Art Is Awesome with Emily Wilson

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Emily spends time with Gamynne Guillotte (Chief Education and Public Engagement Officer) and Ted Mann (Project Assistant Curator) about SFMOMA's dramatic reimagining of the Doris and Don Fisher Collection — 250 works by 35 artists reinstalled for the first time since 2016.

They also reorganized the galleries by artist rather than nationality or style — placing German artists like Richter alongside American contemporaries like Warhol — and used the Fishers' deep holdings to create mini-retrospectives for artists like Sol LeWitt and Philip Guston. A standout pairing of Anselm Kiefer and William Kentridge on the sixth floor explores how both artists confront their countries' fraught histories through material process. The episode highlights a rare collaboration where education and interpretation were involved from the very start of the exhibition design.

For more about the reimagined Fisher Collection - CLICK HERE

Learn more about Gamynne Guillote - CLICK HERE

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Tune in next Episode, when Emily features artist Justin Hoover of the Chinese Historical Society of America.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Emily & AIA is glad to partner with The Svane Family Foundation's Culture Forward initiative — a $5 million grant program to support arts and culture projects in downtown San Francisco.

In this episode of *Art is Awesome*, Emily chats with Rodney Earl Jackson Jr., a San Francisco native who grew up in the Fillmore neighborhood and went on to perform on Broadway. After years on Broadway, Rodney and his co-founder Marcelo Javier — a Latino actor who faced similar typecasting — returned to San Francisco to start SFBATCO, driven by a desire to "expand the canon" and create opportunities for artists of color beyond the narrow roles available to them. The episode highlights their current production, *Every Saturday Night*, playing at the Strand Theater on Market Street. The play is a celebration of Black joy and culture rather than trauma, exploring themes of homeownership, displacement, and honoring the past while reconciling with the present. The production marks SFBATCO's first downtown show and their first all-Black cast.

About Artist Rodney Earl Jackson Jr:

Rodney is the Artistic Director & Co-Founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre (SFBATCO). He made his Broadway debut in “The Book of Mormon” and was last seen at American Conservatory Theatre & Arena Stage in the co-produced production of “Toni Stone”. Prior to that he traveled North America in the first national tour of “Motown: The Musical.”

A San Francisco native who built his love and foundation for art and theatre in public city organizations such as SFartsEd, San Francisco Recreation and Park’s Young People’s Teen Musical Theater Company, and the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts’ where he graduated from the theatre department. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama.

Other theatre credits: Berkeley Repertory “Ain’t Too Proud: the life and times of the Temptations”, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company “I, Too, Sing America”.
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Follow Rodney on Instagram: @RodneyEarlJacksonJr

Visit SFBATCO's Website: https://www.sfbatco.org/

For more about Every Saturday Night - CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Griff Williams, Griff Williams, a Bay Area artist, curator, and the founder of Gallery 16, which operated in San Francisco for over 30 years.

Griff discusses his upbringing in a political family (his father was a longtime Montana congressman) and why he chose art over politics, attending the San Francisco Art Institute and opening Gallery 16 in 1993 as a multi-disciplinary space for visual art, performance, and music. He reflects on the gallery's mission to champion artists over luxury sales, and describes the 2021 documentary *Tell Them We Were Here*, made with his son Keelan, which profiles eight Bay Area artists tackling social issues like environmentalism, racism, and prison reform through their practice.

Griff also addresses the recent closures of the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts, calling them devastating losses for the region's creative economy and cultural identity. He argues that elected officials are largely indifferent to working artists—many of whom are "the working poor" juggling multiple jobs—while public funding tends to favor large institutions like symphonies and ballets over small galleries and nonprofits. Now living in Sonoma with more studio time, Griff continues to curate, including the exhibition *Rex Ray: We Are All Made of Light* at the Monterey Museum of Art, and remains a passionate advocate for the Bay Area's arts community.

About Artist Griff Williams:

Griff Williams is an American multidisciplinary artist, painter, filmmaker, publisher, and gallerist, based in San Francisco. Known for his layered, textural abstract paintings that explore perception, memory, and form through color, surface, and material, Williams has built a career spanning painting, curatorial work, and publishing.

Williams is the eldest of three siblings, raised in Montana’s rugged landscapes by Pat Williams, Montana’s longest-serving U.S. Congressman, and Carol Williams, the first female majority leader in the Montana SenateHe earned a BFA from the University of Montana in 1984 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993.

