Saif Azzuz is a Libyan Yurok artist whose paintings bridge abstraction and surrealism with their sweeping use of color, sensual movement, and evocation of the natural world. Works like the one shown here are full and alive, expanding to the very edges of their canvases, resisting their frames. Azzuz’s gestural marks almost vibrate with the cycles of the seasons—stretching, reaching, pulling, pushing. His work reflects the resilience of Indigenous cultures and the importance of a holistic connection with the land, while simultaneously confronting the history of colonialism and manifest destiny. Azzuz has exhibited widely in the Bay Area, including a recent solo exhibition at Anthony Meier Fine Arts and solo exhibitions at Pt.2 Gallery, Adobe Books, Ever Gold [Projects], NIAD, and 1599DT Gallery, as well as RULE Gallery Denver. He has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence program. His work is held in collections including the Rennie Museum, Vancouver, British Columbia; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Facebook; Stanford Health Care Art Collection; and UBS Art Collection. Azzuz is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist.

Kota Ezawa (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘11) focuses on the appropriation and mediation of current events. Since the debut of his 2002 video animation The Simpson Verdict, Ezawa has been known for creating lightboxes, videos, and works on paper that distill found images into his signature pared-down, flattened style. By reducing complex visual information to its most essential elements, he explores the photographic record’s validity as a mediator of actual events and experiences. His most recent series, National Anthem, draws from broadcast footage of NFL athletes protesting police violence and the oppression of people of color. Here, Ezawa’s approach lifts the moment out of itself, spectral, translating the specific into the universal and back again. National Anthem was exhibited in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. His artworks have been viewed all over the world and the United States, with solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; and SFMOMA, among many others. Ezawa’s most recent showcase was at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens.

Clare Rojas’s (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘03) work defies art-historical pigeonholes; well known for her magic realist and otherworldly abstract paintings, Rojas has developed her own form of pan-American high-folk figurative abstraction. True to her surname—“Rojas” is the feminine plural of “rojo,” the Spanish word for red—Rojas is an avid colorist; she loves mixing paint and experimenting with hues. “I’m honestly obsessed with color, but it’s not something I can talk about,” says Rojas. “I feel like I have an animal intelligence for color, like when a dog intuits that an earthquake is coming.” Of In the fog together, Rojas notes, “The fog always feels like a being, a character in our narrative. It's a force.” She has been awarded grants and residencies from Artadia, Fleishhacker Foundation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and has had many solo shows in public institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; IKON Gallery, Birmingham, England; Museum Het Domein, Netherlands; and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain, among others.

Mining rich histories of craft, Josh Faught creates sculptures that pair traditional textile and homespun techniques—such as loom-weaving, knitting, and crocheting—with everyday objects that reference domesticity and often feature political slogans and elements of kitsch. His assemblages typically start with raw fibers that he dyes by hand with organic materials like ground-up cochineal bugs, or covers with artificial substances like spray paint or nail polish. His labor-intensive sculptures draw on histories of gender and sexual politics, precariously balancing an urgent sense of anxiety with a nostalgic view of the present. Faught's solo exhibitions, commissions, and presentations include, among others, Koppe Astner Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland; Mr. Kramer's Dream House, Casa Loewe, London, England; Frieze London; and the US Embassy in Mbabane, Swaziland, as well as BE BOLD for what you stand for, BE CAREFUL for what you fall for, an SFMOMA commission at San Francisco's Neptune Society Columbarium. Faught is a recipient of the SFMOMA SECA Art Award, an Artadia Award, and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Award.

Barry McGee (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘04) is a pioneer of the Mission School, a movement influenced by urban realism, graffiti, and American folk art, with a focus on social activism. McGee’s aim of actively contributing to marginalized communities has continued throughout his career, from his days as “Twist” (his graffiti moniker) to his current work as a global artist. His trademark motif, a male caricature with droopy eyes, speaks to his empathy for those who identify the streets as their home. McGee’s large-scale murals and his meticulous archive of paintings and drawings examine the notion of public versus private space and the accessibility of art. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. His works are part of public collections including SFMOMA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Fondazione Prada, Venice, in addition to being seen on streets and trains all over the United States.

Sadie Barnette’s (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘19) multimedia practice illuminates her family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The last born of the last born, the youngest of her generation, Barnette holds a deep fascination with the personal and political value of kin. Her drawings, photographs, and installations collapse time and expand possibilities; her use of abstraction, glitter, and the fantastical summons another dimension of human experience and imagination. Barnette has received grants and residencies from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Carmago Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows at The Kitchen, New York; ICA Los Angeles; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; and MCA San Diego, among other institutions. Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; Walker Art Center, MN, and more. Barnette has a permanent, site-specific commission at the Los Angeles International Airport forthcoming in 2024. She is the inaugural Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory.

Mark Baugh-Sasaki (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘15) is an interdisciplinary artist whose art practice focuses on our connection to place through embedded narratives in both the built and the natural landscape. Baugh-Sasaki’s smoke drawings represent his combined interests in art, technology, and science. The artist gathers objects and ephemera from sites that are significant to him, such as Yosemite, Mendocino, and the Pacific Ocean. The objects are placed precariously on the surface of the paper and “smoked,” creating ethereal, volumetric outlines and inverted silhouettes. The smoke image and the burnt remnants of the objects operate as indexes of the artist’s own actions, memories, and personhood. Baugh-Sasaki’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has been an Honorary James Irvine Fellow at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and is a recipient of The Hopper Prize and the Cadogan Award. His work is included in the public collections at the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program and the University of San Francisco.

Painter and photographer Gary Edward Blum (Headlands Affiliate Artist ’15–’17) shares with us the passage of time through the lens of building T828—also known as the Target House—formerly located in Rodeo Valley, just off Bunker Road heading west. What started as a simple interest in the photographic narrative of the lone Target House within the vastness of the valley turned into a meditation on ritual, change, and ultimately, loss. Blum’s first photo featured the Target House and a neighboring cypress tree. Over a number of years, the narrative changed: the cypress tree was deemed invasive and was cut down; a suspected arsonist reduced the building to a pile of burnt remains. Here we see the Target House suspended in time, before and after the loss of the tree; we see a memory of what was; we seem, in hindsight, to have known how the story would end. Blum’s work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and is in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA and the Monterey Art Museum, CA. His work has been reviewed in the L.A. Times, SF Chronicle, and Art in America.

