Press Kit: When the World is Beautifully Strange

ASHWINI BHAT

After thirty-five years in Southern India, transdisciplinary artist Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature, translation, and classical Indian dance, Bhat works in clay and bronze, often creating large-scale installations using sculpture, video, text, and performance. She has developed a unique visual language to explore the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines, and rituals and non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy, for the “more-than-human.” 

Bhat is a 2024 John S. Knudsen Prize winner and a 2023 United States Artists fellow. She has also received the Howard Foundation Award for Sculpture, and the McKnight Foundation Residency Fellowship. Her work is exhibited nationally & internationally and can be seen in collections at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Crocker Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum in USA; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in India; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan; FuLe International Ceramic Art Museum in China; and in many private collections. Her sculpture also has been widely reviewed and featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, Dovetail Mag, Art and Cake, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bay Nature, PinUp Magazine, New City Mag, American Craft Council, Alta Journal, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion, and Riot Material. She is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, and Project 88, Mumbai, India. 

KRISTIANA CHAN 莊礼恩 

Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩 is a multimedia visual artist from the American South based in the Bay Area. Her work examines the material memory of the landscape and the excluded histories of the Asian American diaspora. She researches the political, historical, and environmental heritage of the landscape and its material elements and organisms, and  incorporates their properties into her processes. She is interested in the relationships of themes of migration, labor, trade, and reciprocity with the natural world, challenging ideals of extractive capitalism and grounding her objects in material tactility to explore our future relationships with land, history, and resources. 

Her previous projects have focused on the lost stories of early Chinese diaspora settlers in California, and their connections to industries like fishing and mining. These stories, images, and references entangle the historical and mythological, while the gathered materials attempt to transcend gaps in the written record. Chan is interested in themes of science and speculative fiction, and the littoral coastal zones, gleaning ancient wisdom from environments that have adapted to rapidly changing conditions. 

She is a recipient of the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and has held residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, ACRE, Tides Institute of Art and History, and Stelo Arts. She has shown at the Asian Art Museum, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, University of San Francisco, Stelo Arts, SOMArts, Vessel Gallery, Kearny Street Workshop, and the David Brower Center. Kristiana is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. 

ELISA D’ARRIGO

Elisa D’Arrigo currently works in ceramics, after a 30-year hiatus in which she worked with various materials including hand-stitched and laminated cloth. 

D’Arrigo has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at the ADAA (The Art Show with George Adams Projects), Hunterdon Art Museum (Clinton, NJ), Elizabeth Harris Gallery (New York, NY), Pamela Salisbury Gallery (Hudson, NY), and FiveMyles (Brooklyn, NY). 

Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Everson Museum of Art, The Mead Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and The Weatherspoon Art Museum. 

Reviews, interviews and articles about her work have appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, ArtNews, Sculpture, Partisan Review, ArtPapers, ArtSpiel, Hudson Review, The New York Observer, and Romanov Grave, among others. Residencies and grants include The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Dieu Donne Papermill, NYFA and The Ariana Foundation for the Arts. 

D’Arrigo received a BFA in Ceramics from SUNY New Paltz in 1975. She was born and raised in the Bronx, NY, and continues to live in New York City. 

NIKI FORD

Niki Ford is an artist that lives and works in Los Angeles. Ford channels otherworldly narratives through pigmented stoneware sculpture, mixed-media paintings and works on paper. These pieces take us on a journey through the body, water, plants, landforms, poetry/prayer, histories/time and vortexes of many shapes and sizes. They lean into the corporeal, intuitive, reparative, devotional, and exemplary possibility expressed through queerness & gender otherness. 

Ford works with line, texture, vibration, color, repetition/pattern, deviation from repetition/pattern, sympathetic gesture and repair. The work is also design and textile adjacent.  In the past, Ford has referred to their practice as ‘psychedelic brutalism’ as it combines spirit work, intuitive construction and process driven aesthetics. 

Recent exhibitions include: House Music (two-person exhibition) with Andrea Zittel, The Wolford House, Los Angeles (2025); Pompeii Drag, Broadway Gallery, NYC (solo) (2024); Freak of Nature, Five Car Garage (solo) (2024); Felix Art Fair with Broadway Gallery (two-person presentation) with Devin Troy Strother, Los Angeles (2024); Jeweled Earth, New Work by Niki Ford and Jieun Reiner, La Loma Projects, Los Angeles, 2023; Kneeling At The Mouth, The Lodge, Los Angeles (solo) (2022). 

LINDA NGUYEN LOPEZ

Linda Nguyen Lopez is a first generation American artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her abstract works explore the poetic potential of the everyday by imagining and articulating a vast emotional range embedded in the mundane objects that surround us.  

Her works have been exhibited in Italy, New Zealand, England, France, and throughout United States, including the Renwick Gallery at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; Springfield Art Museum; The Hole, New York; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami; David B. Smith Gallery, Denver; and the Museum of Art and Design, New York. Lopez was awarded the United States Artist Fellowship in 2024. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. 

CATHY LU

Cathy Lu creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Central to her work is unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of one’s American identity.  

Lu received a BA and BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently a SMFA Professor of the Practice in Ceramics at Tufts University.  

She has participated in artist-in-residence programs at Kohler Arts Center; Bemis Center for the Arts; Recology, San Francisco; Greenwich House Pottery, New York City; and the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT.   

Her work has been exhibited widely at The Armory Show, New York, NY; Art Basel Hong Kong;  Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Prospect 6, New Orleans; Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong; MCA Denver. In the Bay Area, CA, she has shown at SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Center, Chinese Culture Center, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Kadist, Kala Arts Center, Manetti Shrem Museum, and Root Division. Lu was a 2019 Asian Cultural Council/Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation Fellow, and is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award winner.   

Lu’s work has recently been included in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Kadist, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.   

NATHAN LYNCH

Nathan Lynch was raised in Pasco, Washington, an agricultural community in the shadow of Hanford Nuclear Power Plant. This contradictory environment gave Lynch an acute sense of location and deep appreciation for irony. His concerns for political conflict and environmental upheaval are filtered through notions of absurdity, hand fabrication, and the dramatic devices of storytelling. As a sculptor, designer and performance artist, Lynch has made collaboration and experimentation major components of his practice. 

At the University of Southern California Lynch studied with Ken Price, and later earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. Lynch is an Assistant Professor of Art at California College of the Arts. 

TIMNA NAIM

Timna Naim, a San Jose-based artist, explores identity, play, and community through interdisciplinary work integrating ceramic sculpture, installation, and performance. Their practice centers on tactility, storytelling, and participation, using vibrant colors, abstract forms, and interactive elements to spark the imagination. Blending improvisation with rigor, their work begins with tension, resolved through fantastical play, crafted beauty, and playful messiness. They investigate social norms and material relationships, questioning how humans shape and transform the world around them. As a queer, multi-ethnic immigrant and artist with North African and Eastern European roots, Timna explores the fluidity of identity while highlighting our responsibility to continually reshape ourselves, our spaces, and our material environment with intention and care. 

Timna Naim holds an MFA in Spatial Art and an MA in Teaching. They chair the Art Department and teach ceramics at Fremont High School, and also teach ceramics at SJSU. Naim has been in residence at the Zentrum für Keramik and the Ponderosa Dance Center in Germany, TEOR/ÉTICA, and UCR in Costa Rica. 

WOODY DE OTHELLO

Woody De Othello holds an MFA from the California College of Arts, San Francisco and BFA from Florida Atlantic University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; SFMOMA, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Seattle Art Museum; LACMA, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Baltimore Museum of Modern Art, MD; ICA, Miami; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; San José Museum of Art, CA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; and MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy, and many more. Othello’s work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. He has exhibited widely in group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Hayward Gallery, London; The Met, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial; 33rd Ljubljana Biennial, Slovenia; and Center for Craft in Asheville, NC, among others. Large-scale public art commissions include San Francisco International Airport; de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Cityline, Sunnyvale. Othello lives and works in Oakland, CA. He is represented by Jessica Silverman and Karma. 

ANNABETH ROSEN

Annabeth Rosen studied at Alfred University (BFA) and the Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA), and has gone on to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1997, she has held the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis. 

‘Rosen’s work made of fired and glazed clay seem to have neither fixed contours nor stable shape, even their scale appears to shift as you look. They are variously volcanic, beastly, catastrophic, and unnervingly funny, suggesting things going terribly wrong, but not yet irreversible.’ –Nancy Princenthal 

Rosen’s work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and is in the collections of the LA County Museum, The Oakland Museum, The Denver Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and many public and private collections. She shows her work with P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York. Rosen has received multiple grants and awards, including a Pew Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a UC Davis Chancellors Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and in 2016, she was named a USA Artist Fellow. Rosen has been granted the Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Guggenheim Fellow. 

LINDA SORMIN

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Linda Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. Sormin’s sculptures and site-responsive installations embody the vulnerable and fragmentary nature of her diasporic experience. Recent exhibitions include two large-scale installations in Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2021-23), and Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2023). Her first solo museum exhibition will open in November, 2025 at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Sormin lives and works in New York City. 

Since the early 2000’s, Sormin has established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive methods. She integrates writing, video, sound, and hand-cut paintings with clay, metal and wood.  Sormin’s research and writing cast light on how her work has always been influenced – though at times unwittingly – by cultural practices in her family histories rooted in Thailand, China, and Indonesia. She has taught visual art at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College, Alfred University, and currently New York University, where she is a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art and Head of Ceramics. She holds a BA in English Literature (Andrews University,1993), a Diploma in Craft and Design (Sheridan College, 2001) and an MFA in Ceramic Art (Alfred University, 2003).  

Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Alfred Ceramic Art Museum (Alfred, NY).

WANXIN ZHANG

Zhang, whose personal and artistic journey has taken him from Manchuria to California, has spent over 30 years living and making art in the Bay Area. He has rightfully earned the title of “a California artist.” His sculpture represents a fusion of historical references and contemporary cultural context, often employing humor along with potent social and political commentary. 

Zhang received the 2006 Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant and the 2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, he was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective and accompanying monograph, Wanxin Zhang: The Long Journey, at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. 

His work is included in the collections of the Asian Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.;  Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA; the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA; Arizona State University Art Museum; and the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Internationally, his work is held by the Annie Wong Art Foundation in Hong Kong, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the Ube Tokiwa Museum in Japan. 

Zhang lives and works in San Francisco. He is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery.