Artist Bios

Sadie Buckner (b. 2002) is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her paintings, drawings, and constructed magazines feature densely layered fields of color in conversation with enigmatic references to pop culture and her own lived experiences. Allusions to Ugly Betty, Gwen Stefani, Clueless, and Martin Luther King Jr. appear alongside capitalized lists and notes-to-self, such as “Pain And Girl Power,” “Relaxation, Hygiene, Doubt, And The Rest,” or “Goofy Feelings, Silly Feelings, And The Rest.” Since 2024, Sadie has been making art at The Arc-Solano, a center supporting adults with developmental differences and their families in Vallejo, CA. She lives with her sister, mother, step-mother, and grandma. Sadie likes to blog about fashion and beauty, and she dreams of becoming an editor at Vogue. Sadie’s work has been exhibited in Open Invitational (San Francisco), Good Grub, curated by Alix Sivollela (Vallejo), Riverbank, curated by Gavin Piedra at the Vallejo Public Library, the Solano County Fair, and Party of Your Imagination at the Benicia Public Library, and Open Studio Gallery in New York City.

Luis Estrada (b. 1982) is an artist who has been creating work at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, CA since 2004. Estrada refers to himself as “The Weatherman," and for years he has meticulously recorded environmental changes, catastrophic weather events, and the natural phenomena impacting our daily lives. As Luis describes, “Far away in Mexico and Texas, there's tornados. There’s earthquakes 365 days a year, and New York City is frozen. Everything happens, the weather changes real fast. The weather changes backwards.” His practice ranges from notational paintings and drawings to figurative ceramics and embroidered textiles, and also explores themes relating to personal history, celebrity WWE drama, and the passage of time. Estrada’s work has been collected and exhibited nationally, and was most recently featured in exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California and Wave Pool Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. 

Rochele Gomez (b. 1980, Los Angeles, CA) often works with handmade and craft processes such as cane weaving, sewing, woodworking, and glasswork to emphasize the presence of the hand, and bring in the aesthetics of the home. Working with handmade processes has required her to teach herself the skills necessary to make, which allows her to work beyond mediums she's learned in institutional settings. In this, she can emphasize modes of production and consumption through a decolonial lens—one that first moves slowly through the body before existing in the world.

Gomez received her BFA from California State University, Long Beach (2006), and MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2014). She has had solo exhibitions at As-Is, Los Angeles (2025), Art in the Park, Los Angeles (2024), mandujano_cell (2017), Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016), and LAXART, Los Angeles (2015). Gomez has been part of group exhibitions at Suzanne Vielmetter (2024), Mile McEnery (2024), Left Field Gallery (2024 & 2021) Tyler Park Presents (2023), Artist Curated Projects (2022), ArtCenter (2020), Galería Curro (2019), Peggy Phelps Gallery at Claremont University (2014), among others. In 2016 she was part of Caza: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, Alejandra Seeber at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, which was written about in the New York Times and Art Forum. She is a recipient of the American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize and a residency at Yucca Valley Material Lab. From 2017-2020 she co-ran QUEENS Los Angeles, an artist-run space in which emerging and underrecognized artists were given solo projects. She lives and works in Los Angeles,CA.

Kainoa Gruspe: I was raised in Waiau and then Mānoa and now live in Waiau again. I went to certain schools for an art education but am now learning that my education comes from a much larger list, some of which you can find here in no particular order: Mom, Dad, the reef, Amber, Aunty Meleanna, craftinamerica, Aunty Maile, RT, southeast london, Anthony Watson, Donnie, gourd banjo, Emma, Pu’uhonua Society, Kainani, Tiffany, keeaumoku mcdonalds, Hanu Boy, Alec, Noa, Uncle Umi, Reem, Junyi, Alvaro Barrington, ballpoint pens, Lise, the loʻi, Vincent, Juvana, Vico, Aunty Puamana, Cody, thrasher magazine, Tony, my students at hālawa correctional facility, Peter, city mill, Chris Windnagle, wood, Lawrence, the dump.

I have successfully gone two years without ordering anything from Amazon and everything is still okay. My art practice has become what I can best describe as “whatever needs to get done.” Sometimes painting, sometimes sculpture, sometimes fishing, I am trying to look at the current and historical interactions of the location I find myself in and find ways I can contribute with my work. My practice is rooted in exploring the possibilities within material culture, examining how objects, textures, traditions, and techniques can be vessels that hold meaning. This might be best summed up in the form of a list of recent ingredients: pigeon feather, invasive guava wood, hard labor, pōhaku, petty theft, coconut husk, skin of the umaumalei fish, the golf course fence, douglas fir-plywood, sand taken from Waiʻanae to build Waikīkī. Kainoa’s work is included in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, as well as recent exhibitions at Kaiao Space (HI), Mānoa (HI), and Arrival Art Fair (MA).

Léonie Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, prints, and artist books. Her work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces. The shapes conflate geometric and organic structures; while specific and individuated, they resist being named. The intimately scaled forms reside in expansive chromatic fields. Her exacting work is realized on antique and salvaged paper, marble remnants, panels, walls and windows. The use of particular materials and contexts extends the dialogue in her practice between the ancient and contemporary. 

Guyer's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; staircase gallery, San Francisco; odium fati, San Francisco; 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco; Bibeau Krueger, NYC; Feature Inc., NYC; Peter Blum Gallery, NYC; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, NY; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; PLUSkunst, Düsseldorf, Germany and other venues. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reed College Art Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and others. 

In 2024 Guyer was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant; Sites ReSeen Grant, New York State Council on the Arts; John Anson Kittredge Foundation Fellowship; California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grant; Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, San Francisco Foundation. Léonie Guyer was born in New York, NY. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA, and received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, The Mead Museum of Art and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Klea is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE, an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and the late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy books in 2023.

Mitzi Pederson (b. 1976, Stuart, Florida) is currently based in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. Her drawing, sculpture, painting, and installation work is often minimal, reduced, and consistently addresses notions of time, value, and perception. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. Venues include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; American Academy in Rome; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Aspen Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; MACRO Future, Rome; Milton Keynes Gallery and Harris Museum, Preston, UK; 9th Shanghai Biennale; and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York. Previous solo exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; World Class Boxing, Miami; Ratio 3, San Francisco; Nicole Klagsbrun, NY; Schleicher/Lange, Paris; Unosunove, Rome; and White Columns, NY.

Ben Peterson Born 1977 Hawthorne Nevada, currently lives and works in Oakland California. Current work consists of ceramic sculptures Plastered or painted to resemble archeological objects, or fragments of architecture and design He has a BFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and a MFA from Stanford University. Peterson’s works are found in numerous public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, the Berkeley art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA. He is a recipient of the Pew Fellowship, as well as the Fleishhacker foundation Eureka award, and has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, as well as Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland.

J Pendleton (b. 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, and large scale collage work. JP first began making art in 2023 at The Arc-Solano, a center supporting adults with developmental differences in Vallejo, CA. His dynamic collages present a kaleidoscopic array of pop culture references partially submerged between vibrant layers of gestural brush marks and dripping paint. JP loves music, dancing, gaming, and watching cooking shows. His work has been included in Open Invitational (San Francisco), Good Grub, curated by Alix Sivollela for Personal Space (Vallejo), the Solano County Fair, Party of Your Imagination at the Benicia Public Library, and Glyph at Personal Space. His work will be included in Open Studio in New York City in 2026.

Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973) is an artist who recalibrated the possibilities of art. For over fifty years his work and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown. An autodidact, Smithson's interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science-fiction, popular culture, and language spiral through his work. He was fascinated by concepts of duality, entropy, and questions of how we might find our place in the world. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural schemes, films, photographs, writings, earthworks, and all the stops in between. From his landmark earthworks, Spiral Jetty (1970) and Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), which recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary this year, to his 'quasi-minimalist' sculptures, nonsites, writings, projects and proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas are profoundly urgent for our times. 

Smithson's works are in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Dia Art Foundation, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recently his work has been in solo exhibitions at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (2018); Montclair Museum of Art, New Jersey (2014); Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (2013); Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2012); and Center for Visual Arts, Emmen, Netherlands (2011). In 2004 an important retrospective opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, and ended at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2005.

Emma Spertus is an artist who makes sculptures and site specific installations. Recent exhibitions include "Helping Heads" at Personal Space gallery in Vallejo, and a site specific installation titled "Sentence Model" for the Kala Windows in Berkeley. She has been the recipient of residencies at Chalk Hill and Winslow House Project. Emma has completed a diverse range of community-minded art projects, including co-founding Real Time & Space, which offers affordable artist studios to 17 artists in Oakland Ca. A graduate of the MFA program at Hunter College, Emma has exhibited her work at White Columns, Dorsky Gallery, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Lab, NIAD Art Center, and other venues. Emma lives and works in the Bay Area.

Henna Vainio (Finland, b.1981) earned her MFA from The Slade School of Art, London, and her BFA from Chelsea College of Arts, London. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include Ben Peterson - Henna Vainio, 1599fdT, Mill Valley (2023); Hardstep, Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2019); More Life, Ratio 3, San Francisco (2018); Capital Gallery, San Francisco (2017) and Step of Two, Royal NoneSuch Gallery, Oakland (2017). She has also participated in a number of group shows in the UK, Finland and Germany.

Henna Vainio's recent ceramic works focus on language in the form of word stacks. In language, understanding, imagination, and meaning intersect as we read, write, speak, and listen from beginning to end. In Vainio’s word stacks, the linear is disrupted as beginning and end are compressed in spacetime. The message becomes nearly impossible to decipher, but the letters remain with their message becoming nearly infinite.

Richard Zimmerman is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans various media, including sculpture, photography, sound, video, and drawing. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from Cornell University and BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. He received the John Hartell Graduate Award, a Cornell Council for the Arts Grant, and a nomination for The Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at various venues, including Miami Art Basel, Artlot, Shore Institute for Contemporary Art, Signal Gallery, Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Enter Enter, and Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. He has been an artist in residence at Real Time and Space in Oakland, California, Zero Foot Hills in Durham, Connecticut, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Currently, he lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.