Irving Street Projects // October 5 - December 7, 2019

Taking the mid nineteen-sixties as its starting point, If All of This Were Silence reflected the conflicting and radically varied ways women have strategized to control the impact of patriarchal culture on their lives.

As part of the exhibition visitors explored “Permanent Library”, a piece that displayed hundreds of books written by women in a single room. “Permanent Library” documented women’s diverse lived experience and included everything from Angela Davis’ powerful “Women, Race and Class” to the best-selling dating book “The Rules” by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.

The exhibition also featured a recording booth where visitors could select and record passages from the “Permanent Library” to create an audio ‘exquisite corpse’.

During the closing event, “The Big Take-Away,” visitors dismantled the exhibition by taking away what they liked.

If All of This Were Silence asks questions about how women can be heard, politically, in their difference. Can women, an oppressed majority, create political, social and economic equality across the breadth of their experience?

The project was open to the public Sundays 1-5pm starting Oct 6 and running through Dec 1, 2019. The closing event "The Big Take-Away" happened Saturday, December 7 1-5pm.

Haug also taught a free workshop for high school students relating to the exhibition titled, “The Future is Female” at 826valencia.org.

If All of This Were Silence was supported by funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kate Haug is a San Francisco-based artist, filmmaker, and writer. She makes conceptually based works in print, film, photography and installation. Using experimental and narrative forms, her projects often investigate history— its presentation and consumption—through a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Her project "News Today: A History of the Poor People's Campaign in Real Time" originally developed at Irving Street Projects, has been shown at The Museum of Capitalism and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Recently, Haug and Ivan Uranga completed a Summer of Love-themed public art work for the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Her short films have been screened internationally at festivals including MOMA’s New Directors/New Films, the London International Film Festival, and the Sao Paolo International Short Film Festival.

Haug holds an MFA from UC San Diego in critical theory and experimental film. She was curatorial fellow at the Whitney Independent Study program where she co-curated, “Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine” at the Whitney’s Philip Morris Branch in New York City.

For several years, she taught in the Bay Area at University of San Francisco, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State, and the College of San Mateo.

July 5 – October 15, 2018

Over the course of her three-month residency, Cathy Lu developed an installation of ceramic-based sculptures inspired by the ancient Chinese myth of the Immortal Peach Garden.

According to legend, peaches from this garden ripen over generations to be eaten by deities to gain eternal life. For thousands of years the peach fruit has served as a symbol of longevity and prosperity in Chinese culture.

In Western art history, the fruits are also part of a suggestive, symbolic visual language and are frequently fetishized in popular culture today.

Neither edible or romanticized, Lu's Peach Garden offered an alternative perspective to traditional symbolism associated with the fruit.

In addition to opening and closing receptions, Cathy led a free ceramics workshop for the community.

Cathy Lu  is a San Francisco-based artist. Her work explores the manipulation and appropriation of traditional Chinese art imagery and how ideas of cultural ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ interface with contemporary trans-cultural experiences. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Johansson Projects, Root Division, Aggregate Space, and Hashimoto Contemporary. She is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI MFA 2010) and Tufts University (BFA 2007). She has taught ceramics at UC Berkeley, Sonoma State University, California College of the Arts (CCA), and Ulloa Elementary

PRESS:

Sarah Hotchkiss for KQED Arts

Peach Garden was supported by funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

March 10 - May 31, 2018
 
Fielding Connections transformed the gallery at ISP into a community space for art making and educational opportunities exploring the biodiversity of our local region through fiber arts and fiber systems education.

Artist Matt Katsaros organized a series of events and projects in collaboration with fifteen other participating Bay Area artists, designers, and educators. Inspired by his background as a fiber artist and natural dyer, these events demonstrated techniques used in his work and also drew connections between his artistic practice and its related pursuits. In addition to programmed workshops, talks, classes, and collaborative projects, a series of pamphlets, maps, and other printed educational materials were available for pickup outside the gallery throughout Matt’s project.