Val Britton (Headlands Affiliate Artist '06) collects, cuts, paints, pastes, folds, and layers paper, creating immersive, collaged works and site-specific installations that explore physical and psychological spaces. Originally trained as a printmaker, Britton meticulously builds paint and collage layers to create depth in her compositions. The process becomes a constant negotiation of addition and subtraction, both filling and creating space. Through a formal language rooted in mapping, Britton's visual lexicon is both familiar and illegible; the resulting works offer a gesture of invitation without prescribing any particular worldly destination. "Ultimately," she says, "I am trying to make intangible experiences visual through an intense layering and physicality of material." Her work is held in numerous collections, including the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; The Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Ohio; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; New York Historical Society; New York Public Library; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. Britton is the recipient of many grants, fellowships, and residencies, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship.

Nyame Oulynji Brown (Headlands Artist in Residence '19) is an Afrofuturist installation artist working in the mediums of painting, drawing, cut paper, blackboards, augmented reality, gaming, and fashion. His work addresses the Black imagination as a space for new ways to perceive the Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined. Brown's depictions access African American culture through an approach that seeks social transformation and community revolution. Brown is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and The Richard H. Driehaus Individual Artist Award, as well as a site-specific public commission for the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, for which he executed a double portrait of Malcolm X and the artist Jack Whitten. Brown has had solo exhibitions across the U.S., including at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Hearst Art Gallery at St. Mary's College, Moraga, CA; and the Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown. His work was recently featured in the group exhibition Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California, and will be in a group show at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago this summer.

In her work at the intersection of photography and sculpture, Rachelle Bussières (Headlands Graduate Fellow '15) addresses the limits of both sight and knowledge through the creation of photographic exposures, works which investigate our wider human experience through light, perception, and time. She makes cameraless lumen prints, engaging with photographic materials as a means of exploring the impact of light on the psyche, environment, and social structures. She fabricates, stacks, folds, and assembles objects as her point of departure in the creation of new artifacts, transforming her arrangements by exposing gelatin silver paper to sunlight or artificial lights. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, Oregon; Penumbra Foundation, New York; Johansson Projects, Oakland; and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco. She is the recipient of a Penumbra Foundation Workspace Fellowship, a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation award, and an honorable mention for the Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and has been a finalist for the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize.

Takming Chuang's (Headlands Graduate Fellow ‘17, Affiliate Artist ‘18–’20) sculptures, photographs, prints, and installations reflect upon the desire to preserve in the face of perpetual change. His creative process incorporates the mutable potential of materials such as paper, brass, photographs, and clay to underscore the value of transformation. Bunker belongs to a series of sculptures initiated this year that allude to architectural models of spaces without clearly defined interiors and exteriors. In this time of war, Chuang recalls the past life of Headlands Center for the Arts, formerly Fort Barry, and the colors and shapes of spaces designed to shelter and protect. He has exhibited at SculptureCenter, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Camden Arts Centre, London; and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, among other institutions. Chuang received his MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Economics from the State University of New York, Binghamton. His work is in the public collection of the Berkeley Art Museum.

Lenka Clayton (Headlands Artist in Residence '17) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. Her Typewriter Drawings, a series of illustrated works on paper, are entirely rendered with a portable 1957 Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter. Stemming from her ongoing project An Artist Residency in Motherhood, her typewriter drawings came out of a need to create portable works of art during her downtime between childcare. Clayton's playful and often humorous drawings are driven by a restless and incisive inquisitiveness about how we collectively document and catalog the world around us.

In creating the drawing Boat and Ocean 10/08/2020, Clayton folded a sheet of typewriter paper into the shape of a boat, unfolded it, and ran it through the typewriter, creating simple but meticulously rendered waves with the typewriter's parentheses keys. Through keystrokes and folds, the artist's elegantly restrained composition suggests a world beyond the monotony of everyday life.

Clayton's work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, MA.

Gina M. Contreras employs drawing and painting to examine the complexity of traditional and cultural standards. Contreras uses self-portraits to embrace the narrative between her conventional Chicana upbringing and her admiration for a contemporary lowbrow culture of self-awareness and body acceptance. Contreras approaches her work from a symbolic perspective, painting melancholy yet light-hearted self-portraits that honestly depict her aspirations and disappointments with Western beauty standards and romantic prospects. She seeks to produce and create an abundance of sexual vulnerability that reflects and accepts the physical space that she occupies, without minimizing herself in order to appease or indulge male-driven aesthetic ideals. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally.

Gina M. Contreras employs drawing and painting to examine the complexity of traditional and cultural standards. Contreras uses self-portraits to embrace the narrative between her conventional Chicana upbringing and her admiration for a contemporary lowbrow culture of self-awareness and body acceptance. Contreras approaches her work from a symbolic perspective, painting melancholy yet light-hearted self-portraits that honestly depict her aspirations and disappointments with Western beauty standards and romantic prospects. She seeks to produce and create an abundance of sexual vulnerability that reflects and accepts the physical space that she occupies, without minimizing herself in order to appease or indulge male-driven aesthetic ideals. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally.

Kenturah Davis’s (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘20–’21) work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores the fundamental role that language plays in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in forms including drawings, textiles, and objects. The photo shown here, featuring Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, was made while both artists were in residence at Headlands in 2021. In a gesture between the two, Kenyatta extends an invitation, continues the conversation, underscores a point; space is held. Davis’s work is in several institutional collections and has been included in exhibitions internationally; she presented the solo exhibition Everything That Cannot Be Known at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum in 2020, and recent exhibitions also include the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Davis was commissioned by the Los Angeles Metro Rail to create a large-scale, site-specific work that will be permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX rail line. She has been a contributing writer for publications including the LA Times and The Brooklyn Rail.

In the 1980s Janet Delaney worked in a photography lab in San Francisco and served as occasional courier for companies making deliveries cross-country to New York. Having fulfilled her duties, she would wander with her twin lens Rolleiflex through Chinatown, across Canal Street, into SoHo, and beyond 14th. Despite being tired and often lost, making photographs made Delaney feel present, alert, in tune with the crowds, and mesmerized by the city's history. Her photographs capture a precious mixture of private lives lived in public, and fleeting moments of connection between photographer and subject. Here, the long shadows of the early morning slice across the work, echoing Delaney's path from one edge of the country to the other. Delaney is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Grants. Her photographs are found in the collections of SFMOMA, Pilara Foundation, and de Young Museum, San Francisco; Oakland Museum of California; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. Delaney had a solo exhibition at EUQINOM Gallery earlier this year, and recently released her third monograph, Red Eye to New York, published by MACK.

Cheryl Derricotte is a visual artist whose favorite mediums are glass and paper. Derricotte's Blue Wall Project visually illustrates people killed by the police in the U.S. Using available counts from The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database, this project shows the magnitude of the problem in the U.S. The first series of artworks in this project, the Years-at-a-Glance, focus on Black men killed by the police. The deaths are memorialized in blue ink on wall-sized paper At-A-Glance calendars, using the days as anchors of experience. Instead of numbers, bullets symbolize the killings; for example, four Black men killed on one day results in a calendar square with four bullets. When all of the deaths are rendered in this manner and considered together, the resulting work is abstract, reminiscent of both hieroglyphics and binary code. A selection from this series has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and The New York Times, and is in the permanent collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Derricotte is a thought leader in the arts and a frequent speaker at colleges, universities, and museums about her own work and, more broadly, contemporary political art.

