Flyer Design by Crystal Dawana. Image by Rachel Thomander. Typeface: Ouvrières by Laure Azizi. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

Helping Heads

Curated by Gabriel Garza

Opening Mother's Day, Sunday May 12 from 2-5pm

May 12 - June 30, 2024

Helping Heads opens Mother's Day (Sunday May 12) from 2-5pm! Curated by Gabriel Garza, the exhibition presents collaborative work made by children and the adult artists in their lives. The opening reception features a sock-puppet workshop by Erica Gangsei (BYOSS: Bring Your Own Single Sock), kid DJ Valentina Samudio-King, live music by Matt Robidoux and Barbie Dolphin Magic (Benjamin Vilmain and Frances), natural wine courtesy of Village and more!

Featuring work by:

• Miguel Arzabe + Rachelle Reichert + Inti Reichert Arzabe 

• John Benson + Suzi Garner + Quill Garner-Benson

• Cristine Blanco + Agusto Blanco + Otis Blanco

• Ryan De La Hoz + Ollie De La Hoz

• Erica Gangsei + Benjamin Vilmain + Frances Vilmain

• Ahna Girshick + Scott Snibbe + Samaya Snibbe

• Dana Hemenway + Mare Beatrix Blue Hemenway

• Carey Lin + Weston Gilder-Lin

• Lee Materazzi + Mia Blumenberg + Brook Blumenberg

• Juan Carlos Quintana + Delanyo Quintana

• Jonathan Runcio + Leon Runcio + Mona Runcio

• Lisa Samudio + Valentina Samudio-King

• Emma Spertus + Hazel Taylor

• Rachel Thomander + Tomás Thomander + Gregorio Thomander

• Lindsay Tully + Lana Williams + Frances Tully-Williams

• Gaby Wolodarski + Tova Mae Arnold

Sock puppet workshop led by Erica Gangsei

Exhibition documentation by Jordan Benton. Opening photos by Lemia Bodden.

Miguel Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions - weavings, paintings, videos. He starts by finding outdated beauty in paper ephemera from art shows, modernist paintings, discarded audio recordings. They are methodically analyzed, deconstructed, reverse-engineered. Drawing inspiration from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves the fragments together revealing uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation. Arzabe lives in Oakland and is a charter studio member at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. He had recent solo shows at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA). Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in museums and galleries including MAC Lyon (France), MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Oregon), the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Arzabe’s work is held in public collections such as Albuquerque Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, San Francisco Arts Commission, the State of California, as well as numerous private collections. He has attended many residencies including Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Millay Arts, and Santa Fe Art Institute. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2022 Arzabe was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. In 2023 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and and a Golden Foundation Residency. -

Rachelle Reichert is a visual artist and art educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California (Chochenyo Ohlone territory). Rachelle works in a variety of media to explore landscapes permanently altered by climate change and industrialization. She is interested in earth observation satellite imagery- how nature is composed in images and then circulated to a public, algorithmic visions, and natural systems to view how nature is manipulated by human behavior. Her research focuses on sites of specific extracted materials: salt, clay, lithium. Research findings are interpreted through drawings, photographs, and mixed-media artworks that focus on materials found at the site. Artworks embody multi-scale complexities of observing the natural world, both human and machine, and the emotional connections between the two. Artwork is included in many public and private collections, including the Center for Art+Environment Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Archive, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Library, Meta HQ, Google HQ, and Adobe, Inc. Reichert has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Center for Contemporary Art at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Anglim/Trimble Gallery, and September Gallery. Her work has been reviewed and published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Make: Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler and New American Paintings and she has completed permanent commissions for the Ritz Mandarin Oriental in Madrid, Spain and Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. She has presented her artwork at the California Climate Change Symposium, the San Francisco State of the Estuary Conference, and the American Geophysical Union Meeting and regularly lectures on her artwork and research.

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John Benson, Suzi Garner, and Quilly have both individual and collaborative practices, often involving milk, making messes, vibrations, light and sound, dioramas and costumes.

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Cristine Blanco is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, sculpture and installation. Her works take environmental injustices, the precarity of resources, and lineage as her starting point. Her labor intensive practice combines material and weight to explore both tension and care.

Agusto is a curious artist who approaches everything with the question, “Why?” His practice ranges from painting, sculpture and performance - specifically with motor vehicles. Agusto shapes the land with his plastic excavator and creates reverse donuts using his cousin’s spiderman car (Thank you Ethan).

Otis is still fairly new to this world but is following in the footsteps of his older brother. He spends his time investigating the functionality of most objects. The kitchen is his primary studio location, where he experiments with food flavors, textures and colors.

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Ryan De La Hoz lives and works in San Francisco. Heavily influenced by the contrast of past and present as well as modern culture versus antiquity, his work examines society at large and tends to focus on loss, hope, isolation, freedom from oppression, and the destruction of natural resources. He uses a broad variety of media and objects in his attempts to analyze the current state of affairs. He has participated in solo exhibitions in San Francisco, LA and Seattle + group exhibitions worldwide. Ryan's work has been published by FLJ Magazine Tokyo, Museums Press UK, IdN Magazine Hong Kong, and Juxtapoz, Beautiful/Decay, SF Chronicle, and the New York Times in the USA.

Ollie De La Hoz is a tenacious (almost) three year old who loves San Francisco and his best friend, Mom.

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Erica Gangsei wears many hats, among them: mixed media sculptor, mom, media producer, games curator, puppet enthusiast, political activist and transdimensional blob. Her projects engage community members of all ages in the joys of collective making, while pushing the boundaries of which forms of expression are "taken seriously" as Fine Art. Originally from Brooklyn New York, she now lives and works in San Francisco. 

Benjamin Vilmain is an artist living and working in San Francisco. Ben draws inspiration and imagery from day to day things he observes while walking around the Bay Area. Abutting architectures, ragged construction mesh, shadows, rats nests of wires, and things that have been painted and repainted over the years creating a hodgepodge web of small actions-a kind of long accumulation of small efforts by many hands. Ben remixes these things around him into paintings, sculptures, collages and photographs that reflect a lived experience or internal feeling of this place and time.

Frances is a 5 year old living and playing in San Francisco. Frances enjoys singing, playing the ukulele, harmonica, synthesizer as well as noodling in her various keyboards . She likes baking cooking, drawing, painting and making messy sculptures. Frances most recent work displays her new found joy of squirting and spraying paint as well as improvised songs and plays.

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Ahna Girshick is an interdisciplinary artist and research scientist, who investigates the primal beauty and connections between human and AI visual perception. Working with algorithms, photography, paint, and installation, Ahna reimagines her scientific research through materiality and reclaims it through her personal lens as a female computer scientist/neuroscientist. In her creative process she often embodies the discarnate AI perceptual algorithm by pairing it with her hand and the material world. This separation of percept and hand, reappears in her “Blind Bond” series with her daughter Samaya, in which they tenderly explore their percepts of each other through collaborative blind contour drawings. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Vision Science, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Neural Science at NYU and at UC Berkeley’s Dept of Computer Sciences. Her work has exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Contemporary Jewish Museum (SF), The Barbican Centre (London), Southern Exposure (SF), Gearbox Gallery (Oakland), Hera Gallery (Rhode Island), Ely Center for Contemporary Art (New Haven), ARC Gallery (Chicago), and 120710 (Berkeley).

Scott Snibbe is a new media artist and meditation teacher, author of How to Train a Happy Mind, and host of the Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment podcast. Snibbe’s interactive art and augmented reality installations have been incorporated into concert tours, museums, and airports; and he has collaborated with musicians and filmmakers including Björk, Philip Glass, Beck, and James Cameron. His work can be found in the collections of New York MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other institutions.

Samaya Snibbe is a 13-year-old artist who lives in Berkeley, California with her parents. From a young age, she has connected to collaborative art through making “exquisite corpse” drawings with her father. At school she learned the “blind contour” technique in which the artist draws without picking up their pen or looking at their hand. She proposed an intimate creative collaboration with her mother in which they sit face to face, stare into each others’ eyes, and draw blind contour portraits of each other.

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Dana Hemenway (b. 1982) is an artist based in San Francisco. Her work is rooted in the excavation and elevation of utilitarian objects to make visible what has become habituated in our built environments. Hemenway uses these functional items as materials to form traditionally fiber-based crafts–– lights and cords are woven through ceramics or the gallery wall, extension cords are transformed into macramé chains. Hemenway has had residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), ACRE (Stueben, WI), SÍM (Reykjavik, Iceland), Joya: arte + ecología (Spain), The Wassaic Project (Upstate New York) and at Recology Waste Management (San Francisco). Dana is a 2024 Eureka Fellow, Fleishhacker Foundation and the recipient of The San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and a Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant. She has a public art commission at SFO’s Terminal 1. Dana has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally, and internationally. From 2015 – 2017, Dana served as a co-director of Royal Nonesuch Gallery, an artist-run project space in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from Mills College and her BA from University of California Santa Cruz. She is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery.

Mare Beatrix Blue Hemenway (b. 2022) is a two year old living in San Francisco. She loves her family, friends, and doll Kaia. She loves music, dancing and singing. She has a studio at Minnesota Street where she paints and draws while her mama, who is also an artist, works in sculpture and ceramics. She does not like the crows at the Randall Museum! If she could play with or be in water all day, that would be ideal. If she could not wear pants or any clothes, that might also be ideal. This is her first exhibition and collaborative artwork.

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Carey Lin is a visual artist based in San Francisco. Weston Gilder-Lin, age 3, enjoys exploring new plants, finding cool sticks and rocks, riding on airplanes, and pretending to be a cat.

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Lee Materazzi (born Fairfax, VA) from Miami, FL now living in San Francisco, CA. In 2005 she received her BFA from Central St. Martins in London. Mia and Brook were both born and are currently living in San Francisco, CA. “When visiting her studio it wasn't the mess that struck me as extraordinary but the size of the chairs. Materazzi shares her studio with her two young daughters, Mia, 11 and Brook, 8. In conversation, she consistently refers to the studio as ours . The tone with which she says this is important. It’s not said as generous platitude. It's a matter of fact. Their drawings, sculptures, and experiments migrate in and out of Materazzi’s camera frame. Other times, their discarded or in-progress experiments inform the sculptures and sets Materazzi builds for her documented performances. Their uninhibited presence fills the otherwise silent space of tedium that takes place between the inception of a good idea and its execution. Where one’s work ends and the other’s begins isn’t obvious. Mess, play, success, and failure commingle throughout their inadvertent collaborations.” Rel Robinson Lee Materazzi’s work has been shown internationally and is a part of numerous public art collections including The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, The Sagamore Collection, the Scholl Collection at World Class Boxing and The Perez Art Museum where she was Included in “My Body My Rules”. Mia and Brook actively make art and have shown locally at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Bass and Rainer and in Portland at Blue Sky and Nationale.

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Juan Carlos Quintana (b.1964, Lutcher, LA) is a visual artist based in Oakland, CA. His family immigrated from Cuba in the early 60's settling in a region along the Mississippi River known for its antebellum period sugar plantations and petrochemical refineries. Using painting, printmaking, ceramics and mixed media installations, Quintana’s art is imbued with an anti-colonial sensibility. Often satirical in tone, his works oscillate between personal and forgotten histories, current events, speculative time periods, and ideological conundrums. He has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally as well as recipient of many awards and residencies, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculpture grant award.

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Jonathan Runcio is a Bay Area-based artist and curator. Solo exhibitions include FAÇADE, Adobe Books, San Francisco; SQUARE BIZ, Brittany, Vallejo; GLASS IN THE GARDEN, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Blue Turns To Grey, Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA; Romer Young Gallery. San Francisco, CA; XYZ Collective, Tokyo, Japan; Saint Mary’s College Museum Of Art. Moraga, CA; Walter and McBean Galleries, SFAI, San Francisco, CA; Cue Arts Foundation, New York City, NY; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California. In 2011 he was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation M.F.A. Grant. In 2014 he co-founded CAPITAL (2014-2018), a contemporary art space in San Francisco.

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Lisa Samudio and Valentina Samudio-King love to make art, travel, go thrift shopping, try new foods, and watch movies together. Valentina is a 5th grader who will be starting middle school next year and Lisa is a garden teacher. Their painting "Strawberry Days" is a collaboration and inspired by the Fruitvale community in Oakland where they live and the things they encounter in their daily lives.

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Emma Spertus lives in Berkeley, works in Richmond, and has a studio in Oakland. Her sculptures and architectural interventions are inspired by her varied encounters in the Bay Area. She is interested in highlighting the humor and visual intrigue of banal subjects, from business parks to technology lingo. She has exhibited at venues large and small, including the Oakland Museum of California, CCA’s Wattis Institute, White Columns, The Lab, Romer Young Gallery, Important Projects, Stairwell's and Dorsky Gallery. In 2011, she co-founded Real Time & Space, an affordable art studio and residency program in Oakland.

Hazel Taylor also lives and attends school in Berkeley. She makes paintings and drawings that are inspired by real life things and objects, which she sometimes combines into whimsical pieces, like the front of the Personal Space sign. Her work has been displayed at an Real Time & Space, and her work is in the collection of Gabriel Garza.

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Rachel Stallings Thomander is a Colombian American multidisciplinary artist. She lives and works in Santa Cruz, California with her husband and two children. She received an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and a BFA in Studio Art from Brigham Young University. She has attended the Facebook Artist Residency and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. She is a co-founder of Scary Sugar Collective, who held a booth at the San Francisco Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Project. Her curatorial work and artwork have been featured on KQED Arts, It’s Nice That, i-D, Salt Lake City Weekly, and Artsy. She has exhibited work at Tropical Contemporary, CTRL+SHFT, Nous Tous Gallery, Guerrero Gallery, SOIL, Granary Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Richmond Art Center, and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

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Lindsay Tully and Lana Williams are married artists, living, working and raising a baby together in Oakland, CA. They are two-thirds of the art collaborative, Bonanza, with Conrad Guevara, recently exhibiting work at the Museum of Craft and Design and Gallery 16. Lindsay is a filmmaker with experience in the documentary field and currently serves as the Senior Director at Creativebug, an online platform for craft classes. Lana is a painter, ceramicist, author and garden designer. She owns and runs The Tender Gardener, a boutique plant shop and design company. Her first book, The Container Garden Recipe Book, published by Artisan Books launches May 2024.

Frances is 13 months old, loves food and enjoys music class.

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Tova Mae Arnold was born to Gaby Wolodarski in Alabama in fall of 2017. They have spent the last six years doing art and they sure do like it.