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Caterina Fake: Northern California Legacy Spotlight

This month we interviewed Caterina Fake, who lives between San Francisco, where we took these photographs, and New York City, where our long-time collaborator Walter Ancarrow did this interview among stacks of books and paintings and voileipä, which is the Finnish word for sandwich and a delicious way to make them (instead of mayonnaise, use butter). Both of Caterina’s homes are conversation-pieces in that both are like having a conversation with Caterina: full of contrasts and curiosities and distractions that go every which way except where you expect.

Caterina is an entrepreneur, an artist, the heart and mind behind Flickr, which she co-founded, and an early investor in Etsy and Kickstarter, among others. She now hosts salons and works on her own art, with an upcoming show at the Jones Institute this October. Prior to this interview, we thought these two lives of hers—technologic, artistic—were another pair of her contrasting pieces. But as we learned, for Caterina both are ways of telling stories, the oldest technology we have of bringing people together. This interview has been edited for clarity and the linear constraints of prose. You just had to be there. Walter Ancarrow: The first time I met you [here in New York] everything was in boxes because you had just moved in. Then I saw you again three weeks later when I came for the salon, and it looked like this, like your San Francisco home, as if you had lived here forever. Caterina Fake:  Right? Most people come in here and are like, oh, how long have you lived here? Assuming that my answer will be like 10, 15 years. The other thing that's really peculiar about this place, from my vantage point, is that the walls are all white. I don’t own this place, so there’s white walls. But in the entire San Francisco house, there's no white walls. WA: What color would you paint them if you could? CF: Setting Plaster, which is this pink color, a Farrow & Ball pink color, which I love and am kind of obsessed with. Then the kitchen would be another Farrow & Ball color called Breakfast Room Green. I have also grown to love the color of the bedroom upstairs, which is painted in what I think is Benjamin Moore’s Witching Hour, and it's amazing. WA: I love the color names. There’s a Roland Barthes quote: “Do not all the colors in Nature come from the painters?” CF: Yes, like the Biblical naming of the animals. The naming of the animals as being the first creative act. WA: What's going on in your mind when you're decorating these homes? CF:  There's no thought to it, it's just accumulation. In front of us is an American colonial lathe-turned leg table, a Blanc de Chine piece of four bathing beauties, a Tibetan thangka of Avalokiteshvara, and then above it a Victorian mourning portrait decorated in shells, very beautiful.  None of these things are from the same era, the same country. But somehow it coheres. It’s intuitive. Or over there, the juxtaposition of this guanyin statue with a painting of Matthew Henson, the first Black man to go to the North Pole. The two of them make this lovely couple. They would never appear together in any other place other than this house.

It's trial and error. I don’t have any bookshelves. Everything gets stacked on the floor in random order. WA: How about I pick a book and you give me one word that comes to mind. The Journals of Thoreau. CF: [A lengthy monologue on Thoreau as technophile, his obsession with telegraph poles, his likening of their hum to “music of the spheres,” technology-as-magic, the OED as one of the great masterpieces of Western culture, then the reading of a long passage from his journal] WA: Everything you just said, can you summarize in one word? CF: [Laughs] Re-enchantment.

WA: Okay, what about this book, George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. One word. CF: ThisbookissomethingthatIgivepeoplewhoareinterestedinlearningabouthowtoreadliteratureanddon'treallyknowwheretostartit'samazingwhathedoesishetakesalloftheseshortstoriesbyChekhovandTurgenevandalloftheseotherRussianwriterswhoIalwaysfoundalittleshallIsayturgidandthenhetalksaboutthemscenebysceneit’sbrilliant. WA: Blood Meridian.

CF: Violent. WA: Oh, I just bought this book [Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations]. There is a quote in it that I love, he’s actually quoting someone else: The nomads are the ones who never moved on. CF: The nomads are the ones who never moved on. They just continue. Wandering. The rest of us have settled. WA: It's so true to life right now. Don’t you have a show coming up in San Francisco? CF: At the Jones Institute. I am bringing a 19th-century opium bed into the curator's home where various friends and artists will be invited to come and dream. They will actually come and stay and sleep in the bed and record their dreams if they have any. If they don't have any, I'm going to fill the room with dream creatures and dream objects and create what the Jungians would call a sand table to create an impressionistic kind of story you collect from all the dream objects. WA: What constitutes a dream object? CF: Anything that has some kind of evocation. For example, this [a wooden carving, one foot long, of a Victorian woman in a vest wearing a bowtie; she has no arms and no head] is kind of a dream object. The Surrealists nailed this. "The chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table." WA: It makes sense and doesn’t at the same time. It goes back to how you arrange items in your home, these wonderful, accidental contrasts. CF: They’re evocative, they tell a story. It’s kind of like a story cabinet. I have a story cabinet [in San Francisco] full of tiny little figurines. Some of them are from nativity scenes. Some of them are mechanical cars, toys, junk that you find in a rummage sale, sculptures, a lighthouse, a car, a tiger, a devil, an angel, and so on. The story cabinet has all these little objects in it. And then the whole house—somebody said you don't need a story cabinet, the entire house is a story cabinet, a cabinet of curiosities.

WA: The Jones Institute is out of Aida Jones's house. That seems like a better place to be dreaming. CF: I really wanted it to be in a house. I'm not a big fan of the blank slate or white contemporary box feeling of most gallery spaces. One of the best exhibits I've ever seen was at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Mariano Fortuny was famous for his textiles and his family turned his palazzo into an art gallery. It was one of the most stunning shows I've seen because it had couches and sofas and the walls were covered with the Fortuny fabrics. I always thought it would be the perfect gallery space. WA: You host salons here at your house. How did that begin? CF: I’ve  always organized things like this. I had a thing called Mythology Club where you bring a myth to tell, or a story that has been rubbed smooth by multiple retellings, or a song. You could tell a story from your family that has been told so many times nobody knows if it's true anymore. It's become fable. WA: [Smiles, daydreams] CF: I had a critical theory group which went on for many years with my friend Eric Rodenbeck, who lives in Inverness and is now an ink maker and designer, and we were reading things like Adorno and Horkheimer. WA: Have you always been like this, artistic, bringing people together? I remember your mentioning once wanting to move away from your earlier years in technology. CF: I was always planning on doing things in technology that were humanizing. The things that I’ve worked on like Flickr and Etsy and Kickstarter have to do with being platforms for people’s creative work. That part of the internet has been largely lost,  but a lot of the technologies of AI are built on top of the stuff that we were building in that era. You asked about the origins of the salon. We used to do what we called photo forays on Flickr where people would go out together to an interesting place and take photos, a group activity. It’s community building, it’s putting people together, introducing people to each other. I've always done that. It’s what I felt the internet was best at. Granted, you can form really bad communities. You can form communities of white supremacists or cannibals.  People who are without conscience or moral compass can abuse that capacity. That was the great tragedy of the internet. WA: When was the internet’s golden age? CF: It ended in 2007/2008 when Facebook reordered its feed. Instead of being reverse chronological, most recent at the top and going backwards in time, it was ordered by what got the most attention. WA: The algorithm. There’s something about the chronological aspect as what we've lost that really strikes me. It's hard to articulate... CF: It’s time, it’s the passing of time, but not in the sense of clockwork. Time can be conceived of as technological, the manufacturing of time, because humans created time. WA: But you're talking about a different sort of time. CF: Exactly. I'm talking about the sun rises, the sun sets. Time expands and contracts. WA: Like being in the presence of others can slow time or make it go faster. CF: Yes, to spend time together, that's a different way of thinking of time. You know how whatever the traveler sees are things that the map maker will never know? There is an experience of being in a place that you can't get from looking at a map. It’s the romantic versus the technocratic viewpoint. That's why I've had this career that I've had, which is peculiar but necessary. I’ve been this romantic in a technocratic world.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Nico Corona

We hope our summer is just like this Nico Corona interview: all fire, warmth, gay shit, and chains, the chains we wear, the chains we break out of, the chains that are a metaphor for the links we form between each other. Also thank you Nico for "BDSM hacker bitch techno" which we believe is this year's Brat Summer, and for the amazing curated list of places to check out in the city, which you will find at the end of this interview.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us about the piece you are showing next month for our exhibition at Superhouse June 19th  to August 2nd in New York. Why did you choose a chandelier? How does this piece fit in with where you are now, creative-wise?

Nico Corona: Ooo yes, I’m excited about this show, such an honor. So we were prompted to make a piece of work based on architectural elements. I didn’t even know what that meant [laughs] so I did some research, asked some friends what this meant to them. I knew I wanted to do something in the lighting category but didn’t wanna fuck around with anything electrical, and I’ve done some candelabras with chain, so I thought it would be cool do a megazord candelabra chandelier. I love primordial elements. I am a fire sign so I thought of course I’ll do a non-electrical, lighting sculptural rendition. I love the idea of unplugging and doing something intimate, forming the chains into a circle to prompt an intimate space

To gather around and socialize, the rings of fire can hopefully bring people together, hopefully off of their phones.

Studio AHEAD: Give us a bit about how you started working with metals?

Corona: I started working with metal out of curiosity. It was a bit later in life I had a realization that I had the confidence to make sculpture work. Metal is very durable and has a long life, I feel like it’s an archival material, so after when I’m dead I’ll leave behind a bunch of metal objects. You would really have to put an effort in destroying my work. 

Studio AHEAD: What is the metal smithing scene like in San Francisco/Oakland?

Corona: I’m not sure if there really is a metal smithing scene in SF/OAK. From my perspective I feel like that term is a bit antiquated, but I do think there is a big interest and wave of artist interested in metal as material to work with. There are a handful of studios in the Bay and some DIY places too. The thing about the Bay is there’s always an undercurrent of people doing things on a DIY tip, whether it’s knowledge sharing, workshops, or resource gathering—probably because of it being such extreme place in the sense of wealth and disparity.

Studio AHEAD: You wear a lot of jewelry and seeing you wear so many pieces at once, there is an obvious masculine/feminine, hard/soft dichotomy going on. Are various cultural influences at play?

Corona: I actually don’t wear a lot of jewelry: at most I’ll wear two rings and a vintage ball-and-chain necklace. Two silver earrings made from scrap metal. I’m trying to shift away from masculine and feminine dichotomy. But I’ll often work in opposites. I’ll make a set of things that feel sharp, angular, and fixed—I’ll study that and make something that is the opposite stuff that is fluid, moving, and rounded. I’ll make something super tiny and then make the same thing but scaled up.

Cultural things at play—yes! There’s an undertone of my cultural background in my work. I’m Bolivian and Mexican, I come from an immigrant background, so being resourceful, a clever use of materials, and building things to help improve a person’s life. I inherited this directly from my dad, it’s a part of our culture (and a lot of other cultures). To just make things work with what we got, it’s a very beautiful thing. Also popular culture influences me, the animated world, music, and gay shit. So yeah very serious cultural undertones that engrained in me and popular culture stuff that isn’t very serious, that’s playful. 

Studio AHEAD: The chains seem to build upon this. Chains are confining, fetishistic, protective... Can you elaborate? You use them a lot.

Corona: Chains are an everyday object but are referenced so much all throughout history. This is why I love them as a symbol and a material to build. They have been used as a literal symbol or object to keep you from freedom. They can constrict you, they can liberate you, and they can also be used to make chairs [laughs]. Again pretty serious associations and truths with this material. Yes, they’re referenced in fetish culture, they’re sexy, but also very practical. I love seeing people wear chains as jewelry and they attach little charms to them, people hooking charms to their chains, you can see a fragmented identity with what they attach to their chains. A concept I’m super drawn to with the chains is how a singular link is not as powerful as a series of connected links. I really love this. It’s a reminder that we should always stay connected and a metaphor for humanity.

Studio AHEAD: The earmuffs that you wear to protect your hearing while metalworking look like headphones. What music have you been listening to?

Corona: Oh! I think I had a past life in the 80s. A lot of stuff from the 80s: new wave and Madonna. Rock en espanol, cumbia. A lot of stuff my parents would play when we would clean the house that I resented I am super in love with. Music that reminds me of family and my childhood.  I love 90s rap and R&B. Jazz, Sade, and BDSM hacker bitch techno.

Studio AHEAD: I love BDSM hacker bitch techno. What’ve you been enjoying lately in the city?

Corona: Book shopping at Et al. Books in the Mission. It’s close to my studio. Of course going to Auto Erotica in the Castro, I’ll bug the store owner Patrick. Adding to my collection for my archive of illustrative xxx work. Shopping at Body Philosophy Club, Twotwo in Oakland, and Shop Relove. Record shopping at Dark Entries in the Tenderloin (they also have great vintage gay ephemera). Listening to mixes from local DJs, Lowergrand Radio / Unity Press. Eating Ethiopian food at Club Waziema, one of the only Black women owned bars in SF! Probably the most important places in SF’s history. 

Walking from Land’s End to Ocean Beach.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Gay Outlaw

Perhaps the title given to her JSMA exhibition, “Mutable Object,” is the best description of Gay Outlaw’s work: sculptures and prints that seem pure explorations of form and color, going wherever the imagination leads. The treasures found during these adventures of the mind were everywhere on display in her Outer Richmond studio when we visited last month, where, like a page out of Euclid, the shapes of the universe are pared down to their essentials so that they can be built up again in new and surprising ways. Although Outlaw prefers the shapes to speak for themselves, she had no problem telling us what each evokes—“Ellipses are so beautiful and they feel like they are slipping around”—how to stay creative throughout a long career, and why she uses puff pastry as a medium.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us about the piece you are showing at Superhouse in NYC in June. It is based on an earlier piece, “Puff Supports,” made out of pastry.

