ART AT OHANA: A GUIDEBOOK
© Montage Health Foundation, Monterey, CA, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-218-42974-4
All artworks © the artists and poets.
The Art Program at Montage Health is made possible through donor support to Montage Health Foundation. All acquisitions for Ohana were made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund.
Design
Connie Hwang Design, San Francisco
Text Susan Krane
Photography
Inside front cover, endsheet, pages 20-21, 42-45, 61-63, 66-71, 78-79, 212-213: Lost Coast Media, Santa Cruz, CA; front and back cover, pages 6-13: Jacob Hashimoto Studio; pages 31-33, 37-39: Eugenio Castro; pages 161-163: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York; pages 186-187: Courtesy of the artist, Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; pages iv, 4-5, 98-99, 108-109, endsheet, and inside back cover: Ty Cole, Courtesy of NBBJ. All other photographs courtesy of the artist or Montage Health Foundation.
Ohana Art Committee
Dr. Steven Packer, President/CEO, Montage Health
Dr. Susan Swick, Vice President/Chief Mental Health Officer, Montage Health
Kevin Causey, Vice President/Chief Development Officer, Montage Health Foundation
Michele Melicia Young, Director, Montage Health Foundation
Curator
Susan Krane, Consultant for Arts Initiatives
Art Program Staff, Montage Health Foundation
Elizabeth Denholm, Manager, Art and Music Program
Paul Van de Carr, Lead Preparator
Francisca Bravo-Lazaro, Fine Art Specialist
Alison Palma, Fine Art Specialist
Since its inception, Montage Health has embraced the concept of the “healing environment.” This concept is based on the belief that art, music, and nature can enhance the practice of medicine and promote a faster and fuller return to health. Like the harmonious modernist architecture and forest setting of Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the art collection provides moments for calm reflection and brings the energy of creativity into the healthcare setting. While more than half of hospitals in the United States now have art programs, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula was among the earliest to realize the value of art in medicine. The art collection dates back to the 1960s and has grown largely through generous donations to Montage Health Foundation from artists and collectors. Today, the collection is a beloved community resource, on view in over 25 Montage Health facilities across the Monterey Peninsula.
For our newest building at Ryan Ranch, the Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health, we took a further step into the concept of a healing environment. In collaboration with NBBJ architects, we created an innovative campus designed to heal and based on the very latest research on healthcare facilities. Airy interior spaces, views of nature, outdoor courtyards, abundant daylight, communal areas, and calming therapy rooms support Ohana’s mission of building mental fitness and lifelong wellness skills for youth.
In every corner of the campus, visitors encounter artworks curated to amplify the optimism that infuses Ohana and its staff—to engage visitors with uplifting color and creative energy. The Ohana project brought many firsts to our art program. The art we selected for Ohana is tailored for kids and teens; coordinated to be of specific use to clinicians; and intended to provide enjoyment for youth and families. It reflects Montage Health’s bold community leadership and Ohana’s transformative approach to mental health services for the families of Monterey County. I hope you enjoy this catalogue of Ohana’s unique art collection and appreciate its contribution to the well being of our youth.
Dr. Steven Packer President/Chief Executive Officer Montage Health
Everything about the Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health speaks to Montage’s new vision for youth mental healthcare. Nestled in the coastal hills of Monterey County, the building offers expansive vistas from every floor as it curves and cascades down the ridgeline. From the soaring entry lobby to the outdoor gathering space under a heritage oak tree, Dr. Packer (President/ Chief Executive Officer of Montage Health), Dr. Swick (Executive Director of Ohana), and the architects at NBBJ conceived the facility to envelop visitors in nature and to heighten feelings of spaciousness, comfort, and light.
The campus reflects Ohana’s holistic approach to mental fitness, rooted in evidence-based therapies, proven practices of self-care, and tools for emotional resilience. For Dr. Swick and her team, care is a community-based endeavor that provides youths with a wide network of support as well as the warmth of “ohana”— the Hawai’ian word for extended family.
From our first discussions about the art for Ohana, it was clear that the artwork in the building also could go far beyond the status quo. “Color and curiosity” were Dr. Swick’s basic guidelines for me, to which she added, “Please, no figures staring somberly into space.” We beta-tested initial ideas with an installation of posters in a temporary clinical space. Funky street art, with its wry humor and relatable content, proved to be a big hit with the teens. As we talked further about Ohana’s model of care, many exciting points of convergence with contemporary art practice came into focus. By late 2021, a curatorial premise began to take shape around a rich set of overlapping interests: identity, family, and cultural belonging; the natural world; and mindful awareness.
Art in healthcare environments has a wide range of positive effects. It improves outcomes; aids cognitive function; offers
positive diversion; supports emotional processing and self-empowerment; and improves patient expectations. The art at Ohana provides numerous similar opportunities and offers moments for curiosity, enjoyment, and contemplation throughout the building’s five distinct wings. Montage acquired 226 works of art for the center, ranging from paintings to skatedecks. Major pieces were aligned with the functions of a given space. For example, a huge floral mural by Jet Martínez identifies and enlivens the entry to the Conference Center, whereas intimate paintings of the sky by Byron Kim contribute to the quiet ambiance of the Family Respite Room. The colorful stripes of Leah Rosenberg’s c. 70-foot-long wall painting make it nearly impossible to miss the outpatient reception area.
The art at Ohana, however, also becomes a resource for clinicians. It is intended to serve as a catalyst for conversations about topics of therapeutic significance. Recent neuroscience studies now tell us that viewing a painting not only activates areas of the brain involved with vision, pleasure, and recognition, but also excites zones of memory and emotion. As artists process their own experiences via art making, their art in turn creates an opening for viewers’ emotions and vulnerabilities. Contemporary art allows for the difficult stuff—it acknowledges the struggles as well as pleasures. For visual thinkers, an artwork might prompt awareness of feelings for which words have not come easily. We often recognize something about ourselves when we take the time to explore and contemplate our responses to an image, color, or composition. Looking at art opens a door to looking within. At Ohana, the art is both visually engaging and quite purposeful.
Montage Health commissioned sixteen works of art specifically for the campus, ranging from monumental murals to poetry. Community participation was key to many
aspects of the process. For the café—a central gathering place—we enlisted five local arts professionals to nominate artists for consideration. Our thanks go to Darcie C. Fohrman, museum consultant and board member of Youth Arts Collective [YAC] and of Arts Habitat; Karyn Lee-Garcia of the Arts Council for Monterey County; Hector Dionicio Mendoza of California State University, Monterey Bay; Marcia Perry, co-founder of YAC; John Rexine of the Monterey Museum of Art; and Brian Taylor, former director of Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA, and professor emeritus at San José State University, CA for their enthusiastic participation. Danusha Laméris, poet laureate of Santa Cruz County from 2018–2020, collaborated on the poetry commissions and contributed her words as well. Patients seeking a moment of calm in Ohana’s meditation rooms are greeted by the poets’ messages of possibility, hope, and healing.
We also partnered with Zach Weston and the Weston Collective to create an “art library” of photographs for the residential wing. Together we implemented a call for submissions that went to hundreds of student artists in the greater Monterey, Salinas, and Santa Cruz area. From over 70 entries, jurors Dr. Swick and Ann Jastrab, Director of the Center for Photographic Art, selected 34 images by seventeen students for purchase awards. Patients in residence at Ohana will be able to choose one of these photographs to hang in their bedrooms during their stay, giving them a bit of agency at a stressful time.
The art initiative for Ohana was made possible by the heartwarming generosity of the artists, gallerists, master printmakers, and participants. Ohana’s mission inspired great emotional investment in the project. Everyone seemed to know someone who needed a place like Ohana—a niece, a friend’s child, even their younger self. So many of the participants could relate directly
to the challenges of youth mental health in today’s world: several had personal stories of the bumpy journey toward selfhood. Our special thanks go to the commissioned artists, who responded to this atypical context for their art with insight and sensitivity. Their artworks carry forth a warm sense of the human hand—the special quality that the author and artist Edward de Waal called an artwork’s “power of presence.” He wrote, “It is this consolation, someone walking part of the way by your side, that means almost everything. Everything.” We hope that the youth and families on their path to wellbeing at Ohana, too, feel similarly accompanied by the spirit of the art.
Susan Krane Curator and art consultant
Jacob Hashimoto’s 3D landscape shifts with our slightest movement. The picture we see isn’t fixed: images come together—or apart—depending on the angle of your view.
This work includes 2,465 rice-paper kites strung into a grid, as if pixels. The layered structure mimics both digital imagery and real-life experience of nature. When walking through a forest, the artist points out, images unfold as “trees open and move, and light streams in. The whole thing is filled with surprise.”
Hashimoto’s style recalls the low-res video games he played as a kid with his father. Digital graphics gave him a new take on the old art of landscape. With their scrolling narratives, games like Super Mario also reminded him of traditional Japanese and Chinese screen paintings.
The skills of Japanese kitemaking were passed on from Hashimoto’s grandfather to his father, to the artist in turn. His kites are a reminder of childhood wonders, toys, and the joy of connecting with nature. What are your favorite memories of playing with family and friends?
The title, Fragments of a Distant Horizon refers to Hashimoto’s optimistic habit of envisioning future possibilities. “Staying focused on my distant goals gets me through day-to-day life,” he says. What personal goals do you try to keep in sight?
Fragments of a Distant Horizon, 2022 (Detail on pages 8-9)
Pigment prints, acrylic coating, bamboo, wood, plexiglass and Dacron
90 x 90 x 8 1/4 in. (228.6 x 228.6 x 20.96 cm)
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Jacob Hashimoto
Art and generosity
Hashimoto made this artwork specifically for Ohana. He wanted to design a piece that was dynamic yet also meditative. He hopes it conveys the feeling of “sitting on a beach on a slightly windy day, with the sun shining down and waves crashing— when you feel the power of the earth and discover new things. I want my work to be a place of possibility and interest…”
Making art that is accessible and generous is most important to Hashimoto. His intention is to prompt an experience of discovery for the viewer. This piece, Hashimoto says, is about “muchness and possibility, and potential.”
Backstory on the kites
“When was a kid, [my father] used to build kites in our attic in Pocatello, ID. He was writing his dissertation, and he built these little teeny kites that he’d fly out his office window on a spool of thread. His father had taught him to build kites. They used to take chopsticks and cut them up and make little kites out of them, which drove my grandmother crazy because it was right after World War II. They were Japanese-Americans living in Denver. They’re poor and they’re taking the chopstick, which is the implement with which you feed yourself, and just cutting it up and trying to make it into a toy, which seems just like an illustration of bad behavior at the highest level!”
Hashimoto had a long bout of artist’s block in his last semester of art school and wondered why he even bothered to go to his studio. His father (a creative writing professor), said he always advised students with writer’s block to write the same word over and over, so that “the body is ready when the mind kicks in.”
He told Hashimoto, “You need to be in the studio every day. You just have to find something to do while
there. It can be anything. Build model airplanes, or build kites.” Hashimoto began to build kites and flew them in a local park. Eventually, about 75 kites hung in his studio and his classmates suggested he use them in his senior project. Kites have been the building block of his artwork ever since.
The artist’s mother (who is IrishAmerican) was a recreational landscape painter and printmaker. He remembers her “toiling away in her studio on Sunday afternoons.” Both of Hashimoto’s parents were major influences on his art.
What do you do when you feel stuck or anxious about accomplishing something?
Who has influenced your creativity?
What useful advice have you learned from people in your extended family?
Collaboration
“My studio is supposed to be a mistake factory,” says Hashimoto. He works with a team of studio assistants to produce his complicated, timeconsuming artworks, using special knots and procedures that he’s developed over the years. “It’s a symphony of people. Without them there is nothing.”
Although his father and grandfather practiced traditional Japanese kitemaking, Hashimoto now combines Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian, and British kite techniques. He works closely with dragon-kite experts in China to make his circular bamboo frames in large quantities and also relies upon a specialized paper mill in Japan for his rice papers.
Hashimoto is very exacting and tests his materials extensively. “I’m a carpenter at heart,” he says, “I want to build. want to know how it’s made and I want to know where the material came from. It’s hard for me to relinquish that kind of control.”
However, he says, “Things are purposefully imperfect…. [My work is] about the inability to achieve perfection. Humanity is imperfection.”
What do you enjoy making with your hands? How does that engage your senses or get you “in the flow”?
Video games and landscape “Video games are hugely important. The art world takes itself really seriously. But if you eliminate video games, you have a skewed sense of what people value, of what’s beautiful,” the artist says. He combines his love of pop culture, video games, and “high art,” just as he freely creates a mashup of painting and sculpture.
For Hashimoto, our 21st-century vision of landscape is colored by familiar computer-generated imagery and sophisticated “fly-through” scientific models of the universe, with multipoint perspective. He counts the game Minecraft and the TV show Cosmos (with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson) as big visual influences.
“Maybe because I grew up in the American West and feel a close tie to the environment and nature, I feel my work uses design and mass production in service of a discussion about sacred spaces, awe, personal experience, time, repetition, loss, and reinvention.”
Think about your experiences of nature and your experience of landscape through movies, high-definition TV, and computer-generated media. What is special to you about real-life landscape? What spaces are sacred? Which give you a sense of awe?
Jacob
Hashimoto
Fragments of a Distant Horizon, 2022 (Detail on pages 12–13)
About the Artist
Hashimoto calls himself “a child of Atari”—part of the first generation to bridge analog and digital worlds. He is attracted to the world-building that is possible in digital space, yet he also weaves in characteristics of traditional landscape painting (such as a foreground and background) and incorporates his deep knowledge of art history.
His imagery refers to sources as disparate as stained glass, decorative floral patterns, Super Mario, arcade games, and classical Asian screen paintings. The stylized clouds in his landscapes come from both the rolling skies of Super Mario games and the use of clouds to indicate transitions of time in Japanese screens.
Hashimoto draws his organic imagery by hand (as with the pink and yellow flowers in this work), using markers and sharpies. He scans these drawings and then manipulates layers of pattern and imagery in the computer. The grid in this work has six staggered layers (2,465 kites in total), the complexity of which he works out on computer-design software before the work is fabricated by hand.
Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, CO, of Japanese and Irish heritage, and was raised in Pocatello, ID, and Walla Walla, WA. He attended Carleton College, Northfield, MN, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He still talks with his father about video games once a week.
Hashimoto’s artwork is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; Art in Embassies program of the United States Department of State, Washington, D.C.; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; University of Chicago; Civic Art Collection, City of San Francisco, among many others. His permanent public art works are on view at Nashville International Airport, TN; Tokiwabashi Tower, Tokyo; Portland International Airport, OR; Willis [Sears] Tower, Chicago; and the Grand Hyatt at San Francisco International Airport, among many other sites. Hashimoto lives and works in Ossining, NY.
The viewers spend psychic energy on an artwork and give it meaning. It doesn’t have meaning until you show up. You create meaning out of it.
—Jacob Hashimoto
Everything needs a boundary. As humans we don’t play well with the infinite. We need to set up limiting factors that allow us to create.
David Huffman grew up playing basketball on neighborhood courts for hours on end. The sport provided a space of belonging, joy, and independence for him. “I see basketball as a kind of Black ballet,” he says. “It is a rigid game, but it is also about physical expression, performance, and freedom.”
Basketball becomes a symbol of culture and community for Huffman. He calls his paintings “social abstraction”—rooted in art history and in narratives of African-American identity.
Where do you find a safety net of connection and interdependency? The feeling of extended family?
Huffman arranges actual basketball nets on his canvas then spray paints through the webs layer after layer to create flowing patterns. He based his paintings for Ohana on “healing” crystals with vibrant colors. Watermelon Tourmaline, a rare gemstone, refers to the cleansing, calming energy of the earth. (The title also refers to—and reclaims—an old racist caricature.) Mystic Topaz suggests metamorphosis and the release of negative energy.
For the artist, crystals are a reminder of natural forces of transformation. These semi-precious stones form under conditions of intense heat and pressure. They are, to him, a metaphor for people’s ability to heal, emerge, and “flower” after tough experiences. Huffman is fascinated by the “charm of their inner light.”
David Huffman
American, born 1963
Watermelon Tourmaline, from the series “Hoop Nets,” 2023
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas 61 15 16 x 41 15 16 in. (157.32 x 106.52 cm)
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © David Huffman
The backstory on basketball Basketball is a loaded symbol for the artist, with both positive and negative implications. It represents his own childhood pleasures and camaraderie. Basketball is a common denominator of Black life across the country, he says—a place of ‘Black joy’ that transcends the mainstream media’s storyline of poverty, struggle, and pain.
The sport is a path for professional accomplishment, success, and fame for Black men and boys—yet carries the risk of exploitation. For Huffman, the business of basketball typecasts Black men and emphasizes the body at the expense of the mind, letting athletic performance overshadow intellectual achievement.
Huffman thinks that much art today is about re-claiming identity on your own terms as a process of self-healing. In this spirit, he takes on the historical racist stereotype of watermelon in one of the “hoop net” paintings he made for Ohana. Such stereotypes “create a traumatic condition” that he wants to shift into “a state with healing properties.”
After the Civil War, formerly enslaved farmers in the South grew watermelon as a cash crop on land they themselves owned. It was a symbol of self-reliance. With the backlash of Reconstruction in the late 19th-century, watermelon became a cruel blackface caricature, intended to put down and mock African-Americans. The ugly trope was used in minstrel shows, cartoons, film, and popular culture for decades.
David Huffman calls his paintings “social abstractions.” He embeds references to both art history and to issues of identity, race, and social space. The all-over patterns of his “hoop net” series recall Jackson Pollock’s infamous ‘drip paintings’ as well as the game of basketball.
More about the artist’s interest in crystals
For a time in his twenties, David Huffman made and sold crystal jewelry with a friend. He studied minerals and gemstones, attended gem shows, and visited caves to see active stalactites and stalagmites. He also became interested in “crystal healing,” chakras, and other new-age wellness practices.
He returned to his early interest in crystals while making these paintings. For him, crystals connect us with the earth’s geological past. They symbolize metamorphosis and the ability to heal from trauma—just as extraordinary crystals are born out of conditions of intense underground pressure and heat. He is skeptical of mystical beliefs yet intrigued by the fact that a crystal lets us touch “deep time” and be dazzled by the play of light within the gem.
He considers Watermelon Tourmaline a centering, contemplative composition. In purposeful contrast, Mystic Topaz features interlocking shapes. Mystic topaz is actually a plain white topaz that has been “enhanced” with a thin coat of titanium, which transforms it into a kaleidoscope of dazzling color.
