Studio AHEAD Journal

During our recent trip to Morocco, we were able to spend some time at the Anou Cooperative in Fes, an artisan-owned and operated collective of hundreds of weavers in and around the Atlas Mountains. As we mentally traced the zigzagging lines typically found in these carpets, we couldn’t help but connect them to our own community of weavers here in Northern California, and the rich cultural history they represent.

So we were more than happy this month to speak to Trav Meinolf, weaver, artist, teacher, founder of the Meinolf Weaving School in San Anselmo, and great bringer-together of people. For Trav, weaving has always been social, reflecting both the craft's history as a communal activity and the earliest forms of the loom, which needed at least two people to operate.

Studio AHEAD: What's your history with this craft?

Trav Meinolf: In 2000, just as I was introduced to weaving and looms by a brilliant and influential partner I was living with in SF, my grandpa died and I went to Wisconsin to help with his and my grandma's effects. That's where I found a loom, in pieces, as well as photos and stories about a close friend of grandma Lucille's named Aunt Mucie. So close in fact that in their circle they were BOTH called Mucie (Lucy + Mary = Mucie!) I brought the loom back to the city and as I was putting it together it quickly became the largest thing in our small studio apartment! From that moment I've had a very self-guided and intimate relationship with the loom and weaving, which I've tried to supplement with academic and group experiences to fill out my understanding of textiles and their production and cultural uses.

Studio AHEAD: You spent several years in Berlin. Was this integral to your growth as a weaver?

TM: I was born in the Bay Area, in Marin County where I now live, but I tend to feel an outsider, so I've taken times of life in different lands where at least that feeling seems more reasonable. I moved to Berlin in 2008 (after I earned my MFA from CCA) for a lot of reasons, but being relieved of the economic burdens of living in San Francisco was a major one. It allowed me to experiment with weaving projects of my own and in groups. It was in Berlin where I rented my first workshop space, offering weavings marked with the amount of time they took to make and asking for customers to pay their equivalent wage. I also had a small group of students who built their own looms and learned to weave blankets. From Berlin I was able to travel to other areas in Europe and try different teaching models in many contexts with many different populations.

SA: So weaving has always been social for you. Is this true of the craft in general? What were some of the precursors to the Meinolf School?

TM: In conversation with my friend and fellow artist/educator Raphael Noz about providing community craft space he often brings up the refrain of "mending nets," referring to group activities of production or repair, often textile- or food-related, that are practiced in traditional cultures. Public spaces of co-creation have been with us from the beginning, and are one of the foundational rituals of human society.

In my personal history my Berlin workshop was definitely a precursor, and there was also a weaving space I got to establish for a few months at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Before that I held weekly tie-dye parties in my apartment with my dynamic, artistic partner Iris! Doing projects together feels great, which is why I love being able to maintain such a massive resource as a two-story textile school and share it with anyone who can handle it. 

SA: When you start on a project, do you have a clear idea of where it will go? Is it possible to improvise on a loom?

TM: I start with materials, texture, color, pattern. Once I know what I'm using I decide on ratios, how much blue to white, fuzzy to smooth, etc., before really hammering down what goes where. I've developed the process that has just the right balance of pre-planning and improvisation for me, and I've seen students who go all the way to one or the other side of that spectrum. Supporting other weaving approaches always informs me of what part of the activity nourishes me the most.

I've found that most weavers are pleased with their efforts when they do leave marks, either breaks in the pattern or other evidence that they were making decisions at certain points of the process, not just fulfilling some rote task they set themselves. But not always!

Earlier this year we were invited to the home of David King, the British-born graphic designer and musician who lived in San Francisco for four decades. There we were met by his wife Dione, who guided us through the creative force that is David's work. David, who died in 2019, produced an enormous body of print ephemera, as well as photography, film, radio plays, and sculpture, that is just now being archived, sorted, and arranged into something resembling a narrative. If there is any connective thread, it might be David’s anarchist spirit, reflecting the times and places he variously called home: Dial House farm, where he met Crass, whose symbol became David's most well known creation; downtown New York during the no wave scene; and San Francisco.

Dione is lovely and filled with stories, and we were happy to interview her a few months after our meet up to talk about David's legacy.

Studio AHEAD: I want to start with something that you said to us, “after David passed in 2019, we had to sort of reconstruct his past from what was left in the studio. There was no CV.” I like this idea about telling someone's history, especially an artist’s, through objects. Could you give us a short history of you and David through some objects? 

Dione King: I would start with the house because, although it's not the beginning of the relationship, it is a fixed location that to some degree depicted our relationship, what we liked, what we wanted to inhabit. And what was unique to our vision.

I live surrounded by David’s objects and his arrangements. And every single day I see objects that I've looked at over the years, and they give me suggestions and joy and remind me that even the sort of homeliest rock if seen in a particular light can suggest something greater. And that arranged with something else or collaged with something else things that might be singularly banal become wonderful and magical and inspirational just by the nature of their relationships.  

SA: Absolutely. Collage feels particularly relevant at this moment: media coming from all directions, which we DIY into something legible. 

DK: Collage was so important to David. You can see it in so much of what he did—the way he assembled objects in place. He was always visually putting objects together to make a different reality, putting paper together to make a different reality, composing a photograph so that it became a different reality. The house itself is a kind of collage, I would say. Everything was about assembling and creating a new context. 

SA: David was a prolific artist working across multiple media, so I imagine sorting through the archive is helping establish a narrative about his career. Have there been any surprises about his work, even for you in this ongoing archival process? 

DK: I was amazed at how much work he had done. I mean, I knew he was working all the time, but there’s this immense cross-referencing in terms of his output. Scrapbooks, wood sculptures, photography, drawings, posters, zines, stencils, and so much more. And all of these feed into each other to form a very singular aesthetic. Somehow in the day to day of our lives together I had forgotten about how relentlessly he had pursued his personal vision and just how much he had created.

The organizing of the archive has also really unearthed so much that I had never really looked at before. His collections, his cell phone photographs, his eBay purchases. At one point when opening a letter to his mother a little newspaper clipping fell out, and it was an illustration that David had done for the New York Times in 1977. Turns out it was the first illustration work he had done after moving to New York from England. I had never seen this before. It’s small things like that that really helped build a better picture of his life as an artist, and helped flesh out a timeline. That kind of small discovery and making of connections really drove the work of the archive in the early years. It was like a puzzle to be solved. And even though it has lessened somewhat, there are still new things turning up all the time. 

SA: “David King Publications 1977 to 2019” (Colpa Press, 2024) received quite a bit of press as a needed guide through some of his print work.

DK: Oh, I think it's very important in that it highlights the range of his publication work. David was very intense about printed media and immensely skilled at creating images. His engagement with print as an artist and a designer was continuous and prolific. The book is mostly visual—images reproducing zines and books and flyers—but it does also include two short texts. There’s an introduction which gives a brief biographical sketch of his life and work, and then there’s a wonderful essay by the Amsterdam based graphic design studio Experimental Jetset called “Transferware,” which eloquently contextualizes David and his work within the larger world of art and graphic design. 

And even though the book is ostensibly about his print work, it’s also a chronological overview of his work in general. It begins with his late 1970s New York commercial illustration work and flyers for our band Arsenal, and then follows our move from NY to San Francisco in 1980. It covers our later bands Sleeping Dogs and Brain Rust, and all of the zines that David made around these music projects, alone and in collaboration with others. Lastly it covers his self-published books from the early 2000s and everything he made with small publishers like Colpa Press and Kill Yr Idols. And all of that print work provides a platform for David’s photography, drawing, writing, collage, scrapbooks. The book really serves as an entry point into David’s work for people who don’t know anything more about him other than that he designed the Crass symbol. 

SA: For better or for worse, did David feel that the Crass symbol overshadowed the rest of his work? 

DK: Of course, the Crass symbol was, and still is, the most recognized work that David created. However, the more one becomes familiar with his entire body of work, the more the Crass symbol diminishes slightly in importance. There is a lot of diversity and humor in David’s vision that may not be apparent in the Crass symbol alone. 

It’s important to remember that for a very long time most people did not know that David designed the Crass symbol. I mean it was a given that those who knew knew and those who didn’t know didn't know. We were a punk band. We were aggressive and outspoken politically and socially, and that was the main point of doing the work, not necessarily promoting the symbol that he had done.

Finally, in the end, rather than have the symbol overshadow him, he sort of took it back by creating endless variations and putting them out into the world through exhibitions and publications in the 2000s. These versions, or riffs, were David’s way of injecting his humor and his aesthetic back into something he had created decades earlier. They added color—which was so hugely important to David—into the graphic language of anarcho-punk that had almost always been black and white. And surprisingly the humor of the “smiley face” Crass symbol, or the “Superman” Crass symbol, or the “Make Tea Not War” Crass symbol that he designed only added to the depth of meaning of the original. 

Really, I think David always wanted to be seen for the work he was doing at the actual time he was doing it. The work of the moment was what he was most concerned with. He didn’t really deal with his own history as something more important than the present. The present was real. The present was what mattered. 

SA: What do you hope his legacy will be? 

DK: I hope that he is seen for his joy and his humor… maybe even the recognition of a certain sadness that stemmed from growing up in post-World War II England. And then his coming to America and finding some sort of space for personal growth. He did that here, and he found community support. I’m hoping that all of these qualities will be seen and appreciated by those who see his work.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

Jamie Alexander is one half of Park Life, the exquisitely curated, always interesting retail store and gallery space in Inner Richmond, which he opened in 2006 with Derek Song. Since then, Park Life has become a cultural mainstay, where you might find works from our favorite locals next to rare print ephemera or the latest edition of Apartamento (currently, we're enjoying Graphic Languages, a global survey of writing systems). Alexander is also co-founder of the exquisitely interesting, always curated SF Art Book Fair, where you might find us strolling this summer. Recently we visited his home in the Richmond District, where we talked books, beginnings, and the time he was sued by Jeff Koons.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us your origin story, either myth or something approaching reality.

Jamie Alexander: I grew up in the aesthetically and culturally homogenous landscape of Orange County in the 1980s, exposing myself to art where I could find it. At the time that mostly meant seeing the works of Haring, Basquiat, Warhol, and the like pass through the few commercial galleries around town and reading my mom's copies of Interview magazine. I was lucky to grow up in a working-class environment with a family that was creative and progressive and had an entrepreneurial spirit.

After studying urban design in college, I followed my sister and mom up to the Bay Area and was really compelled by the amount of creativity and the diverse culture. I worked for a water resource consulting firm for a few years and later Ask Jeeves (!), but was always looking to get more involved with the art community. While living in the East Bay, I became friends with a group of artists attending and teaching at CCA in Oakland, including Curtis Hsiang, who was a big influence early on and introduced me to what later would be called the Mission School community that was taking hold in the mid 90s.

