Past Exhibitions

Wounds Many: Portraits of the Northern Ute is a solo exhibition of work by Bay Area-based artist Keith Secola and curated by Juliana Lopez.

Keith Secola's practice centers on a deep research into his family and tribal lineage, showcasing members of the Northern Ute community. Secola's work uses printmaking techniques and incorporating found imagery and materials from archival photography, illustrations, and murals sourced from Native American life, transmitting Indigenous memories, identity, and narratives.

For Wounds Many: Portraits of the Northern Ute, Secola screen prints images from his family archive onto collaged and deconstructed American history books, which reinserts and layers Native identities on top of dominant narratives created by non-indigenous writers. By highlighting his ancestors, Secola uses his personal narrative to bring forward a discussion of complex and difficult subject matters like oppression, assimilation, and the loss of culture. He says that it is important to “not forget those sacred ceremonies before me, but grow as an artist with them, and not fully assimilate to western society, but truly exist in two worlds.” 

The concept of "sanctuary city" has figured significantly in recent discussions about immigration, whereby sanctuary cities are framed as “pro-migrant,” particularly in opposition to federal policies that seek to limit asylum seeking. San Francisco became a Sanctuary City in 1989, joining a growing movement. The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Galleries’ new exhibition, side by side/in the world, curated by Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur, takes inspiration from this history, and considers sanctuary relationally, both in the places we find it and the ways we make it.

side by side/in the world, takes its title from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem Sanctuary, which starts with a line that speaks to our shared responsibility in cultivating sanctuary: “I could not disengage my world from the rest of humanity.” The poem frames sanctuary in the small acts of kindness that reflect an attitude of engagement. The artists in side by side/in the world give mark-making new life as a metaphor for renewal, revision and recollecting. In works that investigate histories of exclusion and migration, artists employ processes and materials that suggest healing and mending. Others approach the genre of landscape by transforming it into a poetic, otherworldly space of the imagination that nonetheless maintain a connection to the lived world. The unique formal approaches in the exhibition can therefore be read as metaphors for cultivating sanctuary.

Rhoda Kellogg (1898–1987) was an early childhood scholar, educator, author, and activist who was in a near-continual state of processing child art for six decades, most significantly as the designer and director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Preschool, which still operates in San Francisco. A pioneer in the analysis of child art, Kellogg believed in the fundamental role visual language plays in the emergence of consciousness. Her studies yielded numerous books on the subject, elegant classification systems for the early stages of artistic development, and demonstrable evidence that children follow a predictable continuum of graphic development–from scribbles to finger paintings to certain basic forms–universally and across cultures.

RHODASCOPE brings together approximately 200 artworks from the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection selected by Brooklyn-based artist and child art enthusiast Brian Belott; Belott’s own child art “forgery” paintings; and several of Kellogg’s original artworks, produced during her final years and never before seen in San Francisco. The exhibition marks a homecoming for the visionary Bay Area figure and her extraordinarily vast, yet profoundly singular collection. Like Kellogg, Belott processes overwhelming amounts of information through handling, copying, and organizing, simultaneously documenting and reappraising source material most often destined for the trash heap. His works on canvas are handmade copies of drawings and paintings originally made by children. Eccentric and uncanny, the series finds an adult artist striving for the impossibility of total freedom from self-consciousness. They are, in effect, his tribute to childhood. Kellogg’s cut-paper collages and mixed-media drawings were produced in her 70s and 80s and only recently shown for the first time in New York. Evocative of mandalas, cellular diagrams, and experiments in minimalism, they embody coherence without pretension, questions without answers, and a mind in constant motion.

Beneath My Skin is the History of My Beauty employs storytelling as a gateway to talk about cultural history, as well as Saunders’ family mythology, and personal identity. Physical artifacts such as rope, cotton, snakeskin, and scale models of railroad tracks refer to my own family history, while the salt and water used in the creation of the work references circumstances related to the African Diaspora.

The works in this exhibition are photograms: photographic images created without the use of a camera. To create a photogram, objects are placed on top of light sensitive, silver-based photographic paper and then exposed to light, creating a silhouetted image. Saunders is drawn to this early photographic process because the resulting images emphasize form and structure.