David Huffman
American, born 1963
Mystic Topaz, from the series
“Hoop Nets,” 2023
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas 61 7 8 x 42 in. (157.16 x 106.68 cm)
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © David Huffman
Basketball has this sense of ballet, upliftment—a sense of unencumbered expression. It’s also how children see themselves in dreams, jumping across fields.
Finding one’s personal interest is so important. Art was my window into myself, where I got to feel my own instincts. People become performers for the world, to the extent they lose who they are. Art has always helped me access who I am. I don’t have to perform for anyone. You find a certain kind of well-being in that. Whatever your interest is: attend to it. It becomes a light for you.
—David Huffman
Painting to me is a kind of alchemy. Part physical, part metaphysical. There’s this spiritual quest in my work.
About the Artist
David Huffman was raised in a multiracial family committed to art, social activism, and spirituality. His mother, Dolores Davis, was an artist who also designed graphics for the Black Panthers. In his words, she was an “Afro hippy” involved with the counterculture world of Berkeley, CA, where he was born. Huffman grew up going to protests—and to meditation sessions. The Black Power and Free Speech movements as well as the local psychic community shaped his childhood.
Art making, he says, was central to how his family expressed itself. His childhood fascination with comic books led him to study martial arts, and Huffman trained to become a tournament fighter. He is now a practicing Buddhist.
David Huffman earned his BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts and Crafts, then in Oakland, CA, and attended the New York Studio School. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Embassy of the United States in Dakar, Senegal; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; Oakland Museum of California; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Eileen Norton Collection, Los Angeles, among many others. His public art works are on view at the San Francisco International Airport and Chase Center, San Francisco. Huffman is a longtime faculty member at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He lives in Berkeley, CA.
Jet Martínez’s monumental flowers are a joyful homage to the folk arts of his native Mexico. He draws his motifs from traditional embroidery, weaving, and ceramics. The ornate textiles of Oaxaca were the initial inspiration for this design. His art, Martínez says, is “an intentional way of talking about Mexican culture that does not focus on strife and instead is celebratory.”
Raised in Cuernavaca, Martínez grew up with the legendary, heroic murals of David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. He believes in the tie between culture and community and was attracted to the Bay Area by its vibrant mural and street-art scene. While still in art school, Martínez began painting cheerful murals in forgotten corners of the city, often on walls marred by graffiti.
Today’s urban street art, he says, is the folk art of our time—a universal expression that transcends an artist’s identity. “Transforming overlooked spaces into something beautiful,” he says, “is a daily revolution in the form of creating.”
Martínez has painted murals in cities around the world, as well as for stores, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and museums. For every few paintings commissioned by organizations, he deliberately makes a free mural on the streets.
Jet Martínez
American and Mexican, born Mexico, 1973 Azul. Entre Mar y Cielo [Blue. Between Sea and Sky], 2023
(Detail on pages 22–23)
Acrylic
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Jet Martínez
Art and everyday life
Martínez celebrates craft traditions and the anonymous artisans of decorative arts. He also participates in the global contemporary art world, where artmaking is about authorship. He says,
was convinced from an early age growing up in Cuernavaca, Mexico, that communities can be sustained through artmaking. Like the craftspeople who integrate life into the creation of ceramics and textiles—nothing less than a certain form of magic—I embrace the imperfections of handmade, organic forms and vibrant colors.
Look around your home, school, or work environment for decorative objects, patterns, and colors that bring a touch of beauty into your everyday life.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw or paint. From an early age, I made a connection between my art and my life. In my childhood, I moved a lot.
Drawing and painting were some of the main constants in my life. They were also a way for me to make connections with new people in new places. That has carried on throughout my life.
—Jet Martínez
My process requires disciplined daydreaming.
About the Artist
Jetro [Jet] Martínez was born in the beach town of Tuxpan, Mexico, and raised in Cuernavaca. At the age of thirteen, he moved to Colorado (his mother’s family home). He studied Spanish literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for several years before taking his first painting class. He soon dropped out to build his portfolio and apply to art school. Martínez moved to San Francisco in 1996 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, attracted by the school’s Diego Rivera murals, the city’s Mission District mural movement, and the upstart street-art scene.
While still a student, Martínez “cut his teeth” painting murals in gritty areas around town, learning to work quickly and on a huge scale. After receiving his BFA in painting and printmaking, he worked for ten years at the Clarion Alley Mural Project, a grassroots organization that implements public art as a force for community engagement and equity. Martínez identified derelict alleys that were then transformed by mural projects, “to put beauty into the equation.”
“I am interested in folk art's role in culture and societies, specifically Mexican culture,” the artist says.
In Mexico, hundreds of small towns support vibrant communities of folk artists creating crafts with little obvious functional or economic value: beaded wood sculptures, paintings of birds and flowers on bark paper, yarn paintings, or painted plates. While these objects seem to hold no purpose other than decoration, considered together they form a comprehensive visual identity and culture for Mexico.
Martínez now also incorporates decorative elements from Asian and European sources into his imagery, “to create a multi-cultural dialogue” stretching from ancient artisans to contemporary artists. He thinks of his imagery as an inclusive “symbol of nature’s complexity.”
Martínez has created outdoor murals in cities around the world: San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, New York, Paris, Barcelona, Oaxaca, Zurich, São Paolo, Osaka, Singapore, and beyond. He also maintains an active studio practice and has exhibited in galleries and institutions nationwide, including Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson, AZ; 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco; White Walls Gallery, San Francisco; Museo de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, San Jose, CA; Syracuse University, NY, and many others. Martínez was named Facebook’s first artist-in-residence in 2012 and has painted murals for companies such as Hilton, Kiehl’s, John Fluevog, Tipping Point Foundation, Climate Works Foundation, and Redbull, as well as public venues such as San Francisco General Hospital. He lives in Oakland, CA.
Kara Maria tucks tiny images of endangered species within a brightly colored, swirling cosmos. She calls our attention to urgent environmental concerns while also celebrating the animals’ magnificence—and their resilience in the face of uncertainty.
Blue whales are the largest creatures on earth. An adult can grow twice as long as a T-rex dinosaur and live over 90 years; its heart weighs 1,000 pounds. In late summer, thousands of blue whales come to feed on krill in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary—the largest grouping in the world.
What do you imagine this whale might be feeling, as it winds its way forward? How do humans, too, maintain a sense of direction and balance during times of rapid change?
The artist titled her artwork with a line from the blues song All Blues (made famous by Miles Davis). What does her title tell you about this painting? The lyrics begin:
The sea, the sky, the you and I
The sea, the sky, for you and I I’ll know we're all blues
All shades, all hues, all blues
Holding contradictions
Kara Maria calls out the fact that whole species of animals are in danger of disappearing—overwhelmed by climate change, human interventions, and habitat destruction. This painting was inspired by news reports of whale carcasses washing up on Bay Area coastlines during the winter of 2021, likely due to collisions with massive cargo ships.
At the same time she laments loss, the artist celebrates the splendors of nature and honors the magnificent creatures with whom we share the earth. She holds on to both sorrow and joy at once.
This painting’s cartoonish background is a fun house of pumped-up color, yet it also might seem chaotic. Every person reads it differently. One writer called Kara Maria’s paintings “gonzopoetic.” What emotions do these colors and shapes bring to mind for you? How would you describe them?
Why do you think the artist hides her small, lone creatures within the canvas, for you to discover? By painting the animal in miniature, and with great detail, Maria urges us to take an “up close and personal” look at it. What do you feel when you look intently at this creature?
About the title: “Blues as the dues of living”
The blues is a musical form rooted in African-American culture of the 19thcentury and adapted by jazz, R & B, and rock-and-roll musicians over the decades. Blues tunes are typically stories of hard times, lost love, and oppression.
The blues recognize that human beings face tough times, given the inevitable ups and downs of life.
“Singing the blues” is a way of bearing witness to someone’s troubles and yet continuing to sing—to keep on keeping on.
Kara Maria paints endangered creatures with great care and
attention, at a moment of evolutionary crisis. Before she decided to be an artist, Maria studied music and played the clarinet. Do you think painting is now her way of singing the blues?
Maria titled this painting with a line from the song All Blues, written by Oscar Brown Jr.. You can listen to it here:
The sea, the sky, the you and
The sea, the sky, for you and I
I’ll know we’re all blues
All shades, all hues, all blues
Some blues are sad
But some are glad,
Dark-sad or bright-glad
They’re all blues
All shades, all hues, all blues
The color of colors
The blues are more than a color
They’re a moan of pain
A taste of strife
And a sad refrain
A game which life is playin’
Blues can be the livin’ dues
We’re all a-payin’
Yeah, Oh Lord
In a rainbow
A summer day that’s fair
A prayer is prayed
A lament that's made
Some shade of blues is there;
Blue heaven’s hue,
They’re all blues!
Talkin’ ’bout the sea and the sky
And I’m talkin’ ’bout you and I
The sea, the sky
For you and I
And I know we’re all blues
All shades,
All hues,
All blues
Sea, sky, you and I
See the sky, you and I
All Blues
All shades, all hues, all blues
A few facts on blue whales
Scientists estimate there are 15,000 blue whales worldwide today—and 2,000 of them live seasonally in California’s coastal waters, including Monterey Bay. This group of blue whales is the only population that may be thriving.
The blue whale is the largest animal on Earth and can weigh as much as 200 tons—the weight of 30 elephants—and can be longer than the longest jumbo jet. Its tongue weighs two tons and its heart is the size of a small car.
Blue whales like to communicate. They are one of the loudest animals on earth. They can talk to each other over hundreds of miles and produce songs and sounds of up to 188 decibels— louder than a jet plane.
Blue whales once numbered around 350,000, before the rise of commercial whaling. By the 1920s, the global count of blue whales had fallen to 1,000 Blue whales were declared a protected species in 1966 and are now protected by the Endangered Species Act.
For close-looking Kara Maria’s abstract style is rooted in her love of cartoons, anime, Japanese woodblock prints, pop art, action comics, natural history, and art history. She deliberately stimulates our eyes with a variety of visual enjoyments.
Which parts of the painting offer you a moment of calm? Which are hyperactive? How do they play off of— and balance out—each other? With so many things going on, what holds the whole painting together?
I paint carefully rendered miniature portraits of endangered animals into larger compositions to raise questions about Earth’s biodiversity crisis and the place of wildlife within increasingly unstable habitats. Swirling and exploding shapes, bright colors, representational elements, and unlikely spatial relationships in the greater painting illustrate how our progressively chaotic environment displaces fauna and the systems that support it…. The consequences jeopardize our collective future. Humans are not independent of the natural world’s ecosystems.
A monarch butterfly stakes out its own small corner of stillness in this painting. The artist uses shifts in scale and style to draw our eyes to the insect. She pictures the butterfly in careful, realistic detail—surrounded by a huge flurry of abstract shapes.
Kara Maria’s art reflects her love of cartoons, anime, pop art, action comics, natural history, and art history. She deliberately mashes up styles, yet keeps her dynamic composition in overall balance. What center points and through-lines hold everything together?
The most familiar North American butterfly, the monarch, is an endangered species. Thousands of monarchs spend the winter in Pacific Grove, CA flying here from halfway across the country and then returning eastward every spring.
Migrating monarchs have never been to their destinations before; several generations pass between fall and spring travel. Scientists aren’t sure how each new migrating generation knows the way to warm-weather spots.
What knowledge or traits are passed down from one generation to the next in your family?
Transformation
Monarchs undergo a complete metamorphosis during their lifespan, from egg to larva (a caterpillar) to pupa (in a cocoon) to adult butterfly in as little as 25 days in summer temperatures, but in as much as seven weeks during cool spring weather.
Are there ways in which you have changed as a person, or are in the midst of changing?
What transformations feel fast?
Which feel gradual?
Symbolism
Kara Maria has done several paintings of monarchs and other endangered butterflies—and chose a butterfly for her first tattoo. She’s interested in the varied symbolism of the butterfly, which is different to each individual: freedom, transformation, myth, fleeting time, a special loved one, etc. What thoughts or memories does the butterfly bring to mind for you?
A few facts on monarchs Monarchs are poisonous to their predators. They eat milkweed, which contains toxins harmful to many animals. Monarchs have built up an immunity to most species of milkweed. The toxins protect the butterflies by giving them a bad taste to animals that try to eat them.
Monarchs weigh less than a paperclip.
Monarchs are important pollinators of flowers and many everyday foods.
Monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains migrate to the central California coast. Monarchs east of the Rockies spend their winters in the high mountains of central Mexico. They travel as far as 2,000 miles, covering 100 miles a day and flying as high as 10,000 feet.
The Pacific Grove Monarch Sanctuary is one of about 400 overwintering sites along the California coast—and one of the most important. In 2022 about 16,000 butterflies appeared in the Sanctuary from October through early March, clustering in the eucalyptus and cypress trees.
Citizens of Pacific Grove advocated for the monarchs’ protection and voted for an additional tax to create the Monarch Grove Sanctuary, founded and cared for by dedicated volunteers. In the 1980s, California’s total winter butterfly population was c. 4.5 million. In 2023, it was 350,000 (a recovery from record lows).
Molesting a butterfly is illegal in Pacific Grove and carries a fine of $1,000
Monarchs cluster together in large masses for warmth and protection from the elements. They rest quietly in the trees, resembling dead leaves, until sunlight warms them enough to fly. Monarchs’ flight muscles do not function well at temperatures under 55 degrees. On warm days, butterflies will leave the trees to seek out nectar and replenish their energy reserves. They always return well before evening.
Milkweeds and monarchs’ other sources of nectar are declining due to development, draught, and the widespread use of herbicides on croplands and pastures. Because 90% of all monarch habitats are in agricultural areas, farm practices greatly impact monarch populations. Citizens across the U.S. are participating in efforts to support the insects by planting “monarch waystations” along migration routes.
For close-looking Kara Maria calls herself “very controlling.” To counterbalance her tendency, she deliberately combines freedom and control in her painting process. She believes that it’s important to “take control away from your brain” sometimes—to learn to loosen your hold on habits and tap into intuition.
She first layers broad, fluid passages of color, working with big gestures, and then begins to juggle ideas for the composition by arranging and re-arranging cut-out paper shapes. After finalizing her plan, she paints the abstract forms on the surface.
The artist uses magnifying glasses when she renders her tiny animals in painstaking detail. “I nitpick everything—that’s just me,” she says, both accepting and making the most of her personality trait.
By devoting so much attention to the endangered creatures, Maria encourages us to see them “up-close and personal,” too.
The impact of species loss on human survival is a deep concern that informs the ideas behind my artwork.… I urge people to contemplate what we risk losing.
Kara Maria’s paintings for Ohana feature three endangered species native to California—a land, a water, and an air dweller. While calling our attention to key environmental concerns, she also celebrates these animals’ magnificence and survival.
The Sierra Nevada red fox lives only in California’s Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains. It is specially adapted for cold alpine habitats, with fur-covered foot pads for traveling in snow. Its genetic roots reach back to the last Ice Age. A hardy and secretive animal, this red fox is one of the most endangered mammals in North America. Only about 40 creatures remain in the wild.
Using a very small paintbrush and magnifying glasses, Kara Maria pictures the animal in precious detail. What shapes and colors draw your eye to her miniature portrait of the fox?
Sierra Nevada red foxes are threatened by habitat loss and climate change. Why do you think the artist set the fox against an orange and yellow background? How do you interpret the irony in her title (from the Beatles’ song “Here Comes the Sun”)?
(Detail on pages 38–39)
74 x 50 in. (187.96 x 127 cm)
Adaptation
The Sierra Nevada red fox is the only fox native to the high mountains of California and is specifically adapted to this habitat. It is smaller than similar foxes, lives longer, and has fur on its foot pads that allows it to travel easily in the snow. The Sierra Nevada red fox relocates seasonally. It winters in mid-alpine elevations and spends the rest of the year at very high altitudes, moving among a variety of habitats: alpine and barren areas, subalpine forests, red fir forests, lodgepole pine forests, mixed conifer forests, and meadows.
Consider the ways that we, as humans, adapt to our physical habitat and to social environments, such as through choices of clothing, speech, slang, body language, and even diet.
In what ways do you adapt to the seasons? To the communal context of your school, neighborhood, recreational activities, and family?
The artist is interested in the symbolism of foxes in fiction and myth as clever tricksters who may be sweetly pet-like. She says each viewer brings something of themselves to her animal images.
Is there an animal whose characteristics you associate with in some way?
A few more facts on the Sierra Nevada red fox Sierra Nevada red foxes weigh eight to nine pounds and are about three feet long, with particularly soft fur.
This rare, secretive animal was last seen in Yosemite National Park by a motion-sensor camera in 2014—the first sighting there in a century.
The Sierra Nevada red fox thrived for thousands of years in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Cascade Mountains of northern California and Oregon. Now, two small populations exist: one near Lassen Peak and the second near Sonora Pass. The fox was first threatened
by trapping in the 19th-century and later by habitat destruction from logging, grazing, off-road vehicles, and development—as well as wildfires, drought, and climate change.
The State of California banned trapping of Sierra Nevada red foxes in 1974 and listed the species as threatened in 1980. The fox is a proposed endangered species under the Endangered Species Act.
About the title
Kara Maria titled this painting of the Sierra Nevada red fox after the famous Beatles’ song, “Here Comes the Sun,” written by George Harrison during a tough personal time.
Kara Maria uses the refrain “here comes the sun” with irony—pointing both to the sunny colors of her painting and global warming. Irony is the indirect expression of meaning by using language that is purposefully opposite, typically for humor or emphasis.
The saying “here comes the sun” usually suggests that things are looking up. In Maria’s painting, the title points to human impacts on the Sierra Nevada red fox’s alpine habitat.
The full lyrics of the 1969 song read:
Here comes the sun, doo-doodoo-doo
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s alright
Little darlin’, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter
Little darlin’, it feels like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun, doo-doodoo-doo
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s alright
Little darlin’, the smile’s returning to their faces
Little darlin’, it seems like years since it’s been here
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s alright
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes Sun, sun, sun, here it comes Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Little darlin’, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darlin’, it seems like years since it’s been clear
Here comes the sun, doo-doodoo-doo
Here comes the sun, and I say It’s alright
Here comes the sun, doo-doodoo-doo
Here comes the sun
It’s alright
It’s alright
For close-looking
Kara Maria’s abstract style is rooted in her love of cartoons, anime, Japanese woodblock prints, pop art, action comics, natural history, and art history. She was particularly interested in the way cartoon graphics convey invisible forces: the wind, an explosive noise, or an earth-shaking boom.
She deliberately stimulates our eyes by using an intense color palette. She prefers colors with high contrast and says her color preferences “are definitely not subtle.”
