Residencies

Sahar Khoury

Sahar Khoury is an artist based in Oakland, California. Khoury makes sculptures that integrate abstraction, personal and political symbols, and an intuitive sensitivity to site. Found or rejected objects that are immediate, abundant, and recurring serve as a script for constructions made of metal, clay, cement, and papier-mâché. Trained as an anthropologist and having never taken any fundamental art classes, Khoury continues to develop an idiosyncratic approach to merging diverse materials, with a primary commitment to spontaneity and unity. While at The Space Program, Khoury will be experimenting with aptinated steel cutouts, ceramic and silkscreen objects.

She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC Berkeley in 2013. She will be the recipient of The Kohler Arts/Industry residency in the summer of 2024 and has been the recipient of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2019 biannual SECA Art Award and the 2018 Triennial Exhibition, Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Khoury’s work has been exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, YBCA, Oakland Museum of California, The Wattis Institute, UC Berkeley Art Museum, Scripps 77th Ceramic Annual, Rebecca Camacho (SF) and CANADA (NY).

Gianluca Franzese

Gianluca Franzese's art is a blend of visual allure and purposeful storytelling. Beyond simply capturing attention, his work delves into the heart of pressing issues like climate change, aiming to spark meaningful dialogue and introspection. Through his art, Franzese invites viewers to explore the intricate relationship between humanity and our environment, urging us all to consider the role we play in shaping a sustainable future. While at The Space Program, Franzese will be experimenting with mold-making and casting of 3-D printed sculptures as well as screenprinting.

Franzese similarly considers light as integral a part of his work as the tangible materials. Like beauty itself, its ever-changing and shifting nuances and effects are factored into each piece as it is unique to the time and place in which it is viewed. He utilizes many different types of metal leafs and veneers of color in his pieces to create dynamic refractions of light and color. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including Tiffany and Co, in Milano, and a 60ft mural at Facebook Headquarters.

Jay Howell

Exposed to punk music and skateboard culture at an early age, Jay Howell immediately identified with their shared DIY ethose, inpiring him to self-publish his own zines, cartoons, animations and skateboard graphics. Best known for his work as the character designer for Fox’s hit show “Bob’s Burgers”, and as the co-creator, art director and executive producer of “Sanjay and Craig”, an animated children’s show for Nickelodeon, Howell’s unique line-style, eccentric characters, care-free wit and no-permissions-asked artistic approach has been exhibited around the world and garnered collaborations with brands such as Vans, Gucci and Playboy.

While at the Space Program in February, Jay will complete a 5-color silkscreen edition. He'll return in the fall to complete a sculpture in advance of his show at 111 Minna Gallery.

Richard Colman

Richard Colman's work is typically known for blending figurative imagery, bold geometry and personal symbology. Colman utilizes complex compositions and a unique, often bold use of color to explore themes such as societal hierarchies, interpersonal relationships, life and death. His work ranges from small to large-scale paintings, murals, sculpture and installations. While at The Space Program, Colman will be experimenting with 3-D forms and fabricated sculpture, as well as a series of monoprints.

Colman’s work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout Europe, Asia and America. He currently lives and works in San Francisco, California and Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

Rachelle Reichert

Rachelle Reichert is a visual artist and art educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California (Chochenyo Ohlone territory). Rachelle works in a variety of media to explore landscapes permanently altered by climate change and industrialization. She is interested in earth observation satellite imagery- how nature is composed in images and then circulated to a public, algorithmic visions, and natural systems to view how nature is manipulated by human behavior. Her research focuses on sites of specific extracted materials: salt, clay, lithium. Research findings are interpreted through drawings, photographs, and mixed-media artworks that focus on materials found at the site. Artworks embody multi-scale complexities of observing the natural world, both human and machine, and the emotional connections between the two. While at The Space Program, Rachelle will be experimenting with bronze and salt casting from organic material, as well as silkscreen printmaking.

Rachelle's artwork is included in many public and private collections, including the Center for Art+Environment Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archive, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Library, Facebook, and Adobe, Inc. Reichert has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Center for Contemporary Art at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anglim/Trimble Gallery, and September Gallery.