Williams’s paintings often use a reimagined “paint-by-number” approach with poured resin and stenciled enamel, producing graphic, optically complex surfaces reminiscent of vintage postcards grokipedia.com. His work engages with abstraction, place, and narrative, blending craftsmanship with conceptual inquiry. He has also directed the 2021 award-winning documentary Tell Them We Were Here, focusing on socially engaged Bay Area artists.

In 1993, Williams founded Gallery 16 in San Francisco, later expanding into Urban Digital Color. For over three decades, the gallery became a hub for contemporary art, exhibiting works by artists such as Margaret Kilgallen, Paul Sietsema, and Michelle Grabner. Through Gallery 16 Editions, he published influential monographs, including The Gay Seventies: Hal Fischer (2019) and Rex Ray (2020).

Williams has taught at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, and Mills College, and his work has been exhibited in venues such as the San Diego Museum of Art and San Jose Museum of Art. His writing and public speaking address arts policy and cultural issues in the Bay Area.

His work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and Artnews. He is recognized as a key figure in San Francisco’s contemporary art scene, combining artistic practice with advocacy for the arts and regional cultural history

Visit Griff's Website: https://www.griffwilliams.com/

Follow Griff on Instagram: @WilliamsGriff

Learn More about Gallery16 - CLICK HERE

Learn More about exihibit Rex Ray: We Are All Made of Light - CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Emily & AIA is glad to partner with The Svane Family Foundation's Culture Forward initiative — a $5 million grant program to support arts and culture projects in downtown San Francisco.

Today, Emily chats with Donna Personna, a San Francisco-based artist, activist, and 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade grand marshal.

Donna talks with Emily about her mixed-media triptych *Home in the Promised Land*, created for the Svane Family Foundation's 2020 artist grant program; growing up in Texas and San Jose, and discovering San Francisco's queer community as a teenager at Compton's Cafeteria; then co-writing the play *Compton's Cafeteria Riot* with the Tenderloin Museum, dramatizing the 1966 transgender uprising against police harassment — three years before Stonewall.

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About Artist Donna Personna:

Donna Personna (She/Her) is a transgender rights activist and fine art artist, who focuses in photography, painting, and mixed media. Personna was friends with The Cockettes and played a part in Elevator Girls in Bondage. Personna co-wrote a play about the Compton Cafeteria riot, one of the first recorded LGBT-related riots in United States history, and marking the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco. Personna moved to San Francisco at age 19 and has served on the boards of the Trans March and Transgender Day of Remembrance. In 2018, she raised San Francisco’s first Transgender flag at San Francisco City Hall with Mayor London Breed. In 2019, she was a Grand marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade.

Follow Donna on Instagram: @Donna.Personna

For Tickets & Info on Compton's Cafeteria Riot, CLICK HERE

For More on Donna's work with The Svane Family Foundation, CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

About Artist Amy Trachtenberg:

Amy Trachtenberg is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes painting, collage, sculpture, installation, poetry and public projects. Diverse in their scale and material sources, hybrid paintings and objects exist between fiction and abstraction. By bringing what exists in the world into the work, awareness is aroused by the qualities of color, tactility, and an appetite for examining the remains of material culture. Structures woven together are built on memory and forgetfulness with relationships between architecture, the body and everyday objects.

Visit Amy's Website: https://www.amytrachtenberg.com/

Follow Amy on Instagram: @AmyClaireT

For more on Amy's Exhibit "Abstract Objects of Devotion" CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Emily & AIA is glad to partner with The Svane Family Foundation's Culture Forward initiative — a $5 million grant program to support arts and culture projects in downtown San Francisco.

In the first of episodes, Emily chats with Kelsey Issel, a neon artist and also the Director for the Culture Forward initiative.

Kelsey traces her path from organizing the renegade Fountain Art Fair in the early 2010s (including a memorable "war of the inflatables" with union protesters at the 69th Regiment Armory) to co-founding She Bends, a women's neon arts collective. She discusses the foundation's unconventional approach to philanthropy, which began with giving 100 artists $10,000 each during COVID and evolved into Culture Forward — a general-support grant designed to get cash quickly into artists' hands with the explicit understanding that "some projects might fail."

The episode also highlights the foundation's earlier million-dollar gifts to the Headlands Foundation Fellowship Program and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which enabled the acquisition of works from 30 local contemporary artists — several of whom have been past guests on the podcast.