Which parts of the painting offer you a moment of calm? Which are hyperactive? How do they play off of— and balance out—each other? With so many things going on, what holds the whole painting together?
the Artist
Sixth Extinction (2015), in which each chapter tells the story of a single endangered creature. After painting several of the animals cited in the book, Maria went on to select others of special interest to her.
Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Cantor Art Center, Stanford University, CA; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; and the Katonah Museum of Art, NY, among many others. She has been awarded residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, and De Young Museum’s Artist Studio. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, CA; De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Born and raised in Binghamton, NY, Maria lives and works in San Francisco.
Try giving yourself a bit of color every day. Take time to ‘feel’ the blue of the morning sky, or the bright orange of roadside poppies.
Leah Rosenberg invites us to connect with color—to pay attention to common moments we often overlook. “Color,” she says, “is a universal language that welcomes interpretation. It’s a mysterious thing. It has the power to delight, to evoke flavor, to carry stories and memories.” Color offers endless small pleasures, here for our taking.
Wind, waves/Season change—/Rain, trees/ Dancing leaves features hues selected by Ohana’s Youth Advisory Council in a workshop with Rosenberg, alongside colors the artist “collected” around the Monterey area: a turquoise houseboat; coral building; pink sand verbena; Asilomar dunes; the warm grey of a sea lion by the break wall.
This mural captures a place and time, seen through the lens of ‘living color.’ Across its expanse, currents of wind and water settle into the steadfast form of a tree, which scatters seeds of confetti.
A former pastry chef, Rosenberg challenged herself to make her art as generous in spirit as a cake. Could a painting be about sharing delight?
“The experience of these colors is up to you,” she says. “Choose a color; discover it out in the world throughout your day.”
The color legend
Try keeping a color journal for a few days, or take a color walk with a friend. What new things did you notice in the landscape of your daily life? Share a color discovery with friends or family.
Generosity
While in graduate school, Leah Rosenberg took cake decorating classes on the side, initially to explore new ways of applying paint and to find relief from the pressure she felt in the studio. She brought her elaborate cakes to painting critiques, to the delight of the art-school classmates who devoured her offerings. Rosenberg’s art practice and pastry skills soon merged, at a time when many artists were exploring the idea of art as a “social practice” and opening up their work to public participation.
She asked herself, what it might mean to make a generous painting…. I was curious why a painting on the wall would not illicit such a response as the cakes. thought about what it means to make something for someone and give it to them. So started to make paintings with the same intention as cake—a thing that can embody delight, a shared pleasure that didn’t take up too much space in the world.
What does generosity mean to you?
Think back on your last gesture of generosity, large or small. How did the act of offering feel?
For five years after graduate school, Rosenberg was the pastry chef at the café on the rooftop of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Every day, she and her collaborator made a dessert inspired by an artwork on view in the museum. Their creations ranged from a cake that looked like a Mondrian painting (with a grid of primary colors inside every slice), to hot chocolate topped with a salted marshmallow made with filtered water from the San Francisco Bay. Generosity became the driving force of all of her artwork, which
has included free offerings of food (e.g. ‘cookie-walls’ of many colors), take-aways, colorful DIY booklets, workshops exploring color and flavor, and communal celebratory events. Rosenberg has come to think of creativity itself as an act of generosity—a way of sharing what you alone have to offer. “I sometimes feel like I can’t make anything unless I know it’s for someone.” In what ways do you share your unique skills or qualities with others?
Above all, Rosenberg’s exuberant artwork reminds us, as viewers, to slow down during the busyness of our day and find a moment of relief—and perhaps a dose of energy—as we take in the color that surrounds us.
“Perhaps, you notice the blue sailboat anchored in the bay is brighter next to the deep blue water. As you sit on a bench with a lime green stripe, do you look up to catch the olive tree leaves turning silver in the sun?,” she asks.
Think back on a time someone extended generosity to you. Do you have a memory of a particularly heartfelt act of generosity? What made it special to you? How did you respond?
The emotional life of color
For the artist, color is a marker of a place, a specific time, a memory, and a state of mind. “I cannot not pay attention to color,” she says. Her murals tend to reflect the feel of the season in which they were made. This mural was created in summer 2023.
Pick out a color in Wind, waves/ Season change—/Rain, trees/ Dancing leaves that feels like summer to you. Why?
Do you have a particular memory that’s associated with a color?
Choose one of Rosenberg’s colors and try free-associating words and images. Is there a color you associate with home? With happiness? With calm? With a walk in the woods?
When asked if she has a favorite color, the artist responded, “It depends on
the day.” What’s the color of this day, for you?
A devoted “color collector,” Rosenberg uses color to create a dialogue with viewers across time, long after she’s completed a painting. Her wall painting lets us see the Monterey Bay area through her eyes and then invites us to connect to the life of color, each in our own way. It is a kind of landscape that makes room for your participation in turn.
Savoring the moment
What happens when we slow down to notice the richness of colors we encounter in daily life, taking time to drink in their “flavors” and appreciate the moment? What small interlude of pleasure, even joy, might we find within the things we often overlook?
Rosenberg’s art invites us to practice “savoring,” the act of lingering with a pleasant experience or memory. Savoring is an intentional way of expanding the feeling of positive emotions. It is a topic of interest in the field of positive psychology and in recent studies of happiness. Her art is inherently optimistic. She hopes, “to engage people. Make them happy. For the artwork to continuously feed people in a way…”
Connecting with color can become a form of mindfulness—an everyday meditative practice of heightened attentiveness, if you like. While on an artist’s residency that encouraged wellness practices such as meditation and yoga, Rosenberg asked herself “If I was to create a mantra in the studio, what would it look like?” Her answer was color. “Every Day a Color” became the “recipe” behind her painting as well as an ongoing personal practice. Her sense of wellbeing, she discovered, requires a handful of simple daily routines: to notice color; go outside; move the body; make something; and interact with someone.
Choose your own “color mantra” for today.
Take a slow walk. Notice all the colors. Pick some flowers and leaves on your way, making two small bouquets. One for you and one to give a friend.
I suppose in a way, what I make now coincides with my conception of existence—that we are made up of layers of experiences: sorrows, joys, pains, loves, fears, hopes. All of these come together in my work, in a record of personal experience that is intended for all to share.
—Leah Rosenberg
You cannot take Wind, waves/Season change—/ Rain, trees/Dancing leaves all in at once. It requires you to walk along. It moves with you, like a companion.
About the Artist
Leah Rosenberg explores the role of color in our lives—both for pleasure and as a way to connect with a place, a time, and memories. Her art takes many forms: paintings, sculpture, huge wall murals, installations, multiples, and food. She’s created cakes based on fine art, ‘cookie-walls,’ and even a “Color Bar,” for which she served beverages and treats that matched a “color of the week.”
While in graduate school, Rosenberg took a cake-making class on the side and became interested in creating artworks that might bring a similar sense of “delight and sharing.” She wrote her thesis, Milles Feuilles on the artistic possibilities of cake. Generosity and audience engagement remain central to her thinking.
While in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, in 2014, the artist began what became her ongoing project, “Every Day a Color.” Each day, Rosenberg recorded a color she encountered, “in an attempt to record people’s stories and conversations, meals we shared, and the season. Every day for that month, I painted the wall and furniture a different color—my monochromatic mantra. How can I connect to this place?” She has become a committed “color collector,” and shares the practice with participants. What happens when we are mindful of the pops of color we encounter in our daily life? What joy waits for us in the little things we often overlook?
Rosenberg was born in Ann Arbor, MI, and raised in Saskatoon, Canada, on the wide-open prairies of Saskatchewan. She learned to notice subtle shifts of light and color in a barren landscape with limited hues—blue and white in winter and blue and gold the rest of the year. Landscape has remained central to her artistic vision.
She attended the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, then received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, Canada, and her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. A part-time job at the famed Miette patisserie and a cake-decorating class inspired her to bridge her art and cake-making. Rosenberg ended up working under pastry chef Caitlin Freeman and for five years they ran the café at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, creating whimsical desserts based on artworks in the museum’s collection. Many are featured in the book Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art (Freeman, Penguin Random House, 2013).
Among Rosenberg’s recognitions are an Irvine Fellowship through the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA; a fellowship from Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; and a residency at Recology, San Francisco. Rosenberg has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Johnson; Project 387, Gualala, CA; Meta (Facebook), Menlo Park, CA; Google, Mountain View, CA; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte, NC. Her mural Everywhere a Color is installed permanently at the International Terminal of San Francisco International Airport, as are works at Valley Medical Center, San Jose, and Moffitt Café, Parnassus Hospital, University of California, San Francisco. Rosenberg’s art is also in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art; Montage Health Foundation, Monterey, CA; City of Mountain View, CA; San Francisco Arts Commission; University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas; Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. In 2018, she published The Color Collector’s Handbook (Chronicle Books). Rosenberg lives in San Francisco.
Liz Hernández began to paint as a way to ease the homesickness she experienced when she came to San Francisco for college, at the age of nineteen. Her art is rooted in her vivid childhood memories of Mexico City—the food, crafts, handmade signs, and street life—alongside the comforting spiritual rituals of the women in her family.
Hernández created this group of paintings specifically for Ohana. They recall her grandmother’s milagros [miracles]— small folk charms placed on religious shrines and altars for protection, health, and prayer throughout Latin America. “I am a person who doesn’t have a conventional religious faith,” the artist says, “but I connect to my spirituality through healing rituals.”
Hernández uses milagros as universal symbols of hope and healing. She sprinkles in optimistic sayings and adds her own sign of personal transformation: fields of wild flowers sprouting from the earth under our feet, connecting us to nature’s forces of growth and resilience. Her starbursts represent “little explosions of energy,” she says, akin to how she feels when touched by acts of caring.
If you were to add a message of optimism here, what would you say? What symbol would you include?
Family memories
Memories of home are central to Hernández’s artmaking and sustained her during the time she was unable to visit Mexico while waiting for legal residency status in the U.S.
Her grandmother is a constant inspiration for her. “I want to remember the knowledge my grandmother gave me, and how life was in Mexico City,” she says, “because every time I go back, it’s not what it was when lived there.”
Are there lessons you’ve learned from elders in your extended family? Are there pictures, family stories, or memories that are especially dear to you?
Symbolism
Hernández’s images have very specific meanings for her. The sun in this work implies the beginning of the day. It is her reminder that “there is a new day for each of us—another opportunity to try again.” The heart is a universal symbol of love and caring. The hand, for her, represents the feeling of being supported and the power of human connection.
Hernández wanted this series of artwork to speak of optimism, while acknowledging the ups and downs of life. “Showing up every day can be difficult, but you still do it,” she says, “you continue by feeling the support around you.”
Where do you find a sense of support? How do you care for and support others in turn?
Identity
When Hernández came to the U.S., she noticed that people were confused when she didn’t fit common stereotypes:
I wondered—who am now? Who is this person that I didn’t know I was, but suddenly all these people think I am? I do not feel like I belong here, but also don’t belong to Mexico anymore. I am left in between, in a nostalgic place that doesn’t exist anymore. guess that’s why I make my art about all these things that only exist in my brain: very specific memories of my childhood, the neighborhoods as they were when I lived here, the food I used to eat, how I used to be. My work is about the things that make up who truly am.
What are the various sides of your identity? Do you relate to Hernández’s experience in any way?
Prior page (clockwise): Liz Hernández
Milagro: Sol (Sun milagro)
Un nuevo comienzo (A new beginning)
Las flores (The flowers)
La mano sanadora (The healing hand)
Milagro: Corazón (Heart milagro)
…Y las flores sequiran floreciendo (…and the flowers will keep blooming)
Milagro: El Cariño (Care milagro)
El Camino delante de nosotros (The road ahead of us)
All works 2023; Clay slip and vinyl paint on paper
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Liz Hernández
For focused thinking, I need white noise or even silence. I process my feelings and thoughts by creating an object, an image, or a piece of writing. Once it is out of me, I feel a huge sense of relief.
—Liz Hernández
Art can allow a dialogue on issues that might otherwise be unapproachable.
About the Artist
Liz Hernández was raised in suburban Mexico City. She now considers art a necessity, but for many years she subscribed to her parents’ belief that art was an impractical activity. As a child, she secretly loved to draw and write. She compromised with family expectations by studying industrial design. “It was my sneaky way to go to art school,” she says.
Her art takes a variety of forms: painting, sculpture, ceramics, embroidery, writing, and most recently film. She often experiments with tactile, earthy materials, such as painting with clay and drawing with thread. Mexican craft traditions are a key influence on her techniques.
Hernández attended Catholic schools as a child but her interest in ritual is not tied to any religious doctrine. Rather, it comes from the spiritual practices of her maternal family. Her grandmother, in whose house she was raised, participated in espiritualismo, a hybrid of religions, Indigenous healing traditions, and spiritism. Hernández connects to her personal spirituality through healing and wellness rituals like limpias [cleanses] and other folk practices passed on by her grandmother.
I used to get anxious and just give up before even trying anything new.
Now I think errors are a critical part of my art practice and my life. It’s okay to make mistakes and acknowledging that takes away a lot of pressure from you, suddenly there is no need to be perfect.
Hernández earned her BFA in product design from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She has lived in Oakland, CA since 2011. Her artwork is represented in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the De Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
The billowing forms in Paz de la Calzada’s painting recall wind, water, and plant life. She hopes her imagery taps into the viewer’s personal experience of the natural world—and stirs a similar sense of vitality and harmony.
The artist was raised in Spain, in a region where ancient pagan rituals and “plant magic” melded with organized religion. Such spiritual traditions, tied to the earth, inspired her interest in the deep, healing human bond with nature.
Blue Kolam #42 is based loosely on South Indian kolams, drawings traditionally made on the threshold of a home every day before sunrise. Women of the family created these looping, intricate designs with white rice flour. Meant to disappear as the day wears on, kolams were originally a sign of welcome as well as an offering of food for birds and other creatures—a daily tribute to peaceful co-existence. Kolams now are made largely for holidays, to bring prosperity to a household.
De la Calzada first saw kolams in India while on an artist’s residency and attended a workshop to learn more. “I loved that a kolam has a healing component. I took the idea of linear repetition and created my own style.” Her series “Blue Kolam” is inspired by the soothing flow of water and her ongoing interest in California’s ecosystem.
About the Artist
Paz de la Calzada hopes her art will bring viewers a moment of contemplation and introspection. Although primarily known for her large-scale public murals and “Urban Apothecary” plant workshops, her paintings are similarly inspired by a desire to foster a sense of healing calm and flow.
De la Calzada says, “I am powerfully moved by art’s capacity to alter the relationship we have with the environment and therefore with ourselves.”
Paz de la Calzada
American, born Spain 1967
Blue Kolam #42 2022
Acrylic on canvas
37 7/8 x 76 13/16 in. (96.2 x 195.1 cm)
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Paz De La Calzada
In 2019, de la Calzada was invited to stage a community-based activity for the Monterey Museum of Art. She researched local plants and the syncretic folk-medicine traditions of Spanish and Indigenous peoples. De la Calzada then mapped the sites of gardens during the eras of Spanish and Mexican colonization. The botanical “elixirs” she created were meant to be playful remedies for social ills rooted in the complex history of the region, particularly the power dynamic of assimilation.
Her interest in biophilia informs many of her public art murals. Coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in the 1970s, biophilia hypothesizes that humans have an innate, perhaps genetic, beneficial attraction to nature and other forms of life. Based on anecdotal evidence, biophilia was often cited in early studies of art and medicine programs.
Among the artist’s recent public projects are murals for downtown Napa, CA; the City of San Francisco; and the Mexican Consulate of San Francisco, as well as a transit station in Sumner, WA, and labyrinths in Palo Alto, CA; Amari, Greece; and San Francisco.
She has been honored with artist’s residencies at Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany; Monterey Museum of Art, CA; Tvak Studios, Ahmedabad, India; Art Amari, Greece; Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Woodside, CA; Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojácar, Spain; and Valdearte, O Barco de Valdeorras City Hall, Orense, Spain.
Paz de la Calzada was born in Madrid at the end of the fascist regime and during the rise of a populist counterculture. This hopeful period of democratic transition inspired her artistic interest in personal awakening and healing. She received her BFA from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and her MFA from San Carlos Academy, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México D.F.
Backpacks have become our constant companions. We carry them with us to school, to work, on visits with friends, whenever we are on the move.
For Dora Lisa Rosenbaum, each of the backpacks in this artwork stands for an individual, with a unique character. She says, “Kids carry their lives in their backpacks. Their backpack contains their identity—both who they have been and who they are becoming. A backpack contains comfort objects and becomes a comfort object unto itself, holding the bits and pieces of things that reinforce identity.”
What do you keep in your backpack?
Do you carry around mementos of friends or family?
Does your backpack reveal something special, or unseen, about you?
As she was drawing these images, the artist imagined a journey of transformation for young people at Ohana. The backpacks scattered in the lower part of the mural are “closed and tentative,” perhaps a little shy. The middle backpacks begin to open and cluster, as if forming connections with each other. The one at the very top, she says, has “found its path and is ready to move on.” Similarly, the background colors progress from cool tones below to warm reds and yellows in the upper tier.
Which backpacks do you relate to? How would you describe the “personality” of its shape? Which of these colors reflect the spectrum of your mood today?
Dora Lisa Rosenbaum
American, born Guatemala, 1979
Detail of Holding Onward, 2023
(Installation view on pages 62–63) Digital print on vinyl, felt Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Dora Lisa Rosenbaum
Interior and exterior
Dora Lisa Rosenbaum is interested in our “interior vs exterior” self—the difference between what we readily show to others and what we hold inside. With its hidden contents, the backpack is the artist’s metaphor for this invisible interior life.
The subject is a personal one for the artist. Rosenbaum was born in Guatemala yet, because she does not ‘fit’ set cultural expectations, finds she is often left out of important conversations about the immigrant experience.
Think about the many parts of your identity. How do you express your full self? Have you, too, ever felt misrepresented or unseen?
Process
Drawing is the foundation of Rosenbaum’s art. For Holding Onward, she first made small penand-ink drawings on clear film, then enlarged select backpacks into life-size mock-ups that she arrayed on her studio wall. She worked out details of the composition and color on the computer, going back and forth between mock-ups and digital imagery. She strives to retain the feel of human touch that is present in her original drawings.
Her final composite image was reproduced on vinyl by industrial fabricators and installed like wallpaper. Rosenbaum then applied squares of colored felt over various sections, to add texture, dimension, and softness. She likes the contrast between the flat mechanical reproduction and the plush, organic felt.
Transformation and belonging Rosenbaum often uses images of common objects, clothing, and household items as stand-ins for people in her artwork. She looks at the often-overlooked human side of issues such as immigration and migration, relocation, and homelessness. The artist hopes Holding Onward will encourage families to have conversations about each other’s personal journeys and interior experiences.
