Join us at the Eddie Rhodes Gallery for the opening of “3,734 Dreams Not Remembered” featuring work by NIAD Artists who are Contra Costa College alumni. Read More …
The Rainbow Dancing in the Room highlights the transformation of light from its quieter state to a vibrant kaleidoscopic form. The pieces range from peaceful to energetic, offering an intimate and introspective experience. The exhibition features artists Julio del Rio, Willie Harris, Karen May, Shantae Robinson, and Tre’von Silva. Read More …
“Walking down a narrow path, you’re surprised as you reach a clearing.This sudden openness makes you stop short and catch your breath as you begin to absorb the change in landscape.Works in a clearing beckon, inviting you to enter.Each artist composes forms evolving from intuitive, rather than predetermined, thinking. In these works, the initial pattern elements break down and fall away, creating an opportunity for something unknown to arise. Overlapping and unpredictable shapes and colors create conversations, inviting viewers to come closer, soften their gaze, release expectations. Through a variety of materials, these artworks attain a color energy using vibrant hues and textures. Optical vibrations and textures rumble as deeper looking opens to a clearing.” Read More …
“Walking down a narrow path, you’re surprised as you reach a clearing.This sudden openness makes you stop short and catch your breath as you begin to absorb the change in landscape.Works in a clearing beckon, inviting you to enter.Each artist composes forms evolving from intuitive, rather than predetermined, thinking. In these works, the initial pattern elements break down and fall away, creating an opportunity for something unknown to arise. Overlapping and unpredictable shapes and colors create conversations, inviting viewers to come closer, soften their gaze, release expectations. Through a variety of materials, these artworks attain a color energy using vibrant hues and textures. Optical vibrations and textures rumble as deeper looking opens to a clearing.” Read More …
About the Exhibition The title of this exhibition comes from a piece included in the show, Dorian Reid’s Rainbow Cat Picnic. In Rainbow Cat Picnic, numerous cats are joyously picnic-ing under a big colorful rainbow in what looks to be a very festive occasion. There may be rain but that rainbow safely covers the cats and their food bowls. The sun is just coming out and those cats are really having a good time! The mixed media works in this show are my Rainbow Cat Picnic–20+ pieces representing an inspiring and colorful excursion to a place of creative nourishment and a celebration as a Read More …
“Walking down a narrow path, you’re surprised as you reach a clearing.This sudden openness makes you stop short and catch your breath as you begin to absorb the change in landscape.Works in a clearing beckon, inviting you to enter.Each artist composes forms evolving from intuitive, rather than predetermined, thinking. In these works, the initial pattern elements break down and fall away, creating an opportunity for something unknown to arise. Overlapping and unpredictable shapes and colors create conversations, inviting viewers to come closer, soften their gaze, release expectations. Through a variety of materials, these artworks attain a color energy using vibrant hues and textures. Optical vibrations and textures rumble as deeper looking opens to a clearing.” Read More …
This show is all about comfort text: resilience in everyday words, writing and reading. Expression can also be wordless, the use of line and color as new vocabulary, pushing a thought out onto a surface, making marks and continuously trying to communicate with the world.
We tell stories to sustain ourselves and find each other. These messages embedded in art become an emotional telegram– a signal flare with a flame of memory trailing behind it. “Feeling Language” is about books, lists, slogans, language, gesture, touch and the trust given in sharing. Read More …
In the exhibition What’s Cookin?!, you will see food, art and creativity from various NIAD artists. So feel free to pull up a chair in your mind, take a seat at our dinner table, and see what’s cookin’! Cooking Corner is a place where artists can share artwork, make art, share food ideas and recipes, and interests they have in cooking, and also cook along with me from the comfort and safety of their own homes. Since we have returned to being on site, Cooking Corner has made its way back to the 23rd Street NIAD studio, where myself and a group of artists meet weekly, and come up with recipes to prepare, prep, cook and serve to the NIAD community. Read More …
Crossover is an apt title for this show, which will showcase the vibrant and newly-connected fiber art scenes of NIAD and Cedars. Crossover is a companion to the textile-centered exhibition Follow the String, on view at Marin MOCA. In preparation for this show, artists from both programs visited each other’s studios, and participated in a tee-shirt and doll making workshop at Marin MOCA. T-shirts and dolls from this workshop will be on view in NIAD and Marin MOCA. Read More …
Join us for an Artists in Conversation for our exhibition “Soft Material” with artists Shantae Robinson, Raven Harper, and Karen May, with Moderator Nan Collymore. Read More …
The selected works include NIAD and non-NIAD artists, and encapsulate the ebbs and flows during these vulnerable and emotionally fragile times, when the threat of illnesses and the effects of climate change are entangled in our everyday existence. Read More …
About Touching Touching brings together a selection of works that expand, contract, distort, and modify. Through this they make some sense of the world. They are texturally complex, engaging, thoughtful, and irreverent. They open up like portals; through a variety of materials and approaches they offer us windows to an elsewhere. About Zachary Epcar Zachary Epcar (b. San Francisco) is an experimental filmmaker whose work has screened at festivals, museums, microcinemas, and DIY venues worldwide. He lives in Oakland, California where he is a member of Light Field, an artist-run film programming collective based in the Bay Area. View Zachary Read More …
These pieces are just a few from NIAD’s current cohort, that helps me embody the possibility of the tangible space I occupy each day as well as the infinite spaces just out of my reach or yet to be imagined. Read More …
AUGUST 18 – SEPTEMBER 3 Sherrie Aradanas, Ricky Bearghost, Raven Harper, Gail Lewis, Elmeater Morton, Shantae Robinson Soft Material is a collaborative garment-construction project between artists who have an interest in and connection with fashion and textiles, as well as the corporeal, the body, and performativity. The program supports and connects artists living with disabilities whose communal studios were severely interrupted by the pandemic. The project is co-organized by NAN COLLYMORE and CELIA LESH with artists from NIAD, Creative Growth, Elbow Room, and the Center for Craft. Related Events Thursday August 18 // Opening Reception at Berkeley Art Center Friday Read More …
About the exhibition The invitation to curate this exhibition initially felt like an insurmountable task. The amount of work I felt thrilled by on a first look at the archive seemed impossible to winnow down. I immediately knew I didn’t want to use some contrived academic framework for decision making. I wanted to create an exhibition of works that I just couldn’t shake, a group of things that struck that deep internal chord which has no words or explanation. I decided that I would make an initial large list of things I was drawn to, and then revisit those lists repeatedly over several weeks, seeing what remained stuck in Read More …
About the exhibition It’s not a superbloom year. It’s not one of those years where the rain fall gives us an explosion of colorful flowers in the desert. But it is spring. There are still median strips full of poppies and untended lots full of lupines and purple vetch. There are bright yellow dandelions growing despite everything. There are the plum trees blossoming then letting loose their purple leaves and then the cherry trees blooming and letting loose their green leaves. These moments of color, of unexpected brightness, bring me so much happiness and ground me to the earth. I Read More …
About the exhibition The pieces in this exhibition were selected in a moment of uncertainty. The pandemic has affected each of us differently, but what can perhaps be agreed upon is that its longevity has worn on our collective morale. This was certainly the undercurrent of this grouping. Dorian Reid’s Day or Night it Looks Like Night, is a depiction of September 9, 2020, a day that those of us in the Bay Area remember all too well: the day we awoke to smoky red skies caused by surrounding wildfires. The ominous tones on the canvas continue to be relevant today. Read More …
About Eternal Idol Eternal Idol, Rodin’s famous sculpture, was hewn in marble, plaster, and bronze. His repetition of form, motif, and emotion creates a complex awareness of this bundle of human desire, submission and adoration. To repeat renders the form repeatable. The red paint on the image painted by Guadalupe Soto adds a filter to the couple. The works selected for the online exhibition Eternal Idol together speak about everyday eternity, observing and repeating and tenderly attending to what we desire, submit to and adore. About Emily M. Harris Emily M. Harris is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose large-scale installations and intimate works Read More …
Our final NIAD Gift Guide of the season doubles as a sneak peek into what’s in store for you at Win Win 10, NIAD’s Annual Benefit Fundraiser coming up on Saturday March 5, 2022! Isabel X. Ortiz from NIAD’s fundraising team describes the NIAD artworks that inspired her Win Win 10 Sneak Preview collection… About the collection I curated this collection with all the game-lovers and risk-takers in mind. It’s for the artists who are pushing their own creative boundaries. It’s for the innovators who are thinking of their next passion project. It’s for the people who like to spice up their homes with Read More …
About the exhibition The exhibition windows of NIAD on 23rd street are wildly overstuffed this holiday season. Amongst a backdrop of drawings that are doodled and dotted emerge a collection of creatures that are striped and spotted. This menagerie includes an assortment of tickles and roars from the furriest felines to amphibians galore. At daybreak, dapper penguins appear as mischievous musketeers, parading their way through showers of shapes. Marsupials, with pocketfuls of petunias, patiently postpone their leaping while snails slowly scribe a chalk hopscotch design. By midday, squirrels engage in patterns of play by using their tails as paintbrushes to carry Read More …