Gay Outlaw: The piece for Superhouse is a reprise of a piece I made first in 1996. I made it again for a show in Los Angeles in 2010. This will be its third iteration. It’s a temporary, site-specific work, so it has to be remade, or rebaked, for every exhibition.

Just after moving to San Francisco, I experienced the Loma Prieta earthquake and the memory of it really stayed with me. I grew up on the Gulf Coast with hurricanes, which we could obviously see coming well ahead of landfall. It was the unexpected nature of the earthquake that really threw me—the fact that the architecture all around us, which one minute seemed completely stable, could liquify in what seemed like an instant of shaking. Thus the title “Puff Supports.” I could never look at solid walls the same way again.

Studio AHEAD: Can viewers eat it?

Outlaw: It is not intended for consumption, except maybe by mice…?

Studio AHEAD: You studied at the ­­­École de Cuisine la Varenne in Paris. Was it there you decided to become an artist? Besides the obvious connection between your use of perishable materials and the ­­­École de Cuisine, I’m curious what made you transition from culinary school to arts.

Outlaw: I think I decided to be an artist when I was a little kid. I kept it to myself for a long time, and even tried to repress the urge when it seemed an impractical choice for so many reasons. My father wanted me to go to law school. But art eventually won out.

There was really no transition from cooking school to art making. I think of it all as part of the same path. I just went to cooking school instead of art school. I couldn’t see myself working in a kitchen afterward—I am not that physically strong. I had a string of jobs in food sales and marketing and did a little cooking, and while I was doing that I started making photographs. Which eventually led me to want to make sculpture.

Studio AHEAD: What shape is really speaking to you right now?

Outlaw: At the moment I am studying paper pleating, and thinking of ways to transfer that geometry and energy to other materials… see what shapes present themselves in the process. I see pleating everywhere now, and I can see that it has qualities that have caught my eye before. Vibration. Rhythm. Triangles, which I view as feminine and stable forms.

Studio AHEAD: What about circles, squares, rhombuses…

Outlaw: I’ve always thought of circles as symbols of the self, of a fixed set of qualities or experiences. I love Venn diagrams as a way of presenting a situation.

But I work more often with ellipses. Ellipses are so beautiful and they feel like they are slipping around—more dynamic than circles. I designed a perforated cube when my kids were little and it’s a very specific thing. The perforations come through the faces of the cube and make elliptical openings. I have photographed them and incorporated them into my sculptures for years.

The other shape that I often return to is the hexagon. I learned from bees and wasps that hexagons pack very efficiently into a very stable form. Fun fact: an isometric drawing of a cube yields a hexagon which I think is very cool.

Studio AHEAD: A lot of your work seems to be built around exploration of material and form. At the end of this exploration, what do you hope to find? How do you know when you’ve gotten to that place?

Outlaw: I have found the key to making art for a lifetime is to work with a really open, present mind. I don’t ask myself whether what I am fiddling around with will lead me to a certain place. I just go with the flow of my hands and brain. I finish a piece when I have no more time, or when it stops making demands of me.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Ben Peterson

Ben Peterson is an Oakland-based artist working mostly in clay. A few weeks ago we visited his studio, where among spare modernist furniture were Ben's own creations: vaguely familiar, seemingly functional sculptures with no function. Except for their clean lines and perfect form, they might be something found during an archeological dig, but the civilization to use them has either not yet been created or was lost to time. Ben himself is down to earth. On a shelf were small sculptures somewhat resembling animals, or more accurately, glyphs of animals always pointing to something they are not.

Studio AHEAD: Your Instagram is @newertopographics. Are you furthering the pivotal New Topographic exhibition of 1975?

Peterson: I wouldn't say furthering... that show, in particular the photos and the aesthetic associated with it, were a critical early influence on my work and in some ways they continue to be. That show and photographers like Lewis Baltz and John Divola helped to open my eyes to the built environment and also gave me a way to articulate my own approach to landscape and objects. Also I love the way topographics can be confused with typography as a lot of my early art experiences involved writing on things without asking.

Studio AHEAD: I can see the typographic influence—almost like the Mayan writing system. Many of your works also have an industrial detritus look to them (in the best way). Is this from spending a good bit of your life in Oakland?

Peterson: I think the answer to this question really follows the first, in that I grew up in central Nevada in a small rural community that is also the world’s largest military ammunition depot. It’s surrounded by hundreds of cement bunkers. I also grew up mining with my family and living most of the summer in a cabin built in the late 1800s. There were a number of ghost towns and abandoned mining structures nearby. I moved to Oakland (San Francisco first) when I graduated high school and spent my first few years in the Bay Area skateboarding and playing around in derelict buildings, so I'd like to think I came by my interest in the industrial, the fragment and ruin, honestly.

Studio AHEAD: You recently returned here after spending some years in Houston. What did you miss?

Peterson: If I’m being honest, I pretty much missed everything [laughs], but what really cemented our move back was the realization that I had spent so much of my life here in Oakland that it was hard to articulate what I was trying to accomplish with my work and why or who my peers were or my influences. While living in Oakland I didn't give it much thought, but in Texas I was teaching at the University of Houston, and most of my students were pretty unfamiliar with art history, let alone Bay Area art history, so I really had to build a context/history for myself as well as tell my version of the history of art in the Bay Area. You could check out my friend Jamie Sterling Pitt and his Instagram mariposa_south_west where we tried to put together some of our shared influences, many of whom were firmly rooted in the Bay.

Studio AHEAD: Describe to me a perfect day creating something in your studio.

Peterson: I would get started working around 8am post-coffee. I enjoy the finishing portion of my work the most maybe (it’s where the surprises and spontaneity are), so I would be either putting the final surface treatments on greenware or plastering a fired piece. I don't glaze. Music usually starts mellow and gradually grows more intense... think Townes van Zant (“At My Window,” the Be Here to Love Me version). I listen to a lot of sad country / folk, mostly pre ’77. Lunch is probably a bean and cheese burrito. I usually make a big pot on Sunday, I love to cook. The afternoon music would probably be post-punk pushing into electronic music; I love subwoofers. Sometimes I get in the mood for an end of day harsh noise track or two [laughs]. Although it's a total fantasy, ideally my friend Carlos Matos would drop by and we could go get a drink and talk architecture.

Studio AHEAD: In June you are presenting, with Gay Outlaw and Nico Corona, some pieces at Superhouse in New York. Tell us about the piece and your process in making it.

Peterson: For the Superhouse show I'm making a fireplace mantel. The idea was in place before the fires in LA, but after of course... I’m still a bit nervous about writing down where I am with my thinking. Being born and raised in the rural High Desert I have a relationship to nature and my environment that I have come to understand is very different from people raised in green, lush environments. I’m thinking a lot about Wallace Stegner, the Army Corps of Engineers, a book called Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Ceramics are of course born in fire.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Daria Halprin and Ruthanna Hopper

The term “movers and shakers” refers to anyone who has an outsize impact on their field. For Daria Halprin and her daughter, Ruthanna Hopper, the term is as literal as it is figurative. Daria is a dancer, instructor, and somatic movement therapist, and daughter of famed choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin. Ruthanna is a visual artist whose paintings have the expressive, kinetic quality of dance.

In 1978, Daria and Anna founded the Tamalpa Institute to teach movement- and art-based therapy, going on to teach thousands of students from their studio in the hills of Marin. We visited earlier this year, where Daria showed us some impromptu body movements and Ruthanna some sketches she’d been working on.

Studio AHEAD: We have to start with the dance deck and the Mountain Home Studio in general. It seems to be an extension of, rather than an intruding into, the Marin landscape.

Daria Halprin: The dance deck was designed by my father, Lawrence Halprin, with scenic designer and theater teacher Arch Lauterer.

The residential house was built first. The studio and dance deck were built in 1953/54. The idea was to create a space for my mother, so that she could create new works in a new kind of dance space and be “at home.” The deck was envisioned as an outdoor studio, cantilevered off the slope that leads down from the residence to the studio. Its shape was designed to integrate with the surroundings—the sloping of the land, the redwood forest and Madrone trees, and to capture as much natural light as possible.

Benches were constructed on the hill going down to the deck to serve as observation seats, like an outdoor theater, challenging the notion of the proscenium arch as a boundary between performer and audience.

The studio sits at one edge of the dance deck and the untamed forest on the other side. The studio ceilings are quite high and there are floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors and windows on all three sides. The ochre walls of the studio provide a dramatic background that highlights us as we occupy the space.

The dance deck and studio invite both mover and witness to move in between indoor/outdoor environment and became part of the natural landscape. The wooden walkway from studio to dance deck ritualizes the transition.

Artists and students studying the Halprin work have infused the space and been infused by it. The artifacts and resonances of so many remarkable people and passionate students live in the place. Over the decades it has become a refuge and spiritual home for artistic practice, study, and performance.

Studio AHEAD: Ruthanna, your ongoing Passages is also site-specific. What makes it so? How are you engaging with the space as already there? 

Ruthanna Hopper: The Passages installation and on-going project is a conversation through creative process with my grandfather Lawrence, connecting with his design work. I was incredibly close with my grandfather and we spent a great deal of time together in my growing-up years. He took me on long walks from the back door of the house to Phoenix Lake through the redwoods and over fern paths where my grandfather taught me never to pick a wild flower where she grows. He had a prolific drawing practice and he gave me my first sketchbook. On our hikes, we would sit together on mossy rocks and make drawings. We had wonderful conversations where he would make me feel like he cared about my take on things. As I grew up, I began to understand what a gift it was as a young girl to feel heard and seen. 

My grandfather created a scoring system for creative response called the RSVP Cycles, which is a method that is a resource for artists and designers and communities to create a process in collective creativity and design thinking. The Passages project comes out of a score that I created utilizing his method and in its first iteration is an installation at Levi’s Plaza, which he designed. I see it as a re-generation project, connecting to his landscape designs, in homage to him and in our shared love language of art making.

The Passages project is a way for us to continue our conversations.

Studio AHEAD: Daria, you have also spoken about your childhood hikes with Lawrence. After all these years, what has stayed with you about those hikes? What still guides your practice?

Daria: We hiked from the time I was six years old, going into the High Sierras and camping out for two weeks every summer.  First and foremost are the incredible memories of times spent with my father, the inheritance of a deep embodied love for wild nature, a sense of physical presence and strength in my body, and a wide-open imagination. Our home had a quality of wild nature as well. In some ways nature felt like a second home to me.

Studio AHEAD: Can you describe the moment when you know you've truly expressed some inner part of yourself through movement/dance? It is a feeling suddenly attained? A flood of emotion? How do you know you've gotten there?

Daria: That’s quite a big question. I have spent years exploring and articulating maps that would guide people toward those kinds of experiences.  There are principles, maps and methods that help us “get there.” For me the moment is an experience of complete connection between body and mind: a flow and dialogue between my body moving, my mind imagining, my feelings expressing.

I experience movement as a language, it speaks to me as much as it speaks for me. In those moments of total attunement, I experience my body as an instrument, I become the instrument, I am playing it and listening to its voice.

Ruthanna: I think this is what artists are grappling with, and non-artists as well, the question of “how do I truly express myself”—how do I get to a place of congruence where the inner picture meets the outer picture? Going into the studio is facing yourself and saying I commit to contending with my interpretations and to myself and how I’m going to transmute those influences into some kind of coherence, some kind of integration. There’s a fleeting moment of feeling complete in a painting and then coming back to it and feeling the opposite, like nothing’s working and so beginning again and again, which is the way it goes in life and art. So those moments of feeling something is attained, feel fleeting and impermanent. 

We often have an easier time recognize that creative attainment in others, when we’re moved by art and artists, musicians, dancers—we can see and feel deeply when they’ve had the fulfillment of a full inner expression, because that energy they’re transmitting gets shared with us and it feels like an incredible honor to witness that, like we’ve been privy to magic and the particles shift in the space. This is why art and artists are so important—when there’s an experience of creative authenticity we are moved to understanding and seeing some part of ourselves in its reflection.

Studio AHEAD: What are, so to speak, your next movements?

Daria: On some days I have a clear sense of what my next movement wants to be and on some days I really have no idea. I think about how I want to spend my time with my grandchildren, taking walks in the gorgeous nature where I live, I want to keep teaching. At my age I am feeling my next movement is circular where it used to feel like an extending line.

Ruthanna: My next movements are a daily question, especially during these times. I will continue to show up for art and artists, to make art and to support others in making art. I’ll keep looking for ways to connect to the environment, to Passages, my own and others, and to pick up the extending line my mother speaks of, to carry-on connecting to the Halprin lineage work, coming back to my roots and to the redwood grove and Mountain Home Studio, a full-circle…

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Gallery Spotlight: Et al.

Et al. is Latin for “and others,” shorthand for some of the most interesting works currently being displayed in the city (as well as being a fantastic bookstore), and is a great community-building project in whatever universal language we’re all speaking. Et al. is also Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, who started the gallery in 2013 with Facundo Argañaraz back when it was in the basement of Union Cleaners. Now it is in the Mission and currently hosting the second iteration of Same Blue as the Sky. It’s been a busy time for all of us, so we were happy Im and Harbour could find a little bit of time to talk with us.

Studio AHEAD: We’re really excited and honored to be holding Same Blue as the Sky at your new location in the Mission. What’s the history of Et al. finding space in SF?

Im and Harbour: Et al. has always found our spaces through good fortune and help from many in our community. Our initial curatorial work took place at MacArthur B Arthur in Oakland, a space founded by our friend, the dearly missed Kevin Clarke. It was through a post on social media that prompted us to start organizing exhibitions there. After MacArthur B Arthur closed, we partnered with Facundo Argañaraz (now of 1599fdt) to found Et al., and he found our Chinatown space while walking past Union Cleaners and seeing a sign in their window. We were able to have a space in the initial years of Minnesota Street Project, through a very generous invitation. And eventually we ended up in the Mission by asking (or maybe more realistically bugging) Ratio 3 about the empty storefront next door to them. Our current gallery is in Ratio 3's old one and we are so grateful to have been entrusted with the space. 

Studio AHEAD: What’s your history of making space?

Im and Harbour: We are very keen on thinking about what it means to make space or to give over space to others. For us, exhibition-making is first and foremost a chance to give artists room to develop work in a space with as much or as little involvement curatorially from us. We think a lot about hospitality and what we can do to support our community of artists, curators, writers, and thinkers and a lot of that has to do with sharing space. Right now at the gallery, Colpa Press uses a portion of the back room for printing. Our upstairs office hosts Small Press Traffic, a poetry non-profit where Jackie is currently on their board of directors. Our former Mission Street space is now Climate Control, run by Nico Colon. We also will turn our space over to curators of varying experience levels to realize exhibitions or events in the space. Being able to share our space is a vital part of our vision.

Studio AHEAD: Shout out to Small Press Traffic's series of events, especially the upcoming reading from Lyn Hejinian's "My Life" in February. Anyway, the gallery is very much a passion project—you’ve both got day jobs. Is this the reality for gallerists now?

Im and Harbour: The art market as it is now is one that is precarious and at a tough place, especially for galleries of our size. We have both kept working day jobs partly because it enables a certain level of curatorial freedom. At the same time, while it may help alleviate some of the financial burden, it's still a burden on our time and capacity. It was one thing to do this while we were in a basement in Chinatown, only open a couple of days a week, it's another thing altogether to operate a large storefront with a bookstore and a number of folks depending on us. We are working on getting fiscal sponsorship, as keeping the ship afloat has been hefty this past year or two, even with our jobs. For us going forward, we want to find different avenues to stay open and to continue doing the work that we do because most of all we love art and we love the Bay Area. 

Studio AHEAD: Not to start drama, but what’s it like working with each other? I mean, I imagine you don’t have the exact same taste.

Im and Harbour: Strangely easy! We have this weird uncanny ability to walk into any large group show and leave identifying the same works as our individual favorites. And while one of us may have stronger opinions on this or that artist (or even book or movie or music!), we tend to generally agree. The other night we were talking about this and we couldn't remember the last time we really disagreed on art, other than Jackie liked Megalopolis more than Aaron, and Aaron liked the second Joker movie more than Jackie did. Haha. 

In the more practical sense, Aaron's job is a little looser with his time, so the day-to-day operations of the space are handled mostly by him, while Jackie keeps the space focused. 

Studio AHEAD: Can you make a bland, generalizing statement about the art scene here that only locals will know isn’t true?

Im and Harbour: Where there's money, art thrives.

People from outside the Bay have for a long time held the misconception that the presence of so much tech capital implies the scene should be thriving financially when, maybe especially for us, this is far from the case.

Studio AHEAD: God, that’s so true. By the way, happy new year! What are you looking forward to?

Im and Harbour: Right now, we're writing these answers as many of our friends and colleagues are grappling with the devastating fires in Los Angeles. It feels strange to think about what we're looking forward to as so many dear to us have lost so much. We are heartened to see so much of the community coming together to support each other, from near and afar and as we come upon 2025 with a lot of uncertainty and amid disaster, we look forward to the ways in which we can be of support to each other. To hold each other in love and support where perhaps institutions cannot or will not.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Squeak Carnwath

Our last interview of the year is with Squeak Carnwath, who has lived and worked in Oakland for the past five decades. Carnwath makes heavy use of text in her paintings: sometimes in a dreamlike way, as when you half-forget upon waking a phrase that seemed vivid in sleep; sometimes as subjective encyclopedia, as in her list-paintings of “pretty words” or “what we love about life”; sometimes in sprawling, philosophic lines that move across the whole canvas.

Despite all these words, Carnwath is hesitant to say anything definitive about what a painting might mean; and anyway there is not one meaning because we are always growing and changing, coming back to the painting a different person each time. 

Studio AHEAD: In a great interview you did several years ago, you mentioned speaking less and less as you matured in your art. Yet your paintings often include words…

Squeak Carnwath: Paintings are about sensation and feeling; words are about talking, maybe about thinking, but paintings are beneath language. Paintings are the unseen language made visible. Also, I think that talking is more linear than a painting. Painting is the whole story. Words make up a story that are fixed in time. And I love ambiguity; it fuels creativity and intuition and allows the mind to wander in a beautifully guided way without an end or goal. Also, when I was younger I told stories about the work—particular stories about what started the work as if that was the end in the beginning. So it almost was like illustration, and as I got more into the metaphysics of painting, there was less need for illustration and more need to be open.

Studio AHEAD: One thing perhaps is that you are able to paint phrases that would be cliche if said aloud—ALL OF US WERE YOUNG ONCE, for instance—but somehow aren't when painted. Is this the magic of painting?

Carnwath: Yes, that is the magic of painting. Painting can turn the words into marks into images, scribbles, and scratches. Words in a painting are marks, marks that can make sense or can be a memory or a bit of a song in a painting. Writing in a painting can be a rhythm and add movement to a painting, like a pathway… like walking down a pathway. When you look at calligraphy in a different language, like in Persian miniatures, that’s as beautiful as any mark. And I don’t understand any of the Persian marks. So I love that about language, and it can go back-and-forth between being a thing and being an image. It can be water, it can be anything, but it can’t ever be a painting by itself. Sometimes it can be like a prayer.

Studio AHEAD: I think what draws me into your paintings is that it gives the viewer permission to create their own interpretation. In Equations, the phrase "I just don't know" is written across the bottom of the canvas. This feels like it's always been your mantra when painting, to allow the imagination to meet the painting halfway. Carnwath: I do want the viewer-beholder to have the privilege and permission to interpret the painting through their own lens and lived experiences. What the viewer feels is also important and may not be something anyone can articulate, because a painting can come over you like a wave or later it can just tap you on the shoulder and it’s different every time you come to it. So it’s not set in one time because you’re not set in one time, you’re in the future, you’re always moving in the future; and so the painting goes with you into the future. Studio AHEAD: Equations also depicts a Garry Knox Bennett table. A few months ago we interviewed his wife, Sylvia Bennett [who has since passed away]. How did you become familiar with his work?

Carnwath: I’m not sure when I became familiar with Garry Bennett’s work, probably through California College of the Arts, and then we met a few times at various functions; and then we got to know Garry when we tried to buy the building that he had a studio in. It wasn’t for sale. We called up the owner and made an offer because it was the right size. The owner told Garry and he offered a bit more, so he bought the building. We ended up buying a building in the same neighborhood double the size, maybe more, and then Garry would always tell us that we got the better deal because we had more space. We had dinner with Garry & Sylvia on a number of occasions. It was always fun. Garry was provocative, to say the least, and of course I bit every time. But he had a great heart and so did Sylvia, and I miss him still. He was really multi-talented amazing.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Kate Greenberg

Longtime followers of Studio AHEAD know that a question we love to ask clients is “How do you sit?” because such a seemingly mundane activity has all sorts of cultural and physical assumptions behind it. This is a question furniture designer Kate Greenberg asks herself all the time. What’s thrilling is that she never answers definitively, instead presenting her work as possible non-answers.

For Californians there is the added pleasure in Greenberg’s designs of seeing how she sees California, whose topography unfolds subtly in her pieces. When we visited her studio in Alameda, she was working on something new, possibly a chair or possibly an entirely original way to sit on one.

Studio AHEAD: In your bio you say your furniture “suggests functions that are neither explicit nor expected.” What surprising ways have you seen your work used?

Kate Greenberg: Whenever I can, I design furniture that asks you to engage in a way that’s outside of the norm. I’ve seen the Tubie Chair used the most because it’s been around for the longest. With one armrest, it provides an opportunity for lots of motion over a sitting period while still being comfortable. I love to see how this chair is used at a dining table, because every single person sits on it differently. It’s like a posture opera.

I will never forget one particular delivery and watching the family gravitate toward the table and assimilate with the chairs in different ways. One person relaxed deep into that gap between the seat and backrest, and the other person naturally slouched, facing sideways to the adjacent person, with her arm slung over the backrest. Their kids started to climb on them and settled in by curling up on the cushion. There’s no designated carved seat you’re supposed to slide into, or a backrest or arms that hold you there. Sometimes those things are nice. But for this chair, I wanted a sense of freedom and comfort in one. Western dining chairs are usually meant to sit in one position, facing forward, which feels very Victorian if you think about it, and with the Tubie I really wanted to keep it open ended.

When I talked with reps about selling the chair over the years, they expressed that it would be too tricky to market as a dining chair; it just doesn’t fit the box. As a person trying to run a business, of course this isn’t so great, but you have to remind yourself there is power in taking risks and the right people will do that. When you offer new terms of use that people don’t immediately understand, you see that over time, these can become just as normal. Take the Windsor chair, now such a classic chair. I have many memories of my family’s Amish Windsor dining chairs as a child, listening to the sound they made when I slapped my hands one by one across the spindles, or getting my hand stuck in the gaps. Now this chair is accepted in the canon, but at some point, I’m sure people were confused how a bunch of thin wood cylinders would work well for a backrest.

A bit of a different approach to unexpected function: the lighting works I’ve made—the Radiator and Felled Sky—reference our daily rituals at home, the history of domesticity, and the rift between nature and our constructed world. The lights don’t exist to light up a room or a task, but instead hint to you where the sun is at in the sky, or give a psychological impression of warmth. Those lights people naturally flock to; they want to sit under the Felled Sky pendant and be immersed from below, or crowd around a Radiator light, like the gravitational pull of a bonfire.

Studio AHEAD: Do you feel constrained or freed by the form of the chair you’re sitting in now?

Greenberg: Well, to be honest, right now, I’m standing and writing, which is my preferred set up when working.

I do love chairs though, no surprise, and especially like to sit in chairs that give lots of options, with ways for your limbs to hang over, or ones that make you sit in weird ways. At home we have squatting stools, a wobbly active stool, and also this massive double-sided lounge chair I made. You can do a yoga bridge or sit back-to-back/head-to-head with someone. I cannot stand to sit in an Aeron chair or some sort of armed executive desk chair. It traps you into a position, and they really force ergonomics on you. In no way does that make for a dynamic experience with your body or apply to many bodies. This gets comfort all wrong (for me), invented at a time where they wanted you to shut off your body and give total focus to your company work. In short, I most enjoy sitting on chairs that don’t tell me what to do.

Studio AHEAD: Do you feel constrained or freed by form in general?

Greenberg: Form can be as freeing as you want it to be. I remember with Homan, one of the first long conversations we had, we talked about how our favorite way to hang with people at home was sitting on the carpet. Here we are, two designers talking about how their favorite piece of furniture is actually just the floor. Bad news! But we were recognizing that form can be constraining, and a great challenge to all of us designers is to keep poking holes in that. Researching Verner Panton while I studied furniture at CCA really blew that whole idea open for me. 

In terms of my own design process, form is often the nucleus. It starts off as a sort of positive constraint, and never fails to be a big challenge to come up with a “new” form. That’s where craft-based thinking and working with material come into play, going back-and-forth in mind-centered and hand-centered processes, pushing an understanding of form outside of what you knew when you started. 

Studio AHEAD: Share with us a recent problem that arose while designing and how you solved it.

Greenberg: Perfect timing—I was recently really strung out on designing this piece for our upcoming exhibition together. It’s a fairly large piece that requires a lot of heavy duty and some more traditional technique, because in my mind it absolutely needs to function the way it should. But I also wanted the piece to say something different about the game it’s about, and craft a story that I felt passionate about in lieu of my apathy toward the game itself.

I had to learn a ton about the requirements of this game, and how different materials react to each other in physics, in order to design accordingly. The challenge was how far I could push my concept without sacrificing the utility of the piece. I started to chip away at it by teasing apart the piece’s individual components, seeing how my concept could figure into each element, and then how the elements articulate each other in a comprehensive story. There were many circles of engineering; revisiting concept and lots of writing; design and form and material tests; and then back to engineering and starting over. By going through this cycle multiple times—instead of distilling concepts and then working out the fabrication­—the concept only got deeper and I felt more connected to its purpose, which goes beyond using it as-is.

Ultimately, I think I was able to say something different about a “type” of furniture that doesn’t break norms, due to some very real technical stipulations, and I was very much emboldened by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, who prompted the whole thing.

Studio AHEAD: We love Bobbie and are so happy to have your work shown with hers in our upcoming Same Blue as the Sky exhibition.

In another of our projects, we used your Lean Chair because the shape suggests the waves of the bay or the hills of the city. Is your work tied to place?

Greenberg: Having lived in the Bay for ten years now, and walking all over and thinking about how we got to inhabit the land as we do, the things I make always seem to have this layer embedded in it. My first love was architecture and first design activities were making site plans and elevations. When I moved to Northern California from New York, I became enamored with where the water meets the rock/grass/path/forest/mountains/desert, and how somehow, humans have woven structures around all this. The Lean Chair is about the weightlessness of a gesture, the strength of minimal material with just a swoop. There is something particularly San Francisco about it, the way architecture carves into the rolling land here, cascading in descending steps and giving way to the valley.

In the Lean Chair, the materials are also very tied to place: I sourced the elm from Arborica, from a felled tree that their team had just started to mill, so it was still very green and perfect for intense bending angles. I won’t go down the rabbit hole about how lucky we are to work with the trees in California, their resilience and diversity, but it was special to achieve the gesture I was looking for, out of a material that is itself a testament: strength and longevity are not synonymous to hard lines and rigidity.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us about your studio space.

Greenberg: My studio is split. I design mostly from home, in a corner desk with few distractions. My fabrication workshop is an alcove within a shared space called Alameda Point Studios. It was originally a WWII-era hangar building that housed jet engines, but thirty years ago, Dean Santner—an incredible wood craftsman who’s been at it longer than all of us—and two others decided to turn it into a big woodworking production zone. He is still running the place with JP Frary, another wildly talented wood artist and storyteller. This shared shop is for woodworking primarily, and all the machinery is old and beautiful. I use this space for wood projects as well as mold making, casting, upholstery, material experiments…

It’s definitely a different type of space than I expected to land in, but very diverse as a home to cabinet makers, luthiers and piano repair experts, wood and printing press artists. I am the youngest and only one working in this particular niche of furniture design, and at times that can make me feel on an island, but I really love it and am so grateful to work there. My shopmates have persevered as makers through a decade or two or three, and this gives me a lot of promise that this life is possible. Most importantly, they really make me laugh when I’m having a hard day.

Aside from this communal wood shop, I share a metalworking space in a little upstairs nook, which used to be the control room when they tested military jet engines in the 40s. It’s pretty basic as far as metal fabrication equipment goes, but I’m able to make it all work somehow, with a few welders, a drill, lots of grinders and sanders, and a horizontal mill. I reckon we have the best finishing room in any shared artist space in the Bay Area.

Sadly, one day the city of Alameda will kick us out and start developing it. But for now, it is a second home for many craftspeople.

Studio AHEAD: Describe to us a collection you’d like to do that is also impossible.

Greenberg: I would love to design an entire furniture + lighting collection that is meant to be experienced in water and is made from water and underwater material. I think about and reference water all the time, but I wish it could be a main player in domestic life and in furniture.

Most of us live Earth-grounded lives, and build with material that is sourced from the soil and up. What would happen if you brought water, a vital element that takes up the majority of our planet, to the forefront of our daily experience? Water that meanders through the home, circulates in pools below the dining table, in moats around the interior perimeter. What materials would one have to use that could withstand being submerged every day? Would we look to some regenerative material of the deep sea? How would direct interaction with water every day affect the human experience? Obviously, humans are not meant to live in water day in and day out, and there’s all sorts of health, logistic, and sustainability concerns here, and this would never work. But it’s an interesting and weird future to think about, in a world with a rising sea level and extreme wet weather to which humans and their furniture have no choice but to adjust.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Northern California Legacy Spotlight

Last April, just before her death at 95, we had the privilege to interview Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, the trailblazing landscape architect and artist best known for her supergraphics inside Sea Ranch. Solomon, or “Bobbie” as everyone called her, was much more than her famous graphics, as her daughter Nellie, who helped parlay our questions to Bobbie, emphasizes.

Nellie King Solomon is an artist in her own right, whose gorgeous abstract paintings almost match the vibrancy of Nellie herself. We spoke with the two of them about memory and landscape, about love and what each has learned from the other, and about looking back on a life well-lived. Nellie’s daughter Fia joined in.

A few months after Bobbie's death, we revisited Nellie to ask what her mom’s legacy might be. 

Studio AHEAD: Did California’s landscape influence your work once you returned from Switzerland?

Bobbie: It was the freedom of being a California woman that influenced you more than the landscape. Being in California as a woman was very different than being in Switzerland as a woman. I could do anything I wanted.

Nellie: I feel you, too, about the California woman thing and the freedom here having worked and lived in Europe and New York. I’ve come back to California multiple times as a result. There are hard-to-describe unspoken freedoms that are unheard of elsewhere. Even in New York. I would do things and be dismissed as “Californian”: make a drawing a certain way, have a different relationship to abstraction. At Cooper Union I would jump on top of my drafting table just so I could get a good look at my drawing from a distance. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world! Definitely a California move.

I would spend the weekends at Martha’s Vineyard looking at a seashell, stoned, and come back Tuesday morning with clear ideas about what I was going to draw for afternoon critique—that was a very different way of going about it. Slaving all weekend and sleeping under your desk was the East Coast Cooper way. Not for me. Go jump in some water and look at seashell instead.

Bobbie: About architecture, I see the corners of buildings and how they relate to each other. Supergraphics is all about relating everything to the corners. It never works having to do a computer printout ahead of time. It doesn’t work because it’s all about tying the graphics to the corners, which is on site. The architecture tells you what to do.

Studio AHEAD: The contrast between the colorful, geometric quality of Sea Ranch’s Supergraphics and the rolling hills and waves of Sonoma is very striking. Was this on purpose?

Bobbie: I didn’t want it to stick out. I didn’t want it to be more visible than the landscape itself. Well, it is but it’s indoors.

Nellie: You were doing the Supergraphics indoors so that it wouldn’t stand out against the land and look obnoxious. That’s why there’s all those rules up there at Sea Ranch—that whole dictatorial handbook that comes with the property that says don’t plant a rose or do Supergraphics outdoors. Your stuff is brazen but it’s inside.

Bobbie: Like once I was teaching at Sitka, Alaska and a woman wanted me to paint the main street with Supergraphics—this little town. I said “No!” with vengeance.

Nellie: I remember the walk through the forest and the ancient weathered totem poles and you would let the students paint inside the ugly fluorescent lit hallways. You wouldn’t let them paint outside in the beautiful quiet forest.

Studio AHEAD: What is one of your works that you’d wish had gotten more attention?

Bobbie: Graphics at the San Francisco Museum. It’s the biggest artwork in the museum that a woman has ever been allowed to make. And what does that mean? There really hasn’t been any press.

Nellie: And you’ve been annoyed about that. It’s bigger than a football field, and stronger in a way.

Studio AHEAD: Nellie, you help your mom with these large installations. What have you learned from her?

Nellie: Be big, bold, and beautiful. Be brazen. Think of the whole space and really go for it. These are all things that come in the territory of helping my mom do what she does. They definitely have rubbed off on me. To think of things from the perspective of the negative space, as opposed to the positive space, that’s a more formal quality. I think of the principles that she learned from Armin Hoffman. What I absorbed in watching her put together and draw Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden when I was in fifth grade. So many gardens Bobbie and I snuck into all over the world. That there’s a certain irreverence and physical relationship to space and making that I’ve adopted from working with her.

I learned a lot of stuff from her and that would be very hard to figure out. It’s like untangling pantyhose that has been in a drawer forever. It’s all tangled up. And then some stuff I learned from Cooper Union and then some stuff I learned from Hoffman. I mean where does one education start and another education begin? What stuff did you learn from which grandmother or which parent? These influences are all different voices mixed together and yet when you get in your studio—there’s a great quote—when you close the door to your studio, you have to kick out all the voices and then begin.

Studio AHEAD: Bobbie, what has Nellie taught you?

Bobbie: What has Nellie taught me when you have a kid you love? You just learn how to try and make them happy.

Studio AHEAD: Fia, what’s going to be your medium of choice?

Fia: I'm a singer-songwriter, writer, and aspiring actress. I have an idea. I think that the youngest one should ask a question to the oldest one. I want to ask Bobbie, Why is your imagination at the end of life so opposite to your work?

Bobbie: You smart little thing!

* * *

Nellie: At the end Bobbie saw all of these romantic, fanciful, green, growing vines all over the ceilings and over the whole house. At one point the house turned into a hot-fudge sundae with different shades of light, dark, and milk chocolate for all the shadows. All these romantic and wild, elaborate visions would appear over the white walls of the clean, modernist house where she lived. Entirely opposite to the stark hard-edged graphics she was known for. That’s why Fia asked her question and why Bobbie knew it was wise.

Bobbie always loved the “schmaltzy” as she would call it. The romantic gardens, the formal gardens, the Tuileries, France, Turner Classic movies, Hollywood plots. When we wheeled her up to the entrance of SFMoMA to see her Strips of Stripes exhibition from the revolving doors, there was, flanking her work, two large Julie Mehretu works: “Ah, those are real art. The kind of stuff I would’ve made if I didn’t have to make money.”

As she lay dying in a magical space, her imagination ran wild on the stark white ceiling. She was enveloped in a romantic fantasy, ever-changing, constantly urgent to describe it to me, or anyone who would listen, as she slipped between worlds.

* * *

Studio AHEAD: What do you think your mom's legacy will be?

Nellie: There’s a chance that Bobbie’s Northern California legacy continues to be Sea Ranch. Bobbie does not see herself as defined by Sea Ranch at all. She is much more interested in her books and her continual evolution. Bobbie has a much more complex legacy than that one early project. She has multiple voices: hard-edge Supergraphics, complex books like Good Mourning California, the Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden landscape drawings in the 80s.

She continually reinvented herself. Which made it tricky to pigeonhole her into a discipline or a style for a final summation, but it’s also her brilliance. In a 1968 Vogue issue, Bobbie (and her friend, the film critic Pauline Kael) were named “two of the 20 (?) women most in touch with her times.” Bobbie continually stayed “in touch with her times” by evolving with the times.

Studio AHEAD: What has been the reaction since her passing?

Nellie: People’s reaction is with a certain sense that Bobbie is immortal. It’s a funny thing. A dealer she worked with said “it seemed like she would never die. She couldn’t.” Even as she got old, she said “who you calling old?” Fia and I have decided not to refer to Bobbie in the past tense. We refer to her in the present tense. “Bobbie is” as opposed to “Bobbie was.”

There’s an outpouring of caring. It makes me want to invite everyone to be together in her honor, and onward. Bobbie lives in us. Bobbie is not at all gone.

“To be is not to know what to be”—this is one of my favorite things she wrote. If she is not being, then she now IS. Perhaps this is why galleries prefer to represent estate artists. Quantifiable only after death.

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Artist Spotlight: Elana Cooper - Creativity Explored

In 1983 Florence and Elias Katz founded Creativity Explored, a studio that helps artists with developmental disabilities discover and foster their talents. Four decades later, the organization is still putting out exciting exhibitions and making space for people who have historically been left out of the picture.

When we visited the studio earlier this year, we were arrested by the flower paintings of Elana Cooper. With the help of Creativity Explored’s staff, she answered some of our questions and shared with us her imaginative world.

Studio AHEAD: How did you get started with Creativity Explored? Have you always been an artist?

Elana Cooper: I forget what year I started—Eric knows. When I came here I liked it a lot. I learned how to draw animals, then I learned how to draw flowers, and I kept doing flowers. I went to a different art school before Creativity Explored but only for one day— I didn’t like it.

Studio AHEAD: What does a typical day look like for you when you’re making art?

Elana: I’m really fast in the morning. [laughs] I get tired in the afternoon because of my medication. I have epilepsy and I get tired from it.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us a little bit about your flower paintings.

Elana: I work from a picture, and then I draw it, then I paint it after. Sometimes I do big, big ones, and I do medium size all the time. Like now, with Tom, I’m learning to do a door, with flowers, a patio, a background of trees. Yeah, I’m doing art now with Tom. It’s different with each teacher, I see it a different way now with Tom, he’s helping me learn it.

Studio AHEAD: One thing I find striking about some of these flower paintings is your use of the color black, because flowers aren’t naturally black. Why did you choose this color?

Elana: Paul started it. In the gallery, I got into it, and everybody liked it, then we called it “Flower Power.” I do more black, and I’m trying to get more color into it now too. Now with Tom, I’m doing stuff differently. I’m learning on it.

Studio AHEAD: What’s your favorite flower to paint?

Elana: Any flower.

Studio AHEAD: Do you consider yourself an artist now?

Elana: Yeah, I got a lot of money now. I’m going to London, and LA for Disneyland.

Studio AHEAD: Do you paint at home or just here at Creativity Explored?

Elana: Here. I don’t do it at home. I like doing word searches.

Studio AHEAD: Are you interested in working with other materials besides paint?

Elana: No [laughs]

Kelsey: So you’re a painter through and through.

Elana: Yeah!

Photos: Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Ann Hatch: Northern California Legacy Spotlight

Ann Hatch has had many lives: ceramicist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, visionary founder of the Capp Street Project and the Oxbow School. “I believe ideas and projects have a relevance at a certain time… Things change. It is important to know when it is over,” she said to us, reflecting on a decades-long career that no matter its form has always centered on the arts, even as the city and the scene changes.

The other great constant in Hatch’s life, besides art, is her curiosity for culture. This was abundantly clear when we visited her home in Sebastopol earlier this year. Designed by her ex-husband, the architect and Buddhist priest Paul Discoe, the house is itself a work of art, with obvious Japanese influences and a respect for the materials, often left in their natural state. What makes this house Hatch’s own, however, are the artworks throughout—so perfectly selected that it is no surprise why Hatch has had success through all her personal reinventions.

Studio AHEAD: Years before we met, I came to your Sebastopol property—I didn’t know it was yours at the time—to pick up a piece by Jesse Schlesinger, who was living there. Tell us about this house, which was designed by Paul Discoe.

Ann Hatch: Designing and building a house with Paul was a unique experience. He had just started his construction business. Everything was done in the Japanese tradition. We had a terrific time designing and planning. We both had wild ideas. He could do them and make them unusually beautiful. When the project was finalized, we realized we really wanted to be together. Since we were both married that took some time. Paul is one of the most creative designers I had ever met—nothing was impossible. We shared a love of wood and using materials in creative but functional ways. He designed and built the New York apartment, as well.

Studio AHEAD: Do you regularly open up your home to artists? 

Ann Hatch: There was a time when I had lots of receptions and parties. Now, I invite assorted people for small gatherings, mostly to the ranch. It’s fun to show them the details and materials of the house. I have, like everyone, realized how important my friends are. One benefit of getting old is the depth of friendship that we have.  

Studio AHEAD: Is this the same kind of energy that pushed you to found the Capp Street Project?

Ann Hatch: I started Capp Street unexpectedly. I saw a David Ireland-designed house, which was for sale, empty. I met him on his birthday. I had a lot of apples in the car, which I took over to his personal residence to meet him. I soon agreed to buy the house he designed at 65 Capp Street without really knowing what I would do with it. But I knew it was a special space: I liked the changing light and sculptural elements, especially when it was empty. I knew the house could be a springboard for new ideas, not just a house. It was an immediate decision that you can’t explain. All my projects have started with a burst of confidence. I just knew it was the right idea for that time and needed to be done. I was fortunate to have the resources and advisors to get these projects started. In all cases my intention was that the project would be sustainable. It worked pretty well back then. (Things are different now).

Interestingly, my great grandfather T. B. Walker started the Walker Art Center out of his house. Maybe that had imprinted on me in some deep place. I moved quickly to develop the concept for an artist-in-residency, which was a new idea back in 1983. Artists were very enthusiastic about coming to San Francisco and making new work. We got the bravest and the best of the installation artists. Initially they made loose proposals; it was expected they would use S.F. or the house as a source of inspiration. I learned a great deal about Bay Area history from their projects: shredded money came from our mint, razor blades made from requisitioned cannons in the Presedio, seismic activity, recycled paper from Recology, and what people discard on the street. One collaborative team put fish hooks on all the street detritus around the building. We all had so much fun and realized amazingly bold ideas. The word spread fast among the artists—we were real and could do stuff! We facilitated the artists wishes, and that was thrilling.

Studio AHEAD: Could you have started Capp Street anywhere or was it something unique to the feel of San Francisco at the time? Perhaps it wouldn’t even be possible in San Francisco now.

Ann Hatch: Honestly, I would never be able to do a Capp Street project now. Everything is so charged and PC. I was born in S.F. and feel it has amazing qualities and depth. I wanted to see what artists would find interesting and worth focusing on. It might have worked in Chicago or any big city. Our artists, after 15 years, told us they were getting museum and gallery opportunities, which was great and why we closed. I believe ideas and projects have a relevance at a certain time. They can adapt and change sometimes, but it’s OK to "sunset" projects.

Later, I started Oxbow School in 1997, which we are closing after 25 years. I also closed Workshop Residence after 9 years when the pandemic hit. Things change. It is important to know when it is over.

Studio AHEAD: In the 80s and 90s you put on wild shows in your gallery: in one, the artist purposely flooded the exhibition space; in another, the street was extended right into the gallery, so that you couldn't tell which was interior/exterior. You have a much more adventurous, exploratory spirit than most patrons....

Ann Hatch: In the 80s it was a more adventurous and free time. There were lots of non-profit spaces that did great programs. The artists always wanted tech and unusual materials, which were difficult and challenging to find. Each residency exhibit was completely different. Capp Street Project had t-shirts that said "Weird things in a big room.” We had a small budget with lots of friends and connections. People wanted to be generous and part of these projects.

Studio AHEAD: What drew you to Napa to start the Oxbow School?

Ann Hatch: I was meeting the Mondavi family with a friend who was writing Robert Mondavi’s biography Harvest of Joy. My friend wanted to pitch Mondavi to fund a TV series of artists talking about their work. I said "no, that's a dreadful idea. Artists should not talk about their work… if I were Mondavis, I would start a school." So I was invited up to lunch… many lunches. I showed them many ways the arts can enrich young people and the community. He wanted to do something in the town of Napa that would have national impact. I quickly bought 15 pieces of property that were in the floodplain. It was across the river from his big project, Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food, & the Arts, which made it an "arts" district. Acquiring the properties was easy, as all the owners wanted out of the floodplain. The idea of having a semester for high school students with an arts focus was unique. Subjects taught in tandem with academics: English with painting, math with sculpture, for example. New ways of getting students thinking and engaged. Again, a bold idea that had its time. Oxbow did it really well, as the students say that I’ve changed their lives. I'm very proud of that.

Studio AHEAD: Twenty years ago you did a fascinating interview with Richard Whittaker and gave a great piece of advice to young artists: “You've got to be centered in what the work is about.” How have you remained centered in your own work?

Ann Hatch: That sounds preachy. I was probably thinking about the students at Oxbow School. If we could get the students focused in creative ways, they really blossomed. I have had the opportunity to start three projects. I've needed to be very focused on those to have them realized. Personally, I'm a bit hectic. I try to do too many things. That’s changing now...

In The Dogpatch you had Workshop Residence. Elena came after class from SFAI to a workshop headed by Max Lamb. Tell us about those times. Again I developed a plan for something that did not already exist. I wanted to have a store with limited editions of objects and work made by artists.  Again , we rolled up our sleeves and made things with artists partners and fabricators. rugs made out of fire house, Sol Le Wit blankets, coffee cups made by 3D printing  coffee grounds,, door stop made from skateboards, Perfume made locally, knot tieing Indigo and broom makingtied workshops, broom making,.etc

Studio AHEAD: Let's say I am a young person of certain means who wants to become a patron. What advice would you give? What has been most useful in your career?

Ann Hatch: Try new ideas that are within your means. Research what exists and find a niche. Be bold in concept. Use your friends and contacts. I needed an army for all my projects. It is one of the good parts of getting older, you have deep friendships. If you have financial resources, don’t be shy about using them in a constructive way. Starting projects takes energy, vision, and money. That’s nothing to be embarrassed about. I wanted to keep a low profile. Maybe that’s not possible now? If you’re making an impact, the word gets out by your deeds. Not social media.

Studio AHEAD: In a career of constantly looking forward, what is next for you?

Ann Hatch: I think my ceramics will hold my attention. I can control the whole process and keep learning. No board of directors, staff, or committees. I am enjoying doing porcelain portrait dog and cat bowls. People are crazy about their pets. They should have beautiful dinner dishes. It’s fun to capture their charming distinct expressions. 

Studio AHEAD: Along with your house in Sebastopol, you have a home in the city, and also I think one in New York. Is there a commonality among all the houses you’ve lived in—something that makes you say to yourself, Yes this is my home.

Ann Hatch: Actually, all three are really different, which show I have many sides and interests. 

Studio AHEAD: Can you share a favorite part of your house with us?

Ann Hatch: The morning and the shadows that play on the windows and surfaces. Each house has a unique character. The NYC apartment is so traditionally Japanese, it is like being in Japan. It’s very high contrast to the street energy. I see and think differently in each house. Outside at the ranch everything is fresh. You can hear things growing as I water the vegetables and assess the day. S.F. is home in lots of ways. I’m very lucky to have these places and I treasure them in different ways. 

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Garry Knox Bennett: Northern California Legacy Spotlight

During his life, Garry Knox Bennett received wide recognition for his mischievous and wildly creative (but never “whimsical” as we learned from this interview!) furniture designs and art. It is useless to describe these pieces, done in various materials—industrial metals, glass, wood—and pulled from a seemingly endless catalog of ideas straight out of his head, because they are so imaginative it is hard to imagine them. When he died in early 2022, a more private side of his artistry came to light in a series of touching tributes showing just how special his presence was on friends and proteges.

We were honored to speak to his wife Sylvia from their home in Oakland, where they live on the third floor of Garry’s studio. True to Garry’s selfless spirit, the house is full of works made by friends and not by the man himself. We discussed Garry’s life (born in Alameda, self-taught, a true Californian), his creativity (inspirational), and his reputation as a provocateur.

Studio AHEAD: Walking through your home, it’s kind of like a museum or chronicle of not only his work but the work of your friends. Can you explain a bit about how you came to collect these pieces?

Sylvia Bennett: We were both involved in the arts from high school on. We both appreciated painting, sculpture and work by hand and enjoyed the association with that genre. After we were married, we talked about accumulating for our home objects made by friends and artists we would get to know. It seemed a much more meaningful way to acquire the things you enjoy being around.

Fortunately, many of our early friends ended up as pretty well-known artists, which just added to the excitement (for them) in what we had managed to accumulate over time. Garry was opposed to collecting his own work, preferring it go “out” to others. I was able to acquire some of my favorites of his by requesting specific pieces he was making for my birthday or Christmas, which is how we have what we have of his.

The often-heard comment “like living in a museum” with regard to our environment I feel this mainly refers to the variety of what we live with and the fact that very little is manufactured. What we live with we embrace enthusiastically, as it is how we chose our environment. No “hands off!” or white gloves here.

Studio AHEAD: Tell us a little about this house in general. I believe the first house you two lived in he built, and this one you moved into a bit later.

Sylvia Bennett:  Our varied homes: immediately after leaving CCAC Garry took a job with his ex-stepfather who was a large rice farmer in Lincoln, CA. This was a very tempting set-up: it involved working in the planting and harvest seasons and some simple caretaking, and Garry could use a building for his sculpture work and was also given money to build a home (not ours but to use indefinitely) and a monthly stipend. Garry hand built, by himself, a very large beautiful two-story A frame house in one year, which we lived in.

It was his first contact with construction and with wood. Garry ran the foundation plans for the A frame by an engineer friend who said, “well, if you ever experience a hurricane, it won’t blow down, it will roll!”

Leaving Lincoln, we returned to Alameda and after about 3-4 years we were able to buy our first home, which had the space to put things we were starting to accumulate, primarily as furnishings. We did not think in terms of “collecting.” It was an enormous Victorian and we enjoyed being there for 35 years. An unfortunate fire resulted in our adding a third floor living space to Garry’s studio in Oakland, which we have been in since 2007. Much smaller in scale. Garry designed this space above his studio and an architect drew the formal plans. It is very well suited to our present needs. This move cut our living space by three-fourths so we did not have the grand space we had, but our lovely collection is fine and re-housed very comfortably.

Studio AHEAD: What was your role in all of this? Were you his muse?

Sylvia Bennett:  My role was classic back-up—not a muse as far as I know. Garry had no interest in anything but his work, which comprised all days of the week unless something interesting was going on—all 7 days! He loved being at the studio, and while he would go to friends’ exhibits and museum shows he really preferred not looking at exhibitions of furniture in general as he dreaded undue influence. As a creative person one just registers and unconsciously stores impressions and images observed. He tried to keep outside influence at bay as best he could.

I did all the interactive work for him. Correspondence. Although Garry received a penmanship award in grammar school, he refused to write. He would dictate and I wrote all correspondence with the exceptions of a few highly X-rated hastily printed missives with misspelled words and all! He would do these when he was really upset at something; there are probably a few around in files somewhere. With regard to all normal communication - galleries, photography, PR, shipping, etc., we would discuss at length and I would take care of the implementation and follow-through.

Studio AHEAD: You first met him in high school, and then later reconnected with him. Was he always so creative?

Sylvia Bennett: We knew each other in high school, then dated briefly out of high school and went our separate ways for about 5 years. I just dropped by his house one early evening to see if he was still around and he answered the door. We started dating seriously and were married the following year.

In high school Garry was painting seriously and actually writing a little poetry and involved in San Francisco’s Beatnik scene. I was following jazz and involved in dance. We spent every weekend in San Francisco and it was quite a scene—this would have been the late 50s. Garry was an excellent chess player and we spent a lot of time in the coffee houses in North Beach. He would bring his paint. He worked in both oils and casein and the casein was very transportable and we would just sit in a corner on a blanket and sketch, and he would paint the “scene” or the Victorians. A really amazing time but very brief. 

Studio AHEAD: What was his creative process like? When you watched him work, what were you amazed by?

Sylvia Bennett: His ability to visualize his process from concept/idea/inspiration as he progressed with a piece. Almost never relied on preliminary drawings. It was all conceived in his head and various elements manipulated through his thought process. He always said he saw his work dimensionally—visually. Or as he put it “isometrically and in full color.” Much of his work would assemble and disassemble as he went along, just to accommodate any redirection he might choose. 

It seemed that the driving force behind his efforts was to challenge existing boundaries. He felt the now-classic California Studio furniture, with the “round-over” of edges utilized extensively in the early 70s, was a bit lazy and sloppy, not well resolved. There were of course wonderful exceptions. It was an extraordinary time and really exciting. Garry felt the “reverence for the wood and joinery” adversely overshadowed serious thought to overall design, visual balance, etc. 

His other consistent drive was continuously “pushing the envelope” with regard to his own work. He would intentionally set up approaches that were unique as he loved to experiment and if successful kept pushing that forward until he felt his search was complete or  refined to his satisfaction. This is why many of his pieces were made in series, each piece different but similar in use, a type of chair or a bench, etc.

Studio AHEAD: A lot has been written about Garry...

Sylvia Bennett:  His furniture immediately received attention in the press early on. It was surprising to him as a newcomer to the field. His work was always original. He had the added advantage that he was easily noticed: at 6’8” with an impressive beard he was hard to miss.

Studio AHEAD: I was somewhat surprised, reading through his Smithsonian interview, at the political undercurrent in some of his pieces. What aspect of his work doesn’t get enough mention?

Sylvia Bennett:  His extraordinary skill with metalwork, which has never been much noted by the press. He made a lot of one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry, which for him I think was just sculpture in miniature. He actually had a company for a couple of years that sold original lines of both costume jewelry and cast and fabricated silver and gold jewelry. Much of the exposed hardware in his furniture and lamps incorporates fabricated parts as well as carved shapes for pulls from wax and then cast in bronze and silver.

With regard to “political undercurrent,” yes periodically Garry made statements important to him at the time with and in his work. As a student he did a series in welded-steel as statements against war. Which was duly noted in the San Francisco papers when displayed at an art fair, very dramatic pieces! You may have noticed it on the first floor: Retreat from Stalingrad. The other two are You are Your Brother’s Keeper and Boy with a Bullet. There are also comments inside some of his cabinet work—you have to remove all the drawers then look at the rear inside to read—referencing his disenchantment with a couple of presidents and a particular gallery owner. Owners of these pieces may not realize their presence!

Garry never signed a contract with any of his galleries as he felt his word was sufficient. One insisted, so he sent Garry the contract, Garry made a beautiful little clock and on the front there is a tiny window with the word “contract”. It is in the clock in such a manner you would have to totally destroy the clock to take it out and read it. I know it was never confirmed as actually signed because after the gallery owner died, the piece eventually came to auction and the clock was still intact.

Another very effective protest was his introduction to the local furniture making community via an invitational exhibition in San Francisco. Garry, who now was familiar with the local work, felt he wanted to say something meaningful that would kind of shake up the (to him) seeming reliance on dazzling woods and trick-joinery, exposed dove-tails, etc. Garry decided to make a piece using all the “trick-stuff,” as he liked to call it, that he could execute. Plain simple design, classic shape, incredible wood and tons of dove-tails. 

The result was his infamous Nail Cabinet. Upon completion he removed a small door on the front and placed it on a table and hammered a huge 5-penny nail, ugly and bent, into the middle of the door. It caused quite a commotion at the opening and was I think pretty thought provoking. Many of these makers became dear friends over the years—the work became better and better perhaps partly due to Garry’s little statement. The cabinet has certainly made an impact and helped to (as Garry hoped) loosen up a rigid approach to furniture making. Students years later often shared with Garry how much it served to allow them more freedom to explore rather than accept the accustomed processes as was expected. Surprisingly the Nail Cabinet is almost always referenced in any contemporary studio furniture book published, so it seems to have found an audience who felt it was a valid statement.  

Studio AHEAD: What other things do you hope Garry is remembered for?

Sylvia Bennett:  The extent of his originality and his total dedication to what he set out to do. Although a lot of his enjoyment of life and his humor is reflected in his work, he was dead serious. And never describe his work as “whimsical”; he did not like that word!

Studio AHEAD: I think we should end back on this beautiful home. Tell us one piece and your associated memories with it.

Sylvia Bennett:  Fortunately I have associated memories of every piece so to pick one…

I will pick one piece that was a total surprise in a wonderful way. We commissioned a “chair” from Tommy Simpson, as we had a significant collection/acquirement of chairs at the time. We did not specify anything further. However, everyone who ever had contact with Garry knew he was a total Oakland Raiders fan. A latecomer to sports in general and organized sports in particular, that was it for him! So we kind of assumed it would reference football. Over two years went by and suddenly a crate arrives. We see the return address and it’s from Tommy and we anxiously open the crate to find inside a “Boxing Chair” complete with an adjustable rope ring, memorabilia in a lower drawer, an inscribed towel with Fire Ball Bennett embroidered on it, a water pail with sponge, miniature boxing gloves hanging, and carved with all the famous boxers’ names around the seat, with photographs, front and rear, on the back-support of old fight scenes and Mohamed Ali! Amazing.

[studioahead]

Artist Spotlight: Isaac Vazquez Avila

Isaac Vazquez Avila’s home studio is as inviting and intriguing as he is. Look in any direction and you are met with a self-portrait, a hanging fern, a sketchbook, a sculpture that likely has a fascinating backstory. This sense of wonder must be what Avila feels during his long walks through his neighborhood of Bernal Heights, where the objects he finds and the city itself are a source of continual inspiration: “[It’s] less about where I’ve been and more about… where did these things come from?” Which is what you can say about all of us who, having seen a lot of things along the way, choose to call San Francisco home.

Studio AHEAD: Text plays a not insignificant part in your paintings, often words or phrases in Spanish. What are your associations with Spanish? What are your associations with English?

Isaac Vazquez Avila: My use of text is drawn from things my dad and mom would say around the house, platitudes, and messages I see scrawled around in the environment outside my studios. My work in sign painting also has an influence on the way I approach text albeit in a more practical sense. I am surrounded by words and letters. 

I use text as a way to lead the viewer’s imagination into the painting or sculpture. From there I hope it takes over and starts making its own associations. The text in my work functions as signposts to a destination, not the destination itself.

I incorporate words and phrases in Spanish and English in my work because it is what I know. Spanish is my mother tongue but I adopted English quickly after. Each language has a unique way of accessing different emotions, memories, thoughts, and rhythms. I feel privileged that I can speak and understand both because it widens the aperture through which I look at the world.

There are words in Spanish that don’t exist in English or are very difficult to describe and translate. If there’s a word that describes a certain emotion in Spanish and there is no word for it in English, does that mean that the emotion does not exist in English? It goes both ways. I think language falls short of what it tries to articulate or communicate. I love when it short circuits and something new fills its place. There’s humor and drama in those moments, and I think that’s where art comes into play. Art fills the gaps that language is unable to communicate. I’d like to think my work plugs in some of those gaps sometimes.  

Studio AHEAD: A recent exhibition, “Como Siempre,” collects mixed media work based on your daily walks through Bernal Heights. Are these pieces a sort of travelog of where you’ve been?

Isaac Vazquez Avila: Walking is a ritual and part of my practice in life and in art. Its benefits touch creative, mental and physical aspects. It’s also a way to distance myself from my studio when I’m not feeling it and want to get out of my head. When walking you see life happening before you and my work is a reflection of that, whether that’s walking around in my own neighborhood, the beach or somewhere completely foreign to me.

The objects and materials used in my sculpture work for “Como Siempre’’ had a life before me. Their history is shown through their color, patina, form and material condition. I like the idea of extending the life of an object or bringing things back to life from obscurity or neglect. That’s why I use pre-existing materials and incorporate them into my work. I like second chances. There’s also the memories I’ve attached to the materials I find, which locate specific times, dates and remind me of the places where I sourced them. Those things are important to me, too; however it’s not something I feel I need to clearly lay out for the viewer. For me the sculptures are less about where I’ve been and more about… where did these things come from?

Studio AHEAD: What’s one of your favorite walks or at least most memorable?

Isaac Vazquez Avila: It’s hard to say, nothing beats getting tossed around during a walk while in the vortex that is Mexico City. I was recently in Madrid and my feet would not get tired of walking around, I loved it. One particular walk I remember is from a route I always take which starts from Bernal, down Mission to 16th and back. I was out on one of those really hot beautiful days in the afternoon and stopped by King’s Bakery to get a coffee and bread. I continued on and crossed 24th Street on Mission, birds chirping, sound blaring, people bustling. The first thing I see when I cross 24th Street is a guy on the sidewalk making a pot of gumbo in the sweltering heat. I walked a few steps and noticed two beautiful white poodles in a stroller getting pushed by their owner, a few moments later a fight broke on the sidewalk and shortly after I ran into some familiar faces. I felt like I was inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting, a surrealist depiction of ecstasy and horror and I loved it. One of my friends told me he watched a guy take a dead raccoon inside of the McDonald’s on 24th while on a walk. You can see all sorts of things if you put yourself out there.

Studio AHEAD: Maybe you’d like to speak more about Mexico, where you were born but where you did not return until later in life. There’s a blurred-memory aspect to a lot of your art…

Isaac Vazquez Avila: Mexico has always held a special place in my psyche. I was born and lived there until the age of 5 before moving to Salt Lake City, Utah. My earliest memories are of Mexico City, experiencing the 1985 earthquake as a child and my dad taking me to bullfights. As a young person I longed to visit the place of my birth but was unable to do so until I was an adult. There was a time when I only knew Mexico in my imagination through secondary sources like the language I spoke at home, food, photos and stories I’d heard. I felt so close to it. I like thinking about the paradox of feeling like you know something so well and yet not knowing it at all. That duality is something that  attracts me and maybe a key to understanding the blurred memory aspect you mention in my work.

Studio AHEAD: I’m drawn to these butterfly wing pieces. Tell us more about them. 

Isaac Vazquez Avila: I don’t have much to say about those at the moment. They are still kinda fresh and I’m just having fun making them. When I’m making work I try not to allow my thoughts to get in front of making the work. Of course I’m thinking about things, but the thoughts about what I’m actually doing are usually not resolved until after the work is done and I’ve sat with it for a while.

Studio AHEAD: What have you been experimenting with lately?

Isaac Vazquez Avila: I’ve been experimenting with scale and Venetian plaster and finding ways to incorporate it into paintings and sculptures. I’m excited about this woodturning lathe I recently bought which I think is going to allow me to make some interesting things. I’ve also been designing some functional objects for the home, we’ll see.

Studio AHEAD: We’ll end on a question for your cat, which we will translate into English for our readers: Meow mewmew mrkgnao? [If you could knock any of Isaac’s pieces on to the ground, which would it be?]

Isaac’s cat, translated: I’m a really good cat and would never knock Isaac’s stuff over on purpose. However, one of my favorite things to do is edge up to his delicately balanced sculptures as if I was. I love sitting on the hard surface of his paintings while he’s working on them and dipping my tail in his paint and tracking it around the house. I don’t do it out of malice but because I’m cute. I could never do wrong in his eyes.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

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Alice Waters and Fanny Singer: Northern California Legacy Spotlight

Alice Waters needs no introduction but we'll introduce her anyway. In 1971, back from travels in the UK, France and Turkey, and channeling the counterculture, she opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley. The restaurant quickly became an icon of the farm-to-table movement with its menu of seasonal ingredients sourced directly from local farmers. Waters has remained at its forefront, expanding the movement through projects like Edible Schoolyard and the Chez Panisse Foundation. Despite her global success, Waters is for us one of Northern California’s true visionaries of the local, and it is hard to imagine our regional cuisine without her.

We spoke with Alice alongside her daughter Fanny Singer, an accomplished art critic, writer, new mom, and founder of Permanent Collection, a line of handcrafted homeware that tells the stories of the people who make each piece.

Studio AHEAD: How do you sit?

Alice Waters: I sit at the table and I like to sit in a chair. I love to be in front of the fireplace. It’s very important to be seated at a table. It can be oval or round. It doesn’t matter as long as everybody’s there together.

Fanny Singer: Sitting is something I either do a lot of or very little depending on the day. I have a one-and-a-half-year-old and spend a lot of time cajoling her at dinnertime into her seat. It’s become a new topic of conversation: How do we sit? How do we actually eat? How do we commune over this meal, because that was a very significant part of my childhood.

But the last year-and-a-half of having a baby, you’re standing eating out of the refrigerator, and not taking a moment to sit because you’re in between things. Recently we’ve made a real point to sit together with [Fanny’s daughter] Cecily, who loves to eat thankfully. We sit on either side of her and light candles, which she loves. She goes “candles, candles, candles” if we forget. So after a year-and-a-half of very frenzied never sitting down for a proper meal, we’ve reintroduced a real sense of ritual in how we wind down from our day and enjoy this moment of communal eating together.

Studio AHEAD: I love that both of you have fire—Alice with the fireplace and Fanny with the candles. It’s warmth. Fire always has that effect of calming.

Alice: I light candles, too! It’s the beauty of the light. When you light a candle at the table it’s like a ritual. You all are there. And in candlelight everyone looks good.

Studio AHEAD: Do ideas of space—of people being together in a room, whether at one of your restaurants or at home—influence your approach to cooking? To laying out a menu?

