Origin STORIES

Exhibition OVERVIEW

Spanning the past decade, Origin Stories: Expanded Ceramics in the Bay Area surveys key works by 10 artists and artist groups who consider ceramics in relation to site and place. Select works trace where material comes from in the landscape, while others investigate histories of ceramic production and the movement of objects across international borders.

We begin with works by Kari Marboe and Dana Hemenway that playfully encourage close looking and are installed in relation to the Berkeley Art Center’s unique building. The show moves outward to cultural subjects associated with Berkeley and California, to works first performed in the environment of artists’ neighborhoods, or developed through artist residency programs in the Bay Area.

This exhibition foregrounds the contributions of both interdisciplinary artists and artists who primarily work with clay to a larger and vibrant contemporary field. Several artists bring a conceptually driven approach to functional ceramics, embracing the potential to invite participation and community engagement. For Ilana Crispi and Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik & María Inés Leal García, conversation over tea becomes a vehicle for sharing the story of place.

The cup. The brick. Some of the oldest and simplest forms are employed here in different ways. The show is centered on works that are about ceramics itself, moving beyond the traditional capacity of ceramic sculpture to portray something or someone. They draw attention to the basic elements and conditions behind the medium, from the apparatus of the kiln to the byproduct of ceramic waste.

From the collectives Futurefarmers to Mutual Stores, this show highlights the role of collaboration and artist publications as significant forms of expression. The expanded field represented here often embraces the idea of multiple formats and modes of distribution, in-person and online. Certain multiyear projects will continue to unfold and inhabit different spaces.

Several of the artists are not only contemporaries, but taught or studied with one another during the past decade. Related virtual public programs will not only illuminate artist processes, but discuss teaching and making work during a global pandemic. It has been a particularly challenging moment for an inherently communal medium. For the closing weekend, we will host a Bay Area Cup Swap outside the gallery in neighboring Live Oak Park, offering an opportunity for a lively and socially distant form of exchange, open to all makers.

—Tanya Zimbardo, Guest Curator

About the Artists

EBITENYEFA BARALAYE is a ceramicist, sculptor, and designer. His work explores cultural, spiritual, and material translations of form/objects, text, and symbols interpreted through a diaspora lens and abstracted around the aesthetics of craft and design. Baralaye received a BFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Baralaye was an AICAD Teaching Fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2016 to 2018 and will be featured in the exhibition and catalogue “Objects: USA 2020.” Baralaye has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), Traywick Contemporary (Berkeley), New York Design Center, Kristin Wigley-Fleming Fine Arts Gallery (Luther College VPA, Decorah, Iowa). He is currently an assistant professor and the section head of ceramics at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.

SITA KURATOMI BHAUMIK is an artist, writer, and educator who uses art as a strategy to connect memory and history with the urgent social issues of our time. Her work focuses on decolonization, the hierarchy of the senses, and the impact of migration. Raised in Los Angeles, Tongva Land, and based in Oakland, Ohlone Land, she is Indian and Japanese Colombian American. Sita holds a BA in Studio Art from Scripps College, an MFA in interdisciplinary art and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. Bhaumik has exhibited, collaborated, and cooked in the United States, Holland, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Mexico. These institutions include: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, Southern Exposure, 826 Valencia, Stanford University, Smithsonian APAC, Future Food House in Rotterdam, and MaD Asia. She has been a Fellow at the Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo and an artist in residence at Shankill Castle in Kilkenny, Ireland, and Denniston Hill in Upstate New York. Bhaumik is a founding member of the People’s Kitchen Collective in Oakland along with Jocelyn Jackson and Saqib Keval.

MARÍA INÉS LEAL GARCÍA has collaborated with Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik to contribute handmade, lead-free masala chai cups to the installation MamaSita’s Tiny Tea House (2013–ongoing). With Dignicraft, a Mexican media artist and ceramicist collective, Leal García was in residence as a Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center in 2013 and participated in their project Encuentros/Encounters: Three Artisans in the Bay Area and in Tijuana. The decorative stippling technique used by Leal García is referred to as “capulineado,” because it reflects the flower motif traditionally used in Capula, Michoacán, México, where she is based as an artisan. Leal García has reimagined this motif with a simple, playful, and elegant touch. Thanks to the support of nonprofit organizations her work is lead-free and she uses gas kilns.

THE BRICK FACTORY is a ceramics and performance collective of Nicole Burisch (Ottawa, Ontario), Thomas Myers (St. Paul, Minnesota), Erik Scollon (San Francisco) and Summer Zickefoose (Youngstown, Ohio). Formed in summer 2011 at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, they are “sometimes sincere and sometimes irreverent in [their] examination of what constitutes ceramic practice.” They focus primarily on the intersection of ceramics and performance art. Their collective work is currently atemporal and digital, but was recently featured in the book “New Directions in Ceramics: From Spectacle to Trace” by Jo Dahn, and on various online platforms such as @potsinaction on Instagram.

