#sfaicurrent

“I love painting people...”

Lift every voice and sing, oil on canvas, 24x20

“No matter where they’re from—gender, nationality or background, we are all beautiful!” 

Send in the Clown, Oil on canvas, 20x20

A.t.L.a.S, Giant Steps. 65x72, Oil on Canvas.

African Gothic Oil Painting 60x36

About Christopher Williams: 

1. Program/Year: MFA Studio Art, 2020

2. Hometown: Sacramento, California 

3. Website: theblackdavinci.com

“My work is an internal discourse that conveys deeply rooted issues about loss, resilience, identity and the uncertainty of life. Querying my actions is seeking the very essence and substance of these experiences.” 

Lexygius Sanchez Calip, Mirror. Site-specific performance | intervention,  water on concrete tiles, 2017. 

“They emphasize the subversive aspect of impermanence, our ideas and objectification of them and all of our natural relationships and connections.”

Lexygius Sanchez Calip, Semiotics No.1. Single channel video | sound, 2017.

Lexygius Sanchez Calip, Everything is Temporary. Site-specific performance | intervention, water on concrete, 2017.

“They interrogate an understanding of what contemporary art practices can be by addressing profound and relevant questions regarding its boundless potential and transitory characteristics.”

About Lexygius Sanchez Calip:

1. Program/Year: MFA Studio Art, 2020

2. Hometown: Bay Area, California / Manila, Philippines

Jusun “Jessie” Seo is a Korean born artist who currently lives and works in San Francisco and Mountain View. She is currently pursuing a double major in Printmaking and Painting at SFAI. She mostly works with oil painting and woodcut printing.

Jessie has received the four year California Community College Scholarship from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Clyde & Community Art Awards in 2018 and 2019, and (most recently) the 2019 AXA Art Prize. Her works have been exhibited at Arion Press, Merced Multicultural Arts Center, Diego Rivera Gallery at SFAI, and Clyde & Community building. Her recent works explore the identity by observing nature and people while studying how the way humans see with different perceptions.

Image (above): Yet, 6 x 18 ft, oil on unstretched canvas.

From birth to death, 2019, 15 x 18 inches.

Father at age 53, 2018, woodcut.

Her 2018 woodcut print Father at age 53 (pictured above) will be featured in the upcoming exhibition AXA Traveling Art Prize Exhibition, formerly the XL Catlin Art Prize. SFAI will be the first venue in a series of three to present works from the 40 finalists: 9 young men and 31 young women from 30 different schools.

The AXA Traveling Art Prize Exhibition opens September 6 and will be on view through October 6 in the Main Gallery at SFAI—Fort Mason Campus. It will then travel to Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and concludes at the New York Academy of Art. To learn more about the exhibition, please visit: sfai.edu/axa-art-prize.

Was There series, 2018, woodcut.

“Art is my visual language. Recreating my perceptions through painting and printmaking, my work becomes an expression of who I am, what I can be, and the time I live in now.”

Momo at her studio, 2019, 24 x 36.

About Jusun Jessie Seo:

1. Program/Year:  BFA Painting and Printmaking, 2020

2. Hometown: Seoul, South Korea

3. IG: @jessie9524

4. Website: jusunseo.com

Faculty + Staff News July 2019

Through September 1 – More Than 700 Years, on view at both SFAI campuses. Listen to the podcast series, with curator Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción ⇢ sfai.edu/faculty-interviews

– Congrats to Zeina Barakeh, SFAI Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs, for winning the 2019 Best Experimental Film award for her animation “Slam Bang Blue.” Read more about the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin.

Homeland Insecurity, Zeina Barakeh

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA:

Rhiannon Alpers — Faculty | Printmaking Through September 2 you can see Rhiannon Alper’s handbound books on view at the SF Public Library’s Skylight Gallery in Hand Bookbinders of California 47.

Zeina Barakeh — Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs See how the work of Palestinian artists reflects a variety of relationships with the land–Preoccupations: Palestinian Landscapes. On view from July 27 through August 24, at Minnesota Street Project / Institute of Advanced Uncertainty.

Matt Borruso / Visible Publications — Senior Lecturer | Painting and MFA Faculty Don’t miss the spectacular weekend of SF Art Book Fair 2019. July 19–21 at Minnesota Street Project.

Clark Buckner – Faculty | Liberal Arts and MA Experience the celebration of life’s flowering in the face of its passing away, through the animation and prints of Sarah Klein. Curated by Clark Buckner, Lost Holidays will be on view through August 10 at the Telematic/ front gallery.

Charles Hobson – Professor Emeritus | Printmaking Small Inventions: The Artist’s Books of Charles Hobson is a celebration of the Legion of Honor Museums’ acquisition of 29 works by Charles. On view through July 14.

