#studioahead

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

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

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

It will surprise no one that Studio AHEAD loves walking through the deep forests of Marin. So it was a delight to speak this month with Nobuto Suga, a Japanese-born woodworker who shares with us not only an appreciation for Northern California's forests, but a willingness to allow the natural world to influence and guide his creative work. To look at a Suga piece is to read, behind each block of wood, the tree that gave the piece its form and the landscape that gave home to the tree: "We are not separate from our natural world. Nor are we separate from each other." We were happy to speak of creative partnerships with those we cherish: in our case, Elena and Homan; with Suga and his partner Amy.

Studio AHEAD: Share with us some of your journey in arriving to California. Did you grow up here? What was your introduction to woodworking?

Nobuto Suga: I grew up in the countryside of Hiroshima, surrounded by forest and farmland. I started playing around with wood when I was sixteen. I remember one day my father brought some pieces of milled lumber home. The pieces came from trees that had been cut down on one of his landscaping sites. I was fascinated by the grain patterns in the wood and I wondered what form I could shape from the wood. I made a towel rack and some shelves, those were my first woodworking projects. They are still in my family home, and whenever I visit there, I see the living element of memory in those early pieces. 

In 2000, I went to upstate New York to study ecology and gain a wider understanding of ecosystems. On a visit to the West Coast my eyes were opened by the majestic landscape of an old-growth forest. When I settled in San Francisco in 2014, I reconnected with the forests and woodworking. I have been deepening my appreciation ever since.

SA: Does the region where the tree grows affect how you work with it? Does a tree in Japan necessitate a different way of keeping its integrity than does a tree in California?

NS: Yes, absolutely. It does affect how I work. I had an opportunity to work on the edge of the coast recently under an old cypress canopy. I felt a direct connection with the surrounding elements—the wind and the rocky landscape. Connectivity to place is a very important part of my process when forming and laying out a vision and a direction. Without that connection, I can not make work. Relationship to place is extremely meaningful for me.

The most majestic tree I have ever encountered is at a Shinto shrine in Hiroshima. It’s wildly branching. The tree is covered with moss and lichen. It hosts so much life. It is a living historical artifact. Typically the trees around shrines are given the most respect in Japan. But a tree is a tree and deserves deep respect no matter where it grows.

SA: Tell us more about this respect. How does a designer go about respecting the material? Does this play into or get in the way of innovation, of using materials new ways?

NS: I’m keen on using urban salvaged and reclaimed wood to extend the life of the source elements. Understanding resources and bringing out the best characteristics of the material are very important to me. Working with resources from this perspective can help lessen our consumption flow which is excessive and problematic. It is important to build awareness and have respect for our natural environment that we depend on for life. We are not separate from our natural world. I’m fortunate to have access to urban salvaged wood and reclaimed materials in the Bay Area. I’m just one of many here who works respectfully and consciously with wood. I’m glad to be part of this community of woodworkers.

SA: You helped repair Sol LeWitt sculptures in New York. What ways do repair and creation intersect or diverge?

NS: My plan at that time was to attend a landscape architecture program, to explore physical interaction with space as a way of connecting with nature. But instead, I was fortunate to meet with a few Japanese artists who worked with Sol LeWitt for many decades. I participated in two executions of his Open Cube Structure, learning directly from a lead fabricator/artist, Kazuko Miyamoto. It was a very repetitive process, and it was pleasing to see the progress of structure and various visual effects that appeared in each step. 

LeWitt’s sculptures are based on numbers, laying out a grid and a score, and the structural form emerges like a sound. The visual effects appear within the open cube from many different angles. I appreciate his vision, playfulness, endless curiosity, and openness to discoveries. LeWitt’s system of composition and application has a heavy impact on my practice. 

Over time, I have developed an interest in kiwari, a traditional Japanese method of proportion or a co-relationship with each structural component. There is an underlying interconnectedness that I experience in nature, and when I make something, as I put pieces together I am always trying to respond to this feeling.

SA: Can you elaborate on this? Is this harmony of proportion what you are trying to achieve, or are you purposefully distorting these ideas of proportion to evoke certain emotions?

NS: Woodworking gives me new challenges all the time. The harmony of proportion is a starting point and a structuring principle of a concept and a process. I’m not distorting these ideas, I’m searching for the best way to accommodate the material and honor what it is offering.

SA: Your partner, Amy, is your collaborator and you've built a home, studio and practice together. Tell us about how you work together.  We [Elena and Homan] are creative partners and are grateful we have each other to move through creative life together. If one of us feels unbalanced, the other brings us back or carries the baton for a while.

NS: Amy and I have been interacting and influencing each other with our creativity and sharing our appreciation for the last 15 years. She and I first met each other when we were both involved in the retrospective installation for Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA in 2008. We had a spark and a similar appreciation of nature and have been together ever since. Our cultural backgrounds are different, but our attention to detail is the same. We’re both interested in the qualities of line and the negative space between things. And we both have a lot of respect for the untouched elements of a place or a material. We have been cultivating a shared language for the last fifteen years. 

