Artist Feature

SOMArts is proud to partner with the San Francisco Foundation to present The Annual Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition, a focused look at the future of the Bay Area visual arts. Made possible by the San Francisco Foundation and its donors, we’re excited to feature 13 promising visual artists working across disciplines and identifying young artists from Master of Fine Arts programs throughout the Bay Area whose work intersects with emerging trends. The [...]

Listen to the artist: Fred M. DeWitt is an African American interdisciplinary artist with a disability who is researching and exploring ways to deconstruct notions of white supremacy as it is promoted in early American art. DeWitt's research at Berkeley places materials as a cornerstone of cultural liberation. Coffee, cotton, gold, clay, sugar, ground pigments are just some of the elements he uses as a means [...]

Listen to the artist: Alexandru Salceanu's artistic concerns revolve around micro and macro tensions: between power and vulnerability; fear and resilience; cultural identity and the homogeneity of globalism. These themes arise from Salceanu's childhood in Communist Romania and assimilation into the culture of the United States. Salceanu's f­­amily lived under surveillance during the regime’s most repressive period. After the revolution, they managed to immigrate to the U.S. [...]

Listen to the artist: Zhongyu Yuan looks closely at the space between the individual and the surrounding world. Yuan believes that self consciousness is the key factor separating one's self and others, and is reinforced by the structure of today’s society. In answer to the spectacle of this era overwhelmed by modernization, Yuan relates minimalism to zen culture, endeavor to recover the echo of nature, and survive [...]

Listen to the artist: Consuelo's work is an effort to make the limits of the artist's own convictions a fertile ground for questioning the status quo. Starting from the idea that knowledge is a never-ending negotiation, Consuelo explores the restraintsof our thinking processes, the uses and failures of language as a mediator and our attitudes in front of what we feel incapable of understanding. Consuelo comes from [...]

Listen to the artist: The current body of work/ Installation is an invitation, an invitation into my reality, I want to invite the audience into a space that is filled with vulnerability and vagueness. I chose to create this installation with just one color, red. I chose red to emphasize the state of my emotions, like anxiety, impulsiveness, and rage. Though red evokes different emotions for others, [...]

Listen to the artist: champoy is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and performer and also currently an MFA cohort at the UC Berkeley Art Practice. Born in the highlands of Bukidnon, a landlocked province in the island of Mindanao, Southern Philippines. champoy has been based in the US/Turtle Island since immigrating in 2002. champoy's drawings and paintings exhibit varied elements from comix, organic patterns and a humorous sense [...]

Listen to the artist: Gregory Rick started in St. Cloud Minnesota, lived there roughly until Rick's father went to prison when he was seven. Now Rick sees his fathers time in prison as the direct result of fighting in Vietnam, at the time was devastatingly perplexing. The artist spent his early formative years in Minneapolis. From an early age he also found the bookshelf as a [...]

Listen to the artist: Seat cushions on a thrift store shelf, boxed-up clothing from my grandmother’s garage, an earring that lost its pair, and antique dinnerware—secondhand items are artifacts of modern day consumerism, the fast fashion industry, and the cyclical nature of style. These items are normally seen as static relics of the past. Through sculpture, Gabriella Grill highlights the memory embedded within these discarded fossils, and [...]

Listen to the artist: As an artist, Amy Elkins interested in the complex nature of gender as well as the psychological and sociological impacts of mass incarceration in America. Elkins has been researching and creating work on these topics since 2005, the year a close family member was sent to a federal prison in California. Elkins approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual [...]