How can we have agency during times of transformation? The artist thinks that even material objects— “the stuff of our lives”—reflect individual choices and can be a form of claiming agency.
What things do you choose to carry forward (literally or metaphorically)? What might you decide to leave by the wayside as you journey onward?
My goal is for viewers to reflect on the ideas I present through the context of their own everyday lives. I am originally from Guatemala and was raised in the United States. I have always lived between and within two cultures. I learned from an early age to question what would otherwise be taken for granted.
—Dora Lisa Rosenbaum View
About the Artist
For Dora Lisa Rosenbaum art is a way of making sense of the world around us. She says her approach is much like anthropology, rooted in observation and questioning. Rosenbaum looks closely at the daily experiences and routines that we tend to take for granted, but which color our lives:
Every day we make choices that shape who we are (and want to be) in the world, but these often remain out of our consciousness. We forget to notice that the food we eat for breakfast or the clothes we wear are not merely a matter of idiosyncratic taste. Rather, through these choices, we project ourselves onto the world…. My work foregrounds these seemingly thoughtless and individual, yet deeply meaningful, social practices and compels us to see our choices….
Rosenbaum is trained as a printmaker and applies an exacting sense of craftsmanship to all her endeavors. Just as printmakers adjust and rework successive states of an image, so does she try out many iterations of an idea. She loves experimenting with different materials and carefully tests new techniques to achieve the effects she wants.
Rosenbaum received her BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; MA from Libera Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma; and MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. She has been an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice; and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson. Among her recent exhibitions is Courage within: Women without Shelter, at the Monterey Museum of Art in 2022, a collaborative artists’ project that created art workshops for women experiencing homelessness in Monterey County. Rosenbaum lives in Carmel Valley, CA.
Simon Tran paints intuitively, letting shapes bounce off each other in unpredictable ways. A former improv performer, he brings that free-flowing mindset to making art. Even after a work is finished, he juggles the overall composition of its segments.
He hopes this creative sense of play translates for viewers. “Tapping into playfulness gives us balance—a feeling of release,” Tran says.
Made for Ohana, Sway and the Holdfasts is titled for the bull kelp found in Monterey Bay. The giant kelp sways with the ocean’s changing tides and currents, anchored to the seafloor by its holdfast, a root-like structure. Bull kelp can grow more than ten inches in a day as it reaches toward rays of sunlight at the surface.
“The canopy of a kelp forest has a meditative quality, swaying back and forth,” Tran says. “The sway can be turbulent, too, but the holdfasts secure the kelp in place.”
For Tran, kelp is a metaphor for human resilience. How do we, as individuals, ‘sway’ and ‘holdfast’? Where do you find a strong sense of rootedness?
Tran’s color palette comes from video games, anime, family memories, and his Vietnamese heritage. Art is his way of processing cultural history.
Choose a panel of the painting. Let your eyes and mind flow with it for awhile.
Simon Tran American, born 1980 Installation view of Sway and the Holdfasts, 2022–23 (Details on pages 68–71) Acrylic on panel and wall Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Simon Tran
Art and the backstory of family
Although Simon Tran’s images are abstract and deliberately open to viewers’ interpretations, they have a deep backstory. Painting is his way of processing personal memories and his family history. He considers his art a meditative path to “re-directing the cultural trauma caused by war and colonialism in Vietnam.”
Tran’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from South Vietnam in the turbulent weeks just before the fall of Saigon. His father was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Air Force and was able to obtain citizenship. They rebuilt their life in Long Beach, CA where the artist was born. He knew few other Vietnamese families growing up.
There were, he says, certain things about the past that his parents simply did not talk about. “I was left to wonder what happened. My art is about these gaps. It is my imagination trying to answer all those questions.”
Tran felt a need to connect his family history to cultural history. He began to research the war years, French colonization, and mystical traditions.
The colors of Tran’s paintings are bright and engaging, in part drawn from pop culture. Yet below this cheerful surface, his palette silently refers to the “rainbow herbicides” used during the Vietnam War by U.S. troops to clear mangrove forests and crop fields: Agent Orange, Agent Pink, Agent Blue, Agent Purple, and Agent White. The toxins have had longlasting impact on the environment and people of Vietnam. His reference is intentionally abstract and below the radar—like the undercurrent of generational family trauma.
Tran re-claims these colors and gives them a vibrant, alternate life. He says he merges happiness and pain, imagination and memory.
How did you come to learn about your family’s story? About your cultural background(s)?
Are there family histories you wish you knew more about? Whom might you ask? How do you move through difficult parts of the past, as you define your own future?
Behind abstraction
For Tran, color is full of nostalgic, warm memories:
My color palette references things from my past and things of a youthful nature: video games, animation, anime, manga. My grandparents used to live in the back room of my parents’ house and their walls were an ugly teal color. It was just too much for me at the time, but now every time I see that color (which has become one of my favorite colors), it reminds me of my grandparents. like how we associate memory with color.
Choose a pleasing color from Tran’s painting. What does it bring to mind?
A story, a place, a person? Try freely associating, like an improv performer, and see where it takes you.
In the process of painting, Tran relates shapes, too, to personal memories. The organic, bean-like form is tied to his fond remembrances of holding his daughter in the crook of his arm when she was a baby, “swaddled like a little baby burrito.”
Tran nestled other personal symbols within the abstract swirl of these paintings: a small leaf and his “signature”—the Chinese characters for his artistic pseudonym, “Ghost Ghost Teeth,” assumed during his post-punk years. It refers to his mother’s recurring dream of tooth loss, which she considered prophetic.
See if you can find these images. Look at the “beginning” of the painting at the far left and at the “end” at the far right of the wall painting.
What else do you discover when you look closely? Do certain colors and shapes bring to mind associations of your own?
Nature as a metaphor for resilience
Tran uses bull kelp as a metaphor— an indirect comparison. The botany of kelp, for him, offers a lesson for human behavior. Its lyrical movement also becomes an opportunity for quiet meditation.
Just as kelp sways freely in the ocean’s constantly changing waters, so do people try to adjust to the ever-changing situations of their lives. Kelp is able to sway, dance, and literally “go with the flow” because of the strength of its roots (called the holdfast). Similarly, the things that ground us as individuals—family, perspective, tools for wellbeing, creativity, nature—can become the roots of emotional resilience.
Tran also thought of the kelp as a metaphor for his parents’ experience as refugees and immigrants. Uprooted from their homeland by the Vietnam War, they had to find a new ecosystem of support and community in the United States.
Bull kelp is a giant form of seaweed. Its stalks can be over 100 feet long and it can grow more than ten inches in a single day. The bull kelp forest in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is part of a complex ecosystem of sea urchins, star fish, abalone, birds, and a vast fishery. It has gone through various periods of distress and revival.
I have to paint in order to have my communication with the world.
I
come from a working-class family. My dad was a tool-grinder machinist and my mom worked as a preschool teacher. Being born in California and raised to be an American, but also being Vietnamese—I can say it was hard, something I had a lot of questions about.
I don’t feel like I’m a full American and I don’t feel like I’m a full Vietnamese. I’m somewhere in the middle there.
I’d like my art to reflect that.
—Simon Tran
About the Artist Simon Tran was an improv comedian and actor before he decided to focus on visual art. He paints with the same free-flowing, “yes and” mindset as improv, letting his shapes play off each other intuitively and unpredictably.
His paintings take many forms, from easel-sized panels to large-scale public murals. Among his public art projects are paintings for doorways, utility boxes, a community altar, construction fences, storefronts, and electric-vehicle charging kiosks. He has also designed album art, consumer products, ‘zine covers, and logos.
Tran attended San Francisco State University and Long Beach City College, CA, before receiving his BA in art practice from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as an instructional assistant for kids with special needs at Berkeley High School and also volunteered at Creative Growth, Oakland, CA, an art workshop for adults with disabilities.
Tran recently created large-scale murals for Meta (Facebook), Sunnyvale, CA, and Chapter 510, a youth writing program in Oakland, CA. His work has been included in exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; Oakland Museum of California; and galleries around the country. He currently manages the Artists in Education program at Southern Exposure, an arts organization in the Mission District of San Francisco, and lives in Menlo Park, CA.
Michael McConnell gives familiar stories a new twist. Here, he turns the fable The Tortoise and the Hare from a tale of competition into one of collaboration. “Get a little help from your friends,” the artist reminds us.
In the classic fable, the hare is speedy and confident. The tortoise is slow and methodical. What words would you use to describe the personalities of McConnell’s tortoise and hare? Do you share any of their traits?
McConnell sketches constantly. Specific animals—the owl, fox, bear—are stand-ins for the artist and members of his family. Art, he says, is the way he makes sense of the world and of his own anxieties.
With his warm and quirky sense of humor, McConnell enlists charming, innocent animals to shed a gentle light on human vulnerabilities. “At first glance my work reads like a fairytale, yet I combine my peculiar images with phrases to create layers of narrative possibility,” he says.
Michael McConnell
American, born 1977
“Creating your own narrative (in three parts),” 2023
(Installation view on pages 78–79)
Above:
Life Doesn’t Have to be a Competition
28 1/8 x 39 7/8 in. (71.44 x 101.28 cm)
Pages 76–77:
Get a Little Help from Your Friends
17 1/8 x 16 15/16 in. (43.5 x 43.02 cm)
Rewrite the Story
28 1/8 x 40 in. (71.44 x 101.6 cm)
Digital pigment prints from original watercolors
Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Michael McConnell
Michael McConnell sketches and makes watercolors constantly, as a journal of his daily observations and thoughts. He is a masterful draftsman, able to capture the character of people and animals with a tender, expressive touch.
His artwork includes sculpture made from castoff stuffed toys, paintings, artist’s books, live drawing, and murals. McConnell owns a popular coffee shop and vintage video rental library in the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco. He organizes pop-up exhibition projects and is active in the LGBTQ+ arts community.
McConnell was raised outside Detroit, MI. His parents enrolled him in weekend art classes as a child and he was soon drawing animals and cartoons for the fantasy games he and his brother created. He was awarded a scholarship to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, where he received his BFA in printmaking. McConnell packed up a U-Haul after graduation and drove across country to the Bay Area. He lives in San Francisco with his husband and son.
He has been a visiting lecturer and teacher at University of California, Berkeley; Columbus State University, GA; East Oregon University, La Grande; La Porte Piente Centre pour les Arts, Noyers sur Serein, France; and Redwood High School, Marin, CA. McConnell’s work has been included in exhibitions at Marin Health Medical Center, CA; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; BlueSpace, San Francisco; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; Tusculum College, Greenville, TN; A.I.R. Gallery, New York; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; and di Rosa Preserve, Napa, CA, as well as at artist’s spaces around the Bay Area.
Ian Mackay, an illustrator and animator, created the ’zine Bugggs for the opening of Ohana, to be given away to youth and families. His comic tale is both a road-trip and a warmhearted buddy story. Two bugs, Tato and Wink, combine their talents to navigate a landscape full of unexpected challenges and opponents, such as a stampede of giant millipedes. With each other’s unflagging support, they eventually make their way to an idyllic waterfall where they chill out amidst nature.
Mackay updated the classic hero’s journey in his mini graphic novel. This adventure of friendship and collaboration emphasizes the importance of personal relationships that support us through thick and thin. Boldly colored and zany, Bugggs is full of the light-hearted absurdities that have become the artist’s trademark.
The legendary animated films of Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli (such as The Boy and the Heron, 2023) influenced Bugggs Mackay was fascinated by Miyazaki’s take on humanity’s relationship with nature and the subtle ways his landscapes morph to mirror the characters’ interior emotions.
Mackay’s graphic style is perfectly suited to Risograph printing—a form of xerographic silkscreen developed in Japan. Risographs can be printed in large editions, with saturated color. After discovering that local artists were using Risograph machines to self-publish books, Mackay started Hi-Bred, a small press that publishes his comics and ‘zines as well as creative collaborations with friends.
Ian Mackay American, born 1984 Bugggs, 2023 (Front cover)
Risograph
16-page ’zine, exclusive first edition of 1000 Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Ian Mackay
Ian Mackay is a cartoonist, animator, and illustrator with an interest in visual storytelling. Mackay typically casts his whacky characters into what he calls “absurd situational comedy”: a guntoting duck goes hunting for humans; a charming fitness guru takes over the monastery in a small medieval town; and a helpless heart is chased through the pages of a ‘zine by Cupid’s fated arrow.
He first studied English literature then transitioned to landscape architecture for graduate studies. Mackay soon realized he was drawn to the graphic side of the practice and, given his burgeoning ideas for stories and books, decided he needed to change direction yet again. He now works as a freelance artist and independent publisher.
Mackay was the senior designer for WeWork and his clients include The New Yorker, New York Times, Zeit Magazin, Premier Guitar, Midnite Snack, and Gehl Studio His books and ‘zines are carried by signature alternative venues such as 50 Watts Books, Printed Matter, Inc., Needles and Pens, Comix Experience, and Wildflower Bookstore.
What is beautiful is not
unbroken. Take, for instance, a leaf, edge bug-bitten,
clipped by caterpillars but still a brilliant green. Or this chipped
ceramic cup, the lip rough and nicked because it fell from my hand and can’t be fixed.
But is still my favorite shade of blue and survived to hold hot tea.
I survived, too–not the broken cup, but the broken heart–
heart a pomegranate, spilling its plump seeds where it was nipped by grief.
Still sweet, still doing its dazzling deed of keeping me here tonight and every night to look up at the moon— that broken plate hanging in the dark.
—Danusha Laméris American, born 1971
About the poet
Danusha Laméris is a poet, essayist, and teacher whose full-hearted perspective on life is rooted in her deep humanity and understanding of loss. Born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother, she was raised in northern California and spent many childhood afternoons in the biology research lab her mother directed at Stanford University. Her poetry encourages readers to take pleasure in both the microcosmic details and expansiveness of life.
Laméris received her BA in studio art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR. She was the poet laureate of Santa Cruz County from 2018–2020; founded the Hive Poetry Collective; and cohosted the related podcast on KSQD. Laméris received the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize in 2014 for her first book, The Moons of August. Her second book, Bonfire Opera received the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her third book, Blade by Blade is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
Among her best-known poems is “Small Kindnesses,” which appeared in the New York Times; became the basis for a collaboration with teens around the world; and was read by actress Helena Bonham Carter for the project 365 Poems for Life (Allie Esiri, Macmillan, 2023). Laméris’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications.
Chrysalis
One day the caterpillar forms a chrysalis, waits a while, becomes butterfly.
They told us this much, told us to wait for chitin to split, for the emergence of dazzling colors and pumping wings.
But they never talked about what really happened inside: how the caterpillar’s whole body dissolves, how for a time there is nothing but soupy liquid, butterfly goo, formless but for the rigid purse holding it in midair.
And no one told us, either, that when the caterpillar was born, while it grew and crawled along, a few cells called imaginal already held instructions for what to build when it came time for another body. Here, the shining eye, the scaled wings.
Let me remind you of the power of sticking around.
If you feel shapeless and scared, imagine yourself in that tiny, thin-walled shell, whistling in the dark, some part of you already knowing the way.
—Emilie Lygren
American, born 1988
© Emilie Lygren
About the poet Emilie Lygren is an environmental educator and poet. Her broad range of expertise includes curriculum development, science education, social emotional learning, facilitation, nature journaling, learning theory, outdoor leadership, and culturally responsive teaching practices.
Lygren received her BA in geology and biology from Brown University, Provincetown, RI. Her work as a teacher includes the awardwinning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley. Lygren believes that awareness and curiosity are tools that deepen “people’s relationship with themselves, their communities, and the natural world.”
Her poems have been published in Thimble Literary Magazine, The English Leadership Quarterly, Askew, and Solo Novo, among others. Her first book, What We Were Born For was published in 2021 by Blue Light Press. Lygren was raised in Carmel Valley and lives in San Rafael, CA.
My Mom Buys My First Houseplant
—after Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up”
more than it’s careening green limbs and mouth-wide holes. more than the yield to the potential of its smaller selves, it's the monstera’s leaf—its delicate dance to the sun's infinite rhythm that really gets to me. what unstained gall to be wounded and still believe in the budding of tomorrow. fine then, it seems to say. surrendering to its own will: a shard of light passing through what’s been endured. a node drones on. patient, plodding small miracle reaching for the sky. grand as each day it chooses to arrive. defying gravity, again and again.
About the poet Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet, professor, and scholar who brings a spiritual lens to his exploration of Black joy, community, and rebellion. He has performed his work in over thirty states across the country and was invited by the U.S. Embassy to perform in South Africa. Summerhill currently is the assistant professor of poetry at Santa Clara University, CA, and previously was an assistant professor of poetry/social action at California State University, Monterey Bay.
He was named the first poet laureate of Monterey County in 2022 and, the year prior, received a grant from the Community Foundation for Monterey County for Project 21, a literary arts program to preserve Black history and encourage youths’ research and creative writing. Project 21 leverages art as a vehicle for building community and personal growth.
—Daniel B. Summerhill American,
born 1991
© Daniel B. Summerhill
Raised in Oakland, CA, Summerhill received his BA from College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY, and his MFA from Pine Manor College, Boston (now part of Lasell University). He was also a New York State Writers Institute Scholar at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
Summerhill released his third book, Mausoleum of Flowers (CavanKerry Press), in 2022. Divine, Divine, Divine, was published in 2021 and Black Joy Anthology in 2019, both by Nomadic Press. He has received a Sharon Olds Fellowship and a Watering Hole fellowship. Summerhill’s poems have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journal, Rust & Moth, Button Poetry, Alaska Poetry Review, Inkwell, and Obsidian Literature & Arts.
some days
remember when windows opened into morning greening insight you didn’t know you could muster
empty your pockets of yesterday
some days the wind lifts me with everything else paper bag on a street corner, carried across petals in September as they blow from their stems and don’t know where they’ll land
some days I want to be carried this way and that
towards surprise to possibility
—Farnaz Fatemi American, born Iran, 1968 © Farnaz Fatemi
About the poet
Farnaz Fatemi is an IranianAmerican poet, editor, and writing teacher. She was named the 2023–24 poet laureate of Santa Cruz County.
Fatemi’s poems make space for the “multiple inheritances” that shape her sense of self. In the words of poet Tracy K. Smith, “Fatemi shines gorgeous light on the liminal space between languages, bearing witness to the joy and longing that accompany every act of translation.”
Fatemi’s first book, Sister Tongue (Kent State University Press), won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (selected by Tracy K. Smith). She is a member and cofounder of the Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and events.
Her work has appeared in Poema-Day, Grist Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Tahoma Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, phren-z. org, and the anthologies Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora; My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices of the Iranian Diaspora; and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me.
