In conjunction with our Summer exhibition, Untitled Gesture, Creativity Explored is welcoming Bay Area arts educators for a discussion on innovative approaches to pedagogy. The artists highlighted in this exhibition communicate in non traditional forms and have developed their own visual language through their mark making. To facilitate an equitable artmaking environment, the staff at CE have developed unique tools and techniques to help all of our artists thrive.
For this free professional development event, CE teaching artists will present on their personal approach to teaching, systems that they have developed, and how those systems were shaped by their experiences at Creativity Explored.
Agenda
10:00 am - 11:00 am: Opening remarks and presentations by CE staff
11:00 am - 11:15 am: Break
11:15 am - 12:00 pm: Round table discussion about tools highlighted and how they can be applied in various settings including classrooms, museums, camps and afterschool programs.
Adaptive art tools used by artist Kaocrew ‘Yah’ Kakabutra. Yah’s most common tool is her adaptive paint brush made from shredded tee shirt strains attached to a broken brush; she has crafted hybrid tools, such as brushes, stamps, and sticks, to achieve her distinctive multi-dimensional strokes.
By Marilyn Wong
Leeza Doreian is an Oakland based artist whose work explores time, attention, pattern, and conservation. Returning to individual items of discarded clothing as source material, her Paintings invert the process of mass-production, recasting what may otherwise be overlooked as banal into singular poetic experience. With a focus on systems and webs of connection, her work addresses the relationship between visual language, materiality, intimacy, and empathy. A fundamental concern is the ways we, as humans, understand and impact the world around us. Leeza received her MFA from the University of Texas in Austin. Her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions in numerous galleries and museums, including: Artist Space, PS1, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Root Division, The Lab, Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State and the Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a Teaching Artist at Creativity Explored, and recently co-founded the art cooperative Mending Collective.
Kate Hope
By Jesus Huezo
Kate Hope was born in the northeast of England and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2022. She studied BA Honors Degree Graphic Design at Leeds Arts University. Her ethos is to make a positive impact on people's lives and she is an advocate for individuals with disabilities.
Kate was a camp counselor at Camp Harmon in Santa Cruz for two summers. This experience made her fall in love with working with individuals with disabilities. She has experience in health and social care and educational settings.
In her spare time, she enjoys experimenting with traditional and digital art methods and she has a love for books.
Alex Hernandez
By Jesus Huezo
Based in San Francisco, artist Alexander Hernandez was originally born in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in Grand Junction, Colorado. His practice is mixed-media in nature with a concentration in textiles. His work explores the intersectional identities of the immigrant experience, queer sensibilities, gender expectations, HIV survival and acculturation anxieties. In 2007, he earned his BFA in Painting and Drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver, CO and his MFA in Studio Art in 2012 from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He has participated in a variety of art residencies including Mass Moca in North Adams, MA; SJ Museum of Quilts and Textiles, San Jose, CA; Root Division in San Francisco; Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC; Mark Rothko Art Center in Latvia; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; ACME in Steuben, Wisconsin; and recently finished a residency at the New Museum Los Gatos, Los Gatos, CA.
Lacey Johnson
Lacey Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker and collaborator. Her work is grounded in elevating the everyday to embody the cosmic and divine through accessible mediums. She leans into rituals that grow from the politics of emotion, from publicly reading bedtime stories, to song writing, protest imagery, archival research, zines and video installations. She performs in the art band Cave Babe, and spent ten years writing her autobiography through self published comics. Her work has been used as teaching tools in classrooms from pre-school to college, and has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, SOMARTS, Mills College Art Museum, the Salesforce Tower, the Roxy Theater, Recology SF, and the SF Public Library.
Lacey is also the inaugural artist in residence at one of the country’s last remaining queer bars, Mother.