Sinjin Jones, transmedia artist

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Sinjin Jones is a transmedia artist, storyteller, and poet interested in the connections between diverse media forms which allow him to combine these in interesting ways. In 2019, shortly before the reality of a global pandemic, Jones became the Executive Artistic Director of The Pear Theatre in Mountain View, California.  

Sinjin Jones in 2024. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.
Sinjin Jones in 2024. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.

Jones has a long history of engaging in live performance. From his student days until he moved to the Bay Area, Jones spent his summers working for A Theatre Group in Silverton, Colorado where he wrote, directed, and eventually became their Artistic Director and Vice President of their Board of Directors. He has founded a non-profit, multimedia artists’ collective called Otherworld Collective; and co-founded Perplexity Pictures, a film production company. He has a background in teaching performance arts at all levels, and is currently teaching for The Pear’s outreach programs. Jones has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, Film, and Video Production from the University of Colorado, Denver; and an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University.

At The Pear, Jones is developing dynamic, engaging, and fresh programming that both surprises and challenges.
His leadership consistently demonstrates his rich intellect and deep investment in local communities. We spoke over tea at an outdoor cafe on a lovely spring afternoon.

Nanette: How did you come to theatre?

Sinjin: When I was a kid I would tell stories to myself. We were very poor and didn’t have access to theatre. We would go to the dollar store and I would get to pick out one thing. I would pick out a [cassette] tape because my mom had a radio that also had a tape recorder. I would go into my room at night and tell stories to myself, improvised stories. That turned into getting together with the neighbor kids to tell stories. I would write stories and we would perform them. This was second and third grade, and I didn’t really know what theatre was, only to some small extent. Then my elementary school turned into a school of the arts and I got to take some theatre classes. I think that’s the beginning. I consider myself to be a storytelling artist, but that live act of performing in front of people or seeing story come to life in person has always interested me. That’s really the start of it all.

More formally, I did theatre in high school. I was deciding between archaeology and theatre/film for college. The University of Denver had a program where you could do theatre and film at the same time, so I was sold. The idea of storytelling is really beautiful to me. I’ve practiced a lot of different forms of art, many are less collaborative than theatre is. I like the coalescence of different artists from different backgrounds and different skill sets coming together to create one unified portrait of something.

Nanette: Did you grow up in Colorado?

Sinjin: I did.

Nanette: Denver has a really good art scene.

Sinjin: They do. I am very lucky. Downtown Denver has a ton of public art. In college, one of the assignments for one of my theatre classes was, “Here’s a map of downtown Denver. Go see as many of the public art pieces as you possibly can.” That is very lucky. It’s nice to have a lot of public art to experience and just be around.

Nanette: You demonstrate an immense amount of theatrical knowledge, and it is apparent by your presentations that developing a contemporary and engaging season requires broad and deep research. What is your process from seed to completed season?

Sinjin: It’s long is what it is. Let’s take this season as an example. I started having conversations in July of last year; before we had started the current season. The start of it is asking what interesting things are happening in the world of theatre, around here, around the country, around the world. . . and just staying with a weathered eye on cool people doing cool things in my network. Some of those are people I have worked with, some are artists in theatres that I find to be aspirational for The Pear or for myself as an artist. Some of them are a variety of artists I would like to work with someday. Part of it is: what are these artists doing, what is Broadway doing, what are the fringe festivals doing, what are off Broadway theatres doing. 

I haven’t been in the Bay Area very long compared to most of the artists I’m working with, but there are a group of artists who will share with me interesting things they see or hear if they have a chance to go to New York. Some of them are like, “If there is something you want to know about, tell me before I go and I will see that show.” Because I don’t get to go to New York as often as I would like. If The Pear were a bigger theatre it would be different. Also, in pop culture, what is the trend in performance art, time-based art, media formats that are single person-based but more crowd facing—what are people doing there. That’s how it starts. Then reading the current seasons of many other theatres around that I look up to like Aurora Theatre or Berkeley Rep or Shotgun—theatres that I respect that have a different perspective on things. Denver Center is one of those. Each year I see their whole season and I read all of those plays. 

The fall is just reading as many plays as is humanly possible. Every year I read at least 50, maybe closer to 100 new plays. That’s not fully reading. If I read a page and it’s not. . . I won’t force myself to read it unless it’s a recommendation from someone who is saying, “I really want you to read this.” Then I will read more even if my vibe isn’t with it. Full plays, at least 50 every single year. It’s about seeing what strikes and feeling out what is inspirational.

We are coming off of a season that is highly theatrical—plays that are exploring theatricality in a different way. We’ve learned that what is most successful for us is when the audience has a sense of awe coming into the theatre. At The Pear, you never know what the arrangement is going to be. Hopefully, people are starting to have trust in the work that we do. I wanted to lean heavily into that with this upcoming season. We have a lot of plays that are historical in nature. They take stories from the past and connect us with that history by taking those stories and exploring them in an interesting way. That is what grounded this upcoming season. 

Last season we took the idea of driven characters and the concept of theatrical experiences. We chose a bunch of finalist plays. I whittle down all the plays [I read] to a group of about 15. Then I get a bunch of community members together with the whole Pear staff and the Board Members. They all have to agree to read at least half of the plays and write a little blurb about each. This year was our largest group, 16 members. Then we have a meeting. 

I believe in healthy conflict. People are arguing which play is the best. My job, in that context, is listening because at the end of the day we are a community-based theatre. I want to make sure that several of the stakeholders in our community are really excited about the choices. Then it’s logistics—can we get the rights, how expensive is it to produce this show, how does it fit in the larger scheme of things. This is the less artistic and more practical side of things where we start to move things together and collapse things that work and things that don’t work.

We are lucky we don’t do a ton of plays that other theatres are thinking about before us, so we don’t have competition all of the time. But you never know. We applied to do The Agitators two seasons ago and didn’t get the rights. I think because there was a West Coast Premiere in the Central Valley. That sort of thing will dissuade us from doing a play.

Nanette: You have to apply to do a play?

Sinjin: Yes. There are three big licensing companies. Some you just pay and you get the rights. There are plays that are newer or have a hold on them for some reason. For example, we applied for a play called Passover. It has two black men in the ghetto sitting on a street corner waiting for someone to come. It takes that Waiting for Godot vibe, but puts it firmly in a Black perspective and what it means to live a hard life in the projects. We applied for those rights and then it was announced it was going to Broadway. In that situation it can’t go anywhere else in the country because Broadway gets exclusive rights. 

It’s not guaranteed and we do pay a lot of money for rights. Musicals being the most expensive with fees for the music, books and other stuff that is licenced. Love Letters (in the current season) is one of the most expensive shows we’ve had. I don’t know why, it just is. It can range from $100 to $250 per performance. A mainstage play might be two to three thousand, a musical might be six to seven thousand to produce.

Sinjin Jones performing in Eight Nights with Chris Mahle and Rolanda D. Bell at The Pear Theatre. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.
Sinjin Jones performing in Eight Nights with Chris Mahle and Rolanda D. Bell at The Pear Theatre. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.

Nanette: When you say driven, do you mean character driven v plot driven?

Sinjin: Yes. This season we had a mix of character driven and plot driven shows. Noises Off is a show where the characters are interesting, but things are happening. I would argue you’re equally interested in the plot of the show as you are in what the characters are doing. For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday it is the characters driving the story and there is not a ton of plot. 

I’ve been looking at very powerful characters who have control of their own destiny, whether as heroes or as villains. Folks who are pushing hard to make a change—to change their world or the world at large, to fix something. Then to take stories focused on what choices the characters are making in the world and not on what things the world is doing to the characters. That sort of structure is not about spectacle, it’s about the struggles that exist in everyday life, whether it’s on a big scale or small scale.

Nanette: Is the casting more of a challenge in a character driven play?

Sinjin: I think so. I would argue, and there are people who will disagree with me on this, that character driven plays have fewer big elements to distract you from the things the characters are saying. They tend to be very language heavy. If an actor is not embodying the character in a way that is believable and exciting, you are going to notice it a lot more.

One of the goals for this coming season is to lean hard into the incredible South Bay talent that we have, in terms of casting, and to put the actors at the forefront, as opposed to covering things with spectacle and pushing through with big, larger than life things. . . focusing on that personal journey. For sure it will make casting harder. We have our first open call for auditions this coming weekend. We are very happy and honored that we are full for in person auditions. We are expecting another 60 folks to submit online. We tried to promote “first” auditions early and eagerly. We are very lucky that people are showing up. I am a very “actor first” director. I am very excited about this but it will be a big challenge for us considering the scope of where Bay Area theatre is right now.

Nanette: Your role as Executive Artistic Director at The Pear is extremely complex, much more than selecting each season’s line up. What are the joys and challenges of this job?

Sinjin: I am happiest in moments when I come into rehearsal for a show that I am not directing and I feel enraptured by theatre. It’s why I do this. It’s being connected to something larger than yourself. That’s why I am in the arts and why I love theatre. 

In the midst of all the logistics for my job to function and for the theatre to function, it is those moments that make me feel so lucky that I get to do this everyday. Especially in the Bay Area where many people do their jobs as part of three other jobs they have to do to make ends meet. I am very very lucky. 

Those moments when I come into a design rehearsal or a director rehearsal—I’ll be doing three things at once, taking notes, and I’ll look up and Wow. Something happens on stage that I am not expecting and I get to see it. That is a beautiful moment. I get to experience that more often than most people. I get to flex my artistic muscles in many different ways. That is a very rare privilege. If I want to act, I can act. If I want to direct, I can direct. If I want to design, I can design. I get to create professorial conceits for a production. I get to see that play out.

The hard things. . . with non-profit theatre in general and certainly right now, there is a looming sense that maybe not around that corner, but around the corner around that, there is just utter destruction. There is stress and anxiety. There is, we’re okay now, but there is no guarantee. There is the artistic director job which is creative and production based, and there is the executive director job which is we need to find money to fund all of these things. The granting landscape, which isn’t all that reliable here in the South Bay, makes us reliant on fundraising, and hoping that the work that we are doing is appealing to our donors. So far we are honored that we are continuing to meet our fundraising goals collectively. 

It’s doing interesting and artistically challenging work while trying to make sure that people are excited to come see it. To take artistic risks in a climate where a lot of audience members are taking less risks now than they were before the pandemic. It is a very risk aversive environment for a lot of theatre patrons. 

The people who are coming to see shows at The Pear, in my qualitative and quantitative experience, are enjoying the shows. The number of people taking the risk and coming to see shows is lower than we would like it to be. In the meantime we have the grant landscape and the donor landscape and the patron landscape, a sort of tripod to keep us from falling over. That’s a precarious balance. It’s the balance of every non-profit. . . There are some anxiety ridden days. That’s the most challenging, the general non-profit vibe.

Nanette: Theatre is highly collaborative. What makes it work and what hinders a successful production?

Sinjin: At The Pear, by necessity we are All hands on deck. We don’t have a luxury of staff that can work in a single domain. Everyone is on board for everything. For theatre to work successfully it has to be a spirit of collaboration. 

My ideal version of theatre is when a director has a strong collaborative vision and an understanding of how to execute that vision. Which is to say the director is the conductor on this train. We need to know where the tracks lead, but every artist on that team has something very interesting to add in the direction that we are going. The most effective way to go about those things is when the director says “I have this really exciting idea. I want to share it with you. What are the ideas that you have based on this idea?”

We try really hard to set up a situation, the guide rails, so that directors feel empowered to create that strong vision and feel excited about collaborating on what direction that vision might take. We are in a place in theatre where the idea of top down leadership is just not a thing. Or if it is a thing, it’s very much not in the mainstream consciousness as it may have been in the 90s and 2000s. I think that leading from behind or leading from within is a far more effective structure. That’s what pushes the elements of theatre forward. That’s what pushes productions from being good to being great. Or from being great to being awe-inspiring. That’s my goal in theatre. It’s to feel that I’m connected with something larger than myself as often as possible. If everyone is committed to that goal, and everyone feels they have a voice towards that goal, that is perfection.

The most successful productions we’ve had are when the team members are saying ooh what about this. . . In full disclosure I’d like The Pear to teeter on the precarious precipice of “can we do this or can we not do this?” For a group of artists to ask the question “What if?” and for us to set up a situation where the artists want to ask the question “What if?” is a beautiful thing. Everyone is on the edge. Can we do this? 

Sometimes the answer is no at first and yes later. Sometimes the answer is I don’t know but let’s try. If everyone on the team is firing on those cylinders—that is the best example of what makes powerful theatre—it means that everyone is artistically engaged. It’s not just people coming in to execute a job. It’s people coming in to do something they are passionate about. To me, that’s what defines the arts in general, and certainly theatre. 