Mark Dion (Headlands Artist in Residence '98) examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeology, field ecology, and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between "objective" ("rational") scientific methods and "subjective" ("irrational") influences. The artist's spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkammen of the 16th and 17th centuries, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. Dion also frequently collaborates with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos, and other institutions mandated to produce public knowledge on the topic of nature. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Dion questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas, and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production.

Rodney Ewing’s (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘19) drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on the need to intersect body, place, memory, and fact. He re-examines human histories, cultural conditions, and traumas, extensively researching overlooked historical objects, individuals, spaces, and events of the Black Diaspora. His narratives explore and translate the actual and emotional dimensions of these subjects, drawing viewers into his pieces and immersing them in a reorienting experience of images, words, and ideas. With his work—as in this piece, a ledger marking millions of journeys, a mesh of memorials—Ewing creates a platform that requires us to be both present and profound in our observations. Ewing has exhibited widely, including at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; The Drawing Center, New York; and most recently at SFMOMA, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, and Jack Shainman Gallery—The School, New York. Ewing has received multiple grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and his work has recently been included in the collection of the Tufts University Art Galleries in Somerville, MA.

Expanding upon previous work centered on the U.S./Mexico border, Ana Teresa Fernández's (Headlands Tournesol Award '07) five-year project Of Bodies & Borders meditates on the deadliest borderland in the world: the Mediterranean Sea. Sited in various locations off the island of Poros, Greece, the project encompasses video, painting, drawing, and installation drawn from a site-specific performance in which the artist, weighed down with 13-pound weights, wrestled with a bed sheet underwater, a physical act that, across many hours, became an act of physical and psychological endurance. In the series of works on paper titled Gauging Gravity, Fernández depicts a shrouded figure suspended in a void, identifiable as a stand-in for the artist by her signature tango heels, which appear throughout her visual art and performance-based work. Caught in a precarious in-between state, the figure's fate remains unknown, a powerful tribute to the thousands of refugees and migrants who've died in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean.

Fernández's artwork is included in the permanent collections of the multiple institutions, including the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; and the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and San Francisco.

Martha Friedman is a sculptor whose multimedia practice incorporates choreography, printmaking, drawing, cast and poured rubber, mold-blown glass, plaster, wax, and concrete into works that encompass her interdisciplinary interests. In this work, inspired by drawings of the human brain from the late 19th century neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Friedman imbues neurological components like dendrites and somas with vibrant pigments, abstracting cerebral circuitry to traverse the complex entanglement of all matter. The artist’s sculptural process is precise yet experimental; cast rubber is used to make three-dimensional wall works that suggest phase changes or suspension. This gestural form of mark-making magnifies the microscopic to enact new material associations where the body is both subject and object at once, bearing witness to itself. Friedman is the recipient of a Visiting Artist Fellowship at Urban Glass, Brooklyn, and of two National Endowment for the Arts grants in collaboration with Susan Marshall & Company. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; The Institute of Fine Arts Great Hall, New York; and Locust Projects, Miami, among others.

Maria Gaspar (Headlands Chamberlain Award ‘17) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mediate, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Her body of work responds to the perceptual and political manifestations of place through multi-year projects that span a range of formats and scales. During her Headlands residency, Gaspar constructed a suit made of stitched dry grasses found in the region. Using the material as camouflage in response to the surveillance of immigrant bodies, and engaging strategies of “dark sousveillance,” as coined by Simone Browne in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Gaspar developed a series of disappearing images as she sought to make her own form invisible in the Sausalito landscape. Gaspar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, United States Artists Fellowship, Frieze Impact Prize, Art Matters Award, Imagining Justice Art Grant, Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and Creative Capital Award. Gaspar has exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the San José Museum of Art.

Julia Goodman gathers, sorts, tears, and soaks fabrics, transforming discarded bedsheets and t-shirts into malleable pulp that she presses against brick walls, concrete, textiles, woodcarvings, flat surfaces, and her own hands to create low- and high-relief handmade paper sculptures. By working with fabrics that exist in close proximity to our bodies—holding personal histories both mundane and profound—she highlights layers of relationships and caretaking, the love and loss that shapes our lives. Most recently, Goodman’s simultaneous experience of new motherhood and the pandemic led to her creation of a series of raw, anxious, awkward, colorful, and tender forms, including this work. Goodman’s recent exhibitions include, among others, the California College of the Arts Hubbell Street Gallery and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; San Jose Museum of Art; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; and Poetry Foundation, Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at JB Blunk Residency, Inverness, CA; Recology San Francisco; Creativity Explored, San Francisco; and the Salina Art Center, KS. Goodman had her first solo show at EUQINOM Gallery in late 2021.

Ann Hamilton (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘90) is a visual artist whose practice centers on the metaphorical structures and material processes of textiles, and takes form as large-scale site-responsive installations, performance collaborations, print media, and public projects. Inspired by histories and geographies of place, her work’s multiple forms often juxtapose expressions of language and tactile materiality to explore relationships between the individual and the collective, the animate and inanimate, the human and non-human animal, the silent and the spoken. Of the ongoing series pages, of which this work is a part, Hamilton writes, “cloth fragments and words meet on paper lifted from a book’s frontispiece or endpapers. The work is the felt sense of this meeting—the size and color, opacity and transparency, the facticity of the cloth, the color and wear of the paper, the abstractness of the language sifted from loose fragments of sliced books, themselves the residue of another project.” Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Glenn Hardy is a self-taught artist known for alluring, powerful paintings of Black life liberated from the burdens of racial stereotypes and conflict. Hardy idealizes figures and scenes in his depictions of a world of Black figures existing in comfort; in moments of relaxation, enjoyment, and triumph; free from the realities of life as a marginalized minority in America. Hardy deliberately darkens the skin tone of his figures, irrespective of the skin tone of the various subjects. Hardy’s works are chronicles of lives lived Black—Black talents, Black “comfort,” and Black voice. In a style influenced by Kerry James Marshall and Ernie Barnes, Hardy’s work seeks to subvert, transcend, and ultimately replace stereotypical, negative depictions of American Black life. In 2020, Hardy had his Los Angeles solo show debut at the United Talent Agency Artist Space in Beverly Hills. Hardy is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

Dana Hemenway's work is rooted in the excavation and elevation of utilitarian objects to make visible what has become habituated in our built environments. Hemenway uses these functional items as materials to form traditionally fiber-based crafts. Lights and cords are woven through ceramics or the gallery wall; extension cords are transformed into macramé chains. Hemenway has had residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; ACRE, Stueben, WI; SÍM, Reykjavik, Iceland; and The Wassaic Project, NY. Dana is a recipient of The San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, and a Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant. She recently completed a public art commission for SFO's Terminal 1, which opened in April of 2020. From 2015–17, Dana served as a co-director of Royal Nonesuch Gallery, an artist-run project space in Oakland, CA.

Untitled is from Todd Hido’s newest body of work, Bright Black World. Underscoring the influences of Nordic mythology and specifically the idea of “Fimbulwinter,” which translates into the “endless winter,” many of Hido's recent images allude to and provide form for this notion of an apocalyptic, never-ending winter. Exploring the dark terrain of the Northern European landscape and regions as far as the North Sea of Japan, Hido found himself enchanted; these places called him back on several occasions. Hido’s photographs are in the permanent collections of The Getty, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; SFMOMA; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and many other public and private collections. Hido’s work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Wired, Elephant, FOAM, and Vanity Fair. His work is documented in more than a dozen published books. Aperture published his mid-career survey, Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album, in 2016. Bright Black World was released by Nazraeli Press in 2018.

Inspired by the introspective structure of airport terminals, Julian Hoeber’s (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘17) Vector Model series explores the undulating façades that he imagines might adorn the exterior of a main terminal through string formulations. The aesthetic form is structural and biomorphic, mathematical and intuitive. Hoeber notes, “One of the things that’s always interesting for me in working with repetitive units and tessellations is if you can take the complexity up to a point where something based in pattern can begin to look random and organic.” Hoeber sought to work with colors that would evoke the digital; in his words, “These pieces have always been based on trying to do computer modeling without the computer, instead using really rudimentary materials.” Hoeber's work has been shown in galleries and museums in Shanghai, Paris, London, and across the U.S. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Genre-busting maverick William T. Wiley collaborated with Robert Hudson and Richard Shaw—his closest friends and fellow San Francisco Art Institute alumni—at Magnolia Editions in Oakland to create this edition of 30 lithographs. Together, the practices of these three legendary artists span mixed media, sculpture, printmaking, paint, and drawing. This distinctive work, the fruit of their multidisciplinary collaboration, features Moby Dick in a landscape surrounded by the sea, boats, cryptic figures, a dog, a woman on horseback, a goat, and a raven, telling the story of the goat and the raven conversing about Moby. The work features extensive text and images contributed by each of these three irrepressible artists. 

Barry McGee (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘04) is a pioneer of the Mission School, a movement influenced by urban realism, graffiti, and American folk art, with a focus on social activism. McGee’s aim of actively contributing to marginalized communities has continued throughout his career, from his days as “Twist” (his graffiti moniker) to his current work as a global artist. His trademark motif, a male caricature with droopy eyes, speaks to his empathy for those who identify the streets as their home. McGee’s large-scale murals and his meticulous archive of paintings and drawings examine the notion of public versus private space and the accessibility of art. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. His works are part of public collections including SFMOMA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Fondazione Prada, Venice, in addition to being seen on streets and trains all over the United States.

David Ireland (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘86) was an integral member of the Bay Area Conceptualist movement, admired internationally for a diverse body of work concerned with the beauty inherent in everyday things and the making of art as a part of daily life. His idiosyncratic, hybrid practice blended sculpture, architecture, painting, and performance, and often drew on ordinary materials such as dirt, concrete, wood, or wire that he collected over time. “You can’t make art by making art” became one of his best-known sayings, often used to summarize the philosophy that guided his Zen-like, interdisciplinary practice. Ireland created After Skellig, Red, an enigmatic rust-colored meditation, following his visit to Skellig Michael in Ireland, a rugged island known for the austere, beehive-like monastery built there in the 6th century. Ireland’s visit inspired a series of multiple works; this piece was included in the 1994 exhibition Skellig at the Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco. Ireland’s work has been presented in more than forty solo exhibitions at venues including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the New Museum, New York. His work is held in major museum collections worldwide.

Trained as an anthropologist, Sahar Khoury (Headlands Artist in Residence '20–21) makes sculptures that integrate abstraction, personal and political symbols, and an intuitive sensitivity to site. Khoury's idiosyncratic approach merges and melds diverse materials, elevating a primary commitment to spontaneity. Khoury introduced wood into her practice during her time as a Headlands AIR, and in a recent exhibition, she debuted an ensemble of two- and three-dimensional landscape constructions in metal, ceramic, paper-mâché, and wood—the last pruned from the artist's own walnut and apple trees. Here, the shapes of trees both deciduous and evergreen are extruded, lifted, suspended in relation to a single stump, a shared point of origin. Khoury is an SFMOMA SECA Art Award recipient and was featured in Bay Area Now 8, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts's triennial exhibition. She has shown at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco; Oakland Museum of California; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; 77th Scripps College Ceramic Annual, Claremont, CA; and Canada, New York. Her work has been written about in The New Yorker, Art Review, and Hyperallergic.

Lu Kynn is a collaboration between artists Alicia Decker and Elissa Breitbard. The duo creates textile assemblages using natural fabrics that are hand-dyed and sewn together, often spliced with fashion and interior design remnants. Lyra combines cotton, hemp, and linen fabrics with repurposed leather and remnants to create an immersive abstract assemblage, one that evokes a balanced yet lively energy; the work is inspired by the regenerative nature of these materials and the myriad lives they have touched. Working with a rich palette of periwinkle, tobacco, crisp white, and mauve, Lyra unfolded through an intuitive arranging and thoughtful reworking of pattern and color. The slow, contemplative act of hand-dyeing and constructing is uniquely felt in each composition, as is the human connection inherent in the threads themselves. Decker is a fiber artist, textile designer and university educator with 20 years of experience in the fashion industry; her work focuses on storytelling and social justice through textiles. Breitbard, who hand-dyes fabric out of her backyard studio, owns a digital textile print shop and serves as an ongoing long-term board member with an ethical U.S. soft-goods cut-and-sew factory.

Mila Libman’s process begins as she takes photographs in the Sierras, then distorts the photographs until she arrives at the images that she wants to recreate in her drawings. Libman creates her works using a subtractive process. In an evolution of her work with pastels and charcoal, most of her drawings are made with dry pigments rubbed over large sheets of paper; Libman then erases a pattern into the medium, lifting pigment and revealing the paper to create a pattern of light. “My ultimate goal is to arrive at the place where the drawing leaves me with a sense of wonder, the same feeling that I have when I take photographs of nature in the first place. I’m not trying to imitate reality, but to create reality from within.” Libman is a recipient of The Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at various venues in the Bay Area, including the UC Berkeley Art Center and Pacific Film Archive; Institute of Contemporary Art San José; Art Ark Gallery, San Jose; 01 San Jose Biennial; and the Los Altos Museum, as well as in New York; Belfast, Maine; and New Haven, Connecticut.