We tend to take turns supporting each other’s passions and projects. When I was pursuing ecological restoration, I assisted Amy’s art practice by helping with installation and gathering materials. Five years ago, Amy set up our family woodworking business, Suga Studio.

I enjoy and appreciate her vision, playfulness with elements, and I admire her ability to transform an indescribable emotion to visualized formations. Our practices blend with regular and creative existence in a way that gives us energy and flexibility. Pursuing the passion and our listening hearts is filling me with gratitude and compassion. Our next direction is making an even deeper connection with nature. It inspires us both to the core of our being.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

Go north of San Francisco, through the woods of Marin, up the southern side of Mount Tam, and you may find what remains of Druid Heights. This is the name of the bohemian community that settled there in 1954, led by poet Elsa Gidlow. Gidlow was best known for On a Grey Thread, thought to be the first book of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. Initially envisioned as a secluded retreat, Druid Heights quickly attracted other trailblazers: Beats like Allen Ginsburg, queer radicals, women's liberation activists who came to socialize or get away from socializing. For many, it was a place to party and listen to music: The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and the Eagles all played there. A few made it their home, like philosopher Alan Watts who moved there in 1971, had a library built, and died soon after. The countercultural figures who visited this fabled five acres remain in popular memory. The buildings they stayed in have had a more precarious history.

These were designed by Roger Somers, a carpenter-turned-architect who with his white beard and maharishi clothing looked somewhat like a druid himself. A Somers house is wooden and seemingly inspired by Indonesian batak houses, Japanese stone gardens, Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian fancies, and The Hobbit. They made perfect sense, but probably only if you were on any number of drugs at any number of parties that made the retreat infamous.

The party lasted long after Druid Heights' heyday—lasted probably until 2001, when Somers died in his hot tub on site. It was definitely over by 2006 after the National Parks Service, which had used eminent domain to seize the land in 1977, evicted all residents who did not have permanent leases. Since then, the forest has slowly reclaimed its territory, and only the occupied buildings are in sound condition.

The Parks Service has shown little interest in maintaining what is left. In 2017, a campaign was launched to save the Heights, to little effect; and the few remaining residents are in their 80s. Is this a fitting end? Watts once wrote: "What makes this world a beautiful experience is the impermanence and mutability of all things." Druid Heights was based on spontaneity, anarchism, improvisation—a preservation society is the opposite of this. In a culture of constant growth and productivity, one in which we expect all things to remain available at all times, to let the Heights decay into the past is perhaps the most countercultural action to take. But the Heights also represents an authenticity rare in a radically changed Bay Area that has allowed its cultural heritage to vanish or corporatize; perhaps then the most subversive act is to save it, and to save it for the same reasons we want to save the redwoods that surround it: because it is unique, because it is there, because places like it can't grow just anywhere and might never come again.

Elsa Gidlow in her shoji room.

Gidlow and Watts in the gardens of Druid Heights.

Gidlow in her bedroom surrounded by her books.

This month we chatted with Evan Kinori, a local menswear designer making practical (but stylish) clothing to be worn over and over again. And you'll want to: each is crafted with select fabrics, hand-numbered, and made ethically. We love them for their rich earth tones that remind us—where else—of Northern California.

Are you originally from Northern California?

I'm from Connecticut. I moved to San Francisco a few weeks after high school. I had visited the Bay Area throughout my childhood to see my uncle and godmother who live here and that sort of established the route for me. I grew up an hour and a half from NYC, but never saw myself living there. As I finished high school I was more concerned with where I was going geographically rather than with my studies, so college was an excuse to move to San Francisco.

San Francisco is a small town with the benefits of a metropolitan cultural center but with immediate access to nature and rugged coastline/wilderness; and at the time that I moved here it didn't have the tech reputation yet, so it was still pretty affordable and a bit more quiet. No self driving cars collecting data on every block.

What is the inception story of Evan Kinori, your clothing brand?

Well, after floating around trying different courses at university and community college for a few years and not really locking into anything, I was starting to think about clothing more and wondered about studying design instead. I grew up skateboarding, which forces you to consider details like the millimeters of difference in wheels or 1/8'' difference in board width or the meeting ground of function/form in footwear and clothing. It can foster a detail-obsessed mind. The big one for me was skateboard footwear: I really wanted to design them when I was a teenager and I would read as much technical information as I could find. I didn't think this could be a career path at the time, and after high school I didn't really consider art or design school as an option for me. So five or so years later it began manifesting itself in clothing—then I dropped out of college and went into a design program with more of a trade focus and was able to learn how to physically make clothes.

As I finished the program I had no interest in a corporate design job where I would be stuck on a computer all day in an office. But it wasn't clear how to earn a living on the craft/trade side. I worked with a few smaller companies/projects while further developing my own ideas about clothing. I was selling made-to-order pieces on the side and that evolved into making tiny production runs with local, small-scale factories.

Tell us about your process for designing and selecting fabric.

