
Great Barrington, Massachusetts
and stories from around the world. I am interested
Education
I paint from narrative fragments that I can’t
BA Poetry, Bard College, 2011
quite fit together. When these disparate
in the tension between illustration and fine art.
fantasies are linked, I find worlds where the MFA Studio Art,
contradictions of reality are revealed to be
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
absurd, illogical, or humorous.
robincrofutbrittingham.com
18
Maenads 2015 Watercolor and gouache on paper 44 x 48 inches
SRIMONGKOL DARAWALI Born
In Japanese landscape painting, the word ma
Nakhon Nayok, Thailand
suggests “empty� space, where surface with neither ground nor paint and painted space are
Education
of equal importance; in gagaku music, ma refers
BFA Painting,
to an interval or the period of waiting before a
San Francisco Art Institute, 1988
note or a group of notes is sounded. This cycle of paintings reflects through my visual sense
MFA Painting,
a response to sound, in relation to silence,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
experienced in music, by referencing the aesthetic concept of ma.
sites.google.com/site/5000errors
19
RXXRNN 20159-10 (SONATA-FORM) 2015 Acrylic and fiber tape on board 48 x 48 inches (each), triptych RXXRNN 2015123 2015 Acrylic and fiber tape on board 48 x 48 inches
ENAR DE DIOS RODRÍGUEZ Born
If ever written, this artist’s statement should be
Ourense, Spain, 1986
an alphabetically ordered list comprising all the repeated words used in other artists’ statements
Education
within this catalogue.
BA Translation and Interpretation, University of Vigo, Spain, 2009; MA Multimedia Translation, University of Vigo, Spain, 2011 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 enardediosrodriguez.com
20
Context Is the New Content 2015 Digital inkjet prints on wall and framed digital inkjet prints 96.5 x 22 inches (each) Drawing Now 2015 Charcoal drawings on paper and wall, xeroxed copies, and digital inkjet prints Dimensions variable
SUWECHHA DHAR Born
My work involves different genres of filmmaking.
New Delhi, India, 1991
My films originally delved into issues of human rights violations. Understanding this whole process
Education
required me to understand the psyche of an
BA Sociology,
individual, which helped me understand my own
University of Delhi, India, 2012;
psychological functioning. The human brain has a
Postgraduate Diploma,
habit of overthinking, which helps people construct
TV and Radio Production,
different scenarios in their minds—different stories
University of Delhi, India, 2013
their minds are trying to convey. These stories helped me create and visualize narratives.
MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
21
Turn Off the TV 2015 Video 2:01 minutes
ZEN DU Born
My work emerges from the fallacious society we
Gubkin, Russia, 1983
live in. I aestheticize ubiquity and redefine it through various contexts to achieve a sense of irony.
Education BA Linguistics, Voronezh State University,
Double Bubble 2015 Chewing gum on furniture, wallpaper (chewing gum wrappers), paintings (chewing gum on canvas in windows), and video Dimensions variable, 7:59-minute loop Love Seat 2015 Acrylic on fiberglass 16 x 20 x 21 inches
Russia, 2003; BFA, Studio Art, Appalachian State University, 2012 MFA Painting, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 zenduart.com
22
GĂ–ZDE EFE Born Izmir, Turkey, 1988
I wanna help the Fisherman catch the Fish, I wanna help the Fish,
Education
get away from the Fisherman.
The Money Tree 2015 Digital prints 5 x 5 inches (each), metal sculpture, and cherries Dimensions variable How I Make the World Home 2015 Artist’s pair of shoes Dimensions variable
BA Arts and Understanding, Volda University College, Norway, 2010; BA Cinema and Television, Anadolu University, Turkey, 2011 MFA Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 efegozde.me
23
NEIL ENGGIST Born
My practice explores the space where
Princeton, New Jersey, 1982
the distinction between human and nature dissolves, aspiring to rupture and
Education
reconstitute the encounter with that which is
BFA Painting,
wild and empty within. Acts of painting are
Washington University, 2004
embodiments of experience that, through the ritual of gathering and composing material,
MFA Studio Art,
form orchestrations of shared consciousness.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
The painting is the site of transformation, unbound to permanence in its open enclosure
neilenggist.com
of time, encircling both void and union through the crossroad poetics of painter and nature.
24
Wheel I 2015 Acrylic, ink, and brick dust on canvas 57 x 57 inches
İRIS ERGÜL Born
My sculptures, objects, and installations are
Ankara, Turkey, 1980
hybrid creatures: reorganizations of fragmented figures. They investigate the very condition
Education
of the human and our interconnectedness
BA Sculpture,
with nature/the other/the abject. The tension
Mimar Sinan
between the human-centered reason and the
Fine Arts University, Turkey, 2014
acknowledgement of absurdity is transformed into a playful, yet sarcastic, visual language.
MFA Studio Art,
I draw influence from tales, beliefs, mythologies,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
bestiaries, and the human experience, which is defined by these relations and our ways of
irisergul.com
encountering the world.
25
anōnumos x 2015 Fabric, polyester filling, coffee grounds, natural dyes, and ink 25 x 23 x 12 inches Old She-Hyena 2015 Performance still Duration variable
LUSI FAN Born
While living in Beijing, Scandinavia, and Australia,
(Left to right)
Beijing, China, 1992
I’ve been immersed in both Asian and Western
Shipping Info. 2016 Clay, acrylic, mirror, and wood 16 x 12 x 8 inches
cultures. My works explore and react to social Education
news and phenomena by comparing and
BVA Printmedia,
commenting on cultural and political issues. I also
The University of Sydney,
use daily-life elements as proxies in my work,
Australia, 2013
authoring it with Chinese cultural references. My work is influenced by Yasumasa Morimura
MFA Studio Art,
and Robert Arneson, and the idea that art about
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
politics could be both critical and playful.
26
The Red Parade 2014 Chalk and collage on blackboard, graphite pencil and watercolor on paper, and video 15 x 15 inches
SHANNON FOREMAN Born
My mother is dying. She’s done many terrible
(Left to right)
Jacksonville, North Carolina, 1984
things. I want to be able to be in a room with
Mother-Daughter Portrait 2015 Archival inkjet print Dimensions variable
her without wishing I were anywhere else. Education
I want to tell a new story of old history. I want to
BA East Asian Languages
answer the questions that still linger in the dead
and Culture,
air between us. I want to find the woman I was
Smith College, 2006
forced to leave behind.
MFA Photography,
Taking up themes of liminality, extinction, and
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
faith, I explore what it means to lose something that is already gone.
shannonforeman.com
27
Search 2015 Archival inkjet print Dimensions variable
TONY FOSTER Born
“The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1966
but to find the antidote for existence.” –Anonymous
Education BA Science,
Among the contemporary themes that run
Indiana University
through this particular body of work, it is the
of Pennsylvania, 1990;
construct of time, the deconstruction of mortality,
MA Industrial Arts,
and the reconciliation between the two that
San Francisco State University, 2010
bear the significance. My concepts are borne of conversations for reconciliation, and theoretically
MFA Studio Art, Art and Technology,
act to find the antidote for existence.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 revoltingfag.com
28
Dandelion 2016 Digital: Maya, ZBrush, and Final Cut Pro 3:05-minute loop
SHANE FRANCIS Born
I strive to decode the onslaught of media
Fort Polk, Louisiana, 1968
that are a tsunami gushing through our cultural universe through NeoMAXIMALISM,
Education
a discipline dealing with the concepts of
Dual Degree BS Illustration
self-promotion, advertising, gratification, and
Photography (S.I. Newhouse School
critique, demanding that participants suck
of Public Communications),
harder to bring the ejaculate that can be found
Advertising Design
in dismantlement and reformation with repeated
(The College of Visual and
images carving paths through mounds of
Performing Arts),
outdated media to form a cacophony from which
Syracuse University, 1990
The Form will emerge by light shown through the Technicolor prism of NeoMAXIMALISM. 
MFA Studio Art, Art and Technology, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
29
Screen Burnt: Alien Cult Goddess 2015 Film/video 4:41 minutes NeoMAXIMALISM Frequency Modulation Display 2000–present Photo montage Dimensions variable Screen Burnt: Satan Sneezes 2015 Film/video 4:41 minutes
REBECCA A. FRANTZ Born
By “fossilizing” found clothing in concrete, I
Los Angeles, California, 1990
create self-made ruins that I uncover. Within discarded ordinary trinkets and clothing there are
Education
traces of ourselves in which memories are stored
BA Art,
or neglected—from pleasant ones passively
Franklin & Marshall College, 2013
forgotten to traumatic ones actively forgotten. Using an archaeological lens, I investigate
MFA Studio Art,
these physical and psychological surrogates
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
of memory. By “filling” in lost information I reimagine and fabricate new histories for the
rebecca-frantz.squarespace.com
lives possibly attached to these objects.
30
January 5, 1996 2015 Found clothing, cement, wire, and string 19 x 8 x 6 inches Spring 1988 2015 Found clothing, objects, rebar, and cement/concrete Dimensions variable
SIMÓN GARCÍA-MIÑAÚR Born
“I knew this moment was going to happen, but
Bilbao, Spain, 1991
I had somehow managed to forget it.”
Education
–Green Suit Guy
BA Cinematography, Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, Spain, 2014 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 simongarciaminaur.com
31
An Unexpected Visit 2015 HD video 4:50 minutes
YUANLEI GONG Born
My works explore the connection between reality
Chengdu, China, 1991
and humanity. My inspiration comes from my everyday observation of society and life. I want
Education
to build up a way of critical thinking toward life,
BA Literature,
and I am also willing to create the reenactment
Central Academy of Drama,
of emotion by people through my works.
China, 2014 MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
32
Ripple 2015 HD video 21:11 minutes She 2014 HD video 12:52 minutes
ANDREA NICOLETTE GONZALES Born
My work consists of painting on the human
Fort Worth, Texas
body, then photographing and filming the figure integrated with large-scale paintings.
Education
My process begins with creating small-
BS, Early Childhood
scale oil paintings. These paintings are then
Education emphasis,
recreated directly on a larger scale and on
Texas Wesleyan University, 2011
the human body using hypoallergenic paints specifically designed for human skin.
MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
33
Rebirth 2015 Photograph of oil painting and body paint 17 x 22 inches Codes of Culture 2015 Photograph of oil painting and body paint 17 x 22 inches
FLYNN GRINNAN Born
Flynn’s breadth of artwork spoke about the
(Left to right)
Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, 1988
remnant, or what is left behind. It is only fitting
Untitled Cyanotype (Tire with Neil) 2015 Cyanotype on Arches Cover 72 x 48 inches
for such a prolific artist and dedicated friend Education
to be remembered through the work he gifted
BFA Sculpture,
us in his untimely passing. The legacy he left
Hampshire College, 2010
behind continues to influence all who had the honor of knowing him.
MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
In loving memory of our dear friend Flynn Grinnan.
34
Untitled Cyanotype (Dana) 2014 Cyanotype on Arches Cover 72 x 48 inches Untitled Cyanotype (Hellena) 2014 Cyanotype on Arches Cover 72 x 48 inches
YI (GRACE) GUO Born
My practice focuses on combining dream and
Qin Huangdao, He Bei, China, 1986
imagination: the subconscious and subjective phenomena are expressed simultaneously.
Education
In hope of conveying these ideas to different
BA Art Management,
audiences, I made an effort to observe a
Central Academy of Drama,
variety of people and their daily lives. The tiny
China, 2010
moving moments I captured rewarded me with inspirations in my work.
MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 graceyiguo.com
35
Untitled 2015 16mm black-and-white film 3:22 minutes
KUNLIN HE Born
As I grew up in China, I was informed and
NanChang, China, 1992
trained in the traditional ways and techniques of brush painting and calligraphy. Those traditions
Education
were born of a sensibility that combines
BFA Architecture Design,
thought and action; equal within that tradition
Huazhong University of Science
is the relationship between language and
and Technology, China, 2014
visuality (perhaps a unique relationship), and it is my intention to reconsider that relationship.
MFA Studio Art,
I endeavor to explore a contemporary way
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
of contemplating the ancient ways using expanded methods and processes.
cargocollective.com/kunlinhe
36
The Axe-Cut Strokes in Ink and Wash 2015 HD video 3:35 minutes The Ghost Face Strokes in Ink and Wash 2016 HD video 5:27 minutes
WILLOW BLUE HEATON Born
My large-scale paintings are the visual archive of
Nelson, British Columbia, Canada
my experience as mother, addict, criminal, and artist seeking to confiscate the authority to speak.
Education
My use of the human figure as well as the animal
BFA Studio Art,
in intimate, crowded, domestic settings is crucial
San Francisco Art Institute, 2014
to my project of disturbing stable identities, systems, or the orders that we would like to rely
Dual Degree MA/MFA,
on to define the safety of home and family.
History and Theory of Contemporary Art/Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2017 willowblueheaton.com
37
Curs 2015 Watercolor on paper 42 x 89 inches Raven and Frankie 2015 Oil on canvas 60 x 78 inches
KEVIN CORBETT HILL Born
Primarily working with emotion and gesture in a
Denver, Colorado, 1989
direct and tactile nature, through varying modes of production: to expose and display “primordial
Education
truths,� constructed by an emotional narrative and
BFA Painting and Drawing,
symbolic language. Translating the unseen, or, felt
University of Tennessee
experience into visual fact.
at Chattanooga, 2011 This is all an orchestration between: MFA Studio Art,
The shaman and the schizo
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
Ritual and obsession Dionysian and savage
kevincorbetthill.com
Skill and unskilled Raw and refined
38
Dark Mtn Dark Sky 2015 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable At the Violent Hour Born a Skeleton Mysteriously Delicate 2014 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable
SHISI HUANG Born
I work with photography, installation, video,
Hunan, China, 1989
sculpture, and book art to discuss dialogues concerning the language of visual arts.
Education
Instead of easily identifiable subjects, I explore
BA Broadcasting and Television
things invisible, ambiguous, subconscious—
Journalism, Hunan Normal University,
between authentic and fictional, ephemeral
China, 2011;
and permanent. My experiments of art have
MA Photography,
reflected the natural human impulse on
Nottingham Trent University,
exploring time, space, and the way we
United Kingdom, 2012
perceive and present reality.
MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 huangshisi.com
39
φ, Empty Set 2015–2016 HD video, digital inkjet print, prints, stone, screw, and wire Dimensions variable; 30-minute loop Present, The Present 2015 Silver gelatin print, dry flowers sealed in black mesh, and flour powder on cotton Dimensions variable
JAMIE HULL Born
In my films I explore the celluloid image as
Margaretville, New York
poetry, a nexus that offers a way to speak to the dead, to recall the absent, or ponder what will
Education
be. Film for me offers a way of looking at the
BFA Filmmaking,
world that is outside the frozen vacuum of time.
San Francisco Art Institute, 1993
It allows for movement, the shift or the entropy between thought, action, and expression.
MFA Studio Art,
The light that exists between the stains of
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
the essential, and the already expired . . . the fleeting notion that we are all temporary guests.
vimeo.com/129356718 In loving memory of Jamie.
40
Fugitive Letters 2013–2016 16mm film, color and black-and-white 7:30 minutes
KATIE JENKINS-MOSES Born
Everyone has a body. We are all confined in this
Fresno, California, 1991
materiality of flesh and bones. I’m interested in words that describe and affect one’s body. By
Education
controlling the language used to describe bodies,
BA Studio Art/Political Science,
we gain possession of our own materiality.
Whittier College, 2013
Through bookmaking, drawing, collage, and text, I create physical representations of bodies
MFA Studio Art,
that explore relationships between language,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
materiality, and fragmentation—seeking to possess my own body and help others gain
katiejenkins-moses.com
possession of their own.
41
I’m No Girl 2015 Make-up, make-up wipes, thread, and ink 42 x 42.5 inches
JALEESA JOHNSTON Born
My work springs from my curiosities surrounding
(Top and bottom)
San Francisco, California, 1989
the stereotypical and political components
Monument to 6% 2015 Performance 1 hour
that mark me as a black woman. As such, I Education
experiment with the materiality and image of the
BA Comparative Ethnic Studies/
black body through performance, photography,
Studio Art,
video, and collage. Reflection and the gaze
Vassar College, 2011
are crucial themes in my work; I am interested in playing with the gaze as an active element
MFA Studio Art,
that defines itself through the psychological
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
manipulation of black flesh and its meaning.
jaleesajohnston.com
42
JEFF B. JOHNSTON Born
My work is primarily painting and installation.
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1978
In said installations, components include: film,
Someday This War Is Going to End (Panel 2) 2015 Mixed media on paper 24 x 18 inches
video, sound sculpture, music, found objects, Education
and very often, painting. In the context of
BFA Art,
process, this phase of my work particularly
University of Tulsa, 2001
focuses on the idea of happenstance. Many pieces remain unplanned and are shaped by
MFA Studio Art,
fortuitous improvisation. From that spontaneity,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
subconscious truths are revealed and shaped. These subjects deal with emotion, psychology,
jeffbjohnston.com
and the human condition.