Nanette: This is a quote from your CV:

 “In those brief moments where one encounters a piece of art, whether it be as simple as a single note or as complex as a symphony, and is caught up entirely in a subtly profound sense of awe, it is then that we are closest to the original intention of storytelling.” 

I totally agree. How are you able to bring that type of magic into live theatre? 

Sinjin: That’s hard. My original and most interested form of study is in this concept of the sublime. This concept of connecting to something larger than oneself. There are traditions of theatre that are about this idea, about the ritual of theatre. In that there is some magic. 

The times that I feel that theatre is actively achieving this is when you have a story that is both accessible and challenging, written by a playwright who had personal connection to the story they are telling. You have a cast that has a personal connection to the work they are doing whether that is subject matter based or process based. You have a process and consequently a director who has that same intimate connection to the work, but also has brought something of themselves and laid that bare as part of the work. You have designers that have brought a unique and fascinating angle to the perspective as well, but it is more often not noticed, it is subtle and there. All of that is half. 

The other half is an audience, it could be one person, that is for whatever reason, a little bit more open. An audience that is able to take a deep breath at the beginning, and then exhale to be connected with every other person around them. With that sort of perfect chaotic and symbiotic situation, that occurs in that unpredictable way, that’s what makes theatre the perfect expression of the sublime in that singular moment. I think this happens to people when they are experiencing art one-on-one and they feel enraptured, or when listening to poetry. It happens in film a lot because film is a fully sensory form. The unique thing about theatre is that you are not alone. It is not a singular experience. 

I’ve been in such magical situations when I am sitting there and there is an acknowledgement across the whole space that magic has happened and you have been transported to a place—emotionally, intellectually, spiritually—that you were not expecting to go even if you were open to it. That to me is the perfection of theatre. When theatre is performing at it’s peak, it is maybe the one place that is designed for that collective experience. It comes from an oral tradition, right? and it ignites that ancient, primal experience that we have when we connect with something older. But then it can connect with something new, the frontal lobe brain intellectual concept. I would like to do a PhD on the sublime.

Nanette: Is there one favorite role/play/performance that continues to resonate with you?

Sinjin: When I was in my senior year of undergrad I was working with Laura Cuetara, one of my two incredible directing mentors. She is a wild human being and directs in a very organic style. We got the rights to do the first authorized adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. This was an insane production. There were about 35 people involved. We had a German style opera house theater at the University of Denver. We took out the floor and built staircases so that it was in the round. There were things happening in the rafters, bodies hanging. I remember being in the booth calling the show. I was watching the armed soldiers in the opera house, Ofred escaping the chaos of this immersive situation. My job was to keep this production together and to provide a sense of stability with this complex, 50 plus person crew and cast. I remember feeling . . . I still get goosebumps remembering that production, how impactful it was on my aesthetic and my interests in the artform in general.

At The Pear it was much smaller. It was back in January 2022. We were doing Mountain Top and Sunset Baby in repertory. We were live for a while. I was with three wonderful actors. It was so small and so intimate. We were working on these two very difficult but very impactful plays. It was in this realm of ritual. I’m a big fan of ritual based practices theatrically. We did some hard work that was incredibly emotional and so challenging. I was working with actors to push them very hard, but in a safe and contained way. It’s that hard work you have to do with a play like Sunset Baby where the lead character, Lena, has lived through so much trauma. We need to lay that bare on stage and see her come across as a powerful woman. To work with incredible actors in that space; those moments sit with me. Mountain Top is such an important play about the real Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and not the image of that person. Those moments in those rehearsals where I felt surprised and shocked by what actors were able to conjure up from inside of themselves is just remarkable. Those are two that I would name for sure, but there are a lot.

Nanette: This concept of repertory where you work two plays together. Where does that come from?

Sinjin: What I know is that it is a pretty common thing in Shakespeare companies. If you have a summer stock experience or you have a group of people working just for the summer, oftentimes you are paying them for their time so you want to be doing full time work, so they would do Shakespeare plays in repertory. You have the same ensemble doing two, three, four plays in rep to attract different audiences, but also to keep them busy. It is less common for non-Shakespeare theatres to do repertory shows with the same acting ensemble. 

We did it for our 20th anniversary season in 2021. It was about talking to our more traditional Pear audience, saying these are the plays we’ve done in the past. Let’s put them in context with the direction we might be heading. We chose plays that The Pear had done before with plays that The Pear had never done before. We found that the actors and the directors and the crew find this to be a unique type of experience where you are contextualizing each within each other. The shows are giving perspective to one another in ways you don’t often get. It allows for the opportunity to explore two or three really different roles as a performer that you wouldn’t get to explore in context of one another. When done well, it is both a logistical nightmare, and an enriching experience for the audience and the crews involved, as the shows provide influence to each other. You might get sucked into one play or the other, but once you’ve seen one you want to see the other. It might be that you want to see an actor do a different role. 

It’s a long tradition, repertory. It provides some logistic ability for our theatre to do more shows while giving our staff a little bit more space. 

Nanette: I’ve noticed that The Pear does Shakespeare regularly.

Sinjin: Here’s what I believe about Shakespeare. I am a fan of Shakespeare. I do not believe that The Pear is a Shakespeare company. There are many wonderful Shakespeare companies in the South Bay. While I am leading The Pear, I am of the belief that we should only do Shakespeare for the purpose of contextualizing it in an interesting way. That doesn’t mean we can’t do traditional Shakespeare done traditionally. It means that its important to me to have something to say about it and that means contextualizing it and creating something that feels like it can make Shakespeare accessible for a non Shakespeare audience. Because I don’t think Shakespeare is for everyone. When we do Shakespeare I want people to leave the theatre finding it unique enough, transforming enough, that they found it interesting.

Sinjin Jones performing in Richard II with William J. Brown III at The Pear Theatre in Mountain View, California. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.
Sinjin Jones performing in Richard II with William J. Brown III at The Pear Theatre in Mountain View, California. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.

Nanette: Do the arts have/carry responsibility to encourage or further cultural dialogue?

Sinjin: My basic answer is, Of course they do. I certainly think it is my responsibility and The Pear’s responsibility to facilitate the conversation towards moving our community forward in the ways we talk about certain things. We try to be a culturally responsive organization in both the shows we produce and how we produce them. If we are going to do plays by dead white guys we want to put them into context in a larger perspective in a way that enriches our community. That also means that we are generally going to choose plays and perspectives that are traditionally excluded from the conversation. It also means that I am super interested in stories that are going to challenge our audiences in ways they maybe didn’t even know they needed to be challenged.

I’ll give an example. We did Mountain Top and Sunset Baby. Those are really heavy in the Black drama sphere. Those are hard plays about hard things that happen to Black people. I am a Black man. After doing those shows I was a little bit exhausted. There are so many plays about trauma from the communities of color, from queer communities. I was really exhausted and I didn’t want to see it in the next shows that we did. So we did Dontrell Kissed by the Sea which had Black people but it was about centering the joy rather than centering how hard life can be. That’s some of the reasons for the shows we are choosing. Yes. The trauma exists but how do we also feature actors in different stories and explore all the nuances that exist in different cultures. 

I think it is my responsibility to look at the whole swath of our community and how they can be represented, and also to tell engaging stories so that other people can understand what it is that different communities are going through in equal measure with what those communities have to offer if you haven’t experienced them. That includes a lot of learning. For me it is our duty and responsibility to help our community progress and process. There is a reason why we are doing The Agitators after the election.
I think it can be helpful for us to be reminded of where we came from in order to help us contextualize where we must go. Who knows if we will have any answers. Posing the questions is an important aspect of the work that we do. 

We shy away, perhaps to our bank account’s detriment, from doing crowd pleaser plays for the sake of crowd pleaser plays. We ask, how can we do interesting plays with interesting perspectives. We also want to play with the way we cast those plays so that people can feel enriched just by the type of people they are seeing on stage, in addition to the style we are producing it in.

Nanette: You have an MFA in creative writing and a long history as a poet. Are you still writing poetry?

Sinjin: I am. A lot of the work that I do tends to be transmedia at this point. I have a sort of entity called The Foundry of the Ether. I wrote a poetry album and then recorded that poetry album. I then sent that poetry album separately to musicians and filmmakers, and had them separately create visual components and auditory components. Then collaborated with an artist friend to put those components together to create a visual poetry album.

I am working on my first poetry book right now. Well, I guess I wrote one for my MFA, but I’m not sure that counts. I’m writing a poetry album that is more spatial. It’s set in a room and laid out as a room. It is weird. I’ve been working on this for a while. One of my major goals in life is to find a better balance between theatre and my more personal projects.

So, yes, I do work on poetry actively as well as film making. I made a short film in 2021 and in 2022, as well. There is a symbiotic series that I have going on that’s about symbols. 

It’s important for me to keep active in these other formats because I think it keeps my theatrical life alive. Hopefully what my directing craft holds is a variety of context that is attributed to the other artforms I create with.

Nanette: What is the future of live theatre?

Sinjin: No one has ever called me an optimist. I am not a pessimist. I think I am realistic. I think I am pretty honest. Theatre has a vibe which has been happening for thousands of years. There is no reason to believe that theatre as an art form is going to die. I think that it is imperitve that theatre as an industry changes dramatically in the next 10 to 20 years in order to greet a lot of the technology that exists in our world now and the next five years. As an industry theatre has never been that great at treating artists well or respecting people’s time. Part of that is very American based, because we don’t fund the arts that well here. In many, if not most, European countries there are artists’ funds and a lot of ways to do theatre work in its more traditional forms that is funded by the government. That just doesn’t exist as much here, or if it does exist there are many more difficult hurdles to jump through to get that funding. The pandemic, especially in the South Bay, has opened people’s eyes to the unsustainability of what the theatre art form does. That’s really challenging. It’s challenging the status quo in a way that I think is really important. How we pivot the “model” of theatre in order to greet that is really important. Artists should be getting paid more for what they do. That has always been the case. How do we get from where we are to where we need to be is the million dollar question. Literally. There has already been a dramatic shift in the way artists are treated and that is imperative and the most valuable thing we can continue. 

How do we greet the fact that AI is a big thing. Technology provides a type of immersion that for people in my generation, as a millennial, is much more accessible—I’ll tell you definitively as a theatre person, it is an easier sell for me to spend $100 to go to a unique immersive experience that feels one-of-a-kind, than it is for me to spend the same amount of money to go see a show that I’ve seen before. And I’m a theatre person. Theatre is my job and I love theatre. So, if I’m not a theatre person, that cost benefit analysis is so hard. Perhaps that will change. 

Historically theatre audiences have always been older. Perhaps as millennials get older they will have more interest. My generation is the first generation that grew up with computers, right. So I don’t know if that is going to get better. The industry has some really important questions to answer about what role we want to play in the artistic sphere. How we make it accessible for artists to survive, and also how we engage a generation of new theatre goers with new tools that we haven’t used in previous generations. I think it can be done. 

The reason all theatres are in this really hard financial place right now is because they are not set up for our current environment. What that future will hold, I don’t know, but I think it will take some re-invention. Theatre has reinvented itself many many times, so there is nothing that says it can’t be done, but I do believe that it will take some concerted effort.

Whirligig Interview by Nanette Wylde.

Sinjin Jones’ website
The Pear Theatre

Sharmon Hilfinger, playwright

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A Conversation between Bay Area playwright Sharmon Hilfinger and Katherine Bazak

As I sit across the table talking with Sharmon Hilfinger, I see the embodiment of two different women who are elegant, gracious, and intelligent. One is a wife, a mother, a musician; the other is an artist/writer committed to portraying her view of life and the world around her. As a playwright, she has chosen the theater to tell her truths under the guise of entertainment.

Theater is a tough art form to navigate. One must try to get their play off the page and onto the stage. It is impressive to meet someone with Sharmon’s track record. Her produced plays include three dramas and nine ensemble plays with music in collaboration with composer Joan McMillen. These have been produced by San Francisco Bay Area theatre companies, including The Pear Theatre, TheatreFIRST, Inferno Theatre, Menlo Player’s Guild, BootStrap Theater Foundation, as well as Heartland Theatre Company in Illinois. In 1998, she founded BootStrap Theater Foundation which develops and produces original plays by Bay Area playwrights.  

Sharmon Hilfinger in her office. Photo: Katherine Bazak
Sharmon Hilfinger in her office. Photo: Katherine Bazak

Katherine: Let’s start at the beginning. I know that I saw An Ideal Mother some time in the early 90s. Was that your first play?

Sharmon: Well it was’t the first play I’d written, but it was the first play of mine that was produced. I read somewhere that The Menlo Players, at Burgess Park Theater in Menlo Park, was asking for scripts, so I sent it in. The director, Dean Burgee, called me immediately and it was produced in 1992. Beginner’s luck!