About Artist Kelsey Issel:

Kelsey Issel is a culture worker, artist and curator whose practice centers the ethos of craft—learning through doing, cultivating attention, and recognizing the social responsibility held within materials. She leads Opie Project (space), an arts and culture firm that develops cross-sector programs investing in cultural capital, with partners including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Headlands Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Port of San Francisco, and Coca-Cola.

With a background in alternative photography, car mechanics, and neon, Kelsey’s hands-on material practice informs her approach to curating, programming, and public initiatives. Her work bridges art and infrastructure, sustaining cultural ecosystems and the communities that grow around them.

Issel was the 2025/2026 Antigravity Residency Artist with Corning Museum of Glass and Rockwell Museum and sits on the Board of Directors at Southern Exposure in San Francisco.

Learn More About "She Bends" Women In NEON - CLICK HERE

For More On The Svane Family Foundation & The Culture Forward Initiative - CLICK HERE

Follow Kelsey on Instagram: @KelseyMarieIssel

Follow The Svane Family on Instagram: @SvaneFoundation

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, host Emily chats with Miguel Novelo, a multidisciplinary artist from the Yucatan, Mexico, now based in the Bay Area. Miguel's solo exhibition Inframundo is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose through August 23rd.

Inframundo is a large-scale, immersive installation featuring sculpture, video, and sound. Inspired by the cenotes and caverns of the Yucatan — underwater cave systems formed by the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago — the work explores Mayan cosmology, the cycles of nature, and what Miguel calls "techno shamanism": the use of emerging technology to evoke shamanic experiences and altered states of consciousness.

About Artist Miguel Novelo:

Miguel Novelo is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing. Currently working on algorithmic movies, technoshammanic installations, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses.

Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals.
Currently a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.

Visit Miguel's Website: https://miguelnovelo.com/

Follow Miguel on Instagram: @xMiguelNovelo

For more about his exhibit Inframundo, CLICK HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Jonathon Keats — conceptual artist, experimental philosopher, and writer based in San Francisco. He has sold his thoughts, copyrighted his brain, choreographed a ballet for honeybees, and written six books. He contributes to Art in America, Popular Science, and Wired, and has exhibited at LACMA and Modernism Gallery SF.

Jonathon discusses Centuries of the Bristlecone, an 11-foot-tall dual pendulum clock on permanent display at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. The clock, created in partnership with the Long Now Foundation, tells both atomic time and arboreal time — time as experienced by ancient bristlecone pine trees that can live up to 5,000 years. The project took over a decade to realize, with clockmakers Phil Abernathy and Brittany Cox.

About Artist Jonathon Keats:

Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research fellow at the Highland Institute, a consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center, a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a Flux Exchange Artist at Flux Projects, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He co-directs the Center for Climate-Adapted Heritage Cuisine and serves as curatorial director of the Museum of Future History.

For more from Jonathon:

Nevada Museum of Art – Centuries of the Bristlecone

Jonathon Keats at the Long Now

New York Times: In the Fastest-Warming CIty in the US, These Artists See Hope

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Miguel Arzabe, a engineer turned artist based in Oakland, Ca...

About Artist Miguel Arzabe:

Miguel Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions - weavings, paintings, videos. He starts by finding outdated beauty in paper ephemera from art shows, modernist paintings, discarded audio recordings. They are methodically analyzed, deconstructed, reverse-engineered. Drawing inspiration from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves the fragments together revealing uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation.

Arzabe lives and works in Oakland, CA. He had recent solo shows at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA). Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in museums and galleries including MAC Lyon (France), MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Oregon), the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Arzabe’s work is held in public collections such as the Harn Museum of Art in Gainseville, FL; the de Young Museum; Albuquerque Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; San Francisco Arts Commission; the State of California; as well as numerous private collections. He has attended many residencies including Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Millay Arts, and Santa Fe Art Institute. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2022 Arzabe was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. In 2023 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and and a Golden Foundation Residency. In 2024 his work was featured in the exhibitions About Place at the deYoung Museum and The Poetics of Dimensions at the ICA San Francisco. His work is featured in the 2025 contemporary art survey TEXTILES x ART published by Thames and Hudson AU.

Visit Miguel's Website: MiguelArzabe.net

Follow Miguel on Instagram: @Miguel.Arzabe

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily welcomes Paola de la Calle, a Colombian American multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Her work spans textiles, ceramics, printmaking, and writing, and often explores themes of immigration, land sovereignty, family memory, and diaspora identity.

About Artist Paola de la Calle:

Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. In her practice, De la Calle combines photographs sourced from family albums and found images which she prints on textiles, as well as poetic texts, paintings made with coffee instead of paint, and found objects, to mine the aesthetics of nostalgia and examine the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia.