An opening reception was held Saturday, March 10th from 11 - 3 pm and featured a collaborative weaving project by artist Travis Meinholf. Other scheduled events, most of which were free to the public, included dye classes, community clothes mending, plein air drawing, experimental tapestry weaving, sewing instruction and more.

Fielding Connections was supported by funding from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and was included in the INTERSECT SF Series, funded by San Francisco Grants for the Arts and Intersection for the Arts.

Matt Katsaros is a multi-disciplinary artist based in the Outer Sunset district in San Francisco. His process-based artworks center around natural dyes and textiles sourced from his immediate environment, frequently made on an entirely local scale. He works in partnership with Fiber Shed, an organization dedicated to developing regional fiber systems that build soil and reduce pollution caused by synthetic textile manufacturing and dye processes. His work has been included in exhibitions at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Perish Trust, and Mollusk. In addition to his fine art practice, he is the founder of Flint Outdoors.

October 1 - Feb 28, 2018

Combining both analog research methods and Google Street View technology, artist Kelley O’Leary mapped the Outer Sunset in a way that fused physical, digital, and psychological geographies and re-inserted the emotion and personal experience that maps never capture. At a time when the neighborhood, the city, and the nation were experiencing rapid transformation, Collective Geographies provided an opportunity for reflection, dialogue, and a glimpse of the innumerable layers of community and connection shared through place.
 
For Collective Geographies O’Leary invited the public to contribute memories associated with a street address in the Outer Sunset, loosely defined as west of 19th Avenue, north of Sloat Blvd, and south of Golden Gate Park. Each locale was added to a large-scale collage in the gallery, and each memory was transcribed in a set of corresponding cards for visitors to explore.

Public programming included opening and closing receptions, open hours for drop-in visitors to participate, a movie night featuring historical footage collected by O'Leary from the Prelinger Archive, the Western Neighborhoods Association, long-time residents of the Outer Sunset, and online research, and a "Discover Your District" event with District 4 Supervisor Katy Tang.

Collective Geographies was supported by funding from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and was included in the INTERSECT SF Series, funded by San Francisco Grants for the Arts and Intersection for the Arts.

Kelley O’Leary is a San Francisco-based multi-disciplinary artist working in collage, painting and video. She holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in Art and Anthropology, and currently works as a textile designer and as an art educator. Kelley has taught workshops and classes at various organizations in the Bay Area including Root Division, Southern Exposure, Facebook, Breakthrough Collaborative, Case for Making, Khan Academy and Little Artistas.

photos courtesy the artist and Irving Street Projects

July 1 – September 30, 2017

Using a narrative style of painting and her own cast of contemporary characters, local artist Lindsay Stripling developed an installation illustrating a neighborhood mythology influenced by her daily observations in the Outer Sunset. Stripling’s watercolor work is characteristically populated with animal-human hybrids, downed tree branches, disembodied heads, floating swimmers, talking animals and insects involved in bizarre situations. These and other imaginary beings slowly populated a surreal tableaux inspired by her everyday surroundings, evolving over her three month residency.
 
An opening reception was held on Saturday, August 5th and a closing party was held Saturday, Sept 23rd. Stripling also led a mask-making workshop inspired by the use of masks to create identity-transcending alter-egos in her work.
 
Lindsay Stripling is a San Francisco-based artist working in the Outer Sunset district. She studied photography at UC Santa Cruz and painting at San Francisco Art Institute. Lindsay uses color and form to create dreamlike narratives that echo folk and fairy tales. Mysterious characters exist in familiar landscapes, playing out scenes from stories with no beginning, middle or end; where the moral might be lost, switched, blurred or just completely missing. 

photos courtesy Rachelle Derouin and Irving Street Projects

April 2 - June 30, 2017

Working with life-sized renderings of local species on plastic packaging material combined with new work with native wildflowers, local artist Alicia Escott explored the interplay of endemic and introduced species as a meditation on community as it relates to the ecology of the Outer Sunset and Ocean Beach.
 
 Another Brief History of the Sunset, focused on a local scale of introspection, research and connectivity to discuss broader issues of inclusion, adaptation and intersectionality.
 