Marbie Miller

Marbie Miller is an artist and professional skateboarder from a small town in Iowa, based in Oakland, California. Her work focuses on her inner life and the characters who compose it, using a unique collage style to express her intense feelings of yearning, solitude, intimacy, and affection that make up her identity. These characters and their dream-like environments manifest as vivid colors, robust shapes, and wavy twisting lines, rooted in real-life relationships that are central to the artist's practice. Marbie's flat works use symbols like the moon or orbs with a distinct cut-out look to represent someone or something watching over or orbiting the artist, reflecting on how time passes differently in the silence of solitude or the ebullience of love. While at The Space Program, Marbie will be experimenting with screenprinting, creating a 3-color print edition as well as a set of printed crewnecks. 

Amy Nathan

Amy Nathan is an artist working in sculpture, painting and installation; her practice asks questions about how meaning can be expressed through visual languages. Nathan’s work is guided by ideas such as the gendered nature of politics and power, classical mythology and contemporary literature, and the body’s visceral reaction to its environment. While at The Space Program, she will be casting objects and three-dimensional drawings to create larger works, as well as experimenting with silkscreen and inkjet printing.

Nathan’s work has been exhibited at CULT Aimee Friberg, Headlands Center for the Arts, /room/, Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, AORA London, Traywick Contemporary, Root Division, Facebook, and the International Sculpture Center. Nathan’s work has appeared in Artforum, Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings, Sculpture Magazine, and was featured with Juxtapoz. She holds an MFA from Mills College and was a Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Andy Diaz Hope

Andy Diaz Hope creates work that seeks to offer alternative viewpoints to the mainstream media out of a desire to foster dialogue, encourage pluralism, and critical thought. While at The Space Program, he will be completing a residency in two parts. The first will employ the use of the printing and silkscreen facilities, overlapping abstract images with translucent inks to invoke memories of the future.

Diaz Hope earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Engineering from Stanford University’s joint program in Design—a collaborative program between the Engineering and Art departments. He has exhibited internationally in venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, New York; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; and the London Crafts Council, England. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; and 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville. He lives in San Francisco and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2005.

Packard Jennings

Packard Jennings is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses appropriation, humor and interventionist tactics to explore the dynamics of public spaces and to address political and corporate transgressions against public interests. Over the past twenty five years he has built a practice that employs interventionism, conceptual work, performance, collaboration, and social practice to engage the public and semi public spheres.

While in residence at The Space Program, Jennings will be working on the creation and fabrication of an interactive sculptural installation that combines iconic architectural elements – a towering stack of historic spires, rotundas, and domes – that project authority, permanence, and power. This project is an effort to create cognitive dissonance with our accepted understanding of the permanence of state authority and control. It is a site for reflecting on our relationship to physical and internalized forms of state power and a site to organize action.

Although he primarily works in public spaces, Packard's work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and internationally in Geneva, Turin, Paris, Stuttgart, Madrid, Ljubljana, Mexico City, Vancouver and Barcelona. His work has been published in several books, including Art and Agenda, Urban Interventions, the BLDG BLOG book, and We Own the Night. His work has garnered critical media attention in The Boston Globe, Artforum, Flash Art, the Believer, Adbusters, New American Painting, the Washington Post, and the front page of the New York Times. He received his BA from San Francisco State and his MFA from Alfred University in New York. He teaches interdisciplinary courses at CCA and SFAI. He lives and works in the historic 45th Street Artist’s Cooperative in Emeryville, California.

Sarah Thibault

Sarah Thibault is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work is inspired by painting’s history as well as autobiographical experiences to create works that center the female perspective and prioritize a mystical view of the world. Thibault’s paintings mine her personal photographic archive, art history, and imagery from meditations and astral travel to investigate themes of death, renewal, and the unseen forces that shape our world.

While at The Space Program, Thibault will be creating new paintings and working on two media projects: The Side Woo podcast, an investigation of the intersection between mental health and metaphysics through the lens of creative people, and a writing project called Art Date.