ILANA CRISPI is a San Francisco-based artist with an interdisciplinary practice incorporating ceramic arts with local histories and geologies. She has mined urban soil for gold, shared it with neighbors, sculpted it into ceramics, and built ephemeral monuments in the landscape. Her site-specific installations invite engagement and investigate ideas of power, access, and perception and the ways in which we experience our environments. Crispi has been the resident artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, Montalvo Arts Center, the de Young Museum, and Can Serrat. She has shown at museums, galleries, and alternative sites in the USA, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and China. She is Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.

FUTUREFARMERS is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to a particular time and place. Founded in 1995 by Amy Franceschini, the design studio serves as a platform supporting art projects, an artist-in-residence program, and its own research interests. Its members are artists, researchers, designers, architects, and farmers who collaborate with scientists and are interested in scientific inquiry, and operate through participatory projects that create spaces and experiences where the logic of a situation disappears — encounters occur that broaden perspectives and destabilize logics of certainty. They have deconstructed systems related to food policies, public transportation, and rural farming networks to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics. The work often provides a playful entry point and tools for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry — not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places they live. Futurefarmers’ work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area; Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (Rome); New York Hall of Science; and Walker Art Center (Minneapolis).

NICKI GREEN is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2018. Her sculptures, ritual objects, and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation, and aesthetics of otherness. Green has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum (New York); Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco); and Rockelmann & Partner Gallery (Berlin). She has contributed texts to numerous publications including a recent piece in Duke University Press’ Transgender Studies Quarterly and a piece in “Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen.” In 2019, Green was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Art Award and a recipient of an Arts/Industry Residency from the John Michael Kohler Art Center, among other awards. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

DANA HEMENWAY is an artist based in San Francisco. Her practice is rooted in the excavation and elevation of utilitarian objects to make visible what has become habituated in our built environments. This stems from an ongoing exploration into the relationship between an item’s value and the environment in which it is presented. She received her MFA (2010) from Mills College and her BA (2003) from University of California Santa Cruz. She has held residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), ACRE (Stueben, WI), SÍM (Reykjavik, Iceland), The Wassaic Project (Upstate New York), Root Division (San Francisco), and is a charter resident of the Minnesota Street Project’s Studio Program (San Francisco). Hemenway is the recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, a Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant, and in 2017 she was awarded her first Permanent Public Art Commission for SFO’s Terminal 1. Hemenway has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally, and internationally. From 2015–2017, Hemenway served as a co-director of Royal Nonesuch Gallery, an artist-run project space in Oakland.

KARI MARBOE is a Bay Area artist and Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts (CCA), Oakland and San Francisco. Marboe’s works engage with storytelling, humor, and outlier opportunities for clay through sculpture, collaborations, and interactive works. She received her BFA in Ceramics from CCA and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. Marboe’s archive-based ceramic works and performances have been exhibited at the Mills College Art Museum (Oakland), California Greenwich House Pottery (New York), 500 Capp Street/Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), Wave Pool Gallery (Cincinatti, Ohio), Museum of Northern California Art (Chico), Jacksonville (Florida) University, and the Waffle Shop Billboard (Philadelphia). She has done residencies at
Greenwich House Pottery (New York), Mutual Stores (Oakland), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Maine), and Elsewhere Museum (Northern California).

MUTUAL STORES is a studio collective located in a pair of storefronts on Seminary Avenue in Oakland. Their mission is to expand the field of ceramics and to cultivate mutually supportive relationships with the beings, places, and materials they come into contact with as artists in an urban environment. Founded in 2018 by Brendan Page, Kate Pruitt, and Rosa Novak, the collective comprises six artist studios, the Mutual Artist in Residence Program based around the experimental reuse of ceramic waste, a shared gallery, and a brick library and studio archive. Current studio members are Nicki Green, M.J. Sasaki, Rosa Novak, Brendan Page, Kate Pruitt, Ken Becker, and Hannah Volckmann.

STEPHANIE SYJUCO works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. For 2019/2020 she is a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. Born in the Philippines, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/PS1 (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology (Karlsruhe, Germany), the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the 12th Havana Biennial, and the 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. A longtime educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland.

About the Curator

TANYA ZIMBARDO is a San Francisco native whose curatorial projects primarily center on site-responsive work and histories of art and experimental cinema in California. In 2017 she organized a public conversation between Bay Area artists Jim Melchert, John Roloff, and Stephanie Syjuco, on expanded ideas of ceramics. As an assistant curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Zimbardo has curated several solo exhibitions and screenings and co-curated group surveys and commissions. Her SFMOMA exhibition Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith is on view through May 23, 2021. She has co-edited SFMOMA publications including the digital catalogue Soundtracks and the book Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards. She has guest (co-)curated several exhibitions and public programs for Bay Area nonprofit arts organizations including Alison O’Daniel: The Tuba Thieves (2019) at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Center of Gravity: Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley (2018) for San Francisco Cinematheque, Organic Logic (2017) at The Garage, The 500 Capp Street Foundation; Equilibrium: A Paul Kos Survey (2016) at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art; and Public Works: Artists’ Interventions since 1970 (2015) at Mills College Art Museum. She independently co-curated the online series In Process and such events as Lynn Marie Kirby: Collaborations with Etel Adnan at Mill Valley Public Library and Barbara Hammer: Cinema of Intimacy at The Roxie.