Katherine: Had you written anything before 1992? 

Sharmon: I had been writing for a long time. I’m not quite sure how to say this—writing was my consolation prize for failure. I was an actor and I was admitted to the Conservatory program at Carnegie Mellon. It was, and still is, a University degree structured as a conservatory program, very unusual at that time. It was heaven! Theater classes all day, crewing shows at night—24/7 theater. It wasn’t easy to get in, and it wasn’t easy to stay in. They had a policy of accepting a certain number of students and cutting 10% of the class after the first year. It was very rigorous and class attendance was mandatory. I was there in 1970 when the Kent State Vietnam War protest killings happened. I cut classes to march on Washington D.C., which did not help my standing in the department. I’m sure there were other reasons (I was not given any kind of performance review) for why I was cut from the program. 

That was traumatic! I was devastated. I came home and finished up my BFA in Drama at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois (my hometown). IWU is one of those gems of a good liberal arts college and had a very strong drama department. I grew up getting my theater education there because I went to all the plays they put on—the Head of the Drama Department was surprisingly avant-garde. I finished my BFA in drama, but I had it in my head that I couldn’t expect to pursue a professional career in acting, I was a failure, this profession was not for me. So I gave up theater! My creativity had to go somewhere, and I started writing instead. I wrote a novel, and a number of short stories over the following years. Whatever my day job was, I would get up at six in the morning and write before I went to work. First thing in the morning is still the best time for me to write. 

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Zach Pine

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A Richard Whittaker Conversation

A few years back, Sam Bower and a few friends would gather every few weeks to think about the future of Bower’s greenmuseum.org. Its funding had come to an end. Was there some meaningful to way to keep it going? 

I’d happened into this group about that time and it’s how I met Zach Pine. Although we never managed to come up with a saving strategy, it was always a special pleasure meeting with this group of creative dynamos. Our meetings would begin with a silent meditation and move on to brainstorming as Sam manned a whiteboard, sharpie in hand. After a few hours, we’d share some food. Our meetings went on for three or four years. In the meantime, occasionally I’d run into Zach at Karma Kitchen in Berkeley. Even so, I didn’t know a lot about him. He’d mentioned that he was involved with contact improvisational dance and had also been doing some art activities in nature with groups of people. 

Zach running on a beach propeller with a sand globe decoration at Crissy Field East Beach, San Francisco.
Zach running on a beach propeller with a sand globe decoration at Crissy Field East Beach, San Francisco

One day I began asking questions and soon learned that he’d been a doctor before I met him. I was stunned. It was hard for me to imagine that this open, lively, youthful and entirely unpretentious man had already been a medical doctor and had left the profession. But so it was. Later, I got a good look at his art. The time had come to ask for an interview.

Richard: Let’s start with your journey into medical school and your experience there. 

Zach: I went into medical school for a lot of the reasons that I live life the way I do now. I was really interested in caring for people. I was very curious and had a scientific mindset. I wanted to get at real human things, and health and health crises were something I experienced up close as a young man. 

Richard: Can you say a little bit about that? 

Zach: My girlfriend got quite ill right after I met her in college. Now we’re married. I had a lot of experiences with the medical field because of that. I saw the science and humanity in it and, at that point, I decided to go premed in college. Before that I was an English and Physics major, so I already had diverse interests. My father and my stepfather were both experimental physicists. My mother is a painter, and also went to the High School of Music & Art in New York City, and did a lot of drama work. 

Richard: You lived in New York then? 

Zach: I did, but not as a child. I actually grew up in California with my mom. My parents divorced when I was two. 

Richard: Both your father and stepfather were experimental physicists. What does that mean, exactly? 

Zach: In the world of physics, there are two main branches, experimental and theoretical. The experimental physicists are the ones who actually design the experiments to try to find out how things work. My father and stepfather both worked on all the atom smashers here in the U.S. 

My youth was spent, in the summers, going wherever my dad was doing experiments. He would go and experiment with something that took months to run. Stanford, Brookhaven National Laboratory, those are places that we went because there were accelerators there. So I was interested in physics and in the humanities in college. I realized that medicine actually combined a lot of the things I was interested in, and I had personal experience with what it felt like to be on the receiving end of medical care. I saw there was so much opportunity for ways of being creative in delivering care and, also, understanding medical problems. That was how I got interested in medicine. 

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Cynthia Sears, Champion of the Arts

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Cynthia Sears smiles as she stands in front of a well lit display case filled with handmade books.
Cynthia Sears in the Sherry Grover Gallery at BIMA.

Meet Cynthia Sears, Champion of the Arts

Cynthia Sears is a creativity explorer and the founder of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (BIMA) on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. She is known for her extensive support of artists, writers and cultural entities. Her collections include paintings and sculptures; antique and finely bound books; and some 1800 artist’s books, which comprise the Cynthia Sears Artist’s Books Collection at BIMA.

A pioneer in cultural support, Sears has collected and donated numerous works of regional artists to BIMA, creating a rich legacy of Pacific Northwest artistic production. Her wide ranging appreciation of the arts is demonstrated in BIMA’s community-centered mission and diverse programming which includes musical and theatrical performance; hands on educational activities; lectures, tours, and a wide array of community outreach events including an online series Artist’s Books Unshelved. This year BIMA is launching four generous biennial awards to support both regional artists and an artist making books. These BRAVA Awards (BIMA Recognizes Achievement in the Visual Arts) are in celebration of the tenth anniversary of BIMA in 2023, and a further expression of Sears’ belief in the value of the arts to human existence.

We conversed via zoom over a span of four months, discussing a range of subjects which touch on aspects of Cynthia’s life and thinking, including her work in radio and film, social and environmental issues, collecting and philanthropy, education, and the arts. 

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Photo by Art Grice.
Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Photo by Art Grice.

Nanette: What is your background: growing up, education, early careers? 

Cynthia: I spent my childhood in Beverly Hills. I went to public school through eighth grade and then to a girls’ boarding school in Virginia, Chatham Hall. I was actually relieved that I wasn’t going to Beverly High because the girls that I knew in 7th and 8th grade who were going there were so much more sophisticated than I was. They were very concerned with boyfriends and convertibles and cashmere sweaters. . . they were already like late teenagers. I wasn’t ready for any of that. The idea of going off to a place where you had lessons in the morning and then rode horses in the afternoon was heaven. My older sister went to Chatham first. I couldn’t wait to go because I met many of her friends, whom she would bring home during vacations. They were great, interesting girls, so I couldn’t wait to go. Going to that boarding school was one of the great experiences of my life. 

Then, I went to college at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, also a small institution. The entire student body was only 750 girls. It was out in the country and beautiful. I just loved it. It looked like a medieval fortress—towering gray stone buildings which were built out of mica schist which catches the light so that it sparkles in the sun (I learned in my geography class). 

I studied English Literature and Latin. I was sure I was going to be a writer. Well, that didn’t happen, but I was convinced of it when I was in college. I had a wonderful experience with terrific people. 

Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Photo by Art Grice.
Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Photo: Art Grice.

Nanette: What happened after college? 

Cynthia: After college I got a wonderful job teaching in the Bronx. I was a teacher at the Hoffman School. It was a school for kids who didn’t exactly fit other places, either because the child was super intelligent and could get bored in a regular classroom, or kids who had physical or mental challenges. They were all mixed together in the classes and it really worked. It was extraordinary. 

I was hired as a Latin teacher. I taught Latin to second through sixth grades. We made Latin books and grammar books. They would say things like, “If the verb goes at the very end, how do you know who is doing what to whom? Maybe you make sounds so that you know this is the person who is doing the throwing and this is the thing being thrown.” They basically invented the accusative case. 

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Kathleen Canrinus, author

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A Tale of Two Remarkable Women: Interview with the author of The Lady with the Crown: A Story of Resilience by Helen Gibbons

Bay Area native Kathleen Canrinus wrote The Lady with the Crown: A Story of Resilience to honor her mother, Dorothy. When Kathleen was 15, her mother suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. After three months in a coma, Dorothy emerged partially paralyzed and cognitively impaired, upending the life of her family. 

Photo of Kathleen at work in her small office. Behind her is a painting by her father, who took up oil painting after retirement, immersing himself in it much as Kathleen has immersed herself in writing. Photo: Don Anderson
Photo of Kathleen at work in her small office. Behind her is a painting by her father, who took up oil painting after retirement, immersing himself in it much as Kathleen has immersed herself in writing. Photo: Don Anderson

Kathleen’s memoir focuses on the relationship between mother and daughter, particularly its evolution during the 54 years between Dorothy’s accident and her death at age 99. There were plenty of challenges, but also lots of laughter and, oh, so much love. It’s a story I will enjoy reading again and again, finding some new insight or well-crafted sentence to relish each time.

I met Kathleen in 2006 when we both joined the World Harmony Chorus in Mountain View, California, and our conversations over the years have focused mostly on music. I wanted to learn more about Kathleen’s writing life and in particular The Lady with the Crown. We exchanged some emails and then sat down to talk. Our conversation is edited and condensed.

Helen: When did you start thinking of yourself as a writer?

Kathleen: I came to writing late in life, that is, after I retired from teaching elementary school. When I signed up for my first writing class, I had in mind writing stories from my life and wanted to tell them well.  Even though I have now written a book that was published, and numerous personal essays too, I still hesitate to introduce myself to a stranger as a writer. But as far as thinking of myself as a writer, that came in the first few years of writing seriously, when I discovered that I was a person who noticed and remembered things, that I could write an occasional beautiful sentence, that I had a sense of how to shape a story, and most importantly, that finding words to match experience brought with it a thrill like nothing else. Writing lends meaning and purpose to my life. I like the Joan Didion quote: “I write to find out what I’m thinking.” 

Helen: How did The Lady with the Crown come to be?

Kathleen: The Lady with the Crown evolved from stories I wrote about my mother over a decade in various writing workshops and classes. My mother had a remarkable attitude about life in spite of epic reversals. She was funny too—good material. I was never writing about her for family alone but for people like my classmates and possible future readers who didn’t know her. I intended to honor her and others who live small lives with dignity and courage. Although I wrote about other topics like friendship, marriage, and aging, the response to the mother stories was the most positive. I planned to string them together in a book and had finished most of them when the editor at a small press offered me a contract.

Helen: What a great opportunity! What happened next?

Kathleen: Next I spent nine months finishing a manuscript. Everything I had already written needed to be revised and new chapters added to complete the story. My editor made a lot of suggestions that improved the book.

Helen: Can you share examples?

Kathleen: When I originally thought about doing a book, I thought I would take the stories I had written about my mother and link them very loosely, like the stories in Olive Kitteridge [a novel by Elizabeth Strout that is a collection of interrelated stories]. I thought that approach would make my task easy. But when I told the editor, she said, “No, no, no! Make it one story. And whether you like it or not,” she added, “you’re the main character. You need to put yourself into this story; you’re not just the witness.” 

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Elizabeth Gómez, artist

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Elizabeth Gómez is a Redwood City based artist and children’s book illustrator. Part of Gómez’s practice involves designing and managing community participatory murals in both paint and mosaic. 

I first met Elizabeth during her July 2021 Redwood City Art Kiosk exhibition. Her installation, Naturaleza Muerta, was striking in the manner it pulled the audience in and then held their attention with an edgy softness: A lifesize deer and mountain lion hang upside down in the center of the kiosk. They are accompanied by a squirrel and a crow. These hand sewn creatures are made from pale, low contrast fabrics. Scatterings of thin red cloth trail from each body. The kiosk floor is covered with pink quilting and a spare grid of deep red, fabric roses. There is a feeling of being in a child’s bedroom. These layers of symbolism reveal a multi-dimensional philosophy about the relationship of humans to other animals, to profound effect. In this work Gómez brings together a blend of Louise Bourgeois construction with Sue Coe content to make her own statement about real life events involving wild animals in our suburban neighborhoods.  

Gómez has an MFA in Pictorial Art from San Jose State University. She has shown at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco; the Oakland Museum of California; MACLA in San Jose, California; and at the Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California.

This week Gómez’s most recent mural, created with the help of many from our community, will be unveiled at the Magical Bridge Playground in Redwood City. We spoke during the last weeks of mosaic tile making under the redwoods and oaks on the back patio at Red Morton Park, the mural’s home.

Magical Bridge Playground mural, 2021

Whirligig: Let’s talk about your background. You went to San José State?

Elizabeth: I did most of my college in Mexico City where I am from. I did three years at the San Francisco Art Institute and then I did my masters in painting at San Jose State. I had great professors like Erin Goodwin-Guerrero and Rupert Garcia. It was an excellent program, lots of support, really nice.