Selected exhibitions include past shows with Dreamsong Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, Fahrenheit Madrid in Spain, and Casa Lu in Mexico City. Thibault and her work has been featured in W Magazine, Artsy, ArtMaze Magazine, CARLA, The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, SFAQ, and The Huffington Post. She was a Charter Resident of the Minnesota Street Project studios in San Francisco, from 2016-2023.

Previous projects include acting as Co-Director of the Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland, CA, which was named as one of Artsy’s Best Bay Area Artist-Run Spaces, and Co-Director of The Painting Salon, a nomadic lecture series. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts and a BA from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

Carissa Potter

Carissa Potter is an artist who lives and works in Oakland, California. Her prints and small-scale objects reflect her hopeless romanticism through their investigations into public and private intimacy. Speaking both humorously and poignantly to the human condition, Carissa's work touches chords we all can relate to - exploring situations we've all experienced at some point in our lives and conveying messages we simply long to hear.

She received her MFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010, is a founding member of Colpa Press, and is the founder of People I’ve Loved. Carissa has worked with the ICA in Boston, BAM/PFA, SFMOMA, and the De Young Museum, to name a few, and has also served as a mentor in Southern Exposure’s One-on-One Mentorship Program. I like you, I love you, Carissa’s first book, was published with Chronicle Books in 2015, and her second book, It’s Ok to Feel Things Deeply, was published in 2018. Currently, Carissa is working on If You Were Here Now, a project presenting guided videos by artists that can help people navigate life during the COVID-19 pandemic. While at The Space Program, Carissa will be producing two large-scale print editions of her work.

Christopher Martin

Christopher Martin is a multidisciplinary artist from North Carolina currently working in Oakland and San Francisco. Exploring the African Diaspora and Indigenous histories and driven by a desire to push cultural narratives, Martin confronts aesthetic perceptions of contemporary injustice. Cotton fibers are the primary medium of storytelling in order to reclaim the roots of the Atlantic slave trade. Martin's hand cut and sewn monumental tapestry banners in contrasted black and white images tell a surreal story of religion, captivity, and freedom. He has been awarded the first ever Artist-In-Residence from the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD AIR 2018), Inaugural Artist for ICA San Francisco Museum (2022), along with lectures both in the United States and Internationally.

Martin will utilize his Space Program residency to further explore and expand his artistic expression. Building upon his primary practice in fiber art, Martin is venturing into new territory by experimenting with more resilient fabrics for his banner creations. Additionally, he plans to delve into the concept of space, incorporating sculpture and an album that captures the soundscape that embodies the meditative experience within the vibrant surroundings of West Oakland. Lastly, he will also be showcasing his talents as a tattoo artist by providing silk screen printed images of his tattoo flash sheets.

Sonny Smith

Singer, songwriter, playwright and author Sonny Smith will be in residence at The Space Program working on 100 MORE Records, a sequel to a project from 2008 called 100 Records. Smith creates fictional singers and bands, and writes and records real songs for the fictional characters. A final show that "feels like the record store of an alternate universe" will feature a jukebox will where listeners can hear the 100 songs and view 100 large wall mounted ceramic LPs to go with each title. For each fictional record, the LP record jacket will be designed by a guest visual artist.

Chris Duncan

Christopher Robin Duncan (born 1974-Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Duncan utilizes the Sun and the Moon, the Ocean, as well as Time and Tide as conceptual and compositional prompts for experiments in sonic and visual endeavors. In addition to his studio practice, Duncan runs LAND AND SEA- a small press and project space in Oakland California(now in its 12th year), with his wife- Maria Otero. Chris' time at The Space Program will culminate with several elements for an upcoming exhibition titled "Seasons" with Rebecca Camacho Presents (SF), including recording and pressing a record, bronze casting and incorporating sound into static pieces.

