For Bioneers’ 33rd conference we are excited for art to play a vital, celebratory, and transformational role at the conference. Check out this year’s contributing artists.
Bioneers Conference Stage Art
Each year the Bioneers stage is decorated with original artwork designed by leading artists. In 2022, it is our distinct honor to be working with Jazmin Novak, a Navajo sculptor from Albuquerque, NM. We learned about Jazmin through her incredible sculptures on display at an exhibition at the Institute for American Indian Arts and we are truly excited to be able to share her work and perspective with the Bioneers community.
Artist Statement
In March 2020, COVID-19 began to spread through the country. Checking the daily news to keep track of a vaccine’s progress, mortality tolls, and virus complications had become a routine for me. All this knowledge was both overwhelming and intimating. Along with this, working and living in a confined space lead to depression and anxiety, causing me to get too much sleep or not enough. However, I wanted to focus on something positive, so I began creating, methodical, calming artwork. The animals were made by hand bending a steel frame, layering paper mâché, then filling out the form with cotton and wood. While maintaining faithful to the medium, using these elements in their natural state adds complexity and variation to the piece. The result is a series of sleeping animal sculptures. These creatures inspire us to search for a similar haven where we can relax, reflect, and make sense of the current events and challenges.
Artist Biography
Jazmin Novak is a Navajo sculptor born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2021 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts with a minor in Performing Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts located in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
During her studies, she trained with indigenous artist George Rivera, learning about monumental sculptures and the intricacies of sculpting the human body. Jazmin has worked with Walt Disney Imagineering on a collaborative team with innovative technology to help construct the Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge in Anaheim, California. She was selected for a residency with Marist College, where she spent time in Venice, Italy, creating works for the Marist LdM Biennale 2019 exhibition.
In 2021, Jazmin was selected as a SITE Scholar. Jazmin Novak has shown work at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Arts, Shidoni Gallery, Balzer Contemporary Edge Gallery, and Gallery Hózhó. Currently, Jazmin is working as an artist at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, while continuing her art practice.
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Bioneers Artists on the Grounds
Irene Bee Kain
I embarked on a full-time artist career after my first Open Studios Art Show in 2019. I was spending a lot of time at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, getting inspired by the new city construction and older architecture, the ever-changing sky, light, and air. Other far and away mountains like those in Switzerland and California’s Mt. Diablo with its own magical lure, amazing bounty, and beauty are daily inspirations. Tentative strokes and Impressionist works changed into Abstract images using credit cards & plant matter to create. Showing across the USA.
Stephen Bruce
You have probably encountered his work as it has been on some of the most popular TV shows and movies to come out of Hollywood in recent years. From House, Law & Order, Criminal Minds, Californication, Big Bang Theory, Last Man Standing, The American Housewife, to movie sets (The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Avengers: Endgame, Horrible Bosses and The Social Network, his acid paintings on copper help set the scene.
The man in the director’s chair is genuinely overjoyed to be making art after decades spent supporting other artists and working in retail management. “For years I was an artist representative, consulting on presentation and development. Some encouraged me to focus on my own creativity, but I felt that my time to become an artist had past — that my creative spirit had not been revealed and developed as a child,” says Bruce. In that sense, his problem was the opposite of Picasso’s famous observation, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
But one memory stuck with Bruce, as the call to express himself grew more insistent: “I used to make copper bracelets as a child. They kept turning green. My father gave me a lecture and explained that oxidation is merely acids affecting the surface of metal. As an adult, I just thought it through backwards: What if I introduced an array of acids to the metal? Could I manipulate oxidation and control the resulting effects of color and pattern and texture? I wanted to explore that nexus of art and science.”
Similar in style and philosophy to that of the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, Bruce’s work has amassed followers and patrons around the world ranging from prestigious gallery owners to discriminating art lovers to legendary American Painter Richard Mayhew. “The creativity of the process renders such unique color tones and textures,” Mayhew remarks. “The contrasts from cyan to deep blue combined with the ocean greens are the effects we love the most,” enthuses Rob Bowley, a London England client.