Alice: I love the connection between the kitchen and the dining room. It means that the people who are dining [at Chez Panisse] can see where their food comes from, and they can watch if they want to go into the kitchen. Just take a peek before they sit down. They're welcome. It’s not like you’re trying to hide something. There’s a big fireplace in the kitchen, so most people do want to take a look.

Fanny: I’m so fascinated by that question in terms of thinking about it relative to what is cooked. Permanent Collection recently launched a new project called the Platter Project. Most of the products that we make are kept in stock. We reissue them. The idea is to keep good design readily available. But we thought it would be nice to work in a more limited-edition capacity with artists and artisans to make something that stood apart from a design perspective or just felt different.

When I was thinking about the form that this idea could take, the platter was the only idea that made sense. There is something about that shape, generally oval or circular or round, that has this sense of generosity and compatibility with food. It’s the way we plate and the way that plates then convey accessibility: a round plate can be reached into and served out of from every side. There's always a family-style relationship to service and dining in our families and also at Chez Panisse.

I mean even the downstairs, which is more formal, doesn't feel like there's not a permeability. There’s an invitation to taste and share that’s always been the philosophy when I cook, too. My tables and those spaces in which I've cooked have varied widely over the course of my life, from graduate school kitchens—tiny, fluorescently lit spaces that my mom suffered through visits to, but always brought candles—to the home that I live in now in Los Angeles. I feel like platters and those shapes that we bring to the table are transcendent. There’s always a beauty to be found in how we bring food to the table.

Alice: I always love a big bowl of usually a fruit in the middle of the table. Whatever is in season. It’s full of oranges right now, apples. You’re probably going to eat some of it at some point but it’s so nice to see something beautiful when you sit down.

Studio AHEAD: I love at Chez Panisse you have the copper plate with the fruit for dessert. It’s an invitation to sharing. It’s changing boundaries.

We recently did an interview with Nobuto Suga who talked about different trees suggesting different objects to make with them and being true to the local wood. Fanny, I think this relates to Permanent Collection with your focus on the people who make what you sell.

Fanny: Absolutely. It was the raison d'etre of what we do: to bring the people who craft the things that we make into the foreground. It’s what distinguishes not just Permanent Collection, but any products that are artisanally produced and not mass manufactured. It’s evidence of the hand that makes the things.

The Japanese ceramicist who makes our beautiful green ceramic plates… the plates are immaculate, but there's always some slight difference. There's not a sense of them being pressed into a mold by a machine and turned out in perfect uniformity.

It’s the wabi sabi approach to setting the table and thinking about the things that you're putting into your mouth and the context in which they are delivered to you—the ethos around production for us absolutely stems from that. You want to understand the hand that's behind the carrots as much as you want to know the story of the hand behind the dishes.

Alice: Of course, the color of the dishes is always important to me. What I'm putting on the plate is enhanced by the color of the plate. It’s great to have all different shapes and cups. I like those charming irregularities.

Fanny: That’s always been the defining philosophy of Chez Panisse: that very, very little needs to happen on the culinary side of things if what you're cooking with has been grown by people who are working in concert with nature, and that that connection between the people who grow the food and the natural world is something that you can taste, becomes manifest on the plate.

Studio AHEAD: Fanny, you have a PhD in art history. Has this guided how you choose which craftspeople to work with? The sculptural quality of the pieces is undeniable. I'm also curious about the name Permanent Collection, because so much of what the farm to table movement pays attention to is seasons. It's the opposite of permanent.

Fanny: I think I would quarrel with that or at least say there isn’t an exact one-to-one correlation in terms of how we think of the permanence of what we have on the table versus the perennial or the always changing nature of nature and agriculture.

There’s a deep sustainability infused in both, to have things that are heirloom quality that will last forever in your home. Objects that can be passed down from generation to generation are truly in tune with nature in the same way that tending the land and caring for the land displays that same respect and reverence for not wasting, not extracting totally.

That said, how could my PhD not play into it? I mean, I spent the better part of my professional life thinking about art and writing about it. Not just in my PhD, but also as an arts critic and culture reporter. It's part of what drew Mariah Nielson and I to one another. What first started Permanent Collection was this idea that we had really honed our sensibility and also sensitivity to what makes good design and good art. There was something in all that cumulative time of observing and learning that gave us maybe not a talent per se but an openness and an ability to discern what makes something feel like it might be timeless or it might resist trends or fads. That’s where the permanent in Permanent Collection comes in. It was meant to echo that ethos that governs how things are brought into the permanent collection of museums.

They have to stand. They have to prove they will stand the test of time and that they will be good examples of design at a certain time. They will teach us about what people cared about in that moment. 

Alice: I think about what I’m using in my everyday life and people think that there are some things that are too precious to use. You put them in a cabinet over there, you never drink out of those beautiful glasses or one of them might break. I just feel like it's such a shame to not remember the person who gave it to you.

I'm just holding this sterling spoon. It was given to me by a friend in Ireland, and every time I use it, I think about her.  The same way with my cafe au lait bowls; they're all different, but they come to me at different times in my life from different people. They always bring me a kind of sense of comfort and connection. I love that.

I think what Fanny's doing with Permanent Collection is helping to make that available to people in their everyday lives: the colors that they choose… to bring that beauty back to the table.

Studio AHEAD: Can you share a memory you have with a specific kitchen tool?

Alice: I think it’s a mortar and pestle for me because I make, every day probably, a vinaigrette. I always take a little bit of garlic and use that Japanese mortar and pestle that's grooved. Then I put my vinegar in, let it marry, calm the garlic down.

Fanny: Of course mine is the same tool. We made a mortar and pestle called Alice's Mortar and Pestle, which was an homage to the ones that were ever present in my mother's kitchen. The one that we make for Permanent Collection is made by a wonderful potter in Northern California called Colleen Hennessey.

I make salad dressing in it on a daily basis. It is also a tool that has this relationship to the huge mortar and pestle of Lulu Peyraud at Domaine Tempier who is my mom's mentor and a kind of surrogate grandmother to me. She used her mortar and pestle every day, too.

It was a much more rustic, almost molcajete-looking mortar and pestle, and she would use it to make aioli. She would pound the garlic and then bring the whisk. I think she would use the old school technique of whisking the olive oil with a little piece of potato on the end of a fork. [Alice laughs.] At least I remember seeing her doing that when I was little. There were so many other sauces that she would make in there, whether it was pounded anchovies or black olive tapenade. Or the monkfish liver, bready, aioli-y, delicious sauce that's made to add into bouillabaisse.

Studio AHEAD: Alice, you’ve spoken many times about the influence the Montessori School had on you. How do you follow recipes while also being open to experiment and imagination?

Alice: I have to say that I'm not somebody who follows recipes. I mean, I learned to cook from French cookbooks, but very, very simple ones like Elizabeth David's and Richard Olney's books. I liked knowing I could look at a longer recipe if I wanted to, like Julia Childs who could make it work.

But I'm looking mostly at the ingredient and what it needs to make it really something special at the table. Maybe it's just a tomato and needs vinaigrette, but maybe it wants to be stewed or made into a sauce. I'm sort of just letting the food speak to me.

Maria Montessori’s greatest gift was understanding that our senses are pathways into our minds. When you're not touching and tasting and smelling and looking at beautiful things… she wondered why the children who lived in poverty and hunger back in the 1880s didn't learn the way other children did in school. She created a way of learning by doing, a way of engaging children at a very early age with smell and taste and touch.

Studio AHEAD: This leads to my last question, which is that recently in a New York Times interview you talked about the tactile richness of food. Are you telling us to eat with our hands?

Alice: I certainly am! I don’t think I can eat a salad with a fork. I'm always picking up the leaves and putting them in my mouth. But there is something absolutely important about feeling and not just fruit. Just being able to touch the ingredient, like a string bean and dip it into the aioli or whatever you're doing and you're engaged in a very immediate way. You're not letting that fork in between you and the food. I eat that way all the time, even at the restaurant when I'm a guest. I think people around the world have always used their hands in some way when they're at the table. Something about the fork can get in the way.

Studio AHEAD: I love that. The fork can get in the way. That's my new motto when I'm eating with my hands. 

Fanny: That's also Cecily’s motto!

Studio AHEAD: I was going to say. How has it been watching Cecily eat? Are you eating with your hands more?

Fanny: Absolutely. I'm not sure I ever stopped with my hands.  Our family has always been a family of picking food up and touching it and sort of getting a sense of it. The tactility of it is the most immediate reaction. To pick up a lettuce leaf and to try it, or even when you're cooking a steak you're touching it to see, Is it done? Is it too rare? I watched my mom cook by finger-feel almost more than with implements in a way. It was the intuition around whether something was properly prepared or not.

So fingers are important utensils in our house. Cecily is learning how to use spoons or what she calls "boons." I'm not trying to rush her. There's a lot of intelligence in the tactility and the feeling of texture that helps you understand whether something is juicy or dry or liquid or solid.

I think it's part of the education of how you use your senses and how you eat.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

[studioahead]

Artist Spotlight : Nobuto Suga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

[studioahead]

Artist Spotlight: Jeffrey Sincich

One thing that happened when listening to Jeffrey Sincich talk about his art is that Ace of Base’s 1993 hit "The Sign" kept playing in my head. This is because Sincich talks a lot about signs, particularly the ones you see walking around a city, which he replicates in quilted and mixed-medium works. Removed from their context, these signs make promises they can’t keep (FRUITS FOR 1$), intrigue and tantalize us (1 HOUR THE BEST), and provide space for gratitude (THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU). Sincich shared his thoughts on quilting (not just for grandmothers!), what cities have what kind of signs (New York: "ghost signs high up on buildings that have been there for generations"), and how to be more cognizant of what’s around us, which leads to deeper appreciation for the hidden meanings behind all that we see. As the Swedish adage goes: “I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes."

Studio AHEAD: Your work is inspired by the built environment. Have you always lived in cities?

Jeffrey Sincich: San Francisco is the first big city that I have lived in. It is also the first one I ever visited. I grew up in suburban Florida near the Gulf of Mexico and moved to Portland, OR a little after college. Almost as soon as I moved to Portland, I became obsessed with moving to San Francisco. My first trip here was in middle school when I came to visit my uncle, who was living here at the time. Even as a kid I knew this city was special. San Francisco is so dense, and forces you to be around so many different types of people, which I love. Sharing walls and hallways with people instead of side yards makes me feel like I am part of something larger. I enjoy being one piece of the puzzle, rather than feeling like I am on my own.

Living in a city that is built to function for 800,000+ people has created so many interesting architectural details. Awnings that are connected to signs that are connected to lights that are connected to window grates that are connected to fences. I am constantly looking around and noticing how people have cobbled together materials to make things work. There is so much texture and variety in materials on every block. The inspiration is never ending. Being able to see all of this from the sidewalk versus looking at it across a front yard or from a car speeding by is priceless.

SA: You do a lot of quilting yet you are not an old woman. Please explain.

JS: Sexism in the art and craft world is nothing new. Is sewing only for women? Is welding just for men? They are both means of joining two materials together, yet they are often associated with gender. My dad taught me how to sew in high school when I wanted to make bicycle bags. I really enjoyed learning a new skill that allowed me to make an idea I had in my head a reality. I learned how to weld in college and loved it. Unfortunately, metalwork requires a lot more tools, resources and space than sewing.

I have always been interested in craft and majored in ceramics in college. I found antique quilts so beautiful and often referenced their patchwork designs in my work. It seemed like a natural step to try and make a quilt. It was years after a failed attempt at making a quilt in college that I turned on my sewing machine again. After working full time as a sign painter for about five years, I wanted to start making art again. I decided to try making a quilt, this time inspired by the architecture I loved so much and got to paint signs on. A couple years and quilts later, COVID hit and I decided to turn my love of hand painted signs and lettering into quilts. It has been my focus ever since.

SA: A quilt is domestic. One thinks of fireplaces, interiors. I am particularly intrigued by your quilted works that represent outdoor spaces: street signs, façades, ads. Could you speak about this contrast?

JS: Signs can be personal. They are used to guide, inform, warn and sometimes manipulate you. Quilts are made to warm and comfort you. They often become hand-me-downs and keepsakes. They get worn down and are mended, holding family history. The same things can be true of signs. They fade and are touched up, sometimes professionally and sometimes not. Businesses can pass through different owners but still keep the same signs that have been up for generations. I like to reference the signs that have been cared for, or at least been maintained enough, to get a message across. Quilting objects from signs around the city like Clorox bleach and Marlboro cigarettes is my way of archiving the everyday items we often take for granted. I think that seeing these items as quilts makes them approachable in a more personal way.

SA: Are the window grates in front of your pieces like “All Makes & Models” or “Milk Beer” a comment on urban malaise?

JS: Yes and no. Window grates serve multiple functions. On one hand they are meant to keep people out. On the other they attract people with their beauty. I find this dichotomy of push and pull fascinating. The twists and curves that are used in the designs are gorgeous. Oftentimes they have hearts and sometimes the owner’s surname in them. They blend in with the architecture, filling asymmetrical voids and entryways. They cast beautiful shadows at night. The care and attention to detail put into the creation of these is amazing. That being said, they also serve to protect and evoke a sense of danger. They say look at me, but don’t you dare try to cross me.

I look forward to seeing these window grates every single day, on every block and on nearly every house. Their patterns are unique to San Francisco. I love adding a new design into my mental data bank. When I’m in other cities, I enjoy seeing what type of designs they use and how they are unique to that city's vernacular.