Escott’s studio work during her residency explored the ecosystem of Ocean Beach, a vast expanse of dunes that was once largely inhospitable to humans but provided a niche habitat for a wide array of life including the now extinct Xerxes Blue butterfly, the endangered Snowy Plover, and countless species of birds, mammals, insects and mollusks. Today, the Outer Sunset is also home to a growing vibrant and diverse human population negotiating a changing landscape.
 
Much of Escott’s work is characterized by a dedication to a research-based practice and a connection to understanding past ecologies.  Her residency at Irving Street Projects served as a framework for visitors to explore the social and ecological history of the Outer Sunset neighborhood as a way to better participate within it.

Over the course of her project, ISP hosted several community events including an opening and closing reception. Escott also hosted a discussion followed by a short neighborhood walk with Amber Hasselbring, Margaretha Haughwout, and Suzanne Husky.

PRESS:

MOMUS- Invasiveness and Indigineity: Alicia Escott's Complicit Critique by Monica Westin

October 1 - December 31, 2016

Through daily ritualistic stacking, assembling and rearranging of hundreds of wheel-thrown ceramic sculptures, artist Julie Cloutier used the storefront gallery at Irving Street Projects as a testing ground for various groupings and realignments of her works. Useful Irrationalities questioned the boundaries of utility within the domestic environment and explored the relationship between labor and value and fine and applied art.
 
Cloutier’s stoneware vessels evoke both an ancient and modernist aesthetic and technique. Her works highlight the natural beauty of the dense, rock-like nature of her material when it is fired to its maturation temperature, through a process that historically dates back thousands of years. Each work in the installation is ever-so-slightly non-functional; cups with rounded bottoms, concentric and exact clay circles, hourglass shapes that could never hold sand.
 
A series of limited edition prints made by Cloutier in collaboration with The Aesthetic Union accompanied the exhibition, along with a limited edition handmade folded screenprint documenting one day of arrangements printed by Matt Katsaros.

Inspired by Julie's work and its relationship to craft, we held a panel discussion about how overlapping interests in art, craft and design relate to issues of accessibility, personal agency, independence, and economic pressure. You can listen to it here:

Panel discussion with Julie Cloutier, Carissa Potter Carlson, Lisa Ellsworth, Georgia Hodges, Matt Katsaros, and Leah Rosenberg:

ABOUT THE ARTIST
 
Julie Cloutier is an artist living and working in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco. Her ceramic work focuses on handheld sculptures, functional wares and everyday objects. She draws upon her architectural background to inform her minimalist lines and quotidien investigations. She holds a Masters in Architecture from California College of the Arts and a Bachelor in Environmental Design from University of Colorado at Boulder. She has exhibited her work at The Lab (SF), Jancar Jones Gallery (SF), Chandran Gallery (SF), POP Gallery (Culver City) and Little Paper Planes (SF).

photo credit: Airyka Rockefeller

July 7 - September 24, 2016

Through her eclectic style of painting, sculpture and wall drawing, San Francisco-based artist Carey Lin built an installation at ISP by culling patterns from community participants, friends, acquaintances, and her day-to-day life. In this evolving environment, Lin asked questions about patterns of attraction and the potential of the creative process to transform seemingly mundane objects into meaningful experience.

To build the installation, Lin invited the public to bring items to be photographed and small objects to be traced for inclusion in the installation. Contributors shared imagery on Instagram using the hashtag #nobodysaidnotto. Lin rendered those elements and combined them with imagery selected from her daily life: patterns from the closets and homes of friends and acquaintances, objects found on neighborhood walks, images from store windows, posts on her social media feed, etc. Lin’s receptive installation reflected the different, highly variable visual interests of community participants, the artist’s social circle and the artist herself.

Throughout its run, Nobody Said Not To served as a platform for thinking about artistic intention, hierarchies of visual culture, and in the most basic terms, why we make art. Lin’s playful, obsessive, energetic studio practice stems from a critical investigation of the creative impulse.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carey Lin is a visual artist based in San Francisco, California. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Chicago and her B.A. from New College of Florida. Aside from her individual studio practice, Lin directs Stairwell’s, a collaborative social practice project with site-specific programs in the Bay Area and beyond. She also creates a line of handmade ceramic sculptures under the moniker DONUT DEPOT.