SA: Were you part of the Mission School or more like an onlooker?

JA: I wasn't part of the Mission School but I am a big fan of the artists associated with it: Margaret Kilgallen, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Alicia McCarthy, Zara Thustra, and others. Park Life definitely was heavily influenced by those artists.

Ultimately, I decided I wanted to open a business where I could make a living in the arts, working with artists and being a part of the creative community. I met my future business partner Derek Song, who at the time was managing a retail store called Giant Robot and knew about running a retail business. Together we embarked on the voyage that would become Park Life.

SA: You also cofounded the city's art book fair. It’s somewhat surprising this didn't exist prior to 2016—it just seems like something San Francisco has always had.

JA: I've thought for years that the NYABF and later the LAABF (started by Printed Matter) were the two best, most relevant art events in the country in terms of creativity, inclusivity, accessibility and energy. I felt that opportunity existed for San Francisco. Together with my friends Luca Antonucci and David Kasparzak from Colpa Press, we started to formulating plans which, a couple years later, and with a strategic and generous partnership with the newly founded Minnesota Street Project in 2016, turned into the first annual SFABF. 

SA: How do you feel it differs from the NY and LA versions?

JA: The SFABF differs in that San Francisco differs from those cities... each has its own vibe. LA and NY are a bit bigger than ours and more comprehensive, but I think the SFABF is one of the highest quality, best produced and most successful books fairs in the world, and that speaks to the community of creative people in the Bay Area that show their support every year.

SA: Your curation—whether books for sale or the artists you exhibit—offers a space for other modes of thinking: Leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist... Maybe you can speak a little bit about navigating the last few years and making space, as it were, for these ideas.

JA: A big part of what drew me to a life in the arts is the sense of justice and resistance and equality that the art world can define. It's important for us that Park Life represents these qualities in choosing the products we sell and make and the artists we work with.

SA: You have a second location where you exhibit artists.

JA: My inspiration for curating our gallery program is motivated by the idea of showing a young artist or an early career artist and providing them with a launching point and platform that might lead to opportunities with bigger, more established galleries. Having someone show with us once or twice and then move on to a full-service gallery would be the best case scenario. A few artists that come to mind that have put on really great shows for us: Esther Elia, Jeffrey Sincich, Rico Duenas, Gina Conteras, Mark Mulroney, Leah Rosenberg, Caitlyn Galloway, Joe Ferriso, and Peter Gray Hurley, whose current show in the gallery includes some of the best paintings I've seen in a while. [“Mostly Water,” featuring works by Shaine Drake, opens April 10, 2026.]

SA: What are a few of your favorite pieces that have passed through Park Life?

JA: A big part of the fun for me is being able to track down a new publication or edition or design object that fits into the Park Life story, and if we are able to create these kinds of products with artists even better.

After 20 years, some that stand out to me include David Shrigley, Tucker Nichols, Carissa Potter Carlson, Mark Mulroney, Barry McGee, Marina Luz, Jonathan Anzalone, Todd Hido, Jason Polan, George McCalman, Paulson Bott Press, Small Works (SF), MacFadden and Thorpe, Aperture (NY), The Thing Quarterly. And all the artist and publishers we've worked with through the SFABF. I've also really enjoyed working closely with Bay Area institutions like the Headlands Center for the Arts, Creative Growth, SOEX, SFMoMA, FOG Fair. We're also looking forward to working with Art + Water, The Further Triennial, and A March Through Time.

Though, my favorite happening might be the time that Jeff Koons famously tried to sue us, and it ended badly for him. Also, the Oh Sees once played in our gallery.

SA: Wait, you have to tell us this Jeff Koons story.

JA: One day in December over a dozen years ago Koons and his team of lawyers decided that they owned the copyright to the Balloon Dog likeness and were going to litigate to control it. There was a design firm in Canada that produced a Balloon Dog bookend as a design object and we carried it at Park Life. Koons served lawsuits to the maker and chose one retailer, us. The design firm quickly folded and stopped making them. We decided to take him on and counter sue him in federal court here in Oakland. After a few weeks of getting dragged through the media—it was on the front page of the NY Times and London Times, as well as Art Forum—he realized it was a losing proposition and folded like a tent.

It turned out to be a landmark case and is used as a case study in several legal courses. The results of the case spawned a billion-dollar Balloon Dog industry. Anytime you see one being sold in the wild you can trace it back to Koons losing to Park Life.

Another fun part of the story is that a friend of mine, who at the time managed Koons’ studio in NY, told me that in response to seeing that the publicity was not going away, Koons screamed, "What the fuck is Park Life!” so that keeps me warm.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

When Rel Robinson told us that the internet could be considered one giant fiber art structure, our minds were blown, but she has a point. It’s just one of many surprising observations Robinson throws into a conversation, which, when we talked to her earlier this month, ranged from quilts as archive to the importance of gay sex guides in defying LLM training.

Robinson is an artist, quiltmaker, publisher, writer—but as we learned, these are not stable categories, and one interesting aspect of her work is how one label folds into another. Is a quilt that features language in its design a text? Is hanging one on your wall a form of publishing? We’re not sure there are definitive answers to be had. The delight of Robinson’s work is getting us to ask.

Studio AHEAD: Before we get to the quilts, I’m curious about some of the other objects in your studio: “Historic Girlhoods”, “Male Video Guide,” Robert Falco, a can of Pringles. Are these inspirations or decorations?

Rel Robinson: I’ve always been drawn to Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the “ragpicker” who, like the poet or the artist, scavenges overlooked materials of contemporary life to assemble a more truthful or transcendent telling of history.

SA: Yes, from his Arcades Project! All about reading the ephemerality of commodities as history. One of my favorite books. Every designer should skim through it.

RR: The studio is a place where I get to collect various forms of detritus and breathe new life into them as objects or images.

I’m very lucky, I have a husband who works in rare and antiquated books/ephemera and knows me very well. “Historic Girlhoods” is a book he brought home when I was researching American Girl Dolls for a body of work titled “Felicity’s Bed Chamber.” It’s the kind of book I would have read as a kid, and I like keeping up that version of myself in the studio.

“Male Video Guide” is a list (with concise yet exacting descriptions) of various pornographic movies from the 80s. I was stunned by the breadth and aesthetic of this taxonomical categorization. Texts like this are the material predecessors to algorithmic feeds and FYPs, technologically obsolete ways of helping you find what you like. I’ve used scans of early 20th-century interior decor catalogues for the same reason. I appreciate that these objects exist in print. While I love and rely heavily on digital relics like the Internet Archive, it’s unlikely that the “Male Video Guide” has been used to train any LLMs. Relegated ephemera like this feel almost out of step with time, like a fossil. 

Together, the books make a diptych that mirrors an aesthetic I’ve been working towards, one that’s both the horny and pastoral. 

Robert Falco is a painter and friend from art school. We were studio mates during the pandemic, which was a really formative time in my practice. His work engages with image culture as a sort of specter, like the moire of a screen. Last summer I published a small monograph of his screenshots through my imprint, Conventional Projects. The screenshot is such a fascinating impulse. It’s a way of grappling with the ephemerality and intangibility of our lives online, a new form of ragpicking! The book is simultaneously a collection of his painting studies and an exercise in the editorial tendencies of my own practice. It’s the first of many to come.

SA: Is Conventional Projects an extension of your solo work?

RR: In my early 20s I lived in an artist collective housed in a former convent, which is how Conventional Projects got its name. I had a studio and a project space in the basement. When I had to stop curating shows during the pandemic I switched Conventional Projects to an artist editions model. My studio work is very solitary but publication allows me to work collaboratively with artists I admire. I always wanted to be in a band, but I have no musical talent or knowledge. Publishing feels a bit like being in a band. 

I used to view Conventional Projects as a distinct entity, separate from my studio practice, but I see them as two parts of a whole in conversation with one another. The books I put out last year, “iPhone Notes Vol 1.” and “Robert Falco Screen Shots” grew out of the same impulse to collect images and ephemera that I use in my studio work. Contextualizing that work into the space of a book only extends my research interests further and it keeps them in circulation. Last year I spoke about iPhone notes with KQED Forum and The Washington Post. I got to reach audiences that I wouldn’t necessarily encounter in a contemporary gallery. 

Conventional Projects is also a very practical endeavor. Simply put, more people can afford a book, a sticker, or a quilted tote bag than a piece of art from a gallery. I love working with galleries, but I appreciate the opportunity to make and publish things that get to live out in the world as well. I’m currently working on two books and an edition of functional quilts, so stay tuned.  

SA: Can you share with us your latest iPhone note? 

RR: “Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus in Rags” followed by my Kaiser medical record number.

SA: Intriguing. Tell us about your quilts.

RR: I learned how to sew when I was four. The sewing machine had a sort of omnipresence in our home. I grew up in single parent homes, without television or much supervision, so I found ways to entertain myself. I watched my mother sew all the drapes and lay the marble floors herself in the house I grew up in. This made the domestic space feel very androgynous. The curtain served a dual function, protecting us from the outside world and aestheticizing the interior. The sewing machine made things beautiful and safe. It has always felt like a machine with limitless capacities. 

In undergrad I studied photography at SFAI. I was really preoccupied with the question of *why* we felt the need to make photographs, yet the practice of image making always fell short of the spiritual capacity of the medium. Photography and all subsequent forms of digital communication are a means of time travel, but printing photographs in a lab felt flaccid and dull. I ended up in a fiber sculpture class on accident, due to an enrollment error. I was pompous because I already knew how to sew and the assignments felt juvenile. We were supposed to make a bag, so I peeled a bunch of fruit and then sewed the skins back together. That's when I started to think about what was possible with thread and fabric, and how the act of binding disparate materials together and quilting was another form of record keeping, like a photograph. In concert with one another, the image feels true, and makes space for the body. Like the ragpicker, so much of my practice relies on the evocation of touch.

I consider my practice in the words of poet Ariana Reines: “The images gave us no rest yet failed over/And over despite the immensity/ Of their realism to describe the world as we really/Knew it, and worse it knew us.” 

While I use free motion quilting as a tool, my work might be more akin to relief sculpture than quilts. It engages more heavily with the history of “decorative arts” than that of domestic objects, but both are present. 

I’m interested in the function of decor, the way we use it to both emphasize and obfuscate systems of power within and outside of our emotional lives. I find that sometimes we are suspicious of beauty, as if it is trying to trick us by the nature of demanding our attention. I think there’s an immense capacity for criticality in the notion of wanting to be looked at. 