Candice Lin (Headlands Artist in Residence '16) investigates the legacies of colonialism, racism, and sexism in works that refuse straightforward description; Lin's swollen and sprawling installation works often grow, decay, or otherwise evolve, shapeshifting in response to site and the passage of time. Consider this work: according to Greek mythology, the Gorgons were three sisters with snakes for hair who could turn people into stone with a single look. In the oldest versions of these myths, there was only one Gorgon; here, Lin's Gorgon oscillates between one and many, a multiplicity of bodies, sprawling and united. This movement is fixed in place via Lin's use of a technique involving the inlay of contrasting slip into lines incised in leather-hard clay—a practice allowing intricate design work with sharp edges, difficult to replicate in other ways. Lin is the recipient of numerous residencies, grants, and fellowships, and has shown or been featured in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Gasworks Gallery, London; Sharjah Biennial 13; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Bétonsalon, Paris; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Meg Lipke questions conventional notions of painting with her colorful, shaped abstractions. Working directly on canvas or cloth, the artist cuts, stains, and sews her materials to create compositions that project from the wall or rest upon the floor. The space around and between each form is as much the artist's subject as her final creation. Many of these soft, pliable paintings imaginatively conjure up aspects of the body, seemingly animate and poised to leave the space in which they reside. Lipke's approach and process summons past craft traditions, memories of her mother's and grandmother's creative practices, and canons of 20th-century modernism. The artist deftly draws upon these legacies to make innovative and remarkable work that reinvigorates the possibilities of contemporary abstraction. A recent exhibition at Burlington City Arts in Vermont traced the artist's inspired evolution from suspended canvas, to low-relief, soft paintings and totemic sculptures, to her most recent large-scale work. Lipke has been featured in solo shows at Broadway Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Freight and Volume, New York.

Terri Loewenthal’s work challenges the predominantly male canon of landscape photography by reviving and liberating the genre from the strictly representational. Her works are single-exposure, in-camera compositions that utilize special optics she developed to compress vast spaces into complex, evocative environments. These photographs—collaged vantage points of the 360˚ landscape surrounding a single location, each layer altered with swaths of saturated color—present landscape not as it may appear visually, but how it could be experienced emotively and imaginatively. As she describes the works resulting from this process, “The result is not a “made-up” image, but rather one that reflects the truth of countless multiplicities: the human capacity for intimacy with land; our connection to a reality that is not merely factual but also arises from emotion and imagination; and our longing for wild, transformative experiences within and without the psyche.” She has exhibited at venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Institute of Contemporary Art San José; and Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, Georgia. Loewenthal has been an active musician for more than a decade; her bands Call and Response, Rubies, and Shock have performed extensively nationally and internationally. 

Nathan Lynch (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘11) was raised in Pasco, Washington, an agricultural community in the shadow of Hanford Nuclear Power Plant. The futility of this environmental contradiction gave Lynch an acute sense of location and deep appreciation for irony. In the five formative years after graduation Lynch worked as the prop master for a local community theatre, the effects of which are still being realized in his current body of work. His concerns for political conflict and environmental upheaval are filtered through notions of absurdity, hand fabrication, and the dramatic devices of storytelling. As a sculptor and performance artist, Lynch has made collaboration and experimentation major components of his practice. Recent projects include Doubledrink, a two-person drinking fountain for Headlands Center for the Arts, Dead Reckoning at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ceramic nest modules for the Wedgetailed Shearwater on Oahu. Here, in Radio, the gestures of Lynch’s organic, bulbous forms are echoed in outline, evoking a tangle of waves made visible. Lynch is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Ceramics Program and Glass Program at California College of the Arts. 

Amanda Marchand (Headlands Graduate Fellow '01, Affiliate Artist '02–'03) makes work that explores the natural world and an experimental approach to photography. Book Stack: Here We Go (again) is a triptych from Marchand's series titled "The World is Astonishing." The series of lumen prints are exhibited as fixed, archival prints; extracting moments from the natural world as defined by line and shadow, Marchand explores the fleeting nature of time and the fragility of our mortal planet. Known for both her creative writing as well as her art, Marchand has created several award-winning artist books to accompany each photographic series. She exhibits work in solo and group shows internationally, and has most recently been shown at Turner Contemporary, United Kingdom; Datz Museum, Korea; Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Colorado; and the Palo Alto Art Center. Marchand is the recipient of numerous honors, including among others the 2022 Silver List (Silver Eye Center for Photography and Carnegie Mellon); Medium Photo's Second Sight Award, 2021; and Photo Lucida's Critical Mass Top 50, 2021.

Central to the work of Sean McFarland (Headlands Artist in Residence '11) is the complex and often fraught relationship between photography and the American West, which has resulted in both the exploitation of the land and its preservation. He explores the tensions between the natural and the artificial and between a subject and its representation. McFarland is interested in our tendency to overlook the ways our experiences of the landscape are mediated, just as we are prone to trust the truth value of photographs even though we know they are not transparent windows on the world. He deftly plays with these slippages, creating pictures that call attention to the fact that they are constructions: he makes moons from bottle caps and mountains from chips of glass; he uses double exposures and prismatic effects to suggest physical forces that do not typically register in photographs. McFarland is a recipient of the John Guttmann Photography Fellowship, a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and the SFMOMA SECA Art Award, among other accolades. His work is held in numerous collections, including SFMOMA; Milwaukee Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley Art Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Library.

Klea McKenna's (Headlands Affiliate Artist '15–'16) recent work uses analog light-sensitive materials to reanimate objects from our contemporary past. Her subjects—found clothing, textiles, amateur paintings—bear the marks, flaws, fingerprints, and damage that accumulate through time, devotion, and contact with our bodies. In darkness, she embosses these charged objects into photographic paper, then casts light across the resulting textures, later adding color with dyes and toners. This unruly process subverts photography's intended use by making touch more primary than sight, and generates images that contain a confounding blend of evidence and fiction. McKenna's recent exhibitions include SFMOMA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY. Her work is held in the public collections at SFMOMA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; and the U.S. Embassy, Republic of Suriname, Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State. She has a solo show at EUQINOM Gallery this May and June.

Working between photography and sculpture, Harold Mendez (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘12) explores the tension between fiction and truth, visibility and absence, with an interest in how constructions of history and geography shape our sense of self. A first-generation American of Mexican-Colombian descent, his work often considers the transnational experience, ritual, and cultural memory. Mendez’s large-format two-dimensional works transform found photographs through a laborious manual transfer process similar to lithography. Using charcoal or graphite to build the surface, Mendez both traces and erases archival imagery with specific sociocultural or art historical references to create otherworldly new images. Mendez’s ten-year career survey Let us gather in a flourishing way premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2020 and toured museums in 2021. He has participated in notable exhibitions including Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Mendez’s work has also been included in exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem; Drawing Center, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Project Row Houses, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among other venues.

Weaving threads of African American experiences with broader ideas of identity and collective history, Adia Millett (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘07) says of her work, “My process is informed by taking things apart, removing, replacing, cutting, pasting, sewing, and building, in order to discover the space where transitions occur and where stories of impermanence unfold.” Millett investigates the fragile interconnectivity among all living things; here, she weaves that exploration into a web of rhythmic and recurring colors and textures. Her art reminds us of the importance of renewal and rebuilding—not only through the artistic process, but also through the possibility of transformative change. Millett has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Greater New York at PS1 in Long Island City, New York, and Freestyle at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She has been part of exhibitions at the Barbican Gallery, London; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA; Santa Monica Museum of Art; and The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.

Tucker Nichols (Headlands Artist in Residence '10, Affiliate Artist '11–'14) creates iconographic works that transform the simplest objects into visual curiosities. Often drawing inspiration from nature, Nichols layers various talismanic depictions of stones, plants, and flowers in his sculptures, installations, and drawings. He says of his organic fascination, "I honestly want to understand the impulse to depict imaginary things from nature. I'm sure many smart people have opined on the nature of depicting nature, but it remains mostly unclear to me. I've been drawing branches and rocks and vases forever. There's something about conjuring a thing that didn't exist the moment before, but is conceivably from the outside world." Nichols's work has been featured at the Drawing Center, New York; Denver Art Museum; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; and SFMOMA. A show of his sculpture, Almost Everything On The Table, was recently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. His drawings have been published in McSweeney's, The Thing Quarterly, The New Yorker and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books Crabtree (with Jon Nichols) and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray (with Dave Eggers). Flowers for Sick People is his ongoing multimedia project.

Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm in 1929. His father was a diplomat; the family lived in the United States and Norway before settling in Chicago in 1936. After his art school years at the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to New York and met several artists making early Performance work, including George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, George Segal, and Robert Whitman; Oldenburg soon became a prominent figure in Happenings and Performance Art. In 1961, he opened The Store in his studio, where he recreated the environment of neighborhood shops; he displayed familiar objects made out of plaster, reflecting American society's celebration of consumption, and was heralded as a Pop artist with the emergence of the movement in 1962. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he proposed colossal art projects for several cities, and by 1969, his first such iconic work, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was installed at Yale University. Most of his large-scale projects were made with the collaboration of Coosje van Bruggen; the two were married in 1977. Here we are treated to a more intimate experience of Oldenburg’s sense of humor, as the spirit of a pair of cherries meeting again for the first time echoes one of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s monumental works, Spoonbridge and Cherry, located at the Walker Art Center’s Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Woody De Othello’s subject matter spans household objects, bodily features, and the natural world. Everyday artifacts of the domestic—tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps, air purifiers, and so on—are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood, and glass. Informed by his Haitian ancestry, Othello is also inspired by the supernatural objects of Vodou folklore, nkisi figures, and other animist artifacts. His sense of humor manifests across his work in visual puns and cartoonish figuration. “I choose objects that are already very human,” says Othello. “The objects mimic actions that humans perform; they’re extensions of our own actions. We use phones to speak and to listen, clocks to tell time, vessels to hold things—and our bodies are indicators of all of those.” Othello was the recent subject of a solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. His work is represented in numerous collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; SFMOMA; MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Seattle Art Museum; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Othello’s work is currently on display in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Erik Parra's paintings, drawings, and collage draw on a collective cultural memory and the history of painting and film. Parra focuses on architecture and the real and imagined spaces contained within; as he mines his childhood memories of a modernist house and various visual tropes of contemporary spaces to create his vision, interior spaces become cultural self-portraits. As in Lunch Counter, Parra employs vivid colors and plays with the contrast of light against shadow, blurring a viewer's sense of the line between reality and unreality. Parra's architectural paintings have received international acclaim, and he has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings and the L.A. Times. He is a recent recipient of the inaugural Liquitex Research Residency and the Hopper Prize for Contemporary Art.

Tahiti Pehrson was inspired to paint from an early age. As he pursued his studies in art, Pehrson found himself gravitating toward new modes of working. He left school and began making work in the streets with stickers and stencils—a process that evolved into a dedicated practice of paper cutting and public engagement. Building sculptures by cutting the material away, Pehrson creates geometric patterns that speak to universal traditions throughout the history of mathematics, art, and craft. His intricate sculptures explore interplays of light and shadow; dynamic monochromatic constructions give material form to the space-changing qualities of light. Pehrson’s works are intertwined with their sites; a viewer’s perceptions of a work’s volume and structure are prone to shift as they move around a piece, and as the light evolves across the day. Pehrson’s work can be found in collections around the world, including California, Oregon, New York, and Cape Town, South Africa. He has been commissioned for site-specific installations at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José and Facebook. Pehrson has been featured in publications including Huffpost, Juxtapoz, Strictly Paper, ESPN, National Geographic, San Francisco Magazine, and SF Weekly.

Yulia Pinkusevich (Headlands Graduate Fellow '12–'13) states, "The Isorithm series grew out of my research for Double Vision, a collaborative project with Andrea Steves and Francois Hughes. I located a Cold War-era, declassified military manual which gave step-by-step instructions on how to create maps that predict the impact of nuclear bomb airbursts, showing fatal and non-fatal casualty isorithms over particular types of habitable regions. I was struck by the immense tension between the elegant geometries and rational calculations of these maps, juxtaposed with the irrational chaos and mass destruction they represent. I draw on my Ukrainian and Russian identity and my personal experience of growing up in the USSR at the end of the Cold War, as well as the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, to create marks made by gestures and physical movements that react to and synthesize the complex relationship between these countries." Pinkusevich has exhibited nationally and internationally, including site-specific projects executed in Paris and Buenos Aires. Her art is in the public collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Stanford University; Facebook HQ, Menlo Park, CA; Google HQ, Mountain View, CA; and the City of Albuquerque, NM, among others.

Jami Porter Lara is a conceptual artist interested in the ways that humans use ideas about what is natural to naturalize human political constructs. Through a broad range of formal approaches such as sculpture, printmaking, and drawing, as well as sewing and embroidery, Porter Lara explores how fictions of identity create lived reality. With Terms and Conditions, a flashing neon asterisk invites, or rather demands, that we flip our awareness: we are obliged to consider that which is typically tucked away behind the subtleties of punctuation, footnoted out of view, designed to be overlooked—and to face it head-on. Porter Lara's work is in public and private collections across the U.S. and Mexico, and has been featured in Art 21 Magazine, American Craft, Hyperallergic, and on PBS. In 2017, Artsy named her one of the artists shaping the future of ceramics. Exhibitions include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles. She has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Tamarind Institute.

