KQED features CE artwork in its newly remodeled headquarters
Photo by Jason O’Rear, courtesy KQED
Creativity Explored partnered with KQED to include a selection of local artists’ work in the station’s newly remodeled headquarters in the SF Mission District.
Installations featuring art by disabled artists working at Creativity Explored kick off the KQED’s community art program at 2601 Mariposa Street. The installations are available for the public to enjoy prior to KQED Live and PRX Podcast Garage at KQED events through spring of 2022. Visit these events early to tour a small collection of art celebrating disabled artists in San Francisco.
Artists featured in the installations include Eric Boysaw, Peter Cordova, Pablo Calderon, Christina Marie Fong, Joseph “JD” Green, Nita Hicks, Loren King, Thomas Pringle, and Yang “Buurin” Yu Zhen. All artworks are available for sale with proceeds benefiting Creativity Explored and the artists directly.
“We are thrilled to partner with Creativity Explored to curate and showcase the work of disabled local artists in our new building. By highlighting artists like Peter Cordova, we hope to celebrate and educate visitors about the diverse artists and organizations working here in our neighborhood and eventually elsewhere in the Bay Area.””
Artwork by Peter Cordova installed in a community meeting room at KQED headquarters. Photo by Kirsten Dalldorf, courtesy KQED
Artworks by Peter Cordova and Pablo Calderon celebrate immigrant stories in a public meeting room.
A large collection of drawings by Peter Cordova and a display of three bicycle paintings by Pablo Calderon hang on opposite walls of a community meeting room that KQED plans to make available to community parters later this year. The room is adjacent to The Commons, a multipurpose venue at the heart of the remodeled building and the setting for thes tation’s new hybrid live event series KQED Live. Both Calderon and Cordova reference memories about their homelands in their works.
Filipino artist Peter Cordova’s drawings of Indigenous peoples are presented at KQED in three arrays – two groupings of nine drawings surround an arrangement of 25 artworks.
One of seven siblings, Peter Cordova was born in 1966 in the Philippines in his father’s small village of Iguig, Cagayan. At nineteen, he immigrated to San Francisco with his sister and father to live with his mother in the Mission District, where he still resides. He joined CE in 1996 and views making art as his vocation. Cordova recently retired from a 25-year career at Safeway and now dedicates his time to his art practice.
““I want to speak for myself through my art. I try to share my heritage with other people. If people are not willing to see what you express – how do they know, if you are not telling them?””
A series of landscapes and desert mountains of the American Southwest in on view in a series of 43 individual drawn panels. Plantlife, people, animals, and birds are other predominant features in his lush, graphic drawings. His detailed frieze-like drawings of native peoples contain immense amounts of detail about an imagined daily life. Cordova incorporates a wide variety of American tribal and Filipino characteristics and motifs, creating a mythos all his own spanning centuries and diasporas.
Cordova’s work has appeared in dozens of exhibitions at Creativity Explored including To the Place Where I Grew Up, his first solo exhibition on view through March 2022. Work by Cordova has been shown locally at Svane Family Foundation Ark Auction 2021, UNTITLED ART FAIR, the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art, SFO Museum, Jack Fischer Gallery (San Francisco), Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek, CA), and internationally at Museum of La Creation France (Begles, France) and Funabashi Cure Gallery (Japan).
Installation of three original paintings of bicycles by Pablo Calderon in a community meeting room at KQED headquarters. Photo by Kirsten Dalldorf, courtesy KQED
Artist Pablo Calderon joined CE in 2002 and recently retired from the program in 2019. Born in El Salvador in 1952, Calderon immigrated to the US in his late thirties. His artwork focuses on trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles, which he remembers from his family’s auto and bicycle repair shop in his native El Salvador. These vehicles are presented as flattened map-like abstractions created with thick colorful lines of paint. At KQED, three brightly-colored paintings of bicycles offer this history with a nod to San Francisco’s vibrant cycling culture.
“In my country, there is zero opportunity for people like my brother,” states Maron Vitellio Calderon in a video released in 2016 at CE’s annual spring gala, Art Changes Lives. But Calderon has experienced much success at Creativity Explored, exhibiting work at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Outsider Art Fair New York, SFO Museum, Sheffer Gallery (Sydney, Australia), Crawford Art Gallery (Cork, Ireland), Oakland International Airport, and dozens of exhibitions at the Creativity Explored gallery. Calderon still keeps in touch with his favorite Creativity Explored teaching artists and connects with the program when he visits San Francisco.
Self-portraits installed in the lower lobby at KQED headquarters. Photo by Kirsten Dalldorf, courtesy KQED
Neurodiverse artists represent themselves with a lively collection of self-portraits.
The series of self-portraits on display in the hallway in KQED’s lower lobby represents an important tradition in the Creativity Explored studios. The practice of self-portraiture in the CE studios dates back to our founders, Florence and Elias Katz. They believed, as do we, that art is a means of universal communication – no matter one's abilities.
As a way to introduce artists to the practice of creating figurative visual art and as a tool of self-discovery, the Katzs would offer new artists a mirror. The mirror would be positioned so the artist could view their own face while working on paper in their preferred medium (typically drawing with pencil, pen or marker). Artists would draw themselves, often many times, developing in their own unique ways of seeing.
This practice continues today at the studios. Self-portraits and group portraiture are popular projects CE teaching artists employ in the studios. Drawing each other is another important practice that is intimate and human, creating bonds and understanding that go beyond language and physical communication.
The collection on view at KQED includes seven self-portraits by Eric Boysaw, Christina Marie Fong, Joseph “JD” Green, Nita Hicks, Loren King, Thomas Pringle, and Yang “Buurin” Yu Zhen. Each artist approaches their own image with their own unique visual vocabulary, however, each artist gazes back at the viewer. The viewers are confronted with an unabashedly human representation of a disabled person on their terms. The collection of self-portraits is on view in the hallway leading from the garage and into the lower lobby, inviting staff and visitors to ‘meet’ some of the CE artists working right in the neighborhood.
The KQED Live and PRX Podcast Garage at KQED calendars are stacked full of incredible and inspiring events bringing live journalism, performance, and community building to the Bay Area. Be sure to check out the art installations when you attend an upcoming event!
Creativity Explored is proud to partner with KQED to represent local artists in their beautiful Mission District headquarters as part of our Professional Art Services program.
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