Kate Laster – Public Education Summer Assistant If you are in SF, stop by Sweetie’s Art Bar and check out the work of Ben Cornish and Kate Laster, who’ve worked together for five years, encoding their work with transmissions for each other to receive. Anomaly seeking anomaly is curated by Cait Petersen. and will be on view through July 31.

Kerry Laitala – Faculty | Film The recent collaborations in moving image and sound by Kerry Laitala and The Atchleys will leave the viewers draped in a colorful cloak of decay, rebirth and contemplation. Sunday, July 14 at the Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland.

Kate Rhoades – Faculty | New Genres If you are walking down Market Street between the Embarcadero and 8th Street, through July 31 you can see how Kate Rhoades illustrated the City’s best-known urban legends in an attempt to capture and preserve it’s legendary “weirdness”–Art on Market Street Poster Series.

Lindsey White – Faculty + Photography Department Chair | Photography Curated by Lindsey White and Jordan Stein, Brian Belott’s RHODASCOPE: Scribbles, Smears, and the Universal Language of Children According to Rhoda Kellogg, will be on view at North Light Court + Ground Floor of the City Hall, through March 13, 2020.

Wanxin Zhang – Faculty | Sculpture/Ceramics and MFA Check out a Solo Exhibition of Wanxin Zhang: The Long Journey. On view through July 14 at the Museum of Craft and Design.

SANTA CRUZ, CA:

Constantinos Dafnis Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: “In The Works”—a special free concert featuring new works by three young composers will find you at the very center of contemporary music-making. Tuesday, July 30 at 5:30pm, Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

NEW YORK CITY, NY:

Zeina Barakeh — Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs Follow up with all the events around the launch of  Poetry Is Not a Luxury, a book that considers how book arts have contributed to the recording of oppositional subjectivities in the U.S. On view at The Center for Book Arts, NYC, through September 21.

WILMINGTON, DE:

Maria Elena González — Faculty + Sculpture/Ceramics Department Chair | Sculpture/Ceramics/New Genres If you find yourself in Delaware this summer, check out Maria Elena Gonzalez’s work in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, on view at the Delaware Art Museum, on view through September 8.

CHICAGO, IL:

Maria Elena González — Faculty + Sculpture/Ceramics Department Chair | Sculpture/Ceramics/New Genres If you’re in Chicago, see Maria Elena González’s work in the group exhibition About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art, on view through July 20 at Wrightwood 659.

MIAMI, FL:

James Claussen — Faculty | Printmaking James Claussen’s Headed for an Accumulated Comfort lithograph will be on view through August 4. Check out the group exhibition Observing Life: Intersections Among Art, medicine, and Health at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.

CHINA:

At SFAI, faculty and staff members are artists too! Faculty and staff shows are a great way for students to connect with the wider community of SFAI-affiliated artists across the globe. Here’s a glimpse of what SFAI faculty and staff are up to this month:

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA:

Johnna Arnold — Faculty | Photography See Johnna Arnold’s work in her solo exhibition at Sarah Shepard Gallery in Larkspur, CA, entitled From Inside This Earth, on view through June 1.

Clark Buckner — Faculty | Liberal Arts Check out Clark Buckner’s curatorial work at Telematic in If AI Were Cephalopod, featuring 0rphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts), on view through June 8.

Charles Hobson — Professor Emeritus | Printmaking See Charles Hobson’s work at the Legion of Honor in Small Inventions: The Artist’s Books of Charles Hobson, on view through July 14.

Frances McCormack — Professor Emeritus | Painting See Frances McCormack’s work in the group exhibition Sonoma Modern | Contemporary, on view through June 16 at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

Kal Spelletich — Faculty | Sculpture/Ceramics Book an appointment to see Kal Spelletich’s work in Molecular Vibrations of the Radiant Body, on view through May 31 at the Recology SF Transfer Station.

Taravat Talepasand — Faculty + Interim Painting Department Chair | Painting See Taravat Talepasand’s work in the group exhibition EPOCH, on view through May 31 at Gallery 16.

Lindsey White — Faculty + Photography Department Chair | Photography On view at Casemore Kirkeby through May 26, see Lindsey White’s work in the group exhibition Handless Operative.

Wanxin Zhang — Faculty | Sculpture/Ceramics See Wanxin Zhang’s work at the Museum of Craft and Design in Wanxin Zhang: The Long Journey through July 14.

CHICAGO, IL:

Maria Elena González — Faculty + Sculpture/Ceramics Department Chair | Sculpture/Ceramics/New Genres If you’re in Chicago, see Maria Elena González’s work in the group exhibition About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art, on view through July 20 at Wrightwood 659.