43
February 5, 1984 2015 Acrylic on paper 24 x 18 inches
This Is When I Turned to Liquid 2015 Found object and paint Dimensions variable
JORDAN ROSE JURICH-WESTON Born
My work documents a running interior
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Berkeley, California, 1986
monologue about the love and heartbreak
Untitled, from series Home in Light/Dark 2015 Archival pigment print 24 x 24 inches
of family and the loaded space that is home. Education
I get lost in the light that slices through the
BA Art,
rooms of my house. I follow it as it distorts and
University of California,
disorients—reveals and conceals—in arbitrary
Santa Cruz, 2009
breaks that paint spaces and figures. With its courage I tell stories with a blatant disregard
MFA Studio Art,
for what is and is not allowed to be seen.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 jordanjurich.com
44
Untitled, from series Home in Light/Dark 2015 Archival pigment print 24 x 24 inches Untitled, from series Home in Light/Dark 2015 Archival pigment print 24 x 24 inches
SASINUN KLADPETCH Born
I use my installations as a form of self-portrait
Bangkok, Thailand, 1989
and reflection of how the environment has impressed upon me. I have been experimenting
Education
with materials such as clay, soil, plaster,
BFA Ceramics,
concrete, plants, etc. My work has also involved
Silpakorn University, Thailand, 2012
the creation of conceptually based natural materials and installation. I’ve decided to use
MFA Studio Art,
raw materials in collaboration with human-made
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
materials to show the coherence of beauty.
sasinun.com
45
Self-Portrait 2015 Mixed media Dimensions variable Landscape No.1 2015 Mixed media 7 x 5 inches
CHRISTINA MARIE KLEIN Born
My work explores how the human body and
Galloway, New Jersey, 1986
external environments interact with one another through the use of various technologies.
Education
Sensing Energy 2014 Plexiglass, infrared sensors, and LED strip lighting 144 x 276 x 228 inches Energy Connection 2014 Plexiglass, LED strip lighting, and wire 108 x 180 x 48 inches
BA Psychology, Roger Williams University, 2009 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 christinamarieklein.virb.com
46
ELISABETH KOHNKE Born
I’m interested in parallel points of view
(Top to bottom, left to right)
Monterey, California, 1980
and the hypocrisy that results. Sometimes
Parasitoidal Reflections II 2015 Oil pans, motor oil, and bark from trees killed by increased western pine beetle populations Dimensions variable
disturbing, sometime surreal, the imagery and Education
installations I create are grounded in nature
BA Electronic Music,
and everyday consumer materials. The often
Mills College, 2002
invisible connection between first-world energy consumption and raw resources inspires me to
Dual Degree MA/MFA
make work about the human psyche and its own
History and Theory of
layers of parallel viewpoints—and the states of
Contemporary Art/Studio Art,
denial that separate them.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2017 elisabethkohnke.com
47
Sky Suite 2015 HD video 4-minute loop The Perfect II 2015 HD video 4-minute loop
DEVON MARIE LACH Born
Through photography I explore the body as a place
Santa Barbara, California, 1991
of critique on society’s standards, and work against heteronormative qualifications for how a man
Education
or woman should look or act. My work explores
BA English Literature,
how gender norms set the stage for stereotypes
Montana State University, 2013
that create discrimination. I work with both myself and other models, making photographs that ask
MFA Studio Art,
us to go beyond our view of the visible body and
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
challenge our experience of the female form.
devonlachphotography.com
48
Nude #1 2015 Archival inkjet print 12 x 14 inches Nude #2 2015 Archival inkjet print 12 x 14 inches
CAROLINE LANDAU Born
I use glass, performance, and painting to
Reading, Pennsylvania, 1991
portray vulnerability, empathy, and endurance. My artwork tests limits of comfort, survival,
Education
and the body’s ability to cope with external
BFA Art,
elements. Both ice and glass are on the
Carnegie Mellon University, 2013
dividing line of strength and weakness. They are both simultaneously translucent
MFA Studio Art,
and opaque, a liquid and a solid, and forever
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
in constant evolution and motion.
carolinelandau.com
49
You Musn’t Be So Loud 2015 Oil painting, glass, and performance 8 x 5 x 5 inches (glass cubes), 36 x 96 inches (painting), 36 x 96 inches (white stand) Untitled 2015 Glass and video projection 8 x 5 inches (glass cube), 2:27 minutes (video)
BECCA LEVINE Born
I question notions of strength and vulnerability
Hartford, Connecticut, 1988
through the means of an obsessively repetitive practice. In opposition to the expectations
Education
of ad hoc industrial materials, my sculptures
BFA Photography,
provide alternative connotations with the
University of Connecticut, 2010
transformation into organic structures. Misguided approaches to traditionally feminine
MFA Studio Art,
processes are used to construct pieces that
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
balance density with delicacy. Indulging in avoidance tactics manifests the weight of
beccalevine.com
inescapable histories for both artist and material.
50
Bad Seed 2015 Recycled tire soaker tubing 23 x 20 x 20 inches Bad Seed, detail 2015 Recycled tire soaker tubing 23 x 20 x 20 inches
SAI LI Born
My work focuses on the transformation of
(Left to right)
Jinan, China, 1989
psychological actions to physical output by
Untitled 2016 Graphite and ink on paper 11 x 10 inches
means of drawing and painting. Education BA Animation, Tsinghua University,
I explore the already blurred boundary
China, 2012;
between the conscious and unconscious,
Post-Baccalaureate Certificate,
as well as the various expressions of these
Studio Art,
intangible undercurrents.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2014 For me, the process of art-making is going MFA Studio Art,
through a conversation, a confession, a battle,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
an explosion with and within myself. It allows me to unveil my deepest desires and fears without
sailiart.com
having to say a word.
51
Present Tense 2016 Graphite and ink on paper 25 x 16 inches
ZHANLIANG LI Born
Death is an invincible mystery. I’m constantly
Kunming, China, 1990
living in fear of the passage of time and I want to snatch something from it. So I make short
Education
films and videos. They explore how a person
BE Digital Media Art,
confronts the “death” in daily life—loneliness,
Xiamen University, China, 2013
madness, and restrictions—and is reborn as a more complete human being.
MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 vimeo.com/user23542270
52
Butterflies 2015 HD video 10:51 minutes 1602 2015 HD video 3:47 minutes
COLIN LIANG Born
I’m a multi-media artist and my mediums are
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Shanghai, China, 1992
mainly videos, films, and performances that
Kinderheim 2014 HD video 11:10 minutes
focus on culture, social issues, humanity, and Education
postmodern lifestyle. My fluidity between
BFA Art Photography/Ceramics,
different mediums often allows the audience
Syracuse University, 2014
to have multiple dimensions of a viewing experience. The content of my works always
MFA Studio Art, New Genres,
includes humor, satire, and harsh evidence. I also
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
work as a chef and have catered multiple events and art shows. My work has been exhibited
colinliang.org.uk
in many places throughout the United States, including Light Work in Syracuse, New York, and the Diego Rivera Gallery in San Francisco.
53
Happy Together 4 2015 Single channel video/performance 5:40 minutes Mobile Mummification 2014 Single channel video/performance 10:02 minutes
ROSE LOU Born
Through the medium of experimental film, a
Boston, Massachusetts, 1991
mytho-poetic approach is employed to envision psycho-surrealist filmmaking methodologies in
Education
my work. Optical aspects of time are analyzed in
BA Art History,
a psychology-based manner. A sculptural mode
New York University, 2013
of producing imagery lures the viewer into an enchanted state of hypnosis and flow of thought.
Dual Degree MA/MFA,
By incorporating transparent materials such as
History and Theory of
water and contact lenses for a three-dimensional
Contemporary Art/Studio Art,
sculptural object, optics, memory, and space
San Francisco Art Institute, 2017
continue to be suggested in an illusory manner.
roselou.com
54
Passive Sands of Time 2015 Video performance documentation 8:06 minutes Remnants from a Visuational 2015 Digital inkjet print 12 x 18 inches
WEILAI LU Born
“The world’s flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet
Anhui, China
morsel: eat less of it, for it is full of fire. Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest, but its smoke
Education
becomes visible in the end.”
BA Interior Design,
–Rumi
University of Arts London, United Kingdom, 2010
My work explores the water damage upon our society after artificial fires in the world.
MFA Photography, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 luweilai.com
55
60 Rooms 2015 Polaroid Dimensions variable
VICTORIA MAIDHOF Born
The primary focus of my work is portraiture.
San Diego, California, 1985
I build trusting relationships with remarkable people and am welcomed into their private lives
Education
to talk, laugh, cry, observe, and photograph. I
BFA Photography,
foster long-term friendships with many of my
San Francisco Art Institute, 2010
subjects, often revisiting them over the years. Loneliness and the yearning to make intimate
MFA Photography,
connections with other human beings are
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
universal afflictions. In my work, I combine portraits with text to create a multi-dimensional
victoriamaidhof.com
viewing experience to emphasize these concepts.
56
Vicki, 4 Months Before Her Death 2014 Photograph 20 x 30 inches Wayland with Pet Rat 2014 Photograph 20 x 30 inches
NICK MAKANNA Born
“Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when
San Francisco, California, 1988
the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake.
Education
Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm
BA Studio Art,
right square in the eye and he says, ‘Give me
Lewis & Clark College, 2010
your best shot, pal. I can take it.’”
MFA Studio Art,
–Kurt Russell Big Trouble in Little China, 1986,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
directed by John Carpenter nickmakanna.com
57
Dungeon I 2015 Glazed ceramic 14 x 10 x 9 inches
WILLIAM MANTOR Born
Lines, shapes, and sheer mass of structures are
Edmond, Oklahoma, 1990
what I convey within my work. I use shapes and lines that I see in my everyday life to create my
Education
minimal structures. Creating artwork on a larger
BFA, Sculpture,
scale allows the viewer to relate one-on-one with
Oklahoma State University, 2014
the artwork, and using industrial materials gives the artwork a seemingly larger weight and mass.
MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 willmantor.wix.com/willmantor
58
Barrier 2015 Concrete 60 x 64 x 72 inches Viewpoint 2015 Wood 84 x 84 x 112 inches
MALCOLM MC BRIDE Born
My work aims to depict the anxieties of
San Francisco, California, 1971
the social phobic.
For “Stereo” Jack Woker 2015 Screenprint 18 x 22 inches Insomnia 2015 Screenprint 18 x 22 inches
Education BFA Illustration, Rhode Island School of Design, 1995 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
59
CAMERON WAYNE MOLIDOR Born
I create intimate works that interweave the darker
Antelope Valley, California, 1989
side of comedy and the lighter side of drama, exploring what it means to live, love, and laugh
Education
in an over-masculine, over-medicated cultural
BA Cinema and Television Arts,
climate that claims to value the underdog.
Emphasis in Screenwriting, California State University,
I work with both digital video and found footage
Northridge, 2013
(film stock and digital), intensely manipulated color, and a digitally manipulated soundscape
MFA Studio Art, Film,
that provokes anxiety and general discomfort,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
all the while provoking genuine laughter.
vimeo.com/camolidor
60
Untitled 3 2015 Video 3:42 minutes
ANA MARร A MONTENEGRO JARAMILLO Born
Hollywood 2015 Video 2:35 minutes
Bogotรก, Colombia, 1986 Education BA, Emphasis in Electronic Media/Time-Based Arts, University of Los Andes, Colombia, 2010 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 montenegrojaramillo.com
61
DANA MORRISON Born
My work deals directly with the space between
Spring Mills, Pennsylvania, 1986
the articulated and the silent. It abstractly represents reactions of the mind and body to
Education
memory, which is at once absent and present. I
BFA Photography,
use the positive and negative space of my
Maryland Institute College of Art, 2010
body as a basis for the size and structure of my works. The color palette and materiality are
MFA Studio Art,
unaltered, referencing the rawness, strength,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
and delicacy of physical and mental emotions.
danamorrison.com
62
(Left to right, top to bottom) Pull Yourself Up 2015 112 pounds of concrete and ratchet straps 144 x 24 x 18 inches Milk and Oil 2014 Photograph 60 x 42 inches Come In. Stay Out. 2015 Wood and copper wire; live performance 120 x 8 x 11 inches
*An education at SFAI is a significant investment in your future.
JUAN PABLO PACHECO Born Bogotรก, Colombia, 1991 Education BA Film and Cultural Studies, Connecticut College, 2014 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 juanpablopacheco.com
63
MARCELA PARDO ARIZA Born
Through the use of wry humor, awkwardness,
(Top to bottom, left to right)
Bogotรก, Colombia
and queerness, I engage with the medium
American Paranoia 2015 Archival inkjet print 21 x 28 inches
of photography to create compositionally Education
arranged and colorful scenarios that embed the
BA, Studio Art,
uncanny within the mundane. By incorporating
Earlham College, 2013
quotidian objects in seemingly absurd ways, these tableaux reference recognizable situations
MFA Studio Art,
mixed with a hint of magical realism.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 marcelapardo.com
64
In the Red 2015 Archival inkjet print 21 x 28 inches Found Wanting 2015 Archival inkjet print 28 x 21 inches
CAITLIN PETERSEN Born
I investigate opposites and inbetweens.
San Diego, California, 1988
(Left to right, top to bottom) Higher Level Shenanigans 2015 Found materials, spackling paste, and glue 12 x 5 x 6 inches
Education BA Painting and Printmaking,
Black Hole Lesbian 2015 Found materials, spackling paste, and glue 2 x 2 x 2 inches
San Diego State University, 2013 MFA Studio Art,
Allishness 2014 Found materials, spackling paste, and glue 6 x 2 x 2 inches
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 caitpetersen.com
65
NATHANIEL RECORD Born
I explore different relationships between the
(Top to bottom, left to right)
Fort Worth, Texas, 1986
human body and animal flesh utilizing a
Chuck 2015 Oil on canvas 54 x 36 x 3 inches
variety of media. Education
Lengua 2015 Oil on canvas 36 x 54 x 3 inches
BFA Painting, Texas State University, 2014
Tessellation 2015 Serigraphy 40 x 22 inches; dimensions variable
MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 nathanielrecordart.com
66
LAURA ROKAS-BÉRUBÉ Born
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,
Another Day in Paradise Lost 2015 Oil on canvas 53 x 57 inches
Québec, Canada, 1989 Education
Manicure 2015 Ceramic sculpture 5 x 6 x 18 inches
DEC Fine Arts, Dawson College, Canada, 2008;
No Life, No Future (Big F#ckin’ Jacket) 2015 Oil on canvas adhered to oil on canvas 66 x 66 inches
BFA Painting and Drawing, Concordia University, 2013 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 laurarokas.com
67
SARA SAMANO Born
Through traditional methods of illustration, print-
(Left to right, top to bottom)
San Antonio, Texas, 1991
making primarily invokes the linear perspective
In Mother’s Arms 2015 Lithography 24 x 18 inches
of storytelling I wish to achieve. The suggestive Education
titles for each piece give context to the
BFA Photography,
narration. The material is significant to the
University of the Incarnate Word, 2013
scene, while also embellishing and layering particular events that occur within the tale. By
MFA Studio Art,
collecting and examining my family’s history,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
I weave my perspective into the events that brought content, tense, and nostalgic days.
68
Burn to Ash 2015 Lithography 18 x 24 inches Expectations 2015 Lithography 18 x 12 inches
BRIAN Z. SHAPIRO Born
Cultural and natural places can be shaped
San Francisco, California, 1987
not only by events but also by tales, myths, ideologies, and the passage of time. Through my
Education
photographs, my work explores my experiences
BA Art,
and historical research, both the place and the
San Francisco State University, 2009
forces that have an effect on one particular locale. I want to create for my audience a logical
MFA Studio Art,
understanding as well as the visceral “aura� of
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
this unique and curious place.
brianzshapirophotography.com
69
Do Not Attempt To Deceive #1 (Boat Ramp) 2015 Digital inkjet print 30 x 44 inches Do Not Attempt To Deceive #3 (Eastside) 2015 Digital inkjet print 30 x 44 inches
SORAYA SHARGHI Born
My art challenges various portrayals of
(Top to bottom, left to right)
Tehran, Iran, 1988
orientalism by drawing on childhood memories
Ámadāi, detail 2015 Acrylic on canvas 71 x 65 inches
and “inner child” explorations to understand Education
the formation of my adult identity. I visually
BFA Painting, Soore Higher
translate these into universal experiences that
Education Institute, Iran, 2012
bridge cultural divisions and boundaries. The iconography of my work focuses on fictions at
MFA Studio Art,
the intersection between reality and fantasy,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
influenced by mythology and heroic narratives. I confront issues of religion, politics, and gender,
sorayasharghi.com
challenging cultural stereotypes by personalizing and historicizing them.
70
Roots and Axes Collection 2014 Acrylic on canvas 58 x 58 inches Hybrid 2014 Acrylic on canvas 62 x 40 inches
LAUREN CARLY SHAW Born
I am deeply interested in investigating the
(Left to right, top to bottom)
New York City, New York, 1986
human form. Using cast replications or
Let Them Eat Cake 2015 Sculptural object, video, and performance 36 x 66 x 51 inches
constructed likenesses of the body, I am able Education
to manipulate the appearance or context of the
BFA Studio Art,
human. I make reference to conditions such
School of Visual Arts, 2009
as scale, environment, and fantasy to create surreal and detached archetypes of the body.