Whirligig: How long have you been working in mosaic?

Elizabeth: I have been doing small things here and there but I am really a painter. I have been working with Redwood City for many years. I have done murals in the schools and parks. The city knows me as an artist that can create and facilitate public works with volunteers, with the help of the community. That is why they asked me to do this mosaic mural. I have learned a lot doing this. 

Whirligig: What are the dimensions?

Elizabeth: It is gigantic. It has more than 700 square feet of tile. 

Whirligig: You did the design?

Elizabeth: I did the design and many workshops. For example, here in Red Morton Park during the pandemic we were outdoors and indoors and outdoors again and then we couldn’t do it at all. Then, I had to transport boxes of materials to the volunteers, house to house, I would bring a new box and take competed work away. I did that for many months. It was a lot of work. Then we were allowed to work here outside again, almost a year and a half after we started. The hardest thing about this project has been the management. We have had more than 750 volunteers on this mural. Everybody is welcome. I have taught the class on how to make mosaic shapes hundreds of times now. I will be happy to see it on the wall.

Whirligig: You plan to install next week. . .

Elizabeth: We have two walls and a tunnel. We are hiring professional tile installers because it is so big and heavy. I will be there as support. I don’t know what problems we will encounter, but we will have problems. We already fixed a few things–the walls were uneven and there was an anti-grafitti sealant on one wall that would not allow the tiles to adhere, so we had to remove that.

Orange Halves

Whirligig: Tell me about your painting work.

Elizabeth: My work belongs to the Mexican tradition. I like surrealism. I like animals and nature. I like a lot of handmade patterns and decoration. I have been working on a collection called Madre Tierra (Mother Earth). They are women with the face of an animal. Very surreal. They represent the need to care for the environment. The most recent is Mother Earth Crow. She is signaling with her wings the end of the wilderness, saying “From here to here is wilderness, so you don’t build. And from here to here is for humans, so stay on the human side.” They almost look religious. They are big animals with dresses, in nature. One is Vindictive Mother Earth. She has humans in a cage. Bird Mother Earth is teaching little birds how to protect themselves against us. But all very beautiful and colorful, filled with flowers. Mother Earth Wolf is planting flowers on the pavement in Mexico City. She is taking care of them with a watering can, a nurturing Mother Earth.

Whirligig: Those are in acrylic, oil?

Elizabeth: I love to paint old style, oil on wood, because with painting in glazes it becomes very jewel like and medieval. You can touch the colors. 

I’ve also illustrated many children’s books. I just finished a book on El Salvador, ABC El Salvador.

Crow Mother Earth at the Edge of the Wilderness

Whirligig: Are there specific artists you are inspired by or look too?

Elizabeth: Sometimes I am a bit sad that the person most known here is Frida Kahlo. When you see Frida’s work it’s not only Frida’s style, but it is Frida’s style on top of the Mexican tradition. Her work makes a lot of sense within Mexican art. When she was painting there were a lot of women painting. For example Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. There was a magical group of women painters that had this surreal, folksy, decorated, colorful work. I really like their work. Because I grew up in Mexico City it was normal for me to visit Frida’s house or see a show of Remedios Varo and other artists from that time. I don’t try to do what they do, but I like the visual language they were using. My own work is always about nature and the environment.

Whirligig: Would you say that you are mostly inspired by female artists?

Elizabeth: I would say that I really like their quality. I don’t want to generalize, but with Mexican women artists there is something that is, to use a trite word, feminine–care taking, nurturing and smaller–that I like. The famous male Mexican artists are very grandiose, “Industrialism came to save us! The workers will save us!” Full of big ideas, but with little heart. I like works with more heart. I am not saying that men cannot do this, just historically in Mexico it has been the case that women pay attention to heart.

Lion Fountain

Whirligig: You exhibited sculpture in your Art Kiosk show.

Elizabeth: I do a little bit of everything. I have created three installations with ideas of nature and animals. At the Oakland museum for the Day of the Dead I showed dead animals. I made a coal circle . . . where it is clean the animals are alive and flying. Where it is dirty the animals are dead. 

Whirligig: What is it about working with animal symbolism that you hope to communicate?

Elizabeth: I sometimes feel that we humans do not believe that animals have the same right as us to be here. That we are more than they are. That we own this place. After all of the facts telling us this is not the case, global warming. . . I want to be a voice for animals, even if it is a small one, saying “We are here. We belong. This is also our earth.”

Whirligig: So you grew up in Mexico City . . .

Elizabeth: Yes. I did most of my formative years in Mexico. I came here after I got married. I have been many years now here in California.

Whirligig: How is it to be an immigrant here in California?

Elizabeth: Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not so much. Especially if you are from Mexico. My husband is from Argentina and he does not cross too many people with stereotypes about what an Argentinian is. Maybe they know about the tango. . . But if you are from Mexico the stereotypes are very, very, very strong. Sometimes when I encounter someone who knows only that I am from Mexico and nothing else about me, I feel discriminated against. For example, people who don’t know me immediately assume that I am not educated. They talk to me as if I didn’t know things. This actually happens a lot. I am not saying that everybody needs to be educated, but oh my gosh, they speak to me in such a way that I want to say, You know I have a graduate degree you don’t have to talk to me as if I don’t understand things.

Whirligig: Because of your accent?

Kelp Ballerina
Desayuno

Elizabeth: My accent for sure, and then they ask me, Where are you from? And I say, Mexico. In my life in California I have been hired at least three times as a babysitter. I would be with my children and they [some stranger in public] would assume I was a nanny. It was hard for me to convince these moms that I was also a mom and not the nanny. They would ask questions like, “The children speak Spanish to you?” And I would say, Yes. Then they would say, “That’s wonderful. Other nannies I know speak Spanish to the children but the children do not speak Spanish back. Do you have a driver’s license? How much do you charge?” They would be so surprised to find out I was the mother and not the nanny. Some assumptions are stronger than you think. In daily life doors can close easily because people have very strong stereotypes about what a Mexican is. I moved to a new neighborhood and the next door neighbor told me, “I don’t want to be discouraging but Mexicans are moving here. . .” Things like that happen here and there and everywhere. It always surprises me because most people are nice and good. But those who are rude and not nice. . . they don’t know me, I don’t know them. . .

Whirligig: Part of it is being a woman. . . 

Elizabeth: Yes. But why don’t they just ask me what I think rather than thinking I don’t know anything? Sometimes people start sentences like, “Here in California, we. . . ” immediately making me the other. I’ve been here 30 years. I can say, We in California. . . 

I like so many things about Northern California, but when I face those discriminating people I don’t like it.

Whirligig: I’m sorry that is here.

Naturaleza Muerta, at the Redwood City Art Kiosk

Elizabeth: People don’t know that if you have an accent you are asked a lot, Where are you from? How long are you staying? If it were a neutral question . . . but when you are asked that on a weekly basis it makes you feel as if you don’t belong, you don’t belong, you don’t belong. It makes you feel there is a wall around you everywhere you go. Now when they ask me, I ask them, And where are you from? Tell me about. . .  We all are from somewhere, even if we didn’t cross a border. I try to be light about it but I wish it wasn’t the case.

Whirligig: You’ve been working on a two plus year project. What will you do after?

Elizabeth: The park has asked me to make some individual animals. It will be only me in my studio. I will have control of everything. I am looking forward to that. Then I will paint. I have loved doing this, but it was a lot of heavy lifting.

Whirligig: It’s an important project.

Elizabeth: I love that we have so many community members taking part, and also, if someone came to a workshop and made a piece of the mural, it is included. I didn’t get rid of anything the volunteers created. I kept my promise, that “if you learn to do it, you are a part of the mural.”

Whirligig:  Do you think there was anything in your upbringing that made you particularly tune into non-human animals?

Elizabeth: My grandfather was a farmer. He could barely sell his cows because he loved them. He named them and the chickens and the pigs. When buyers came to take them, he had so much trouble. They followed him like dogs. He was a bad farmer in that sense. I think growing up with him I fell in love with the animals just like he did. Growing up in Mexico City, nature was so devastated by pollution, 20 million people in one city.

One day, everywhere I went, there were dead birds. Something was happening in the air or poison. Walking to school that day was one of the most important days of my life. I realized it was not a normal day. This was human induced. I think I became an environmentalist that day. Later we heard it was a paper factory that did not have proper air filters. They polluted the air. The birds died. . . It really welded a before and after for me.

Whirligig: Do you have a spirit animal? Is there a particular animal you are closest to?

Elizabeth: Not really. I strongly believe the earth would be better off without us. We are the extra animal.

Whirligig: Agreed.

Magical Bridge Playground mural, 2021

Elizabeth: Even sharks and insects have a right to be here. I’m a little bit of Buddhist in that sense. Everything that is living has a right to be here.

What makes me really happy is that I have found many paths to follow and they have taken me to incredible places that I never thought I could go or do. My parents were very sad when I told them I wanted to be an artist. But I am so happy that I am. A perfect day for me has art and nature. I have lived my life like that. And Northern California is a beautiful place and people respect nature here. People are also more open. I know that the Bay Area is the right place for me. Here I can blend in. California has a very nice collection of Asian art and Latino art and Californian art and good food.

Whirligig: How are you feeling now that the mural is up and complete?

Elizabeth: It was a tremendous amount of work. I am exhausted. I am happy.

Whirligig Interview by Nanette Wylde.
All images copyright and courtesy of Elizabeth Gómez.
Elizabeth Gómez’s website.

Minoosh Zomorodinia, artist

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A Week Living Art, 2015

Minoosh Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist and curator working in time, space and the natural world. Her current art practice involves nature walks which are documented via smart phone app. The resultant maps are then made tangible via a variety of both old and new technologies. There is an edgy, accessible humor in much of her work, this she calls “the abstract absurd.” actuality, Zomorodinia uses all aspects of her making to parse and comment on current critical issues including borders and territories, colonialism, immigration, culture and identity, stereotyping, relations of the self to the environment, the power of technology, and the art world itself. Her work is both layered and engaging—smart, funny, and often visually exquisite.

Zomorodinia earned an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). She has a Masters in Graphic Design and a BA in Photography from Azad University in Tehran. She is the recipient of a Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, a California Arts Council grant, and a Kala Media Fellowship Award. She has received residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Michigan, I-park Foundation in Connecticut, Local Language Residency in Oakland, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Djerassi Residency in Woodside, and Recology in South San Francisco. Zomorodinia has exhibited locally and internationally. She volunteers for Southern Exposure Gallery’s Curatorial Council and is a board member of Women Eco Artists Dialog. Zomorodinia currently lives and works in the Bay Area.

We spoke in the studio at Recology, where Minoosh is resuming an artist residency interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Minoosh Zomorodinia Integration with Nature
Integration with Nature, 2010

Nanette: A great deal of your work has a focus on the body in nature—often your own body which is shrouded, wrapped, blanketed, responding to external elements. Why the body? Why your own body?

Minoosh: There are different reasons to use the body in my work. First, I want to acknowledge that my friend, Tara Goudarzi, generously accepted to be a model for the Destruction of Nature, Destruction of The Human Being as we were traveling together.

One reason to use the body is expressing self. I spend a lot of time in nature, it’s an extraordinary experience and inspiration for my practice. My mind opens and I see things when I’m in nature. I search for spirituality in nature and some sort of psychology for finding positive energy. I have been wanting to illustrate this feeling in different ways.

Another reason is to dematerialize and use my body as a signifier to lived experience as well as illustrate identity. I believe using my body offers a variety of contexts and perceptions. Employing my body in my work somehow represents time and space, especially in my performance installations. I consider my body as a sculpture—I make myself vulnerable to challenge the perception of the female body, and represent culture and religion. I want to emphasize a political perception from a Muslim woman’s body and how it’s been interpreted in the world.

Nanette: Are you thinking of specific interpretations of a Muslim woman’s body? Can you explain?

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Ever Rodriguez / La Feroz Press

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Ever Rodriguez and Gabriela Valencia in the studio of La Feroz Press.
Ever Rodriguez and Gabriela Valencia in the studio of La Feroz Press.

Ever Rodriguez was born and raised in Mexico and has lived in California since the early 1990s. He writes prose and poetry on themes related to his experience, including immigration, biculturalism, music, language and nature. Ever is a pragmatic writer for whom the common becomes the special as a way to contrast the abject against the normal.  His education includes a B.A. in Spanish Literature and a M.A. in Library & Information Science from San José State University. He has worked for the Stanford University Libraries for the past 25 years. Ever’s letterpress studio, La Feroz Press, focuses on handmade editions with original texts and translations. His work often has the intention of amplifying the voices and concerns of his marginalized community.

Although we live a short bike ride apart, we conducted this interview via email while sheltering-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nanette: What is the history of La Feroz Press?