SA: I like these dichotomies in your work, particularly that of text/textile.

RR: In the studio I try to be a conduit. It’s taken me years of practice to allow myself this grace. I’ve repeatedly taught myself that the clearer the vision at the beginning of the process, the more disappointing the outcome. So, I let myself be motivated by anecdotal or research-based inquiries, and guided by intuition and curiosity.

Quilting has always served as an inadvertent archival methodology. Historically, it metabolized outworn and disused clothes and linens into newly functional objects. But it’s thread that binds the dregs of the past into a new form, a retelling of the past, for the future. 

Thread is what allows fabric to take up space, otherwise it would have no shape. It’s so delicate, I can break it with my fingers, but it’s a fiercely demonstrative technology.

There are many, often cited relationships between fibers and the history of technology. The word “text” itself comes from the Latin word “texere,” to weave. The earliest forms of binary code were modeled after the punch cards used for Jacquard weaving. In felting, quilting, and blocking tapestry you’re essentially rasterizing the material because it literally shrinks by compression, but it’s a lossless compression. It retains its structural integrity, unlike the lossy compression of datasets in the latent space of artificial intelligence. 

In thinking about quilting as a method of speculative historiography, it’s telling that in English we often rely on allusions to fibers to describe narrative. Parts of a story are often woven, stitched, or pieced. We even use the word “thread” to describe the continuity of something. The word “felt” is also a homonym, describing the past or history of one’s feelings but also the variety of wool that is created by repeatedly puncturing the surface and agitating it. The word feeling stems from the Old English word “felan,” to touch or perceive through the senses, while the word “felt,” in regards to the material, comes from the West Germanic “felatz,” something that is beaten or compressed. I’m so struck by this etymological collision suggesting that to have feeling, to have felt is/was to have had something beaten, or compressed, by touch, out of us.

My smartest friend tells me that the best etymologies are typically false friends, but I’m an artist not a scholar so I have permission to yield for poetics.

This is all to say that working with fibers lends itself to dichotomies by nature. Even the medium of “fiber art” is difficult to define: why aren’t paintings on canvas and drawings on paper considered fiber art? Living in San Francisco, when I tell people I work in fibers, 80% of them assume I mean fiber optic networks. If, by definition, fiber art is art that engages with or relies on a fibrous substrate or material of synthetic or organic composition, then the internet is just one big fiber sculpture. So, who’s to say, really.

[This conversation has been edited for length.]

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

Whenever we’re in New York, we try to spend an afternoon with artist and writer Michele Oka Doner at her loft in SoHo. Oka Doner moved here in the early 80s, when the neighborhood was still industrially zoned, the streets empty, and the buildings, if not abandoned, housed a few struggling artists.

Things have, obviously, changed. But from Oka Doner’s loft, you can still barely hear the traffic below, as if the streets were deserted. Instead, as she pointed out, there is birdsong and seagulls. Both Oka Doner’s home and her studio, the loft is also an archive of sorts, a gallery, and a library with thousands of books. We followed her as she walked around pulling out drawings, holding up bits of rock and coral, pointing to new and old sculptures, each with a story or idea behind them. For Oka Doner, the natural world is a book and none of the answers are in the back.

Oka Doner is probably best known for “A Walk on the Beach,” the mile-and-a-quarter long floor installation at the Miami airport (her father was mayor of Miami Beach). But we have an affinity for her smaller, more intimate pieces, like the Burning Bush candelabras cast in bronze, throwing a spidery shadow along the walls; or her inscrutable books, like “Intuitive Alphabet,” which might be for children if adults weren’t the ones who need to read it most. We wondered how someone so attuned to nature could spend most of her life in the city, but Oka Doner reminded us that nature is always there, if we only look and see.

Studio AHEAD: So much of your work is rooted in reimagining the natural world so that we see it differently. When I’ve come to visit you, you’ve shown me little pieces—sticks, stone, coral—that you’ve contextualized into figures, bodies, faces. It’s one of the things that drew me to your work, because it’s what our designs do with Northern California’s landscape. Can you speak about this reimagining?

Michele Oka Doner: You describe a very old human impulse rooted in the neural networks of our ancient visual system. The recognition of familiar forms in natural objects goes as far back as the cave. Hominins discovered, likely felt, a flush of pleasure in connection, and took back to their shelters the stone that resembled a face, the branch that echoed their human body. This ability is unique to our species, and I'm a humble keeper of this golden thread tightly woven through the human tapestry.

SA: When you are working on a piece, are you adding to—accentuating—the natural form, or is your process more a taking away, a stripping back, to allow the form to come into its own? Are these insignificant distinctions?  

MOD: I believe I am celebrating, or examining, or altering forms by any and all techniques that seem applicable to a desirable conclusion. There is no singular approach to making.

SA: Do you see nature as a kind of writing, a script?

MOD: Again, I reference the ancients. Hieroglyphics are just one example of how we began the experience of visual communication through the shape of objects culled from daily life. Images of snakes and birds, so exquisitely executed in stone and painted on walls in Egypt, speak a language that was/is universal in its ability to forge immediate recognition of information. A direct circuit before the internet.

SA: You moved here in the early 80s. Did the downtown art scene at the time influence you? Manhattan, and especially downtown at that time, seems very far from the natural world.

MOD: New York is part of the natural world. Everywhere I look there are trees and seeds, leaves under my feet, the moon gliding past my window at night, the sounds of gulls screaming down Mercer Street, all reminding me that the power of the living, of weeds and feral creatures is irrepressible. And then there is the seaweed that dropped off the box of the neighbor's sushi delivery, flattened already by a truck, evoking a Victorian pressed specimen. And Devonian crinoid fossils in the marble table at the restaurant down the street.

SA: What were the landscapes of your childhood like?

MOD: Miami Beach where I was born and raised was a new city, only 20 years old. The wildness of semi tropical life still pulsed. Vines overgrew their place of origin and landed on the doorstep. In those early years the Everglades still burned periodically, a reminder that beyond the boundaries of my neighborhood there were other forces operating.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens, one of our great American poets, speaks to this feral moment of heat and moisture and resulting dew and endless tides, and the mystery of it all.

SA: I remember your reciting his “Nomad Exquisite” to me once with the line about the green sides and gold sides of green sides. He was well attuned to color. Has he taught you anything about being an artist?

MOD: Wallace Stevens was not afraid of passion, a great observer of growth and form as well as the enigma of water. I particularly love his line describing the “green vine angering for life” as it clings to and ascends a palm. Every time I used to stop at a red light in Miami I would look sideways and remake “there’s a green vine angering for life.”

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

After forty years in the industry, the best way to describe Claudio Mariani is not so much old school as Old World. Born and raised in Italy, descending from a line of artisans, a man who still makes fish glue himself and with real fish, Mariani is the name behind C. Mariani Antiques, the preeminent antiques dealer, restorer, and furniture maker in the Bay Area.

While his showroom is filled with works one ostensibly should touch and sit on and gather round (chairs, sofas, dining tables), their provenance in Europe's 18th- and 19th-century elite gives them the hands-off aura of museum pieces. But maybe this is just a general unfamiliarity with a world that seems as distance in time as in space—the world of the atelier, of guilds, of handcrafted pieces with storied pasts longer than the lifespan of their owners. It's a world Mariani has spent his career fostering, whether through his insistence on traditional materials (natural resins, beeswax), his mentorship program, or his ability to create custom works that seem like they've always existed.

Studio AHEAD: You call yourself a “third-generation artisan and antiques dealer.” What’s your family history in this trade? How did you get your own start?

Claudio Mariani: I come from a long lineage of artisans and antiques dealers—my great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and now the nephews and sons in our family have all worked in this trade. It has truly been a multigenerational craft, passed down not just as a livelihood but as a way of life. Some of my earliest memories are of being in my father’s workshop. Even at five years old, I was sanding, polishing, organizing tools—small tasks that over time became foundational training. He approached my learning with the same discipline and structure you would expect from a formal apprenticeship, instilling in me an eye for detail and craftsmanship. That immersion from such a young age is the root of my deep fluency in antiquities.

I eventually came to the United States with the support of my brother, working alongside him for nearly a decade before taking the leap and establishing my own business. That was the moment when all the years of family tradition, hands-on training, and ambition converged.

SA: What was the most important thing you learned from them? In what ways have you diverged?

CM: The most important lesson I learned from my parents and grandparents was the absolute value of dedication—particularly the discipline required to honor quality and precision in restoration work. They taught me that every surface, every join, every nuance of finish matters, and that true craftsmanship is measured in the details. Equally important was the sense of reverence they instilled for history itself. Each period has its own vocabulary, personality, and cultural story, and understanding that context is essential to treating any piece with integrity.

Where I’ve diverged is in how far I’ve taken that foundation. My family gave me the skills and sensibility, but my own passion pushed me to seek out exceptional pieces across Europe and beyond, restore them, and ultimately build a gallery that reflects my personal aesthetic and vision.

SA: Are there any more modern movements that you secretly—or not so secretly—admire? That you’ve learned from? Or is everything for you a way of carrying tradition into the present?

CM: While my heart is firmly rooted in antiques and the traditions they embody, I do pay close attention to modern movements. Art Deco and modernism, in particular, have been gaining new relevance in today’s design landscape. I admire the clarity, geometry, and material innovation they bring. I don’t see them as competing with antiques.

That said, my true devotion remains with historical pieces: their craftsmanship, the cultural narrative they carry. I consider myself both a custodian and a student of antiquity, and much of my work is about honoring those traditions and bringing them forward in a meaningful way. 

SA: Maybe you could select a few favorite pieces currently in your showroom and talk about their histories?

CM: One of my favorites is an extraordinary 18th-century Italian chinoiserie secrétaire. It represents a fascinating moment in cultural exchange: the piece itself was crafted in Italy, but its decoration was executed by Chinese artisans whom Italian craftsmen brought back from their trading voyages. The result is a rare and exquisite fusion of Eastern and Western sensibilities. Italian form enriched with the delicacy and narrative detail of Chinese lacquer work. It is a true testament to how global influence shaped European decorative arts long before the modern era.

Another highlight is a pair of Giuseppe Maggiolini commodes. Maggiolini was the preeminent ebanista of the 18th century, celebrated for his virtuoso marquetry and his ability to orchestrate contrasting woods into remarkably refined compositions. His work is immediately recognizable: elegant, meticulous, and intellectually sophisticated. Having a matched pair in the showroom feels like having two masterclasses in craftsmanship under one roof.

Beyond these, the gallery holds objects that have passed through prominent families across Europe and carry with them not only beauty but the layered histories of the homes they once graced.