Farnaz received her BA in American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA in poetry from Mills College, Oakland, CA. She taught writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1997–2018, and has also taught at Cabrillo College, Aptos, CA, and Anzar High School, San Juan Bautista, CA. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.
Whitney Aguiñiga’s neighborhood in Del Rey Oaks was suddenly empty of its usual street life during the first year the COVID-19 pandemic. Neighbors were nowhere to be seen. The quiet was overwhelming.
In response to this feeling of isolation, Aguiñiga made a series of landscape photographs overlaid with optimistic phrases and hopeful predictions in bold type. Her messages are anonymous, yet also intimate. They read like sure advice from a wise relative: “The sky will be clearer”; “The flowers will be blooming”; “Sweet friend I have missed you.”
She posted the photos on trees and telephone poles along a walking path in Del Rey Oaks Community Park. The text is designed to read from both directions. Her messages (reprinted just for Ohana) are timeless.
“We are alone in this together” is about the mutual support of community. It is a reminder that someone is by your side. In the midst of an anxious time, Aguiñiga offered a soothing vision of the future to viewers—and perhaps also to herself.
Whitney Aguiñiga
American, born 1987
“We are alone in this together,” 2022 (Seven parts)
From left:
We are alone in this together
Sweet friend I have missed you
Pages 112–115:
The sun will continue to shine
The sky will be clearer
The trees will be taller
The flowers will be blooming
Neighbor it is so good to see you
Archival pigment prints
31 x 24 9 16 in. (78.74 x 62.39 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Whitney Aguiñiga
Art is a powerful tool, capable simultaneously of disrupting and connecting.
—Whitney Aguiñiga
I first fell in love with photography as a ritual of documenting reality, but after standing still long enough I began to see new things. Photography allows me to unveil not only what exists but what is hidden or possible.
About the Artist
For Whitney Aguiñiga, art is a way of processing experience. Her art takes many forms, from photography to sculpture to public activities. Collaboration and community are at the heart of her work as an artist.
Aguiñiga thinks of her art as an invitation to the viewer. “I am most interested in the relationship between artist and community—in art-making as a form of conversation, connection, and collaboration,” she says. She addressed the communal crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic through several art projects, hoping to provide suggestions of transformation and hope even as people navigated a time of such great loss.
Whitney Aguiñiga was raised in San Luis Obispo, CA, and teaches in the art program at Stevenson School, Pebble Beach, CA. She earned her MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA; her MA in museum studies from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; and later her BA in photography and digital media from California State University, Monterey Bay.
Valerie Arber’s vibrant abstraction has a very personal backstory. This work is based on a string of pearls that belonged to her mother. It is part of an ongoing series, “Pearl,” that ranges from recognizable necklaces to mysterious images such as this pulsating pattern of color. Arber explains,
I continue to draw on this subject for the depth of connections that it embodies: the beautiful and miraculous forces of the natural world, and my place within it…. Necklace III explodes the elements into a gyrating pattern of circles and dots, describing a phenomenon not unlike viewing light itself.
Valerie Arber
American, born 1949
Necklace III 2006
Lithograph, Edition 6/10
36 5/8 x 30 1/4 in. (93.03 x 76.84 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Valerie Arber
About the Artist
Valerie Arber is primarily a printmaker. She often combines minimalist abstraction with personal narrative. In this work, for example, she looked at various ways to describe a string of pearls that belonged to her mother. She says, “The power of each image lies in the fact that it generates a vibrating, retinal sensation while remaining very still and contained.”
Arber studied at Leksand Folkhögskola, Sweden, and received her BFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Her work is represented in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, OR; Albright Knox Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Hallmark Collection, Kansas City, KS; Corning Museum of Glass, NY; and Albuquerque Museum, NM. She lives in Santa Fe, NM, and Marfa, TX.
In Ya me voy a therapy, the artist pictures his vintage, customized 1957 Chevy sedan surrounded by a cast of spirit creatures taken from myths and creation stories.
The banner on the back of his car proudly declares he’s going to therapy. A sly twist on “just married” car decorations, it is also a retort to cultural taboos against seeking help. Armendariz says,
Therapy was talking to family and friends growing up. The idea of talking to someone is the polar opposite of machismo attitudes about mental and physical health. I find humor to be an excellent way of dealing with that difficult subject.
This image is autobiographical, made not long after Armendariz’s long marriage ended in divorce. He says he re-emerged from this difficult time with a new artistic vision that grew out of his “…unlikely resort to the method of therapy.”
Ya me voy a therapy [I’m going to
Woodblock, Edition 3/5
41 1/2 x 53 1/4 in. (105.41 x 135.26 cm)
Purchase made possible by the
“Corazón is a celebration of life and love,” the artist says. Here, spirit animals drawn from Indigenous myths populate a heart that seems to swell with their presence and power. Armendariz often uses animals as stand-ins for humans when he explores difficult physical, emotional, or psychological concerns.
He lifts his creatures from the myths of Indigenous peoples and Greek, Roman, and Asian legends, yet casts them into stories of his own making. “Many traditions have a trickster character,” he says. “I change the stories around and sample them, to draw further connections with my own Mexican-Indian tradition.”
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Purchase
Growing up in El Paso, Texas with Juárez, Mexico in my backyard, I was saturated with a mix of romanticism for the new and old West, American culture, and the iconography of my ancestral past. I am influenced by the mystique of the border region, including mesas, honky-tonks and big skies reaching as far as the eye can see.
—Ricky Armendariz
About the Artist
Ricky Armendariz was raised in the border town of El Paso, TX. The hybrid culture of the region heavily influences his art. He takes his subjects from literature, mythology, pop culture, and regional storytelling—everything from TexMex music to colonial-era painting.
The artist received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In 2008, he received the Artpace Supplemental Travel Grant for travel to Mexico City and in 2013 was an artist in residence at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Armendariz was the first artist in residence at the DoSeum in San Antonio and was artist in residence in 2018 at the Anderson Ranch, Snowmass Village, CO. His work is represented in the collections of San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Denver Art Museum; Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Bush International Airport, Houston; and Cheech Marin Collection. Armendariz lives in San Antonio, TX.
That’s how I deal with a lot of things… through humor.
About the Artist
Eddie Braught plays the acoustic guitar and sings, alongside making visual art. Many of his prints and drawings feature guitars. He gives his instrument a bold, graphic form that seems to vibrate with energy. Braught recorded an album of classic songs, aptly entitled Look at that Guitar!
He has practiced for many years at NIAD Art Center, a studio in Richmond, CA, for artists with developmental disabilities. Braught’s work was included in an exhibition at Hurwich Library, Alliant University, San Francisco, in 2015.
Eddie Braught
American, born 1962
Untitled, not dated Linoleum print
34 1/16 x 27 15/16 in. (86.52 x 70.96 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © NIAD Art Center
Brown American, born 1997
Now What? Nobody Knows, not dated Screenprint, Edition 1/1
19 7/8 x 16 13/16 in. (50.48 x 42.7 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Teralyn Brown
the Artist
Casey Byrnes has a gentle touch with watercolor. With just a few, economical strokes of his brush, he’s able to convey the look and feel of a landscape using his characteristic upbeat rainbow of colors. His images often have a lyrical sense of movement.
Creative process, rather than the final outcome, is most important to him. He liberally experiments with techniques and works in a variety of styles, from abstraction to figurative images to clothing. Byrnes has worked at Creative Growth, an art center for artists with disabilities in Oakland, CA, since 2013.
23 1/2 x 30 1/4 in. (59.69 x 76.84 cm)
Purchase made possible by the
44 1/2 x 19 3/4 in. (113.03 x 50.17 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © NIAD Art Center
About the Artist Deatra Colbert’s drawings, prints, and paintings are rooted in her enthusiasm for sports, particularly professional wrestling. She is an obsessive fan. Her narrative images document the activities and life-events of the celebrity athletes she follows in great detail.
Colbert stacks her figures vertically, as if layering a sequence of events one on top of the next, over time. Within the tangle of her compositions, she often inserts names, dates, and phrases that celebrate particular matches, heroic feats, or circumstances. Colbert has worked for over 30 years at NIAD Art Center, a workshop for artists with developmental disabilities in Richmond, CA. In addition to her two-dimensional artwork, she also makes clay sculptures of wrestlers and fiber art. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center, CA; Oakland Museum of California; Wellness Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Northern California Art, Chico; and Walt Disney Family Museum, San Francisco.
About the Artist
Woody De Othello makes wonky, anthropomorphized sculptures that feature domestic objects—tables, radiators, vases, lamps, television sets. In his related works on paper, such household fixtures similarly take on comic character and become animated by movement and emotion. Things are often stretched or slumped over, seemingly overcome by gravity or other forces.
“Home holds a lot of psychic energy,” Othello says. He infuses his art with whimsy—as well as cultural references to African nkisi (objects believed to summon, or be inhabited by, supernatural spirits).
De Othello was raised in Miami, in a Haitian household. He began making art as a child and in high school designed and sold custom t-shirts. He received his BFA from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, and an MFA from the California College of Arts, San Francisco. De Othello was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2022 and the 33rd Ljublijana Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljublijana, Slovenia, quickly establishing an international reputation. He has exhibited with Karma, New York; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Quality, Oakland, CA; and UFO Gallery, Berkeley, CA, as well as in a solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, CA. His work is represented in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. De Othello lives in Oakland, CA.
Woody De Othello
American, born 1991
From left:
About That Time, 2021 Edition 12/30
Isn’t This Still Life, 2021 Edition 11/30
Both color sugarlift and spitbite aquatints and aquatint, c. 34 3/8 x 27 7/8 in. (87.31 x 70.8 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Woody De Othello
This lush, colorful landscape overflows with plant and animal life. In the artist’s words, it “suggests a natural ecosystem in which all life is interdependent.” With bold optimism, DuBasky embraces a belief in nature’s powers of renewal, even in this time of extreme climate change.
This work was inspired by the artist’s travels along the Silk Road in China, India, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, and her study of Buddhist cave paintings. She juxtaposes ancient images of birds and her own observations of nature, made at the same location many centuries later.
About the Artist
Valentina DuBasky’s travels along the Silk Road and her deep research into ancient Buddhist cave paintings are fundamental to her art. She explains, “In my large-scale series “Birds of the Silk Routes,” images of birds are juxtaposed with symbols, plants, and pictographic marks within [strata-like] layers. [I am] inspired by illuminated manuscripts and ancient images of birds from a variety of cultures.”
DuBasky earned her BFA and her MFA from Goddard College, Plainfield, VT, and now lives in New York. Her celebrated bird paintings were featured on WETA Public Television and shown at the United States Embassy in Beijing.
Articles and reviews of her work have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Artforum, ARTS Magazine, Art in America, Art & Antiques, Luxe Magazine, and Art News DuBasky’s artwork is included in the collections of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Newark Museum, NJ; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; the Orlando Museum, FL; and the Seattle Art Museum, among others.
Hózhó loosely translates as “peace, balance, beauty, and harmony” in the Navajo language. To be “in Hózhó” is to be at one with, and part of, the world around you. Crystal Lynn Dugi Dághaa’ii frequently includes the word in her decorative graphic designs.
Dághaa’ii started making art after receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, while her medications were being stabilized. She shared her artwork on social media and soon developed a successful web kiosk. “I believe deeply in Hózhó and bringing harmony to anyone who will see my artwork,” she says.
Crystal Lynn Dugi Dághaa’ii
Diné [Navajo], born 1985
Top: Turquoise Hózhó, 2022
Bottom:
But When You Come From Water, 2022
Both 31 5/8 x 31 11/16 in. (80.33 x 80.49 cm)
Archival pigment prints
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Crystal Lynn
Dugi Dághaa’ii
In Two Stories, an Art Deco structure has two doorways leading to an intertwined path inside. Edie Fake (he/him; they/them) uses architecture as a metaphor. The artist’s buildings map the elusive route of self-definition for Fake as a trans person. His elaborate architectural facades are symmetrical: each side is a mirror image of the other, joined together. Fake’s colorful geometry is a decorative front—and a protective screen.
Fake loosely bases his images on real buildings of importance to the LGBTQ+ history of Chicago, his hometown. As he explores the construction of queer identity, so too does he imagine a safe space for gender expression, glowing from within. He explains,
Because English lacked the words, I had trouble conveying the queer spaces inside myself until I began drawing architecture. Sometimes grounded and concrete, but mostly winding, ornamental, complex, and ecstatic, drawing architecture became my metaphor—or perhaps my semaphore?
Widely known for his indie comic books about a nonbinary humanoid on a journey of self-discovery, the artist now lives in Joshua Tree, in the California desert. “Being out here reminds me that things are flawed, funny, and contradictory, and that’s ok…. Being out here, I can think, ‘Oh yeah. There is joy in life, not just conundrums.’”
About the Artist Edie Fake explores the landscape of self-definition. Raised in a strict Polish Catholic household in Chicago, he delves into queer history and the puzzling, “psychic geography of trans people in society.” He thrives on a strong sense of community and explains,
For as long as I’ve been an artist, I have felt part of communities where bartering and collaborating are critical parts of growth. Cross-pollinating is how ideas spread and get expanded upon. Sharing what we can is how we help each other thrive on this messed up planet. It creates networks, emotional bonds, kinship, thought, and physical resources. You can’t always give and you can’t always take. The balance is something I’m always working out.
Fake’s art takes many forms—drawings, performance art, paintings, installations, prints, comics, books, and ’zines—and continues to be influenced by his background in animation and filmmaking. His work has been showcased at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; The Drawing Center, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Fake’s comic narrative Gaylord Phoenix won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His work has been featured in ArtForum, New York Times, The Paris Review, Art News, Art 21, Juxtapoz, HyperAllergic, The Comics Journal, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Fake received his BFA in film and animation from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 2002, and attended graduate school at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Twentynine Palms, CA, in the high desert around Joshua Tree.
Ana María Hernando takes inspiration from the floral embroidery and ornate lace worn for festivities in Spain, her grandparents’ homeland. Raised in Argentina in a family of textile workers, she often refers to the rich but “invisible” artistry of traditional women’s handicrafts.
Flowers remind us of the earth’s cycles of fullness and “fervor,” says Hernando. In these prints, she uses cut-outs to suggest a merger of flowers and sky. In her poem “We have flowers,” Hernando writes,
… I follow the floral cadences in the breeze, the elegance they serenely assume. A glamorous revolution invades my garden, floats over the greens, the whole year I wait for them. In the dark months I long for them.
Queens, now, The flowers, My house levitates in their aroma.
Ana María Hernando
Argentinian and American, born 1959
From left:
Flores Hechas de Cielo (Flowers Made Out of Sky) #1, 2021
Flores Hechas de Cielo (Flowers Made Out of Sky) #2, 2021
Both lithograph, Edition 20/25
Each 47 1/8 x 34 13/16 in. (119.7 x 88.42 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Ana María Hernando
About the Artist
Ana María Hernando bases many of her images on design motifs found in the elaborately woven and embroidered mantillas and mantones worn by women for religious festivities in Spain, her family’s homeland. She merges these forms with images of flowers, plants, and insects. For the past several years, she has focused on the graceful, uplifted shapes of flowers. For Hernando, flowers symbolize the seasonal cycle of life, from its glorious full bloom to inevitable wilting.
She gives each of her floral forms its own particular “pose.” Hernando says these works are “reminders of the playfulness of sensuality and spirituality, the fullness and the sparseness, the rules and the inspirations.” As an artist, she hopes to use “empathy as a way of making the invisible visible, as well as questioning our preconceptions of the other, their worth, and their value.”
Liz Hickok began photographing the poppies in her backyard in San Francisco as they started to bloom during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She was drawn to the patch of bright orange California poppies, a hardy and resilient native species whose petals open daily with the morning sun. The project was a way to bring a little color and relief to a stressful time. For Hickok, the flowers were a reminder of “the power of nature to heal and inspire.”
Hickok’s project soon became a collaboration. Her wife wrote a software program that morphed the photos into fluid, painterly abstract images. The artist then asked a technology designer to build an augmented reality program to add a virtual layer of lyrical movement to Cycles of Regeneration. She says,
Viewers can feel as if they are walking through the art, as the flowers flow and move around them. The effects suggest the movement of reflections in water, wind, or fire. At times, they might echo the flickering of memories and the passing of time, as the flowers bloom and fade.
Use the QR code below to view the augmented reality on your cell phone or iPad, via the Instagram app.
About the Artist
Liz Hickok works in many different forms: photography, video, sculpture, and public art. She constantly experiments with techniques and odd materials such as Jell-O, crystals gardens, and complex data visualizations. Hickok often changes the scale of her subject or otherwise morphs it to the point it becomes mysteriously unrecognizable at first glance.
As she blends art with science, Hickok brings a sense of whimsy and wonder to viewers. She first won widespread attention for her architectural models of cities made from Jell-O, which were featured on NPR, HGTV, Gastronomica, and in the New York Times. She won an award from the Food Network for “best use of food as art medium.” Most recently, she has turned to interactive technologies to close the gap between artist and viewer.
Hickok has developed photomurals for Meta (Facebook) and Google’s San Francisco offices, as well as for University of California San Francisco Hospital and Sutter Hospital. She recently created an outdoor photomural (with integrated layers of augmented reality, video, and sound), and an interactive large-scale video projection in Palo Alto, CA.
Hickok received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA; BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and her BA in art history from Tufts University, Boston. She lived and worked in Boston for over ten years before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Hickok has created elaborate installations at Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA, and the Exploratorium, San Francisco, as well as for public art programs in Scottsdale, AZ, and University of California San Francisco at Mission Bay. Her work is also in the collections of California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco; Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Blue Shield of California, San Francisco; Mills College Art Museum, Mills College, Oakland, CA; Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; and Santa Fe Art Institute, NM.
Peter Hiller compares glorious expanses of blue sky with close-up shots of battered paint on old cars. He seeks out sublime abstract patterns, no matter how unlikely the source. Moments of beauty, Hiller reminds us, often hide in plain sight.
Hiller attends Concours d’LeMons in Seaside, CA, nearly every year. This renegade parade of humble, junker cars is held concurrently with the upscale Concours d’Elegance in Pebble Beach, CA.
Hiller finds his version of elegance in the old stains, rust, cracks, and ground-down surfaces of the beloved clunkers and old lemons at the Seaside gathering. He takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the esteemed art of abstraction—and celebrates imperfection.
