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.
Self Help Graphics & Art, Inc. is a community arts center in East Los Angeles, California, United States. Established in 1970, Self Help Graphics served as a critical locus of activity during the Chicano art movement and is a center for Chicano and Latino artistic production. SHG is most well-known for organizing annual Day of the Dead festivities, in addition to hosting exhibitions and musical performances. Throughout its history, the organization has worked with well-known artists in the Los Angeles area such as Barbara Carrasco, Los Four, the East Los Streetscapers, and Shizu Saldamando.
Jesus Barraza, is an American printmaker and graphic artist. He started working as a layout editor in 1994 of the Xicana oppositional newspaper La Voz de Berkeley. He worked as a graphic designer for student groups at UC Berkeley, community organizations and with Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez designing Shades of Power, the newsletter for the Institute for Racial Justice.
Mildred Howard is an African-American artist known primarily for her sculptural installation and mixed-media assemblages. Her work has been shown at galleries in Boston, Los Angeles and New York, internationally at venues in Berlin, Cairo, London, Paris, and Venice, and at institutions including the Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, SFMOMA, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. Howard's work is held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Ulrich Museum of Art.
Weston Teruya is an Oakland-based visual artist and arts administrator. Teruya's paper sculptures, installations, and drawings reconfigure symbols forming unexpected meanings that tamper with social/political realities, speculating on issues of power, control, visibility, protection and, by contrast, privilege. With Michele Carlson and Nathan Watson, he is a member of the Related Tactics artists' collective and often exhibits under that name.
Kay Sekimachi is an American fiber artist and weaver, best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.
Blanka Amezkua is a Mexican-American Latino inter-disciplinary contemporary artist. Collaboration, radical pedagogy, and community building are central to her art making and projects. Formally trained as a painter, her creative practice is greatly influenced and informed by folk art and popular culture, from papel picado to comic books.
Yreina Cervantez is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Lia Cook is an American fiber artist noted for her work combining weaving with photography, painting, and digital technology. She lives and works in Berkeley, California, and is known for her weavings which expanded the traditional boundaries of textile arts. She has been a professor at California College of the Arts since 1976.
Patricia Rodriguez is a prominent Chicana artist and educator. Rodriguez grew up in Marfa, Texas and moved to San Francisco to later pursue an art degree at Merritt College and this is where she learned about the Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALA-F) and the Chicano Movement. In 1970, Patricia received a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute and this is where she met Graciela Carrillo. Together, they created and founded the Mujeres Muralistas, the first Chicana women's mural collective in San Francisco.
Jane Norling is a visual artist active in San Francisco Bay Area cultural venues since 1970. Her work addresses social & environmental justice and aesthetic concerns through public art, graphic design, painting, printmaking & small press publishing. She graduated from Bennington College in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and began her career designing books at Random House before relocating to San Francisco in 1970.
Sandy Rodriguez was born in 1975 in National City, California. She is a Los Angeles based artist who grew up on the US-Mexico border, in Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles. She has exhibited her works with numerous museums and galleries, including the Denver Art Museum, The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, MOCA Busan Busan Bienniale, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Art+Practice, and Self Help Graphics. Her work focuses on the ongoing cycles of violence on communities of color by blending historical and recent events in the Los Angeles area and along south-west US-Mexico border. A transitional moment for Rodriguez happened in 2014 on a visit to Oaxaca, a southern Mexican Region, where she first procured a red pigment called cochineal, coming from the pre-Columbian era. Prior to this, Rodriguez had painted exclusively in modern paint. The encounter with cochineal happened at the same time she was painting fire paintings and the protests began in Ayotzinapa Mexico in response to forty-three missing college students, which included setting fire to palacio nacional and an Enrique Peña Nieto effigy pinata. The alignment of content, form, and the materials magnified how material can signal cultural identity, history, and politics. A goal of her work is to disrupt dominant narratives and interrogate systems that are ongoing expressions of colonial violence witnessed regularly, including Customs Border Enforcement, Police, and Climate Change.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an American visual artist, organizer, and professor.
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA) is an arts nonprofit that was founded in 1977, and is located at 2868 Mission Street in the Mission District in San Francisco, California. They provide art studio space, art classes, an art gallery, and a theater. Their graphics department is called Mission Grafica, and features at studio for printmaking and is known for the hand printed posters. It was formerly named, Centro Cultural de La Mission.
Sandra C. Fernández is an Ecuadorian-American artist living in Texas. Her practice includes—separately and in combination—printmaking, photography, artist's books, soft sculpture, fiber art, assemblage, and installations; using a variety of materials, such as paper, thread, metal, wood, organic materials, and small found objects. Fernandez's work is rooted in the transborder experiences of exile, dislocation, relocation, memory, and self-conscious identity-construction/reconstruction.
Oree Originol is an artist and activist working in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Originol's work has been included in exhibits at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the Oakland Museum of California. In addition, his portraits of victims of police violence have been used in social justice demonstrations in the Bay Area and other locations.
Susan Landauer (1958–2020) was an American art historian, author, and curator of modern and contemporary art based in California. She worked for three decades, both independently and as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and co-founder of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Landauer was known for championing movements and idioms of California art, overlooked artists of the past, women artists, and artists of color. She organized exhibitions that gained national attention; among the best known are: "The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism", "Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement", and retrospectives of Elmer Bischoff, Roy De Forest, and Franklin Williams. Her work was recognized with awards and grants from the International Association of Art Critics, National Endowment for the Arts and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. Critics, including Roberta Smith and Christopher Knight, praised her scholarship on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, and Bernice Bing, among others, as pioneering. In 2021, Art in America editor and curator Michael Duncan said that "no other scholar has contributed as much to the study of California art". Landauer died of lung cancer at age 62 in Oakland on December 19, 2020.
Angela Hennessy is an American artist and educator. She is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts, and co-founder of SeeBlackWomxn. Hennessy teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death in contemporary art. She primarily works with textiles. She uses synthetic and human hair to create large-scale sculptures addressing cultural narratives of the body and mortality. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice addresses death and the dead themselves. Hennessy constructs “ephemeral and celestial forms” with every day gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding.
Linda Gass is an American environmental activist and artist known for brightly colored quilted silk landscapes, environmental works, and public art sculptures, which reflect her passion for environmental preservation, water conservation and land use.
JoAnn Gillerman is an American multimedia artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is known for interdisciplinary, often interactive and immersive, works merging art, science, culture and technology. Gillerman emerged in the 1970s as an early new media artist, creating experimental combinations of video, collaborative live performance and installation. Art historian Liz Kotz wrote, "Gillerman pioneered the use of computer graphics and synthetically-generated imagery in video art … us[ing] the technology of computer-generated and re-processed images combined with electronic and acoustic music to develop different ways of making abstract visual designs." Since the 1990s, she has employed new technologies to produce interactive and educational environments, performances and works focused on cosmic events, natural phenomena and sociopolitical issues.