OTHER FUN STUFF:

Miah Jeffra — Faculty | Liberal Arts Get your copy of Foglifter—a magazine co-founded by Miah Jeffra and nominated for the Outstanding Literary LGBTQ Anthology at the 31st Annual Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony.

Danielle Lawrence — Faculty | Painting + Drawing Congratulations to Danielle Lawrence, who was selected for the 2019 Golden Foundation Artists in Residence Program in New Berlin, NY.

IMAGE CREDITS:

(1) Taravat Talepasand, White Div I, II, III (installation view), 2019; featured in the exhibition EPOCH, Gallery 16, San Francisco.

(2) Lindsey White, Man Plow, 2019, Archival pigment; featured in the exhibition Handless Operative at Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco.

SFAI’s 2019 MFA Exhibition opens this Friday at SFAI—Fort Mason Campus. Fifty emerging artists will open their studios and transform the campus into a large-scale gallery, theater and performance space full of multi-media installations, sculptures, contemporary art films, paintings, prints, photography, performances, and more.

To give you a sense of what’s in store for visitors, let us introduce you to ten SFAI MFA students who will be exhibiting work May 17–27!

Check out the first preview of student work, and don’t forget to join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 17th during the public opening, or May 16th at Vernissage for an exclusive VIP Preview!

Ben Barbour

“These pieces are inspired by a seemingly insignificant wooden cog formerly used for the production of steel machinery components utilized in the extraction of china clay. In casting the object using the very material the cog was designed to process (porcelain), and by combining contemporary technologies such as 3D digital printing with traditional slip-casting techniques, a feedback loop is created between product and tool, and between contemporary and historic industrial processes and materials.”

Arthur E. Gies

“My work explores representational figure painting as an act of deliberate seeing and observation, as well as politics in an era of constant photographic bombardment—of concentration and analysis, understanding and acknowledgment. The individuals I paint determine how they present themselves, initiating a collaborative process predicated on humanity and consent based on their conceptions of identity and body. This subverts the traditional artist/subject dichotomy.”

Kate Laster

“My work is about the people we carry with us. There is a cumulative intensity to my work as I explore tenderness and the space between people—the wordless distance and closeness defining relationships. The process of carving reveals the figure, keeping that specific intensity alive. Working either intimately or monumentally, I make work connected to the weight of the past, human migration, and the effervescent exhaustion of romantic love.”

Eliza Phelan-Harder

“I am interested in the intersection of environments. My work looks at the interaction of city, nature, and humans with the utilization of organic life, photography, and sound. As an artist, I feel the responsibility to address subject matter our society tends to neglect, including adverse environmental impacts. Creating an immersive environment, I try to provide a starting point for the viewer to begin contemplating their own landscape and what role they play within it.”

Kathryn Gardner Porter

“My work exists in the spaces between intuition and intellect, childhood hope and adult reality, the archival past and the ephemeral present. I am interested in exploiting and reclaiming historically recognizable and genericized symbols to explore emotions in a higher resolution. Through the investigation of these symbolic borders, boundaries, and metaphors, I hope to provoke internal reflection and intellectual curiosity, not didactic polarization.”

Gautama Ramesh

“I observe societal, cultural, and ecological violence deep within and far outside of commonly acknowledged spheres of consequence. By hybridizing misanthropic fiction, amoral nonlinear narratives, documentary works, and abstract handmade film, I disrupt and disfigure violence as seen within cinema. Set within fractured infrastructures of nonurban spaces, constructed with tools restricted by the socioeconomic status, time, and geography of those portrayed, these films are nonconformist artifacts, created with hardcore punk rebellion and Woody Guthrie anger.”

Sherwin Rio

“Perpetually foreign, fitting neither here nor there—I am hanging on a clothesline between two countries. Working at the intersection of cultural identities, I investigate the ways in which belonging becomes blurred. Domestic objects, items of clothing, and house-construction materials function as sculpture to reference the home space that became my Philippines in America. Using pieces of personal history as departure points, I ask: Can I ever come to know what’s foreign to me?”

Suzanne Russell

“By using clay to make objects that have no practical function and refuse conventional values of skill and beauty, my goal is to make work that negotiates the uncomfortable space of the abject body and gives ceramics a non-craft identity. I am interested in the ways in which clay can elicit and hold the emotional states and marks of the maker and how this energy can inform the meaning of the work.”