Lin’s work has been exhibited at Artists’ Television Access (ATA), ampersand international arts (SF), Screen Share Video Gallery (Chicago), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Root Division (SF), Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland), tmoro projects (Santa Clara), City College of San Francisco, Martina }{ Johnston Gallery (Berkeley), Interface Gallery (Oakland), Tartine Bakery (San Francisco), Macarthur B Arthur Gallery (Oakland), Truesilver Gallery (San Francisco), Zughaus (Berkeley), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Samsøn Projects (Boston), DOVA Temporary (Chicago), and more.

Lin has been artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project (NY), Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI), Hayes Valley Art Works (SF), Wave Pool (Cincinnati, OH), Opossum House (Eugene, OR).

News Today: A History of the Poor People's Campaign in Real Time

April 9, 2016 to June 25, 2016

www.resurrectioncity.us

Using news photographs, memorabilia, reconstructed objects, documentary fragments, and original documents, contemporary artist Kate Haug re-told the story of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last monumental social protest prior to his assassination.  The exhibition featured images and objects culled from Haug’s extensive research in the archives of the Associated Press and the Library of Congress, which have not been seen together before, bringing to life the complex ambition of King’s vision.
 
King began organizing the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) in 1967 to unify America’s poor across class rather than racial lines, believing that economic parity was key to African American equality within the United States. The PPC culminated with a 3,000 person shanty town named Resurrection City, constructed on the National Mall in Washington DC.  Resurrection City drew people from all over the country, was the nineteen sixties version of the 1932 Bonus March and a predecessor to “Occupy”. The exhibition time frame for this show mirrored many of the actual dates of the campaign, tracing the Resurrection City’s opening day to its final destruction.
 
The PPC echoes aspects of current social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Fight for Fifteen, and Our Walmart.  In San Francisco, a city with one the highest rates of income inequality in the United States, King’s work asks pointed questions about the contemporary social contract and the democratic promise of America.

“News Today: A History of the Poor People’s Campaign in Real Time” was exhibited in two iterations of The Museum of Capitalism in Oakland, CA and at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
 
ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kate Haug is a San Francisco-based artist, filmmaker, and writer. Her short films have been screened internationally at festivals including MOMA’s New Directors/New Films, the London International Film Festival, and the Sao Paolo International Short Film Festival. Haug holds an MFA from UC San Diego in critical theory and experimental film. She was curatorial fellow at the Whitney Independent Study program where she co-curated, “Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine” at the Whitney’s Philip Morris Branch in New York City. For several years, she taught in the Bay Area at University of San Francisco, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State, and the College of San Mateo.

Press:

Sarah Hotchkiss for KQED

SF/ARTS Monthly

Jonathan Curiel for SF Weekly

January 1 - March 30, 2016

While at Irving Street Projects, Teschner used the storefront at ISP as both a workshop and exhibition space, creating a progressive series of large architecturally-inspired textile works exploring the natural and man-made forces that gradually transform and erode our environment.

Teschner's project was both research-based and intuitive, centering around processes of building and decomposition. She wrote, “The governing idea is that the city, like a mountain range, erodes gradually to become the grains of sand that line the ocean floor.” Her project also considered concrete as the inverse of that erosion, a liquid composed of fragments of stone. Teschner used fabric, ink washes, and paper to emulate the nature of concrete and explore its formation and decay.
 

Press:

Vanessa Kauffman for Art Practical

During the month of December 2015, gallery neighbors Alexis Petty and Lana Porcello installed large-scale hand-dyed canvases in the windows of Irving Street Projects. Inspired by the idea of a community advent calendar, each day they cut a new design in the canvases, illuminating them from behind so that every evening for the remainder of 2015, passers by could see their evolving light show.

September 1 - November 30, 2015

Lisa Solomon's studio practice revolves thematically around domesticity, gender roles, and the pursuit of art as research, incorporating materials that intentionally question the line between art and craft.