Duncan earned his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and his MFA from Stanford University. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by:Halsey Mckay (NY), Rebecca Camacho Presents (SF) and V1 (CPH). Duncan has performed throughout the states from living rooms to institutions such as Bemis Center, Zebulon (LA), Coaxial (LA), Southern Exposure, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, Gray Area (SF), Home Sweet Home/Nothing Changes (NYC), Headlands Center for the Arts, Human Resources (LA), ACRE, Center for New Music (SF). He has released music with Aventures ltd, Daft Alliance Media, Universal Freeing Object, and LAND AND SEA.

Chris Duncan portrait by @grain_vs_pixel

Kristin Bauer

Kristin Bauer is an interdisciplinary artist born in MN, and based in Tempe, AZ and Los Angeles, CA. With a background in art, psychology, art therapy and writing, Bauer works with text, propaganda, social psychology, mythology and embodied narrative via symbolic meaning in visual and written communication, synthesized in visual art and across various mediums. She also maintains a part-time private practice specializing in Jungian Depth Sandplay Therapy, working with subconscious archetypal content in creative processes, including dreams and active imagination in the collective unconscious.

Disciplines of artistic production that Bauer works with include performance, painting, sculpture, installation, video, sound, research, poetry and conceptual archival printed work. Her performances and public activating works have been with de Sarthe Gallery, SMoCA, The ICA LA, Franconia Sculpture Park, Abrons Art Center and ASU Art Museum, among others. Internationally she has exhibited in the TransBorder Biennial, El Museo de Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Melbourne, VIC and Santiago, Chile. Bauer and her spouse, artist Emmett Potter, collaborate on sonic beat punk music and are parents to Artemis Rain Bauer-Potter (16) and Lilly G. Bauer-Potter (17) who also love to make music and visual art.

At the Space Program Bauer will be creating a series of artist print inserts for the release of her book “This Is Like That: Kristin Bauer” published by Hirmer Verlag, in Munich, internationally available in Spring 2023. Using several screens of text and images, Bauer will approach the printing process in a freeform mashup of overlapping vertical and horizontal elements resulting in unique prints remixing the same content: headline fonts, abstracted propaganda imagery, foundational propaganda print techniques and a cohesive color palette.

Jamil Hellu

Through a multidisciplinary art practice that spans photography, video, and site installations, Jamil Hellu's work focuses on themes of identity, visibility, and cultural heritage, while expressing a shift towards a world beyond binaries. Navigating from a personal lens, his projects weave together strategies of performance and photographic representation to point to the tensions found in the evolving discourse about sexuality. While at The Space Program, he will be experimenting with sculptural and screenprinting processes for new works scrutinizing areas of intersection between queer representation and political action.

Born in Brazil, Hellu holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Art Practice from Stanford University and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His projects have been discussed in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Artforum, and VICE. He is the recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission Artist Grant, Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Grant, Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award. His work is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco.

Miguel Arzabe

Miguel Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions - weavings, paintings, videos. He starts by finding outdated beauty in paper ephemera from art shows, modernist paintings, discarded audio recordings. They are methodically analyzed, deconstructed, reverse-engineered. Drawing inspiration from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves the fragments together revealing uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation. In his time at The Space Program, Arzabe will be making unique prints using a multilayered silkscreen process.

Arzabe lives in Oakland and is a charter studio member at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. He had recent solo shows at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA). Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in museums and galleries including MAC Lyon (France), MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Oregon), the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2022 Arzabe was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. In 2023 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Golden Foundation Residency.

Skinner

Oakland based artist Skinner creates psychedelic nightmare paintings, otherworldly animation, toys, murals and more. Influenced by 80’s pop culture, human struggle, myths and violence, dungeons and dragons and the heavy metal gods, Skinner’s mind is one of psycho social mayhem fueled by a calculated chaos. His work has been shown all over the world in various museums, universities and galleries. He has been an ambassador of the alternative arts movement in locations ranging from Russia, Cuba, Japan, Europe and all across the United States.

In his work with The Space Program, Skinner will be making a first foray into bronze sculpture. The resulting work will be shown at the Hot House Gallery at the 4 Star theater, along with illustrations, paintings and screenings of Skinner's films, animations, commercials and other "weird film stuff" in February 2023.

