Shirin Towfiq (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. Towfiq focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.

Towfiq’s art has been featured in galleries and museums across the globe. Currently, the artist is featured in exhibitions at ICA San Jose, New Museum Los Gatos and USC Roski School of Art and Design. She received a BA in Practice of Art from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Stanford University. She is currently working on her PhD at UC Santa Cruz.

SEE(d) invites you to meet Shirin Towfiq on Saturday, December 7, from 4 - 6 PM, hosted at Clio’s, a new literary and cultural hub in Oakland. Cari Borja, Ph.D., cultural anthropologist, multidisciplinary creator, and professor at California College of the Arts, will moderate the conversation exploring themes from Shirin’s work— cultural memory, family histories, the legacies of trauma, transnational migration, archival silences, and the complexities of translation. Join us in the spirit of belonging!

yétúndé olágbajú (b. 1990) is a research-based artist, producer, and residency director living on Ohlone and Tongva lands (Bay Area & Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together?

With no set answers or expectations, olagbaju unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are affected by what we confront in the reckoning.

Inspired by the divine and the everyday within Blackness, they use the moving-image, the sculptural, and the collaborative in order to explore possible futures.

Through their social practice they have co-founded and are a member of numerous artist and worker-led collectives, each with liberatory missions and values. An advocate for non-hierarchical working structures, they embrace shared leadership models that challenge white supremacy, by actively rejecting disposability and power hoarding — two of its guiding tenets.

They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of multiple awards including a YBCA 100 award and a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship. They were a recent award finalist with ART X Prize, organized by ART X Lagos and was a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME) and Center for Afrofuturist Studies (Iowa City, IA). They began a commission and year-long residency at 500 Capp Street in winter 2023.

olágbajú generously invites SEE(d) Creative Network to engage with their work at 500 Capp Street on Saturday, September 14, 2024, 2 PM - 4 PM. Delicious wines and bites will accompany the artist-led visit. Ticket proceeds go to support the artist’s studio practice.

Macro Waves is a Bay Area, CA-based creative collective made of artists, designers, and technologists of color, producing experiences centered on social practice, conceptual art, new media, and design. The collective was founded in 2015 and includes members Anum Awan, Robin Birdd David, Dominic Cheng, Tina Kashiwagi, and Jeffrey Yip. Macro Waves projects examine systems, infrastructures, and processes of future world-building through storytelling from a science fiction-based lens. Their practice focuses on introspective work around ancestry, intergenerational experiences, and collective care.

Macro Waves is the current recipient of the 2023-2024 California Arts Council Impact Project Grant. The collective recently received Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure grant, the California Arts Council Impact Project Grant, and former Artists in Residence at Recology (AIR), San Francisco. In 2022, the collective was the Featured Artist for the Asian Pacific Island Cultural Center’s 25th Annual United States of Asian America Festival and participated in the Youkobo Artist Residency in Tokyo, Japan, in 2020.

Saturday, May 4 (1 PM - 3 PM) Macro Waves has offered to take SEE(d) on a deep dive walking tour of their two projects—The Bridge at Chinese Historic Society of America and Collective Futures on view at the Edge on the Square gallery in Chinatown San Francisco. Both installations were inspired by the resiliency of Asian American communities in the US in the face of collective loss and dislocation. Purchase tickets here. Wine, culinary bites, and good company included.

Lisa K. Blatt (she/her) is an internationally recognized artist who often shoots photographs and videos in extreme locations from Antarctica to the Atacama (the driest desert). Her groundbreaking art helps bring awareness and action to the impacts of climate change and other social issues. Sandra Phillips (SFMOMA Photography Curator Emerita) nominated Blatt for global awards and Cindy Sherman chose and wrote about Blatt, when asked which one photographer Sherman thought was doing groundbreaking work (Smithsonian Magazine, March 2012).

“Landscapes attract me with their light, beauty, simplicity. I stay for their darkness, complexity, and secrets. My work examines issues of site, sight (perception, light, space), pop culture and social and political issues. My art explores how landscape may be defined by what is not visible, what is memory or what is trace.” —Lisa K. Blatt

Lisa K. Blatt is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco, and travels around the world to take landscape photographs and videos with a particular focus on deserts, both hot and cold. Blatt’s art has been exhibited widely, including many museums. Her work has been shown at the Shanghai Biennial, China, the Havana Biennial, Cuba, Museo de Tigre, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Reykjavik Museum of Photography, Iceland (solo show), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Contemporary Art Platform and Freud Museum, London, Kunstverein Haus, Germany, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (solo), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Bellingham National (Whatcom) Museum, Washington, Santa Cruz Museum, San Diego International Airport, Phillips Collection Museum, Washington, DC and Sean Kelly in New York, among others.

Blatt invites SEE(d) to join the conversation on Sunday, February 25, 3 PM - 5 PM, in the Minnesota Street Projects studios in San Francisco. Purchase tickets on eventbrite.

nkiruka oparah (they/them) is an artist and designer currently based in Oakland, CA. They work fluidly across mediums to create works on paper, installations, wearables, and performances that explore the poetics of collage. Their installation practice draws on cultural memory and utilizes the histories of found and recycled materials, as well as the image detritus of an internet in flux to agitate ideas of time, progress, identity, and spirit. Using fragmented images, experimental printmaking techniques, and looping gifs, they explore an interest in expanding traditional self-portraiture into multi-dimensional spaces.

Their recent work considers how experiences of longing and the wisdom of grief can be transmitted through distortions of the Modernist grid to create new models for belonging.

oparah’s works have been exhibited locally and internationally at 副本 INSTANCE, Shanghai 2021, Museum Ludwig, Cologne 2020, at La Box, Bourges France, 2019, LAND AND SEA, Oakland, CA in 2018. They hold an MFA from California College of the Arts.

SEE(d) experienced a deep dive with nkiruka on Sunday, March 26, 2023 learning about their fluid practice, which spans across multiple mediums and explores the dimensions of consciousness and memory in our hyper-mediated era.

Sofía Córdova (she/her) was born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and is currently based in Oakland, California. Córdova makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory dimensions, colonial contamination, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution - historical and imagined - within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its technologies. The artist works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy.

Córdova’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, SFMOMA, Arizona State University Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Vincent Price Museum, Wattis Institute, YBCA, Art Hub (Shanghai) and MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany). The same is part of Pier 24’s and The Kadist’s permanent collections. She has recently participated in residencies at Eyebeam, New York, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, Mills College Museum, Oakland, and the ASU Museum, Phoenix and composed and choreographed performances for the SF Arts Commission, Merce Cunningham Trust and Soundwave Biennial. She is a recipient of a Creative Work Fund and has been the subject of a First Look feature in Art in America. Her work was recently featured in Aperture Magazine and formed part of the exhibition no existe un mundo posthuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

SEE(d) Creative Network visited Córdova’s Oakland-based studio and received a delightful behind-the-scenes look into her timely and varied working processes on Saturday, September 9, 2023.

Marcel Pardo Ariza (they/them) explores the relationship of wry humor, queerness and representation through color sets and prop-like objects. Their photographs incorporate quotidian objects in seemingly absurd ways creating tableaux that mix recognizable elements with magical realism. Ariza is interested in the action of looking within the theatricality of “the set” and their visually provoking portraits explore metaphors regarding race and gender.

SEE(d) visited Marcel Pardo Ariza’s studio on Saturday, March 9th, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00pm at the Minnesota Street Projects artist studios.

​Marcel Pardo Ariza (b. 1991 Bogotá, Colombia) is the recipient of the Tosa Studio Award 2017, a Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and a finalist for the 2017 San Francisco Artist Award. They are the recent recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award (2023), and was included in Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They received their BA from Earlham College, Richmond, IN in 2013 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 2016. Ariza lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Julia Goodman (pronouns she/her) reimagines the centuries old Western rag paper making that depended on reusing discarded domestic fabrics. Building on this history and her environmental concerns, Goodman gathers and transforms discarded bedsheets and t-shirts into sculptural forms. She works with the pulped fabrics slowly and intricately creating entangled and expanding shapes inside her studio and outside against built structures. Her work rejects flatness and gives volume to women’s labor and interdependence.