During the course of her three-month residency at ISP, Solomon documented keepsakes, those cherished objects that we hold on to for a variety of sentimental reasons. She invited the public to participate by either booking an appointment to have a keepsake photographed and drawn at the gallery, or by sending an image of their chosen object via email. The documentation progressively filled the walls with nostalgic mementos culminating in an exhibition, a website, and now a correlating book.

By the time she completed the residency, 65 keepsakes were documented through photography, drawing, and transcribed personal accounts of the objects’ significance to their owners. Solomon’s documentation of pieces of clothing, bric a brac, stuffed animals, jewelry, tools, handwritten notes, toys, and other ephemera paid tribute to these odd knick-knacks that often carry a huge amount of emotional weight, and can sometimes hold cultural significance as well.

As the documentation accumulated, we noticed threads of commonality in the stories: the love of a grandparent or close relative, a physical connection to childhood, the honor of a cherished family member’s skill, memories of significant moments in life. It became clear that these objects function as portals to parts of our human experience we can’t fully access without a trigger. So many of life’s details and emotions fade with age – thankfully - but these objects somehow carry the emotional weight that dissipates with time. Though the transfer of emotion to inanimate objects can get out of hand and become overwhelming, some things are worth holding onto and contemplating.

What Solomon has begun to create is a type of alternative museum. While a traditional museum seeks the “best” examples of cultural production to showcase to the public, we rarely get to know the stories behind these objects, their acquisition, or their emotional significance. These aspects are virtually erased and replaced by origin stories and explanations of why a particular object is deemed the best, most significant, most valuable example of its kind. The Keepsake Project is the antithesis of that format, a place to celebrate the distinct yet fleeting moments in life that shape our respective paths and help narrate our personal definition of our place in the world.

See the objects documented and read their stories at www.thekeepsakeproject.tumblr.com

Press:

TimeOut San Francisco

SFArts Monthly

Mary Anne Kluth's work explores representations of nature through drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and installation. Kluth grew up participating in many geologic field trips and camping trips all over the United States but over time became obsessed with theatrical representations of the land that both evoke and subvert cultural notions of the sublime and national pride.

Expanding on her collection of Theme Park Collages, Kluth transformed ISP’s storefront windows into one luminous diorama. During her two-month residency, Kluth painted a mural and arranged two and three-dimensional works that drew inspiration from John Wesley Powell’s journals chronicling his 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and landscape paintings from that era by Thomas “Yellowstone” Moran, but were instead compiled from her replications of theme park landscape elements.

Kluth's work draws an interesting contrast between the use of color and composition in romantic landscape painting of the 1860s to emphasize magnificence and power and our more modern tendency to infantilize the landscape.

During her residency, Kluth taught a diorama workshop and the public was invited to opening and closing receptions. If you look closely you might recognize rocks from Big Thunder Mountain Railroad or clouds from Hello Kitty Land.

Kluth’s work “Megamatterhorn” can be seen at the Oakland Museum of California in their Gallery of California Art.
 

Press: The Coastal Post

Leah Rosenberg's work spans painting, sculpture, installation and pastry exploring the ways color, form, flavor, and arrangements affect human emotion.

For her residency at ISP, Rosenberg painted the gallery a different hue selected from the surrounding Outer Sunset neighborhood for fifty days. Each day she marked off a width of tape to preserve a stripe of the previous days’ color, gradually creating a low relief site-specific striped mural.

Each day’s color was announced by Leah on her instagram account along with its source photo: ‘Mint Graffiti”, “Converse Shoe”, and “Lavender Fog” and others emblematic of the vibrant neighborhood known for being foggy and gray.

The public was also frequently invited to help paint the walls, table, chair and vase in the gallery. Other events included a sunset happy hour, a color walk, a stripe reveal and a talk about the project. In the end, Leah served striped cake and the fifty layers of paint peeled right off the walls with a cake server.

A limited edition poster documenting each day's color highlighted each tone.

“Everyday, a color” went on to be exhibited as “Where Once Was None” at ProArts in Oakland and is included in the exhibition “One Day at a Time” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) highlighting the work of Rosenberg and Susan O’Malley.

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