Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts center in San Francisco, California, United States. Located in Yerba Buena Gardens, YBCA features visual art, performance, and film/video that celebrates local, national, and international artists and the Bay Area's diverse communities. YBCA programs year-round in two landmark buildings—the Galleries and Forum by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and the adjacent Theater by American architect James Stewart Polshek and Todd Schliemann. Betti-Sue Hertz served as Curator from 2008 through 2015.
Bill Daniel is an American experimental documentary film artist, photographer, film editor, and cinematographer. He is also an installation artist, curator, and former zine publisher. His full-length film, Who is Bozo Texino? about the tradition of hobo and railworker boxcar graffiti was completed in 2005 and has screened extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Daniel has collaborated with several artists from the Bay Area Mission School art movement, notably Margaret Kilgallen and has worked on multiple projects with underground director Craig Baldwin. Film/video artist Vanessa Renwick of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass has been a frequent touring partner, collaborator and co-curator.
Taraneh Hemami is an Iranian-born American visual artist, curator, and arts educator based in San Francisco. Her works explore the complex cultural politics of exile through personal and collective, multidisciplinary projects often through site specific installation art or participatory engagement projects.
Josh Greene is a San Francisco-based conceptual artist. His work usually is focused around creating interactions between people, and he is probably best known for his work with creating funds and grants, and by enabling others to create and show their art through a new medium, namely, his projects. In keeping with an interest in the interpersonal and relationships, he ran an unlicensed therapy practice. He has also focused on the distribution of wealth and the concept of money in his work selling money for less than its face value, giving away money on a street corner, placing the entire contents of his apartment for sale, and in buying signs from the homeless and having them redesigned by a graphic designer. He also has a fascination with the culinary arts and the art of food service, and began a restaurant out of his studio apartment called EAT, where he served as the cook for the meals. Continuing the theme of the meal in his art, he served a dinner as an art project for the staff at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and his latest project, entitled Service-Works, melds his work at a high-end restaurant in San Francisco with his grant giving.
Renny Pritikin is an American curator, museum professional, writer, poet, and educator. He was the chief curator of San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum from 2014 to 2018. He was Director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis from 2004 to 2012.
Ted Purves was an American artist, educator, and independent curator living in Oakland, California. He was the chair of the first Social Practice graduate program in the US, at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. Central to Purves' interests were the gift economy, and the distribution of free goods and services by artists.
Andrew Berardini is an American writer known for his work as a visual art critic and curator in Los Angeles. Described as "the most elegant of all art critic cowboys", Berardini works primarily between genres, which he describes as "quasi-essayistic prose poems on art and other vaguely lusty subjects."
Win "Winfred" Ng was a Chinese American artist, entrepreneur, and decorative designer. Ng was known for working as a ceramist, sculptor, metal worker, industrial designer, painter and illustrator, but best known as the co-founder of the groundbreaking San Francisco based department store Taylor & Ng and his commercial ceramics work under the same name.
Marcel Diallo is an American musician, poet, artist and community builder, known for his founding of the Black Dot Artists Collective, The Black New World and his revitalization efforts in West Oakland's historic, predominantly African-American Prescott neighborhood aka the Lower Bottoms.
Charlie Castaneda and Brody Reiman are two contemporary artists who work together to form castaneda/reiman.
Kadist is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts organization with an international contemporary art collection. In addition to being a collecting body, Kadist hosts artists residencies and produces exhibitions, publications, and public events. The first location was opened in Paris in 2006 by Vincent Worms and Sandra Terdjman, and a San Francisco, California location was added in 2011 in the Mission District.
Arnold J. Kemp is an American artist who works in painting, print, sculpture, and poetry. After graduating from Boston Latin School, Kemp received a BA/BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and an MFA from Stanford University.
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.
Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya Mahieddine Baya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Vertighost, playing the role of herself as an art historian. She also authored the Facebook Artist in Residence book on the recent history of Art and Technology in the Bay Area for the 5th anniversary of Facebook's artist-in-residency program. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is an expert in the art of California countercultures, the modernist avant-garde, surrealist women artists, the Mission School and Outsider artists.
Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. She is currently based in Oakland, California.
Betti-Sue Hertz is an American art curator and art historian and director of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.
Lindsey White (1980) is a visual artist working across many disciplines including photography, video, sculpture, and book making. Her work has been described as "reveling in lighthearted gags and simple gestures to create an experience that is all the more satisfying for the puzzles it contains."
The Sanchez Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization located in Pacifica, California. It was formed in 1996 by local artists and community members.
Xiaoyu Weng (翁笑雨) is a Chinese curator, writer, editor and educator in the area of contemporary art.
