SPRING 2021 PORTFOlio REVIEW Day

Portfolio reviews are a great opportunity to get feedback about your work and ask questions about navigating the professional art world from esteemed artists, curators, and educators. Each participant will have the opportunity to meet with two reviewers for 20 minutes each.

Meetings will take place over Google Meet, and artists will present digital images of their work to the reviewers. We will share some tips to help you prepare by separate email upon confirmation of your registration. Please understand that due to the limited number of spots, there are no cancellations or refunds for this event.

about the reviewers

KIMBERLEY ACEBO ARTECHE (she/they) is an educator, cultural worker, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work explores the hybrid cultures formed by technology, movements of immigrants in America, and the way movements through space and spaces has been affected by these two.

Arteche serves on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council, SOMA Pilipinas’ Arts & Culture Committee, and is the Visual Arts curator for UNDISCOVRED SF. She recently finished as the Production Manager for “We Came Here to Live” by Skywatchers in the Tenderloin. As the Artists in Education Program Coordinator at Southern Exposure, she worked to integrate more equitable and transformative pedagogies. She teaches at San Francisco State University, and is working with Kultivate Labs to develop a future Filipinx American Cultural Center in the South of Market.

Arteche is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, while creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists.

LEO BERSAMINA was born in San Francisco, California and grew up surfing and fishing on the coast, just south of the city. Early on, Bersamina began studying art and design in Santa Cruz, California. Later he attended San Francisco State University to finish his BA with an emphasis in Studio Art. He received an MFA in Painting at Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

Upon graduating Yale, Bersamina moved to New York City. He returned to California to teach Studio Art at UC Berkeley for two years. Along with his studio practice, Bersamina has also taught Studio Art at Yale, Stanford, Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Santa Rosa Junior College, and Diablo Valley College (where he currently is a tenured instructor). Bersamina continues to exhibit nationally and internationally, and currently resides just north of San Francisco.

MICHAEL HALL is an artist and educator whose work is concerned with finding empathy and complexity in situations that are often polarized and oversimplified. Through painting and video works he looks to add a more nuanced approach to necessarily critical but discordant conversations. 

Hall is a recipient of both a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and a MFA Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His recent Bay Area exhibitions include Townsend Center for the Humanities, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Southern Exposure, Marx and Zavattero Gallery and SFMOMA Artist Gallery. His work has been featured in group exhibitions nationally and throughout California as well as in numerous online and print publications, including New American Painting. 

He was born in San Diego to military parents and has lived around the world in Japan, Russia, England, and France. Hall received his BFA from the California College of the Arts and his MFA from Mills College. He currently lives and works in Oakland. Since 2003, he has taught at Creative Growth Art Center, where he began the first video production class for artists with developmental disabilities and currently is a member of the Board of Directors for the organization. Additionally, he has taught painting at Mills College, UC Berkeley, and has participated on the curatorial committee at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. Hall is currently an Assistant Professor, Painting and Drawing, at California State University East Bay.

LORDY RODRIGUEZ was born in 1976, the Philippines, raised in Louisiana and Texas, and currently lives and works in Benicia, CA. He obtained his B.F.A. degree from School of Visual Arts, New York and his MFA at Stanford University. For several years he has been working on a series of ink drawings that critically look at the effect visual languages have on culture and identity through the use of mapping and cartography. His recent exhibitions include, “Tahoe: a Visual History”, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2015), “The Map at Art”, Kemper Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012), “Code Switch” and "The Map is Not the Territory", Hosfelt Gallery New York, New York (2013 and 2011 respectively), “Surface Depths”, Nevada Art Museum (2009), “States of America”, Austin Museum of Art (2009), “Optimism in the Age of Global War”, 10th Annual Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, (2007), and “The California Biennial”, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2006). Recently completed public art projects include works for the San Francisco Arts Commission at San Francisco International Airport, General Services Administration at Land Port of Entry Immigration Federal Facility in New Mexico, and the Facebook headquarters event space lobby in downtown San Francisco.

MEL PREST is an American abstract artist whose intricate, layered paintings mobilize color, line, and perspective to activate kinetic perceptual phenomena. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Prest’s work has been exhibited internationally including: The Drawing Center (New York), The Weatherspoon Museum of Art (Durham, NC), IS Projects (Leiden, The Netherlands), McKenzie Fine Art (New York), Saturation Point (London), Nakaochiai Gallery (Tokyo). Prest has been awarded residencies at: Ragdale, The Sam and Adele Golden Artist Foundation (2012 and 2018), Willapa Bay AiR, (2014 and 2021) The Wassaic Project, deYoung Museum, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work is held in collections at Apple, BAMPFA, Crocker Museum of Art, Kaiser Permanente, Marin General Hospital, and Mills College Art Museum, among others.

As an independent curator, Prest has organized shows in Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, and Zagreb. She served on the advisory board of The Art Monastery Project from 2007–2010 and is a founding member of Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial gallery initiative in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. Prest is currently an advisory board member of Root Division, a nonprofit arts organization in San Francisco and artist advisory board member of Trestle Gallery in Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. A longtime adjunct arts instructor, she is now a program developer for City College of San Francisco Extension.

PATRICIA CARIÑO VALDEZ is an independent curator and Founder/CEO of Cariño Valdez Art Advisory. Her passion is to inspire curiosity about material culture, and her vision is to strengthen community through art collecting, exhibitions, and public programs. In addition to her role at Cariño Valdez Art Advisory, she currently develops engaging virtual and onsite public programs for the Oakland Museum of California. From Spring 2016 to Summer 2018, she served as the Curator and Director of Public Programs at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2017, Valdez was appointed by the Mayor of Oakland to serve as a member of the Public Art Advisory Committee.

Valdez has curated exhibitions and public programs for the Asia Society Texas (Houston), Erica Broussard Gallery (Santa Ana), Exploratorium (San Francisco), Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), San Francisco State University, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco), and Pro Arts (Oakland). She has participated as a lecturer, speaker, and panelist at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), San Francisco Arts Commission, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Living Room Light Exchange (San Francisco), Stanford University (Palo Alto), University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery, Cal State University East Bay, Central Features Contemporary Art (Albuquerque), and Arizona State University. 

 Valdez earned her BA in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts.