πΈ photo credit: Nicole Ravicchio
Nathan Watson currently lives and works in San Francisco as an artist, designer, and the Executive Director of the Bayview arts non-profit Public Glass. His work investigates a range of issues from equity and privilege to materiality and labor, but always with a focus on practical applications in addressing complex social issues. Before pursuing his graduate degree at the California College of Arts in 2004, Nate received a BA in history from Centre College and was awarded grants from the Rhode Island Foundation, and the Rhode Island Council For the Arts for his work concerning immigration and craft.
Nate has lectured and taught nationally as a visiting artist at the Massachusetts College of Art, Centre College in KY, UC Fullerton, San Francisco State University, and at conferences addressing issues surrounding arts education, youth programming and social justice. In 2012 Nate co-founded Light A Spark, a glass focused arts program that provides rare opportunities and resources for youth in the underserved communities of San Francisco.
His visual work, often formed by constructed architectural interventions and poetic imagery, has been the subject of exhibitions at the Noma Gallery and Refusalon in San Francisco, POST in Los Angeles and numerous surveys of contemporary artist using glass as an element in their practices. As a curator, Nate has contributed to exhibitions at Southern Exposure, Google, The Reclaimed Room at Building Resources and directs the gallery and artist in residence programs at Public Glass.
πΈ photo credit: German Vazquez
Michele Carlson uses creative strategies to question systems of power and legacies of racialization. She is a visual artist, writer, educator, and facilitator of projects ranging from conversations to publications to occasional curatorial endeavors. Her work is as much about how we create and endure systems of power as how we can refuse and reform them through creative imagining and action.
Carlson fostered her multidisciplinary practice at the University of Washington, where she received a BFA in printmaking, BA in interdisciplinary visual arts, and BA in history. Her making and writing practice was further developed at the California College of the Arts, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she earned an MFA in printmaking and an MA in visual and critical studies.
In her visual works on paper, which have been exhibited and supported nationally, Carlson often uses speculative, imaginative strategies to explore how humans engage collectively and affect one another. As a writer, she uses various writing styles to process the ways visual and material cultures reflect the lived experiences of diverse social groups. Her critical writings on art and culture have been published by Art in America, KQED, and Afterimage and include numerous catalogue essays and book chapters. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled The Visits, which examines the visual culture of incarceration as a means to explore constructions of kinship and family. This project has recently been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the San Leandro Arts Council, and Montalvo Center for the Arts.
Her broader practice demonstrates a commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices through curatorial work, editorial direction and publishing, and leadership positions. From 2016 to 2019, Carlson was the executive director of Art Practical, a West Coast arts media organization that produced art writing, books, events, and podcasts about contemporary art. From 2011 to 2016, she served on various editorial and leadership teams, including as editor in chief of Hyphen, a media outlet for Asian American culture and politics.
From 2016 to 2019 she was as an associate professor of visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts, where she taught across the fields of critical theory and studio arts. She currently teaches at George Washington University as an associate professor of printmaking.
πΈ photo credit: Mia Nakano
Weston Teruya Weston Teruya is an artist and cultural producer who has exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills College Art Museum, University of HawaiΚ»i, MΔnoa, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; received public art commissions for the San Francisco and Alameda County Arts Commissions; grants from Artadia, Asian Cultural Council, CCI Investing in Artists, and Creative Work Fund; and been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, A. Farm Saigon, Montalvo Arts Center, Ox-Bow, the de Young Museum, Recology SF, and Kala Art Institute. Weston received his BA in Studio Art with a minor in Asian American Studies from Pomona College and an MFA in Painting & Drawing and MA in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.
For three seasons, he produced and hosted (un)making, an interview-based podcast highlighting the work of artists & cultural producers of color through the West Coast online arts writing and criticism publication, Art Practical. In his other professional work in the field, Weston has almost 15 years of experience across different roles in grantmaking and arts fund development: he has worked for the San Francisco Arts Commissionβs Cultural Equity Grants program, served as a Commissioner with the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, and sat on selection panels for funders including the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Craft Research Fund, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. As a grant writer, he supports culturally-rooted arts organizations with a specialty in cultural equity, civic arts, and artist-centered projects. He has successfully secured grant funding for his clients ranging from National Endowment for the Arts - Our Town to Hewlett Foundation 50 Commissions. Weston currently serves on the Board of the Berkeley Art Center.