Ever: La Feroz Press officially started with this name in January of 2019. We had been working under the name of Taller de Tinta y Texto since 2015, which was the time when our printing press project really took shape. It is wise to say here that when one has the intuition or the wish to do something, one has to follow up with at least one decisive action that would move further towards that direction to really get started. 

For me, the decisive action that put me on the printing track was taking a letterpress class. This allowed me not only to learn the basics of letterpress printing, but it also laid out the challenges I would need to overcome in terms of space and equipment, and it put me in touch with the printer and bookmaking culture and communities that would inspire me to fully embrace this activity.

Out of such initial inspiration I was able to create a space for myself at home where I could potentially house a printing press and other essential equipment. For years our one-car garage was filled with unused furniture, souvenirs and unwanted items, so one day I just decided to get rid of all of it and remodel the space to make room for a printing studio.  

Once I had the space, I started itching to find me a press. At first, I was looking for a hand press, but those are as rare as they are expensive, and I even started looking at the possibilities of making my own wooden hand press. I figured that if Gutenberg’s contemporaries were able to build those presses without the tools we have today, I should be able to build one press half as good. I found and bought a book entitled The Common Press, by Harris and Sisson, which has drawing plans and notes about the construction of the Franklin hand press, owned by the Smithsonian Institution. But I deviated from that adventure for a different alternative.

In January of 2015, I found a small press for sale online. The press was not ideal, and it was certainly nowhere near the Franklin hand press, but it was an inexpensive alternative that would get me started. So I bought it and the next day I drove to Los Angeles to pick up a midsize (14 x 24) Morgan Line-O-Scribe proofing press. This was the very first piece of equipment that I owned, and it came with a little bit of awful metal and wood type, but that satisfied the itching.

I experimented with that proofing press for about one year, and then Matt Kelsey—printer and owner of Camino Press, in Saratoga, California—told me about a Chandler & Price (C&P) 10×15 platen press that somebody was selling in Gilroy. I decided to buy that press, and a few printer friends helped me pick it up, bring it to my garage and install it. Mark Knudsen and Kim Hamilton made beautiful wooden feed boards and a treadle for it, and other printer friends gave me some tools and made me feel welcome to letterpress printing. 

The acquisition of this C&P press gave me added impetus to get more serious about letterpress. I acquired both new and used metal type and other essential tools and items through friends and referrals, and then I started to get more adventurous with printing and designing other things beyond postcards. All along, my wife—who I call Gaby—had been supportive about my new adventure, and I think that when she saw me purchasing that big, old C&P press and hauling it into our garage, she realized that my temporary craziness had turned into long-term seriousness. I think she was happy but surprised and concerned all at once. Once Gaby realized that these old devices and tools were here to stay, and she saw how excited I was about them, she got excited as well and started making lemonade with my lemons.

LFP_ZoombiesCard

A couple of years passed, and in 2017 our friends Linda Stinchfield and Kim Hamilton gave us a beautiful Griffin etching press, thus helping me to expand my horizons to allow for more and better relief printing, which now includes linocuts and occasional woodcuts. Finally in June of 2019, I was lucky to bid on and win a Vandercook SP15 press at a local auction and that is now part of La Feroz Press.

By then I had taken several letterpress printing classes and I even earned core letterpress diplomas from the San Francisco Center for the Book on both the platen and the cylinder press. So far that is the story of La Feroz Press, which is still in the making.

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Judith Selby Lang, artist

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Judith Selby Lang

Judith Selby Lang’s website states that she “is an artist committed to the creation of positive symbols and life-affirming images to help energize the conversation about social, political and environmental issues.” This is a perfect description of the uplifting and transformative nature of her multi-dimensional art practice as well as a reflection of her demeanor and personality—creative, positive, life-affirming, energetic, and openly communicative about critical concerns that affect us all.

Lang’s work includes artist’s books, mixed media objects, and a wide range of projects using plastic debris collected from 1000 yards of one beach on the Northern California coast. Lang has an extensive exhibition history. She currently has a large scale beach plastic installation in The Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! (And possibly really Angry!) at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland; and will be showing in The Great Wave: Contemporary Art about the Ocean at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, California in early 2020. Her current project is creating a wedding dress made from recovered plastic bags for exhibition in Castaways: Art from the Material World at The Bateman Foundation in Victoria, British Columbia, which opens in Spring of 2020.

Lang has a BA from Pitzer College and an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University. She spent many years teaching art in a variety of North Bay (California) venues before turning her focus to the studio full time. With a barn full of beach plastic—washed, sorted and boxed—collected over the years, Lang has an immense body of work, both independent and collaborative, which reflects our times while engaging viewers from all walks of life in conversations regarding possibilities for improving our environment.

We visited on a bright fall afternoon in her rural Forest Knolls studio, just a short drive to Kehoe Beach.

Nanette: How did you come to art?

Judith: Defining myself as an artist was a long time in coming. I thought I would never have the patience to be an artist. People have this preconception that art is a wild and spontaneous activity but don’t know that after the flash of inspiration sometimes a long and tedious effort is required to realize the vision.

I grew up in a family that was art friendly. My dad and mom both painted. We went regularly to the art museum. In 1962 my parents took me to the Dallas Museum of Art where I saw Andrew Wyeth’s painting That Gentleman.

The painting drew many to the museum—there were long lines with stanchions and velvet ropes to control the crowds. Was it because curious onlookers wanted a glimpse of a painting of a black man? Mind you it was a simple scene of a black man seated, in dusky light, in a moment of repose. It’s of Wyeth’s neighbor Tom Clark. To me it seemed a radical move for the museum to exhibit a painting of a black man especially at a time when segregation still existed in the South. I remember water fountains with signs for whites only, for blacks only. This was 1962, years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Perhaps it was the shock to the public that the museum had purchased the painting or maybe, it was, as I would like to think, that there was tremendous interest in seeing a masterwork by a great American artist. Either way there were people, lots of people waiting for their turn to view the painting.

The line moved slowly in a kind of reverential prayer and when it was my turn I stepped up in front of the painting to gaze with wonder not only at the power of the image but also the incredible finesse of the brush work. Something in my young heart was deeply moved. At that moment I made a commitment to art. I made my pledge to become an artist. That an image could have such an incredible impact on me and the people who had come to the museum was something that I too wanted to accomplish. On that day, at age twelve, I knew that I wanted to do something that would make a difference—to make art that would shine a light on injustice in the world.

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Felicia Rice

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Felicia Rice, well known for her fine press work and collaborative books, celebrated 40 years of Moving Parts Press in December with a solo show at Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz, California. Rice has worked with notable Californian artists and writers including: Francisco Alarcõn, Elba Rosaria Sánchez, Juan Felipe Herrera, Enrique Chagoya and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. As Moving Parts Press, Rice has received the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, Elliston Book Award, Stiftung Buchkunst Schänste Bücher aus aller Welt Ehrendiplom, and grants from the NEA, CAC and the French Ministry of Culture with Perseverance furthers: Moving Parts Press 1977–2017. Rice celebrates her history as printer, publisher, artist and collaborator. We visited the gallery to experience the work, talk about making books and working with other creatives.

Felicia Rice portrait

Whirligig: You started Moving Parts Press in 1977 as a printshop in downtown Santa Cruz. How did you come to letterpress?

Felicia: When I was a kid a friend’s mother had a letterpress in the family room. It was a little table top pilot press. I can remember standing in the room and seeing it, and maybe touching it.

My folks were artists and teachers: my mother was a sculptor and kid’s art teacher. I grew up in her art classes and was exposed to all types of fine arts. My parents were founding members of the Mendocino Art Center. My father was a mosaic artist in the Art and Architecture movement in San Francisco working with Lawrence Halprin. He did pool bottoms and walls. Later he made independent fine art animated films.

The critical point came after I had left home. I was living in Berkeley around the corner from David Lance Goines’ studio and letterpress shop. My mom accidentally sent me one of those San Francisco Chronicle Weekend Edition articles on “Letterpress Printers of the Bay Area.” Adrian Wilson, Jack Stauffacher–there were about five of them. She accidentally sent it to me instead of my older sister. So I’m reading this thing and looking in the window at what’s going on around the corner. I started thinking this might be something I could get into. It didn’t necessarily mean I had to stay with it. I was 18 or 19 and thought maybe I could learn more. I went to Laney College which had a print and graphics program. The instructor said, “If you want to be a printer you need to get into computers.”

It was a time when there was a lot of support for crafts. A lot of my peers who grew up in California were carpenters or in the trades, which were highly respected. And the newspapers listed a lot of jobs for printers; so I thought I could be a printer. I could get work. At Laney there was some old letterpress stuff, but there was mostly this idea that one would go on to computers. It was interesting. I had also taken a printmaking class in Oregon around this time. I thought I could go to school for this but if it was just a fluke I could change my mind and do something else. I started looking around for print programs. There wasn’t really anything going on in the Bay Area. I came down to Santa Cruz with a friend to visit the school, and a friend of my friend said there was a press in the basement of Cowell College dining hall. So we went down there and there was this beautiful letterpress studio with a Vandercook, type and floor to ceiling windows with a gorgeous view of the bay. That’s how I got started. Jack Stauffacher was teaching.

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Jan Rindfleisch, artist & curator

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Jan Rindfleisch

Jan Rindfleisch is an artist, educator, writer, curator, and cultural worker. She was the executive director of the Euphrat Museum at De Anza College in Cupertino for 32 years. During that time, Rindfleisch laid the groundwork for an engaged and inclusive museum environment by continuously tapping the diverse local voices of Silicon Valley. Rindfleisch continues her work as a community builder with Roots and Offshoots: Silicon Valley’s Arts Community, a history of the art of the greater South Bay area from the post-Mission era artifacts of the Ohlone peoples to the artists and activists that have made the western/southern half of the Bay Area the rich and vibrant scene it is today.

Rindfleisch has a BA in Physics from Purdue University and an MFA from San José State University. Her awards include: Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence (2014); San José City Hall Exhibits Committee (2006–2013); The ABBY Awards (2010); Silicon Valley Arts & Business Awards; Arts Leadership Award; Santa Clara County Woman of Achievement, (1989); Leadership Vision Award in the Arts, Sunnyvale Chamber of Commerce (1993); Civic Service Award, City of Cupertino, Cultural Arts, and the Asian Heritage Council Arts Award (1988).

Nanette: What was the impetus for you to write this book?

Roots and Offshoots cover image

Jan: I am one of those people that love to question boundaries. I started thinking: How did we get past the exclusion in the art world in the monochromatic 1970s, which didn’t reflect the breakthroughs of the 1960s, such as women’s rights and civil rights? How did we take that early cultural landscape, break new ground, and build new forms for the future? After decades as an arts museum director and a lifetime career as an artist, author, community advocate, and educator with an earlier background in the sciences, I decided to put some of the explorations and findings together.

My book and project Roots and Offshoots: Silicon Valley’s Arts Community begins with an essay entitled The Blossoming of Silicon Valley’s Arts Community and a profile of artist/activist Ruth Tunstall Grant. A Spiral Through Time follows threads between the ancestral Muwekma Ohlone, Juana Briones in the 1800s, Marjorie Eaton and her arts colony in the 1900s, and artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood today. Over a period of years of research and writing, the book grew to about twenty profiles and two additional guest essays; one by Maribel Alvarez about MACLA, “Doing that Latino Art Thing,” and the other by Raj Jayadev about Silicon Valley De-Bug, “The Anatomy of an ‘Un-Organization’.”

There are people in Silicon Valley connected with incredible history, but their story isn’t being told. Their experiences tell a different story of who we are. Origins of organizations are often forgotten or rewritten, and the originators erased. How can one or a few names stand for an organization/period/idea and the rest be forgotten? How does this erasure affect our view of ourselves as creators and as being worthy of judging or promoting art, or taking a larger role in our community? I wanted to add some of these missing pieces that contribute to a richer story of Silicon Valley’s art scene. Frustration with systems can be a motivating force. Another big personal motivation was gratitude. This book is a way to thank so many people who paved the way and with whom I worked.

Nanette: The Bay Area is deeply rich in terms of cultural diversity and creative output. How did you determine which groups to represent, likely knowing that you could not include them all? Who was left out? Will there be a second volume?

Jan: The book is not a survey of the South Bay Area scene. I wanted to tell the story of the trailblazers who truly made a difference in Silicon Valley, and to provide broader historical context for their experience. A major/shared motivator was to share with the reader how the artists/activists in this book enrich us personally. The artists/activists open us to the art of daily life, and to the artist within each of us. They get us to examine ourselves, to question our lives, and to think freely. They inspire us to dream and imagine and effectuate change—to build connections (not walls!) and enliven our communities.

