KQED Arts: Art to See at the Start of 2025 (Daniel ‘Attaboy’ Seifert, ‘Upcycled Garden’)
Weblink: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13969965/january-2025-bay-area-visual-art-gallery-museum-guide
Art to See at the Start of 2025
Jan 6, 20205
Other than September, there is no bigger month for Bay Area visual art than January. Major shows open, year-long projects kick off, and the FOG Design+Art Fair (Jan. 23–25) caps off SF Art Week, a jam-packed affair running Jan. 18–26 which includes programming well beyond that titular city.
We’ve got 10 recommendations to fill up the blank days of your brand-new calendar:
Viola Frey, ‘Transitory Fragments’
pt.2 Gallery, Oakland
Jan. 11–Feb. 22
Frey, who died in 2004, might be best known for her oversized and decidedly sturdy ceramic figures, but her practice (which spanned five decades) also included painting, drawing, bronze-casting and some truly wacky assemblage. It’s been five years since a local institution gifted us with a solo show of her work. Knowing pt.2’s careful attention to presentation, this show of art made between 1974 and 1995 will be a must-see.
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‘Stitched: Contemporary Embroidery’
Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek
Jan. 11–March 30
This is a show for anyone who admires the things talented people can do with a needle and a bit of colored thread. Featuring 18 national and international artists, Stitched pushes back against the idea of embroidery as a fiddly craft reserved for “women’s work,” surveying the political, social and artistic messages that can be conveyed when we leave the rigid definitions and materials of fine art behind.
Kota Ezawa, ‘Here and There – Now and Then’
Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco
Jan. 11–March 9
The 11th is emerging as a tricky day to prioritize art openings. At Fort Mason Center, Kota Ezawa distills iconic images into flat, mesmerizing still images and graceful video works. Familiar or nearly forgotten moments become otherworldly in Ezawa’s hands, like the surreal arrival of the Grand Princess cruise ship in March 2020 — the beginning, though we couldn’t possibly grasp it, of a very different world.
Daniel ‘Attaboy’ Seifert, ‘Upcycled Garden’
Richmond Art Center
Jan. 22–March 22
Here’s another artwork born from pandemic times. In Seifert’s hands, and with the help of house paint, repurposed boxes lose their sharp corners and nondescript branding to become frilly, flowery forms. His Upcycled Garden installation has morphed as it traveled from venue to venue across the U.S., but here, it gets a very special staging in Seifert’s hometown.
Ethel Revita, ‘Ethereal Material’
Creativity Explored, San Francisco
Jan. 23–March 29
While Revita has created artwork at Creativity Explored since 1994, this is her first solo exhibition at the space. Her works on paper are filled with repeated shapes and thin strips of color, but there’s a dynamic irregularity to her pattern-making. Rendered in marker and watercolor (often in delicate jewel tones), Revita’s compositions are both deeply satisfying and a little off-kilter, the perfect recipe for long, slow looking.
Cian Dayrit, ‘Liberties Were Taken’
Root Division, San Francisco
Jan. 23–April 19
Philippines-based artist Cian Dayrit brings embroidered textiles, paintings and multimedia work to Root Division for his first Bay Area solo exhibition. Described as a “counter-cartographer,” Dayrit uses the language of maps to illustrate complex layers of power and legacies of colonialism. His dense, richly textured and gorgeously tactile art speaks of marginalized communities in the Philippines while tapping into larger global resistance movements. This show will have a special resonance in SoMa, the center of San Francisco’s Filipino community.
‘Artist as Witness’
SOMArts, San Francisco
Jan. 25, 7:30–10 p.m.
Artist and filmmaker Adrian L. Burrell hosts a night of screenings at SOMArts that brings together short films by Burrell, Erina C. Alejo, Aurora Brachman and Imani Dennison (plus a poetry reading by Mimi Tempestt). Come for stories of womanhood, identity, community and overlooked histories, stay for a rare chance to view short films en masse (and take in a post-screening artist conversation).
Ruby Neri, ‘Taking the Deep Dive’
Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis
Jan. 26–May 5
In a month that opens with a Viola Frey show, it’s only logical to follow the through-line of Northern California ceramics to Ruby Neri, whose figurative bronzes and ceramics pick up on Frey’s flea-market aesthetics and take them to a cheerfully zany place. Her smiling flowers, nude women and technicolor finishes are by turns monumental and unhinged. This is her first solo museum show.
‘Folds’
Personal Space, Vallejo
Jan. 26–March 9
Bodies enter the landscape in the next group exhibition at Personal Space, which includes a smattering of local artists alongside heavy-hitters like Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar. Documentation of actions or interventions, like Xandra Ibarra’s excellent Turn Around Sidepiece (a 2018 video in which the artist poses atop a spinning chunk of marble), expand the show beyond the confines of its storefront walls.
Maya Gurantz, ‘The Plague Archives’
de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University
Jan. 28–June 14
Exciting things are happening down in Santa Clara. Ciara Enis, the new director at the de Saisset, Santa Clara University’s art museum, first brought a lovely and meditative Julia Haft-Candell show to the collegiate space. (For those who missed it, Haft-Candell’s work will also be on view at Rebecca Camacho this month.) Next up is an installation from Los Angeles artist Maya Gurantz, filled with video, archival material and interactive elements that chart the history of epidemics and outbreaks — and their disastrous side-effects, including racism, paranoia and mistreatment of vulnerable populations.
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