Peter Hiller
American, born 1952
Untitled 2022
Three archival pigment prints
Each 24 3/4 x 19 1/2 in. (62.87 x 49.53 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Peter Hiller
About the Artist
Peter Hiller grew up in Santa Monica and moved to the Monterey Peninsula in 1981. He and his wife Celeste taught at All Saints’ Day School in Carmel Valley for over 34 years. Hiller was a founding board member of the Monterey County Youth Museum, served on the board of the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, Carmel, CA, and taught many classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in Monterey. He was pivotal to the community effort to secure preservation status for the Monterey County Courthouse, now on the National Register of Historic Places—for which he received the Preservationist of the Year Award from the Alliance of Monterey Area Preservationists.
Hiller graduated from Johnston College, an experimental college affiliated with the University of Redlands, WA, with a BA and received his teaching credentials from University of California, Los Angeles.
Chris Johanson offers off-beat messages of advice and consolation in his series “Perceptions.” These prints, he says, are “quiet, quick sketches of thoughts I want to share.”
With his deliberately childlike style, Johanson adds a dose of dry humor to his simple expressions of compassion. He acknowledges human struggles with a matter-of-fact acceptance that lets viewers know he, too, has been in these psychological trenches.
As a child with a learning disability and mental health concerns, Johanson found peacefulness in making art. His suburban childhood in San Jose, CA, often serves as his subject matter. Well-known in the skateboarding community and as ’zine artist, Johanson went on to become a leading member of the Mission School of street artists in San Francisco. He is widely recognized for his poignant cartoony style and warm, yet cryptic, insights on the human condition.
Chris Johanson
American, born 1968
Abstract Art with Cosmic Narrative, 2014
Color sugarlift, soapground and spitbite aquatints, and hardground etching with drypoint, Edition 14/35
42 7/8 x 47 7/8 in. (108.9 x 121.6 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Chris Johanson
About the Artist
Chris Johanson was an early participant in San Francisco’s Mission School of street artists, known for its urban interventions, use of cast-off materials, and funky style. His paintings, drawings, and public art are all characterized by his sincere, quirky sense of humor and intentionally naïve style. His imagery is rooted, he says, in his commitments to compassion and environmentalism.
Johanson was born in San Jose, CA, and considers his renegade art a response to his suburban childhood. He grew up skateboarding, attending punk rock shows, and drawing. He first painted skateboards and houses, and emerged as a 'zine artist with his publication of Karmaboarder, a popular skateboarding and art ‘zine of the 1980s. In 1989, Johanson moved to the Mission District, where he began drawing cartoons on lampposts and bathroom walls using black Sharpie pens. He created one of the initial skate deck graphics for Anti-Hero, the popular San Francisco-based brand, which introduced his art to a much wider audience. Johanson also played in a band called Tina, Age 13, whose numerous records included "The Alcoholic Father of My Inner Child" and "Good Feelings." He achieved international recognition after his art was included in the prestigious biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2002.
From 1989 until 1992, Johanson attended City College of San Francisco. He has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. His art has been featured in exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, OR; Pacific Design Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland. His works are in the collections of the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Caroline Kent and her identical twin sister made up a secret language when they were young, giving them an exclusive means of communicating that was indecipherable to others. When she began painting, Kent saw the possibility of creating a similarly intimate, coded visual language. She developed a vocabulary of playful, colorful abstract symbols. Kent’s images entice us with hints of recognition—perhaps a hand, an eye—but withhold the storyline as they dance across the page.
A fan of foreign films, Kent is fascinated by the slippages of meaning between the image on the screen, the tone of language, and translated subtitles. Abstract art offered her a way to explore parallel limits of communication. Her titles read like cryptic translations of her imagery, open to our individual interpretation.
Alongside her cheerful pastel palette, Kent loves the color black. She says “it’s a space that can hide things, so there are ghost elements. It can act like a mist. It can act like a cloud, like a veil,” and lead us to think “about mystery, intrigue, the unknown…”
54 15/16 x 40 9/16 in. (139.54 x 103.03 cm)
A poem about the cosmos, 2022
Color aquatint, sugarlift and spitbite aquatints with softground etching
55 15/16 x 40 9/16 in. (142.08 x 103.03 cm)
Both edition 20/35
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Caroline Kent
Caroline Kent
American, born 1975
From left:
The Charlatan's sleight of hand, 2022
We hold them inside us, 2022
Both color aquatint and sugarlift aquatint with softground etching, Edition 20/35
Each 55 x 40 13/16 in. (139.7 x 103.66 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Caroline Kent
About the Artist
Caroline Kent is intrigued by the language of abstraction and the abstraction of language. She works intuitively, first moving cut-out shapes around the canvas as she tries out various configurations and combinations. Rhythm, tone, and pattern are key tools for her.
Over the years, she’s developed a vocabulary of shapes and symbols that dance through her lyrical compositions. Some function like punctuation marks within a busy field of activity. She thinks of her recent imagery, “as formulas or equations situated inside the cosmos; the cosmos here being metaphorical for a kind of space that invites one to comprehend in new ways.”
Kent’s art is inspired by her personal experiences and her Mexican and African-American heritage. She favors lush colors and layered textures. While a Peace Corps volunteer in Transylvania, Kent was struck by the pastel house facades that enlivened village streets. She adopted a similar palette of soft pinks, greens, oranges, and yellows.
The artist spent her teen years working summer jobs in agriculture (such as detasseling corn), in the small town of Sterling, IL. She attended Illinois State University, Normal, on an athletic scholarship for track and field. Kent found herself lingering in the campus art gallery, fostering a fascination with the geometry of Russian constructivism and the intrigue of foreign films. After receiving her BS degree in art, she joined the Peace Corps and later returned to school to earn her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Kent’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Flag Art Foundation, New York; DePaul Art Museum, DePaul University, Chicago; California AfricanAmerican Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among other venues. She has been honored with awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Artadia, McKnight Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her work is represented in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dallas Museum of Art; and Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN. Kent is assistant professor of art, theory, and practice at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She lives in Chicago.
Tiny scale is a mechanism for “meticulous attention,” Em Kettner says. Have you ever noticed how a small object can seem insignificant from a distance, yet becomes precious when seen up close? Kettner explores this reversal of perception and value judgement.
Kettner’s minutely detailed animals merge into the background—as if in hiding. As a person with muscular dystrophy, she navigates the invisibility and biases disabled people often face within the social landscape. She says,
As someone with a physical disability, I experience my own body as inextricable from support systems. If I rely on another person to help me stand up, then in that instance I have four extra limbs working in tandem with mine. The characters I create exist within these moments of expansion, mutualism, and dependence…. [My artworks] celebrate a support system that in my life has been both social (care providers, animals, family, friends, lovers) and designed (furniture, mobility aids, architectural features).
Kettner is active in national networks of disabled contemporary artists and teaches art to adults with developmental disabilities.
Em Kettner
American, born 1988
From left:
Having Wriggled, 2015
After the Argonauts, 2015
Pages 158–159:
To Protect the Carrots, 2015 Fall Turning, 2015
All works ink and graphite
Each 5 ½ x 3 ½ in. (13.97 x 8.89 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Em Kettner
About the Artist
In Em Kettner’s works on paper, ceramic sculptures, and paintings, tiny scale is a mechanism for meaning. She explains,
I’ve always been most curious about ritual and votive objects: those collected and carried by pilgrims, saints, and children; those used in healing or transformation ceremonies; and those with covert or lost purposes…. In the case of my work, the scale invites the viewer to approach intimately and lean in or crouch down. Closer inspection reveals [exactly how something is drawn, painted or stitched]. I want to imbue the objects with spiritual significance or animism. Paying meticulous attention to something so small is a way to suggest deep import.
Born in Philadelphia, Kettner now lives in Richmond, CA. She earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Recent solo exhibitions include those at François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Goldfinch, Chicago; and Specialist, Seattle. Kettner’s work has been reviewed and published in ArtForum, Art in America, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), HyperAllergic, and Sixty Inches from Center. She has been awarded the Wynn Newhouse Award, the MIUSA Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability, and the 2019-2020 AAC Diversity + Leadership Fellowship.
Almost every Sunday, Byron Kim makes a small painting of the sky and adds a few sentences about his life or mood. Taking time to look upward has become a personal ritual— his way of observing far more than the day’s shades of blue and cloud formations. Kim’s “Sunday Paintings” are akin to diary entries. He often mentions his wife, Lisa (also a painter), and his children (Emmett, Emma, and Addee).
Here, Kim contrasts daily human details with the big picture of the heavens. Everything changes, inside and out, he tells us. His “Sunday Paintings” recall the meditation practice of watching thoughts and emotions as they pass through your mind, ever-shifting like the clouds in the sky.
The artist started his “Sunday Paintings” over twenty years ago as a side project. It became a lifelong practice that reminds Kim “we are a part of nature.” He says, “My work is mostly concerned with the relationship of a part to the whole. How am I connected to the others in the world, and how are we all connected to the greater whole?”
Byron Kim
American, born 1961
Sunday Painting, 11/24/14, 2014
Pages 162–163:
Sunday Painting, 3/22/09, 2009
Sunday Painting, 11/14/21, 2021
Acrylic and pencil on panel
Each 16 x 16 in. (40.64 x 40.64 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Byron Kim
Ella and Emmett are here at my studio. Yesterday, we all went to Jonathan and Jodi’s wedding, which was really quite moving. It’s really amazing how far Jon has come. Thanksgiving is well timed this year. Or as Lisa said, “All the tragedies have come full circle.”
Lisa and I seem to be communicating a bit better lately. Maybe am more able to bury my petty jealousies now that winter is lifting. Addee scored a gorgeous goal at the end of the match today—high far post!
Last night Sigrid, Karyn, Jeanine, Martha and Brian came over for soba noodles, tofu and Lisa's unparalleled apple pie. I have not laughed so much in months.
I have been working for a full week on the bottom third of a painting that I thought would take a morning to finish. Tonight GO club meets at our house. I feel too exhausted to play.
Personal perspective
Byron Kim’s “Sunday Paintings” bring him perspective on the ups and downs of ordinary life. His scribbled texts, he says, are a way of “juxtaposing something small with something very large”—of putting his daily life in bigger context.
Kim lives in Brooklyn, NY, in the heart of the city. He says he thinks most people take the sky for granted. For him, it represents “everything.” The sky is a reminder of the beauty of nature and the scale of the universe. These paintings are based on the artist’s exacting observations of light and color. At times, he paints them from memory.
What do you do to give yourself perspective when something perhaps feels too big to handle, or blown out of proportion?
Daily practices
Kim made a commitment to himself to make a painting every Sunday. He rarely misses a week, even if he’s traveling. He chooses a canvas size small enough to fit in his carry-on luggage and uses fast-drying acrylic paints. Over the past 22 years, he has created “Sunday Paintings” in cities around the globe, on a plane, and even riding on a bus to the airport in Seoul. The ongoing project reminds him “we are part of nature.”
Kim also swims nearly every day, often in the ocean, and meditates regularly. He diligently maintains daily practices of self-care and contemplation.
What do you do to take care of yourself and bring balance to your life?
Art, nature, and spirit
Kim initially wanted to be a poet. In college, he majored in English and studied the writings of American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who felt a deep gratitude for nature and found spirituality within everyday experience. Kim says,
I didn’t have any sustained, formal spiritual or religious community when I was young. became drawn to Buddhism and Taoism in the last fifteen years, specifically to meditation. I’ve become a very avid meditator. I think it connects to my working life, my art life, in the sense that I’ve come to realize nothing stays the same. Everything changes. And something about unity, that a relationship exists between the very small and the vast. Everything is connected, and interconnected: our little concerns, the world around a tiny animal like an ant, or a flower are all related to the stars.
What is your most meaningful experience of nature? Did it feel calming? Expansive? What words would you use to describe it?
I am always dissatisfied with my work. There is always something to improve. Working in series allows me to make it better.
—Byron Kim
Don’t take no for an answer. Just keep working. Stay in touch with people with whom you find common ground…. You know, you have to spend a lot of time with your work, a lifetime of care with your work.
About the Artist
Byron Kim first gained recognition with his ongoing project Synecdoche (1991–present), a grid of small panels, each painted a flat color based on a specific individual’s skin tone. The work now includes over 400 “portraits,” identified by the sitter’s name. Among them are Kim’s friends, neighbors, relatives, fellow artists, children, and strangers. The work is a study of identity, race, and representation—the people of this nation who make up the whole. It is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Kim typically works abstractly and always in series. He is a master of subtle color variations. The “Sunday Paintings” are a departure for him, deliberately more romantic in feel than his other work. The title is part parody. It describes his commitment to make a painting every Sunday and also jokingly refers to the weekend efforts of amateur artists (aka “Sunday painters”).
Byron Kim was born in San Diego, CA, and was raised in Connecticut and southern California. His parents, both doctors, immigrated to the U.S. from Korea in the 1950s. His family valued education above all and always supported his interest in writing and art. Kim received his undergraduate degree in English literature from Yale University, New Haven, CT, then studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME. He is a senior critic at Yale University and co-director of the Yale Norfolk School of Art, Norfolk Historic District, CT.
Among his many awards are John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship; Louise Nevelson Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; Joan Mitchell Foundation grant; and Alpert Award in the Arts. His art is represented in the collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among many others. Byron Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and San Diego, CA.
Ethan Lauesen (they/them) looks at gender and LGBTQ+ identity through the lens of Indigenous culture and community. Raised in the interior of Alaska, they tell a very personal story of self-acceptance.
Self Reflecting, Loving Yourself Can Be So Difficult is a sequence of self-portraits. The artist’s mirrored images describe a multi-faceted sense of self, shaped in part by the day-to-day rejection they’ve experienced as a queer person in a rural community. Lauesen’s face is shielded by dogwood blossoms—their mother and grandmother’s favorite flower. Here, family offers protection from the eyes of others.
The artist says, “The moment I found my voice through my work, I began to strive for an intimate narrative that would have an impact within my communities.”
About the Artist
Ethan Lauesen focuses on cultural perceptions of gender and LGBTQ identity, specifically in the rural interior of Alaska. Lauesen’s art is a very personal response to intersectional issues of Indigenous identity, gender, and sexuality. Their autobiographical narratives document changes in attitude.
The artist often uses mirror imaging, or the multiplication of a form, to emphasize their shifting feelings of unease. Lauesen contextualizes individual experience within the activities, routines, and cultures of their urban and rural environments.
For Lauesen, the unpredictability of the etching process forces a tolerance for unintentional blemishes and mirrors their own journey of selfacceptance. They received a BFA in printmaking and painting from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and were honored with a virtual residency at the Anchorage Museum of Art, AK, in 2020. Lauesen was born and raised in Klawock, in rural southeastern Alaska.
Self Reflecting, Loving Yourself Can Be So Difficult, 2020
Etching, aquatint and chine-collé, Edition 5/20
19 7/16 x 21 1/16 in. (49.37 x 53.5 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Ethan Lauesen
Danielle Lawrence plays with the line between recognizable imagery and abstraction. Here, a sweatshirt dissolves into soft veils of color and shadow, fading into the background. Like the camouflage pattern of the fabric, the image speaks of absence and presence.
This work is one of a series of paintings of clothing in which Lawrence explored working-class identity, using apparel as a surrogate for the individual. Now you see me, now you don’t she says, also conveys the “psychological space” that arises when a person attempts to conceal one’s self in order to fit in.
About the Artist
Danielle Lawrence (she/they) explores representation, environmentalism, feminism, and various social and artistic hierarchies. They frequently rethink the use of traditional materials and the painterly gesture. Hybrid processes are, for Lawrence, a way to explore “a queer approach to the historical form of painting and the dominant narratives.”
Lawrence received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA. They have taught at the San Francisco Art Institute; California College of the Arts, San Francisco; Mills College, Oakland, CA; and San Francisco State University.
The artist’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at venues such as Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco; Walter McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute; Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, CA; and Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA. It is included in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Fidelity, Boston; Mills College Art Museum, Mills College, Oakland, CA; and the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA.
Lehuauakea (they/them) creates “microscopic representations of mythologies, origin stories, and environmental relationships since time immemorial.”
Guided by Our Stars (We Were Never Lost) features the constellation Ka Makau Nui O Maui [Maui's fish hook], known in western cultures as Scorpius. Alongside creation stories of the Pacific Islands, the image recalls canoe migrations across the oceans. The artist explains,
This constellation is the subject of many oral histories and mythologies throughout the Pacific. In Polynesia, this was the fishhook that the demigod Maui used to pull islands up from the bottom of the ocean. In Hawai‘i, this was the fishhook that Maui used to bring the islands closer together. It is a primary star line used for traditional Pacific Islands celestial navigation in the summer, when it is visible for most of the night.
For Lehuauakea, art is an act of cultural retention and advocacy. They learned the skills of hula and making kapa [barkcloth] and studied their family’s Indigenous language. “At the core of my practice are the kuleana [responsibilities] I have to my community.” Lehuauakea’s art takes many forms—from kites to a recent mural for Meta (Facebook).
About the Artist
Lehuauakea (they/them) is a Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa [barkcloth] maker from Pāpaíkou, Hawai‘i. Their family lineages are connected to Maui, Kaua‘i, and Moku O Keawe [the Big Island].
The artist embraces both Indigenous traditions and contemporary art practice. They are skilled in the labor-intensive craft of kapa, ‘ohe kāpala (carved bamboo printing tools), and the use of natural pigments. Kapa is made by beating the bark of paper mulberry, then felting the tough fibers into a soft, textured fabric that is dyestamped with geometric patterns. The art nearly died out before its revival in the 1960s. Lehuauakea spent years studying kapa making with master artists in Hawai’i and Samoa and is committed to passing on the skill to future generations. Traditionally, men harvested the materials and made the tools; women made the cloth. A nonbinary artist, Lehuauakea takes on dual roles, carving ohe kāpala [bamboo stamps inscribed with geometric patterns], stripping the bark off the trees, then beating, hand-printing, and painting it using earth pigments, plant dyes, and charcoal from wildfires.
This print was made at Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts, an educational center and fine art print shop east of Portland, OR, on the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, OR. Established in 1992 by Native artists James Lavadour and Phillip Cash Cash, the institute is located in the Saint Andrew’s Mission historic school house. It is the only center of its kind on a reservation anywhere in the United States. Crow’s Shadow has become a center for Indigenous printmaking, attracting prominent Indigenous artists to its residency program.
Lehuauakea
Kānaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian], born 1996
Guided By Our Stars (We Were Never Lost) 2021
Lithograph, Edition 14/14
36 3/4 x 30 3/8 in. (93.35 x 77.15 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Lehuauakea
Lehuauakea currently lives in the Pacific Northwest and Pāpa‘ikou. They earned a BFA in painting with a minor in art and ecology from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Willamette University, Portland, OR. Their work was included in the 2023 Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as well as exhibitions at Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Maui Arts and Cultural Center, Kahului, Hawai’i; Center for Native Arts and Cultures, Portland, OR; Portland Art Museum, OR. Their work was featured in a podcast by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and at Meta (Facebook) in Bellevue, WA.