SA: You started an apprenticeship program 40 years ago. What, besides technique, do you hope to have passed on to younger generations?

CM: My hope was always to do more than teach technique. Craftsmanship can be learned, but what truly sustains this field is a deeper sense of purpose. A respect for history, a commitment to preservation, an understanding of the cultural value embedded in every piece. I wanted younger artisans to appreciate not only how to restore an object, but why it matters.

I also hoped to create a path for continuity. If some of the talented individuals who trained with me feel inspired to carry that legacy forward, it would be immensely rewarding. Ultimately, my goal has always been to pass on a genuine love of antiques to the next generation, ensuring that this remarkable craft remains alive and relevant.

SA: We love that you work as an Old World atelier—metal smiths, carpenters, assorted artisans all producing under one roof. Could you comment on the communal aspect of this?

CM: It’s one of the defining aspects of our practice. Each craftsperson brings a unique skill set, but it is the constant exchange of ideas—sometimes quiet, sometimes spirited—that elevates the final outcome. You feel the lineage of centuries-old European workshops where knowledge was shared, perfected, and passed from master to apprentice through daily practice.

The communal aspect is essential, because restoration and conservation are never solitary pursuits. A single piece may require the trained eye of a cabinetmaker, the precision of a metalsmith, the sensitivity of a gilder. When these artisans can interact face-to-face, examining a piece together, touching it, discussing it, questioning it, the result is a level of authenticity and refinement that simply cannot be achieved in isolation.

It also creates a culture of mutual respect. Everyone understands the weight of the work—the responsibility of preserving history—and there is a shared pride in contributing to something larger than any one individual.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

This month we visited the much discussed home of Julian Goldklang and Desiree Meyers, owners of Mid Century Møbler in Berkeley. Their love of everything MCM extends to their unusual round house, part space-age optimism, part Californian modernity, designed by Bay Area architect Leon Meyers in 1967. The layout is a continuous circle, with the master bedroom in the center and the only flat wall the one that separates the bathroom (even the windows are curved). How does one furnish such a space? By filling it with period-specific pieces, of course.

Although Meyers designed several of these houses, Julian and Desiree's might be the best preserved. The couple's meticulous use of mid-century furniture gives a complete experience of stepping back in time—or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that upon entering one of the house's two front doors,  one gets the sense that time is, in fact, circular.

We spoke with Julian while Teddy the Boston terrier posed in the background.

Studio AHEAD: Most of your pieces at Mid Century Møbler are sourced from Scandinavia. Was this once a hub for MCM design?

Julian Goldklang: Absolutely. Scandinavia was one of *the* global hubs of mid-century modern design. Denmark in particular became a powerhouse for several reasons: a strong tradition of woodworking, a culture that valued functionalism, and a post-war push to create furniture that was affordable, durable, and beautifully crafted. Designers like Hans Wegner, Arne Vodder, Johannes Andersen, Grete Jalk, Finn Juhl. They weren’t just making furniture, they were redefining everyday living.

What’s special is that so many Danish pieces were made in relatively small production runs by highly skilled cabinetmakers. Because of that the quality held up incredibly well and the styles aged beautifully. That’s why 50-70 years later, these pieces still feel fresh. It’s timeless design executed at the highest level.

SA: What’s your own history with this style? When did you start collecting?

JG: For me it actually started before furniture. Back in high school, I found my first car, a 1958 Pontiac Star Chief, sitting for sale in the parking lot of an old barbershop. I spent two years bringing it back to life in an auto shop, and that car pulled me straight into the world of late 1950s atomic design. The chrome, the lines, the optimism baked into every curve, it opened my eyes to design as a language. When I eventually discovered Scandinavian mid-century furniture, I felt that same spark. Even though the aesthetics are different, there’s a shared belief in form, craft, and a kind of quiet futurism. Those pieces felt to me like the natural evolution of the design sensibility I fell in love with when I was restoring that Star Chief.

So I didn’t choose Scandinavia over California. The path from that car simply led me there.

SA: Of course California is well-known for this style, at least in architecture.

JG: I love California mid-century architecture. Eichlers, Neutra, Lautner, Kellogg, but the furniture that was being made in Scandinavia during that same period just spoke to me on a deeper level. California had the architecture. Scandinavia had the furniture. The Danish approach emphasized organic materials, sculpted forms, and a human centered philosophy. The joinery, the teak and rosewood, the hand shaping feels more intimate and expressive. I also love that so much of it was made in small workshops, almost like functional sculpture studios. Plus, once I began sourcing in Scandinavia, I realized how much incredible material was still sitting in homes untouched. It was like discovering a time capsule of design history

SA: Your home was designed by Leon Meyer and much has been written about it. I’m curious if the layout has affected the way you live in less obvious, more subtle ways.

JG: Definitely. Living in a circular house rewires the way you move through space. There are no dead corners. You’re always flowing from one area into the next. It makes you hyper aware of placement, proportion, and light. Because the home is so sculptural, you end up editing your belongings more carefully. Everything has to earn its place. It also encourages a slower lifestyle. You don’t race through the house, you float through it. 

It’s a home that asks you to be intentional, and I think that’s influenced not just how I live, but how I approach furniture and design in general.

SA: Do you ever get dizzy walking around a circle house?

JG: Only when I’m chasing my dog around it! Your brain adapts surprisingly fast. But guests will sometimes do a full loop without realizing it and say, “Didn’t we already pass this?” So I always warn people: if you start feeling like you're in a stylish version of Groundhog Day, reverse direction.

SA: What are some pieces here that you particularly love?

JG: One of my favorites is the Adrian Pearsall "Havana" round lounge chair with the matching ottoman. Living in a circular house, you naturally gravitate toward pieces that echo that geometry, and this chair feels like it was designed specifically for the space. It has that sweeping, sculptural form Pearsall was known for. When we restored it, we tracked down a teal boucle fabric that’s about a 99% match to the original color and texture, so it still carries the exact mid-century energy it would’ve had the day it left the factory. It’s cozy, sculptural, and perfectly at home in a round house full of curves. The second piece I love is our 1956 “Samsel” sofa by Carl Malmsten. This particular example is incredibly special. At some point in its life, someone reupholstered it using a full set of needlepoint panels, each one stitched by hand, probably over many years. Those panels were then expertly pieced together and used as the upholstery, so the sofa becomes this living tapestry of woodland scenes, cabins, deer, winterscapes… it’s like sitting on a storybook. It’s whimsical but still rooted in serious craftsmanship, which is exactly what I love about Malmsten. Both pieces represent two sides of mid-century design I love: the sculptural, architectural optimism of Pearsall, and the soulful, hand-crafted warmth of Scandinavian design. And in both cases, the house and Teddy seem to agree.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

We met Rico Duenas last year, when he showed up as our electrician during the install of "The Lily Too Shall Function." Our paths crossed again at Gallery 16, where he had a piece in “Everybody Knows This Is Someplace,” an exhibition featuring Studio AHEAD fave Jeffrey Sincich and Rose D’Amato. Naturally, we had to know more about this intriguing electrician-turned-artist (or is it artist-turned-electrician?), so we invited ourselves over to his studio, where we shot these impromptu pictures and had a little chat.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us about the show at Gallery 16. We were quite surprised to see you again!

Rico Duenas: Being included in that show was so much fun. Rose and Jeffrey are just such great people. They are always looking for ways to show and bring their community together. Not even just their community, [they] bring different communities together.

My piece for that show was pretty special for me because it was one of the first times I felt that one of my lights became more sculptural than lighting. It was an a-ha moment for me. It didn’t necessarily relate to what Rose and Jeffrey were doing, but I’m really happy that I got to show that I can do a thing and it’s a lil different.

SA: You started as an electrician, though, and now you make lamp art.

RD: I actually learned how to make lights before I became an electrician. When I was 19, I reconnected with this guy named Kevin Randolph. His daughter and I went to K-8th together. He was selling at the Alemany Flea Market unique objects, but he was also selling lights that he made. At the time I had just dropped out of college and was looking for something to do so I asked if I could check out his space and process. After visiting his storage/studio space, I fell in love with art again. After that I had the opportunity to work for him installing his lights in some commercial settings (Ramen Shop, Bar Crudo, 15 Romolo). That led me to want to learn more.

I figured I could learn a trade that can also help expand my art. Also, health insurance is cool. I thought I would be working in people's homes but actually I mostly do commercial and industrial work. I believe being an electrician and making art that includes light gives me a unique perspective and advantage. I mean I can make something and properly install it. I've been an electrician for 14 years now. Throughout that entire time I kept tinkering and playing in my garage making my sculptures. 

Kelly Ishikawa, who owns Perish Trust, was so kind to let me sell them out of her store. In 2021, I got the opportunity to do a small residency at 500 Capp Street. That was the first time I really got to show my light sculptures as art. I also turned their garage into a lamp repair shop that I open 4 days a week. I repaired people's lights for free. I really got to blend my trade, art, and love into one thing.

SA: Is being in a union important to you?

RD: I didn't know much about the electricians' union and was very lucky to have gotten in on my first try. I love being in the union, especially for construction. I would say the main things that stick out to me are the training (5 year apprenticeship), job site working conditions (much safer and cleaner), and the bylaws of when and how I work, so if I work outside normal hours I will be compensated for my time appropriately

SA: Are there parallels between union work and being part of a larger art community?

RD: I can't really speak about the art world or community. But I can speak to my friends that do art and they, like the union, all prop each other up, constantly helping each other with personal projects, brainstorming, or talking about dream projects that we want to do together. I guess in a way it's like an unofficial artist union.

SA: Each lamp is made of repurposed parts. Where do you find the pieces?

RD: The majority of the material I use comes from flea markets, garage sales, scrap yards, or the trash. I don't know how often you all go to flea markets but growing up I would go every Sunday with my family. We legitimately called it the Flea Church. I don't remember the family buying new things. I feel like everything came secondhand growing up. For example our dining room table was surrounded by 12 different, slightly broken chairs all with potential. To me everything in my studio is bursting with potential.

SA: What is your thought process when putting disparate pieces together?

RD: I look for objects that have been used and loved. Those types of objects always have a specific patina and wear on them. Or I look for things that have been neglected and left alone to just survive time and weather. Either way I find these objects that have been essentially thrown away and I get to give them a new purpose and in doing so they give me purpose. I never really looked at it as an art practice. Up until recently it was just something I did in my basement.

My niece once asked me how long it takes me to make a light. I thought about it, grabbed a few things, and made a quick light. Then I told her I had one of those objects for over 10 years, so did it take me 30 minutes to make the light or over 10 years? I think about that every time I make a light.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

Happy belated birthday to this journal, started five years ago in August 2020. While we continue to celebrate all the creative people who make Northern California special, this month we are going international with Emma Fineman, a Berkeley native now residing in London.