MFA Studio Art,
Each work addresses feelings of transformation,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
evolution, mortality, and femininity; these works appear to exist in a bizarre, abject universe
laurencarlyshaw.com
somewhere between birth and collapse.
71
White Girl Problems (Bust Series) 2015 Synthetic hair and glass eyeballs 13.5 x 6 x 6 inches Leather Head (Bust Series) 2015 Leather and glass eyeballs 13.5 x 6 x 6 inches
ADAM M. SMET Born
A relationship, a power dynamic, and questioning
(Left to right)
West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1985
who holds the dominance and who the submission
Coffee 2015 Digital inkjet print Dimensions variable
is an interplay I am bound to. Explorations of Education
hyper-masculinity present in gay male BDSM
BFA, Emphasis in 3–D,
interactions through a submission to craft. Using
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 2014
specific historical moments and processes that are linked to gender roles. Tenuous fibers impregnating
MFA Studio Art,
a surface to form simple homoerotic imagery or
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
reimagining misogynistic advertisements as queer sexualized affairs. Dominance and domesticity co-
adamsmet.com
exist where materiality is as important as imagery.
72
Whip Up a Batch 2015 Aida cloth, embroidery hoop, and tango pink and black floss 10 inches round
HITARTH B. SOLANKI Born
Films and photos have touched many people
(Top to bottom, left to right)
Gujarat, India, 1992
and I am no different. My work explores my
I Met Life 2015 Digital photograph Dimensions variable
limitations, humor, angst, and survival. Education
Photography captures the natural human
BE Information and Technology,
behavior of people in their daily lives, while
Gujarat Technological University,
film is the energy by which I survive, with its
India, 2014
entertainment and my pure love for stories. Both deal with the nature of human beings.
MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
73
Kapkapi 2014 Digital photograph Dimensions variable Bhaag: Per Kyu? 2015 Video 2:19 minutes
CHRISTIE SPILLANE Born
Fever Dream is an investigation into memory,
(Left to right)
Hartford, Connecticut, 1986
violence, and imagination, and how they intersect,
No Escape? #3 2015 Archival inkjet print 24 x 36 inches
influence, and overpower each other. I create Education
disquieting scenes of feminized experiences of
BFA Film, Photography, and
reality by photographing women and everyday
Visual Arts, Ithaca College, 2008
domestic materials, which are distorted and stripped of context. I reveal the tension between
MFA Studio Art, Photography,
the forces that attempt to strip us of agency,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
and our refusal to let them. My photographs are characterized by their quiet intensity, luscious
christiespillane.com
textures, and uncanny compositions.
74
Don’t Worry, I’ll Go Slow #1 2014 Archival inkjet print 36 x 44 inches Twin Traumas 2014 Archival inkjet print 36 x 44 inches
HAYLEY SUTTON Born
My body of work travels from sculpture to
(Left to right)
Danville, Illinois, 1988
painting, political metaphors to abstraction.
Leaning Brands 2015 APA board Dimensions variable
The discovery of the materials I use is half the Education
battle. I contemplate the materials’ creation
BA Art,
process and their final domestic intent.
Greenville College, 2011
The wood chips are molded and glued and arranged together by an industrial process
MFA Painting,
into a marquetry, both random and poetically
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
composed. I apply industrial logic and intuitive rendering to create alternate versions of the
mshayleysutton.squarespace.com
re-aestheticized remains.
75
Pattern 1 2015 APA board, chalk, spray paint, glue, and nails 48.52 x 24.5 x 0.5 inches
SANIYA TALHOUK Born
The process of making art is akin to the process
San Francisco, California, 1981
of making sense. My work utilizes the geometric and nonfigurative qualities of Islamic textiles
Education
and mosaics, scientific fascinations, and the
BFA Painting,
urban landscape. Through mark-making inspired
California State University, Chico, 2006
by language and the inherent impossibility of direct translation, abstract elements of the
MFA Studio Art,
world are made tangible. In my paintings,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
personal experience is vulnerable to order and rearrangement. The canvas becomes the
saniyatalhouk.com
platform through which I negotiate ideas.
76
Untitled 2015 Acrylic, ink, and house paint on canvas 60 x 60 inches Mark My Word 2015 Digital collage Dimensions variable
VALERIE THOMPSON Born
My current work explores the symbiotic
(Left to right)
Dallas, Texas, 1992
relationship between the role of the organic
Untitled 2014 Gouache on digital inkjet print 19 x 13 inches
and synthetic in the curation of both indoor Education
and outdoor human spaces through works
BA Journalism,
on paper and installation. I use a camera and
Southern Methodist University, 2014
hand-painted interventions to create work that manifests as mixed media, because I hope to
MFA Studio Art,
visually excavate my subjective subconscious
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
and reveal the imperceptible both in my own life and in the contemporary human condition.
valeriethompsonphoto.com
77
Untitled 2014 Gouache on digital inkjet print 19 x 13 inches
KAITLIN TRATARIS Born
My work draws inspiration from the domestic
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Littlerock, California, 1990
ideals created in the post–World War II flight to
S(laughter) 2015 Screenprint on fabric, thread, and PVC pipe Dimensions variable
suburbia. I fabricate installations that recreate Education
my childhood home and subsequent inhabited
BA Liberal Arts and Sciences,
domestic spaces to highlight the relationship
Emphasis in Studio Arts,
of past aesthetic and historical influences with
San Diego State University, 2012
the present. In my work, household objects are flattened through screenprinting and rendered
MFA Studio Art,
soft through fabric; and in their gestures they
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
resist assigned tasks and structures: performing the absurdity of a singular domestic ideal.
kaitlintrataris.com
78
S(laughter), detail of Chicken, Knife, and Blood 2015 Screenprint on fabric, thread, and PVC pipe Dimensions variable S(laughter) detail of Magnetic Knife Rack 2015 Screenprint on fabric, thread, and PVC pipe Dimensions variable
RYAN VAN RUNKLE Born
(A)
San Francisco, California, 1983
Samuel Beckett’s at a party. An American
(Left to right, top to bottom)
academic is drunk. “The thing is,” he
Portrait #80, from the series Portraits 2016 Slide film Dimensions variable
shouts, “Beckett doesn’t give a fuck.” Education
Hearing this, Beckett turns around,
BA English Literature, 2007
raises his hand, says: “But I do give a
MA American Literature,
fuck. I really do.”
University College Dublin, Ireland, 2008
(B)
I work with moving and still images, performance, and writing. Recently, I’ve
MFA Studio Art,
built sets/props and photographed myself
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
interacting with these sets/props to produce images that reference social history, cinema, and performed photography.
79
Potential Ad for Fleiss #1, from the series Ads 2016 Archival inkjet print Dimensions variable Eyez on the Prize, from the series Science v Magic 2015 Medium format archival inkjet print 20 x 20 inches
CRISTINA VELÁZQUEZ VALENCIA Born
Repurposed Black—Endless utilizes donated
Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, Mexico
VHS tapes to create oversized, elongated shawls. It brings together the videotapes, to
Education
address waste in the environment, and the
BFA Pictorial, San Jose State
rebozos/shawls, which represent older Mexican
University, 2001
women as they depart.
Dual Degree MA/MFA,
At play are the combination of repurposed
History and Theory of
matter and the oppression of women as two
Contemporary Art/Studio Art,
obsolete objects.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2017 This artwork considers ecofeminism, a political cristinavelazquez.com
movement that addresses ecological concerns with feminist ones, symptomatic of current environmental issues.
80
Repurposed Black—Endless 2015 Installation and performance, VHS film, and knitting needles Dimensions variable Shiny Black Lines 2015 Installation, VHS film, and nails Dimensions variable
JEREMY KEITH VILLALUZ Born
Due to the rapid economic growth in the
(Top to bottom, left to right)
Burlingame, California, 1985
San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve realized that my
The Gateway 2015 Digital inkjet print Dimensions variable
hometown of Daly City—a suburban town Education
neighboring San Francisco, with one of the densest
BA Asian American Studies,
populations of Filipino Americans outside of the
San Francisco State University, 2009
Philippines—is undergoing a rapid socioeconomic shift. The photographs I create explore the
MFA Studio Art,
challenges of gentrification and the complex
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
relationships between the suburban landscape, immigrant communities, and cultural reproduction.
jeremykeith.me
81
American Dreams of Home 2015 Digital inkjet print Dimensions variable Well, They’re Here 2015 Digital inkjet print Dimensions variable
ANIČKA VRÁNA-GODWIN Born
“ Youth is powerful when applied properly
”
Caledon, Canada, 1991 –@girlsallweek Education BFA, Queen’s University,
Samantha is my naughty twin operating online
Canada, 2013
as an identity spy. Her findings are a collection of feminine stereotypes and coming-of-age
MFA Studio Art,
narratives that I represent through embellished
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
paintings and drawings. By rediscovering my younger selves in found photographs
anickavg.com
and injecting them into this fabricated social narrative, I construct whimsical installations where pop culture is motif, personas flourish, and the abject lies in wait.
82
Sad Duck I with Pear Girls Simulation 2016 Digital image Dimensions variable
HUIMENG WANG Born
My work explores the possibility of creating
Inner Mongolia, China, 1990
temporary, theatrical, and often unusual moments in a space, and finding a way to document them.
Education
I have hosted dinner parties on suspended tables;
BE Bioengineering,
directed a short film, which is a dramatized
Beijing University of Aeronautics
presentation of table etiquette on chocolate
and Astronautics, China, 2012
fountain parties; and searched for shipwrecks once seen. It is through the creation of many
MFA Studio Art,
fictional realities that I discuss social-class
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
identities, and my identity in particular.
cargocollective.com/hmwang
83
The Pure Reason We Dine Tonight 2015 Installation, site-specific performance, and single-channel video Dimensions variable 2 hours
You Are Beautiful You Should Be Seen 2015 Site-specific performance and single-channel video 3:34 minutes
YIN-HSIANG WANG Born
My hope is that this work can provide a distance
Taipei, Taiwan, 1990
from which to view my relationship with my family, especially with my mother. By this
Education BA Arts, National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan 2012 MFA Studio Art, Sculpture,
process of dissociation from myself, I am able to recognize the trauma and begin to accept it. Also, when I am weaving the nets, I can hear my mother’s voice. It is a practice in order to understand her and rebuild our connection.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 novo813.wix.com/yinhsiang-wang
84
We Pretended We Were Wonderful 2011 Paper 118 x 196.85 inches Untitled 2013 RC paper 3 x 5 inches
YIXIN WANG Born
My artworks are based on people’s daily
Xi’an, China, 1991
lives and their relationships. I really enjoy the moment when I sit in front of a French window
Education
and see different people: they’re walking with
BFA,
their earphones, dressed in various clothes
Northeast Normal University,
representing their occupations; they’re laughing,
China, 2014
arguing, bland, or blind; they’re meeting someone or saying goodbye to someone.
MFA Studio Art,
The relationships among these people are
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
changing just like the passing of time. My work explores how I feel about this change.
85
The Bridge 2015 Ready-made things, such as clothes, furniture, and commodity 7.5 x 10 x 2.3 inches
CHARLIE WATTS Born
In search of a dying whale in Earthworks,
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Atlanta, Georgia, 1989
California, a meditation on the oscillation
Honey or Tar VI 2015 Archival inkjet print 48 x 30 inches
of sex and death consumed me. Swamps Education
and shamans shrouded my dreamscape.
BA Art History and Visual Arts,
Whether it is a subtext of the destruction of the
Emory University, 2012
environment or the desecration of women, the serene, aesthetic nature of my work coats the
MFA Studio Art,
chaos with honey. Through a photographic lens,
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
I reach into the feminine collective unconscious in a chance to reveal and heal underlying pain
charliewattsphotography.com
just past the peripheral.
86
Pretend You’re Actually Alive 2014 Archival inkjet print 36 x 48 inches Feast III 2014 Archival inkjet print 36 x 48 inches
LI WESTERLUND Born
My interest in fact versus perception and its
Uppsala, Sweden, 1967
correlation to literal versus abstract sparked the creation of this installation piece. A personal loss
Education
inspired me to investigate this existential tension
B.Sc. Electrical Engineering,
further. The installation aims at expressing as
Brännkyrka Upper Secondary School,
reality that which lacks physical structure.
Sweden, 1986; JD (equivalent) and LL.M.,
The act of abstraction through predominantly
Uppsala University, Sweden, 1993;
literal mediums, such as photography and video,
LL.D. (PhD) Patent Law,
carries meaning. To me, this piece signifies
Stockholm University, Sweden, 2001
emotionally charged voids of thoughts, notions, and beliefs, forming and reforming.
MFA Photography, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 lifethrills.com facebook.com/Lifethrillsphotography
87
Inner Demons 2015 Metal print 42 x 52 x 1 inches Inversions 2015 Metal print 42 x 52 x 1 inches
YONG XIAO Born
Isolated signifiers are mute. I believe meaning
Tianjin, China, 1987
can only exist on the knots of a net that mutually connects to a large scale of a constellation. My
Education
work generally explores the relationships between
BA Accounting,
objects, people, and incidents. Various possibilities
University of Idaho, 2012
of interpretation get activated via juxtapositions, while conventional ways of understanding devolve
MFA Studio Art,
through the process of decontextualization. The
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
pen is never only for writing, and the internet has existed long before electricity.
cargocollective.com/xiao2029
88
Spines/Mainboard, from Book Sextant 2015 Digital inkjet print book 8 x 10 inches, 70 pages Trilogy 2015 Digital inkjet print Dimensions variable
CHAO XU Born
My movie world has been and always will be a
Shanghai, China, 1989
laboratory in which different elements will react, clash, and mix. Thus, different outcomes will be
Education
generated as also happens in actual scientific
BA Literature for Drama,
laboratories. Will these outcomes, however, be
Film, and TV,
good or bad? As scientists or as directors, we
Shanghai Theatre Academy,
have no authority to criticize these results; all
China, 2011
we have to do is present the results to the world through our cognition.
MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 vimeo.com/user15865257
89
Heroic 2015 Digital video 3:33 minutes
MITCHELL ANTHONY YEE Born
This work explores the southern-most region
(Top to bottom, left to right)
San Francisco, California, 1957
of the Central Valley of California. I imagine the
7904-14 2014 Digital inkjet print 20 x 30 inches
experience of water as it journeys through this Education
challenging land. My photography captures
BS Materials Science and Engineering,
the journey of water through the hydrological
University of California, Berkeley, 1980;
cycle: through the air as water vapor, down
MS Mineral Engineering and Geology,
river drainages, and finally diverted from the
University of California, Berkeley, 1991;
normal destiny of rejoining the sea: a journey
Post-Baccalaureate Certificate,
now altered by anthropogenic modifications that
Photography,
have reshaped this landscape.
San Francisco Art Institute, 2014 MFA Studio Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 mitchellayee.com
90
4937-15 2015 Digital inkjet print 20 x 30 inches 6252-15 2015 Digital inkjet print 20 x 30 inches
NANXI ZHOU Born
I use film and video as mediums to explore
Beijing, China, 1992
the boundaries of human perception and awareness, emphasizing the ever-changing
Education BA Television Editing and Directing, Communication University of China, 2014
relationship between humans and the society they live in. I devote myself to making art about important social issues and events related to gender, identity, class, and more.
MFA Studio Art, Film, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 vimeo.com/user32332271
91
Take Down the Hammer 2015 HD video 2-minute loop Progress 2015 HD video 10 minutes
ZHENGYI ZHU Born
My work discusses the simplicity and possibility
(Left to right, top to bottom)
Tangshan, China, 1991
in my daily life, as I am fascinated with what
It Tells 2015 Color darkroom enlarging paper Dimensions variable
can possibly be created and reconstructed with Education
simple methods. I am willing to spend a certain
BA Digital Film and TV,
amount of time on the exploration of individuality
Beijing City University, China, 2014
and the verification of identity through my response and reaction to anything or anyone
MFA Studio Art, Film,
around me. Gradually, this process becomes the
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
evolution of understanding who I am, where I am, and what I live for.
92
A Conversation With Chantal Akerman 2015 HD video 7:10 minutes Distance 2015 16mm film, black and white 2:30 minutes
93
MA THESIS PROJECTS
The 2016 Graduate Exhibition takes place during a strange presidential campaign in the epicenter of an economically stratified Bay Area, where the intersection of art and politics seems to be on the tip of every local cultural producer’s tongue. This cultural landscape provides fertile creative ground, in which the premises and promises of making art in the face of these national and local political economies open up modes of critique and possibility that are seemingly unlivable—even though we are almost always living through these modes. This year’s MFA artists shape and mark the contours of their everyday lives in order to double back on their various and varying environments. They turn to the intimacy of touch, the flicker of the moving image, the social contract of skin, the texture of materials organic and inorganic, and the weight of paint—they turn to the conceptual to make sense of the material. This year’s MA scholars mark with words the impacts, investigations, and illicit subjectivities that are otherwise unaccounted for in art and its histories. They turn to the tactility of place, the sensorial registers of the body, the searing cut of the image as modalities through which alternative archives, memories, and worlds make meaning through us, about us, for us. These students take these expanded fields and pivot them back, such that we can ask ourselves—are we paying attention to those places, senses, practices, and beings that live underneath and between the cracks and crevices of capital and its unevenness? These shifts are conceptual—to a mode of art making and art writing that privileges thought, feeling, reflection, and critical engagement—and create openings for us to imagine and activate our worlds otherwise.