She is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza in 2020. She was awarded fellowships at KALA (2022) and The Studios at MassMOCA (2025). She has attended residencies at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY and Casa Lu in Mexico City, MX. ​De la Calle was awarded the 2026/2027 Ann Chamberlain Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco State University.

She’s been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, “Through My Eyes” on Hulu, NPR, Refinery29, The Boston Art Review, Latina Magazine, Glasstire, and VOGUE among others.

Visit Paola's Website: https://www.paoladelacalle.com/

Follow Paola on Instagram: @PaoladelaCalle

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily Wilson sits down with Julia Goodman, a San Francisco-based artist who makes paper and textiles, as well as paintings and sculptures. They meet on the campus of the California College of the Arts — the last art school in San Francisco, set to close at the end of the 2026–27 school year — where Julia has been teaching. Their conversation covers Julia's winding path to art, the meditative and cathartic labor of making paper from recycled fabrics, grief, and an ongoing audio archive project about astronomy and motherhood.

About Artist Julia Goodman:

Julia Goodman is an artist and educator working at the intersection of papermaking, textiles, sculpture, and painting. Her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), DePaul Art Museum, Recology San Francisco, and Google. Unimaginable Units of Time marks her first solo museum exhibition, presented at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Recent group exhibitions include NMWA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, and Berkeley Art Center. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency, Recology SF, Creativity Explored, Salina Art Center, The Space Program SF, and The Eames Institute. She is a recipient of the 2020 Women to Watch Award from the San Francisco chapter of NMWA. She is a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and started making paper in 2003 with a kitchen blender and old window screens.

Visit Julia's Website: https://www.jagoodman.com/

Follow Julia on Instagram: @JuliaAnneGoodman

Learn more about Julia's Wrenching News Workshops HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily welcomes Abram Jackson, the Director of Interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, to talk about his work making museum exhibitions more inclusive and equitable. Abram came to the role through an unexpected path — he was a teacher and dean specializing in ethnic studies at the Bay School when a student's mother asked him to review an audio tour for inclusive language. He fell in love with the work and joined the de Young full-time in 2022. In his role, he reads exhibition labels through an equity lens, a practice he traces back to his very first edit on the Soul of a Nation show, where he revised the description of Fred Hampton's death to accurately name the role of COINTELPRO. The conversation also covers an upcoming Lowrider Culture Celebration at the de Young on June 6th, honoring artist Rose B. Simpson's Lexicon — rebuilt classic cars painted like pottery — planned in partnership with three women lowrider community leaders: Angel Romero, Ruby Ramirez, and Vera Majano. The free public event includes a lowrider exhibit, a screening of the documentary Los Dueños, a DJ, and family art-making activities.

About Abram Jackson:

Abram Jackson is the inaugural Director of Interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Jackson utilizes ethnic studies theories and DEIA practices in partnership with staff to incorporate more inclusive narratives into didactics. Jackson holds a Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University and a Master of Teaching in Social Studies from the University of Southern California. Jackson has fifteen years of administrative and teaching experience at the high school level, including seven at The Bay School of San Francisco as a humanities teacher and junior class dean, adjunct lecturer at San Francisco State University and at education programs for incarcerated people in California.

Connect with Abram: LinkedIn Profile

Follow Abram on Instagram: @Interpreting_Abram

For Details About The Lowrider Culture Celebration on June 6 at the de Young - CLICK HERE

Learn More About Rose B. Simpson Lexicon HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily interviews Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Culture and revolutionary artist. The episode centers on a retrospective of his work, Emory Douglas in Our Lifetime, on view at San Francisco's African American Arts and Culture Complex.

About Artist Emory Douglas:

The former Minister of Culture and Revolutionary Artist for the Black Panther Party, Douglas helped define the aesthetics of protest at the height of the Civil Rights era, cementing his status among the 20th century’s most influential radical political artists. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he designed all but one of the Party’s newspapers, each issue marked by the artist’s bold, figurative illustrations outlined in thick black line and contrasted with bright colors, block text, and photomontage. The clearly rendered imagery, applied to a range of printed media from newspapers to posters, notecards, and pins, became a hallmark of liberation movements around the world, as supporters calling for an end to the oppression and subjugation of Black, Indigenous, and other communities sought to project a spirit of shared struggle through a common artistic vocabulary.

Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1951, his family relocated to San Francisco, where he continues to live today. Widely known as an epicenter of radical countercultural politics in the post–World War II era, the city was also deeply divided and segregated, and it was the injustices that Douglas observed as a child that informed his political ideology as an adult. Beginning in the early 1960s, as a student of commercial art at City College of San Francisco, Douglas made frequent trips to nearby San Francisco State University to see civil rights leaders like Amiri Baraka, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown speak. He soon lent his talents to the nascent Black Arts Movement, creating fliers and other promotional artworks to advertise events held across the city. These formative experiences solidified his intentions to dedicate his work to the broader struggle for Black liberation that was taking shape around him.

In January 1967, Douglas met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two young activists from nearby Oakland, who, months earlier, had founded the Black Panther Party (BPP). Black self-determination was the Party’s primary motivation, seeking to improve the position of underprivileged people of color in America through “whatever means necessary.” The organization initially focused on an individual’s right to bear arms for defense against police violence, but its attention eventually turned to social justice issues like free breakfast for school children and fair housing. Seeking to promote their civil rights agenda to a primarily Black American audience, the Panthers developed a newspaper, the first of which Seale created and published in April 1967.

That first issue was simple in layout and design, leading Douglas to offer his expertise in print production, understanding the power that strong visuals could lend to political action. Beginning with the second, he designed every issue thereafter—some 537 newspapers, from 1967 until it ceased publication in the early 1980s. Douglas quickly rose through the ranks of the organization: he was officially named its Revolutionary Artist and, eventually, Minister of Culture, overseeing all aspects of the BPP visual identity.

Douglas’s familiarity with the print production process was a fruitful asset, as he employed simple tools like markers, rub-off type, and prefabricated texture materials to create his visually impactful designs. To keep costs low, each paper was printed in one or two colors—black ink, often with a contrasting bright color. His illustrations shone a spotlight on state-sanctioned brutality, depicting law enforcement officers and politicians as pigs, while also portraying Black people bearing arms and defeating their oppressors. Some issues featured images of Black suffering, lambasting the political establishment for failing to meet the basic needs of people of color across the United States. Douglas strategically employed photomontage as well, integrating photographs alongside text and illustrations to emphasize urgent issues facing the Party. The impact and influence of Douglas’s designs underscored the importance of a consistent graphic strategy in conveying complex political messages in very simple terms. This success was underscored by the massive global distribution of the newspaper and the frequent use of Douglas’s illustrations in the political campaigns for organizations like the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina, Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, known as OSPAAAL. Despite the popularity of the Panthers’ programs and their frequent struggle against the established white political order, the Party was disbanded in the early 1980s.

Douglas continues to work as a political artist and activist, producing work that seamlessly translates complex political issues into easily understood illustration, a hallmark of the pieces he produced as a member of the Panthers. His striking figural illustrations connect him to generations of American artists like Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, and Charles White, while his combining of type and image draw on generations of political art emanating from across the world, including contemporaries working in Cuba during the Communist Revolution. Deeply bound to American history and politics, his imagery evokes a powerful, globally resonant narrative.

For more on Emory, CLICK HERE.

To learn about the exhibit honoring Emory's revolutionary work, CLICK HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily chats with Kara Maria, a painter and printmaker based in San Francisco

Episode Highlights:

• Kara discusses her large-scale wood panel print on display at Chase Center in San Francisco, created at Magnolia Editions in Oakland with master printer Tallulah Terrell
• How a monarch butterfly painting became the starting point — and then had to be modified — for the Chase Center commission
• Her colorful aesthetic, rooted in 1970s cartoons, Spirograph, comic books, and Japanese woodblock prints (particularly Hokusai)
• The influence of her husband, Mexican artist Enrique Chaya, and their travels to Mexico on her color palette
• Childhood memory of a school librarian who gave her a shelf in the library for her handmade illustrated books
• Her journey from music school to painting — and why she knew she could never stop making art
• Her love of Bay Area edges: the Marina, Ocean Beach, and the view from Mount Davidson
• Why her studio, SF MoMA, the de Young, and the Legion of Honor all hold special meaning

About Artist Kara Maria: Kara Maria is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking, and public art. Her recent work addresses climate change, biodiversity loss, and their significant impact on humanity. She meticulously paints miniature portraits of threatened, endangered, and extinct animals amid fields of flying shapes, twisting lines, and swirling colors. These works celebrate the joy and exuberance of life, emphasizing the incredible variety of existence on our planet.

Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows across the United States at venues such as the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, CA; the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York.