Great artists allow a peak into their vibrant inner gardens through their work; great interviewees through their words. We are lucky that Fineman can do both, and it was a delight to hear how a truly creative mind processes the world. Her paintings are big and bold, sometimes literally combining word and image, her sculptures full of life and movement, like Fineman herself. We talked about the two most significant subjects of our time: color and shape.

Studio AHEAD: You grew up in Berkeley, studied in Baltimore, and now live in London. What colors do you associate with each of these places?

Emma Fineman: I love this question. I feel like remembered and internalized color is such an important part of the way work is made. There is a very specific shade of what sits somewhere between umber and Venetian red that is very present in all three cities and has a strong current in my work. Brick red. You see it on the roofs of buildings from the Cold War period, all across Marin and throughout the city. Rustoleum paint. Anti-rusting paint in a city prone to weathering. Baltimore has brick too, but its bricks sit a bit more muddy, or perhaps that’s where chartreuse comes in. The city lights on the Howard Street Bridge at night. London red is vibrant—there is the printed red I think about in ads from the 60s that still informs the key of red on busses or other printed materials. London has two color keys. When the sky is grey the bricks meet the color of those in Baltimore for an afternoon both brownish and muddied. But then when the sky is blue they glow like the rooftops in Marin. Then there is printed material London. All the most saturated colors of printed media, adverts on tubes and all the signage. It’s bold and graphic in nature. It comes from a tube and is joyful but not always sincere.

SA: For our Northern Californian readers, perhaps you can describe a bit about the art community in London, as you see it.

EF: The art community is an ecosystem in London. You have artists, curators, and collectors all interfacing and showing great support and interest in one another in a way that helps to foster a healthy creative society. Sometimes it is challenging to navigate, as the art world is so incredibly small. On the whole there is a constant hum: of people making interesting work, really brilliant writers commenting on it, and luckily enough financial support to keep the whole thing running. That has absolutely kept me there. The artists are so enthusiastic and so talented and it’s a joy to be in a city that supports our knowing and loving of each other.

SA: Is this one of the reasons you’ve decided to stay in London, rather than come back to the US?

EF: Certainly, although I’ve been working on my first international institutional show and working with artists in the US has been an absolute JOY. There is nothing quite like American enthusiasm. It is so incredibly contagious and encouraging.

SA: You have a distinct personal style, even when covered in overalls and paint. Is this an extension of your work or a rebellion against it?

EF: I see design as an integral part of my creative language. The way you dress everyday can be just as much an act of abstract color relationships as making a painting, maybe even more so. Dress, home design, and art making are all informed by those relational internalized colors you asked about earlier. That is deeper to me than the way fashion is often falsely perceived as superficial. There is nothing less superficial to me than how one chooses to identify through dress. Your internal world interfacing with your external environment. In invitation, and a presentation. These are the things I’ve gathered through looking and collecting, now you can see them too! I’m a dress for the occasion type of bitch. My mood and the context play a huge role in how I show up and show out.

SA: I love that! I’m enamored also by your recent installation at the Chapman Studios Residency. It has all facets of the erotic: movement, body, power, love, vulnerability, humor. Could you speak about the creative process behind these pieces?

EF: I am very lucky to have an uncle to teach me how to use tools. Man stuff, welding is one of those skills. I love bonding with him in that way. We spend afternoons going to Alco Metals and looking at all the materials they have, then bringing home rods in his truck for him to show me how to weld. How to keep the metal from spitting, how to get a good arc with enough bevel so the weld can really hold. I love that man and he was a big part of what led me to making these works. He left me with his MIG welder and I just carried on playing around with the skills he taught me. Since I was alone at Chapman, I was able to play with the metal and feel it bend against my body. Welding is highly physical. Painting at scale is [also] in a different way, but these works felt like they made themselves through my body. Channeling is always a part of my making, but this one felt more like a dance and growing into my own vessel as much as making theirs.

SA: What are you currently learning about now?

EF: I’m currently learning a lot from my friend Ash Rucker. She’s a genius and her relationship to her work and community feel like an amazing well that I’m lucky enough to witness. She’s teaching me about Benson meditation and gifted me a copy of “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker” edited by Valerie Boyd. Reading such personal letters of queerness feels like such a gift as I continue to process this past year plus of leaving my husband to be out as a lesbian. I’m learning a lot about the divine gift of self-actualization that queerness sort of demands. That’s the glow you see on/in gay people. That’s that sparkle. Divine isn’t it?

Photos: Sam Hylton and Cory Maryott

If you’re a Bay Area native, or just visiting, you’ve likely stepped inside a building designed by Hans Baldauf. His architectural firm is responsible for the interior of the San Francisco Ferry Building and the restoration of the Palace of Fine Arts, among other familiar projects. But unless you’ve been wine tasting in Napa Valley, you’ve likely not stepped inside a building by John Marsh Davis (1931–2009), whose majestic, dreamy constructions stand as wineries and private residences along the valley. Luckily, Baldauf has recently published a book, “Design Legacy of John Marsh Davis: Early Career: Wooden Expressionism 1961–1979,” with lots of large photographs of Davis’s work to get lost in. This first volume of a series on Davis is an account of the architect’s formative years spent in Oklahoma and the homes and wineries he built for himself and others in Northern California.

Davis’s buildings are extensions of Californian landscape: eliding indoor and outdoor space, they have the elegance of the old trees that surround them, constructed in wood but growing in lightness. Earlier this month, we spoke with Baldauf about the enduring magic of this neglected master.

Studio AHEAD: We can start with how you first became interested in Davis’s work and why you felt the need to write a book about him.

Hans Baldauf: I became interested in John Marsh Davis’s work when my firm, BCV Architecture + Interiors, was hired to renovate Joseph Phelps Vineyards old winery that John had designed 40 years prior, to create an expended visitors center and offices. I had long admired this particular building as well as a number of his other buildings throughout the Bay Area from Stinson Beach to Mill Valley and up in Napa as well. I was surprised that I was not able to find a monograph on his work. Bill Phelps put me in touch with John’s niece, Katy Davis Song. Katy had preserved John’s archives. Katy generously allowed us to scan the drawings and material from John’s scrap books. This became the basis of the book. Assembling the book and doing the research took most of a decade as I had to fit it in on the side of managing an architecture practice with my partners.

SA: You introduce the concept of “wood expressionism.” What is it and whose works, besides Davis’s, would you consider to be wood expressionist? Is it purely a regional thing?

HB: I coined the term “wood expressionism” because whenever I found myself in one of John’s buildings, I felt the emotional power of the way John uses wood to create and animate space. The work reminded me of Franz Ruen’s abstract expressionism book, “The Emotional Intensity of Expressionism,” and applied it to non-figurative art. John seemed to be doing the same with wood structures. As I learned more about John’s education under Bruce Goff at the University of Oklahoma, all of this made sense. Goff championed an approach to architecture in which each student was to explore his or her understanding of design. John’s buildings are an expression of his view of the world. Interestingly, a group of OU graduates came to California in the late 1950s and 60s where they supported each other and found an audience for their experimental approach to architecture. We have explored this group of architects in two recent exhibitions—the first, Outré West, at the Oklahoma Contemporary, and Do Not Try to Remember at the San Francisco Center for Architecture and Design.

SA: Davis’s designs often break down the indoors/outdoors dichotomy, as in the Barbour House. Has this influenced your own work in spaces that are mixed private and public? What have you learned from him?

HB: John’s designs are inspiring to me in how they break down exterior and interior divides, from the way that the Joseph Phelps building is split in two to the great sliding doors at the Barbour House. We have explored similar strategies at the new winery we designed for Sullivan Rutherford Estate. I am very influenced by John’s use of wood structure, which can be seen both at the Overland Trail Cabin at the Sugar Bowl Ski Resort and the Fall River Cabin.

SA: After writing the book, you must have come away with a different feeling towards his work.

HB: The joy of researching the book has been the opportunity to get to know the exceptional group of clients and craftspeople that John was surrounded by and these individuals were also interwoven into this unique group of Oklahoma trained architects of John’s era. I have been very enriched by the collaboration with the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma. 

SA: "The Design Legacy of John Marsh Davis" is volume one. What’s in store for volume two?

HB: I have several other book projects that I am working on—a history of the Les Halles Market Hall in Paris and one on the food culture in the Bay of Naples over the last 2,500 years that are occupying my time right now. My hope is to get to the second volume on John’s work as soon as possible.

We're no strangers to unusual materials– and perhaps even one of us microdoses on the occasional psilocybin– we're not admitting anything– but 10th Floor Studio, which is Jerome Tavé and Kyle Lawson, did surprise us with the beauty of their fungal sculptures. These pieces, somehow functional and not, organic and inorganic, unsettling and homey, have a terrifying sort of beauty, like arriving at a truth after a long trip. Our horizons have broadened. We acclimate to the new.

Studio AHEAD: You often use mycelium as a medium.

10th Floor Studio: Using mycelium is part of a response to the industrialized petrochemical materials we used in our education and part exploration of our interdependence with life on Earth. Sustainable materials in design had always been a major interest to us since we met at SCAD 16 years ago. When we started collaborating and learned that fungi could be used as biomaterials, we immediately jumped at the opportunity to see what we could create.

Mycelium is a vast, branching network of microscopic thread-like structures called hyphae. It is this part of the fungus that is the most adaptable, formable, and structural, which is why many of our pieces are primarily centered around the mycelium as opposed to the fruiting bodies (the mushrooms themselves).

SA: Do certain fungi call out for certain shapes, uses, objects?

10F: All species of fungi have different characteristics. When we start learning and experimenting with a species of fungi that are new to us, we quickly learn about the conditions that they like, the substrates they like to grow on, and how these external characteristics affect the growth of the mycelium and the fruiting bodies. In doing so, we are often inspired to lean into certain observations, in order to intentionally reproduce a certain effect as a material characteristic.

Mycelium can be airy and light, or dense and hard, white, brown or red. When presented with different materials, it’s inevitable for us to start imagining new things we can bring to life with the help of interspecies collaborations.

SA: This involves a lot of experimenting. Can you share with us some interesting failures?

10F: Most of our failures come down to poorly managing the external factors that the fungi need to thrive in. Things such as temperature, humidity, light, CO2 & oxygen levels, gravitational orientation, or inappropriate substrates have all been reasons that projects didn’t turn out the way we expected them to. We have learned to expect the unexpected, so we see most of our unpublished work as successfully teaching us something, despite the outcome.