Hughen/Starkweather

Hughen/Starkweather is the collaboration of artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen, who have worked as a team since 2006. Together they create abstract artworks about specific topics or locations. For the past several years Hughen/Starkweather have explored the impacts of climate disruption on places where water meets land. As engineered, human-made structures are increasingly, inextricably interwoven with natural systems in the landscape, how might these systems fail or succeed together? In looking to answer this question, the artists visit water systems and archives; read articles, books, and oral histories; interview specialists and community members; collect historic photos and maps; and look at data trajectories and possible future outcomes. The resulting artworks reinterpret this gathered information into new and unexpected forms. The abstract artworks include strong hints of recognizable topographies, landforms, waterways, and infrastructures. While in residence at The Space Program, Hughen/Starkweather will continue a line of work focusing on the fragile water solutions in the American West, exploring new processes in ceramics and screenprinting.

Stuart Robertson

Stuart Robertson's practice oscillates between figuration and abstraction, and across painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation. He creates images of Black life that reject the distortion, misrepresentation, and erasure of Black history typically centered on degradation and suffering. Considering the Black body as both vessel and substance, each intimate yet quasi-anonymous metallic portrait complicates the concept of identity and skin color-as-race. They embody bling, shine, and glow to highlight the conspicuous consumption of Black bodies, resist erasure, and illuminate the duality of being coveted and discarded. In Robertson's world, Black skin is durable, weatherproof, conductive, magnetic, flexible, percussive, and indestructible. These lustrous figures offer unusual interactions with images of Blackness and invoke metaphors of the Black body that position skin as much more than an indicator of race.

During his Space Program residency, Robertson seeks to develop more efficient processes for the mediums in his work creating and customizing existing tools and processes for cutting, flattening and embossing aluminum cans for new treatments of skin in portraits. Speeding up production will help maintain a high level of excitement and innovation.

Johanna St. Clair

Johanna St. Clair lives and works in San Francisco. Along with her husband, John McCambridge, she co-founded Mollusk Surf Shop which has developed into a cultural institution that integrates surfing, art, craft, music, and film. Mollusk has brick and mortar store in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset Neighborhood, Venice Beach, and Silver Lake, and a clothing line which is widely distributed. A few years after starting the business, Johanna returned to making art. First with drawings from observation on small, blank cards (she keeps a pocket-studio with her at all times), then with her larger-scale ink and brush paintings on paper, and recently with paintings in oil, Johanna's work has grown more direct, fluid, and urgent. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, and at the Tucson Desert Art Museum.

At The Space Program, Johanna will create a multi-level botanical still life to inspire a new set of drawing and paintings, as well as experiment with silkscreen to create prints inspired by sumi ink on paper works.

Lucien Shapiro

Lucien Shapiro’s art is rife with found objects, textures, cast forms, manipulations, raw substances, oddities and multiple personalities. Treating forgotten objects and memories as treasure, he creates a kingdom under which new life is born through sculpture. In today’s day and age, the ease at which information and products are made available has led to a continual state of over-consumption. Everyday items have become neglectfully disposable, and there is an immediate desire for what’s new and what’s next. Shapiro’s work, a laborious craft and meditative consumption of time, transforms forgotten objects into nostalgically interesting and beautiful relics that compel viewers to re-evaluate what our everyday possessions represent and mean to us. Shapiro invites us to slow down, to not only gain appreciation for the artifacts that tell a story about who we are in this day and age, but to find inspiration in the value of time and craft.

During his time at The Space Program, Lucien will be screenprinting a set of clothes and a performance backdrop, as well as casting a set of bronze bells to attach to new sculptures, all of which will be documented in a performance work.