Carmen Lomas Garza brings to life her memories of the Mexican-American community of her childhood in south Texas. Here, she pictures a multi-generational dance social in the desert landscape.
“I saw the need,” she says, “to create images that would elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican-Americans, both adults and children, and at the same time serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture.”
Lomas Garza began making art at the age of seven, after watching her mother paint and her grandmother design embroidery patterns. During college, she followed in her parents’ footsteps as activists and decided she wanted to make art that was populist in style and content.
She made this print just after completing a large-scale commission for the International Terminal at San Francisco International Airport, similarly titled ¡Baile!
About the Artist
Carmen Lomas Garza is well known as a painter, illustrator, and children’s book author whose work is rooted in her Chicana heritage. Throughout her varied work and public art, she brings to life her memories of MexicanAmerican communities in South Texas and California, where she has lived for many years.
Garza received her BS in art education from Texas Arts and Industry University, Kingsville (now Texas A&M University). Her parents had been involved in political organizing through the American GI Forum, and Garza followed in their footsteps by organizing on her college campus. During her undergraduate studies, she decided that it was important for her to create art that would be understood by people of all ages. She earned her MA in education at Juarez-Lincoln/Antioch Graduate School, Austin, TX, and her MFA from San Francisco State University.
She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and an artist-in-residence grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy.
Garza’s work is in many museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; Oakland Museum of California; El Paso Museum of Art, TX; and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Carmen Lomas Garza: A Retrospective was organized by the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art; South Texas Institute for the Arts, Corpus Christi; Ellen Noël Art Museum, Odessa, TX; National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM; and the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL.
With a quirky sense of humor, McConnell enlists his charming animals to shed light on human vulnerabilities. Art, he says, is the way he makes sense of the world—and of his own anxieties.
His “social network generated hybrids” illustrate the insecurities that social media can trigger. McConnell pictures the awkward, uncomfortable result when we attempt to cloak ourselves in someone else’s skin, so to speak.
His lazy giraffe and antler-ed jackal gently ask us to consider what happens when we are not true to ourselves—when we perform for others or strive to meet impossible expectations.
Hector Mendoza collects and presses plants that are believed to have medicinal properties. He spray-paints over the foliage, creating a negative shape that he then fills in with layers of bright color and pattern. Mendoza’s plant forms take on a radiant sense of energy.
These joyful works are a tribute to his grandfather, Dionicio Mendoza, a fifth-generation curandero [healer] who was much revered in his Michoacán community as an herbal practitioner. The artist grew up with deep respect for the importance of faith, ritual, and alternative healing traditions. His grandfather was of Afro-Cuban heritage and practiced a hybrid form of Yoruba-Purépecha—a mix of Catholic, African, and Indigenous beliefs that honored spirits of the natural world.
“Making art for me is a way of life, like breathing and eating,” Mendoza says. “Art making is an everyday ritual that keeps me grounded, challenges my intellect, and gives me purpose in life. I am dyslexic—making art is the best way for me to communicate.”
About the Artist
Hector Mendoza is an artist, educator, and curator whose work ranges from paintings to large-scale sculpture and public art works. He is committed to making art that is rooted in the community and brings attention to social issues. “The more you are exposed to art… the more compassionate and mindful you’ll be with others,” he says.
All works 2021; Spray paint and acrylic paint on primed nylon mesh
Each 24 x 20 in. (60.96 x 50.8 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Hector Mendoza
Mendoza was born in Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico. When he was twelve, his family relocated to the ranching and agricultural community of King City, CA, in the Salinas Valley. He graduated from high school with honors and was awarded a scholarship to attend California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. He initially studied graphic design, then received a full scholarship to study fine arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from which he received his BFA. After spending an extended time in Europe at artist-in-residency programs in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and England, he earned his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Mendoza was honored with an artist’s grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 2022. His sculpture was cited by national art critics as a highlight of the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA. Other honors include the Eureka Fellowship (2004), Kunst Now (2005), and Eco-Conciente (2007). In 2015, He was awarded the Lucas Artist Residency at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA, where he collaborated with Amalia MesaBains, Viviana Paredes, and Steve White to create spaces of healing, contemplation, memory, and collaboration.
Mendoza is an assistant professor in the visual and public art department at California State University, Monterey Bay, in Marina, where he teaches sculpture, painting, and screen printing. He lives in Salinas and San Jose, CA.
The natural world is Christine Nguyen’s source of imagination. In Migrating Caverns, she pictures a strange sci-fi landscape where life-forms morph and trees nestle in the belly of fish. As she builds her mysterious miniature cosmos, Nguyen says she fantasizes “that the depths of the ocean reach into outer space—that through an organic prism, vision can fluctuate between the micro and macroscopic.”
Fascinated by nature’s curiosities, the artist draws upon the theories of naturalists, artists, occult philosophers, and astrologers dating back to the 16th-century. She imagines wild possibilities and commonalities among species. In her intricate worlds, “there are no waste materials: vision is a renewable resource.”
Nguyen’s sense of intertwined oneness is rooted, too, in contemporary science. She quotes astrophysicist Carl Sagan, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
About the Artist
Christine Nguyen’s subject matter is wildly imaginative. She explains,
My practice is devoted to the natural world and its curiosities. It has been my inspiration and a place that I find meditative and complex but also mysterious. It has allowed me to continuously know more about the world we live in. I’ve been drawn to 19thcentury [thinkers] such as Robert Fludd, a cosmologist, astrologer, and occult philosopher who believed that every plant in the world had its own equivalent star in the firmament… I have been developing a personal cosmology in which commonalities among species, forms, and environments become visible and expressive, suggesting past narratives and possible futures.
Nguyen was born in Mountain View, CA, and now lives in Aurora, CO. She received her BFA from California State University, Long Beach, and her MFA from University of California, Irvine. Her work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brentwood, CA; Grunwald Center for Graphic Art, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, Brentwood, CA; CedarsSinai Medical Center, Los Angeles; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Hanoi; Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; Art Collection of the Cleveland Clinic; and Microsoft Collection, Redmond, WA.
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Chrisitne Nguyen
Nguyen is the 2022-2024 artist in residence at Redline, Denver. She has been an artist in residence at Montello Foundation, NV; Pacific Bonsai Museum, Federal Way, WA; Gyeongju International Residency Art Festa 2018, Korea; U.S Dept. of Interior; WFAR, Wildfjords, Iceland; Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, CA; Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM; and the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA.
As she assembles her collages, Natani Notah builds a narrative behind the scene in her mind. Here, an abstract figure floats above its earthbound companion, invisibly connected like a kite on a string. In her work, she envisions “what it means to hold up, hold onto, and let go of each other simultaneously, across generations and subjectivities.”1
With outstretched arms, one of Notah’s figures speaks to this idea above, while below, another figure is marching towards a hogan—a Navajo representation of home—and carries a flag that ironically advises to “KEEP CALM” as something falls from the sky. Notah is interested in how slogans like “keep calm and carry on” actively dismiss very valid emotional reactions to times of crisis.
Natani Notah lets her mind flow freely while making her collages, bringing together various images and symbols to create a multitude of associations for the viewer.
Here, a pink ribbon trails behind a figure in the sky, directly referencing the ribbons used to raise awareness of breast cancer, honor survivors, and remember those lost to the disease (including the artist’s grandmother). Notah thinks of her forms as living entities to whom she is still connected by memory and imagination.
Holding on by a string, a figure with antler-like arms balances on the red earth of a tiny hogan and waves a LOVE pennant. Notah says it is a declaration that “love wins” the race in the end. Love endures.
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Art and autobiography
Notah has lost multiple family members to cancer and in many ways has turned to art to help process her feelings—to imagine a world where she could “control the outcome.” In her collages, “familiar and unfamiliar figures float, reach, and walk toward something or someone else.”
Women’s issues
Notah also brings pop culture into her work, relishing the absurdity of unlikely combinations. She became interested in the phrase “Keep calm and carry on” while watching the TV program “Antiques Roadshow” and then researched its origins. The slogan appeared on a motivational poster produced by the British government in1939, to raise morale as the U.K. prepared for World War II and potential air attacks. The phrase advises discipline and “a stiff upper lip” in the face of catastrophic trouble.
“Keep calm and carry on” entered the realm of pop culture c. 2000 and now appears on everything from mugs to baby clothes. The slogan reminds Notah of the way women’s emotions are frequently downplayed or invalidated by many similar sayings, such as “just get over it” and “you gotta’ calm down.” She thought of the figure holding the “KEEP CALM” flag in her collage as an attendee at the nation-wide Women’s March or a similar peaceful protest.
I am a Native woman making work that draws on my lived experience and connections to my community and culture.
—Natani Notah
For me, Native feminism is deeply connected to…. resisting assimilation, reclaiming and enacting our belief systems that respect the strength and the sacred role of women in the community.2
2. Video interview with the artist, in conjunction with the exhibition Native Feminisms apexart, New York, Jan. 15, 2021, see apexart.org/hawley.php.
About the Artist
Natani Notah explores contemporary Native American existence through the lens of Indigenous Feminism. She brings to light practices of exploitation and environmental injustice, with a focus on the crossroads of history, politics, land, and human rights. Inequities in healthcare and environmental degradation of Native lands are among her ongoing concerns.
Notah works in many media, from large-scale sculpture to delicate collages. Her aesthetic is spare and contemporary, yet amplified by her inclusion of traditional materials and Native techniques such as appliqué beadwork. Notah’s art is anchored equally by her academic interest in feminist theory.
Laura Owens draws viewers into her fanciful, imaginary landscape, lit by moonglow. The artist’s style is deliberately lighthearted, inspired by her love of folk art and homey crafts. This peacock is a riff on a bird in an 18th-century American embroidery. It has the sweet naivety of a storybook illustration.
When Owens was in art school, she decided to “stop worrying about making art so much and just make stuff I liked and wanted to see.” She brought her love of charming and goofy images into the “high art” of painting, upending expectations. She soon became widely admired in the art world for her ability to balance intuition and intellect—and for her down-to-earth values.
Owens says that an artist’s life is a “whole proposal for a way of looking at the world.”
Laura Owens’s pioneering approach to painting has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold work challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship of avant-garde art to craft, pop culture, and technology. She is often credited with leveling old-school hierarchies of painting by bringing humble domestic interests into the realm of fine art.
When she came to Crown Point Press to make the series of prints that includes Untitled Owens brought books on American folk art and 19thcentury Japanese brocades. The animal images that resulted come purely from her imagination, yet they are rooted stylistically in her historical sources and love of the decorative arts.
Owens emerged on the Los Angeles art scene during the mid-1990s. She began incorporating quirky personal allusions, doodling, and common craft materials into her abstract canvases—quite an outrageous move at the time. Silkscreen, computer manipulations, digital printing, and unlikely materials later worked their way into both her paintings and works on paper.
Owens received a BFA in 1992 from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and an MFA in 1994 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She lives in Los Angeles. Her work received early critical acclaim and has been featured in solo exhibitions at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, France (alongside canvases by Van Gogh), among many other locales.
Owens’s paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Tate Modern, London; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Fingerprint is a kind of self-portrait. Instead of showing his face, however, Rex Ray depicts the body’s one-of-a-kind identifying “signature.” Within Ray’s fingerprint is a whorl of other thumb-like shapes. The image is a statement about both personhood and community.
Ray is known for his vibrant pop style and brilliant graphic designs for books, products, and concert posters for rock musicians such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop. He explored various ideals of beauty, bridging the worlds of painting, commercial art, and street culture. Ray was also a major force in San Francisco’s literary, music, and AIDS activist communities during a pivotal era for LGBTQ civil rights.
One of the first artists to adopt computer-based technology, he continually experimented with techniques. Ray often used his own artworks as raw material, cutting them up freely and recombining reproductions, Xeroxes, and handmade woodblocks. Later in his career, he committed himself to making one collage every night, “as a way to get away from computers.”
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Estate of Rex Ray
About the Artist
Rex Ray was born on a U.S. Army base in Landstuhl, Germany, and raised in Colorado Springs, CO. His given name was Michael Patterson, but he adopted the moniker Rex Ray before moving to San Francisco in 1981, inspired by Andy Warhol. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with Sam Tchakalian, Kathy Acker, and Angela Davis. Ray worked in the worlds of both fine art and commercial art. He was very active in the city’s arts, music, and literary communities and also performed with the multimedia music collective The Residents.
Ray was one of the first artists to embrace Mac-based technologies for artmaking. His computer-assisted designs include the first graphics for the San Francisco chapter of the AIDS-advocacy organization Act Up; many guerilla marketing flyers and posters for queer nightclubs; and numerous book covers for City Lights Books. His impressive client roster in the music, fashion, entertainment, and design industries includes David Bowie, The Residents, Bill Graham Presents, DreamWorks, Levi’s, Neiman Marcus, Sony Music, Warner Brothers, and Apple. Rex Ray’s designs have been licensed and reproduced on scarves, carpets, ceramics, wristwatches, surfboards, and even a Mini Cooper car.
Ray’s signature technique involved a complicated process of combining Xerography, handmade woodblock prints, newsprint, and magazine images into vibrant color schemes and abstract patterns. His works reference mid-century modernism, the early 20th-century Dada movement, decorative arts, Fluxus, and Pop Art. Ray is widely respected for his ability to speak to ideals of beauty during an era known for heady conceptual art.
Ray’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum, OH; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Through a simple word list, Dorian Reid conjures a world of dazzling wonders—from the sunrise to gemstones. She lands on the word “princess,” as if she has been endowed with the riches of these natural delights.
The idea of utopia—a future paradise—inspires the artist. “I’m looking for a place like that because I went through a lot of anger and hostility in my childhood,” she explains. Through her art, she creates spaces of peace, pleasure, and lingering calm.
Reid is an artist at NIAD Art Center, a workshop for adult artists with developmental disabilities in Richmond, CA. The optimism of her art reflects, too, her family’s long legacy of civic leadership and social activism in the AfricanAmerican community.
Dorian Reid
American, born 1957
Untitled, 2021
Linoleum print, Edition 1/1
46 5/16 x 24 5/8 in. (117.63 x 62.55 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © NIAD Art Center
About the Artist Dorian Reid is one of 70 select artists supported by NAID Art Center, a studio art program in Richmond, CA, for adult artists with disabilities. She paints, draws, works with fabrics, and makes clay sculptures of fanciful figures and animals. Reid is inspired by her love for animals, childhood memories, nature, and her family’s long commitment to civil rights.
Reid’s extended family is well known in the East Bay community. Her father and mother, Mel Reid and Betty Reid Soskin, founded Reid Records in Berkeley, CA, one of the first Black-owned music stores. Her mother was a community advocate and activist who later worked for a state legislator. She became involved in the National Park Service’s development of the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, CA. Reid Soskin was instrumental to the park’s interpretive narrative, particularly the inclusion of Black women’s history and the story of segregation in the military and local wartime industries. At the age of 84, she became a park ranger there and received national recognition for her groundbreaking advocacy work. In 2021, upon turning 100, Betty Reid Soskin was widely honored as the country’s oldest park ranger.
Reid was raised with this positive spirit of activism and determination. “The politics have been handed down to me. It’s from generation to generation,” she says.
Janica Soro builds worlds populated by a cast of imaginary characters. She sets her stories in tropical landscapes that bring to life her childhood memories of the Philippines, using digital illustration software.
“My art,” she says, “becomes an outward expression of my inner world.” In Journey Home four companions come to the end of a long trek through a rugged valley, welcomed by lush jungle and cool blue skies.
Soro’s family includes many healthcare workers and she was affected deeply by the COVID-19 pandemic. Art became her way to explore “the importance of family and coping through seasons of grief”—as well as a path for self-discovery. “As I navigate through an unstable world, I am reminded by my family that I am enough. I am told to find a spot to reflect on how I’ve grown as a person and appreciate who I am in the present moment,” Soro says.
Soro recently graduated from Pacific Grove High School. Both her parents are nurses at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula and she, too, plans to pursue a career in healthcare.
Cherokee, Creek, and Osage, born 1980
Miles & Maude, 2019
Lithograph, Edition 11/16
12 1/4 x 15 in. (31.12 x 38.1 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. © Yatika Starr Fields
About the Artist
Yatika Starr Fields is a painter and muralist, influenced by landscape painting and graffiti culture. His work is characterized by dense patterning and a very bold use of color. He uses symbols and narrative elements that refer to contemporary concerns as well as Indigenous traditions. Throughout his work, Fields prompts viewers “to rethink and reshape their relationships to the world around them.”
Fields was born in Tulsa, OK. His parents are Anita Fields (Osage), a well-known ceramicist, and Tom Fields (Muscogee), an accomplished photographer. Fields has made art since childhood and by high school had his own painting studio, which he funded by working at a restaurant.
Fields attended the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, and participated in a study abroad program in Sienna, Italy. He studied photography, painting, and sculpture at the University of Oklahoma, Norman and then moved east to pursue his degree in painting at the Art Institute of Boston. He later received a fellowship from the Urban Artist Initiative in New York; a Native Creative Development Grant from Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA; and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
In 2016, Fields joined the water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota to protest the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred land. Many of his recent paintings address the struggle and hope that permeates the complex issue of Indigenous survival.
His work is represented in the collections of the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Oklahoma State Museum of Art, Stillwater; Sam Noble Museum, Norman, OK; Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Wereldmuseum, Leiden, The Netherlands; and Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. Fields has completed large-scale public murals in Tulsa, OK; Santa Fe, NM; Oklahoma City, OK; Phoenix, AZ; and Portland, OR. He currently lives in Tulsa, OK.
“I take the brushstroke, an icon of abstract painting, and let gravity play with it so it becomes an image,” Pat Steir says.
Alphabet: Secondary features her signature image—an abstract veil or ‘waterfall’—in the secondary colors of purple, orange, and green.
Taoism and Buddhism inspire the intuitive flow of Steir’s process and her desire to create a contemplative state of mind for the viewer. Rather than picturing a sublime waterfall or seascape, Steir wants the artwork itself to offer a space of transcendence, released from the representational world.
Steir is a key figure among the first wave of women painters to gain widespread prominence in the contemporary art world. She is known for her elegant painterly abstractions and her ability to achieve equal subtleties in her prints.
About the Artist
Pat Steir initially became known in the 1970s for her groundbreaking conceptual art, based on her study of semantics.