Bruce’s gentle humility coupled with an unusually disciplined work ethic have much to do with his success: “My biggest artistic influence is the greatest artist ever, Mother Earth. Every artist is imitating her. My seascapes are inspired by the beauty of the ocean, perhaps an aerial view from the sky. My abstracts, an attempt to mimic the colors and patterns of some geological formations. And my landscapes are my best efforts to capture the feeling of a fleeting moment in a sunset, a sunrise, or on the horizon.”
The Acid Painting Process
The concept of metal patination is centuries-old. Jewelers use the technique to age metals and create colors, while in the 1970s Andy Warhol did a series of oxidation paintings — one of which sold in 1997 for $1.9 million.
Patinas on metal can be created by painting with flame, or using hot or cold solutions. Bruce’s method of choice is cold patinas. He sprays, brushes, dips or sponges an acid solution and allows the metal to slowly react. “Previous experience tells me how the colors, patterns and textures will develop and how long it may take to happen. There are some processes that can completed in a day, but most take five to ten days to complete,” Bruce explains. “Other than my father’s lecture, I’m self-taught.”
Nora Bruhn
Nora Bruhn is a self-taught artist based out of San Francisco, CA. Her artwork is a reflection of her deep love of the manifold ecosystems that blanket the planet. She grew up running barefoot through fields, picking juicy blackberries and catching tadpoles at her family home in the countryside of Minnesota. As a young adult, she felt it was important to begin learning about the many systems which make life on Earth possible and studied Biology and Sustainability at The University of Iowa. After graduating from UI, she moved to San Francisco seeking a masters degree in Environmental Management. Quickly after beginning her program, she realized it was not the right time for her to continue her education. It was time to learn from experience rather than the classroom and she withdrew from her program shortly after. She found herself wandering the neighborhoods of San Francisco in constant awe of the street art decorating every surface. She was inspired by the idea of transforming the grey, concrete city into a vibrant landscape of storytelling and public artwork. At this point, she picked up the paintbrush and has yet to put it down. With visions of painting huge walls on her mind, she decided to take this dream as far she could. Her work often reflects the marriage of a deep reverence for nature and influences of urban street art. After studying herbalism, she began painting what she is now known for, large scale murals of flowers cast in dramatic lighting. A perfect ménage of nature, femininity and sexuality.
Website | @konorebi
Michael Campbell
Michael Campbell lives and works in the San Francisco Bay-Area. He grew up in the Midwest in the 1970’s amid the handicraft movement with a home full of macramé, decoupage, and paper-mâché. 1,600 miles away from Haight-Ashbury, he made God’s eyes in Cub Scouts and glued macaroni onto wooden crosses in Sunday School. From an early age, handcrafted objects and the divine were connected.
Artist Statement:
“I’m interested in our perception of the eternal, the divine and the otherworldly through objects that bring about an alternate mythological narrative spoken through the voice of nature. This narrative suggests, counter to Judeo-Christian teaching, that we are all connected to the natural world and its ecosystem. A new earth-centered liturgy is offered by saintly objects and altars that seem to grow from the forest floor.”
Website | @michaelcampbellart | @moderneden
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Katerina Capetanos
I am a scientist and an artist. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Sonoma State University and I worked for many years in the sciences as a Chemist, Microbiologist and Laboratory Director. I do not have any formal training in the Fine Arts, but many years of practice over the years.
Working with encaustic is challenging, but offers endless possibilities and Nature never disappoints to inspire. Many years of fungal microscopy and slide preparations have also influenced my work. I was always astonished by the delicate and intricate structures of lichen, microscopic fungal hyphae and protozoans that I found with my light microscope.
Always looking with a scientist’s eye, I observe flowers, leaves, moss, all the different textures, then re-imagine them using encaustic paint, oil paint sticks, inks and shellac to create one-of-a-kind fantastical botanicals. My work has been exhibited at the Arts Guild of Sonoma, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, and San Francisco Women Artists Gallery in Northern California and most recently was featured at The De Young Open Exhibit in San Francisco in 2020-2021.
Ricardo Cervantes
Ricardo Cervantes started his artistic expression at his natal Guadalajara Mexico at a very early age, painting and drawing in middle school. At age 11, He was introduced to sculpting on various materials and learned mold making and casting. Here in California, He has worked for more than 20 years where He has done artwork with many masters of painting, mural, and sculpting. Cervantes learned the art of stone sculpting as well as lost wax techniques, enhancing his skills as an artist. Currently, you can find his studio (@cervartestudio) in downtown Oakland in the art district where he is exhibiting weekly.
Patsy Craig
AWA – Cusco, Peru
MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction
Etochime Harakbut Artist Collective: Los Hijos del Bosque
Bioneers Conference/ 13-15 May 2022 @ Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California
EXTRACT: a) to draw forth (as by research) ; b) to pull or take out forcibly ; c) to obtain by much effort from someone or something unwilling.
The Earth system has now entered the Anthropocene, a geological age in which plantation monocultures, pollution, and industrial-scale resource extraction are damaging or destroying vital ecological systems on which the planet and its biological diversity depend. Globally dominant modes of human existence are driving us towards ecological collapse. Due to our ethically untenable relationship to nature, the Earth System is in crisis. Moreover, large numbers of people who have done nothing to cause this crisis are most exposed to its consequences. Many come from cultural traditions that enrich and perpetuate healthy biodiversity as the means to ensure mutual flourishing. These Indigenous ‘wisdom traditions’ are widely recognised for their sustainable world views and sophisticated understanding of our interdependence within the Earth System.
The Amazon is a central focus of the most consequential geopolitical and environmental concerns of our time. It is a vast, rugged, beautifully diverse expanse that is integral to the Earth System’s ecological well-being yet has been continuously invaded by numerous resource exploitation interests severely lacking in sustainable administrative policies. Within this setting the region’s original custodians are under threat despite significant scientific research affirming that Indigenous environmental stewardship perpetuates biodiversity which ensures inter species flourishing. Although this is beneficial to us all, it remains a struggle for Indigenous peoples to uphold their rights, maintain their cultural traditions, and preserve their ancestral knowledge and lands.Today, such traditions are calling out to be seen, understood and honoured.
From this perspective, AWA seeks to amplify Indigenous worldviews specifically as they pertain to land relationship and sustainability. “MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction” at Bioneers 2022 will present art works that render the impact of extractive industries on the Harakbut Indigenous community featuring the Harakbut artist collective known as Etochime from the region of Madre de Dios in the southern Peruvian Amazon- an area heavily impacted by contamination from the illegal gold mining boom of the past 20 years there.
MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction will also be presented alongside relevant works by the San Francisco Art Institute alumni at the Midway Arts Center (900 Marin St. San Francisco, CA 94124) from 16 June- 18 July 2022.
awagaleria@gmail.com
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INSTAGRAM @awa_galeria
Tara Esperanza
Tara Esperanza earned a BFA in Painting and graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In addition, she studied plein air painting in Brittany, France. Inspired by the light and landscape, she later moved from MA to NM. She now resides in Oakland California where succulents grow all year long. Tara has exhibited her paintings in galleries throughout the Bay Area, including Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, Orangeland Gallery in San Francisco, and Marin Society of Artists in San Rafael. As well as Sturt Haaga Gallery in Los Angeles, the Museum of Northern California Art in Chico, and the San Diego Museum of Art. In addition Tara has been interviewed by Gita Joshi of The Curators Salon and Visionary Art Collective. Recently Tara was featured in the 2nd edition of All She Makes Magazine. She is inspired daily by the beauty that surrounds us and she captures images that live on through her art. All of the subjects of her paintings are seen through her eyes in nature.
Jimmie Evins
My bliss is to use my creativity to make art I feel best express my idea of life. Art that challenges and satisfy a profound place in thee spirit (the process of making). Color, shape, texture, and balance, working together are the most inspiring elements of creating. Developing a technique of application has always been a critical aspect of my process. Application is the method of making marks, an exploration into how color and texture work to evoke responses in the viewer. I have been exploring this relationship between color and space to create emotional, provocative, and technically alluring expressive works. To ensure that each viewer has his/her own experience with the work. Using my foundation in basic drawing and composition, this knowledge releases me to create with a freedom that is energizing
Julia Feldman
Julia Feldman was born in Hollywood, California. She works predominantly in the medium of bers with a strong propensity towards found materials. Her work reflects her concern for repairing the earth and encouraging conversation through art towards working toward a kinder, peaceful world. Ms. Feldman earned a Master of Art + Design, with an emphasis in Surface Design and a Certificate of Accomplishment in Teaching from North Carolina State University, and a Bachelor of Fine Art from California College of the Arts, in Oakland, California, with an emphasis in Sculptural Fibers and Metal. She currently resides and works in Santa Rosa, California.
Paulina Fuenzalida-Guzman
Paulina Fuenzalida-Guzmán, a textile artist, was born in Santiago, Chile. Her background is in interior design and journalism. In 2018, Paulina decided to move with her family to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to pursue an MFA in Fibers at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Taiko Fujimura
Taiko Fujimura is a mixed media artist based in San Francisco. Her focus is currently painting with watercolor, ink, acrylic and oil on a variety of surfaces. Her use of colors is often vivid and extreme, and evokes her emotional responses to objects and non-objects. Her pieces confront the dichotomies between chaos and order, industrial and organic, mind and body, positive and negative, logical and random, and intuitive and sequential. She feels an understanding of dualism is key to her art. Her pieces seek to bridge the contradictions around us where two opposites co-exist through unifying space. The concepts she explores include harmony, unity, and universality. Her work is strongly influenced by Japanese wabi-sabi and Japanese calligraphy, which she has studied since the age of six. Between 1999 and 2001, she studied fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute and graphic design at the California College of the Arts with scholarships and awards. Her recent achievements include a mural at the Salesforce Transit Center in San Francisco in 2018, a painted large heart for the “Hearts Around Hartz” Project in Danville in 2020, and a painted large heart for the Grand Foundation in Tracy, CA in 2021. She also successfully completed three mini-hearts for the San Francisco General Hospital’s “Hearts in San Francisco” Project in 2018, 2019, and 2022. Her works have appeared in collections and exhibitions including the de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco. She has also shown internationally at Hirafuku Museum of Art and Denshokan Museum in Akita, Japan.
Fuzz Grant
Growing up in a sea of suburban beige I was always attracted to color, pattern, texture and anything that was darkly humorous. I delight in being a scavenger of the old and the smallest scrap of paper could be the highlight of my day.
Always in love with animals, a pivotal point in my artistic career was spending time with brown bears in Alaska. The subversion of the power balance, with humans on the bottom, brought home to me the need for a more equitable balance between non-human and human animals. I realized this anxiety is what most animals must constantly feel in the ever-expanding human world.
My art is a vehicle to connect humans to the non-human world while providing joy and humor. Discarding saccharine or cliched imagery of animals, I portray them as characters, watching over humanity, in silent judgment.
Originally from Australia, I now live and work in San Francisco in a mess of paper, found objects, and paint.
Beth Grossman
Beth Grossman’s art and participatory performances focus attention on our place in nature, history and public participation. These creative situations aim to question common social beliefs, raise awareness, build community and encourage civic engagement. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has collaborated internationally with communities, universities, corporations, non-profits and museums. “The Law of Seeds” is a Bill of Rights for seeds, scribed with a quill pen on eleven vintage seed bags that are also painted with images of the stages of germinating corn from seed to mature plant. This traveling art exhibit evokes an appreciation of the wonders of seeds and the importance of Rights of Nature law to protect this precious source of our food chain. Brisbane, California, followed by Foster City, CA were the first U.S. cities to adopt this Law of Seeds as a Proclamation. As the exhibit travels, Beth Grossman hopes to encourage other cities to develop, adopt and enforce rights of nature. The Law of Seeds is about our accountability to future generations and ensuring that nature’s seed cycle will carry on.
Website http://www.bethgrossman.com
Kristi Holohan
Kristi Holohan is an artist & organizer based in Oakland, California. Her work in visual Arts focuses on community, healing, resource-sharing, environmental appreciation, and advocacy for an equitable society. She works through a lens of oppression/liberation framework through radical mindful inclusion and Restorative Practices. Her work is often illustrative and figurative while she crosses a variety of media.
Andy Hope and Laurel Roth Hope
Laurel Roth Hope lives and works in San Francisco. Prior to becoming a full-time, self-taught artist, she worked as a park ranger and in natural resource conservation. Her current work centers on the human manipulation of and intervention into the natural world and the choices we make every day between our individual desires and the well-being of the world.
Roth Hope is a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and was a 2016 Resident Artist with the Kohler Arts and Industry program in Wisconsin. In 2017, she and Diaz Hope created The Woulds, exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco and Catharine Clark Gallery. In 2013, she and Andy Diaz Hope completed a year-long fellowship at the de Young Museum, San Francisco examining the history of human cooperation through architecture. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; the Mint Museum, Charlotte; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; the Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village; and Ripley’s Museum of Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Andy Diaz Hope earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Engineering from Stanford University’s joint program in Design—a collaborative program between the Engineering and Art departments. Diaz Hope creates work that seeks to offer alternative viewpoints to the mainstream media out of a desire to foster dialogue, encourage pluralism, and critical thought.
In 2017, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco commissioned Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth Hope to create The Woulds, a multi-media installation for the exhibition Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid. Diaz Hope has exhibited internationally in venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, New York; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; and the London Crafts Council, England. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; and 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville. He lives in San Francisco and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2005.
Amanda Hopkins
My early years were spent in rural Mendocino and Sonoma Counties. While living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, as an offering my mother planted 3,000 roses while she was pregnant with me, inspiring the name Amanda Rose. Living in this three-dimensional mandala where colorful Tibetan banners blew in the wind and the light glinted off the gold-leafed stupa, cultivated a love of beauty.
In college at UC Santa Cruz, I studied fine art and formed special kinships with painter Melissa Gwynn and performance artist Elizabeth Stephens. Gwynn taught me the beauty of experimentation and obsession in art. Stephens invited me to exhibit with her and Annie Sprinkle in their Eco-Sexual Symposium, where we committed to being lovers of the earth.
During my senior year and after graduation I fell in love with the work of Helen and Newton Harrison, amazingly they were local professors and artists and needed an artist’s assistant. The mother and father of the environmental art movement were writing a retrospective of their work which I helped to transcribe. In the fall of 2013, I received the opportunity to travel to Sarnath, India and assist in painting a mural inside the main hall of the Institute under artists Kaveri and TJ Singh as well as assisting with installing three-dimensional epoxy resin cast and gold-leafed Tibetan script across the outer walls of the Sarnath International Nyingma Institute.
In the past few years, I found my tribe in Sonoma County and the North Bay Area while exhibiting at the 2019 Bioneers Conference and participated in exhibits at the Healdsburg Center for the Arts, the Petaluma Arts Center, and the Santa Rosa Art Center.
Ratna Jain
The artwork which I would like to bring to the Bioneers conference is in a 19.25 inch by 15.25 inch frame. It is a watercolor painting of our majestic and calm Pacific ocean. It is on watercolor paper 12 x 16 inch in size. It is float mounted in a rectangular black wood frame.
I am a scientist having majored in biology at UC Davis in the late eighties. I have since been practicing dentistry in San Francisco using my biological background to treat patients for general oral healthcare needs for the past 26 years. Although this career has been narrow in focus I have always been conscious of our expansive environment and sensitive to recycling, minimizing waste and of my carbon footprint.
I also worked as an environmental consultant overseeing clean up of Navy sites in California. It is the reason why I was motivated to apply for a green business status and our office was awarded the first dental office in San Francisco to receive the SF City recognition for this achievement. I have always shared this knowledge with my patients making them aware that small steps in the betterment of our environmental practices will affect social behavior and global changes. The burden of this responsibility lies on each one of us to do the right thing.
As a painter, I am inspired by nature. My landscapes relate to my immediate environment mostly local and consider the nuances of changes based on my observations and expressed on paper. Some paintings capture the fog, the cool wind amidst warm patches of stillness, the smell of trees, grass or ocean. My abstracts further explore my subject while incorporating my feelings, mood and hope through shape and color.
I am intrigued to participate in the Bioneers conference in SF and to share with like minded people from diverse backgrounds in co-creating a regenerative future. I am interested in being a live painter and can create an artwork onsite, working on an interactive display or a community art project.