Amina Shah

“Translational Mediations. In my art practice, I situate the work within historical contexts—culling from personal history, then from wider social, political, and cultural contexts. Utilizing the history of subjects and mediums with which I work, appropriating images from mass media and from systems of knowledge production, I am questioning both what is included and excluded, what is archived and what remains ephemeral. Translation becomes a tool to dissect divisive rhetoric and a site for discursive intervention.”

Yiling Zeng

“Born and raised in the East, I’ve had a hard time fitting into a distinct culture since I moved to an unfamiliar city in the West. With film and video, I have found a way to inject my nostalgia, insecurity, perplexity, and anxiety into the characters. They act as eyes and feelers for me to investigate both acceptance and rejection between different cultures.”

Next Friday is the 2019 MFA Exhibition at San Francisco Art Institute! Fifty emerging artists will open their studios and transform SFAI—Fort Mason Campus into a large-scale gallery, theater and performance space full of multi-media installations, sculptures, contemporary art films, paintings, prints, photography, performances, and more. 

To give you a sense of what’s in store for visitors, let us introduce you to ten SFAI MFA students who will be exhibiting work May 17–27! 

Tune in next week for another preview, and don’t forget to join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on May 17th during the public opening, or May 16th at Vernissage for an exclusive VIP Preview! 

Ans Li 

“My paintings and installations contain bright colors as well as materials from childhood. Under a cheerful surface, my work discusses issues that I am concerned about—such as gender inequality and cultural conflict—as a Chinese woman living in the United States. I highlight the importance of interaction and multiple senses, asking the viewer to become a participant in the work by allowing their senses (sight, taste, smell, and touch) to be engaged.” 

Anthony Chao

“This work explores the relationship between the splendid beauty of the undeveloped, rural, ancient landscapes and stunning ancient architecture in 安徽 Anhui Province, China, and the brilliant artistic craft that has passed its prime in history.”

Ben Cornish

“My current body of work acts as unsure timelines of mistakes and anomalies. The tensioned narratives that governed my childhood were spoken with a certainty that could only be argued back in a kind storytelling steeped in repentance. I choose to speak in image. Bosch made paintings for the dungeons, I make images for houses that are filled with arguments and quiet anxiousness hidden for oneself from an environment built of allegory and alibi.“

Guiliana Funkhouser 

“I’m interested in meeting the Wizard, how about you? My artwork interrogates contemporary mass-media entertainment and “content delivery” platforms that promise instant connection while fragmenting reality in unprecedented ways. By presenting the darkly Babylonian aspects of weaponized narrative and social media interactions through photo and sound art installations, I hope to celebrate the people and places continually pushed to the wayside in the name of technological acceleration, economic expansion, and the siren song of paradise.“ 

Haley Toyama

“I dedicate my energy to preserving memories of the city I love. I treat my practice as one of the remaining ways to criticize the neo-imperialism of the mainland Chinese government acting under the guise of British postcolonialism in Hong Kong.“

John James Hartford V

“Through a destructive process, exhumed works are constructed of both collected material and found objects that resonate with personal traumas, memories, or appeal to the aestheticized destroyed object. My work guides the viewer's attention to the visual object’s (or icon’s) sediments of time and decay—in what I've come to describe as “post-opulence”—and aims to reveal the contemporary mimesis of twice-removed truths surrounding greater bloom and decay.“

Joshua Mintz

“Through the act of stitching fractured, yet interdependent, moments in time, my work explores themes of memory and the displacement of the human psyche experienced through the wonted events of ordinary life. Sculptural and illustrative, the miniature environment, combined with the imitative inclusion of banal objects, becomes a door to the uncanny. These cross sections, extracted from a complex story line, present the viewer with ignored moments of everyday life, frozen to invite stillness and contemplation.“ 

Katie Curry

“These works are subject to the liminal: a convergence of opposites where line becomes form, where the two-dimensional verges on the sculptural, where desire and conscious thought intersect. Forms give way to recognizable imagery in the guise of domestic goods and desert landscapes, often flirting with the figurative.“

Leigh Daniels

“Using non-archival and semi-photographic processes, time and human interaction encourage inevitable destruction. I create camera-less exposures, using both light-sensitive and natural materials such as cyanotype and turmeric or beets and sun. Welcoming the materials to flow freely, I remove myself and enable the moment I have created to live and decay naturally. I strive to bring visibility and beauty to what society and the art world deem easy to dismiss.“

Sami Cutrona

“Often revealing the subject through fragments, I am interested in the ability to maintain agency through abstraction. I utilize photo-based works as a means of reclaiming bodily autonomy and disrupting the ways in which power and meaning have been inscribed on my queer abject body. While considering the art historical canon, I seek to reject its traditions. I do not directly allude to my identity—allowing room for gender ambiguity and, ultimately, agency.“