With an imagination that reaches into the historical and a fondness for drawing stories, Gregory Rick collapses history and confronts trauma with works that reflect his personal experience as they also engage in dialogue with the wider world. His vibrant works depict scenes of conflict and struggle in high contrast, cartoon-like imagery. Border Wall, a response to the ongoing crisis at the US–Mexico border, swims with symbols and references pointing in many directions, creating a feeling of anxiousness and violence. While known for his monumental canvases, Rick feels most comfortable working at a smaller scale on paper, which allows him more freedom for experimentation. Rick has received the Yamaguchi printmaking award, the Nathan Oliviera fellowship, the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, and the SFMOMA SECA Art Award for his artistic work, as well as the Combat Infantry Badge for his military service. He has shown in museums and galleries in Minnesota and California, including the Kala Art Institute; Bass and Reiner Gallery; California College of the Arts; Ever Gold Gallery; Slash/; and the Rochester Art Center, among others.

Justine Rivas’s practice focuses largely on oil painting, incorporating the sentimental through the figurative. Yielding works that are typically personal in content, Rivas paints from routine moments involving movement and space, oftentimes centered on the domestic or the ephemeral as it relates to memory. Rivas’s solo exhibitions include Phaedra Bathes in Fabuloso, Et al. at Vacation, New York; and Memory Foam, Alter Space, San Francisco. She has been a participant in Summer Literary Seminar in Tbilisi, Georgia. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently pursuing her MFA at UCLA. Select group exhibitions include The Valley, Taos, New Mexico; and Mission Comics, Guerrero Gallery, Book and Job, and Ladybug House, all in San Francisco.

Stuart Robertson (Headlands Graduate Fellow ‘20–’21) is a mixed media artist who paints, collages, and assembles images of Black life inspired by nostalgia for his birthplace in Kingston, Jamaica, confrontations with the American dream, and fantasies of the African Diaspora’s future. His creative and educational practices prioritize interdisciplinary discourse and aesthetic innovation that better serve the representation of the Black Diaspora in contemporary art. Robinson’s work explores familiar shapes, color, and materials drawn from our daily encounters with media, signs, and our surroundings. Untitled (Weekend Dad), made while the artist was at Headlands, unites a breadth of materials and textures to manifest a shimmering patchwork story. Robertson has been an honorary artist in residence at the Kala Art Institute, and is currently a full-time teaching artist-in-residence at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He is a prizewinning finalist for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

Carrie Schneider's work spans mediums including performance, photography, and film. Her practice explores the tension between the camera's exactitude and its capacity for abstraction, using techniques that invite discord into the otherwise rational photographic process. In the work shown here, one of Schneider's Moon Drawings, we see some of the many faces of the moon overlaid, a portrait of a dancer at work; the artist notates the moon's moves across the sky in a compression of time and space. Schneider has presented her photographs and videos at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Galería Alberto Sendros, Buenos Aires; santralistanbul, Istanbul; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Pérez Art Museum Miami; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; and The Kitchen, New York. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award and a Fulbright Fellowship, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Schneider serves on the boards of Iceberg Projects and A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, and is currently Wolf Chair of Photography at The Cooper Union in New York.

Leslie Shows's (Headlands Tournesol Award '06) mixed-media, monumental works broaden the definition of landscape art, incorporating assemblage, painting, drawing, glass, and sculptural relief. Show's creations contrast time scales—the long range of geological time and the shorter history of human civilization—and fuse that exploration with urgent imagery alluding to the degradation and destruction of nature at the hands of humans. The energetic spirit of this elemental visage provides a glimmer of humor in the face of it all. Shows has exhibited widely, including at SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, among others. Shows is the recipient of an Artadia Award, the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and the SFMOMA SECA Art Award.

Edra Soto (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘17) is a Puerto Rican-born interdisciplinary artist and co-director of THE FRANKLIN. Motivated by civic and social actions, her recent projects prompt viewers to reconsider cross-cultural dynamics, the legacy of colonialism, and personal responsibility. The Open 24 Hours series draws attention to our discard culture through the presentation of liquor bottles collected in her neighborhood of East Garfield Park. “Glass liquor bottles are the most prominent litter left behind, always glimmering and intact, as if someone carefully laid them to rest. I collect these liquor bottles and strip them of their labels to obscure the type of liquor the bottle once held and deter viewers from presuming the demographic of the imbiber.” Reintroducing the bottles to society invites reflection on their significance; Soto asks viewers to engage in difficult conversations around socioeconomic and cultural oppression, the erasure of history, and the loss of cultural knowledge. Soto has been awarded the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. She has exhibited extensively at venues including El Museo del Barrio, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Susie Taylor explores geometric abstraction through the medium of weaving, engaging a creative and technical mindset to solve visual and structural puzzles. Using an intuitive sense of geometry, she composes using basic shapes such as blocks and lines that are held together by and generated from a physical grid. Images surface when colored yarns cross, resulting in tones that mix in the eye. Her work addresses the notion that ordered systems can still flirt with chance, interruption, and improvisation. Taylor has exhibited in the U.S. and in international fiber art and contemporary textile biennials in China and Ukraine. Her recent exhibitions include Andrea Schwartz Gallery, San Francisco; Craft in America Center, Los Angeles; Art Ventures Gallery, Menlo Park, CA; and oliviermasson.art. Her work will be in an upcoming issue of New American Paintings and has been seen in the L.A. Times, American Craft, FiberArt Now, The Textile Eye, and Complex Weavers Journal, among other publications. She has taught at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, and Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA.

Painter and muralist Madeleine Tonzi creates works focused on capturing the essence of ephemeral moments, works that are a reflection of her investigation into memory and place and the relationships we form with the various environments we experience. Born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her aesthetic echoes her time spent in the high desert landscape, and simultaneously gives way to her experiences traveling and living in California. Finding both solace and discomfort in the places that she goes, Tonzi creates vivid abstract representational landscapes that are at once organic and architectural, utilizing a distinct visual language to emote what cannot always be put into words as we move through time and space. Abstracted vistas intermingle with surreal rock and architectural forms to create soothing and surreal compositions. Tonzi’s dusky toned landscapes evoke the first blush of sunrise on a desert road; a fleeting memory from a dream; a moonrise on a distant planet.