Maria has been selected for awards and honors, including the Masterminds Grant from SF Weekly; a grant from Artadia; and an Eisner Prize in Art from UC Berkeley. Her work has received critical attention in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and Art in America. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center, the Recology Artist in Residence Program, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the de Young Museum Artist Studio.

Maria’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others.

Born in Binghamton, NY (1968), Kara Maria now lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Links & Resources:

Visit Kara's Website: https://karamaria.com/

Follow Kara on Instagram: @Kara Maria Art

Kara Maria's work is on display at Chase Center as part of the Homegrown Series (alongside work by Masako Miki, featured in Episode 60) CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO

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Coming Up Next: Episode 70 on May 19th — Emery Douglas, graphic artist and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. His show Emery Douglas: In Our Lifetime is at the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco through October.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

In this episode, Emily talks with San Francisco based artist Chad Hasegawa, known for his minimalist, bold abstract style. Chad grew up in Hawaii, moved to San Francisco inspired by the Mission School art movement, and studied advertising at the Academy of Art University before becoming a full-time painter. He discusses how artists like Franz Kline and Mark Rothko shaped his goal of creating work that stirs deep emotion without explanation, and how painting murals on the street — and the raw reactions from passersby — reinforced that vision. Chad is currently painting a mural on shipping containers at the entrance to the San Francisco Art Fair at Fort Mason (April 16–19) and will have a solo presentation at the Good Mother Gallery booth inside the fair.

About Artist Chad Hasegawa:

Chad Hasegawa is a San Francisco-based artist and a graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Art. Hasegawa's art is a quest for simplicity and emotional resonance. His approach, deeply rooted in minimalism, focuses on reducing complexity to reveal the essence of feeling and reason. Hasegawa believes in stripping away the unnecessary, leaving behind art that genuinely connects with the viewer through color and form. This process, a balance of adding and subtracting elements, aims to capture pure emotion rather than narrate stories. His work is a deep exploration into the intrinsic structures that shape our perceptions.

His work is not just an artistic expression; it is a blueprint for understanding and experiencing the world. Through the lens of minimalism, Hasegawa meticulously crafts each piece to serve as a map, guiding viewers through a landscape of feelings and ideas. The essence of his art lies in this careful balance of elements - each subtraction and addition serves a deliberate purpose, ensuring that every stroke, every color, and every form contributes to the overarching narrative of emotional truth. He strips away the extraneous, focusing on the elemental to evoke a raw, unfiltered emotional response. This purity of expression allows the viewer to connect deeply with the work, engaging not just with the art but with their own inner landscapes of emotion and thought. His work reshapes our understanding of art and its purpose, emphasizing the importance of simplicity in a complex world. By removing the superfluous, his work allows us to appreciate the fundamental aspects of life and art.

Hasegawa's work uniquely blends emotion and reasoning, ensuring each piece is both meaningful and emotive. When his work lacks feeling, he enriches it with emotion; when it lacks purpose, he refines it to its core. This balance is Hasegawa's signature, making his art a powerful statement in the ongoing evolution of minimal abstraction and its role in shaping our future.

For more from Chad, CLICK HERE.

Follow Chad on Instagram: @ChadHasegawa

For more about the San Francisco Art Fair at Fort Mason - CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, we are paying tribute and remember Tosha Stimage, who passed away earlier this month. We are revisiting Emily's conversation with Tosha back in 2024, as they discuss her artistic journey, from her childhood experiences with nature to her current projects and inspirations. Emily highlights her creative process, experiences during the pandemic, and her upcoming installation at the Presidio Tunnel Tops.

About Artist Tosha Stimage:

Tosha Stimage is an Oakland-based multi-disciplinary artist who uses a variety of art mediums to examine how we create language. Her paintings, collages, installations, and floral sculptures “use experimentation to re-contextualize physical material and histories with fresh perspectives,” she shared.

As the founder of SAINTFLORA, a full-service floral design company specializing in “unconventional flower experiences”, Tosha is also a local entrepreneur and the third and final artist within the Presidio’s Public Art Mentorship Program. In July 2024 Tosha will create and install a large-scale art installation to transform the space between the Presidio Transit Center and the enclosed Picnic Pavilion at Presidio Tunnel Tops.

“Flowers put us back in the ‘circle’ and connect us to labor, land, and each other,” Tosha shared. “I’m incredibly excited to explore the flora of the Presidio and use it to spark curiosity and fresh perspectives. Nature provides an accessible and inclusive entry way for dialogue around complex social and environmental topics.”