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Michelle Wilson, papermaker & book artist

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Michelle Wilson is a papermaker in an extremely complex sense. Her work with paper is both conceptual and concrete as it extends from the making of sheets for artist’s books and printmaking to social practice, sculpture and installation. As a somewhat recent transplant to the Bay Area, Wilson has quickly embedded herself and her work into the consciousness of the local art scene with a residency at the School of Visual Philosophy, a Small Plates commission from San Francisco Center for the Book, teaching at both San José State and Stanford, engagement with a handful of arts organizations, and many exhibitions.

This summer, Wilson’s collaboration with Anne Beck, The Rhinoceros Project, travels to the Salina Art Center (Salina, Kansas), Shotwell Paper Mill (San Francisco, California), the Healdsburg Center for the Arts (Healdsburg, California), and later this fall to the Janet Turner Print Museum in Chico, California. Her work is included in The Power of the Page: Artist Books as Agents for Change at the New Museum of Los Gatos (NUMU in Los Gatos, California), and Pulp as Portal, Socially Engaged Hand Papermaking at the Salina Art Center in Salina, KS. Wilson has a BFA from Moore College of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of the Arts, both in Philadelphia.

We got together on a lovely spring afternoon towards the end of the semester to talk about art and teaching.

Nanette: I first became acquainted with your work in 2010 at an SGCI Conference in Philadelphia, occurring at the same time as Philagrafika, where I came upon a Book Bomb intervention in a public park. How did this collaboration with Mary Tasillo come about?

Michelle: Book Bombs began as a question I posed on Facebook. I was reading about yarn bombing, the tradition of knitting or crocheting something that is then bombed— left in a public space—a form of craft meets street art. I’m not a knitter or a crocheter; I’m a book artist, and so I posted a status update, “What would it mean to book bomb?” Mary took me seriously, and through our conversation, we discussed where people read in public space, who owns public space, and it led us to the idea of park benches. In Philly, every park bench has this center bar installed that is called the “arm rest,” but is designed to prevent a homeless person from sleeping comfortably on a bench. This seemed like an ideal place to install a book. Our project grew from this initial idea. And thus, Book Bombs was born.

Nanette: What were you envisioning regarding the scope and effects of Book Bombs?

Michelle: We originally saw Book Bombs as just a project for Philagrafika 2010. However, we’ve had so much fun, we’ve continued. It’s been tricky to keep it up transcontinentally, but we manage. Most recently, we did a sort of intervention-workshop at the Center for Book Arts in New York called Keeping the Fire Alive. This was designed as a workshop for activists who were interested in using papermaking in their work, as well using it as a form of self-care against fatigue and for continued resistance. We’d originally proposed the workshop during the summer of 2016, before the election, thinking it would be a very different conversation.

Nanette: How is papermaking used for self-care?

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C.K. Itamura, conceptual artist

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C.K. Itamura is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and producer. Her work responds to a wide range of personal and social content; and is realized as richly engaging, metaphorically layered, participatory, conceptual installations. C.K. is Director of Marketing and Events for San Francisco Center for the Book and a board member for Healdsburg Center for the Arts.

Her most recent work s+oryprobl=m is a three part series of exhibitions which may be experienced at: O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, Loft Gallery in Mill Valley (June– July 2017); The Spinster Sisters in Santa Rosa (April–June 2017), and City Hall Council Chambers also in Santa Rosa (thru May 4, 2017).

We chatted over an early evening cup of tea in mid April.

Nanette: You are making and exhibiting complex, multi-layered, series of works that are highly metaphorical and cross media distinctions. How would you advise new art audiences to approach and experience your work? What do you hope people will “get” from experiencing your art?

C.K.: I’ll use my piece Ladies (2015) to illustrate your point.

Ladies was inspired by a surreal hours-long conversation I had one afternoon in 2013, with two strangers in an art gallery. One woman was a retired physician with crutches, the other woman was an art patron that I’ve seen at artist receptions but had never spoken with before. Over the course of the afternoon, the retired physician revealed that she wanted to die because her crippled legs prevent her from doing all the things that hold joy for her, such as hiking, swimming and traveling. The art patron revealed that she had lost all of her money and was now living in a van that she had to park in a different place every night to prevent getting into trouble with the police. After the conversation concluded when the gallery closed for the day, I wrote down notes that would remind me of this curious encounter. Two years later, the notes evolved into Ladies, a wall mounted sculpture in the style of a mini-dress that Tina Turner wore on stage during a performance with Mick Jagger on the British stage of the Live Aid Concert in 1985.

Ladies is constructed of torn paper grocery bags; it is a bag dress that suggests the phrase “bag ladies,” term recalled from childhood that was used to describe seemingly homeless women who kept all their belonging in bags they carried with them, from place-to-place, at all times. Ladies is symbolic of contrasts: the facades of the retired physician and the art patron vs. a hidden desire to die and destitution; the opulence of Tina Turner’s memorable performance during a come back era of her career vs. the desperation of forgotten “bag ladies.” Excerpts from the notes I wrote after the curious conversation were written on the paper bag sections in pencil then selected words were traced over in permanent marker. In a final nod to another lady, my maternal grandmother, who hung laundry outside, rain or shine, the inside of the piece is filled with wooden clothes pins that are not plainly visible from the outside, as my grandmother was rarely seen away from her home.

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Angelica Muro

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Angelica MuroAngelica Muro is an integrated artist, curator, and art educator with a strong interest in cultural criticism. Originally from the Central Valley agricultural community of Hopeton, California, Muro grew up on an apple orchard. As a child she became interested in photography, media imagery and popular culture. Muro served as Gallery Coordinator for WORKS/San José for five years, and as Educational Programmer for Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA, San José, California) for three years. She has a B.A. in photography from San José State University, and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. She is currently Director and Chair of Visual and Public Art at California State University, Monterey where she teaches courses in photography, integrated media and media culture.

Her newest project, created with Juan Luna-Avin, Club Lido: Wild Eyes & Occasional Dreams opened February 12 at Empire Seven Studios in San José. We chatted over tea in early January, at Angelica’s Japantown (San José) bungalow. Reina Sofí­a, Angelica’s eight-year-old rescue pup, sat on her lap.

Whirligig: How did you come to be an artist?

Angelica: I’ve been interested in art since I was a child, but I was never really good at making—I suppose my vision never matched my actual skill set, it still doesn’t. I remember always trying to make things such as sculptures and drawings, but never having the dexterity. Photography came into my life very early—my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dixon, had a pile of National Geographic magazines I was pointed to whenever I finished my assignment early—this was the first time I was truly able to look at images, photographs, people. Since then, it’s become my primary area of interest, socially and culturally.

Whirligig: The first time you were able to look at images or that you became aware of the power of images?

Angelica: Aware of the power, of ways of seeing, of actually looking. We are so visually saturated, so much so that we are not actually seeing. I read recently that the brain is on a need-to-know basis. Our brains store the information in our environment and we don’t actually see it, even as we know it is there.

I very vividly remember looking through these National Geographics and seeing, seeing things that I had never seen before. It was new information. This is why travel is so exciting, it’s overwhelming new information for us that we are absorbing in a completely different way, and we take that absorption as being creative influences.

Whirligig: Much of your work exploits and reveals the tensions between consumer celebrity culture and the realities of working class and immigrant lives in contemporary America, perhaps even specifically California. Who do you see as your audience for this work and what do you hope it achieves?

Angelica: I don’t often think about audience in the traditional sense; although as an educator, I often address ethical concerns involving audience with my students. I happen to live and work in California, so my work deals with the complexities of this eco-system—the spectrum of productivity, exploitation, and the distribution of wealth—and often explores issues of gender, race, and class. I’m interested in social issues, and I find that visual tension inspires me to create.

I think there’s several ways to think about audience—I remember being in graduate school, a time that allowed me to experiment with ideas with a critical, yet limited audience. Suddenly, I had a body of work about being Latina, being a woman, being the daughter of a farmworker, and navigating social constructs. And then my audience became people who where interested in issues of identity. However, my work deals with larger social issues of equalization, socialization, conditioning, and the various codes of gender identification. It’s a dialogue with my community, my artist cohort, scholars, thinkers, curators, and activists who are interested in issues of positionality and privilege. I suppose that in the simplest and most complicated sense, my audience is one interested in issues of difference, otherness, and diasporic culture. I question ideological frameworks of meritocracy, social mobility, and distribution of wealth, because I want to, in small part, be in dialogue with someone, anyone, interested in discourse about the complicated social structure we live in.

Angelica Muro

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MicroClimate Collective

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Victoria Heilweil & Glenna Cole Allee of MicroClimate Collective

Glenna Cole Allee (right) and Victoria Mara Heilweil (left) make up the collaborative curatorial project known as MicroClimate Collective. The exhibitions they produce are thematic (Hypnagogia, Wabi Sabi, Night Light, Chance Operations, Unseen Unsaid, Everything Must Go!, Eidolon, Perfect Place/No Place, X Libris, A.D.D.) with strong considerations for the nuances of layered meanings within the language of the title, and appear to seek unexpected, if not surprising, interpretations across creative genres.

MicroClimate has a focus of interdisciplinary visual and performing arts programming which provides a context for cross-pollination between diverse circles of Bay Area artists. Their mission is to foster experimentation, collaboration, and risk-taking in an atmosphere free of commercial pressures.

Within this entity they have curated eleven multi-disciplinary exhibitions during the last seven years. They are currently preparing their twelfth, Obsidere which opens at Alter Space Gallery (San Francisco) on May 9.

Glenna and Victoria are both exhibiting visual artists, often working with photography. We chatted in late January in Victoria’s Mission District flat.

Whirligig: Individually, how did you come to be an artist?

Victoria: I started off doing film and video work while I was in high school and majored in that in college. While in college I also took quite a few photography classes, which is where I discovered that I loved all media that utilized a frame. I made an experimental film in college, and also did some less than traditional photography. I think I knew then that I wanted to be an artist, but feared that I wouldn’t be able to support myself and so didn’t immediately call myself that, or move in that direction. Out of college I worked first in the feature film industry in editing, and then in the commercial photo industry as a photo assistant and studio manager. While working I was still doing my own personal photography work, and it became apparent that I wasn’t cut out to be a commercial photographer. At that point I committed to getting my MFA and being an artist. I would say that it’s only been the last ten years that I have been really actively showing my work and moving my art career forward.

Glenna: I certainly tried not to. This fact of who we are, as artists, seems to be a wider circle that persistently swallows whatever other circles we draw. I tried to do other things and deny it but it wouldn’t leave, this predicament, “artist.” I have become better at putting parentheses around the resistance and the doubt. Recently I’ve been inhabiting a certain excitement and deep joy in working consistently, as well as a daily sense of appreciation for being able to make, and give time to, my work.

Whirligig: How did you come to be MicroClimate Collective and how do you think of yourselves inside of this entity?

Victoria: I had a friend who was the Artistic Director for the Climate Theater on 9th and Folsom Street. It was a small theater that had been around a while, but when she took it over she had a vision of it having other programming than just theater. She invited me in to check out a space she thought could work for visual art and asked me to tell her what could be done there. I gave her some suggestions and then she asked if I would run it. I had been doing some curating as part of my teaching at City College of San Francisco, but was definitely interested in doing more curating outside of that arena so I said yes. Very quickly I realized I needed help with this and invited Glenna and another artist to join me.

microclimatecollective_kramer_Biblio-Babel_XLibris

I knew Glenna from showing her work in the student gallery at City College. There was also a music series and a film series at the theater. The three of us joined forces with the three film series curators to put on one night shows that took over the whole floor. We showed all different media including music, performance and spoken word. It was exciting, but very tiring and eventually the other curators left to go on to other pursuits leaving just Glenna and I. We had decided after a few years that we wanted to start looking for other spaces to curate our thematic shows, and to have them last more than one night. Right about that time the Climate Theater lost their lease and closed, which forced us to move on.

I think of myself as one of the co-founders and primary co-curators of MicroClimate Collective. Glenna and I each have different strengths and wear different hats, although we can switch off if needed.

Glenna: I was just finished with an MFA and there was Victoria, beckoning. The MFA experience I’d just finished had been transformative–the constant company and critique of others who understood art as the main focus, having everything needed right there. I wanted to actively sustain dialogue and community, and this curatorial project seemed like a possible way. It was very interesting, to create a project together to try to foster creative community–the multi-genre shows might become a conversation between artists. That was one main motivation that drew me–the notion that MicroClimate might initiate work, and even collaboration between artists. It’s been a very satisfying thing, that we have inspired others in this way a little bit.

How I think of myself within MicroClimate: as an artist, with all my personal aesthetics and sensibilities, working intentionally to be a creative collaborator. Which entails seeking to meet halfway, and to be receptive/inviting to the third thing in the room, to what would not be created alone.