Pat Steir
American, born 1938
Alphabet: Secondary, 2007
Color soap ground, sugar lift and spit bite aquatints with drypoint and hard ground etching, Edition 14/20
35 1/8 x 55 1/8 in. (89.22 x 140.02 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022.© Pat Steir
She turned to a more intuitive approach to painting in the 1980s. Steir began to experiment with pouring and flinging layers of thinned paint onto canvas, releasing herself from conscious considerations and allowing the traces of her gestural process to become the image itself. Her technique invites comparisons with Jackson Pollock. Rather than laying her canvases on the floor as he did, Steir paints from a ladder and works directly on unstretched canvas tacked to the studio wall. She explores what she calls, “a contemplative condition of unbound perception” and seeks to evoke a similar meditative state of mind for viewers.
Alphabet: Secondary belongs to a suite of three prints Steir made at Crown Point Press, San Francisco. The suite features Steir’s familiar ‘waterfall’ veils: one in primary colors, one in shades of grey, and this work in secondary colors. Alphabet: Secondary includes two shades of purple inks, forceful drypoint lines, and delicate hard-ground passages.
Steir studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. In the mid1960s, Steir was appointed art director at Harper & Row publishers in New York. She has taught art at Parsons School of Design, New York; Princeton University, NJ; and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She is a founding member of the influential alternative presses Printed Matter, HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, and Semiotext(e)
Among her many international exhibitions are: Pat Steir Prints 1976–1988 at the Cabinet des Estampes, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, and Tate Gallery, London. Her work is in many museum collections, including the Louvre, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts in Letters and the following year was awarded the International Medal of Art by the United States Department of State.
Traditional Japanese art, modernism, and science come together in Tachibana’s paintings. She brings a delicate touch to her images, which are deliberately open to viewers’ interpretation.
Finely detailed ferns become an elegant backdrop for mysterious, cell-like clusters in connection-blossom e 7,8,9. Tachibana is fascinated by fractal theory—the idea that very complex processes grow out of a simple underlying pattern that has gone through repeated iterations. Fractal models can describe many natural phenomena, from mountain ranges to the growth patterns of fern fronds.
Tachibana interprets this concept of the universe with a poetic sensibility. She says,
I create works in which elements function like organic building blocks: atoms form a molecule, molecules form a compound, compounds form a cell, cells form an organism, and so on. The marks, lines, shapes, colors, and textures that are the basic language of my work form a kind of network structure—a system of interconnected nodes that seem energized by their interaction within the network. In the interdependence, synergy, and flow of meaning… within these networks, there is subtle and profound beauty.
Seiko Tachibana
Japanese, born 1964
connection-blossom e 7,8,9, 2012
Acrylic on board
36 x 54 in. (91.44 x 137.16 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Seiko Tachibana
Seiko Tachibana is fascinated by the idea that the universe has a single unifying principle, governing everything from the smallest atomic particles to the cosmos. Eastern traditions of one-ness and contemporary theories of physics exist side by side in her art. The artist says,
I draw a circle. It could represent a cell, a planet, infinity, or peace. When I draw the circle, I think of the connectedness of all these things, and I draw more circles. Circles connect to circles and circles contain circles…. Working with these elements, I see a kind of cosmos blossom.
Seiko Tachibana Japanese, born 1964
spacial-diagram g-30-1, 2019
Acrylic on board
30 x 30 x 1/2 in. (76.2 x 76.2 x 1.27 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Seiko Tachibana
Seiko Tachibana’s landscape is an imaginary journey through forest and mountains. It scrolls horizontally (like traditional Japanese screens), panning across space and seasons. The rolling curves of the composition and the artist’s delicate touch give the painting a calm, gentle quality.
Tachibana’s miniature world brings to mind the magical scenery of Japanese animated films. Here, too, anything is possible: blue trees, a feathery river, rocks that appear soft as felt.
In spite of the fanciful look of this painting, its title refers to the artist’s fascination with fractal theory, the scientific concept that simple patterns (repeated infinitely) form the basis of very complex processes. Fractal models describe many phenomena in nature, including mountain ranges, river deltas, and the growth of tree branches—all of which Tachibana pictures here.
The network of lines, shapes, and patterns within her painting are an analogy for the interdependence and synergy that unifies the universe. In such one-ness and infinite connection, Tachibana finds a “subtle and profound beauty.”
Seiko Tachibana
Japanese, born 1964
fractal-scene 1, 2023
Acrylic on clay panel
18 x 48 in. (45.72 x 121.92 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Seiko Tachibana
About the Artist
Seiko Tachibana was born in Japan and completed her BA and MA in art education at Kobe University. She also studied at the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design, Lancaster, and Kyoto Seika University before receiving her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She is an expert printmaker as well as a painter.
Tachibana has been awarded artist’s residencies at Siena Art Institute, Italy; MillstART, Millstatt, Austria; Morgan Conservatory, Cleveland, OH; Arte Studio Ginestrelle, Assisi, Italy; 33 Officina Creativa, Toffia, Italy; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson; Kunstenaarslogies, Amersfoort, The Netherlands; Jyvåkylån Grafiikkakeskus, Finland; and Frans Masereel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium.
Tachibana’s work is in the collections of Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Portland Art Museum, OR; Museum MeermannoWetreenianum, Den Haag, The Netherlands; Cleveland Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; Boise Art Museum, ID; New York Public Library; The Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp; Belarusian National Arts Museum, Minsk; Museo de los Niños, San Jose, Costa Rica; Newark Public Library, NJ; Stanford University (Redwood City campus), CA; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Medical Center, University of California, Davis; San Francisco General Hospital, among other institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. She lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Simply by juggling the order of a few simple words, Andrew Wilson turns common phrases into a short poem, presented on a trio of baseball caps. Together, the sentences in Sweet on My Mind take on multiple meanings and prompt introspection.
On one hand, the artist’s text seems to conjure the spirits of his grandmother and mother, always by his side. On the other, the artist also directs these phrases to the viewer: “You are here; Are you here; Here you are.”
Wilson poses questions of identity; presence and absence; cultural visibility and invisibility; and self-realization.
What does each phrase mean to you at this point in your life?
Wilson used an antique French quilting technique (boutis) to make the raised text on each cap. The attention he devoted to creating this work is, for the artist, an act of caregiving. Sweet on My Mind is a tribute to the women in his family whose care, nurture, and unconditional love shaped his life.
Do you have relatives or friends whose presence or memory you keep close to heart?
Andrew I. Wilson
American, born 1991
Sweet on My Mind, 2022
(Details on page 208)
Cotton, leather, muslin, embroidery
(“Mom’s sheets, Granny’s leather, muslin, Boutis type”)
Nine parts, each c. 10 ½ x 7 x 4 ½ in.
(26.67 x 17.78 x 11.43 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2023. ©Andrew I. Wilson
Baseball caps
Baseball caps have become an accessory of identity: they broadcast team affiliations, fandom, vacation spots, and values.
Baseball caps are also standard streetwear for many young men—and an icon of hip hop culture. Andrew Wilson purposefully challenges “socialized images of the Black male”—for example, the cliché of tough urban youth. He presents alternatives to stereotypes from his perspective as “a Black, queer man residing in the U.S.”
What characteristics do these sunny baseball hats, with their camouflage-like pattern, bring to your mind? What adjectives would you use to describe the vibe they convey?
I am hoping to make objects that are filled with care and that honor all of those who have come before and those who will come after.
—Andrew I. Wilson
My work is a meditation on slow craft and how this slowness collects, amplifies, and transports the viewer through care. It is the way I peer into.…and interrogate the histories that shape the fabric of Blackness.
About the Artist
Andrew I. Wilson first studied metal arts and jewelry. His artwork is rooted in the value of craftsmanship and takes many forms: sculpture, textiles, book arts, fiber arts, fashion, photography, poetry, performance, and installation.
Wilson explores the subject of Black identity, the body, and history. His works always have powerful emotional resonance. He has chronicled “heartbreak, unconditional love, depression, and other moments that have been integral to learning survival tools as a Black, queer man residing in the U.S. It is a toolkit for future generations to utilize as they navigate their journeys.”
Wilson received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at Ohio Wesleyan University in 2021 and has also taught at University of California, Berkeley and Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Wilson’s work has been exhibited at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; SOMArts, San Francisco; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco. He received the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, a grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, and the Carr Center Independent Scholars Fellowship, among other honors. Wilson worked with artist Carrie Mae Weems on The Spirit that Resides in Havana, Cuba, and “The Future is Now Parade” for the opening of REACH, Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Washington D.C.
Multitudes is about the many sides of identity and the changes we all go through over time. Our old stories are updated by a sense of self in the here-and-now.
Here, Chloe Wilson suggests that we hold within us both who we have been in the past and who we are today. “You have to learn to live with your own multitudes,” reads her text.
This work is adapted from a ‘zine Wilson made when she found herself living back home several years after finishing college. She was surrounded by artifacts of her youth—and people’s expectations of her—yet felt like a very different person than she had been in her childhood.
Her text recalls a famous line from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, 51 “I am large, I contain multitudes”—an expression of the poet’s expansive sense of oneness with humankind.
Wilson’s handcrafted ‘zine included cut-out silhouettes, so that her characters overlapped when the reader turned the page. The book reflected back on its own contents, just as we reflect back on our lives. Wilson adapted Multitudes into this sequence of images for Ohana.
Chloe Wilson
born 1987
(Parts 1–3), 2022 Archival pigment print, Edition 1/1
7/8 x 17 7/8 in. (60.64 x 45.4 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Chloe Wilson
About the Artist
Chloe Wilson is a former student at the Youth Arts Collective [YAC] in Monterey, CA. She went on to receive her BFA from the University of California, Davis. Raised in Pacific Grove, CA, Wilson lived in Barcelona, Chicago, and Oakland, CA before returning to the Monterey Peninsula in 2013. She is the youngest artist ever admitted to the Carmel Art Association. Wilson now lives in the East Bay of the San Francisco area and has a studio in Berkeley, CA.
Wilson has exhibited her work at the Monterey Museum of Art, CA, and the Bakersfield Museum of Art, CA. Her work has been featured in Create Magazine, Plain Magazine, Boom, and Supersonic Art.
Christine Wong Yap pictures a cast of cartoon characters working together in ways that are “sometimes nice, sometimes not-so-nice.” Some of the partners listen to each other and spark each other’s ideas; others compete or argue. Her images become a road map of team work.
Yap’s comic creatures act out the positive and negative tendencies that are part of human nature. The artist reminds us, “Imperfection is the thing we share as humans. Embracing your imperfection is also about embracing it in other people.”
Yap believes that cooperation is a series of choices we make again and again, starting in childhood. It is a discipline—a skill that requires practice.
Christine Wong Yap American, born 1977
Installation view of “Working Together” (fourteen parts)
Clockwise: Working Together
Complementary Skills
Unequal Labor
Being on the Same Wavelength
Steamrolling
Shared Growth
Creative Sparks Warmed by the Same Fire
Antagonism
Mutual Respect
Equal Empowerment
Dropping the Ball and Picking Up the Pieces
Listening
Mistrust
All works 2017, Linoleum prints, Edition 5/15
Each 8 1/2 x 7 in. (21.59 x 17.78 cm)
Purchase made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022. © Christine Wong Yap
Belonging
For Christine Wong Yap, belonging is key to mental well-being. We may feel that home is our place of belonging, or perhaps nature brings you that feeling of connectedness. Teamwork can also foster a feeling of interdependence and belonging.
Yap first explored ideas of belonging in the context of marginalized and immigrant communities, yet she soon became more broadly interested in what it means to feel connected. She says,
think belonging is an amalgamation of experiences, memories, meanings, identities, and connections to people, places, activities, or feelings…. Like happiness, belonging isn’t something that happens to you, which you have no power to increase. Belonging often happens because of intention, investment, support, generosity, and cooperation.
Where do you feel the familiarity of belonging? On a sports team? At home? At school? At Ohana? How does that social group work together and support each other?
Keeping your heart open is not ‘one and done,’ but a constant process.
—Christine Wong Yap
Vulnerability is at the heart of connection and belonging.
About the Artist
Christine Wong Yap’s art is rooted in her interest in positive psychology, mental health, and well-being. For over a decade, she has staged art projects that engage broad community participation and prompt introspection. For Yap, art is a social practice.
She typically works in collaboration with groups of people at cultural centers, libraries, and schools, such as seniors in midtown Manhattan; middle-school students in Sheboygan, WI; residents and cultural workers in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Manilatown; and families who have experienced homelessness in Albuquerque, NM.
“I like to think that asking people to respond to questions about their interior life creates much-needed space for self-reflection,” she says. “When every second can be reflexively filled with digital distractions, people can lose their connections with themselves.”
“Working Together” was inspired by her longtime examination—and personal practice—of collaboration, alongside her great distress over the rise in public, politicized displays of disregard for others.
Yap was the 2022 Creative Citizenship fellow at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and is presently artist-in-residence for Mindscapes, an international cultural program focused on mental health initiated by Wellcome Trust in London, for which she is staging projects in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Bengaluru.
Yap holds a BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Times Square Arts, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, England. She lives in Oakland, CA.
Over 200 works of art are on view at Ohana; 85 are highlighted in this book. Please click here to see an illustrated portfolio of all the artworks acquired for the campus.
Sage Alucero I am a Seed of Something Beautiful Page 107
Woody De Othello About That Time 132
Isn’t This Still Life 132–133
Michael McConnell “Creating your own narrative (in three parts)”: Life Doesn’t Need to be a Competition 74–75, 79
Get a Little Help from Your Friends 76, 79
Rewrite the Story 76–78
Seiko Tachibana fractal-scene 1 204–205
Simon Tran Sway and the Holdfasts 66–71
2
Casey Byrnes Untitled 128–129
Ajelica Colliard Flower Shape 105
Dora Lisa Rosenbaum Holding Onward 61–63, 108
Christine Wong Yap “Working Together” (14-part series): Working Together 212–213, 214
Complementary Skills 212–213, 215
Unequal Labor 212–213, 215
Steamrolling 212–213, 216
Being on the Same Wavelength 212–213, 217
Shared Growth 212–213, 217
Creative Sparks 212–213, 217
Warmed by the Same Fire 212–213, 217
Mutual Respect 212–213, 218
Dropping the Ball and Picking Up the Pieces 212–213, 218
Antagonism 212–213, 219
Equal Empowerment 212–213, 219
Listening 212–213, 219
Mistrust 212–213, 219
3
Whitney Aguiñiga “We are alone in this together” (7-part series): WE ARE ALONE IN THIS TOGETHER 110–111
SWEET FRIEND I HAVE MISSED YOU 111
THE SUN WILL CONTINUE TO SHINE 112
THE SKY WILL BE CLEARER 112–113 THE TREES WILL BE TALLER 113 THE FLOWERS WILL BE BLOOMING 114
NEIGHBOR IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU 114–115
Anonymous Rhopalocera 103
Valerie Arber Necklace III 117
Ricky Armendariz Ya me voy a therapy [I’m going to therapy] 118–119
Corazón [Heart] 121
Eddie Braught Untitled 124–125
Teralyn Brown Now What? Nobody Knows 127
Paz de la Calzada Blue Kolam #42 58–59
Deatra Colbert Down the Rabbit Hole 130
Valentina DuBasky Lake Site with Amber Heron 134–135
Crystal Lynn Dugi Dághaa’ii Turquoise Hózhó 136
But When You Come from Water 136
Edie Fake Two Stories 139
Carmen Lomas Garza Baile [Dance] 172–173
Charlotte Grenier Inside a Moonlit Wave 101
Jacob Hashimoto Fragments of a Distant Horizon Front & back cover, ii, 6–9, 11–13
Liz Hernández El Camino delante de nosotros (The road ahead of us) 50–53
La mano sanadora (The healing hand) 52–53, 55
Un nuevo comienzo (A new beginning)
52–53, 56
Milagro: Sol (Sun milagro) 52–53, 57
Las flores (The flowers) 52–53
Milagro: Corazón (Heart milagro) 52–53
…Y las flores sequiran floreciendo (…and the flowers will keep blooming) 52–53
Milagro: El Cariño (Care milagro) 52–53
Ana María Hernando Flores Hechas de Cielo (Flowers Made Out of Sky) #1 140–141
Flores Hechas de Cielo (Flowers Made Out of Sky) #2 141
Liz Hickok Cycles of Regeneration 142–143
Regeneration #3 144–145
Peter Hiller Untitled 146–147
David Huffman Mystic Topaz 17
Watermelon Tourmaline 15
Chris Johanson
Perceptions (Perception #3) 148
Perceptions (Perception #4) 148–149
Perceptions (Perception #8) 149
Abstract Art with Cosmic Narrative 150–151
Caroline Kent Forest and Shadow 152–153
A poem about the cosmos 153
The Charlatan’s sleight of hand 154
We hold them inside us 154–155
Em Kettner
Having Wriggled 156–157
After the Argonauts 157
To Protect the Carrots 158
Fall Turning 158–159
Byron Kim
Sunday Painting, 11/24/14 163
Sunday Painting, 3/22/09 162
Sunday Painting, 11/14/21 161
Ethan Lauesen Self Reflecting, Loving Yourself Can Be So Difficult 167
Danielle Lawrence Now you see me, now you don’t 168–169
Lehuauakea
Guided By Our Stars (We Were Never Lost) 170–171
Kara Maria The Sea, The Sky, The You and I (blue whale) 27
Here Comes the Sun (Sierra Nevada red fox) 4, 37–39
Dream of Infinite Green (monarch butterfly) 4, 31–33
Jet Martínez Azul. Entre Mar y Cielo [Blue. Between Sea and Sky] 20–23
Michael McConnell
Social Network Generated Hybrids: giraffe/sloth 174
Social Network Generated Hybrids: antelope/jackal 174–175
Social Network Generated Hybrids: hedgehog/bandicoot 175
Hector Mendoza
Ethnobotany #14 176–177
Ethnobotany #15 177
Christine Nguyen Migrating Caverns 178–179
Natani Notah Carrying On 181 Reaching Back 183
Laura Owens Untitled 186–187
Rex Ray Fingerprint 188–189
Leah Rosenberg Wind, waves/Season change—/ Rain, trees/Dancing leaves iv, 42–45
Dorian Reid Untitled 191
Janica Hannah Soro Journey Home 193 Palengke 194–195
Yatika Starr Fields Miles & Maude 196
Pat Steir Alphabet: Secondary 198–199
Seiko Tachibana connection-blossom e 7, 8, 9 200–201
spacial-diagram g-30-1 202–203
Andrew I. Wilson Sweet on My Mind 207–208
Chloe Wilson Multitudes (Parts 1–3) 210–211
’ZINE Ian MacKay Bugggs 81–96
All artworks are in the Montage Health collection. Purchases made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund unless otherwise cited. All works are © the artist. Photos courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted.