SEE(d) looks forward to an exquisite look into Goodman’s labor intensive process in her Berkeley studio, shared with her partner, artist Michael Hall on Sunday, June 5, 3PM - 5PM. Tickets to this exclusive event can be purchased here.

Goodman’s work has been shown nationally at venues including National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Poetry Foundation in Chicago, DePaul Art Museum in Chicago and San Jose Museum of Art. Her residencies include the JB Blunk Residency (Inverness, CA), Recology SF (San Francisco, CA), Creativity Explored (San Francisco, CA) and the Salina Art Center (Salina, KS). Goodman’s work has been reviewed in publications including The Chicago Tribune, SFMOMA Open Space, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She shows with Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco. The artist earned her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University.

Michael Hall (pronouns he/him) is an artist and educator whose work is concerned with finding empathy and complexity in situations that are often polarized and oversimplified. Through painting, video and participatory works he looks to add a more nuanced approach to necessarily critical but discordant conversations.

SEE(d) looks forward to an in-depth conversation into Hall’s working process in his Berkeley garden studio, shared with his partner, artist Julia Goodman on Sunday, June 5th, 3PM - 5PM. Tickets for this exclusive event can be purchased here.

Hall is a recipient of both a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and a MFA Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His recent Bay Area exhibitions include Townsend Center for the Humanities, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Southern Exposure, Marx and Zavattero Gallery and SFMOMA Artist Gallery. Hall earned his MFA from Mills College and his BFA from the California College of the Arts. The artist is currently an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Practice, at California State University East Bay and lives and works in Berkeley, California with his partner Julia Goodman.

Pablo Cristi is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles to Chilean parents escaping the Pinochet regime. Cristi’s work is motivated by an active political awareness and is steeped in a critical inquiry of power, representation and history. His investigations of the colonial past, present, and future often take the form of paintings and sculptural objects that deconstruct and commingle urban visual vernaculars. By articulating strategies of cultural erasure, survival, and transformation, Cristi’s work produces counter-hegemonic narratives that allow a critical reanalysis of the status quo.

Join SEE(d) for an evening in Pablo’s West Oakland warehouse studio where we will share boutique wines, appetizers and lively discussion with the artist. Bring a friend and support the artist—Saturday, September 17, 2022, 4PM - 6PM.

Cristi has exhibited work in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Riverside, CA in the historic, inaugural exhibition of The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture (aka 'The Cheech') at Riverside Art Museum. Other exhibitions include: ‘South of the Border,’ Getty PST: LA/LA, Loft at Liz’s, Los Angeles, CA; ‘Barrio Logos: Displacement and Vanishing Iconography,’ Getty PST: LA/LA, Residency Art Gallery, Ingelwood, CA; and ‘Papel Chicano Dos-Works on Paper,’ University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, WY. Cristi is Chair of the visual art program at Oakland School for the Arts and a graduate of the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program at California College of the Arts, where he was awarded the Barclay Simpson Award in 2009.

Artist James David Lee (he/him) is a painter and bookmaker who explores Daoist parables that invert our perspective, revealing a slippery, unresolved world in constant transformation. He makes books that blend surreal poetry and painted images, oil paintings of secret poems, and ink-on-paper paintings that reveal the intricate textures of mundane objects.

Lee studied book arts at Yale University, art history at the Sorbonne University in Paris, classical Chinese literature at National Taiwan University, and holds a JD from Stanford Law School. His work is in the collection of the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Yale University Arts of the Book Collection, and the Collection of Kaitlyn and Mike Krieger.

Lee lives and works in San Francisco. He looks forward to sharing his exploratory works with SEE(d) Creative Network in his studio on Saturday, November 11, 2023. Purchase your tickets here.

Taraneh Hemami (she/her) works with materials of history, organizing archives of images, data, and information, to weave complementary and contradictory narratives made manifest in objects and installations. She engages in diverse strategies to explore themes of displacement, preservation, and representation through projects that survey a variety of topics, from the concept of martyrdom to reflections of the everyday. Hemami’s architectural sculptures serve as platforms for interaction, personal reflections, and public action. They intermingle with the spaces they occupy, complicating their presence and identity, and at times altering their function. Her collaborative and curatorial projects form connections between artists, writers, and scholars through creative experimentation, promoting dialogue as a central part of both process and presentation.

Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and living and working in San Francisco, Hemami has received awards from the Creative Capital, Creative Work Fund, Center for Cultural Innovation, the California Humanities, as well as San Francisco Arts Commission. Her works have been exhibited widely, including at Pergamon Museum, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Boghossian Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Montalvo Art Center, Southern Exposure, and at the Sharjah International Biennial.

SEE(d) visited Hemami at her San Francisco studio located in the Minnesota Street Studios on Sunday, December 11, 2022 for a thought-provoking private exhibition and studio tour.

Desirée Holman is an accomplished interdisciplinary artist focused in the fields of expanded cinema, performance, public artworks as well as traditional gallery works. 

SEE(d) Artist Series was proud to launch with Desirée Holman as the first studio artist on Sunday, December 2, 2018, 2pm - 4pm. Holman presented two in-progress bodies of work: an expansive video project entitled The Third Place and a series of small scale, ceramic figurative sculptures.

Holman received a San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award in 2008 and Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award in 2007. From 2016-2017, Holman returned to SFMOMA as a fellow in the Film & Performance Department with a new works commission. Holman is internationally collected and exhibited and holds a Master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives and works in Oakland, California.

Chris Duncan is an Oakland-based artist who employs repetition and accumulation as a basis for experiments in visual and sound based media. An overriding theme in current works is the use of natural forces, such as the sun and the moon, as conceptual and compositional prompts for both sonic and visual efforts.  Outside of his studio practice he organizes events and runs a small artist book press and record label called LAND AND SEA with his wife.

Duncan shared his newest body of process-based artwork with SEE(d) on Saturday, January 26, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00pm at his North Oakland studio / performance space. Duncan shed light into his time-intensive, chance-based process of aging fabric canvas out of doors using the sun and moon to ‘paint’, then revealing the remnant of light / shadow in order to determine what hand gesture comes next. Duncan also performed an original sound work.

Duncan earned his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and his Masters Degree in Art Practice from Stanford University. He lives and works in Oakland, CA and often performs under the moniker: OFFING.

Ilana Crispi is a San Francisco based artist with an interdisciplinary practice. She mixes traditional ceramic arts with local histories and geologies, food, dirt, and junk materials. Her site-specific installations invite engagement and investigate ideas of perception and the ways in which we experience our environments.

SEE(d) visited Crispi’s Half Moon Bay studio on Saturday, May 11, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00pm where we learned about Crispi’s intriguing process of making art from the land and her process of excavating dirt from underneath her home in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Crispi has been the resident artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, Montalvo Arts Center, the de Young Museum, and Jiwar and Can Serrat in Spain. Her work has been shown at museums, galleries, and alternative sites nationally and internationally in Spain, Mexico and China. Crispi earned her BA from Brown University and holds an MFA from Mills College. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University and has her studio in Half Moon Bay, CA.

Brett Cook is an interdisciplinary artist who uses storytelling as a vehicle to distill complex ideas of transformation. Cook’s objects feature painting, drawing, photography, and installation to tell pluralistic stories that reinvent representation. His public projects involve community workshops featuring arts-integrated pedagogy with music, performance, and food to create a fluid boundary between art, daily life, and healing.

SEE(d) Creative Network visited Brett Cook’s vibrant Oakland studio on Saturday, January 25th, 2020, 3PM - 5PM where the artist engaged SEE(d) in a discussion about his socially dedicated art practice. See photos of this insightful visit.

Recognized for a history of socially relevant, community engaged projects Brett Cook was selected as cultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State's 2012 smARTpower Initiative. Cook’s work is in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and Harvard University. Cook published “Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits”(2009) with Wendy Ewald and “Clouds In A Teacup”(2016) with Thich Nhat Hanh. Cook has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. Cook has taught at all academic levels and published in academic journals including the Maryland Institute College of Art and Harvard Universities. He is currently Senior Visual Art Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is collaborating with Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Destiny Arts Center on The Black (W)hole.

