MIDAS

Exhibition Overview

Midas: How Art Becomes Life & Life Becomes Art celebrates the mystery of the creative process. Featuring works by an intergenerational group of Bay Area artists, the show includes objects of inspiration and remnants from the studio alongside finished works. These objects hint at the ways in which artists absorb ideas and material culture, and then transcribe them into gestures, patterns, forms or even a way of life.

“Like the legend of Midas, the creative process speaks to something alchemical that is both a blessing and a curse,” says curator SQUEAK CARNWATH. “It’s not easy or glamorous being an artist; it comes with a huge responsibility to witness and record the world in a way that no one else can. But that is also the joy of it.”

Exploding with exuberant color, sly humor, and surprising personality, the artworks in the show include painting, works on paper, textiles, ceramics, and sculpture. The exhibition serves as a testament to joy as a kind of strategy in the face of the absurdity of our current social and political situations. The artists in Midas find ways to upend and poke fun at systems of power while also revealing something deeper about themselves and the world. The artifacts they have chosen to display range from the literal to the mysterious, inviting viewers to forge their own creative associations.

About the Artists

RICKI DWYER is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently teaching at York College and was a 2021 Facebook Artist In Residence. He received his undergraduate degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from University of California, Berkeley. He has exhibited with Anglim Gilbert (San Francisco), SLASH (/) (San Francisco), Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco), and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. He has been artist in residence with Beximco Textiles (Dhaka, Bangladesh), Recology (San Francisco), Jupiter Woods Gallery (London), and the Textile Arts Center (New York). He has been a recipient of the NEA Grant, Eisner Prize, Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Queer Cultural Center’s Emerging Scholar Award.

LINDA GEARY’s work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Otranto, Italy, including exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Oakland Museum of California, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. Residencies include MacDowell, Art Omi, Yaddo, and Sanskriti (India). She completed a permanent mosaic installation at the San Francisco Airport International Terminal in 2021. She is Professor and Chair of Painting at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lives and works in Oakland. Geary is represented by Gallery 16 in San Francisco.

MARIA A. GUZMÁN CAPRON was born in Italy to Colombian and Peruvian parents. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2015 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2004. Solo exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian (Los Angeles); Texas State Galleries (San Marcos, TX); Premier Junior (San Francisco); Roll Up Project (Oakland, CA); and Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco). Select group exhibitions include Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY); NIAD Art Center (Richmond, CA); Shulamit Nazarian (Los Angeles); pt.2 Gallery (Oakland, CA); CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions (San Francisco); Deli Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); and Mana Contemporary (Chicago). Her works have been written about in Hyperallergic, Variable West, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America. Guzmán Capron is represented by Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles.

SAHAR KHOURY is an artist based in Oakland, California. She received her BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. She was the recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 SECA Art Award and appeared in Bay Area Now 8 in 2018 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Khoury’s work has been exhibited at SFMOMA, YBCA, Oakland Museum of California, The Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, diRosa Center for Contemporary Art, Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco) and CANADA (New York). Khoury’s work has been written about in the New Yorker, Art Review, and Hyperallergic. Khoury is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco.

JERRY LEISURE is a sculptor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received an MFA from Washington State University and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been displayed at St. Mary’s College (Moraga, CA), the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis, Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek, CA), and SFMOMA Artists Gallery (San Francisco), among others. He has taught art at Washington State University and Diablo Valley College for over five decades.

The artistic duo of KYLE LYPKA and TYLER CROSS met online in 2013. They live and work in Oakland, California. In 2016 they started making ceramic vases together as a way to spend time with one another. Kyle had been pursuing figurative sculpture and Tyler was studying design. The vases lead into a collaborative sculpture practice that they each found provided novel possibilities while also solving some of the difficulties of being a lone artist in the studio. Lypka and Cross are represented by pt. 2 gallery in Oakland.

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1938, JOHN MOORE moved to Oakland, California, at the age of three. In 2019, his work was featured in a group show along with the artist Oliver Jackson at Creativity Explored in San Francisco. He was included in a group exhibition at Fiber Works Center for the Textile Arts in the late 1970s alongside contemporaries Raymond Holbert, Arthur Monroe, E.J. Montgomery, and Raymond Saunders; his work also appeared in a 2006 exhibition at Santa Rosa Junior College focusing on the collection of artist Mildred Howard, who curated both of the aforementioned shows. A monograph of his work with an essay by Nick Stone was published in 2018.

About the Curator

SQUEAK CARNWATH draws upon the philosophical and mundane experiences of daily life in her paintings and prints, which can be identified by lush fields of color combined with text, patterns, and identifiable images. She has received numerous awards including the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Individual Artists from the Flintridge Foundation, and the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2019, she was inducted into the National Academy of Design and Art. Carnwath is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives and works in Oakland, California.