SA: Your work is horrifying in that, one, it is somewhat Lovecraftian, and two, it's a reminder that our bodies are porous, that we are constantly invaded by microbiota, that we are never sealed up, and that this porousness is actually integral to how we function, which the functionality of many of your pieces calls out. Can you elaborate?

10F: Unfamiliar forms can elicit focus and concern, useful to shift attention, or add emphasis. For us, our porous world highlights themes of interdependence and mutualism. We often think about the fungi’s immune system and what life it cultivates on itself. We are forever a part of the landscape. 

SA: It feels very fungal of you that you share your studio with other artists at the American Industrial Center, instead of working in isolation.

10F: Thanks! It’s often through spontaneous conversations that the best ideas arise. By surrounding ourselves with other artists, we can make that happen more often.

SA: Lastly, in the spirit of your Spotify playlists and Soundcloud streams, give us three songs that would be perfect for listening to out of Hyphal Fidelity.

10F: 1. We actually collaborated with our friend Entropic who composed a piece specifically for the speakers. It’s titled “Sounds of Decomposition”. 2. In the same spirit of ethereal soundscapes that evoke parallel worlds, we'd pick Lugere by Flora Yin-Wong 3. And for a small nod to sound system culture, we’d pick Uwëm/Creātiōn by Space Afrika

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

This month we interviewed Caterina Fake, who lives between San Francisco, where we took these photographs, and New York City, where our long-time collaborator Walter Ancarrow did this interview among stacks of books and paintings and voileipä, which is the Finnish word for sandwich and a delicious way to make them (instead of mayonnaise, use butter). Both of Caterina’s homes are conversation-pieces in that both are like having a conversation with Caterina: full of contrasts and curiosities and distractions that go every which way except where you expect.

Caterina is an entrepreneur, an artist, the heart and mind behind Flickr, which she co-founded, and an early investor in Etsy and Kickstarter, among others. She now hosts salons and works on her own art, with an upcoming show at the Jones Institute this October. Prior to this interview, we thought these two lives of hers—technologic, artistic—were another pair of her contrasting pieces. But as we learned, for Caterina both are ways of telling stories, the oldest technology we have of bringing people together. This interview has been edited for clarity and the linear constraints of prose. You just had to be there. Walter Ancarrow: The first time I met you [here in New York] everything was in boxes because you had just moved in. Then I saw you again three weeks later when I came for the salon, and it looked like this, like your San Francisco home, as if you had lived here forever. Caterina Fake:  Right? Most people come in here and are like, oh, how long have you lived here? Assuming that my answer will be like 10, 15 years. The other thing that's really peculiar about this place, from my vantage point, is that the walls are all white. I don’t own this place, so there’s white walls. But in the entire San Francisco house, there's no white walls. WA: What color would you paint them if you could? CF: Setting Plaster, which is this pink color, a Farrow & Ball pink color, which I love and am kind of obsessed with. Then the kitchen would be another Farrow & Ball color called Breakfast Room Green. I have also grown to love the color of the bedroom upstairs, which is painted in what I think is Benjamin Moore’s Witching Hour, and it's amazing. WA: I love the color names. There’s a Roland Barthes quote: “Do not all the colors in Nature come from the painters?” CF: Yes, like the Biblical naming of the animals. The naming of the animals as being the first creative act. WA: What's going on in your mind when you're decorating these homes? CF:  There's no thought to it, it's just accumulation. In front of us is an American colonial lathe-turned leg table, a Blanc de Chine piece of four bathing beauties, a Tibetan thangka of Avalokiteshvara, and then above it a Victorian mourning portrait decorated in shells, very beautiful.  None of these things are from the same era, the same country. But somehow it coheres. It’s intuitive. Or over there, the juxtaposition of this guanyin statue with a painting of Matthew Henson, the first Black man to go to the North Pole. The two of them make this lovely couple. They would never appear together in any other place other than this house.

It's trial and error. I don’t have any bookshelves. Everything gets stacked on the floor in random order. WA: How about I pick a book and you give me one word that comes to mind. The Journals of Thoreau. CF: [A lengthy monologue on Thoreau as technophile, his obsession with telegraph poles, his likening of their hum to “music of the spheres,” technology-as-magic, the OED as one of the great masterpieces of Western culture, then the reading of a long passage from his journal] WA: Everything you just said, can you summarize in one word? CF: [Laughs] Re-enchantment.

WA: Okay, what about this book, George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. One word. CF: ThisbookissomethingthatIgivepeoplewhoareinterestedinlearningabouthowtoreadliteratureanddon'treallyknowwheretostartit'samazingwhathedoesishetakesalloftheseshortstoriesbyChekhovandTurgenevandalloftheseotherRussianwriterswhoIalwaysfoundalittleshallIsayturgidandthenhetalksaboutthemscenebysceneit’sbrilliant. WA: Blood Meridian.

CF: Violent. WA: Oh, I just bought this book [Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations]. There is a quote in it that I love, he’s actually quoting someone else: The nomads are the ones who never moved on. CF: The nomads are the ones who never moved on. They just continue. Wandering. The rest of us have settled. WA: It's so true to life right now. Don’t you have a show coming up in San Francisco? CF: At the Jones Institute. I am bringing a 19th-century opium bed into the curator's home where various friends and artists will be invited to come and dream. They will actually come and stay and sleep in the bed and record their dreams if they have any. If they don't have any, I'm going to fill the room with dream creatures and dream objects and create what the Jungians would call a sand table to create an impressionistic kind of story you collect from all the dream objects. WA: What constitutes a dream object? CF: Anything that has some kind of evocation. For example, this [a wooden carving, one foot long, of a Victorian woman in a vest wearing a bowtie; she has no arms and no head] is kind of a dream object. The Surrealists nailed this. "The chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table." WA: It makes sense and doesn’t at the same time. It goes back to how you arrange items in your home, these wonderful, accidental contrasts. CF: They’re evocative, they tell a story. It’s kind of like a story cabinet. I have a story cabinet [in San Francisco] full of tiny little figurines. Some of them are from nativity scenes. Some of them are mechanical cars, toys, junk that you find in a rummage sale, sculptures, a lighthouse, a car, a tiger, a devil, an angel, and so on. The story cabinet has all these little objects in it. And then the whole house—somebody said you don't need a story cabinet, the entire house is a story cabinet, a cabinet of curiosities.

WA: The Jones Institute is out of Aida Jones's house. That seems like a better place to be dreaming. CF: I really wanted it to be in a house. I'm not a big fan of the blank slate or white contemporary box feeling of most gallery spaces. One of the best exhibits I've ever seen was at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Mariano Fortuny was famous for his textiles and his family turned his palazzo into an art gallery. It was one of the most stunning shows I've seen because it had couches and sofas and the walls were covered with the Fortuny fabrics. I always thought it would be the perfect gallery space. WA: You host salons here at your house. How did that begin? CF: I’ve  always organized things like this. I had a thing called Mythology Club where you bring a myth to tell, or a story that has been rubbed smooth by multiple retellings, or a song. You could tell a story from your family that has been told so many times nobody knows if it's true anymore. It's become fable. WA: [Smiles, daydreams] CF: I had a critical theory group which went on for many years with my friend Eric Rodenbeck, who lives in Inverness and is now an ink maker and designer, and we were reading things like Adorno and Horkheimer. WA: Have you always been like this, artistic, bringing people together? I remember your mentioning once wanting to move away from your earlier years in technology. CF: I was always planning on doing things in technology that were humanizing. The things that I’ve worked on like Flickr and Etsy and Kickstarter have to do with being platforms for people’s creative work. That part of the internet has been largely lost,  but a lot of the technologies of AI are built on top of the stuff that we were building in that era. You asked about the origins of the salon. We used to do what we called photo forays on Flickr where people would go out together to an interesting place and take photos, a group activity. It’s community building, it’s putting people together, introducing people to each other. I've always done that. It’s what I felt the internet was best at. Granted, you can form really bad communities. You can form communities of white supremacists or cannibals.  People who are without conscience or moral compass can abuse that capacity. That was the great tragedy of the internet. WA: When was the internet’s golden age? CF: It ended in 2007/2008 when Facebook reordered its feed. Instead of being reverse chronological, most recent at the top and going backwards in time, it was ordered by what got the most attention. WA: The algorithm. There’s something about the chronological aspect as what we've lost that really strikes me. It's hard to articulate... CF: It’s time, it’s the passing of time, but not in the sense of clockwork. Time can be conceived of as technological, the manufacturing of time, because humans created time. WA: But you're talking about a different sort of time. CF: Exactly. I'm talking about the sun rises, the sun sets. Time expands and contracts. WA: Like being in the presence of others can slow time or make it go faster. CF: Yes, to spend time together, that's a different way of thinking of time. You know how whatever the traveler sees are things that the map maker will never know? There is an experience of being in a place that you can't get from looking at a map. It’s the romantic versus the technocratic viewpoint. That's why I've had this career that I've had, which is peculiar but necessary. I’ve been this romantic in a technocratic world.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

We hope our summer is just like this Nico Corona interview: all fire, warmth, gay shit, and chains, the chains we wear, the chains we break out of, the chains that are a metaphor for the links we form between each other. Also thank you Nico for "BDSM hacker bitch techno" which we believe is this year's Brat Summer, and for the amazing curated list of places to check out in the city, which you will find at the end of this interview.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us about the piece you are showing next month for our exhibition at Superhouse June 19th  to August 2nd in New York. Why did you choose a chandelier? How does this piece fit in with where you are now, creative-wise?

Nico Corona: Ooo yes, I’m excited about this show, such an honor. So we were prompted to make a piece of work based on architectural elements. I didn’t even know what that meant [laughs] so I did some research, asked some friends what this meant to them. I knew I wanted to do something in the lighting category but didn’t wanna fuck around with anything electrical, and I’ve done some candelabras with chain, so I thought it would be cool do a megazord candelabra chandelier. I love primordial elements. I am a fire sign so I thought of course I’ll do a non-electrical, lighting sculptural rendition. I love the idea of unplugging and doing something intimate, forming the chains into a circle to prompt an intimate space

To gather around and socialize, the rings of fire can hopefully bring people together, hopefully off of their phones.

Studio AHEAD: Give us a bit about how you started working with metals?

Corona: I started working with metal out of curiosity. It was a bit later in life I had a realization that I had the confidence to make sculpture work. Metal is very durable and has a long life, I feel like it’s an archival material, so after when I’m dead I’ll leave behind a bunch of metal objects. You would really have to put an effort in destroying my work. 

Studio AHEAD: What is the metal smithing scene like in San Francisco/Oakland?

