Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Pacifica based artist Saif Azouz, discussing his journey in art, inspiration from nature and literature, his current exhibition 'Cost of Living', and his reflections on boundaries and displacement. Saif's experience with art, his use of materials, and his perspectives on creativity and community are highlighted throughout the episode.

About Artist Saif Azzuz :

Saif Azzuz is a Libyan-Yurok artist who resides in Pacifica, CA. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Azzuz has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, TX in 2025 and has exhibited widely in the bay area including exhibitions at 1599dt Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Adobe Books, San Francisco, CA; Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, FR; ICA SF, San Francisco, CA; Pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA; NIAD, Oakland, CA; Rule Gallery, Denver, CO; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; Jack Barrett, New York, NY and K Art, Buffalo, NY. Azzuz is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence program.

Selected public collections include de Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Facebook, Menlo Park, CA; Gochman Family Collection, NY; KADIST, San Francisco, CA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Rennie Museum, Vancouver, Canada; Stanford Health Care Art Collection, Menlo Park, CA; UBS Art Collection, New York, NY; and University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, MN.

Learn more about Saif, CLICK HERE.

Follow on Instagram: @SaifAzzuz

Check out Saif's current exhibit "Cost of Living" HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with filipina-american interdisciplinary artist Charlene Tan.

In this Episode, Charlene shares her background, inspiration, and creative process behind her exhibition, Warp/Weft which pays homage to her Filipino heritage. It discusses her use of traditional Filipino materials like mung beans and ube, the personal connections embedded in her artwork, and the viewers' responses. Charlene's journey as an artist, from childhood to her current exhibitions, is also highlighted, along with insights into the labor-intensive nature of her work, family influences, and the supportive community that has shaped her artistic path.

About Artist Charlene Tan:

Charlene Tan is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work is thematically focused on the immigrant diaspora and its repercussions, post-assimilation identity, and anthropological investigations of nationalism and cultural heritage. Her work is inspired by her Filipina-Chinese-American identity, reconnecting her artistic cultural heritage of tribal weaving patterns of the Philippines. Using found images by means of digital scanning, these images are edited to pair down to the essence of the pattern.

Once free of scale and color, Tan retraces the patterns to attempt to create a muscle memory of a cultural expression that was once commonplace with her ancestors. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in the US, and is part of several private collections. She holds a BA History and Theory of Contemporary Art with a focus on New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Born in Houston, TX, she lived in the Philippines before moving to San Francisco for her education and work, and is currently a visiting artist at Minnesota Street Project studios.

Follow Charlene on Instagram: @Char.Art.Tan

Learn more about Charlene's art at the Warp/Weft exhibit at re.riddle by CLICKING HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with textile artist Maria Guzman Capron, as she discusses her journey from painting to textiles, influences from her multicultural background, her innovative textile design for the San Francisco Ballet, and her mission to incorporate craft into contemporary art.

About Artist Maria Guzman Capron:

Maria A. Guzmán Capron was born in Italy to Colombian and Peruvian parents. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2015 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2004. Select solo exhibitions include The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Texas State Galleries, San Marcos, TX and Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Select group exhibitions include Boston University, Boston, MA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA; Public Gallery, London, UK; NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA; CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA; Deli Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY. Her works have been written about in Hyperallergic, Variable West, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America.

Capron’s work is in the collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, the Jorge M. Pérez, Miami, FL, and the Speed Museum, Louisville, KY. As a 2022 recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Award, her exhibition Respira Hondo was presented at SFMOMA through May 2023.

For more about Maria, CLICK HERE.

Follow Maria on Instagram: @MariaGuzmanCapron

Learn more about Maria's Scenic Curtain at the SF Ballet HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Iranian born artist and current UC Davis professor Shiva Ahmadi.

About Artist Shiva Ahmadi:

Shiva Ahmadi’s practice borrows from the artistic traditions of Iran and the Middle East to critically examine global political tensions and social concerns. Having come of age in the tumultuous years following the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Ahmadi moved to the United States in 1998, and has been based in California since 2015.

Ahmadi works across a variety of media, including watercolor painting, sculpture, and video animation; consistent through her pieces are the ornate patterns and vibrant colors drawn from Persian, Indian and Middle Eastern art. In her carefully illustrated worlds, formal beauty complicates global legacies of violence and oppression. These playful fantasy realms are upon closer inspection macabre theaters of politics and war: watercolor paint bloodies the canvas, and sinister global machinations play out in abstracted landscapes populated by faceless figures and dominated by oil refineries and labyrinthine pipelines.

Shiva Ahmadi studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; and Azad University, Tehran, Iran. In addition to recent solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017) and Asia Society Museum, New York, NY (2014), her work has been included in major group shows including Home Land Security, For-Site Foundation, San Francisco, CA (2016); Fireflies in the Night Take Wing, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Athens, Greece; and Global/Local 1960-2015: Six Artists from Iran, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY (all 2016); Catastrophe and the Power of Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2018); and Revolution Generations, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Farjam Collection, Dubai, UAE; TDIC Corporate Collection, Abu Dhabi, UAE; and the private collection of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, among others.

In 2016, Ahmadi was awarded the ‘Anonymous Was A Woman’ Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Shiva Ahmadi, a new monograph of her work, was published by Skira in Spring 2017. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at University of California Davis.