Fabric is intuitive—just like picking a color for a room or a dish off a menu, it’s not an intellectual pursuit. It's a natural reaction to options presented. My process has always centered around making clothing and products that I want to wear and use on a daily basis. The hope is to create beautiful tools for living that get better with age and as lives are embedded into them.

Is everything handmade in California?

The clothing is mostly made in California, with some sweaters made in Nepal and Italy, shoes from England, bags from Japan. Patterns are drafted and first samples are sewn in-house but production takes place in small sewing shops in California. Fabrics come from Japan, Italy, and the UK primarily. For fabric it's just about finding the best that I can—what will age the best and what feels the most special while remaining subtle enough to wear four days in a row. Sometimes they come from a tiny mill run by a father and son with a few looms across from their home; and sometimes they come from 100-year-old institutions. The stories vary from cloth to cloth, but they are all natural fibers: wool, linen, hemp, and cotton primarily.

We love that you number all the clothing. It's like limited edition furniture. What was the idea behind this?

I guess it's a reaction to the mass/corporate side of the spectrum—numbering your product is only possible at a smaller scale and hopefully acts as a reminder to people of that difference in scale. The clothes are expensive as they involve high-quality textiles sourced from around the world and locally produced with fair living wages being paid. So it's important to have certain elements that justify or speak to their specialness. A shirt is not just a shirt.

I like your Looks page. Who's the photographer/videographer and how do you pick the locations? It looks like your initial campaigns (circa 2015) focused on city streets architecture and then around 2019 transitioned to Northern California's rolling hills, coasts, oak and redwood trees.

Allen Danze shoots all the film photography and videos. We work together suggesting different approaches and locations. Generally they are places we stumble on from our personal lives. He used to spend a lot of time wandering downtown chasing light in the early AM before his job, so we started there mostly. We both spend a lot of our free time heading north to the headlands or further. Shooting can take a lot of energy so it's nice to be in a setting you enjoy anyway and feel comfortable in.

Any intentions to expand into other lines?

After making clothing for a while, I'm definitely pushed to look at other objects with a similar lens. I would really like to work on furniture more and spaces: it's all the same considerations of proportion, scale, materiality, form, chasing a feeling, etc. We have some female clients, but it would be nice to eventually make specific women’s pieces.

How do you recharge on a day off?

Long bike rides heading north or bringing a book to Mt. Tam.

We always ask for three Instagram accounts of local makers we should be following.

Sam Buchanan @standhere_holdthat

Akari Tachibahana @akaritachibana

Llane @llanealexis

Favorite local areas in nature?

Ridgecrest Blvd.

Finally, some favorite places to eat and shop in Northern California?

William Stout, MARCH, Asakichi Incense, Rainbow Grocery, Tommaso's.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

To understand Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s amazing career and designs, you could look at the influence of Swiss designers like Armin Hofmann, under whom Solomon studied in Basel during the 1950s. Or you could see in her playfulness the ideas of the Dadaists, whom she knew through her husband, Frank Stauffacher. However, when asked what artists, architects, or designers she liked, she responded, “I like white 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper, white walls, the ocean and the sky.”

Solomon is best known for her “supergraphics” at Sea Ranch, although, as a recent exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum reminds us, her career is larger than even these large designs. But since we at Studio AHEAD are intrigued with California and all the ways it has inspired artists, we want to take another look at those influential graphics at Sea Ranch a community built along a 10-mile stretch of the Sonoma County coast in Northern California in the 1960′s. 

It’s easy to see why her first job as a designer remains her most famous. The enormity of the graphics feels interactive in the same way a Rothko painting feels interactive—the colors swallow you up. They are an architecture on top of an architecture: their geometric shapes and vibrancy give illusions of depth and structure on the flat surface of Sea Ranch’s walls. They are bold. They are fun. You don’t have to think too much to enjoy them.

They are also a last-minute addition. When Sea Ranch’s architects went over budget, they needed a cheap and fast way to render signs, and asked Solomon, there to merely design the ranch’s brochures and logo (inspired by the sea waves and sheep horns of the surrounding coast), to come up with a solution. A few coats of paint later, her interior graphics became as famous as Sea Ranch’s architectural outside.

Solomon’s work at Sea Ranch reminds us that great design does not need to be expensive, complicated, or planned long in advance. Sometimes all it takes is a creative person seizing an unexpected opportunity.  

Sea Ranch General Store. Archives, Lawerence Halprin Collection.

Sea Ranch Lodge. Archives, Sea Ranch Collection

Moonraker Athletic Complex Sea Ranch. Archives, William Turnbull, Jr. Collection.

Hines Residence. Archives, William Turnbull, Jr. Collection.

Rush Residence. Archives, William Turnbull, Jr. Collection.

Sea Ranch paint sample.  Archives, William Turnbull, Jr. Collection.

Graphic pool tile designs. Archives, William Turnbull, Jr. Collection.

Solomon at Sea Ranch in the 1960′s. Archives, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.

Solomon at Sea Ranch in 2018. Archives, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.

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!