Hung Liu (劉虹) was a Chinese-born American contemporary artist. She was predominantly a painter, but also worked with mixed-media and site-specific installation and was also one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States.
Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick's contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
New Langton Arts was a not-for-profit arts organization focusing on contemporary art founded in 1975 and located the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Part of the first wave of alternative art spaces in the United States, and New Langton Arts was a leader in exhibiting new media forms in art and involving artists in the decision-making process. Its first directors were Judy Moran and Renny Pritikin.
Walter Maciel Gallery is an art gallery founded in 2005, located at 2642 S. La Cienega Boulevard, in the Culver City Arts District in Los Angeles, California, United States. Walter Maciel worked as a gallery director in San Francisco for fourteen years before he moved to Southern California and opened his own space. Maciel has served on many boards and committees, including Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hospitality House in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Art Dealers Association. He has been on lecture panels at UCLA, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, Pacific Northwest College of Art, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose.
Squeak Carnwath is an American contemporary painter and arts educator. She is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a studio in Oakland, California, where she has lived and worked since 1970.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Bil Zelman is an American photographer and director known for his powerful, candid portraiture and spontaneous, photojournalistic style. Zelman developed a highly stylized form of hard-flash street photography while in art school and Los Angeles Times art critic Leah Ollman compares the "psychological density" of his work to the likes of Garry Winogrand, Larry Fink, Diane Arbus and William Klein- photographers that are "purposely getting it wrong in one way so as to get it right in another, disrupting visual order to ignite a kind of visceral disorder".
Mary Heilmann is an American painter based in New York City and Bridgehampton, NY. She has had solo shows and travelling exhibitions at galleries such as 303 Gallery and Hauser & Wirth (Zurich) and museums including the Wexner Center for the Arts and the New Museum. Heilmann has been cited by many younger artists, particularly women, as an influential figure.
Maria Porges is an American artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an artist she is known for the prominent use of text in her visual works, which encompass sculpture, works on paper and assemblage and have an epistemological bent. As a critic Porges has written for Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture and SquareCylinder, among other publications.
Kim McCarty is an artist and watercolor painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She often works in large formats using layers of monochromatic colors.
David Huffman is an American painter, installation artist, and educator. He is known for works that combine science fiction aesthetics with a critical focus on the political exploration of identity.
Hassel Smith was an American painter.
Ron Linden is a California abstract painter, independent curator, and associate professor of art at Los Angeles Harbor College, Wilmington. He lives and works in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles.
Carolyn Castaño, is an American visual artist. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2013), the California Community Foundation Getty Fellow Mid-Career Grant (2011), and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant (2011). She is an Assistant Professor, Drawing & Painting, at Long Beach City College.
Frances C. Butler is an American book artist and educator. Butler received her B.A. in History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, her M.A. in History at Stanford University in 1963, and a second M.A. in Design at UC Berkeley in 1966. She was a professor at UC Berkeley from 1968–70, and began teaching at UC Davis in 1970. She ran Goodstuffs Handprinted Fabric at 6221 Hollis St., in Emeryville, CA, from 1973–79, and co-founded Poltroon Press with Alastair Johnston in 1975.
Lezley Irene Saar is an African American artist whose artwork is responsive to race, gender, female identity, and her ancestral history. Her works are primarily mixed media, 3-dimensional, and oil & acrylic on paper and canvas. Through her artistic practice Lezley explores western and non-western concepts of beauty, feminist psychology and spirituality. Many works conjure elements of magical realism. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her work is included in museum collections such as The Kemper Museum, CAAM, The Ackland Art Museum, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and MOCA. She is currently represented by Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles and Various Small Fires in Asia.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Stella Zhang is a Chinese contemporary artist whose practice ranges from painting to sculpture and installation. Zhang is notable for her strong feminist approach in art-making. Her work is described as "a statement for women’s power and identity," Zhang is exhibited world-wide and collected by public institutions such as the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens, Greece; and Tan Shin Fine Arts Museum, Tokyo, Japan. There are seven monographs focusing on her work, published by Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, Si Chuan Art Press, EDGE Gallery, JKD Gallery, and Galerie du Monde. She is a guest lecturer at Stanford University and also teaches at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
Katherine Sherwood is an American artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, California who is known for paintings that explore disability, feminism, and healing, and for her teaching and disability rights activism at the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.
Eleanor "Nell" Walter Sinton was an American artist, an art community leader, and educator. She was a distinguished San Francisco Bay Area abstract painter and collagist. Sinton served on the San Francisco Arts Commission, and she was one of the Board of Trustees of the San Francisco Art Institute.