Honor the legacy of Tosha and support her family by gifting her GoFundMe HERE.

Visit Tosha's Website: ToshaStimage.com

Support Tosha's Floral Shop: SaintFlora.com

Follow Tosha on Instagram: @SaintFloraCo

Check out Emily's 48Hills article about Tosha's 'SUPERBLOOM' back in 2024 - CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Host Emily Wilson sits down with Maria Jenson, executive director of SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. Maria shares her journey from dancer and playwright to arts administrator, including stops at SFMOMA before finding her home at SOMArts.

The conversation covers Cece Carpio's solo exhibition Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits, You Are Welcome Here, featuring found objects, poetry-infused wall text, and immersive altar installations that blend Bay Area and Filipino cultural traditions. Maria explains why SOMArts returned to solo shows after focusing on group exhibitions — to amplify community artists ready for bigger platforms.

Maria also discusses the "Artists Live Here" cultural convening, which drew over 400 people in response to the announced closures of California College of the Arts and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Designed as an "unconference" with no slides and no panels, the gathering channeled grief and anger into collective action and joyful community building.

Other topics include SOMArts' annual Día de los Muertos exhibition, the Murphy and Cadogan Awards for Bay Area MFA students, and how Maria organized an art fair at the Tenderloin's Phoenix Hotel that brought together galleries, local artists, and civic partners. She credits advocate Ebony McKinney as a major influence and finds creative inspiration in the Bay Area's natural landscape.

About Creative & Exective Director Maria Jensen:

Maria Jenson is recognized as a leader in the arts for advancing innovative strategies to sustain creative communities in the midst of rapidly changing urban environments. As Creative and Executive Director of SOMArts, Jenson has deepened the organization’s commitment to racial equity, creating clear pathways for Bay Area artists to cultivate new ideas and grow their careers. Through her leadership, Jenson has expanded SOMArts’ public programs, advanced new public-private partnerships, and fostered groundbreaking exhibitions such as The Black Woman is God, The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans* Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience, and many more. These projects represent SOMArts’ commitment to incubating the growth and careers of Bay Area artists and curators.

Prior to joining SOMArts, Maria was a key member of the SFMOMA External Relations team during the museum’s expansion and was the Founding Director of ArtPadSF, an independent art fair launched in the Tenderloin at the Phoenix Hotel in 2010. A graduate of the 2018 Getty Foundation Executive Leadership Institute, she is a sought-after thought leader on the role of cultural institutions advocating for a more democratic and equitable society.

Visit SOMArts Website: https://somarts.org/

Follow SOMArts on Instagram: @SOMArts

For more about the Cece Carpio exhibit at SOMArts, CLICK HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Richmond-based artist Joe Cerda about his multifaceted creative practice spanning tattoo art, painting, and sculpture.

Key Topics:

• Joe's earliest artistic memories, including his godfather teaching him to draw a boat at age four
• His self-taught journey into tattooing, starting with hand-poked tattoos and a homemade machine built from a Walkman motor
• Moving between Southern California and the East Bay, eventually opening his own tattoo shop in Richmond
• His specialty in realistic portrait tattoos and photorealistic paintings
• Travel-inspired artwork from trips to Spain, the Philippines, and Mexico
• Sculpture training at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco
• The emotional connection he feels to his paintings versus commissioned tattoo work
• Influence of representational artist Richard Schmid on his painting technique
• His plans to incorporate more abstract elements while maintaining realism

Location: Cerda Art Studio, Richmond, California

Next Episode: Maria Jensen, Executive Director of SOMArts

Visit Joe's Website and Tattoo Studio: https://cerdaart.net/

Follow Joe on Instagram: @CerdaArtStudio

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily features San Francisco wire sculptor Kristine Mays discussing her politically charged exhibition "State of the Union" at Modernism Gallery. Created in response to the uncertainty and division at the beginning of 2025, the show explores themes of American identity, social justice, and individual responsibility through intricate wire sculptures.

Kristine walks through several powerful pieces: "This is America," a frayed wire American flag with beads representing blood and tears; "Human Complacency," depicting the see/hear/speak no evil concept; and "Modern Day Lynchings and Hashtag Memorials," featuring hand-embroidered names of Black people killed by police on silk ribbons. Many works incorporate quotes from writers like Audre Lord, whose words "your silence will not save you" inspired Mays to create this body of work as both political statement and personal healing.