Ashara Ekundayo

Ashara Ekundayo is a Black feminist, interdisciplinary creative arts leader working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic and social innovation spaces that allow her to embody a range of roles including independent curator, cultural theologian, artist, creative industries entrepreneur, organizer, mentor and mother. As an arts professional she currently stewards both Black [Space] Residency and Artist As First Responder, an organization and 6-point philanthropic, interactive arts platform that reifies artists whose practices heal communities and save lives. Her creative and sometimes performance arts practice centers the making and maintenance of intentional spaces for displaying joy and/or grief through art. As a social practice installation artist who designs site-specific commissioned altar pieces, stewards public meditation ceremonies, and designs public printmaking sessions, Ashara's works are intentionally collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational.

During her time at The Space Program, Ashara will be creating a series of metal-leaf prints, designing a poster, and creating and welding a 3-D model.

Images 2 & 3 courtesy of Jean Melasaine.

Mark Dean Veca

Over the course of his 30 years making art, Mark Dean Veca has produced murals, paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, prints, designs, and other sundry inventions. Along the way, he has experimented with a range of visual styles from the loose and abstract to the obsessive and meticulous; mastering the power of the confident line and discovering the patience required for meticulous detail and the bravado for a super-saturated palette. And though the scale and scope of his work have expanded toward the operatic, his process has never been more intimate. An omnivorous observer of visual culture equally versed in Mad Magazine and Modernist theory, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and French Regency, R. Crumb and Ed Ruscha, Mark Dean Veca’s art truly is the sum of its paradoxical parts and his particular gift lies in making gorgeous, giddy, glorious sense of those paradoxes.

-Shana Nys Dambrot, from the essay Mark Dean Veca: Life|Drawing

During his time at The Space Program, Mark will be producing a series of large format silkscreened prints.

Laurel Roth Hope

Laurel Roth Hope lives and works in Northern California. Prior to becoming a full-time, self-taught artist she worked as a park ranger and in natural resource conservation. These professional experiences influenced her current work, which centers on the human manipulation of and intervention into the natural world and the choices we must make everyday between our individual desires and the well being of the world at large. Hope was a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and a 2016 Resident Artist with the Kohler Arts and Industry program in Wisconsin. In 2013 she and her sometime collaborator, Andy Diaz Hope, completed a year-long Fellowship at the de Young Museum of San Francisco examining the history of human cooperation through architecture. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Mint Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 21C Museum, the Zabludowics Collection, the Progressive Collection, and the Ripley’s Museum of Hollywood, among others.

During her time at The Space Program, Hope will be preparing for an upcoming show with Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. She will be casting a set of bronze birds as well as creating a 3-D printed sculpture.

Connie Zheng

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and filmmaker living in Oakland, California. Connie's practice moves between screen-based media, drawing, painting, text and installation, and primarily examines diasporic memory, ecological elegy, and divergent articulations of hope from an environmental justice perspective. Zheng’s recent work is organized around the fraught histories and migrations of seeds, as well as the ways in which bio-matter simultaneously embodies humans’ hopes for survival and our fears of contamination. Rooted in the idea of home as a contested space, Zheng’s practice treats seeds as immigrant vessels for dreaming, self-sufficiency and transformation in ecologically and politically hostile environments.

As the awardee of the Joint Space Award, the works Connie completed while in residence at The Space Program was featured in a Summer 2021 exhibition at Minnesota Street Project.

Jason Jägel

Jason Jägel is a painter, educator, and commissioned public artist. His work uses the syntax of comics to conjure fictional worlds where anything can happen at anytime, like everyday life. “I want to create a place with its own inner life and see what happens,” says Jägel.

He received an MFA from Stanford University in 2002. His work is in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Jägel has completed twelve commissioned public artworks in San Francisco, all in the context of transforming neighborhoods and innovative large-scale projects. His 2018 commission, The Author & Her Story, is a 13x34 foot ceramic tile mosaic installed at San Francisco International Airport’s new Harvey Milk Terminal 1.

With the Space Program, Jägel will launch two editions, one embossed and one silkscreen print. Proceeds from the two editions will help fund the remainder of the residency, an ambitious new bronze and steel sculpture entitled Everything Is Dependent On Something Else. The tower will consist of rotating sections inscribed with images inspired by the artist’s work with sgraffito pottery that play with stories of connection and authorship.