Sampada Aranke Interim Chair Master of Arts Department
94
95
HARPER GENE BROKAW-FALBO Born
Tearing Down Walls:
Oakland, California, 1987
San Francisco’s Alternative Art Spaces and the Commons This study is an examination of art spaces in San Francisco that have incorporated
Education
practices of commoning both public and private spheres in order to open up
BA, Art History
socio-political artistic space. Ultimately, the success of each organization is
University of Oregon, 2014
dependent on the relationship between it and its surrounding community, as well as its ability to be both a financial and cultural resource. It is necessary that
MA History and Theory of
such spaces remain nimble in regard to programming and their overall mission
Contemporary Art,
statements in order to respond to shifting tides in funding, as well as changes in
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
the community of artists they engage. Through a continuous process of creating common spaces via the streets they border, the money they raise, or the art that
harpergene.com
they nurture, such spaces stay in tension with the forces that would potentially push all art outside of the city. It is when these tensions cease and when the air deflates from the fight for space, no matter its manifestation, that organizations potentially lose their relevance. Through a close examination of three spaces—New Langton Arts, Galería de la Raza, and Southern Exposure—it is possible to glean potential strategies to continue to open up artistic space in San Francisco.
New Langton Street, San Francisco, CA 1975–1981 National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Program Selected Records, 1970–1980 © Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Courtesy of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
96
YUEQI CHEN Born
Concealed Silence: The Condition of Chinese Feminist Art
China, 1991
In parallel with the economic and political rise of China, the growing popularity and importance of Chinese contemporary art has impacted the international art scene.
Education
However, in the Chinese art scene, feminist art has a peculiar existence. It has
BA Art History,
been considered an emerging art trend since the 1990s, yet Chinese feminist art is
Central Academy of Fine Arts,
rarely seen in either domestic or international settings. How do we situate Chinese
China, 2010
feminist art alongside the male-led art world in contemporary China, as well as the Western-dominated international art world?
MA History and Theory of
In this project, I examine the visual qualities of Chinese feminist art. The
Contemporary Art,
first artist I engage with is Xiao Lu, who is, according to general discourse, the
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
representative feminist figure in Chinese contemporary art. Her difficulty in claiming power over both her art and life resonates with the relatively silent lives of many other Chinese feminist artists, and I analyze her struggle critically in this context. The environment surrounding Chinese feminist art is inevitably bound by power; therefore, among the intricate webs of power, institutionalized discourse is the other key subject in this project. Institutionalized publications such as Er Kan Yi Bao are considered important references for Chinese contemporary art in general. This project, based on these two perspectives, looks into the power dynamics surrounding Chinese feminist art to investigate its claims as a movement, and also the relative silence that characterizes it. I also analyze artists Gao Ling, He Chengyao, and Manyee Lam from the exhibition WOMEN, curated by Abby Chen, as a new lens to look into the further possibilities of Chinese feminist art.
Dialogue 1989 Installation and performance Photographed by Ding Bin Š Xiao Lu Courtesy of Xiao Lu
97
JOSEPH E. DWYER Born
Compromising the Position of Giallo Cinema:
Newport, Rhode Island, 1982
The Gothic Journeys of Cattet and Forzani Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are a filmmaking duo who have recently begun
Education
to explore the limits of identity, gender, and sexuality in the marginalized genre
BA Film History, Theory and Production,
of horror. They use the iconography of the gothic and the 1970s-era Italian
Hampshire College, 2004
giallo sub-genres to create spaces of desire and fantasy through cinematic explorations of abjection and sadomasochism. While some horror-makers such
Dual Degree MA/MFA,
as Stephen King, Eli Roth, and Guillermo del Toro use the gothic and giallo as
History and Theory of Contemporary
influences, ending up with reactionary or conservative products, Cattet and
Art/Studio Art, Film,
Forzani have managed to create films with elements of latent feminist commentary
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
and the destabilization of male-dominated power structures. Their films Amer and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears are works of art that break open
restrainedproductions.com
traditional, constricting narrative structures to allow perversity to seep into otherwise old, formulaic genres. Using gothic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, this thesis identifies their work as refreshingly progressive cinema at a time when the horror genre has become stale and complacent.
Amer 2009 Film poster © Zootrope Films Courtesy of Zootrope Films
98
ANNA GARSKI Born
Oppositional Reflections:
Fridley, Minnesota
Carrie Mae Weems and Narcissister Reclaim the Mirror Photographer Carrie Mae Weems and performance artist Narcissister subvert
Education
conventional myopic definitions of vanity and narcissism through the oppositional
BA Studio Art/Women’s Studies,
use of “the mirror” in their artwork. To understand the symbolic function
St. Catherine University, 2012
of the mirror in their artwork and its function in contemporary visual culture, one must consider the genealogy of vanity and narcissism. Western society’s
Dual Degree MA/MFA History and
contemporary characterization of “narcissism” conflates excessive interest
Theory of Contemporary Art/Painting,
in oneself, particularly in one’s physical appearance, with egocentrism and
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
megalomania. “Vanity” is a similarly derogatory term that is often associated with femininity both historically and contemporarily. The symbolic coding of
annagarski.com
the mirror as an object of feminine vanity has been significantly impacted by allegorical depictions of ideal femininity in European oil painting between the 13th and 16th centuries. Weems and Narcissister transform the allegorical mirror from a moralizing symbolic device into a tool for the deflection of false imagery that has been imposed upon their subjectivities. Our contemporary definitions of narcissism and vanity assume an empowered hegemonic subject. In keeping with this false assumption, traditional interpretations of narcissism and vanity as moral vices ignore gender difference and its intersectional relationship to racial inequity. Through a formal analysis of the artists’ work, I reveal how Weems and Narcissister reclaim the tropological mirror and redefine vanity and narcissism’s relationship to black female subjectivity. I identify the gendered limits and latent racism of traditional theories of narcissism and vanity as I reexamine the historical misuse of the mirror and its potential to be repurposed by subjects who are marginalized by dominant visual culture.
Carrie Mae Weems Not Manet’s Type, detail 1997 Silver print with text on mat 24 x 20 inches (each print), 24.75 x 20.75 x 1.63 inches (each frame) © Carrie Mae Weems Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
99
ANITA GONÇALVES DIAS GIANSANTE Born
Quasi-Walls:
Araraquara, Brazil, 1987
Rethinking the Museum Space through Tomás Saraceno’s Art Practice Museums are highly contested sociocultural sites increasingly defined by
Education
bureaucratic practices and neoliberal discourses. Contemporary art that aspires
BA Social Communication,
to reveal, deconstruct, and contest these power structures within cultural
Fundação Armando
institutions cannot be fully experienced and activated in these traditional
Alvares Penteado, Brazil, 2009;
spaces where transience and fluidity are not accounted for. In other words,
PB Art Critique and Curatorship,
the potential of art to challenge predominant systems of power is curtailed by
Pontifical Catholic
the institutionalization of the museum.
University of São Paulo, Brazil, 2013
My research focuses on the work of the artist Tomás Saraceno in order to rethink the museum space as an open ground on which new social interactions
MA Exhibition and Museum Studies,
and politics can emerge. Saraceno’s work challenges the notion of neutral
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
spaces by creating networks that enter into dialogue with their surroundings. His work calls for a more conscientious cooperation between the different
restrainedproductions.com
elements that maintain the dynamic and fragile balance of our ecosystem. When rethinking the museum space through Saraceno’s work, museums become decentralized from their buildings, open to multiple spaces, and invite audiences to think about the museum as an active social agent. Art becomes, therefore, a vehicle to impact the way people engage with each other, and with non-human agents. My research intends to rouse multiple answers, rather than to be a prescriptive guidebook on how museums should be.
100
SHANNON ALYSE PERMENTER Born
An nì a Thig leis A’ghaoith, Falbhaidh e leis an Uisge:
Baltimore, Maryland, 1992
Site-Specific Art Practice and the Resilience of Scottish Identity In the present moment, with conceptions of nation and culture being challenged
Education
by the exponential globalization of the world, the question of the strength of a
BA Art History, Irish Studies (minor),
Scottish identity has been challenged. However, as contemporary site-specific
University of Delaware, 2014
artists prove, a Scottish identity is firmly attached to the existence of the physical land. Through a reading of the work of Rob Mulholland, I show how his
MA History and Theory of
artistic practice of reflective sculptural installations expresses how land-based
Contemporary Art,
art actively engages with the natural landscape in order to reveal how identity is
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
grounded in ideas of place and the history of dispossession. In doing so, the art reveals how the environment becomes a site of collective memory, evoking the melancholic condition that surrounds the cultural mythologies of these events while still provoking sentiments of hope and resilience for the Scottish identity into the future. Through art, a declaration of perseverance has been established, signifying that the Scottish identity has no desire to vanish into history.
Vestige 2009 Site-specific sculptural installation: Aberfoyle, Scotland, United Kingdom © Rob Mulholland Courtesy of Rob Mulholland
101
GUUSJE SANDERS Born
Curatorial Activism:
Helmond, The Netherlands, 1991
Space at the Intersection of Activism, Art, and Curation The discourse of space at the intersection of activism, art, and curation will
Education
create a platform of guidelines in order to consider how to approach the curation
BA Art History,
of activism. Space shapes individual, societal, and structural identity, and as
University of
such, it has the ability to make change through activism. Through analysis of
Wisconsin–Madison, 2013
Anida Yoeu Ali’s 1700% Project that addresses Islamophobia, I construct these guidelines. By understanding the frameworks of space, the history of a particular
MA Exhibition and Museum Studies,
issue, and the spaces in which the activism addresses it, a curator or artist
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
gains the ability to make informed choices about curatorial decisions pertaining to space, activism, and art.
1700% Project: Otherance detail of performance 2010 Installation and performance Photographed by Andrew Walker Courtesy of Anida Yoeu Ali
102
JACKIE VALLE Education
The Flowering of State Murder:
BA Art History,
Art at the Intersections of the Bloom
Florida International University, 2003
When somebody goes missing, the uncertainty of death is made manifest. The all-too-uncertain knowledge of death is revealed by the body’s absence. When
MA History and Theory of
the bodies of masses of people go missing, however, there is only certainty—
Contemporary Art,
certainty of the extremities of the biopolitical state’s power. Modern state
San Francisco Art Institute, 2016
organizations have the power to make people violently disappear, often performing great denials of the deaths they produce by omitting traces of the bodies not only physically, but also in the mass media. When such forms of state murder are overlooked and marked only by absent representations, we are left not only with the uncertainty and disavowal of death, but also with the denial of the body as a vehicle for mourning and as testament to murder’s carnage. Art has the power to make the absent body present, the power to make us face the fact of the state’s investment in death. This thesis explores the work of several contemporary artists, working in different geopolitical locations, who have each taken on the challenge of representing state murder—not by looking at absent images, but by tapping into the appearance of absent smells. María Fernanda Cardoso, Doris Salcedo, and Ai Weiwei all visually mobilize the absent smell of mass death to make certain demands of the audience. Across all of their work, the trope of the scentless flower is invoked to insist that state power proliferates—or blooms—through its disappearance. By focusing on artworks that make the absence of smell powerfully present through visual means, this thesis also examines how smell (an often overlooked sense) matters in our understanding of contemporary art—and particularly, our understanding of art that works to uncover and question the most murderous limits of state power. In lingering with such work, this thesis proposes that we can arrive at a better understanding of art’s capacity to uncover how haunted we are by state violence—we, who might not suffer directly, but are implicated nonetheless.
María Fernanda Cardoso Cemetery—Vertical Garden/ Cementerio—jardín vertical 1992–1999 Artificial flowers and pencil on wall Dimensions variable Photographed by Pablo Mason © María Fernanda Cardoso, 1992 Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum purchase with funds from Charles C. and Sue K. Edwards, 2000.9
103
JULIAN WONG-NELSON Born
Fisting for Freedom: Queer Gesture as Temporal Liberatory Practice
Santa Barbara, California, 1990
While the gesture of the fist in diasporic Asian art is usually thought of as a reference to figures such as martial arts practitioner Bruce Lee, artists Tina
Education BA Art (Studio) and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2012 MA History and Theory of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute, 2016 julianwongnelson.com
Takemoto, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Wu Tsang use the gesture instead to open up alternative, queer, and diasporic spaces and times. The fist disrupts stereotypical temporalities, resists chrononormativity, and clenches together affective relations. By weaving queer timelines, speculative and historical pasts/futures, and alternative worlds, these artists are resisting heteronormative and racialized understandings of diasporic Asian subjectivities. This thesis seeks to examine queer diasporic Asian temporal methodologies and imaginations as generative moments of liberatory practice through close readings of each artist’s work and critical analysis. Tseng and Takemoto use the gesture of the fist, along with temporal and gender-transitive drag, to disrupt what José Esteban Muñoz calls “straight” time. Tsang mobilizes minimalist aesthetics to invoke the fist as sustained and ongoing resistance. These modalities of art practice enable them to create different queer and diasporic Asian temporalities that are woven with liberatory potential.
Looking for Jiro 2011 Production still Photographed by Maxwell Leung Image courtesy of Tina Takemoto
104
COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
105
Curiosity Killed the Cat: A Tale of Archival Fever, Desire, and Seduction Faculty
The Fall 2015 Collaborative Project course offered students an insight into the
Alla Efimova
curatorial practice of working with artists’ legacies and estates. As the first such course in an art school context, it introduced the subject through a combination
Students
of historical and theoretical readings, guest lectures, site visits, and project-based
Yueqi Chen
learning. Course readings focused on the history of 20th-century American
Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante
art through the lenses of government and market intervention. Guest lecturers
Juan Pablo Pacheco
included curators, directors of artists’ trusts and estates, art auction executives,
Shannon Alyse Permenter
and collections specialists.
Jackie Valle Julian Wong-Nelson
The course work functioned as the background for two research-based projects. The first project took the form of a mid-semester exhibition in the Diego Rivera Gallery inspired by a case study introduced in the first weeks of the class. At the center of the case study was the unfolding work of Brooklyn-based artist
Diego Rivera Gallery,
Jill Magid, scheduled to be exhibited at SFAI in Fall 2016. Magid’s ambitious
San Francisco Art Institute
international project deals with ownership of the legacy of the late Mexican
October 26–30, 2015
architect Luis Barragán. In her practice, Magid strives to understand situations where access is denied or obstructed and tests the boundaries of personal and
Other Elements
institutional risk tolerance. Her projects are radical interventions in the discourse
facebook.com/Art.Archive.Practice.SFAI
of legacy ownership. Students were invited to participate in the upcoming Magid exhibition but, in order to do so, they agreed to abnegate any knowledge of the
TAKE ME! Delusions of Control in
project’s outcome. Curiosity Killed the Cat: A Tale of Archival Fever, Desire, and
Contemporary Art:
Seduction, the student exhibition in October, was a reflection on the collective
professionally edited publication
experience of excitement as a result of working with a secret. The students’
of essays on legal and critical
individual presentations touched on the desire to visualize the invisible, the lure of
issues in regard to artists’
knowledge, and the temptation of noncompliance. Although formally engaged with
legacies, estates, ownership,
the idea of secrecy, presentations were based on students’ research in theoretical
and control, written by students.
aspects of artists’ legacy preservation. It was quite unexpected and striking that
Support provided by Koret Foundation.
their projects were realized as artworks; only one of the students identified as an artist, while the rest were enrolled in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art program. Ranging from origami-based sculpture and participatory installation by Yueqi Chen to text-based candy wrapper work by Jackie Valle, the projects were smart, poignant, and beautifully executed. They also articulated the students’ own interest in the course material: the artists’ (in)ability to control their legacies. The second course project arose from discussions following the mid-semester exhibition. Students planned to further expound their collective concern by turning their individual exhibition projects into short research essays published as a collection titled TAKE ME! Delusions of Control in Contemporary Art. The essays address legal and critical issues, and examine such topics as edition numbers control, disavowal of works by living artists, and negotiating national cultural heritage. The professionally edited, illustrated book is one of the first critical publications in the newly emerging field of legacy studies in contemporary art.