She traces her creative journey from childhood craft projects with her mother to her current practice working with construction-grade wire. She explains how she creates faceless figures and sculptural garments that allow viewers to project their own stories and recognize loved ones through gesture alone. The meditative quality of working with wire and its durability appeal to her desire to create lasting legacy work.

A major milestone: the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture recently acquired her piece "Hush Harbor." Kristine, who has participated in San Francisco Open Studios for over 20 years, credits her "divinely led" journey and her mother's early encouragement to create without fear of failure.

About Artist Kristine Mays :

Kristine Mays, a San Francisco native has been an exhibiting artist since 1993. She was the Grand Finale Winner in 2015 of the 5th Annual Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series National Competition. This competition not only provided an opportunity to exhibit her work at Art Basel Miami, but she had a solo exhibition at the Scope NYC Art Fair as well, and was also afforded a chance to collaborate on a large scale public mural. Her mural is on the side of the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco on Fillmore and Geary Streets. (It has large wire feathers placed among the portraits that adorn the walls, reflecting the fleeting existence of black jazz musicians in San Francisco.) In 2015 she also participated in the Hearts in San Francisco program, creating a large 400 pound heart for their annual public art installation. The heart spent a few weeks on display in Union Square before going to its final home upon purchase from AT&T.

In 2009, Kristine was a featured artist in the San Francisco Art Commission's "Art in Storefronts" pilot program, a project which transformed vacant storefronts and commercial corridors into a destination for contemporary art, bringing a new energy to the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. A participant in the San Francisco Open Studios program for over 20 years, Kristine has also served on the Board of Directors for ArtSpan-- the Producers of SF Open Studios and has participated on several of their committees. Kristine served as the 2011-2013 artist-in-residence at the Bayview Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Lowell High School, received her Bachelor Degree in Arts Administration from DePaul University and has occasionally served as a grant review panelist through the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Seeking to create impact and change with her art, Kristine has participated in raising thousands of dollars for AIDS research through the sale of her work by collaborating with organizations like Visual Aid, the San Francisco Alliance Health Project and WE-Actx. Her work has received local and national press including mentions in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post, Source Magazine, Artsy, and the interior design blog Apartment Therapy. She is represented by Simon Breitbard Fine Arts in SF, the Richard Beavers Gallery in Brooklyn and Zenith Gallery in Washington DC.

Kristine has participated in programming at the De Young Museum, Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) and exhibited at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles, CA. Collectors of her work include an eclectic mix of people including Star Wars creator George Lucas and the dearly departed Peggy Cooper Cafritz (who amassed one of the country’s largest private collections of African-American art). Her work is displayed in many Bay Area homes and private collections throughout the USA.

Visit Kristine's Website: KristineMays.com

Follow Kristine on Instagram: @KristineMays

For more about Kristine's exhibit, "State of the Union" CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

In this week's Episode, Emily features Adriene Busch, a Bay Area fiber artist and weaver whose exhibition "Of Water" is currently on display at M Stark Gallery in Half Moon Bay. They chat at Adriene's home studio and discuss her artistic journey and creative process.

Adriene grew up in Arizona making art but studied business in college, considering art impractical as a career. She continued creating throughout her education, exploring photography, ceramics, and painting. About 10 years ago, she discovered fiber arts through embroidery, which led her to weaving—a medium that combines everything she loved: the composition skills from photography, the tactile nature of ceramics, and the color mixing from painting.

Her breakthrough came with "West Bay: A Love Letter," a large-scale aerial view of the Bay Area made with felted wool details like San Francisco skyscrapers. This piece was displayed at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Center for a year and caught the attention of gallerist Marianna Stark, who offered her the current exhibition.

About Artist Adriene Busch:

Adriene Busch is a contemporary weaver based in San Mateo, California. She has worked in various modes of fiber art since 2016, eventually committing fully to tapestry weaving. As a self-taught weaver, she finds great joy and satisfaction from artistic problem solving and in the continual development of her technical skills and artistic vision. She is intentional in her selection of materials, using color and texture to represent particular characteristics of her surroundings. As a tapestry weaver, she enjoys the many choices that working with fiber allows; in her pieces, color, texture, and composition interplay to create a balance between bold and neutral, flat and three-dimensional. Adriene’s work reflects her personal connection to the world around her, creating pieces that embody her daily experiences.

Visit Adriene's Website: https://www.westbayfiber.com/

Follow Adriene on Instagram: @WestBayFiber

For more on Adriene's exhibition "Of Water" at the M Stark Gallery - CLICK HERE

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

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