Brett Amory

Brett Amory’s multidisciplinary practice is based on the intersection of quotidian and habitual engagements with the everyday world. Amory’s work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. He was an artist in residence at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 2017. Amory received an MFA from Stanford University.

While at The Space Program, Brett will make a number of site-specfic works. His time will be spent absorbing the space, surrounding environment, and gathering source material before executing works made from screenprint and traditional painting processes.

Yétundé Olagbaju

Yétundé Olagbaju is an artist and maker, currently residing in Oakland. They utilize performance, sculpture, action, gesture, and performance as through-lines for inquiries regarding Black labor, legacy and processes of healing.

They are rooted in the need to understand history, the people that made it, the myths surrounding them and how their own body is implicated in history’s timeline. They have shown work and done projects with many local and national organizations. Namely, Oakland Museum of California, Pt. 2 Gallery, Southern Exposure, Guerrero Gallery, The New School, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Museum of the African Diaspora and Art Basel. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of the inaugural Nancy Cook Fellowship, the Murphy Cadogan Awards, the Jay Defeo Award, and the Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship.

In their residency, Yétundé is working on two sculptures and a textile surrounding the themes of erasure and the Black body. A 3' spherical pedestal, made to look like wax with the implications of disappearance over time, will hold a cloth-covered 16" bronze female bust reminiscent of Yoruba culture. In line with The Space Program desire to support artists' expansion into new mediums, this will be the artist's first opportunity to cast in bronze.

Rodney Ewing and Tahiti Pehrson

Rodney Ewing's drawings, installations, and mixed media works create an intersection where body and place, memory and fact are merged to reexamine human interactions and cultural conditions. The resulting narrative requires us to be present and profound.

Tahiti Pehrson's works explores fragility and interconnectedness in physical structures through hand-cut paper. Geometric patterns of volume speak to universal traditions of pattern-making through the history of mathematics, arts, and craft.

Bonding over the Isley Brothers' song For the Love of You while independently working on public art pieces, Rodney and Tahiti have wanted to collaborate ever since. Initially, we had planned to host them in-person at The Space Program, but shelter-in-place due to COVID-19 offered a new challenge. Instead, Rodney and Tahiti collaborated at a distance, where each artist sent partially completed pieces to the other via mail, a new way of making art for both of them.

As the artists began their residency, they never imagined the significance of their partnership. Initially, quarantine brought isolation and inaccessibility to materials. The rules of engagement changed and developed with the ongoing pandemic. They began to formulate their creations according to the materials at hand. The global social event of Black Lives Matter brought an unanticipated poignancy to Rodney and Tahiti’s project resulting in works both poetic and potent, created with unmistakable intentionality and meaning. Watch an interview with the two artists about this collaboration in *Process *(Episode 4).

An exhibition of collaborative works titled What Kind of Cool (Will We Think of Next), is on view from October 14 to November 30, 2020 at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.

Jon Bernson

Jon Bernson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores and expands the traditional boundaries of storytelling, often in site-specific contexts. Bernson's work has been shown at the Nevada Museum of Art, Catharine Clark Gallery, Minnesota Street Project, Sundance, SXSW, NPR and The New Yorker. He has been an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Playwrights Foundation and The Growlery. Recently, he received grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (New & Experimental Works) and the Venturous Theater Fund to continue developing Third Eye Moonwalk, a multidisciplinary project that fuses installation art with film, theater and spiritual inquiry. As a musician, he has released more than twenty albums under several names, including Exray’s whose music was featured in David Fincher’s Academy-Award winning film, The Social Network. Jon lives in San Francisco and commutes beneath the bay to his solar-powered studio in downtown Oakland.

In actuality, Jon Bernson's residency started in the recording studio in August 2019, where Jon and audio engineer Jason Kick tracked parts in our new studio space for a yet-to-be titled album. In 2020, The Space Program is thrilled to support the completion of Jon's residency and first solo album, Higher Lows. The album's title is a dual reference to an obscure stock market theory and an approach to measuring emotional health; the idea is that growth can only be reliably measured by looking at the upward progress of one's higher lows over the course of many years.