Rodney Ewing is a visual artist based in San Francisco, CA. Ewing’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate.

“As an artist, it is more important to create a platform that moves us past alliances, and begins a dialogue that informs, questions, and in some cases even satires our divisive issues. Without this type of introspection, we are in danger of having apathy rule our senses,” Ewing states.

SEE(d) held an intimate, behind-the scenes visit in Ewing’s studio in the Pacific Felt Factory arts complex in the SOMA/Mission district on Friday, August 23, 2019, 6:30 - 8:30pm.

Ewing’s work has been exhibited at National Veteran's Art Museum in Chicago, IL, Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, CA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Root Division, Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Alter Space Gallery, and Ictus Projects among others. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at MoAD in San Francisco, CA, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA, Bemis in Omaha, NE, Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, CA. Ewing is featured in Brooklyn Art Library’s newsletter. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking from West Virginia University.

Deborah Oropallo is a painter and video artist, working with web-based imagery and digital media. Oropallo worked as a traditional painter until 2000, when technology slowly entered the work. She incorporates her own photography in addition to digital media, exploring what is currently in the news or surrounds her on her family farm in Northern California.

Oropallo has shown her work at The Whitney Biennial NY, The Corcoran Gallery Biennial, Washington DC, SF Museum of Modern Art. Selected Solo shows include the De Young Museum SF, Palm Desert Museum, Boise Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art. Most recent monographs: “POMP” Published by Gallery 16, San Francisco 2009. “How To”, Published by the San Jose Museum 2001. She has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the arts Award, The Fleischhacker Award, the Engelhard Award and most recently a Pollock Krasner Award.

Oropallo earned a B.F.A from Alfred University, and M.A. and M.F.A. from University of California Berkeley. She lives and works in Novato, California.

SEE(d) enjoyed a lively visit to Oropallo’s family farm in Novato, CA on Saturday, September 28, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00pm where we viewed Oropallo’s new video work, heard from her collaborator and sound designer, Andy Rappaport, and sampled her partner Michael Goldin’s homemade cheese.

Andy Diaz Hope is a visual artist based in San Francisco, CA.

SEE(d) Artist Series enjoyed an engaging and intimate conversation with Andy Diaz Hope on his artistic process on Saturday, November 16th, 2019, 3:00pm - 5:00pm in his home studio complex in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Beautification Machine is a device used to neutralize the fear spewed forth daily over the networks and transform polarizing media sources into vehicles of contemplation and peace. The Machine combines sculpture, projection, audio processing and random chance to manipulate realtime video feeds from FOX, MSNBC, etc. and then strip them of all rhetoric and partisanship. By creating an oasis of calm out of the very thing that makes it difficult to find peace, the viewer can break the patterns of fear instilled paralysis and find ways to enact positive change. Beautification Machine is a collaboration with sound artist Jon Bernson.

Diaz Hope lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Laurel Roth Hope is a self-taught artist in San Francisco, CA. Before her art career, Roth Hope worked as a park ranger and in natural resource conservation. These professional experiences influenced her current work, which centers on the human manipulation of and intervention into the natural world.

SEE(d) visited Laurel Roth Hope in her home studio complex in San Francisco on Saturday, November 16, 2019, 3:00pm - 5:00pm where she lives and collaborates with artist Andy Diaz Hope.

Roth Hope is a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and was a 2016 Resident Artist with the Kohler Arts and Industry program in Wisconsin. In 2013 she and her sometime collaborator, Andy Diaz Hope, completed a year-long Fellowship at the de Young Museum of San Francisco examining the history of human cooperation through architecture. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Mint Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 21C Museum, the Zabludowics Collection, the Progressive Collection, and the Ripley’s Museum of Hollywood, among others.

For their installation The Woulds Roth Hope and Diaz Hope created a forest of tree-like sculptures made of wood, mirror, and glass that is part geometric and part organic as a way to integrate the ethereal with the natural. They imagine how a forest might appear to a bird that can see between worlds, a forest where the trees have souls and exist in multiple planes -- physical and spiritual. Roth Hope lives and works in Northern California.