LOVE, OAKLAND
Despite the negative news cycles that have been circulating around Oakland in recent years, the city has much to offer. Nowhere else can you find the rich diversity, deep history and radical ideals that the city is best known for. Oakland has always been dedicated to envisioning a better future for itself and its people and, even when the odds feel stacked against the city, Oakland continues to rise. This is seen in its unrelenting dedication to the arts, to community and to the pride that comes with loving this city so deeply.
KELLY ORDING Interview
The first leg of Ording’s practice comes in the form of precise abstract works that are mathematically informed and highly controlled. The satisfying compositions feature delicately rendered shapes in the form of curves, circles and stately arches that are harmoniously balanced to one another within each configuration. They require long periods of concentration and a mastery of the medium that the artist has been cultivating for years. When asked if she ever messes up the deft line work, she says, “not in a long, long time.”
SARAH SMITH
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sarah Smith is a Berkeley-based painter working primarily in oils. Her large-scale portraits depict mainly friends and loved ones in safe spaces. Her subjects can be found at kitchen tables, in painting studios or sitting in living rooms; their poses relaxed and their faces calm. The subjects of her paintings exert the quiet power that comes with knowing you are safe - a state of being that, though fundamental, isn’t easily accessed for many. It is important for Smith to create these spaces of refuge because she’s found that true safety, for herself as a woman, is rarely felt outside of private and personal space.
windy chien interview
“I feel like I’ve lived 3 lives,” Windy Chien explains as she describes her careers in the music industry, technology, and, now, in the art world. “I’m super omnivorous when it comes to life, and I consider it my duty to live as many lives as possible.”
From a 14-year stint running San Francisco’s legendary Aquarius Records to almost a decade of work pioneering Apple’s iTunes, Windy has moved into her “third life” as a fine artist. She naturally coalesces her inherent feminism and love of fringe culture into a stunning body of work that, at its core, focuses on the beauty of line.
COLLECTIVE & COMMUNITY IN OAKLAND
Oakland is known for its radical resistance to inequality, its strong sense of community, and its ability to envision better futures for its people. The city’s art scene is no different. Oakland is home to a refreshing and authentic artist community that ceases to give in to the hierarchy of the art world. Oakland’s art is accessible, experimental, collaborative, and thriving against the city’s limiting factors. The crushing impacts of gentrification and rising cost of living have systematically pushed artists further and further out of city centers, and, despite this, Oakland’s creative community continues to find ways to make space for art.
Mary Conrad Essay
The artist often muses on the pleasure in seeing and is fascinated by the mysterious and wonder-filled mechanisms behind the act of sight. Viewing most of her experience through a scientific lens, the artist thinks about the eye as an organ – its intake of light as wavelengths, the processing of color, and our brains’ ability to make sense of what we see. Philosophically, she views seeing as a kind of a magic – defined by the liminal space between knowing and not knowing.
QUILTING & THE FABRIC OF COMMUNITY
Both exhibitions are monumental in their own right. The Quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama showcases nine astounding quilts that are rich with over two centuries of Black history, community and paramount expertise. Stopped in Motion is a glimpse of history happening in real time as we collectively grapple with isolation amidst current realities. Both bodies of work - conceptually and by nature of their design - exhibit the importance of community, the throes of its fracturing, and the enduring strength of coming together again.
nellie king solomon interview
“When everyone zigs, I zag,” says Nellie King Solomon when reflecting on her twenty-year art practice. The San Francisco-born artist is known for her towering and energetic paintings that hinge on an obsession with materiality and motion, specifically how movement drives her medium. King Solomon fully engages her body with her materials – approaching her art practice as she would a sport – moving paint across massive Mylar fields and making her own tools that act as extensions of her small physical frame. To her, art requires the testing of her own limits, a certain level of grit and, what she calls, “the honesty of hard work.”
Randy colosky critical response
Randy Colosky’s Optimist Series are visual biographies that use simple line formations to elucidate the intricate personal history of the artist. The lines are his paths of experience, following the twists, turns, and returns of life. Colors are tied to memories, line work is reminiscent of building and contracting jobs, the bleeding gesso becomes musical distortion from his time as a guitarist - the culmination of these gestures are climactic of the artist’s totality, a visual summation of his life.