I often am in the role of filtering our ideas into language, of pushing to articulate our themes, and sometimes raveling them into little knots and back out again. I find this interesting; actually enjoy it.

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Beau Beausoleil

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Beau Beausoleil is a San Francisco-based poet and the proprietor of the Great Overland Book Company, which is located in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. Beausoleil has written more than ten books of poetry. His most recent collection, Ways to Reach the Open Boat, was published by Barley Books, UK in 2013.

Beau Beausoleil at the Great Overland Book Company

In 2007 Beausoleil read an article in The New York Times about a car bombing on al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic bookseller’s street in Bagdad. This incident inspired the creation of the al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition, a project which currently has five distinct components: 130 letterpress printed broadsides; 260 artists’ books; a publication of poetry and prose titled Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here; the coordination of poetry readings around the world each year on the March 5th anniversary of the bombing; and most recently Absence and Presence, a call to 260 printmakers for the creation of fine art prints.

The project involves hundreds of artists who have created work specifically as a response to the 2007 bombing; and extensive local and international exhibition schedules, much of which Beausoleil coordinates himself. Complete editions of the visual art responses will ultimately be donated to the Iraqi National Library in Bagdad.

We met in early February over a cup of tea at Beau’s kitchen table.

Whirligig: What is poetry?

Beau: What is poetry? At one point in my life I stood on the corner of Powell and Geary, it was real close to Union Square not that far from Macy’s, and I had a little box next to me on the ground that had a sign that read “Support your local poet.” I would give out multiple copies of a poem that I had printed out to anyone who would take them. They didn’t know that they were poetry. My secret hope was that some patron would appear out of nowhere with a wallet, but of course that never happened.

I usually made enough to print out the next batch of poems. Some people would avoid me. They would go out into the street thinking that I was handing out a religious tract or a political tract of one kind or another. Some people would take them. I’d see them read them. I’d see them crumple them up after half a block and throw them away. But every now and then something would happen. I remember this one guy who took a poem. I watched him walk down Powell and I could see that he was reading the poem. He got about three quarters down the block. He turned around and walked back to me and said in this agitated voice, “I don’t know what this means, but this one line, that speaks to my life.” That’s poetry.

One time I was part of a group that was visiting Folsom Prison where there was a writer’s workshop. The visitors would read and then the prisoners would read. During the break this guy came up to me and said, “Are you Beau Beausoleil?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Did you have a poem in . . .” and he named this small magazine, and I said, “Yes.” He said. “Did it go like this. . .” and he recited my poem back to me. I was pretty stunned. He said, “I just wanted to tell you that that is the poem that started me writing.” That’s poetry.

Lorca, the Spanish poet, tells a story about duende. Duende is the inexpressible in art, in beauty. It’s there and you can feel it. Some people can recognize it. It’s an important part of the life of any artist who is really at that point. He tells a story to illustrate it.

There was a flamenco contest in this basement in Spain. All these young women are assembled. They are all in their 20s and beautiful. They are getting ready to go on the stage to perform before these three judges. Suddenly the door opens. A woman in her late 50s walks in, walks straight up to the stage, throws her arms in the air and the judges declare the contest over because they could see that she had duende. That’s poetry.

Poetry is something that gives you back part of your own life. It allows you to see your own life in another form, another way. That’s what poetry is.

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Paul Davies

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Composer, music educator, and concert pianist Paul Davies recently completed his first full length opera based on the life of Charlotte of Belgium who was Empress Carlota of Mexico during the period in Mexican history known as the French Intervention.

Davies received a Ph.D in music from the University of California at San Diego. He currently teaches composition, music appreciation, music theory, and a course on the Beatles at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. Davies has also appeared as soloist with the Foothill Wind Ensemble, the Winchester Orchestra, and the South Valley Symphony.

Paul Davies at the piano

Whirligig: You recently completed the writing of an opera, Carlota. What inspired you to write an opera?

Paul: I had been invited to give a talk about my music and present a new composition, an instrumental ensemble piece, at the Ernest Bloch New Music Festival in Newport, Oregon, in July of 1999. I was at one of the festival concerts where another composer premiered a new chamber opera of his when the idea of doing an opera myself flew into my head. I had been thinking of the tragedy of Empress Carlota for quite a few years before this, but never with the idea of doing an opera on the subject.

I suppose another impetus was that I’ve always been fascinated by history and of the possibility of traveling back in time. So doing an opera on Carlota is the closest I’ll ever get to time-travel, so to speak. I realized that my research would involve reading every major book on the subject I could get my hands on and also traveling to Mexico City to visit Chapultepec Castle, where Carlota and the Emperor Maximilian lived during their short reign. I very much looked forward to this.

Whirligig: What path did your research for this project take you on?

Paul: Since I was intent on doing the text myself, I spent a lot of time researching how to do a good libretto, and I also consulted with two dramaturges who gave me much invaluable advice. I analyzed quite a few librettos to gain further insight. Also, I came across very interesting photographs of the time period. I remember being at the library of San Diego State University and finding a photograph of the moment Maximilian and Carlota enter Mexico City in June of 1864.

Every time I read about an historical event, there’s always at the back of my mind this very small sense of myth, a sense of maybe what I’m reading about didn’t happen since I wasn’t there to actually see it. It’s not that I don’t believe the event happened, or that the historical figure in question never existed, It’s just that tiny feeling of “unreality” since I didn’t experience it myself. But when I saw this photograph I almost jumped and said to myself, “Wow, this really did happen.” I get the same kind of feeling when I look at a life mask of Beethoven, or some other figure for whom the only visual representations are idealized paintings. If I hadn’t been a composer, I probably would have been an historian.

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Diane Cassidy

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Diane Cassidy After Manet's dejeuner sur L'herbe

Bay Area photographer and artist Diane Cassidy celebrates her 82nd birthday this month with the showing of a new series of photographs at the annual San Francisco Altered Barbie show, and the launch of her first website. Cassidy studied photography at San Jose State University in the late 1980’s, and continues to take classes with respected photographers through various peninsula venues. A monograph of Cassidy’s work is scheduled for publication by Hunger Button Books in 2013.

Whirligig: How did you come to be an artist?

Diane: For me, becoming an artist was an indulgence. Throughout my formative years I was equally interested in making art and natural science. An unfortunate marriage ending in divorce left me, at a very early age, completely responsible for myself and my two children.

My first plan in preparing myself for a well-paying job was to get a degree in Art Education. Being young and impatient, I just couldn’t tolerate the necessary Mickey Mouse curricula; those how to educate courses were so so boring. I had trouble staying awake. One day while conversing with fellow classmates I learned that with a degree in a related science I could qualify for an internship in Medical Technology. I made the switch. How I relished those difficult chemistry and physics classes. A welcome relief.

During my 20 year stint as a Medical Technologist I was always taking art classes and workshops. Art was my hobby. Then one day in the 70’s while on vacation I stopped at the Script’s Institute. I noticed some images of shore life displayed on their walls that I really liked. Upon asking I learned that they were hi-contrast photographs. Thus began my foray into photography.

One day I attended a photo workshop in portraiture with Margo Davis at the Palo Alto Cultural Center. While she went over her bio she mentioned that though she had a BA in French from San Jose State, she returned to get a MA in photography. I had gotten a BA in Biology from San Jose State years ago; maybe I could return to get a MA in photography. Which I did. I retired as early as I could from Valley Medical Center and concentrated on photography in earnest.

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Lisa Hochstein

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Lisa Hochstein, Wrap 2Lisa Hochstein is a Santa Cruz, California-based artist who works in collage, painting and fiber arts.

She recently curated the exhibition Earth • Science • Art for the R. Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz. The exhibition paired 16 scientists from the USGS Pacific Coastal & Marine Science Center with 16 Bay Area and Santa Cruz artists.

Hochstein has a BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Whirligig: What is art?

Lisa: My answer to that depends on whether I am in the role of artist or of audience. As someone who creates objects, art making is a response I have to the world’s bumping up against my awareness. Making art feels very instinctual though I can’t completely explain why I feel drawn to this particular activity. It has always seemed a little strange to me—that awareness leads to a desire to make something. When I am in my studio, my frame of mind is one of openness and curiosity and a certain amount of discontent or unease. Each piece grows from a combination of feelings, ideas, memories, associations and formal considerations, plus elements of chance and luck that I always hope to be awake to. I regain some kind of equilibrium through my work, but it’s not just about that. I also want to be surprised by what I’m doing.

Lisa Hochstein, Origins When I’m in the role of audience, I take in someone else’s work and want it to transfer some of that initial response/art-making impulse from its maker to me. As a viewer I also look for something I recognize as much as I look to be surprised. Elegance, honesty, technical skill, originality, narrative truth and aesthetic truth are some of the touchstones for deciding whether I regard something as art or creative output, which strike me as different from each other. There is a lot of creative work that may be artistic but not what I would call art. For me, something that is awkward and raw can be art while something beautiful and harmonious can easily fall into a creative-but-not-art category. Art needs to sing.

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Valerie Raps

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Valerie Raps sculpture

Bay Area artist Valerie Raps recently completed a public art commission for the Alum Rock History Corridor Project.

Cultivating Community is a life-size, stylized spring tooth harrow created from fabricated steel and cast bronze. The tines of the harrow are made from casting the arms of ten San Jose community members. The sculpture is located at Tropicana Shopping Center in East San Jose.

Raps has a MFA from San Jose State University and a MA in Holistic Counseling from JFK University. She is also the Resident Curator of Art Ark Gallery in San Jose.

Whirligig: You recently completed a commission for a sculpture for the Tropicana Shopping Center. Tell us about this project.

Valerie: The project was commissioned by the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs in collaboration with Don Imwalle, who is the property owner of the northeast corner of Tropicana Shopping Center on King and Story Roads in San Jose.

About three years ago the city put out a call for participation for submissions to be part of an artists catalogue. They selected 30 out of 300 applicants for this catalogue which was then made available to developers who build commercial and residential spaces. I was one of three artists to present proposals for a public art project for the Tropicana Shopping Center. The site is part of a larger project called the Alum Rock Cultural History Corridor, an area in East San Jose which has pinpointed several locations for public funds to commenorate the rich and diverse history of the area.

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Steven Andrew Kacsmar

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Steven Andrew Kacsmar is a San Francisco based singer songwriter. His band Phantom City has just released its second CD Off the Map.

Whirligig: Off the Map is Phantom City’s second CD and your third. What goes into making an album and how do you determine the arc of the music?

Steven: My songs come from my experiences and sometimes from my idealism. Sometimes I write tunes to try and help people think about how things could be better. Sometimes I just have a story to tell. But even the songs that are about a real event often undergo a transformation from the literal to the allegorical.

In terms of making a CD, there is a lot of work that goes into producing a CD that goes unnoticed unless you don’t do it. For example, on Off the Map we recorded many takes of each part then picked the best sections and then blended them into a single track. We also ironed out any wrinkles so that we put out a polished product, hopefully without losing the fresh feel of the song. In the process of creating a CD, you spend a lot of time listening, and honing, taking out as much as you put in.

Whirligig: How did you come to be a musician and songwriter?

Steven: I’ve always been musically inclined; I sang on my mom’s lap in the car when I was a child. I was in band in high school and have been playing guitar since I was about 8. There’s always a soundtrack going on in my head. I was curious so I asked some of my friends if this was true for them and was surprised to learn that not everybody has a soundtrack to their life going on in their head. So I guess it’s safe to say that music is an integral part of who I am as a human being. I have worked at many things in my life, but the day gig I had longest was with Bank of America, for 21 years. When I left the corporate world behind, it was with a very clear intent to focus on my music while I still had some fire in my belly.

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Jody Alexander

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Jody Alexander The Artist in Her Studio

Santa Cruz based artist Jody Alexander is known for creating complex characters whose narratives are revealed through an array of artifacts which almost always include handmade books and are often exhibited as interactive art installations.

Her work celebrates collecting, storytelling, and odd characters.

Alexander has just completed two solo exhibitions: Jody Alexander: Sedimentals at Mohr Gallery in Mountain View, California; and The Odd Volumes of Ruby B.: An Installation at Saffron and Genevieve in Santa Cruz, California.

In the first half of 2011 Alexander’s work was included in: The Art of the Book at Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael, California; The Book: A Contemporary View at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; Reconstructions at Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson, Arizona; Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility at Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah; and Masters: Book Art published by Lark Books.

Alexander has a BA in Art History from UCLA and a MS in Library Science from Simmons College in Boston.

Whirligig: How did you come to be interested in the book as an art object?

Jody: While working on my Master’s degree in Library Science in Boston, Massachusetts. One of my professors took our class to Harvard’s Houghton Library. He began by showing us medieval manuscripts: Book of Hours, Gutenburg Bible, Nuremburg Chronicles amongst others. Obviously, this was very exciting to examine these treasures up close, but then he started taking out artists’ books. I don’t think I had ever seen an artists’ book before, and if I had, I wasn’t really aware of them as a genre of art. I think that I couldn’t breathe for a little while. I had one of those moments when everything suddenly made sense and it was clear that this is what I wanted to do. I proceeded to do every remaining project in Library School on artists’ books: their history, collecting them, storage and preservation of artists’ books, etc. As soon as I graduated I started to make them.

Whirligig: Tell us about the first book you made.

Jody: When I was about eight or nine I know I made some small books. I used to draw a hillbilly family and type out their story on my green portable Sears typewriter. These eventually became little books. I’m not sure how I bound them. They were just little pamphlet books. They no longer exist.

Jody Alexander Eleven Exposed Spines

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Marion Patterson

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Photographer Marion Patterson has several new bodies of work coming out based on recent travels to Antarctica and the Galapagos. Patterson was mentored by Ansel Adams who became a lifelong friend. She also studied with Dorthea Lange, Pirkle Jones, Jerry Uelsmann, and Minor White. She studied philosophy at Stanford and received her Masters in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts from San Francisco State University. Patterson was faculty at DeAnza and Foothill College for 28 years. She currently makes her home in Anchor Bay, California.

Whirligig: How did you come to paint on your photographs.

Marion: I was a painter first. A watercolor painter. But from an early age it was always photography, and then I fell into the Ansel Adams circle.

When did I start painting again? Maybe when I saw Holly Roberts’ work. She paints thickly and saves only little bits of the photograph. Instead of that approach I wanted part of the photograph to be painted on. I love paint. When I got my Masters at San Francisco State I took a course in animation in which I had to draw on cels. It’s an incredibly complicated thing. I made a camel walking across the screen and all this stuff. It was two or three minutes of film. My instructor said, “Did it come out the way you wanted it to?” and I said, “Yes, and that’s the problem.” It didn’t give me any surprises. The thing with paint is that there is always a surprise. Even with drawing there is a little surprise depending on how you hold the pencil. That’s what I love about paint. It leads you. The camera leads you. The darkroom leads you.

Whirligig: When you are isolating a particular element in an image what are you thinking about?

Marion: It is a matter of how do we see? How do we perceive as we do? Why do we perceive what we do?

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Stacy Speyer

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Stacy Speyer recently completed a residency at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. For the Exploratorium’s traveling exhibition Geometry Playground, Speyer created an interactive exhibit of metal geometric forms known as polyhedra. Subsequently she began work on a book on this subject called Understanding Polyhedra. Speyer was trained as a textile artist (MFA California College of the Arts) and is known for her large scale open weave installations. She is the Studio Manager of the Textiles Department at California College of the Arts in Oakland.

Whirligig: What is the connection between your work in textiles and polyhedra?

Stacy: There is an underlying grid in the make up of all fabric woven on a loom, but the different weave structures possible on a loom can create a huge variety of patterns and kinds of fabrics. My favorite weave structure is called plain weave and it is the one I usually use for my loom woven artwork. It is the simplest structure and when done in the light open way I weave, the woven grid is revealed. Though it is visually layered by the colourful composition dyed into the threads. It depends on the viewer’s interest whether they are caught more by the details of colour or the organic woven.
Stacy SpeyerThe start of all this polyhedra making, was a curiosity with a basketry technique, a hexagonal weave structure. It has three elements instead of the two in a basic grid that I am used to on the loom.

I liked the odd number of basic elements, one horizontal and two diagonals, that come together to make this regular structure. When all three elements meet, they make a small equilateral triangle and a set of two in three directions form the sides of a hexagon.

One year I worked out how to make the structure flat and the next year I tried making it into a basket. Then I wondered if I could close it off, making all the ends meet in some kind of spherical shape.

Spheres have always been a big part of my work but usually just seen as circles of dyed colour in the cloth or when the form the fabric is hung in an arc and column.

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Julia Bradshaw

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Photographer and video performance artist Julia Bradshaw is exhibiting seven different series of work in her first one person show at Fresno City College this month. Her work often comments on language and the mixed messages of cross-cultural exchanges.

Bradshaw was born in Manchester, England. She spent nine years working and living in Munich, Germany where she studied with Michael Jochum before coming to California in 1995. She received her MFA from San José State University in 2007. Bradshaw is Assistant Professor of Photography at California State University, Fresno.

Whirligig: At Fresno City College you are exhibiting seven different series of photo-based works: Cut Pieces (2010), Case X (2010), Nocturnal (2010), On Photographing Breasts (2009), Tissue Blowing Project (2007), Constraints (2003), and Companions of my Imagination (1994). What is the thread between these bodies of work?

Julia: I am interested in the photographic series as a means to problem solve or comment on everyday life. Apart from the Nocturnal series, all of these projects have something to do with our culture and society. Cut Pieces, On Photographing Breasts and Case X are all linked in that they have to do with my investigations into libraries and books. They consider book content, the public’s misuse of books and a library’s policy on “protecting” books. The Constraints Series has to do with the various societal dictums that potentially have something inherently good and bad associated with them. For example, I have an image and text combination I call “polite conversation.” In this image I am trying to say that “polite conversation” is positive in that it ensures a civil society, however it also has a negative aspect in that polite conversation also can prevent people engaging at a deeper level. Likewise in the Tissue Blowing Project I am also thinking about language. In this project I visually represent miscommunication, disputes, failed advances, diametric viewpoints and avoidance and absence in relationships.

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Pod Post

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Pod Post, the mail art duo comprised of artists Carolee Gilligan Wheeler and Jennie Hinchcliff, has become an icon at Bay Area print, book, and zine fairs. Their presence is memorable in part due to their complete-with-merit-badge uniforms, their much sought after collectible mail art ephemera, and their passion and advocacy for all things postal.

In late 2009 their book, Good Mail Day: A Primer for Making Eye-Popping Postal Art, was published. It quickly sold out and has gone into multiple printings. Good Mail Day—a resource rich in visual, historical, conceptual, practical and hands-on information—was created by two inquisitively whimsical pods who know how to correspond.

Whirligig: What is Pod Post?

Carolee: Pod Post—the name—started out as a brainstorm when Jennie and I were on the airplane to Tokyo in 2005. We like alliteration, and we had been playing around with the concept of a pod as a carrier of potential. After that, we discovered that one of the early national mail delivery services was called Post Office Department.

Pod Post originated as an umbrella for our postal and correspondence obsession, and we started making things under that name, rather than our individual “press” names (Jennie’s was Bubble and Squeek at the time, and mine was superdilettante), to denote that it was a partnership separate from our individual work.

Jennie: Carolee summed up the idea of Pod Post nicely—the entity came about organically, based on our mutual love of all things postal and correspondence related. Once we started appearing together at book fairs and expos as “the Pods,” we quickly realized that there were plenty of other folks out there who were just like us: people who agonized over the perfect fountain pen, searched eBay for exotic airmail envelopes, and knew their postal carrier by first name.

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Jose Arenas

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Bay area painter Jose Arenas recently completed a mural commission in his hometown neighborhood of downtown San Jose, now the up and coming art district of the United States’ 10th largest city. Arenas is art faculty at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California; a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and UC Davis, where he completed his MFA in 2000. He is currently represented by Hang Gallery in San Francisco. This interview was conducted at the completion of the San JJose mural, and will be included in a monograph of Arenas’ work to be published in early 2010 by Hunger Button Books.


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Whirligig: You’ve just completed a mural in downtown San Jose that is 16 feet high by 108 feet long. How does that feel?

Jose: It feels pretty good especially now that it’s done. I now have time to look back and reflect on what happened in the last two months. I was really excited to work with other people. I usually don’t get that when working in the studio, in there it’s mostly alone time. So I got to work with a great team for about six weeks and at the end of the project we held an unveiling party. It was a really good way to give thanks to all of them for being involved in such a big project.

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Jane Reichhold

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Jane Reichhold is an internationally recognized and award-winning artist and poet, prolific writer, editor, publisher, and scholar based in Gualala, California. Jane has written thousands of poems and published nearly 35 books on haiku, tanka, and renga, including Basho: The Complete Haiku (2008); Ten Years Haikujane (2008); and Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands on Guide (2002). Jane is a co-editor of LYNX, the publisher of AHA Books, and editor of AHA! POETRY where she keeps the practice of writing successful haiku and other Japanese poetry forms alive and lively.

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Whirligig: You spent over twenty years working on Basho: The Complete Haiku. What compelled you to create this book? Can you talk about your motivations and processes?

Jane: I felt that if I could really see how Basho wrote his hokku, by seeing each word he used and not some translator’s idea of what a haiku could be in English, I could figure out how to write a better haiku. I started first by collecting every translation of each of his poems and comparing them. Then I asked Japanese friends to give me a word-for-word translation. I began to study Japanese but still depended on Japanese translators. My only contribution was to understand how Japanese poetry works and to make the translations fit or follow these precepts.

Whirligig: That’s a very humble response for twenty years of work which resulted in invaluable insights for both Basho and haiku scholars and enthusiasts.

Jane: Truth, like haiku, is so simple.

Whirligig: What initially drew you to haiku?

Jane: On the sale table at City Lights Books Store in San Francisco, in 1968, I found a Peter Pauper book of translations for a quarter. Though I had been writing poetry since college, I felt that here in the Japanese poems was a new way of expressing poetry. Soon afterwards I was making a vessel on a potter’s wheel and just as I pulled the clay upward a bird sang out. I had the feeling that it was the bird’s voice that caused the clay to rise. I realized that in this coincidence what I felt was the same kind of inspiration Japanese poets valued.

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Alice Templeton

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Alice Templeton is winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry (2008), which she received for Archaeology: Twenty-one Poems. Alice is a poet, musician, songwriter, educator, and scholar. In 2007 she received the distinction of honorable mention from the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation for her poem Homing. Journals which have published her work include: Poetry, 88, Puerto del Sol, and Many Mountains Moving. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Art Institute of California in San Francisco.

alicetempleton_smWhirligig: When we first met you told me your poetry was about nature, but it actually encompasses so much more than what might typically be called nature poetry. I see yours as more like landscapes with an aftermath of human residue. What inspires you to write?

Alice: That’s a wonderful description of it. I think I am very place oriented, and that place is the way I measure what I feel and think. In the poetry I try to define, through concrete imagery and language, where I am so that I can know how far I’ve come—what my thoughts are now, what my feelings are now.

I often write about the places that have been meaningful to me, like my parents’ farm where I lived during high school and have continued to go back to throughout my adulthood. I think those images, those cycles of labor that we went through on the farm, were formative in my sense of who I am and what language is. I hear my parents’ voices and phrases a lot. I hear that connection between the language and the tools and the landscape. So landscape does shape my poetry, but I’m also interested in and driven by philosophical and cultural questions like: What is justice? and What is history?  Hopefully those human things inform my poetry as well.

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Jack Toolin

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Longtime San José art community member, Jack Toolin, has left the Bay Area for the vibrant stomping grounds of New York City. Jack —performance artist, photographer, founding member of the conceptual art collective C5 Corporation, and former board member of Works/San José—has work in the San José Museum of Art exhibition “Road Trip.” In this interview Jack talks about his history as a maker, what drives his practice, education, collaboration, and the search for the sublime.

toolinnatureWhirligig: You were born and raised in Pittsburgh. Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing and family life.

Jack: I grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood in the duplex that my mom grew up in. It was a racist neighborhood, very white, and conservative in lots of ways.

Whirligig: How did you come to be an artist?

Jack: My dad was into photography as a hobby, and he was very political and community-minded. He was responsible for getting various types of community programs in place like the community swimming pool, and music and art classes. So I ended up taking art and ceramic classes. Because of his interests in photography there was a darkroom in our basement, and I began to make photographs when I was 14.

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Kent Manske

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Kent Manske is a visual artist working in traditional and hybrid forms of print media. He is a professor of art at Foothill College where he teaches graphic design, printmaking and books as art. His MFA is from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This interview was conducted upon the publication of a book on Kent’s work titled Re:ad.

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Whirligig: Why do you make things?

Kent: To make sense of things I don’t understand, like my feelings about humanity. I’m compelled to process matters of our existence, like why we believe what we do. I make things to find my own peace, even though much of what I explore is not peaceful. Sixteen thousand people die per day of hunger related causes. The Arctic is melting and the oceans are rising. Exploring issues and concerns help me recontextualize my own reality and make sure I’m not living in a total state of deception. Art helps me to take responsibility for the privileges I’ve inherited.

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