Corona: I’m not sure if there really is a metal smithing scene in SF/OAK. From my perspective I feel like that term is a bit antiquated, but I do think there is a big interest and wave of artist interested in metal as material to work with. There are a handful of studios in the Bay and some DIY places too. The thing about the Bay is there’s always an undercurrent of people doing things on a DIY tip, whether it’s knowledge sharing, workshops, or resource gathering—probably because of it being such extreme place in the sense of wealth and disparity.

Studio AHEAD: You wear a lot of jewelry and seeing you wear so many pieces at once, there is an obvious masculine/feminine, hard/soft dichotomy going on. Are various cultural influences at play?

Corona: I actually don’t wear a lot of jewelry: at most I’ll wear two rings and a vintage ball-and-chain necklace. Two silver earrings made from scrap metal. I’m trying to shift away from masculine and feminine dichotomy. But I’ll often work in opposites. I’ll make a set of things that feel sharp, angular, and fixed—I’ll study that and make something that is the opposite stuff that is fluid, moving, and rounded. I’ll make something super tiny and then make the same thing but scaled up.

Cultural things at play—yes! There’s an undertone of my cultural background in my work. I’m Bolivian and Mexican, I come from an immigrant background, so being resourceful, a clever use of materials, and building things to help improve a person’s life. I inherited this directly from my dad, it’s a part of our culture (and a lot of other cultures). To just make things work with what we got, it’s a very beautiful thing. Also popular culture influences me, the animated world, music, and gay shit. So yeah very serious cultural undertones that engrained in me and popular culture stuff that isn’t very serious, that’s playful. 

Studio AHEAD: The chains seem to build upon this. Chains are confining, fetishistic, protective... Can you elaborate? You use them a lot.

Corona: Chains are an everyday object but are referenced so much all throughout history. This is why I love them as a symbol and a material to build. They have been used as a literal symbol or object to keep you from freedom. They can constrict you, they can liberate you, and they can also be used to make chairs [laughs]. Again pretty serious associations and truths with this material. Yes, they’re referenced in fetish culture, they’re sexy, but also very practical. I love seeing people wear chains as jewelry and they attach little charms to them, people hooking charms to their chains, you can see a fragmented identity with what they attach to their chains. A concept I’m super drawn to with the chains is how a singular link is not as powerful as a series of connected links. I really love this. It’s a reminder that we should always stay connected and a metaphor for humanity.

Studio AHEAD: The earmuffs that you wear to protect your hearing while metalworking look like headphones. What music have you been listening to?

Corona: Oh! I think I had a past life in the 80s. A lot of stuff from the 80s: new wave and Madonna. Rock en espanol, cumbia. A lot of stuff my parents would play when we would clean the house that I resented I am super in love with. Music that reminds me of family and my childhood.  I love 90s rap and R&B. Jazz, Sade, and BDSM hacker bitch techno.

Studio AHEAD: I love BDSM hacker bitch techno. What’ve you been enjoying lately in the city?

Corona: Book shopping at Et al. Books in the Mission. It’s close to my studio. Of course going to Auto Erotica in the Castro, I’ll bug the store owner Patrick. Adding to my collection for my archive of illustrative xxx work. Shopping at Body Philosophy Club, Twotwo in Oakland, and Shop Relove. Record shopping at Dark Entries in the Tenderloin (they also have great vintage gay ephemera). Listening to mixes from local DJs, Lowergrand Radio / Unity Press. Eating Ethiopian food at Club Waziema, one of the only Black women owned bars in SF! Probably the most important places in SF’s history. 

Walking from Land’s End to Ocean Beach.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

Perhaps the title given to her JSMA exhibition, “Mutable Object,” is the best description of Gay Outlaw’s work: sculptures and prints that seem pure explorations of form and color, going wherever the imagination leads. The treasures found during these adventures of the mind were everywhere on display in her Outer Richmond studio when we visited last month, where, like a page out of Euclid, the shapes of the universe are pared down to their essentials so that they can be built up again in new and surprising ways. Although Outlaw prefers the shapes to speak for themselves, she had no problem telling us what each evokes—“Ellipses are so beautiful and they feel like they are slipping around”—how to stay creative throughout a long career, and why she uses puff pastry as a medium.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us about the piece you are showing at Superhouse in NYC in June. It is based on an earlier piece, “Puff Supports,” made out of pastry.

Gay Outlaw: The piece for Superhouse is a reprise of a piece I made first in 1996. I made it again for a show in Los Angeles in 2010. This will be its third iteration. It’s a temporary, site-specific work, so it has to be remade, or rebaked, for every exhibition.

Just after moving to San Francisco, I experienced the Loma Prieta earthquake and the memory of it really stayed with me. I grew up on the Gulf Coast with hurricanes, which we could obviously see coming well ahead of landfall. It was the unexpected nature of the earthquake that really threw me—the fact that the architecture all around us, which one minute seemed completely stable, could liquify in what seemed like an instant of shaking. Thus the title “Puff Supports.” I could never look at solid walls the same way again.

Studio AHEAD: Can viewers eat it?

Outlaw: It is not intended for consumption, except maybe by mice…?

Studio AHEAD: You studied at the ­­­École de Cuisine la Varenne in Paris. Was it there you decided to become an artist? Besides the obvious connection between your use of perishable materials and the ­­­École de Cuisine, I’m curious what made you transition from culinary school to arts.

Outlaw: I think I decided to be an artist when I was a little kid. I kept it to myself for a long time, and even tried to repress the urge when it seemed an impractical choice for so many reasons. My father wanted me to go to law school. But art eventually won out.

There was really no transition from cooking school to art making. I think of it all as part of the same path. I just went to cooking school instead of art school. I couldn’t see myself working in a kitchen afterward—I am not that physically strong. I had a string of jobs in food sales and marketing and did a little cooking, and while I was doing that I started making photographs. Which eventually led me to want to make sculpture.

Studio AHEAD: What shape is really speaking to you right now?

Outlaw: At the moment I am studying paper pleating, and thinking of ways to transfer that geometry and energy to other materials… see what shapes present themselves in the process. I see pleating everywhere now, and I can see that it has qualities that have caught my eye before. Vibration. Rhythm. Triangles, which I view as feminine and stable forms.

Studio AHEAD: What about circles, squares, rhombuses…

Outlaw: I’ve always thought of circles as symbols of the self, of a fixed set of qualities or experiences. I love Venn diagrams as a way of presenting a situation.

But I work more often with ellipses. Ellipses are so beautiful and they feel like they are slipping around—more dynamic than circles. I designed a perforated cube when my kids were little and it’s a very specific thing. The perforations come through the faces of the cube and make elliptical openings. I have photographed them and incorporated them into my sculptures for years.

The other shape that I often return to is the hexagon. I learned from bees and wasps that hexagons pack very efficiently into a very stable form. Fun fact: an isometric drawing of a cube yields a hexagon which I think is very cool.

Studio AHEAD: A lot of your work seems to be built around exploration of material and form. At the end of this exploration, what do you hope to find? How do you know when you’ve gotten to that place?

Outlaw: I have found the key to making art for a lifetime is to work with a really open, present mind. I don’t ask myself whether what I am fiddling around with will lead me to a certain place. I just go with the flow of my hands and brain. I finish a piece when I have no more time, or when it stops making demands of me.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

Ben Peterson is an Oakland-based artist working mostly in clay. A few weeks ago we visited his studio, where among spare modernist furniture were Ben's own creations: vaguely familiar, seemingly functional sculptures with no function. Except for their clean lines and perfect form, they might be something found during an archeological dig, but the civilization to use them has either not yet been created or was lost to time. Ben himself is down to earth. On a shelf were small sculptures somewhat resembling animals, or more accurately, glyphs of animals always pointing to something they are not.

Studio AHEAD: Your Instagram is @newertopographics. Are you furthering the pivotal New Topographic exhibition of 1975?

Peterson: I wouldn't say furthering... that show, in particular the photos and the aesthetic associated with it, were a critical early influence on my work and in some ways they continue to be. That show and photographers like Lewis Baltz and John Divola helped to open my eyes to the built environment and also gave me a way to articulate my own approach to landscape and objects. Also I love the way topographics can be confused with typography as a lot of my early art experiences involved writing on things without asking.

Studio AHEAD: I can see the typographic influence—almost like the Mayan writing system. Many of your works also have an industrial detritus look to them (in the best way). Is this from spending a good bit of your life in Oakland?

Peterson: I think the answer to this question really follows the first, in that I grew up in central Nevada in a small rural community that is also the world’s largest military ammunition depot. It’s surrounded by hundreds of cement bunkers. I also grew up mining with my family and living most of the summer in a cabin built in the late 1800s. There were a number of ghost towns and abandoned mining structures nearby. I moved to Oakland (San Francisco first) when I graduated high school and spent my first few years in the Bay Area skateboarding and playing around in derelict buildings, so I'd like to think I came by my interest in the industrial, the fragment and ruin, honestly.

Studio AHEAD: You recently returned here after spending some years in Houston. What did you miss?

Peterson: If I’m being honest, I pretty much missed everything [laughs], but what really cemented our move back was the realization that I had spent so much of my life here in Oakland that it was hard to articulate what I was trying to accomplish with my work and why or who my peers were or my influences. While living in Oakland I didn't give it much thought, but in Texas I was teaching at the University of Houston, and most of my students were pretty unfamiliar with art history, let alone Bay Area art history, so I really had to build a context/history for myself as well as tell my version of the history of art in the Bay Area. You could check out my friend Jamie Sterling Pitt and his Instagram mariposa_south_west where we tried to put together some of our shared influences, many of whom were firmly rooted in the Bay.

Studio AHEAD: Describe to me a perfect day creating something in your studio.

Peterson: I would get started working around 8am post-coffee. I enjoy the finishing portion of my work the most maybe (it’s where the surprises and spontaneity are), so I would be either putting the final surface treatments on greenware or plastering a fired piece. I don't glaze. Music usually starts mellow and gradually grows more intense... think Townes van Zant (“At My Window,” the Be Here to Love Me version). I listen to a lot of sad country / folk, mostly pre ’77. Lunch is probably a bean and cheese burrito. I usually make a big pot on Sunday, I love to cook. The afternoon music would probably be post-punk pushing into electronic music; I love subwoofers. Sometimes I get in the mood for an end of day harsh noise track or two [laughs]. Although it's a total fantasy, ideally my friend Carlos Matos would drop by and we could go get a drink and talk architecture.

Studio AHEAD: In June you are presenting, with Gay Outlaw and Nico Corona, some pieces at Superhouse in New York. Tell us about the piece and your process in making it.

