PRACTICING MEMORY Everything I am today is because of the memory of someone else. I am the culmination of family and community that came before me. I want to take this moment in the Ramp Gallery to celebrate the people who got me here and thank them for all they have taught me. I want to practice my own version of memory and documenting hxstories that came before me and the hxstory I am a part [...]
VIVA Marina Perez Wong Marina Perez-Wong a.k.a. Micho P. Wong was born and raised in San Francisco's Mission District, she was influenced at a young age by the muralists, craft makers, musicians, dancers, writers, poets, photographers and social activists that lived in her neighborhood. After graduating from Ruth Asawa School of The Arts, she received her Bachelors of Arts at the California College of Art & Crafts. She began her career as a public artist and [...]
Las Caras De Las Calles Fabiola Gamino embodies her art; you see her work, you see Fabiola through it. Feeling like Esperanza in, The House on Mango Street, while walking down the colors of 24th, on an empty bus under the rain, swinging open her front gate to a volume of neighbors, each a parallel of another unit. San Francisco is poetry in itself. Running into her sisters, pieces of a childhood— people she tries to [...]
Los Angeles Blueprints In his newest body of work, Felix F. Quintana highlights the often-unseen working-class individuals that navigate through Los Angeles. He creates Los Angeles Blueprints at the root of photography and drawing, employing the cyanotype photographic printing process to create an emotional blueprint of the Angeleno, working-class, and migrant experience. Each print is hand-scribed with a velocity of line movement, revealing diverse layers of place, identity, and self within the LA urban landscape. Quintana [...]
SOMArts is honored to showcase Natalee Decker's work in The Ramp Gallery in conjunction with our 40th Anniversary programming. Natalee was a SOMArts General Technician and Building Manager from 2014–2016. The Texture of Over–Bleached Linens Natalee Decker’s work attempts to challenge perceptions of disability, intent on creating more space for beauty, empathy, and normalcy. Passionate about care work, she hopes that by sharing her personal experience with disability, she can encourage the development of infrastructural support [...]
The Achromatic Garden In 2000 SOMArts built a darkroom space for the Sixth Street Photography workshop. Jones, began teaching the advanced class, and went on to oversee the workshop entirely. It was a practice of the workshop to have new students learning black and white film photography to begin by photographing SOMArts garden. Jones continued this practice as a way of evaluating each student as well as, help them develop a creative voice and, emotional insight. [...]
SOLAR//SATURN KaliMa is an artist interested in the history and culture of Brooklyn. They explore and capture the essence of women and Black queer bodies. In this personal series, SOLAR//RETURN, they show a compilation of photos taken the week of their birthday transitioning from 29 to 30 years old. Their process to photography is inspired by quotes and personal experience. This series explores the concept of a shifting black queer fat body and conceptualizes the visual [...]
Kutty - The Youngest One My grandparents are from Madurai, a small temple town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India. Having migrated to Nigeria when I was 3, I visited them in the summers and occasional winters, always dreading the harsh heat, my grandparents' company and their Tamilian identity - their rituals, prayers, festivals, and habits embarrassed me. I rejected them as an attempt to present myself as a modern cosmopolitan city child. Now as [...]
CONNECT WITH US