In addition to the recording and pressing of this album, a final outcome of Jon's Space Program residency will include a series of unique screen-printed album covers that form a continuous panoramic image when presented side by side. In doing this, the album art illustrates Higher Lows' central theme, that progress occurs in slow-motion and only becomes apparent when viewed from a distance, over long periods of time.

Jenny Sharaf

Jenny Sharaf is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist that produces paintings, installations, videos, and happenings that celebrate process, while reflecting on art history, counter culture, the canons of feminism and abstraction. Sharaf also has a strong mural practice, with walls as far as Tokyo and Beirut. The mythology of the California girl leads the way to tell a complex and fragmented narrative of art making in the 21st century.

With the Space Program, Jenny is working in a new medium through a collaboration with ceramicist Jeff Perkins to prototype a collection of one-of-a-kind large platters. She'll also be using the facility to produce a series of new, large-scale paintings and works on paper that will be unveiled with this collaboration in the Fall.

Michelle Yi Martin

Michelle Yi Martin's main medium is the process of weaving, whether it be with traditional fibers or plastics, latex balloons, photo negatives, clay, hair, paper, metals, movement, light, and sound. Weaving is sacred because of the labor of joining elements together while allowing each to retain their distinctness. Michelle sees it as a microcosm of the universe and a world in which she'd like to live.

In her own words: Being able to call a place “home” has been a throughline during my 42 years as a woman, mother, partner, educator, activist, artist, and San Francisco native. Whether on my journey of rooting even deeper as a Korean-American-immigrant to the ever-transitioning metamorphosis called motherhood, home has always been in the “in between” space. I used to fight being in this ambiguity, but now I prefer it. It’s this space that allows for experimentation and declassification.

Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock

Modern mythologists, Ferris Plock and Kelly Tunstall are colorists of a different order. Tunstall creates stylized portraits of female or female-identifying characters and their environments; while Plock’s work centers around slightly more masculine characters. Through a variety of mediums including acrylic, watercolor, spray paint, ink, gold or silver leaf and collage, Ferris and Kelly create highly detailed works, often character-based paintings on wood panels, plus installation, video, and sculptural components. Their deliberate focus on human and animal form allows for a certain surrealism to the point of abstraction; playing with how far the mind can consider a rendering of the body animal and/or human, even with multiple useful appendages. As we relate to these fantastic or strange bodies, our mind extends to accept them as our own.

In preparing for their 2019 show PMA at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco, the artists needed more room to work on their grand ideas utside of their home studio. Over six weeks, they produced an entire body of work at The Space Program, including a series of paintings, a 10' "monster house" installation, and a cast bronze edition. Additionally, with the support of The Space Program and Social Imprints, Ferris and Kelly produced a limited edition print and t-shirt whose proceeds benefits Hospitality House.

Both artists have been involved in solo and group exhibitions in Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, and have participated in exhibitions in Tokyo, Mexico City, London, Paris, and Miami. Their work is featured in San Francisco’s Michelin-starred restaurant SPQR, a large scale mural at Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous, SF, and at hotel Alcazar and restaurant Cheeky's, located in Palm Springs.

Photos courtesty of Andrew Caulfield

Jisho Roche Adachi

Jisho Roche Adachi is an artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Employing techniques of traditional craft, print, and animation alongside his painting, Roche Adachi looks to the history of ephemera, craft object, and "low art" in formulating his work. In loosely figurative compositions, his contorted gestures echo the painterly tradition of depicting grand power struggles, while repetitive and layered mark-making manifest a sort of psychedelic idolatry. During his time at The Space Program, Jisho pulled double-duty providing feedback on the space and operations as our first resident while also working on a number of paintings and constructing a zoetrope modeled after paper lanterns.

Jisho received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2009 in printmaking and art history. Over the last decade he has held the position of studio manager for the artist Federico Solmi 2009-2011, as well as a studio manager for Takashi Murakami 2012-2015. Currently he operates an artist co-op space in Queens and is the owner of the art bar Pokito in Brooklyn.