2016 MFA / MA Catalogue

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

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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

|

Insight

Insignia |

|

THESIS

|

Point

Valance

Varncosis

|

Varnication |

| |

Vernianity |

Viscellanies |

Vryptography

|

|

Vosmos |

|

| |

|

Vistory |

Vryptos

the

Vergineering

|

|

Vilosophy

Vostume

Vebt |

|

Vrand

VuperVupreme

|

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

|

En(title)ment

varnishing

Vefore

Vernisdiction

Visual

|

|

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

119

ON-CAMPUS EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS

120

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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.

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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