Visit Shiva's Website: ShivaAhmadiStudio.com

Follow Shiva on Instagram: @ShivaAhmadi_Studio

For more on her current exhibit at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, CLICK HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with art curator and art historian Maymanah Farhat.

About Curator Maymanah Farhat:

Maymanah Farhat’s art historical research and curatorial work focus on underrepresented artists and forgotten art scenes. Since 2005, she has written widely on twentieth and twenty-first century art, contributing essays and chapters to edited volumes, artist monographs, and museum and gallery catalogs. She has written for such publications as Brooklyn Rail, Art Journal, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Vogue Arabia, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Art + Auction, and Apollo. She has presented her research at New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Law School, University of Minnesota, the University of Amsterdam, Johns Hopkins University, and Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, among other institutions.

Farhat has curated exhibitions throughout the U.S. and abroad, notably at the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Center for the Book, Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Arab American National Museum, Virginia Commonwealth University Gallery in Doha, Qatar, Art Dubai, and Beirut Exhibition Center.

Farhat has been included among Foreign Policy’s annual list of 100 Leading Global Thinkers in recognition of her scholarship on Syrian art after the uprising (2014) and honored by the Arab America Foundation as one of 40 Arab Americans under the age of 40 who have made significant contributions to the Arab American community (2020). She holds a BA in the History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a MA in Museum Administration from St. John’s University, New York.

Visit Maymanah's Website: MaymanahFarhat.com

Follow on Instagram: @Maymanah2.0

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Iraqi born, Los Angeles based artist Hayv Kahraman...

About Artist Hayv Kahraman:

Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq 1981, now lives and works in Los Angeles. A vocabulary of narrative, memory and dynamics of non-fixity found in diasporic cultures are the essence of her visual language and the product of her experience as an Iraqi refugee/come émigré. The body as object and subject have a central role in her painting practice as she compositely embodies the artist herself and a collective.

Kahraman’s recent solo exhibitions include; “Acts of Reparation“, CAM St Louis; “Audible Inaudible“, Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha; “Sound Wounds“, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; “Gendering Memories of Iraq- a Collective Performance” which has been staged at CAM St Louis, Birmingham Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins museum of art and Duke University; “Reweaving Migrant Inscriptions” Jack Shainman, New York; “Audible Inaudible“, The Third Line gallery, Dubai; “How Iraqi are you?“, Jack Shainman, New York. Recent group exhibitions include: “No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection”, Miami; “UNREALISM: Presented by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch”, Miami Design District; “June: A Painting Show”, Sadie Coles HQ, London. Hayv was shortlisted for the 2011 Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum and has received the award “Excellence in Cultural Creativity”, Global Thinkers Forum.

Visit Hayv's Website: HayvKahraman.com

Follow Hayv on Instagram: @HayvKahraman

For more on Hayv's exhibition, "Look Me In The Eyes" at the ICA San Francisco, CLICK HERE.

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Today, Emily chats with Andrew Wilson, a multimedia artist and UC Berkley alumnus.

About Artist Andrew Wilson:

Wilson received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013 with a concentration in Jewelry/Metals and his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Wilson’s work has been in many galleries and institutions including: The Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOMArts, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. He has received such awards and honors as: the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, an Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Carr Center Independent Scholars
Fellowship, the McColl Center and more.

He has also worked with Carrie Mae Weems on The Spirit that Resides in Havana, Cuba alongside the Havana Biennial and The Future is Now Parade for the opening of The REACH in Washington D.C.

His work has been collected by Michigan State University and the University of New Mexico.

Visit Andrew's Website: AIWArt.com

Follow Andrew on Instagram: @drewberzzz

For more on Andrew's exhibit, Torn Asunder at Jonathan Carver Moore, CLICK HERE. 

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. 

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. 

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Today, Emily chats with photographer and interdisciplinary artist Charles H. Lee.

About Artist Charles Lee:

Charles Lee is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher and storyteller whose work exploits the fissures in the versions of U.S. history that we have been taught. His work confronts the fallacy of U.S. iconography and encourages critical dialogue questioning origins of American myths, the obfuscation of Black cultural creators and innovators from the historical archive and empowers Black viewers with a more accurate depiction of their histories and encourages the building of future histories. The stories offer insight into the notion of what it means to be a Black American today. The work rebuilds histories by uncovering truths that have been hidden. By unearthing these narratives the work also traces a lineage from deep in the historical past in order to move forward in the future as in the Ghanaian (Akan) principle of Sankofa. 

Whether it be film, photography, installation, sculpture or sound, Lee chooses whichever means of expression he sees fit for the dissemination of a feeling of belonging and identity. He is the recipient of the 2022 Edwin Anthony & Adelaine Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship and Contemporary Art Award, All College Honors, Graduate Merit Scholarship, the 2021 Pabst Open Door Grant and is a 2022 Recology Artist in Residence. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Lee’s first solo exhibition, “Sweat & Dirt,” opens November 7th, 2023 at SF Camerawork.

Visit Charles' Website: CharlesHLee.com

Follow Charles on Instagram: @ohhh_so_sirius

For more on Charles' exhibit at SF Camerawork, CLICK HERE. 

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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

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CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. 

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. 

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com