The 38th annual art exhibition dedicated to Leo D. Stillwell, an active artist from San Francisco who passed away in 1948, has opened at the Fine Arts Gallery, where San Francisco State University student artists displayed their work. The exhibition features art from students in the ART 619: Exhibition Design course taught by lecturer faculty Kevin Chen.
“You don’t have to be an art studio major. You can submit up to two works for consideration by your peers for inclusion in the show. We had 196 submissions and the classes serve as the jurors,” Chen said. “They selected 95 pieces out of 196 for display.”
One of the artists, Carmen Perez-Guzman, created two pieces. One of which is an assemblage piece that has a chair with a book on it, a vase with pink roses and two scarves representing an indigenous woman from her tribe, the Mazahua tribe found in Michoacan in central southern Mexico. The other is a print etching that represents her culture from Mexico.
“I recently have been doing a lot of research into the tribe, like this morning, to know where I come from,” Perez-Guzman said.
The etching took over a month to complete.
“That was a labor of love,” Perez-Guzman said. “Etching is a new medium for me, so it was kind of a learning curve, but it was great.”
Another student artist, Bethany Padilla, created “Our House,” which is a drypoint intaglio print that explores her sexual identity.
“I was exploring this idea of home and place because home hasn’t always been a safe place for me in my queerness,” Padilla said. “It was nice to kind of make my own world that I was exploring these little gay demons in my head.”
She also has a performance installation piece, “This land is made for you and me,” which is about connecting land and the human body. Throughout the performance, it involved planting seeds in different stages to create a discussion revolving around land and food sustainability.
“I have a plant inside the bottom piece, and then the top has chia seeds that are growing,” Padilla said. “It’s a fun way for me to make sense of my relationship to land and my body and sustaining myself through the land that I live on.”
Ava Azarpay, a Persian American artist, had her two ceramic pieces on display: “The Devil” which is a coffin and “Sting” which is a small spiked vase.
“I made it a casket because you think about your devil, you think about your dark parts of your soul, and it just represents a place for all that to rest because all that never really goes away,” Azarpay said. “You just outgrow it in a way. So I guess this piece represents a physical space for both the good and the bad parts of yourself.”
Yasmine Anastasia Nickle, a Moroccan American artist, created an audio piece based on what it was like as a person diagnosed with ADHD and autism.
“I like layered audio,” Anastasia said. “When you listen to it through the headphones, some audio will play only in your left ear, and some will only play in your right ear, and some will send both and talk to each other.”
Anastasia’s other piece, “$10 tasks,” was a self-recording of her doing different tasks for $10 to see whether people need money for human interaction.
“I swapped out temporary license plates. I sexted this man, Jay, from Craigslist for an hour and sent him a picture. I hung out with this woman. Her name’s Sherry. And actually we’re close friends now. I hung out with her son John, who is high-functioning autistic,” Anastasia said. “The whole concept was, can you only connect with people if there is, like, a monetary transaction? Can we only connect with one another if there’s money involved? And how do we connect with strangers outside of money in a capitalist world?”
Local art enthusiast Kevin Webster has been following the exhibition for a couple of weeks and visits the student gallery every week.
“I love the way it changes out every week,” Webster said. “The shows that you have up here are always fantastic. The fact this is all student work is just great.”
The Stillwell Student Exhibition will be on display until Dec. 11. Regular hours are from noon to 4 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays.