Request for Nondisclosure Agreement 2015 Commentary on exchanges with “an artist” in relation to a potential collaboration
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SFAI: San Francisco Archive Investigation
Faculty
This Spring 2016 Collaborative Project course investigated SFAI’s archival holdings
Will Brown:
in an effort to uncover artifacts, histories, and anecdotes from the institution’s
David Kasprzak
past. Informed by Will Brown’s curatorial methodology, students took a hands-on
Jordan Stein
approach to the past by transforming physical materials and more ephemeral
Lindsey White
elements into an unorthodox exhibition(s) and related program(s). Aiming to establish a marriage of content and context, decisions concerning a venue, tone,
Students Enar de Dios Rodríguez Joseph E. Dwyer Simón García-Miñaúr Anna Garski Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante Allison Hall Tortellini Jones Elisabeth Kohnke Melissa Koziebrocki Lauren Licata Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo Juan Pablo Pacheco Marcela Pardo Ariza Guusje Sanders Kaitlin Trataris Anička Vrána-Godwin Multiple Venues in San Francisco April 29–May 1, 2016 wearewillbrown.com
identity, and duration of the project emerged through group presentations and discussions. This practice allowed for unpredictable and tangential wanderings, parallel lines of inquiry, and a rich capacity for experimentation. At the core of this investigative project was Jeff Gunderson, SFAI’s librarian and archivist for over three decades. Gunderson coordinated source materials consisting of manuscripts, photographs, recordings, broadsides, clipping files, and miscellaneous ephemera documenting the history of the San Francisco Art Association (1871–1961), California School of Design (1874–1916), Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (1893–1906), San Francisco Institute of Art (1907– 1916), California School of Fine Arts (1916–1961), San Francisco Museum of Art (1916–1935), Palace of Fine Arts (1915–1924), and San Francisco Art Institute (1961–present). In addition to primary source research, students learned about the importance of narrative and memory, both individually and institutionally. While documented histories are vital, so too are unrecorded corners of the past. In fact, oral narratives and intangible memories are often more relevant and exciting than physical documents. After three decades, Gunderson is as much a living document of SFAI’s institutional history as any piece of printed ephemera. The final project draws from interviews and research with Gunderson and the collection he maintains. Students conducted interviews with Gunderson in order to gather undocumented information to turn into physical displays, documents, and experiences, thereby placing Gunderson himself into the archive for future research. The goal of this collaborative project was not only to revive and retell the colorful, progressive, and often controversial history of SFAI, but also to look at it through the lens of the current student body. Current students were able to provide an updated critique, as well as discover narratives that are still pertinent to their lives and the future of SFAI.
Jeff Gunderson, Champion of the World 2016 Photographed by Ernie Burden © CP International/Alternative Wavves/No Regrets/2016 Courtesy of Ernie Burden
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SELECTED PROJECTS
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in/tensión: Rewriting Stories of Displacement Faculty
in/tensión was a series of events that engaged with the concept of displacement
Robin Balliger
as it relates to history, memory, and land. The artistic proposals, performances, and discussions spoke to the history of the privatized and corporate reality of our
Staff Anthony Molinar Megann Sept Jill Tolfa Students Wesaam Al-Badry Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Enar de Dios Rodríguez Nidal Mujed El-Khairy Guta Galli Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante Jaleesa Johnston Rose Lou Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo Juan Pablo Pacheco Natasha White
current time, specifically in the Bay Area. How do we understand the different forces that have shaped the San Francisco Bay Area? in/tensión began at 5pm at the Diego Rivera and Paul Sack Still Lights galleries, and in the central courtyard at SFAI, presenting works that dealt with displaced historical narratives and with the politics of time. At 6:15pm, the participants hosted public presentations and an open dialogue in the Lecture Hall, featuring speakers deeply engaged in renovating broken narratives and re-negotiating the tension around land and knowledge in the Bay Area. At 7:45pm, culminating the night, there was a healing ceremony conducted by members of the Pomo Native American community, opening a dialogue about the land’s colonial history. in/tensión took place just two days before the Thanksgiving holiday, a perfect moment to reflect on the contested power that shapes history and the construction of collective identities at a time when private corporations hold a monopoly over resources and information. in/tensión served as an open space for sharing experiences relevant to the entire San Francisco Bay Area community, and understanding the forces that shape our relationship to this particular space.
Tomy (Chuhe) Yan Other Participants Nancy Hernandez Catherine Herrera Michelle Krasowski Neil Maclean Mary Jean Robertson Miguel Robles David Smith Nathalie Smith René Yañez Curators Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante Juan Pablo Pacheco Diego Rivera Gallery, Paul Sack Still Lights Gallery, Courtyard, and Lecture Hall,
Exhibition at the Diego Rivera Gallery 2015 Performance by Jaleesa Johnston in collaboration with Natasha White at the opening of in/tensión. Photographed by Christina Walley
San Francisco Art Institute November 24, 2015
Closing Ceremony 2015 David Smith, Nathalie Smith, and Catherine Herrera on the roof of the SFAI Lecture Hall Photographed by Christina Walley
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residence/SF Graduate Students
residence/SF (R/SF) was founded in February 2016 as a home for alternative
Lauren Licata
projects, experimental collaboration, and offbeat programming—a laboratory
Kaitlin Trataris
for unconventional happenings and a place to explore ideas en masse.
Anička Vrána-Godwin
Refashioning intersubjectivity as an artistic medium, R/SF utilizes social intervention and unmediated outcomes to empower creativity and forge
3338 24th Street, San Francisco
collective discourse. As a nearly objectless exhibition space, R/SF endeavors
February 1, 2016, and ongoing
to challenge the role art and artists play in society and to pave a path for a service-based economy. With a penchant for the ephemeral, cross-disciplinary,
residencesf.org
and experiential, R/SF’s robust schedule of pop-up events aims to gather community, spark curiosity, and explore new futures. R/SF is located on 24th Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District and actively hosts radical projects that could not exist elsewhere, fostering true risk-taking among today’s cultural agitators. The space is run by SFAI students Lauren Licata, Anička Vrána-Godwin, and Kaitlin Trataris as an ongoing experiment in collaborative curating and socially engaged programming.
Installation of the title for R/SF’s launch Pre-Party 2016 Photographed by Lauren Licata Courtesy of R/SF Visitors in the space during R/SF’s launch Pre-Party 2016 Photographed by unknown visitor (crowdsourced documentation via 35mm) Courtesy of R/SF
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Noroof Gallery Co-founders
Noroof Gallery is an alternative art space located in the Mission District. This venue,
Marcela Pardo Ariza
co-founded by Marcela Pardo Ariza (MFA 2016) and Siedra Loeffler, strives to
Siedra Loeffler
engage with emerging artists working locally and internationally. Noroof is a place for provocative, defiant, and site-specific artwork.
Students Erik Beltran Nathalie Elisabeth Brilliant Evan Brownstein Enar de Dios Rodríguez* Simón García-Miñaúr Oliver Hawk Holden Santiago Insignares Nolan Jankowski Becca Levine Nick Makanna Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo* Flo Pizzarello Lauren Carly Shaw Kaitlin Trataris Blu Voelker Faculty Johanna Breiding Aaron Terry Other Participants Big Bloom Elkin Calderón Renu Cappelli Petra Class Tyler Eash Nicolas Gaillardon Vicci Jang C’est Jille Andrés Martínez Laura Meza-Orozco Arabella Murray-Nag Emmanuel Sevilla Niki Ulehla Danilo Volpato Wobbly Micah Wood* 현정 *Guest curator
Imaginary Milieu Exhibition 2015 Work by Nick Makanna
1155 York Street, San Francisco
Unbeknownst Exhibition 2015 Work by Erik Beltran and Lauren Carly Shaw
January 30, 2015–February 27, 2016 noroofgallery.tumblr.com
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The Space Between Faculty
The Space Between is the first generation of an ongoing investigation into the
Jeremy Morgan (indirectly)
language between painting and dance as lila, or divine play. Nilaya Sabnis, a Bharatnatyam and modern dancer, responds in dance to the dark action paintings
Graduate Student
of Neil Enggist. Paintings are composed movement and weather breathed into
Neil Enggist
constancy; the dance frees them from stillness and unfurls them into action. The Space Between is a dance in the eye of joined circles, the tidal motion from
Other Participant
color to touch and back. Sabnis selects work in which she finds movements, ones
Nilaya Sabnis
she senses within her journey, and has found the space to embody. The dancer pulls the stories from the pieces of color that awaken and rise from her body’s
40 Mercer Street, New York City
memory. Paintings become movement like the words of an aria. She sees the
June 23, 2015
paintings yearning and pushing and pulling and falling and rising and marching forward. They have the motion of falling between large rocks, the separation of things that grew together in the desert, dark and light matter, and candles in the night. Sabnis’s dance is perhaps the act of seeing the fullness of the painting’s dark space. This exploration continues through video, projection on painting, collaborative mark-making, travel, poetic exchange, and gestural inquiry to find its next performative moment.
(Left to right) Neil Enggist Resurrection 2008 Acrylic, ink, and oil on canvas 58 x 46 inches The Dance Between III 2015 Performance 20 minutes Photographed by Vik Manchanda
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Formation X Photography and Performance
A collaboration between performance artist and photographer Charlie Watts
Charlie Watts
with body painter Andrea Nicolette Gonzales. Formation X discusses the liminal space between the female body and the theatrical environment around her.
Painting Andrea Nicolette Gonzales The Gallery at Lake Wallace February 15, 2015
Formation x
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FLYNN: The Collaborative Works Curator
Flynn Grinnan’s ability to produce collaborative works was unprecedented
Charlie Watts
and inspiring. He was a sheer force of nature, constantly creating and bringing people together to make art. Collaboration was at the core of his being, and
Artists
with that energy this group of artists presented FLYNN: The Collaborative
Flynn Grinnan
Works, in his loving memory.
Kevin Corbett Hill Neil Enggist Dana Morrison Sebastian Ortiz Cabrera Erik Serson Lauren Carly Shaw Ryan Van Runkle Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute September 14–20, 2015
Exhibition View, FLYNN: The Collaborative Works, featuring work by various artists
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Borderless Curator
Non-white artists are always identified, categorized, and stereotyped by their
Yueqi Chen
races; their non-Western backgrounds are often emphasized and expected to be shown in their works. The group show Borderless pushed this idea further by
Artists
questioning which art should be considered non-white art and who should have
Shisi Huang
the power to make the distinction between white and non-white art.
Yan Huang
In this exhibition, the participating artists, along with curator Yueqi Chen,
Di Hou
invited the audience to experience their struggles as non-white, specifically
Sai Li
Asian, artists in both the aesthetic and conceptual processes of art-making.
Weijue Wang
Borderless featured all Asian artists and took place at a time close to the Asian
Shihan Xu
Lunar New Year. Drawing from individual experiences, the artists confronted
Chuhe Yan
oversimplified stereotypes, incited reflection, destabilized general perception, and avoided an easy reading of Asian identities.
Swell Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute January 25–February 5, 2016
Borderless Poster 2016 Designed by Shihan Xu Š Shihan Xu
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To: Insecurity Curator
We all feel insecure at times. Voices can be confusing, glances can be violent,
Ye Liu
even the environment we grow up in can make us feel helpless and vulnerable. In this exhibition, the artists addressed different situations in life that make
Graduate Students
people feel insecure and anxious to see how people react differently to these
Eric Carson
situations. Do we choose to escape or put up a fence to protect ourselves?
Di Hou
Do we shout out for attention or just accept the situation and drown in it?
Soraya Sharghi
Our reactions don’t necessarily help us feel more secure, but they open an exit
Kimber Shaw
from the insecurity that surrounds us so we can go out and see where it leads us.
Undergraduate Student Shae Rocco Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute February 8–13, 2016
Exhibition View, To: Insecurity 2016 Photographed by Soraya Sharghi
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Whose Story? Whose Glory? Curator
By appropriating common materials, twisting familiarity of tropes, and juxtaposing
Yueqi Chen
different narratives within a contemporary cultural capitalist context, Whose Story? Whose Glory? challenged the artist’s experience within general discourse.
Artists
Drawing from recollections of personal stories, the artists negotiated variations
İris Ergül
of narratives by creating visual metaphors for their struggles and solutions in
Jaleesa Johnston
the embodied, objectified, and institutionalized “who.” Using the stage of the
Colin Liang
Diego Rivera Gallery as a platform, this show incited reflection and dialogue,
Megan Mace
and challenged an easy reading within the social consciousness.
Soraya Sharghi Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute January 18–23, 2016
Exhibition View, Whose Story? Whose Glory? 2016 Photographed by İris Ergül ©İris Ergül
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Little Obsessions Graduate Students
Little Obsessions celebrated the collaboration between artists and curators that
Enar de Dios Rodríguez
happens at the intersection of art-making and curatorial practice. The exhibition
Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante
was on display in the Diego Rivera Gallery in conjunction with the summer
Rose Lou
symposium What Can Exhibitions Do?
Guusje Sanders Cristina Velázquez Valencia
The artist-curators responded in unique ways to the challenges of exhibitionmaking, engaging their artistic practice in dialogue with a curatorial approach. New narratives were created by curating elements of exhibitions and art-making, such as
Diego Rivera Gallery,
the artworks, labels, archival materials, and studios that inspired the artist-curators.
San Francisco Art Institute June 15–20, 2015
Exhibition View, Little Obsessions 2015 Photographed by Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante Courtesy of the artists
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(un)seen Curator
In this group show, the artists and curator used the unique stage of the Diego
Yueqi Chen
Rivera Gallery to invite viewers into their world. (un)seen featured sculptural objects and photographs that confronted social stigmas associated with
Artists
psychological abnormality. Drawing from recollections of their own personal
Shannon Foreman
histories, the artists exposed variations of potential truths in their work through
Rebecca A. Frantz
the use of visual metaphors for internal processes.
Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston Becca Levine Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute September 21–26, 2015
Exhibition View, (un)seen 2015 Photographed by Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston Š Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston Courtesy of the artists
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ON-CAMPUS EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS
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WALTER AND McBEAN GALLERIES Alejandro Almanza Pereda:
G.H. Rothe: Seven Paintings
Everything but the kitchen sank
November 7–December 12, 2015
June 20–December 12, 2015 | Diego Rivera Gallery July 28–October 3, 2015 | Walter and McBean Galleries
Following G.H. Rothe’s death in 2007, the artist’s son Peter Rothe discovered a cache of paintings far afield
Alejandro Almanza Pereda was the 2015 recipient of The
from the artist’s known oeuvre. Seven Paintings was the
Harker Award for Interdisciplinary Studies, which supports
first-ever public presentation of works that were hidden since
artists-in-residence at SFAI. The Harker Award was
their creation in 1987. Rothe’s exquisitely lucent tempera
established through a generous bequest by artist and SFAI
works are stunning and frank pictures of sex between
faculty member Ann Chamberlain and is administered by the
aging couples. The tightly framed, small-scale works
San Francisco Foundation. During his residency, Almanza
explore moments of sensuality and pleasure at an age
produced two exhibitions in the Walter and McBean and
often perceived to exceed the prime for physical intimacy.
Diego Rivera Galleries.
Seven Paintings presents ecstasy cascading through
The Walter and McBean Galleries functioned as an
myriad triggers—the pure color of radiant jewels, sheer and
active studio, and scuba tank, for experimentation and the
slumping flesh, euphoric expression, un-gendered faces,
production of underwater photographic and video still lifes.
the unexpected eroticism of geriatric bodies, and Rothe’s
For the Mexico City–based artist Almanza, Diego Rivera
virtuosic layering of paint. Seven Paintings was organized by SFAI and curated
is a catalyst for the ongoing instrumentalization of Latin American identity and artistic practice. From Almanza’s
by Hesse McGraw. SFAI thanks Peter Rothe and Bonnie
perspective, if Rivera is a limiting screen through which we
Levinson for their support of this exhibition.
understand Latin American art, this is an opportunity to add a new screen. Through Almanza’s scaffold of fluorescent fixtures, another narrative of historical imbalance, artistic legacy, and the imperious Rivera achieves focus. Everything but the kitchen sank was organized by SFAI and curated by Hesse McGraw. Leslie Shows November 7–December 12, 2015 Leslie Shows (BFA 1999) recently spoke of a desire to “make work that is so secret from myself that I would be seduced into making it.” In a series of sculptural paintings commissioned for this exhibition, her striking materials— engraved aluminum, synthetic rubber, cut Plexiglas, silk, and digitally printed sand—appear as just-formed thoughts. Shows’ new works further dissolve previous imagery akin to abstractions of pyrite, or glaciers, to crawl out of, and back into, the landscape. They evoke the unknown and are particularly unknowable. Even as they slip from grasp, one is compelled to learn their vocabulary. Yet the paintings don’t arrive at an end—they are rather happening to themselves, and becoming together. Leslie Shows was organized by SFAI and curated by G.H. Rothe, Untitled, 1987 Tempera on paper, 18 x 16 inches, framed, Courtesy of the Estate of G.H. Rothe
Hesse McGraw. The exhibition was commissioned through the Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation Distinguished Painting Fellowship. The project was made possible in part by Headlands Center for the Arts. 122
David Ireland January 14–March 26, 2016 David Ireland’s (MFA 1974) approach to the world and
the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and the
art was wide-eyed and infectious. The joys of his artistic
chance-driven visual art of composer John Cage. Deball is well known for her explorations of the role that
practice were fully synced with his joys of life. Ireland’s maxim, “you can’t make art by making art,” is a reminder
objects play in our understanding of identity and history.
that we take things too seriously, and that art, as well as
The neglected objects of the archive—fragments, plaster casts,
life, can be as expansive as we make it.
false or dubious ephemera, and even forgeries—comprise the heart of her installations. Working with conservators,
This exhibition was presented in conjunction with the public reopening of 500 Capp Street, Ireland’s San
museum professionals, and archaeologists in the fields
Francisco house and most famous work.
of Mayan and pre-Columbian artifacts, Deball follows the narratives of archaeology beyond the artifacts themselves.
The centerpiece of this exhibition was a reenactment of Smithsonian Falls, Descending a Staircase for P.K., a
She presents the convoluted timeline of culture and the
cascade of concrete poured down the gallery’s staircase,
complexities of material history. Deball’s work connects
which the artist created for his 1987 Adaline Kent Award
the gaps of known history with chance discoveries to imagine
exhibition in this gallery.
archaeological narratives that embrace randomness,
David Ireland was organized by SFAI and curated by
speculation, and a love of mystery. Deball developed this exhibition while in San Francisco
Constance M. Lewallen and Hesse McGraw.
for five weeks as the artist-in-residence of the SFAI + Kadist Mariana Castillo Deball:
Fellowship, an annual partnership inaugurated to support
Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances
artist-curated projects as well as young curators in the
April 14–July 30, 2016
transition between graduate education and a professional career. Deball was assisted by recent SFAI graduate and
Berlin-based artist Mariana Castillo Deball (b. Mexico City,
Fellow Christopher Squier (MFA 2015). Mariana Castillo Deball: Feathered Changes, Serpent
1975) revealed gaps in the often unquestioned narratives of museology and archaeology in a newly commissioned
Disappearances was the inaugural exhibition and residency
exhibition at SFAI in Spring 2016. The installation brought
co-presented by SFAI and Kadist Art Foundation. The
together new work by Deball—including sculpture, pottery,
exhibition was organized by SFAI Assistant Curator Katie
and rubbings—inspired by the archaeological archives of
Hood Morgan with SFAI + Kadist Fellow Christopher Squier.
David Ireland 2016 Photographed by Alessandra Mello
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THE SWELL GALLERY The Swell Gallery is a graduate student–run art space dedicated to the examination of the role of the gallery in an educational sphere. The mission of the Swell Gallery is to provide a venue for the exploration and discussion of varying artistic perspectives from the student body, operating as a platform for exhibition, events, and dialogue. The Swell Gallery is open to the public and located on the second floor of SFAI’s Graduate Center at 2565 Third Street. Fall 2015
Spring 2016
Vision Quest Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston Caroline Landau, Brian Z. Shapiro, Valerie Thompson August 23–September 5
Reconciling Madness Tom Colcord, Rebecca Kaufman, Emily McPeek Curated by Paula Morales January 11–22
Blood and Flesh Robin Crofut-Brittingham, Willow Blue Heaton, Nathaniel Record, Anička Vrána-Godwin September 6–19
Borderless Di Hou, Shisi Huang, Yan Huang, Sai Li, Shihan Xu, Weijue Wang Curated by Yueqi Chen January 25–February 5
Latent Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Rebecca A. Frantz, Guta Galli, Juan Pablo Pacheco, Kaitlin Trataris September 20–October 3
Post/Haste Katie Jenkins-Moses, Diana Li, Paula Morales, Kathy Sirico, Natasha White Curated by Harper Brokaw-Falbo February 8–19
2X—Change Francis Calimlim, Sai Li, Sara Samano, Natasha White October 4–17
Psychedelia Greta Anderson, Jeff B. Johnston, Rebecca Kaufman, Rose Lou, William Mantor February 22–March 4
Creatrices İris Ergül, Elisabeth Kohnke, Becca Levine, Cristina Velázquez Valencia Curated by Rose Lou October 18–31
Relational Archives Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Paula Morales, Juan Pablo Pacheco, Aaron Wilder Curated by Paula Morales March 7–25
so·lil·o·quy Simón García-Miñaúr, Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo, Marcela Pardo Ariza November 1–14
Move Measure Mark Greta Anderson, Charlie Ford, Jake Jonghun Choi, Dana Morrison Curated by Dana Morrison March 28–April 8
Lone Star Andrea Nicolette Gonzales, Nathaniel Record, Sara Samano, Valerie Thompson, and more November 15–28
Open Studios Show Curated by Paula Morales, Kathy Sirico, Aaron Wilder April 1–23
The Great Assemblage Neil Enggist, Leah Gonzales, Kevin Corbett Hill, Dana Morrison, Sebastian Ortiz Cabrera, Caitlin Peterson, Lauren Carly Shaw, Eric Sorenson November 29–December 5
Unraveling Robin Crofut-Brittingham, Arika von Elder Bready, Peter Rajani, Christie Spillane, Yin-Hsiang Wang Curated by Kathy Sirico, Aaron Wilder April 25–May 6
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Jeff Johnston Galaxy Contortion 2016 Digital manipulation of mixed media on canvas Dimensions variable
Tom Colcord Necessary Evil, 2015 Courtesy of the artist
DIEGO RIVERA GALLERY The Diego Rivera Gallery, home to SFAI’s historic Diego Rivera Mural, is a studentdirected exhibition space for work by SFAI students. The gallery provides an opportunity for students from all academic programs to present their work or curate in a gallery setting; to use the space for large-scale installations; or to experiment with artistic concepts and concerns in a public venue. Students submit applications for exhibitions in November and March annually, and a jury of one alumnus, one faculty member, and one staff member selects the artists who will exhibit. Students may apply to have an individual show, to participate in a group show, or to curate a show. The Diego Rivera gallery presents 40 exhibitions per year, including work by over 200 student-artists. Fall 2015 Knit-Knit, Weave-Weave, Sew-Sew Kathy Sirico, Kaitlin Trataris, Cristina Velázquez Valencia August 23–29 Continuing MFA Show August 30–September 5 Orpheus Andrew Dugin-Barnes, Austin Schermerhorn September 6–12 Flynn: The Collaborative Works Neil Enggist, Flynn Grinnan, Kevin Corbett Hill, Dana Morrison, Sebastian N., Erik Serson, Lauren Carly Shaw, Ryan Van Runkle Curated by Charlie Watts September 13–19 (un)seen Shannon Foreman, Rebecca A. Frantz, Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston, Becca Levine September 20–26 Utopia is Chaotic Jessica Murphy, Brian Z. Shapiro, Linghao Shen (Zero), HuiMeng Wang September 27–October 3 Paranoia Simón García-Miñaúr, Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo, Juan Pablo Pacheco, Marcela Pardo Ariza October 4–10 Continuously Present Natasha Carlos, Julia Guzmán, Alyssa Fujita Karoui, Christina Walley October 11–17
The Misbehaving Object Sam Bencivengo, Severn Pembelton, Sofia Sinibaldi, Alexandra Toledo, Pedro Alejandro Verdin October 18–24 Curiosity Killed the Cat: A Tale of Archival Fever, Desire and Seduction October 25–31 Post-Baccalaureate Fall Exhibition November 1–7 Alumni Exhibition November 10–15 Nature of Self Kezia Vershelle Harrell, Lucia Ippolito, Phaedra Oliva, Erika Ristovski, Merve Sevinc November 16–21 Pretérito Imperfecto Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Jaleesa Johnston, Natasha White Curated by Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante, Juan Pablo Pacheco November 22–28
The Pure Reason We Dine Tonight 2015 Installation, site-specific performance, and single-channel video Dimensions variable 2 hours
BFA Graduate Exhibition November 29–December 5 Public Education Exhibition December 6–12 City Studio Exhibition December 13–19
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Opening Reception, Night & Day, detail 2016 Photographed by Garik Édgar
DIEGO RIVERA GALLERY (continued) Spring 2016 Whose Story? Whose Glory? İris Ergül, Jaleesa Johnston, Colin Liang, Megan Mace, Soraya Sharghi Curated by Yueqi Chen January 17–23 Traces Francis Calimlim, Peter He, Dana Morrison, HuiMeng Wang January 24–30 Residue John Erbach, Gregorio Figueroa, Natasha Romano, Kolby Rowland, Stevie Southard January 31–February 6 To: Insecurity Eric Carson, Di Hou, Shae Rocco, Soraya Sharghi, Kimber Shaw Curated by Ye Liu February 7–13 Disputable Paradigms Eric Carson, Rose Lou, William Mantor, Orly Ruaimi, Cristina Velázquez Valencia February 14–20 Before I Leave for the Day Zoe Kuhn, Stevie Southard, Ryan Van Runkle February 21–27 Encrypted Objects Saba Ghamati, Julia Guzmán, Christian Schick February 28–March 5 Night & Day SuperMrin (Mrinalini Aggarwal), Elena Dendiberia, Di Hou, Zhengyi Zhu Curated by Emily Alexander March 6–19 Tracing Objects Guta Galli, Paula Morales Curated by Anita Gonçalves Dias Giansante March 20–26 Urban Legends Alice Chung, Lidor Farkash, Galeana Fraiz, Olivia Gastaldo, Jane Hsieh, Anneke Jewett, Quinn Martin, Max Rhu Curated by Barry Despenza March 27–April 2
404 not found Sam Bencivengo, Michael Braillard, Charlotte Hodgson, Oliver Holden, Sachi Moskowitz, Severn Pemberton, Ian Redics, Pedro Alejandro Verdin April 3–9 The Artist’s Body Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Francis Calimlim, Rebecca A. Frantz, Andrea Nicolette Gonzales, Katie Jenkins-Moses, Jaleesa Johnston, Jordan Rose Jurich-Weston, Melissa Koziebrocki, Zoe H. Leonard, Becca Levine, Dana Morrison, Sebastian Ortiz Cabrera, Lauren Carly Shaw, Cristina Velázquez Valencia, Charlie Watts Faculty Advisor: Helina Metaferia Tony Labat April 10–16 Memory Under Construction Harper Brokaw-Falbo, Jessica Hutcheson, Rebecca McGinnis, Mariela Montero, Shangsi Sun, Saniya Talhouk, Arkia Van Edler, Cristina Velázquez Valencia, Yueqi Wang Faculty Artist: Aaron Terry April 17–23 You Can’t Sit With Us Ali Futrell, Kezia Vershelle Harrell, Nicholas D. Sanchez April 24–30 Post-Baccalaureate Show May 1–7 BFA Graduate Exhibition May 15–21 City Studio Exhibition May 22–28 Public Education Exhibition May 29–June 4
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Exhibition view of Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Change the world or go home 2009–2015 Diego Rivera The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City 1931 Photographed by Gregory Goode Courtesy of the artist and SFAI
VISITING ARTISTS AND SCHOLARS LECTURE SERIES The Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series (VAS) provides a forum for engagement and dialogue with major figures in international contemporary art and culture. Through lectures, screenings, and performances, the series creates intimate connections between SFAI and the public, and invites individuals to contribute to the spirit of curiosity that drives the SFAI community.
Fall 2015
Spring 2016
Karen Finley Co-presented with City Lights Books September 15
Patricia Goldstone Co-presented with City Lights Books January 26
Leigh Ledare September 22
Kate Nichols Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow February 9
Peter Plagens September 29 Ron Nagle Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation Distinguished Painting Fellow October 6 Philippe Rahm Co-presented with swissnex, San Francisco October 13 Narcissister October 20
2Fik Co-presented with Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. and the program Gender in Translation February 23 Firelei Bรกez Co-presented with Headlands Center for the Arts March 22
Mariana Castillo Deball Co-presented with Kadist Artist in Residence October 27
Samara Golden Co-presented with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts March 29
William Cordova Co-presented with Headlands Center for the Arts November 17
Park McArthur Co-presented with Food For Thought Lecture Series April 5
Leslie Shows Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation Distinguished Painting Fellow December 1
Paul Renner Winifred Johnson Clive Foundation Distinguished Painting Fellow April 19
Narcissister Untitled (Cracked Mask), 2013 Digital print Courtesy of the artist
2FIK La Grande Intendante, 2012 Photo print 50 x 32 inches Courtesy of the artist
Marc-Olivier Wahler Co-presented with swissnex, San Francisco April 26 127
GRADUATE LECTURE SERIES Designed as an integral component of SFAI’s graduate curricula, the Graduate Lecture Series (GLS) puts students, alumni, and the general public in direct dialogue with major thought-leaders from the international community. The series relies on the critical exchange between guest and audience to promote a diverse and robust learning environment.
Summer 2015
Fall 2015
Alejandro Almanza Pereda Harker Award Artist-in-Residence June 26
David Getsy September 25
Kim Anno July 10
María Elena González October 9
Stanya Kahn July 17
Zarouhie Abdalian October 30
Laura Richard July 24
Nate Page November 6
Charles Hobson July 31
Sarah Thornton November 13
Emily Mast October 2
Sarah Thornton 33 Artists in 3 Acts, 2014 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Ana Teresa Fernandez, Erasure, 2015 Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco
Spring 2016 Douglas Dunn January 29 Marco Rios February 12 Postcommodity February 19 Nicole Archer March 4 Ana Teresa Fernandez April 1 Krista Thompson April 8 Amanda Beech April 29
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PHOTOALLIANCE PhotoAlliance, an affiliate of SFAI, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the understanding, appreciation, and creation of contemporary photography. PhotoAlliance fosters connections within the Bay Area photography community through public programs and education activities, including workshops, lecture series, and portfolio reviews.
Fall 2015
Spring 2016
Chris McCaw September 18
Paula McCartney February 12
Patricia Lagarde and Luis Palacios October 9
Birney Imes with Gordon Stettinus March 11
Beth Moon November 6
Janet Delaney April 8
Gregory Halpern December 4
SFAI CONCENTRATE SFAI Concentrate is a weekend-long festival, art sale, and series of artist-driven events open to the public. The student art sale showcased a broad range of contemporary artworks from over 170 students at SFAI’s Chestnut Street campus. The festival also offered an array of familyfriendly activities, including art-making, a bounce house, ping-pong rallies, goats in the SFAI meadow, and Charlie Mylie’s Wacky Men Forest. At this year’s student art sale, held November 14–15, 2015, Whoop Dee Doo, the internationally renowned faux–public access, family friendly variety show, was the featured performer. In collaboration with a team of SFAI students, the group created ingenious game-show performances especially for Concentrate.
Janet Delaney, 10th at Folsom Street, 1982 Archival pigment print Courtesy of the artist SFAI Concentrate Charlie Mylie Wacky Men Forest Photograped by Alessandra Mello
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SFAI REMEMBERS FLYNN GRINNAN Throughout Flynn’s entire life, he had the desire to learn everything he could about the things he was interested in. When he started working with clay and making ceramics, he wanted every book he could get his hands on to learn the techniques of accomplished artists. When he moved to Providence to live and work in a large open loft space, he went out and learned how to put in a bathroom and kitchen on his own. He built walls and made a space for working and living—while he was producing his own art. Every time I saw him he would amaze me with some new knowledge he’d gained. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of something to ask him about that I know he’d have a solution for. When I try to do something new, his voice is always in my head giving me encouragement. –Marjorie Grinnan (mother)
Photographed by Kaisa Viitamäki
Photographed by Lauren Carly Shaw
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IMMEDIATE BROTHER He knew where to find the clay in some bow in the river He’d snap that cue ball through the rack, solid and stripe both falling He could never lose Black V-neck perfection in the Sea Star light a cigarette to smoke later He could never lose He seemed so near the medicine wheel so close to the answer with his way with his lost winning laugh Never someone with whom you could not talk about Love An injured bird was in his smile something misty and wounded a loose circle of shipwrecked love and wilderness exposing slowly the cyans and clouds of the sky In a ring of light left there by the shadow
Photographed by Lauren Carly Shaw
His world was becoming articulated with slow light We all could see Immediate brother to us without him we form a family sadly searching for something in the ocean the strange fish that live in us Photographed by Dana Morrison
We were going to go to the bow in the river and find some clay for Flynn G, 4/19, immediate brother –Neil Enggist
Photographed by Blake Zaahn
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GRADUATE PROGRAM FACULTY Rigo 23 is a visual artist working in site and cultural-specific settings, often in collaboration with others and over extended periods of time. Recent group exhibitions include the 12th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; 2nd Aichi Triennale, Japan; 1st Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India; Regionale XII, Austria; The Jerusalem Show IV, Palestine; 10th Lyon Biennale, France; and 4th Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom. He holds a BFA from SFAI and an MFA from Stanford University.
Johnna Arnold is an artist, photographer, educator, and urban farmer based in Oakland. Her latest series of photographs focuses on the relationship between herself and a massive network of modern-day efficiency—the freeway system. She has exhibited at venues worldwide, including the Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco Camerawork, the Oakland International Airport, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Her work is a part of public collections including Pier 24 in San Francisco and UNESCO in Paris, France.
Sebastian Alvarez, a transdisciplinary artist and independent researcher, was born and raised in Lima, Peru. Working across diverse media, including film, audio, performance, and installation, his practice highlights the interrelation of disparate infrastructures and the uncanniness of human-made systems. He received an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has performed, curated, and presented work internationally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Biennial, New York; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt; and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art Bourges, France.
Robin Balliger, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include globalization, geography, media, music/sound, postcolonial theory, and the Caribbean; she is currently researching urban cultural politics in Oakland. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was awarded the Textor Award for Outstanding Anthropological Creativity. Balliger’s publications appear in The Global Resistance Reader, Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, Anthropological Forum, and Media Fields Journal.
A cultural anthropologist by training, Thor Anderson has worked in northern Spain, Mesoamerica, and inner city San Francisco. Teaching and research topics range from ritual and religion of the contemporary Maya to ethnographic media, homelessness, and multiple uses of urban spaces. He is currently working on a study of domestic architecture in highland Chiapas and its influence on classic Maya iconography, reflecting an ongoing fascination with the interface between art and everyday life. Anderson also collaborates on anthropological analyses of popular animated feature films.
JD Beltran is a conceptual artist, filmmaker, writer, designer, and curator. She received the Artadia Grant and Skowhegan Residency, and has exhibited internationally, including at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Cité des Ondes Vidéo et Art Électronique, Montreal; ProArte, Saint Petersburg, Russia; and at the 2006, 2008, and 2012 ZeroOne New Media Biennials, San Jose, California. She is president of the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Sampada Aranke, PhD, is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Contemporary Art and Interim Chair of the Master of Arts Department. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts. Aranke is currently working on a book manuscript, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics. Nicole Archer, PhD, is Chair of the Bachelor of Arts Department. Archer researches contemporary art and material culture, with an emphasis in modern textile and garment histories. She also concentrates on critical and psychoanalytic theory, corporeal feminism, and performance studies. Archer’s work has appeared in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture and Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy. She is currently working on a manuscript, A Looming Possibility: Towards a Theory of the Textile.
Timothy Berry’s current work continues a lifelong investigation of mankind’s contentious, yet appreciative, relationship to nature. Combining motifs from natural landscapes and their animal inhabitants with images of mankind’s projections and navigations into and onto these landscapes allows the construction of abstracted understandings of how these two often disparate elements can exist in one place. Berry’s most recent exhibition, Felix Culpa—Recent Work, was exhibited earlier this year at the Peninsula Museum of Art, Burlingame. Landscapes attract Lisa K. Blatt with their light, beauty, and simplicity; she stays for their complexity, contradictions, and secrets. Her work has been exhibited widely and internationally, and she has received many residencies and grants. Debra Bloomfield has worked in landscape for 35 years, producing large-scale color photographs. Her most recent series, Wilderness (2014), explores the relationship between interiority and the external world with questions about land use. In 2007, Bloomfield began incorporating field recordings into her working methodology. Created over five years in Alaska, Wilderness is equal parts art and environmental advocacy. Bloomfield’s past work includes monographs Four Corners (2004) and Still: Oceanscapes (2008). She is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, and has been an educator in the Bay Area since 1977.
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Keith Boadwee studied at UCLA in the late 80s, where he worked with Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden. Boadwee produces paintings, drawings, and photos that explore his fascination with the body, actionism, expressionism, queerness, sex, humor, and abjection. Recent exhibitions include shows at Brennan & Griffin, New York; Shoot the Lobster, New York; and Paradise Garage, Los Angeles. Publications include Keith Boadwee: 1989–2013 and Plaid, a publication with AA Bronson to accompany their Salzburger Kunstverein exhibition. In 2016, Boadwee will exhibit at Galerie Deborah Schamoni, Munich; Art Cologne; and Art Los Angeles Contemporary. Laura Boles Faw’s work consists of investigations through sculptural objects, installations, curatorial projects, and collaborative ventures. She examines the ways we prop ourselves up in the world and borrows from art historical references to create new meanings and transformative fictions. Recent Bay Area exhibitions include Scrawl Center for Drawing, Meridian Gallery, The Mystic Hotel, Alter Space Gallery, Kala Art Institute, Royal NoneSuch Gallery, and Ever Gold Gallery. Other exhibitions include Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History; James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA; and VAST Space Projects, Las Vegas. Matt Borruso is a visual artist who lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo shows include Wax House of Wax (2014) and The Hermit’s Revenge Fantasy (2011) at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco. Recent book projects include IMAGE File (2015), published by Colpa Press, and Wax House of Wax (2016), published by his own imprint, Visible Publications. Borruso’s work has been exhibited at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Derek Eller Gallery, and Anna Kustera Gallery, New York; the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; and Exile Projects, Berlin. Lydia Brawner researches performance in contemporary art with concentrations in gender studies and religious studies. As an artist she has performed at numerous venues in New York City and the Bay Area. She is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, where she earned her MA in Performance Studies. She also received a BA in Religious Studies from Macalester College. Brad Brown is an artist working primarily in drawings and works on paper. His largest project to date, The Look Stains, began in 1987 and consists of tens of thousands of works on paper that are continually worked on, torn up, redrawn, and recontextualized. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum Modern Art; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Arkansas Art Museum, Little Rock; and Boise Art Museum, Idaho.
Dale Carrico, PhD, teaches critical theory and technoscience studies, focusing on the planetarity of environmental justice and anti-democratic media formations. Carrico organized conferences on feminist bioethics at UC Berkeley and on human “enhancement” and human rights at Stanford University. His writings have appeared in boundary 2, Existenz, The New York Times, Re-Public, WorldChanging and the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives. He writes about neoliberal developmentalist ideology, futurological subcultures, and the suffusion of public life by marketing norms on his blog, Amor Mundi. Anne Colvin is a Scottish artist based in San Francisco. Her interests surround the moving image and its relationship to sculpture and our experience of film and its ephemeral and temporal nature. Colvin has shown nationally and internationally in museums, galleries, nonprofits and artist-run spaces, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Torrance Art Museum; Berkeley Art Museum; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Jancar Gallery and Craftswoman House, Los Angeles; and Modern Edinburgh Film School and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. Linda Connor is a photographer and dedicated educator who approaches both roles by enlisting the power of images—the ways they communicate, their unique properties, and how they interrelate. She has exhibited widely, both internationally and nationally, for the last four decades, and has received many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, she founded PhotoAlliance. A driving force in the Bay Area’s photographic community, Connor has helped make it accessible to her students. Christopher Coppola, Director of Film at SFAI, is a film producer, director, screenwriter, public speaker, and digital film entrepreneur. His company, PlasterCITY Productions Inc., produces feature films, episodic television, and alternative media. Coppola is the founder of Project Accessible Hollywood, a hands-on, nonprofit, international digital-filmmaking festival for both non-filmmakers and student filmmakers. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, and the California Arts Council. Dewey Crumpler’s work examines issues of globalization and cultural commodification through the integration of digital imagery, video, and traditional painting techniques. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara; and The California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Crumpler has received a Flintridge Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.
John de Fazio’s recent work involves the creation of “super objects”—handmade objects of desire that encode layers of meaning through the obsessive processes involved in their conception and production. These forms have included ceramic funerary urns, distorted mannequins, clay pipes and hookahs, toilet fountains, and conference room tables. In Shigaraki, Japan, a gold luster sculpture was included in Amazing Ceramic Art at The Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art. In 2014, de Fazio’s collage novel, Divine Comedies, was featured in Allegorical Procedures: Bay Area Collage, 1950–Present at San Francisco State University’s Fine Arts Gallery. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and MTV Networks, New York. Anthony Discenza is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland. Employing a range of media— including video projection, text, street signage, and audio—his work explores our interactions with the production of mass media, as well as the relationship between textual and visual systems of representation. Exhibits include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ballroom Marfa, Objectif Exhibitions, Gallery 400, the Getty Center, the Pacific Film Archive, and the Whitney Biennial. He holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA from Wesleyan University. Andrea Dooley, PhD’s current work focuses on genocide memorials/museums in Rwanda as a space for reckoning with state violence, spatial negotiation of conflicted landscapes, and the recalibration of post-conflict identity. Her most recent essay is We Are All Rwandans: Repatriation, National Identity, and the Plight of Rwanda’s Children, published in The Journal of Human Rights. Her current book manuscript, Implicated Geographies: Public Memorials, the Post-Conflict Imaginary and the Remaking of the Rwandan Citizen, is under contract to Roman & Littlefield/Lexington Books. Alla Efimova, PhD, is an art historian and curator. She is the founder of KunstWorks, an agency advising artists, artists’ estates, and contemporary art collectors on legacy preservation. In the last decade, in her position as Director of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, she ensured the future of one of the premier Jewish collections by overseeing its affiliation with UC Berkeley, designing a state-of-the art building, and authoring a catalog of its major holdings (Skira Rizzoli, 2014). Efimova held positions as a curator and lecturer at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Irvine. Laurie Fendrich is an abstract painter who lives and works in New York, and is Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at Hofstra University. She has had several solo exhibitions, both in New York and across the nation. The author of several essays on the role of art and artists in society, her reflections on art and other cultural issues appear regularly in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Fendrich’s next solo exhibition opens in September 2016 at Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.
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Ana Teresa Fernandez was born and raised in Tampico, Mexico. She received her MFA in 2006 from SFAI. Fernandez was the Tournasol awardee at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2007, and was selected to be part of the Bay Area Now 5 triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has recently been presented in a solo exhibition at Electric Works, and in group exhibits in the Tijuana Biennial, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, and Oakland Art Museum. Rudolf Frieling, PhD, is curator of media arts at SFMOMA. His curatorial projects include the online archive Media Art Net; the SFMOMA exhibitions The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (a major survey of the history of contemporary participatory practice) and Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media; as well as numerous monographic exhibitions. In the fall of 2016, he will co-curate the retrospective BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE at SFMOMA. Thomas Gamburg is a screenwriter working in drama, thriller, action, and horror. A conservatorytrained actor and Bay Area native, Gamburg is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BA English, Film, and Creative Writing), UCLA (MFA Screenwriting), and The New Actors Workshop (Certificate). His writing credits include the Russian television crime series Petrovich (Kino Versia, NTV network, 2013) and independent feature Dead City (Pulse Films, 2004). Gamburg is a former partner in Pulse Films with a focus on documentary, short narrative, industrial, and independent feature film development. Cuban-born artist María Elena González is an internationally recognized sculptor based in Brooklyn and San Francisco. González interweaves the conceptual with a strong dedication to craft in her complex installations and poetic arrangements, exploring themes including identity, memory, and dislocation. Over a career spanning 30 years, she has won the Prix de Rome (2003), and, more recently, Grand Prize at the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts at Ljubljana, Slovenia (2013). She was a Guggenheim Fellow (2006) and has been awarded grants from numerous foundations, including Pollock-Krasner, Joan Mitchell, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Penny McCall. Her work can be found in numerous public collections including the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Museum voor Modern Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands; Museum of Art, The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She received widespread acclaim for her site-specific sculpture Magic Carpet/Home, commissioned by the Public Art Fund in 1999, and another sitespecific work, You and Me (2010), commissioned by Storm King Art Center.
Sharon Grace’s concept-driven works in analogue/digital installation, performance/video, and sculpture engage explorations of presence and absence. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Award, an Award of Honor for Outstanding Achievement from the City of San Francisco, a Rockefeller Foundation Award, and a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Grant. At NASA/AMES, she was artist/project leader for SEND/RECEIVE, the first satellite artists’ network. She has exhibited at the Metro Opera, Madrid; in Informatique at the Venice Biennale; and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alexander Greenhough, PhD, is a scholar and filmmaker. His research interests include classical and contemporary film theory; postwar French, Italian, and American cinema; and recent New Zealand cinema. His writing has appeared in Metro, Film Criticism, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His three feature films—I Think I’m Going, Murmurs, and Kissy Kissy—were all set and produced in New Zealand. Greenhough has received grants from the Arts Council of New Zealand and the New Zealand Film Commission. Catherine Guimond, PhD, researches how urban space is integral to both the production of inequality in our society and to social justice struggles that have the potential to transform our world. She recently completed her dissertation on the rebuilding of the South Bronx in New York after its devastation by disinvestment in the 1970s. Guimond holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MEM from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a BA from Wellesley College. Jonn Herschend is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and experimental publisher whose work explores fiction, reality, and the narrative structures that we employ as a way to explain the chaos and clutter of our everyday lives. Herschend exhibits nationally and internationally and is a winner of three Golden Gate Awards from the San Francisco International Film Festival, two Danish Arts Council grants, the 2014 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Award, and the 2014 Fleishhacker Eureka Fellowship. His last film, Discussion Questions, was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennale and was an official selection of the 2014 Telluride International Film Festival. He is co-founder and co-editor of THE THING Quarterly and is at work on a new feature film. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s artwork is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and in many celebrated private collections. Hershman Leeson has recently been honored with grants from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2014, a museum retrospective, Civic Radar, opened at ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Fiona Hovendon, PhD, is a scholar of the dynamics of change. Her research interests include the psychology of transformation, critical analysis of the role of the future, and the use of art to create social and personal change. With her company, Collective Invention, she creates immersive visions of the future to help provoke a reassessment of possibility through lived experience. She is coeditor of The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Ivan Iannoli is an artist based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. His photographs, collages, videos, and sculptures look at various pictorial strategies and manners of depiction. Among Iannoli’s interests are human potential and new age movements, intention and aptitude, and Pictorialism and modernism. Iannoli received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from UCLA. He has exhibited at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, PØST Gallery, Khastoo Gallery, and New Wight Gallery, all in Los Angeles; among others. Packard Jennings is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses appropriation, humor, and interventionist tactics to explore the dynamics of public spaces and to address political and corporate transgressions against public interests. He moves freely between entertainment, activism, and artistic practice. His work has been published in Art and Agenda, Urban Interventions, The BLDG BLOG Book, and We Own the Night. He has garnered critical media attention in The Boston Globe, Artforum, Flash Art, The Believer, Adbusters, The Washington Post, and the front page of The New York Times. Josh Keller’s artistic practice explores the layers of everyday experiences and routines examined with an analytical eye using photographic, object, and information archiving to investigate the systems under which we function. His work as a professional architect strongly influences his approach to art as idea- and processdriven, and his medium choices are selected by their appropriateness to the specific project. Exhibitions of his work include Toomey Tourell Gallery, San Francisco; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; and the American Institute of Architects Gallery, Pittsburgh. Tony Labat is Chair of the Master of Fine Arts Department at SFAI. Since the early 1980s, Labat has developed a body of work in performance, video, sculpture, and installation dealing with the body, popular culture, identity, urban relations, politics, and the media. Labat has exhibited internationally over the last 30 years, received numerous awards and grants, and his work is in many private and public collections. Recent exhibitions include the 11th Havana Biennial; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, ASU Art Museum, Phoenix, and The Basque Museum, Spain.
Genine Lentine is the author of Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model (Kelly’s Cove, 2012) and Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes (New Michigan Press, 2010). She is also co-author, with Stanley Kunitz, of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden (W.W. Norton, 2005). She received an MS in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University, an MFA in Poetry from New York University, and residencies from Montalvo Arts Center, Hedgebrook, and University of Arizona Poetry Center. Lentine co-founded a thriving CSA in Virginia and worked on the garden crew at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Recently, she taught an interdisciplinary gardening course at Mary’s College, and beginning this summer, she’ll teach a children’s poetry and gardening camp each summer at Montalvo Arts Center. Lentine teaches Writing and Contemporary Practice at SFAI, where she frequently holds class in the meadow. Bob Linder is an artist and curator living in San Francisco. Linder is co-owner and director of CAPITAL, a contemporary art gallery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from SFAI. Crystal Liu’s photography and paintings on paper can be described as psychological and emotional landscapes. Using flora, fauna, geological phenomena, and meteorological events as metaphors for emotional states and personal relationships, she depicts interstitial moments of hope, longing, loss, and love. Her work has been exhibited in Asia, Canada, San Francisco, and New York, and her photographs have been purchased by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is represented by Hosfelt Gallery. Liu holds an MFA in New Genres from SFAI and an AOCAD from Ontario College of Art & Design. Jennifer Locke composes physically intense actions in relation to the camera and specific architecture in order to explore hierarchies between artist, model, camera, and audience. Working in video, photography, and installationbased performance, her actions focus on cycles of physicality, duration, and visibility. Recent exhibition venues include Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Rocksbox Fine Art, Portland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Locke was awarded a 2012 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. Reagan Louie’s photography and installations explore global transformation and cultural identity. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Asia Society, New York; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His books include Toward a Truer Life and Orientalia. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Whitney Lynn implements a wide range of media to question ideas of boundaries and containment, history and restaging, context and form. Her sculptures, videos, performances, drawings, and photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, and alternative spaces including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Torrance Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Armory Center for the Arts, Exit Art, and the City Hall Lobby of Reno, Nevada.
Betti-Sue Hertz’s exhibitions and projects feature socially and politically relevant art and ideas. She is currently lecturer in American Studies at Stanford University, where she organizes the Art and Social Criticism Lecture Series. Hertz was director of visual arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2008–2015), where she cocurated A Special Curatorial Project with Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Way Things Go, Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, and Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?
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Mads Lynnerup was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has shown his work at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; MoMA PS1, New York; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Lynnerup recently produced a new book in collaboration with Colpa Press in San Francisco. His work has won numerous awards, including the Bay Area Award, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, an Artadia Award, the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award, and a Danish Art Council Grant. Alicia McCarthy lives and works in Oakland, California. She received her BFA from SFAI in 1994 and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the New York Studio School. In 2007, she received an MFA from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited in venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, and Deitch Projects and RARE Gallery in New York. Honors include an artist residency at Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2013 Artadia Award. McCarthy is represented by Jack Hanley Gallery, New York. Frances McCormack is an abstract painter. Her exhibition Contemplative Elements at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2016 included a performance of Artifacts, a collaboration with the composer Kurt Rohde and the writer Sue Moon. She was the first recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. McCormack is represented by the R.B. Stevenson Gallery in La Jolla, California, and Laura Rathe Fine Art in Houston, Texas. Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, installation, sculpture, and mark-making. Her work is informed by an interest in diaspora narratives, transnationalism, and gender studies. Metaferia’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, Ethiopia; Galeria Labirynt, Poland; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; and Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago. She is an Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design PostGraduate Teaching Fellow at SFAI. Jill Miller is an art practitioner who works collaboratively with communities and individuals. Her recent work explores motherhood through a lens of feminism and performance, and her work takes shape across many forms and disciplines. In past work she searched for Bigfoot in the Sierra Nevada, inserted herself into the art historical work of John Baldessari, and became a private investigator who performed surveillance on art collectors. Born in Illinois, she received her MFA from UCLA and her BA from UC Berkeley. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and collected in public institutions worldwide, including CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Jeremy Morgan’s paintings are investigations into both Western and Asian landscape traditions as they relate to notions of abstraction and philosophical-spiritual contexts. Primarily a painter, Morgan’s work also utilizes aspects of digital technology to further explore the shifting terrain between the virtual and “real.” His work is in the collections of the China National Academy, Beijing; Luxan Academy of Fine Arts, China; Lucent Technologies, California; and Beringer Wineries, St. Helena, California.
Ceci Moss is the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where she is responsible for coordinating several exhibitions (both solo and group shows) each year, special projects, public art commissions, and public programs. She has a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from UC Berkeley. Moss’s academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, Performa Magazine, New Media & Society, and various art catalogs. San Francisco painter Kate Nichols synthesizes nanoparticles to mimic structurally colored animals, grows artificial skin from microorganisms, and makes her own paints following 15th-century recipes. Her artwork has been featured on the cover of the journal Nature, on the TED stage, in the Stavanger Kunstmuseum in Norway, and in The Leonardo Museum in Salt Lake City. Nichols has received a TED Fellowship, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and, most recently, the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship, an honor SFAI extends to one painter each year. Asuka Ohsawa was born in Los Angeles, raised in Japan, and educated in Boston. She received her BFA in Printmaking from California State University, Long Beach, and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She writes, illustrates, and publishes artist multiples. Recent self-published projects include L is for Lemonade, an illustrated personal rant about the current state of the kid lemonade business in her Oakland neighborhood. Her work is held in numerous permanent collections, including The Center for Book Arts, New York. Ian Alan Paul is a transdisciplinary artist, curator, and theorist. His projects have engaged with a large variety of topics using diverse critical and aesthetic approaches. Through experimental documentary, hacktivism, and simulation, his work aims to defamiliarize our sense of politics and ethics. Paul has lectured, taught, published, and exhibited internationally, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, Art Threat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, Art Info, and C Magazine. Peter Plagens is a painter and art critic. He shows with galleries in New York and Houston, and his work was the subject of a 2004–2005 retrospective at the Fisher Museum at the University of Southern California, which traveled to Chicago. Plagens’s articles and reviews have appeared in Artforum and Art in America; his column, “Fine Art,” runs regularly in The Wall Street Journal. His monograph, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist, was published in 2014 by Phaidon, and he is the author of two novels, Time for Robo and The Art Critic. Berit Potter, PhD, received a master’s and doctorate in the History of Art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and an MA in Museum Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University. She has held positions in several art institutions, including a Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her research examines modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on art of the Americas, and engages with the politics of display. She is particularly interested in the art and history of San Francisco.
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J. John Priola’s photography and video work reveals subtle details of mediated and natural landscapes, depicting what presence and absence look like, while vibrating in the space between art and idea. His work has been published and exhibited widely; selected collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Priola is represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco; Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla; and Weston Gallery, Carmel. Brett Reichmanʼs approach to realism addresses the complexities of identity politics. The staging of sexuality and masculinity are explored through performative situations that address gay culture through narrative subtexts. Reichmanʼs paintings and drawings are in many public collections, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art. His recent solo exhibition Better Living Through Design was at CB1 Gallery, where he also curated the group exhibition Tight Ass: Labor Intensive Drawing and Realism. Reichmanʼs work is represented by CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles and Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco. Laura Richard, Faculty Head of the LowResidency MFA program at SFAI, received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2016 in the History of Art with a Designated Emphasis in Film. Her dissertation is a political reappraisal of the early films, performances, and rooms made by Maria Nordman. Richard has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the Prison University Project at San Quentin. She was editor-in-chief of Artweek magazine from 2003 to 2008, and her recent writing projects include “In Just Deserts: Maria Nordman’s Fire Performances” and an essay on the textile installations of Claudy Jongstra. John Roloff’s recent work includes public projects in Minneapolis and Atlantic City, and exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, and Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco. He has shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Berkeley Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Venice Architectural and Art Biennales. He is a recipient of three visual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bernard Osher Foundation. Lasse Scherffig, PhD, works at the intersection of art, science and technology. His work explores the relationship of humans, machines, and society; technological infrastructures of communication and control; and the cultures and aesthetics of computation and interaction. He co-founded the artist group Paidia Institute and has been a visiting professor at Bauhaus University Weimar. He has published various scholarly articles and shown works at Tranzit Bucharest, Science Gallery Dublin, Transmediale, ISEA International, National Art Museum of China, and the ZKM.
Frank Smigiel, Ph.D., is Associate Curator, Performance & Film, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he commissions visual arts– based performances and programs modern and contemporary cinema programs. His curatorial interests include the intersection of theatrical and live art forms, commerce by artists, and queer histories. He has realized live work with William Kentridge, Rashaad Newsome, Athi-Patra Ruga, Rebecca Solnit, Stephanie Syjuco, and Mika Tajima/New Humans, among others. Upcoming performance commissions take up space operas, music, and visionary landscapes. Kal Spelletich explores the interface of humans and robots, using technology to put people back in touch with real-life experiences. His work is interactive, requiring participants to enter or operate his pieces, often against their instincts of self-preservation. He probes the boundaries between fear, control, and exhilaration. Spelletich has recently exhibited at The Catharine Clark Gallery, Gallery Maeght, and the de Young Museum, all in San Francisco. He was awarded San Francisco Art Commission funding for 2016. Jordan Stein is a curator with an interest in expanded models of exhibition-making, the practice of research, and history as medium. Independently and with Will Brown, the collaborative he co-founded, Stein has organized exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Philip Johnson’s Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida; the Exploratorium, San Francisco; San Francisco Public Library; di Rosa, Napa, California; and more. Recent press has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle. Tim Sullivan is a multimedia artist working primarily in video, photography, performance, and installation. He has spent the last five years completing a series of works exploring the myths and stereotypes of California as informed by television, film, music, and literature. Sullivan has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Singapore, Ireland, and Poland, and has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2006 California Biennial. Ryan Tacata is a performance-maker and PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He holds a BFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His dissertation focuses on La Mamelle (San Francisco) and the relationship between early Bay Area performance art and the alternative art-space movement. His larger research interests include support structures, automobiles in the avant-garde, and critical spatial practice. Taravat Talepasand’s works on paper, egg tempera paintings, and sculpture draw on realism to bring a focus on an acceptable beauty and its relationship with art history under the guise of traditional Persian painting. Paying close attention to the cultural taboos identified by distinctly different social groups, particularly those of gender, race, and socioeconomic position, her work reflects the cross-pollination, or lack thereof, in our “modern” society. Talepasand lives and works in San Francisco, and has exhibited in venues including Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; Orange County Museum of Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Meredith Tromble is an intermedia artist and writer who often works collaboratively. Her talks, installations, performances have been widely presented at venues ranging from Oakland’s Mills Museum to the University of Manizales, Colombia. Since 2011 she has been artist-in-residence at the Complexity Sciences Center at UC Davis, making art with interactive 3-D tools being developed for research. Her most recent book is the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, coedited with Charissa Terranova. Mark Van Proyen’s visual work and written commentaries focus on satirizing the tragic consequences of blind faith placed in economies of narcissistic reward. Since 2003, he has been a corresponding editor for Art in America, and has contributed to a wide variety of other publications, including Square Cylinder and The San Francisco Arts Quarterly. His most recent catalogue essays include With a Sudden Vigor It Doth Possess: Zheng Chongbin’s Recent Paintings, Alison Woods’ Metaclysmic Abstractions, and Fidel Danieli and the Valley of the Unreal. Ben Venom is interested in juxtaposing traditional handmade crafts with extreme elements found on the fringes of society. He was included in the November 2011 issue of Artforum and selected for Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including at Charlotte Fogh Gallery, Denmark; Circle Culture Gallery, Germany; Wolverhampton Gallery, England; Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco; Get This! Gallery, Atlanta; the Honolulu Museum of Art; and the National Folk Museum of Korea. Mary Warden holds an MA from San Francisco State University and a BS from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Lindsey White works with photography, video, and sculpture to model a sight-gag index, working with the language of magic and comedy to present the unexpected and impossible in everyday life. She is part of the collaborative Will Brown, whose main objective is to manipulate the structures of exhibition-making as a critical practice. Recently, her projects have appeared at the Berkeley Art Museum; ACME., Los Angeles; Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen; and Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Steven Wolf is a professional art dealer and founder of Steven Wolf Fine Arts, where he has organized almost 100 exhibitions since 2004. The gallery exhibits artists in all media and publishes artist books and catalogues. Since 2011, Wolf has published a blog at theoffbrand.com, and has written for Open Space, a blog published by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, since 2012. In 2012, Wolf curated Bruce Conner and the Primal Scene of Punk Rock at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. He holds a BA from New York University. Eddie Yuen is a writer, editor, and radio producer whose most recent work is on the politics of environmental collapse in the book Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (2012, PM Press), edited by Sasha Lilley. He is the chief editor of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (2003), from Soft Skull Press. Yuen is a contributing producer for the radio program Against the Grain and is currently researching the political economy and cultural significance of extinction.
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SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE BOARD OF TRUSTEES & PRESIDENT’S CABINET Officers
Faculty Trustees
Cynthia Plevin, Chair
Nicole Archer
Penelope Finnie, Vice-Chair
Brett Reichman
Bonnie Levinson, Secretary Chris Tellis, Treasurer
Student Representatives Marcela Pardo Ariza
Trustees
Graduate Representative
Jennifer Emerson Penelope Finnie
Sofia Sinibaldi
Diane Frankel
Undergraduate Representative
Candace Gaudiani Todd Hosfelt
President’s Cabinet
Teresa L. Johnson
Rachel Schreiber
John C. Kern
Interim President
Bonnie Levinson Pam Rorke Levy
Mark Campbell
Chris Lim
Vice President for
Tom Loughlin
Enrollment and Student Affairs
Jeff Magnin Joy Ou
Daryl Carr
Helen Pascoe
Director of Marketing
Cynthia Plevin
and Communications
Elizabeth Ronn Steven J. Spector
Maureen Keefe
Chris Tellis
Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations
Trustees-at-Large Don Ed Hardy
Hesse McGraw
Annie Leibovitz
Vice President for
Barry McGee
Exhibitions & Public Programs
Brent Sikkema Anthony Molinar Trustees Emeriti
Dean of Students
Agnes Bourne Gardiner Hempel
Jennifer Rissler
Howard Oringer
Interim Dean for Academic Affairs
Paul Sack Jack Schafer
Espi Sanjana
Roselyne C. Swig
Chief Operating Officer
William Zellerbach Anne Shulock Chief of Staff
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Produced by San Francisco Art Institute Zeina Barakeh, Content Editor Niki Korth, Associate Content Editor Amy Krivohlavek Galindo, Associate Editor Design by Brent Nuñez, Design Associate Printed by Smythe & Son, San Francisco Special thanks to: Hawa Arsala Devin Cornwall Anne Shulock Stephanie Smith Joslyn Thoresen Gordon Smythe
ADDITIONAL IMAGE CREDITS: Page 5 Zellerbach Quad Courtesy of SFAI Becca Levine Bad Seed, 2015 Recycled tire soaker tubing 23 x 20 x 20 inches Curiosity Killed the Cat: A Tale of Archival Fever, Desire, and Seduction, 2015 At the Diego Rivera Gallery after installing the show on authorship, legacies, and ownership Photographed by AllaEfimova Installation of the title for R/SF’s launch, Pre-Party, 2016 Photographed by Lauren Licata Courtesy of residence/SF Marcela Pardo Ariza American Paranoia, 2015 Archival inkjet print 21 x 28 inches In process: Mariana Castillo Deball: Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances, 2016 Photographed by Stephanie Smith
Kathleen Smythe
Page 7 Saniya Talhouk Mark My Word, 2015 Digital collage Dimensions variable
San Francisco Art Institute
Diego Rivera Gallery Opening Reception, 2013
800 Chestnut Street San Francisco, CA 94133 San Francisco Art Institute (Graduate Center) 2565 Third Street San Francisco, CA 94107
Christie Spillane Jouissance #1, 2015 Archival inkjet print 36 x 44 inches Diego Rivera Gallery Opening Reception, 2015 Photographed by Joshua Band Diego Rivera Gallery Opening Reception, 2014 Soraya Sharghi King of Wolderland, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 inches Laura Rokas-Bérubé Manicure, 2015 Ceramic sculpture 5 x 6 x 18 inches Becca Levine in her studio Photographed by Lux Rad Page 9 All studios photographed by Stephanie Smith (left to right, top to bottom) Studios of: Nick Makanna Lauren Carly Shaw Julia Sorensen Sean Phetsarath Paolo Salazar Tom Colcord Sebastian Ortiz Cabrera Saniya Talhouk Greta Anderson Zoë Leonard Lucien Jeanprêtre Eric Carson Arika Bready Emily McPeek Melissa Koziebrocki Becca Levine Mrinalini Aggarwal Cristina Velázquez Valencia Willow Heaton Subhrajit Bhatta
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Page 95 (left to right, top to bottom) Looking for Jiro, detail, 2011 Production still Photographed by Maxwell Leung Image courtesy of Tina Takemoto Vestige, detail, 2009 Site-specific sculptural installation: Aberfoyle, Scotland, United Kingdom © Rob Mulholland Courtesy of Rob Mulholland María Fernanda Cardoso Cemetery—Vertical Garden/ Cementerio—jardín vertical, detail, 1992–1999 Artificial flowers and pencil on wall Dimensions variable Photographed by Pablo Mason © María Fernanda Cardoso, 1992 Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum purchase with funds from Charles C. and Sue K. Edwards, 2000.9 Dialogue, detail, 1989 Installation and performance Photographed by Ding Bin © Xiao Lu Courtesy of Xiao Lu Carrie Mae Weems Not Manet’s Type, detail, 1997 Silver print with text on mat 24 x 20 inches (each print), 24.75 x 20.75 x 1.63 inches (each frame) © Carrie Mae Weems Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Untitled, detail, 2006 Napping, a COMMONspace “Paraformance” © Southern Exposure Courtesy of Southern Exposure Amer, detail, 2009 Film poster © Zootrope Films Courtesy of Zootrope Films 1700% Project: Otherance, detail, 2010 Installation and performance Photographed by Andrew Walker Courtesy of Anida Yoeu Ali Page 121 (left to right, top to bottom) Amanda Beech, Covenant Transport Move or Die, 2015 Video still Courtesy of the artist Kate Nichols, Promethean Aspiration, 2013 Silver nanoparticles paint on glass Photographed by Donald Felton Courtesy of the artist Installation view Mariana Castillo Deball Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances, 2016 Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute April 14–July 30, 2016 Photographed by Stephanie Smith
SFAI Concentrate 2015 Photographed by Alessandra Mello Leigh Ledare Let the Good Times Roll. 1 Blond, 53 yrs old, curvey, buxom, slim, clean, petite. No diseases or drugs. Seeking healthy, honest, reliable, financially secure younger man for discreet sensual fun. Ext#1084, 2008 Courtesy of the artist Marco Rios, Symmetrical Spleen, 2014 Wood, drywall, and paint Alejandro Almanza, Like Steaks and Salads, 2015 Still; 20:14 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Curro & Poncho, Guadalajara Krista Thompson: No Credit Park McArthur, Passive Vibration Isolation 2, 3 (detail), 2014 Laminated rubber loading dock bumpers; 9.8 x 11.8 x 3.9 inches ea.Courtesy of the artist and Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Marc-Olivier Wahler, Five Billion Years, 2006 Exhibition view (with Philippe Decrauzat, Mark Handforth, Vincent Lamouroux, Jonathan Monk, François Morellet, and Gianni Motti) in Palais de Tokyo Photo by Marc Domage Alejandro Almanza, Just five blocks away, 2015 Digital print on aqueous paper 42 x 42 inches Exhibition print, courtesy of the artist and Curro & Poncho, Guadalajara Karen Finley Don’t Hang the Angels (performance documentation, St Mark’s Church, New York), 1985 Photographed by Dona Ann McAdams Courtesy of the artist
$20 | ISBN: 978-0-930495-53-4