SA: What are some of your city-sign associations when in other cities? As a culture we tend to associate Las Vegas with neon, Paris with Guimard’s “Metropolitain,” New York with the colored circles of its subway…

JS: Cities can have unique sign styles, but more so individual neighborhoods. San Francisco’s Chinatown has many beautiful gold leaf window signs, often for family associations. The Mission has tons of beautifully stylized illustrations of the products sold in the storefronts. North Beach has giant, glowing neon signs outside the old strip clubs, begging you to come in. Los Angeles has endless hand painted signs, often in yellow, white, black, red and blue. They are faded by the relentless sun, showing off every brushstroke used to paint them. New York has ghost signs high up on buildings that have been there for generations, right next to freshly painted five story advertisements. These painted billboards still thrive in New York. The south has painted plywood highway signs that are barely holding on, advertising fresh oranges or alligator farms. It is really special to be able to walk around cities and see what old signs are still there, discovering which parts of their culture have stayed intact or have been left by the wayside.

SA: When you do step out of the city, where do you go?

JS: I go to West Marin. I don’t think there is a more beautiful natural place. It can bring me so much peace; the coastline, the rolling hills, the eucalyptus forests. Swimming in Tomales Bay is as close to swimming in Florida as it gets around here. It is beautiful in all types of weather: sunny, foggy and rainy. My favorite place is the Steep Ravine Cabins in Mount Tamalpais State Park. They have been around since 1938, and Dorothea Lange used to spend summers there with her family. They are these perfectly designed redwood structures that sit on the bottom of a cliff overlooking the ocean. I feel like I am in another world when I stay there, even though it’s just an hour away from my home. I have never been to an area that gives me this type of feeling, I love it.

SA: Is nature a type of sign?

JS: It can be. Sometimes it tells me to slow down and reminds me not to take things for granted. It is a reminder to try to stay out of the rat race more often. It can put me in a state of awe at how beautiful this world can be. But the one thing it always does is remind me that I can’t wait to get back to the city.

SA: Lastly, OPEN or CLOSED?

JS: Open, 24 Hours.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva

[studioahead]

Artist Spotlight: Ted McCann

This month we spoke with artist and craftsman Ted McCann, whose musings on landscape and memory might be described as dreamy—but the sort of dream you have right before you wake to a startling moment of insight. Before moving to Petaluma from New York, McCann started a “California file of inspiration”—photos of regional trees, textiles, clayworks—to ease himself into his new surroundings. As much as we love this idea, we love even more the new surroundings themselves, with his home-studio at the center. We’re excited to share his wonderful journey, his reflections on art and Self, and his wise quips: “A home is a series of moments that you will encounter again and again and again.”

Studio AHEAD: I think we must start with your beautiful ranch in Petaluma, which you designed. Did working on your own home change the way you approach working on the homes of others?

Ted McCann: This house was such a great transitional vehicle for me, coming from the East Coast. In New York, I worked primarily on prewar apartments and townhouses, tuning into that period and finding ways to merge the old with the new. Similarly, our goal for the Petaluma house was to honor its original bones while giving it new life with more light, more openness, and unexpected materials and choices that all the same felt organic and inevitable.

So, my design approach has remained consistent, but working on a midcentury house required me to learn a whole new design vocabulary. Fortunately, I had plenty of time, as we bought the house and rented it out for two years before moving to Petaluma.

During that time, I started a California file of inspiration. I gathered images that spoke to how I wanted to live—everything from trees and plants, to textiles and rugs, to tiles and wood. They got me dreaming about the future and excited to make the move. One image in particular that I remember was of interior work by Charles de Lisle at the William Wurster Ranch, which like mine had lots of mahogany and painted brick. Realizing I would need to be drawing from an entirely new vocabulary, I pretty much threw out all my go-to New York Prewar sample materials and started over.

When we arrived in Petaluma, the first thing I did was rip out the old shag wall-to-wall carpet, brass chandeliers, and over the calico brick fireplace. By stripping out all of those things, I could see the future. It didn’t feel that far off. But it was. The house hadn’t been touched since 1955, and there was an overwhelming amount of work for one person. Still these images kept me excited for what was to come and helped guide me through the entire two-year renovation.

The whole experience taught me the importance of a guiding vision. Now, when I’m approached for a commission I always like to start the conversation through images. I encourage people to

share whatever it is that they love, whether it’s architecture, design, art, or cinema, music, or whatever! This conversation continues until we find a vision that we’re both excited about.

Another thing I learned from working on my own house is to push people to expect more. A home is a series of moments that you will encounter again and again and again. Why not make the most of those moments? Expect more from your kitchen or study or especially, for God’s sake, your powder room!

My favorite place is my shower. It’s the heated floor, the combination of color, light and materials. It’s a real sensory experience that surprises me again and again, every day. In my woodworking, I try to make things with the same potential to please. Sometimes it’s the smallest of details that can do this—a tweak on typical proportions, an evocative color, or a satisfying handle. Working on my home deepened my belief in better living though art and thoughtful design. I like to think that through my work I can share that with others.

Studio AHEAD: With that answer you are also a poet. I’m curious if there is a line between your furniture design and your art—if you think before you start this is going to be art or this is going to be furniture or you start one but realize it might be better as the other, and what might trigger that response.

Ted McCann: I’ll start by saying, Yes, I do always know at the outset whether I’m going to create a functional piece of furniture or cabinetry, or a sculpture. With my woodworking commissions there is a clear intention from the outset; I know I’m building a table or a bench. But my approach to art is super intuitive; the work tends to reveal what it wants to be as I go along. Either way, the line between art and design is often at play in my work.

I lived in New York City for twenty years before moving west. And in those years, I lived a compartmentalized existence. I had a studio where I made art, and a woodshop where I built cabinetry for the spaces I was renovating through my boutique contracting business. At that time, my professional work was focused on execution. Often, I wasn’t artistically invested in the projects. I didn’t know how to merge my two identities as woodworker and sculptor.

I think living this bifurcated existence, and never having enough time to focus on my personal work made me unhappier than I realized, and that came out in the art I was making during these years. I didn’t see it then, but what I was making for myself in the studio at that time really reflected the friction and discontent that can come to a practical, responsible, but unfulfilled person.

It's crazy looking back how that discontent was right on the surface of my work. I did a series of self-portrait paintings that just showed my eyes, peering out from a cutout in a discarded refrigerator box. They were self-portraits that I think reflected how I felt somewhat invisible and also trapped in an urban landscape. In the same period, I made a series of “personal survival units” that seemed fitting for use on the Antarctic or the moon. One sculpture you wore on your back; it contained a personal surrender flag to be deployed as needed. Another was a portable tripod beacon that sent out a flashing light and the sub base notes of a Keith Sweat song, luring a stranger to the source, where they would find an always warm cup of coffee. Another series of paintings were monochrome panels in bright autobody lacquer, with the dits and dahs of morse code extruded across the surface. These paintings also tapped into a romantic, existential longing. The code spelled out wistful phrases like “remember me” from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and “perfect summer,” a headline from a fashion magazine editorial. These personal works were completely at odds with the impersonal jobs I was executing in my woodshop.

Happily, I’ve come to understand the importance of approaching commissioned projects from a more sculptural or artistic sensibility than I did in the past. These days, I still make my living building for others, but everything that leaves my studio—from paintings and sculptures to entirely functional furniture and cabinetry—reflects my sensibility in some way. My studio goes though waves of time focused on a kitchen or library commission and back to more personal art projects. But often, the commissioned works are in strong dialogue with my artwork and are better for it. In the end, all of my work ends up feeling like mine because it employs the same level of finish and craftsmanship.

This is only possible because I’m more selective about the jobs I take on than I once was. It can be scary to pass up paid work, but I’ve realized that by saying no to jobs that don’t speak to my soul, I’m opening myself and my time up to projects that do.

I know you didn’t ask for that backstory, but there it is.

Studio AHEAD: No, we love a backstory. There is always a backstory to every object, design, taste. We want to give voice to that. Actually, tell us more of your backstory. You grew up in New York and Barcelona, or what we might call the Far East and the Further East. How did you make it out West?

Ted McCann: I always thought I’d get back to Spain to live with my family one day, but never did. Still, I’m writing to you on a plane to Madrid. It seems all my stories about my teenage years in Barcelona planted a seed with my son, who is now spending a high school year abroad in Zaragoza.

Some people are forever New Yorkers. As much as I love that city, turns out I wasn’t. Every weekend, my wife and I would schlep our two young sons and all of their stuff from our Brooklyn apartment to the North Fork of Long Island, where we had a cottage. We lived out of tote bags and were eternally packing and unpacking groceries. Between my studio in Queens, jobs all over Manhattan, and the Brooklyn to Long Island commute, it was all so hectic. Not to mention that half my brain was always trying to remember where I’d parked the car.

One day I was with my family on vacation and we stopped in Petaluma for a delicious sandwich at a downtown spot called Della Fattoria. I loved the Wild West downtown combined with the somewhat gritty industrial grain silos and the fact that every road led to beautiful rolling gold hills. And I don’t know if other asthmatics are like me, but I love breathing in hot, dry air. We left thinking, Maybe Petaluma? With help from my father-in-law, who lives in nearby Glen Ellen, we eventually found and bought a Petaluma midcentury house. This place, where we could live, work, and be in nature all at once, seemed like the antidote to our scattered New York life. But we weren’t yet ready to leave the city, so we rented out the house, knowing it was there for us when the time felt right.

Two years later, I left my work and all my clients behind and started my career from scratch. My wife, Genevieve Field, is a writer, so her career was much more portable, thankfully. This afforded me time to renovate our home and build our dream studios on our property. This project was the slow transition I needed to process a life-changing move.

Studio AHEAD: Now that you are here, what role do ideas of place have in what you create? In your approach to craft?

Ted McCann: I never thought about my living space in such poetic terms as I do now. I’m sure my contemplative state has something to do with middle age, but this beautiful and quiet place also plays its part. Sonoma County and the Marin coast are so dramatic, it’s hard not to be affected. Every time I go to San Francisco, I look forward to the drive back over the Big Red Bridge and—poof!—I’m passing Mt. Tamalpias.

There’s such a fluid conversation between humans and nature, indoors and outdoors, in California that never really stops. Our mild winters mean nature is accessible and comfortable year-round. I love the rolling green hills in winter, and the hot summer days eased by the cool nights. The climate still feels foreign to me, but in a good way, like listening to a poem that you don’t really understand but it doesn’t matter because the words and rhythms just sound good.

I’ve always thought sculpture and poetry shared a language—both use shape and texture to elicit feeling. My father-in-law, John Field, is a poet. He writes beautifully about getting older, and while I don’t always understand his poems, I know how they make me feel. The language of

aging is also present in the drama of the coast—the wind-whipped eucalyptuses and shifting cliffs.... Living here, I’ve become more attuned to the sensory elements of living spaces. This is something I think Studio AHEAD is really good at: creating poetic, sculptural, atmospheric places.

I’ve always found inspiration in found objects. Living in New York, I used to photograph and collect things I encountered on the streets. These days, I have to go to the Pick n Pull salvage yard and pay for my inspiring junk. At the beach, I’m always looking for and collecting flotsam and jetsam, which are also scarcer here. Bruno Munari made The Sea as Craftsman, a small book of writings and pictures of bits of rope and things that he found washed up. I love his concept of the sea as carpenter: manmade objects that make their way into the sea are reshaped, polished, and returned abstracted from what they once were. I have an ongoing series of sculptures where I enlarge the scale of plastic objects I find on the beach, carve them out of wood, and paint them black. On one hand, these pieces are simply shapes that move me, but I think they’re really about the transformative power of nature over all things.

Studio AHEAD: What are some of your favorite places here? And what is one place you miss in New York?

Ted McCann: I’ve run hundreds of miles in the rolling hills of Helen Putnam Park, and it feels like church most every time.

The Marin coast is something else. Just driving there is good therapy: Bodega Avenue is stunning all the way to the coast.

Another driving moment: there’s a section of Stage Gulch Road between Petaluma and Sonoma that gets me every time. Especially when the yellow mustard fields are in bloom. I feel so lucky to be able to enjoy these “spaces in between.”

And if I can mention one more, I’m super excited about the Petaluma River Park, where I’m a volunteer. It’s a new 24-acre space that’s just getting its start. A Mark di Suvero sculpture installed in October has really created a sense of place.

Every time I go back to New York, I worry it will break my heart to leave again. But the city is constantly changing and I have a hard time connecting with the place where I spent my twenties and thirties. I still love it though. I always pop my head into the bar where I met my wife, Sweet and Vicious on Spring Street near the Bowery. It was the exact location where my life changed.

Another place that I love and few people seem to know about is the Nevelson Chapel in Midtown Manhattan, created by the late artist Louise Nevelson. Stepping out of the chaos of

Midtown into the quiet and often empty room in Saint Peter’s Church feels like going to the source of it all.

But the place I miss most is a series of places. I often ran at night when I lived in New York. From Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, I’d run across the Brooklyn Bridge, past the Supreme Court Building, up through Chinatown and the Lower East Side, then back home via the Williamsburg Bridge. The streets would finally be quiet and the buildings lit up. It was a rare time when New York was at rest and I felt I had it all to myself.

Photos by Ekaterina Izmestieva