While spending a year at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize FelIow in 2013-14, Catherine Wagner created a series of works investigating and interpreting the history of culture. The photographs include sculptural masterpieces found both within and outside of museum archives. While rooted in antiquity, each image is embedded with some form of marker that creates a collision in time. The process of conservation, the physical moving of an artifact, or—as seen in Fragments Femminile, the recreation of a figure from isolated fragments literally drawn together—serves to disrupt the historical iconography, allowing for a more contemporary reading. We are invited to focus on overlooked details as unwritten histories are illuminated. Among many accolades, Wagner is the recipient of an Artadia Award as well as a Dorothea Lange Award; she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Aaron Siskind Foundation, and Weizmann Institute, Israel. Her work is held in many notable permanent collections, from SFMOMA to MoMA, New York, and is commemorated in monographs.

Solitude, human nature, and dialogue are at the core of Richard T. Walker’s work. Walker (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘10) employs video, music, photography, sculpture, and performance, often intermingled, to explore and question the experience of the individual within the natural landscape. A paused refrain (embrace 1) collages two copies of the artist’s photo of Mount Shasta in Northern California, with two screenprints using imagery from a 19th-century woodblock etching of Mount Shasta. The collaged elements together give the impression that the outline of the mountain has traversed time and space to reveal itself. The work toys with the perceptive underpinnings of comprehending the enormity of a mountain in a landscape, ultimately finding a sense of visual security—framed and contained within its representation. Walker has exhibited and performed worldwide, including in solo and group exhibitions at SFMOMA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; The Contemporary Austin; The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; and The Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, among other venues. He was an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center and a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; he is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, a fellowship at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and an Artadia Award.

Nancy White’s formal rigor and the intimate scale of her powerfully understated works prompts a different way of seeing. Engaging with painting’s most basic elements—color, shape, composition—White’s worlds of slicing shapes and tilting planes suggest a surprising and deep space. From a seemingly singular, muted color family she conjures multiple variants of hue; the resulting paintings evoke a range of temperatures and sensations. White’s works invite close looking while exerting a physical presence that is ambiguous and unexpectedly expansive. She says, “I am always looking for that particular, peculiar emotive space.” Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Jancar Jones Gallery, San Francisco and Los Angeles; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; and Takada Gallery, San Francisco. Group exhibitions include, among others, Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn; Palo Alto Art Center; 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco; Institute of Contemporary Art San José; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon; Busdori, Tokyo, Japan; and Paris Concret. Her work can be found in a number of collections, including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.

Didier William’s paintings imagine the network that is formed when myth, Afro-Caribbean history, and personal narrative combine. Of his work, he states, “The carved eyes in my paintings conscript the viewer into a flamboyant narrative made deliberately queer by refusing explicit sex and gender signifiers. …In a manner akin to science fiction, viewers are forced to contend with a dissociated body; a body that is cloaked, patterned, adorned; perhaps even consumed with diversionary tactics.” He continues, “My surfaces—where the body is formed through cuts, stains, and the residue of historical narratives—become sites of convergence and collision, marking both the fragility and the persistence of black humanity.” His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art; The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, among others. He is a recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

California native Chasen Wolcott (Headlands Tournesol Award '18) primarily works in drawing and painting, with forays into sculpture, film, and photography. Driven by the inescapable qualities of the natural world, Wolcott investigates autobiographical translations of subject matter in energetic paintings marked by bold color and confident, gestural mark-making. Wolcott grew up finding creative lines through surfing, skateboarding, and outdoor adventure, thriving in the angst of west coast storytelling culture. Wolcott incorporates into his work themes from his mixed Native American and Mexican descent, as well as intersections with mythology. The speed of modern life allows him to translate his subject matter, through confident brushwork and mark-making, into a pictorial playing field of unstaged intimacy. His selected group exhibitions include Durden and Ray, Los Angeles; Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles; Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco; Marilyn Werby Gallery, Long Beach, CA; and Max L. Gatov Gallery, Long Beach.

Lena Wolff identifies as an artist and craftswoman equally, without division. Working with tactile processes in a range of mediums including drawing, wood sculpture, collage, and embroidery, her studio output extends out of folk art and craft traditions, while also being grounded in minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, and feminist and political art. The visual language of her work links the iconography of American quilts with symbols for democracy, motifs from nature, and the greater universe that is our home. In this Drawing for Morning, a geometric burst sparkles in the cool blue of sea or sky; our eyes dance between points of intersection, around and around again. Wolff’s work has been presented in galleries and museums across the US, and collected by ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, Los Angeles; SFMOMA; Oakland Museum of California; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; San Francisco History Collection at San Francisco Public Library; San Francisco Arts Commission; Alameda County Arts Commission; University of Iowa Museum; and the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Cobb County, Georgia, among others. She is currently a 2021–22 Artist Fellow awardee at Kala Art Institute.

Chelsea Ryoko Wong is a painter and muralist whose vibrant figure compositions reflect the diversity and style of her home in San Francisco. Through the use of watercolor, gouache, and acrylic techniques, Wong creates busy scenes of commingling people drawing from real-life events and her imagination. Her work is known for celebrating racial and cultural diversity, promoting working-class communities, and evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder. Through heavily stylized and idyllic imagery, Wong creates an encouraging visual statement promoting joy, acceptance, and openness to one another. In the work shown here, we are invited into a warm sunset scene with friends at the Marin Headlands’ Rodeo Beach. Wong was the first recipient of the Hamaguchi Emerging Artists Fellowship award at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and has recently completed murals for Bay Area organizations including Asana, La Cocina, and the Facebook AIR Program. She has exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Asia. In February 2022 she was announced as a finalist for the SFMOMA SECA Art Award.

Hung Liu grew up in Beijing during the time of Mao Zedong. After finishing high school, she was sent to the countryside to be “re-educated” for four years during the Cultural Revolution, where she worked alongside Chinese workers and concubines seven days a week tending fields of rice, wheat, and corn. During this time, she photographed and painted these people, and they remained the subjects of her paintings throughout her life, where she aimed to give them a life of beauty and respect. Following the Chinese cultural tradition of “calling spirits home” after death, the artist felt that lest these workers and concubines be forgotten and their spirits never “called home,” she should prepare a place for them to rest for eternity. Her work has been exhibited in major museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Denver Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; SFMOMA; San Jose Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Belvedere Museum Vienna, among others. Hung Liu was the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and several books have been written about the artist and her works.

Alicia McCarthy (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘99) works with found wood and spray paint and is known for her signature style of vibrantly colored woven patterns on mixed-media panels. McCarthy is a member of the Mission School, a movement that emerged in the 1990s in San Francisco’s Mission District, encompassing the group of artists who take their inspiration from the Mission’s urban culture, graffiti, and street art. The movement is associated with the use of non-traditional artistic materials and found objects. McCarthy has exhibited internationally and has received numerous awards, including a San Francisco Artadia Award. Her work is in a number of public and private collections, including the Oakland Museum of California, Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, MIMA Museum Brussels, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.