Peterson: For the Superhouse show I'm making a fireplace mantel. The idea was in place before the fires in LA, but after of course... I’m still a bit nervous about writing down where I am with my thinking. Being born and raised in the rural High Desert I have a relationship to nature and my environment that I have come to understand is very different from people raised in green, lush environments. I’m thinking a lot about Wallace Stegner, the Army Corps of Engineers, a book called Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Ceramics are of course born in fire.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

The term “movers and shakers” refers to anyone who has an outsize impact on their field. For Daria Halprin and her daughter, Ruthanna Hopper, the term is as literal as it is figurative. Daria is a dancer, instructor, and somatic movement therapist, and daughter of famed choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin. Ruthanna is a visual artist whose paintings have the expressive, kinetic quality of dance.

In 1978, Daria and Anna founded the Tamalpa Institute to teach movement- and art-based therapy, going on to teach thousands of students from their studio in the hills of Marin. We visited earlier this year, where Daria showed us some impromptu body movements and Ruthanna some sketches she’d been working on.

Studio AHEAD: We have to start with the dance deck and the Mountain Home Studio in general. It seems to be an extension of, rather than an intruding into, the Marin landscape.

Daria Halprin: The dance deck was designed by my father, Lawrence Halprin, with scenic designer and theater teacher Arch Lauterer.

The residential house was built first. The studio and dance deck were built in 1953/54. The idea was to create a space for my mother, so that she could create new works in a new kind of dance space and be “at home.” The deck was envisioned as an outdoor studio, cantilevered off the slope that leads down from the residence to the studio. Its shape was designed to integrate with the surroundings—the sloping of the land, the redwood forest and Madrone trees, and to capture as much natural light as possible.

Benches were constructed on the hill going down to the deck to serve as observation seats, like an outdoor theater, challenging the notion of the proscenium arch as a boundary between performer and audience.

The studio sits at one edge of the dance deck and the untamed forest on the other side. The studio ceilings are quite high and there are floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors and windows on all three sides. The ochre walls of the studio provide a dramatic background that highlights us as we occupy the space.

The dance deck and studio invite both mover and witness to move in between indoor/outdoor environment and became part of the natural landscape. The wooden walkway from studio to dance deck ritualizes the transition.

Artists and students studying the Halprin work have infused the space and been infused by it. The artifacts and resonances of so many remarkable people and passionate students live in the place. Over the decades it has become a refuge and spiritual home for artistic practice, study, and performance.

Studio AHEAD: Ruthanna, your ongoing Passages is also site-specific. What makes it so? How are you engaging with the space as already there? 

Ruthanna Hopper: The Passages installation and on-going project is a conversation through creative process with my grandfather Lawrence, connecting with his design work. I was incredibly close with my grandfather and we spent a great deal of time together in my growing-up years. He took me on long walks from the back door of the house to Phoenix Lake through the redwoods and over fern paths where my grandfather taught me never to pick a wild flower where she grows. He had a prolific drawing practice and he gave me my first sketchbook. On our hikes, we would sit together on mossy rocks and make drawings. We had wonderful conversations where he would make me feel like he cared about my take on things. As I grew up, I began to understand what a gift it was as a young girl to feel heard and seen. 

My grandfather created a scoring system for creative response called the RSVP Cycles, which is a method that is a resource for artists and designers and communities to create a process in collective creativity and design thinking. The Passages project comes out of a score that I created utilizing his method and in its first iteration is an installation at Levi’s Plaza, which he designed. I see it as a re-generation project, connecting to his landscape designs, in homage to him and in our shared love language of art making.

The Passages project is a way for us to continue our conversations.

Studio AHEAD: Daria, you have also spoken about your childhood hikes with Lawrence. After all these years, what has stayed with you about those hikes? What still guides your practice?

Daria: We hiked from the time I was six years old, going into the High Sierras and camping out for two weeks every summer.  First and foremost are the incredible memories of times spent with my father, the inheritance of a deep embodied love for wild nature, a sense of physical presence and strength in my body, and a wide-open imagination. Our home had a quality of wild nature as well. In some ways nature felt like a second home to me.

Studio AHEAD: Can you describe the moment when you know you've truly expressed some inner part of yourself through movement/dance? It is a feeling suddenly attained? A flood of emotion? How do you know you've gotten there?

Daria: That’s quite a big question. I have spent years exploring and articulating maps that would guide people toward those kinds of experiences.  There are principles, maps and methods that help us “get there.” For me the moment is an experience of complete connection between body and mind: a flow and dialogue between my body moving, my mind imagining, my feelings expressing.

I experience movement as a language, it speaks to me as much as it speaks for me. In those moments of total attunement, I experience my body as an instrument, I become the instrument, I am playing it and listening to its voice.

Ruthanna: I think this is what artists are grappling with, and non-artists as well, the question of “how do I truly express myself”—how do I get to a place of congruence where the inner picture meets the outer picture? Going into the studio is facing yourself and saying I commit to contending with my interpretations and to myself and how I’m going to transmute those influences into some kind of coherence, some kind of integration. There’s a fleeting moment of feeling complete in a painting and then coming back to it and feeling the opposite, like nothing’s working and so beginning again and again, which is the way it goes in life and art. So those moments of feeling something is attained, feel fleeting and impermanent. 

We often have an easier time recognize that creative attainment in others, when we’re moved by art and artists, musicians, dancers—we can see and feel deeply when they’ve had the fulfillment of a full inner expression, because that energy they’re transmitting gets shared with us and it feels like an incredible honor to witness that, like we’ve been privy to magic and the particles shift in the space. This is why art and artists are so important—when there’s an experience of creative authenticity we are moved to understanding and seeing some part of ourselves in its reflection.

Studio AHEAD: What are, so to speak, your next movements?

Daria: On some days I have a clear sense of what my next movement wants to be and on some days I really have no idea. I think about how I want to spend my time with my grandchildren, taking walks in the gorgeous nature where I live, I want to keep teaching. At my age I am feeling my next movement is circular where it used to feel like an extending line.

Ruthanna: My next movements are a daily question, especially during these times. I will continue to show up for art and artists, to make art and to support others in making art. I’ll keep looking for ways to connect to the environment, to Passages, my own and others, and to pick up the extending line my mother speaks of, to carry-on connecting to the Halprin lineage work, coming back to my roots and to the redwood grove and Mountain Home Studio, a full-circle…

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

Et al. is Latin for “and others,” shorthand for some of the most interesting works currently being displayed in the city (as well as being a fantastic bookstore), and is a great community-building project in whatever universal language we’re all speaking. Et al. is also Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, who started the gallery in 2013 with Facundo Argañaraz back when it was in the basement of Union Cleaners. Now it is in the Mission and currently hosting the second iteration of Same Blue as the Sky. It’s been a busy time for all of us, so we were happy Im and Harbour could find a little bit of time to talk with us.

Studio AHEAD: We’re really excited and honored to be holding Same Blue as the Sky at your new location in the Mission. What’s the history of Et al. finding space in SF?

Im and Harbour: Et al. has always found our spaces through good fortune and help from many in our community. Our initial curatorial work took place at MacArthur B Arthur in Oakland, a space founded by our friend, the dearly missed Kevin Clarke. It was through a post on social media that prompted us to start organizing exhibitions there. After MacArthur B Arthur closed, we partnered with Facundo Argañaraz (now of 1599fdt) to found Et al., and he found our Chinatown space while walking past Union Cleaners and seeing a sign in their window. We were able to have a space in the initial years of Minnesota Street Project, through a very generous invitation. And eventually we ended up in the Mission by asking (or maybe more realistically bugging) Ratio 3 about the empty storefront next door to them. Our current gallery is in Ratio 3's old one and we are so grateful to have been entrusted with the space. 

Studio AHEAD: What’s your history of making space?

Im and Harbour: We are very keen on thinking about what it means to make space or to give over space to others. For us, exhibition-making is first and foremost a chance to give artists room to develop work in a space with as much or as little involvement curatorially from us. We think a lot about hospitality and what we can do to support our community of artists, curators, writers, and thinkers and a lot of that has to do with sharing space. Right now at the gallery, Colpa Press uses a portion of the back room for printing. Our upstairs office hosts Small Press Traffic, a poetry non-profit where Jackie is currently on their board of directors. Our former Mission Street space is now Climate Control, run by Nico Colon. We also will turn our space over to curators of varying experience levels to realize exhibitions or events in the space. Being able to share our space is a vital part of our vision.

Studio AHEAD: Shout out to Small Press Traffic's series of events, especially the upcoming reading from Lyn Hejinian's "My Life" in February. Anyway, the gallery is very much a passion project—you’ve both got day jobs. Is this the reality for gallerists now?

Im and Harbour: The art market as it is now is one that is precarious and at a tough place, especially for galleries of our size. We have both kept working day jobs partly because it enables a certain level of curatorial freedom. At the same time, while it may help alleviate some of the financial burden, it's still a burden on our time and capacity. It was one thing to do this while we were in a basement in Chinatown, only open a couple of days a week, it's another thing altogether to operate a large storefront with a bookstore and a number of folks depending on us. We are working on getting fiscal sponsorship, as keeping the ship afloat has been hefty this past year or two, even with our jobs. For us going forward, we want to find different avenues to stay open and to continue doing the work that we do because most of all we love art and we love the Bay Area. 

Studio AHEAD: Not to start drama, but what’s it like working with each other? I mean, I imagine you don’t have the exact same taste.

Im and Harbour: Strangely easy! We have this weird uncanny ability to walk into any large group show and leave identifying the same works as our individual favorites. And while one of us may have stronger opinions on this or that artist (or even book or movie or music!), we tend to generally agree. The other night we were talking about this and we couldn't remember the last time we really disagreed on art, other than Jackie liked Megalopolis more than Aaron, and Aaron liked the second Joker movie more than Jackie did. Haha. 

In the more practical sense, Aaron's job is a little looser with his time, so the day-to-day operations of the space are handled mostly by him, while Jackie keeps the space focused. 

Studio AHEAD: Can you make a bland, generalizing statement about the art scene here that only locals will know isn’t true?

Im and Harbour: Where there's money, art thrives.

People from outside the Bay have for a long time held the misconception that the presence of so much tech capital implies the scene should be thriving financially when, maybe especially for us, this is far from the case.

Studio AHEAD: God, that’s so true. By the way, happy new year! What are you looking forward to?

Im and Harbour: Right now, we're writing these answers as many of our friends and colleagues are grappling with the devastating fires in Los Angeles. It feels strange to think about what we're looking forward to as so many dear to us have lost so much. We are heartened to see so much of the community coming together to support each other, from near and afar and as we come upon 2025 with a lot of uncertainty and amid disaster, we look forward to the ways in which we can be of support to each other. To hold each other in love and support where perhaps institutions cannot or will not.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva