Visual Arts

Tourmaline

Artist, Filmmaker, Activist, Editor, and Writer

Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible.

Tourmaline lives and works in Miami, FL. She received her BA from Columbia University in 2006. Tourmaline has had...

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Contemporary Artist

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary Thai artist who pioneered the Relational Aesthetics movement. By deconstructing the concept of art into its basic components, the artist focuses on the interactions between people and their surroundings rather than aesthetic objects. “My starting point was the search for my identity in foreign places, in places where I am estranged from myself,” he has explained. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961, he grew up in multiple countries before attending the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and the Whitney Independent Study Program...

Stephanie Syjuco

ARC Fellow, Conceptual Artist, and Professor of Sculpture at UC Berkeley

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and...

Hito Steyerl

Filmmaker, Moving Image Artist, Writer, and Professor of New Media Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer. She teaches New Media Art at University of the Arts in Berlin. Steyerl studied film at the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, the University of Television and Film in Munich, and holds a Ph.D in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The most formative parts of her education, however, include working as a stunt-girl and bouncer. Steyerl’s work focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire by using humor, charm, and reduced gravity as political means of expression. Her sources range...

Chris Vargas

Video Maker and Interdisciplinary Artist

Chris E. Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Bellingham, WA whose work deploys humor and performance in conjunction with mainstream idioms to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical & institutional memory and popular culture. He earned his MFA in the department of Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011 and his BA in the Film & Digital Media department from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2006. He is a recipient of a 2016...

Pamela Sneed

Poet, Performance Artist, Actress, Activist, and Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University

Pamela Sneed is a New York–based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery (Holt, 1998), KONG and Other Works (Vintage Entity Press, 2009), Sweet Dreams (Belladonna*, 2018), and Funeral Diva, published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, Artnet, and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry....

Sunny A. Smith

Dean of Fine Arts and Professor of Sculpture at CCA

Sunny A. Smith (they/them) is a queer trans* non-binary artist, time traveler, and practical animist based in Yelamu and Huchiun a.k.a. the San Francisco Bay Area, on unceded Ohlone territory.

Smith has presented their work at museums such as SFMOMA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and S!GNAL Center for Contemporary Art, P.S.1/MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, MASS MoCA, and The Tang Museum. Smith has lectured at art schools and research universities internationally, as well as at MOMA, the Whitney...

Situated: Sunny A. Smith

October 10, 2011
Sunny A. Smith
1) What are you most looking forward to from this gathering? I am most looking forward to seeing the same set of things using a different set of lenses. 2) What are the top five lessons you want to share to fellow artists and community leaders about the kind of work you do? Most likely no one will encourage you to do the most important work, because it hasn’t been done yet and is literally unthinkable. If your idea feels awkward at first, it may mean that it is especially worth pursuing. The craft world and the social practice world are both relatives of art, like distant cousins who don’t...

Kim Shuck

Poet, Author, Weaver, and Bead Worker

Kim Shuck embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot. Her maternal grandparents met at the Polish Hall on Shotwell and she spent many hours with her mother and grandmother wandering the Mission St. Miracle Mile, taking books out of the Mission Branch library and watching aquarium fish on the ground floor of what used to be Hale's. She firmly believes in carrying a bubble wand, keys, pen and notebook and cats cradle string at all times.

Shuck is widely...

Tiffany Shlaine

Filmmaker, Artist, and Author

Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, speaker,bestselling author, and ...