Participating artists

This exhibit aims to challenge and inspire viewers to consider new realities.

Come see it at the Library Art Gallery from January 19 to March 9.

Wendy Baker graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was a landscape architect for 25 years and began painting full-time after retirement 10 years ago. She has been in many solo shows and competitions in Marin County, including the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, the Falkirk Cultural Center, Gallery Route One, and the Marin Society of Artists (MSI). She is currently painting full time at her studio at MSA Gallery in San Rafael.

Aia Bower grew up in Mill Valley, California and majored in art history and French language at Mills College and La Sorbonne, Paris IV before following a childhood dream to live in Europe more permanently. After realizing this dream, and living in France and Italy for ten years, she has come full circle, returning home to live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I began drawing and painting at a very young age. Later, inspired by concert posters, album covers, and Pop Art, I studied Advertising Design and Illustration at Northern Arizona University and Art Center. After college I pursued a 30+ year career in San Francisco as an art director/creative director. In 2011, a weeklong art workshop at Esalen reignited my first love of making art. My studio is in the Industrial Center Building (ICB) in Sausalito.

Torryne Choate, the owner of birch, has been a leading florist in the Bay Area for more than twenty years. birch, her floral design studio and retail concept, was founded in 2007 in a storefront on Sacramento Street. Its second location, on Hayes Street, provided fresh-cut flowers, vases, magazines, and other gifts to stylish San Franciscans for ten years. Her recent work departs from pure florals, exploring her evolution as a photographer and a sculptor.

Thomas Colletta received his first set of oil paints in the eighth grade and his brushes have been occupied ever since. His work was included in the 2020 “de Young Open” and more recently in the Crocker Museum’s 2022 juried show. And he happily holds a Grammy Pin from his time with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and their 1994 Grammy Award winning recording of the Brahms’ Requiem.

Joyce Creswell grew up horseback riding in the emerald hills and forests of Maryland. Her B.F.A. in Graphic Design put her on a particular commercial path that she followed for many years. But, painting has always been her first love. It wasn't always an easy balancing act, work and art. But that's the way it has always been…”painting has been my lifeblood.”

Rachel Davis is a mixed media artist with a studio in the historic ICB Building in Sausalito. Her award winning abstract and figurative work has been juried into shows nationally and internationally, including the de Young Open Exhibition, the Salon at the Triton, and is in collections across the United States, in Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

Michael Friedland studied painting and design at Paier College of Art, Coronado School of Fine Arts and Philadelphia College of Art. Retired now from a forty-year career as a designer, he has been teaching painting (with watercolor) for the last eight years. He teaches in San Rafael, Corte Madera and Belvedere/Tiburon and at Yosemite’s Artists in Residency.

While attending architecture school at UC Berkeley, Jonathan Gaber painted murals, built furniture, and created an art and design business. After a forty-year career in the office interiors business, he sold his company, and restarted his art efforts in 2017.

Luis Garcia is a Mayan-Pipil, Oakland-based artist. Luis graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2002 with Honors. Garcia is a current member, award winner, and exhibiting artist of Marin MOCA, and most recently curated his first museum exhibition at Marin MOCA in 2021, "Invincible", an exhibition that highlighted LatinX Artists of the Bay.

Gerald Huth was born and raised in New York City to an émigré family who instilled in him a deep love of culture and the arts. Originally influenced by European travel and art, he has since traveled extensively in Asia, and arts of India, Cambodia, Japan, etc. have become a strong influence on his work. Huth has exhibited extensively in the US and Europe.

Barbara Kibbe graduated from college in 1974 with a B.A. in Art and a special concentration in printmaking. Following art school and in search of a livelihood, I went to law school. During those years, I gave time to New York Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA). I have continued to paint and make prints, but I also discovered the visual and tactile richness of art quilts. I now revel in the expansive vision of large-scale work that is painted but also often both printed and stitched.

Jung Han Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. Since 2002, he has lived and maintained his studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. His works have been exhibited and awarded nationally and internationally, including in San Francisco’s 2020 “de Young Open Exhibition”. He paints California and San Francisco in oils.

Hugo Kobayashi received his bachelor’s degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1983 and his M.F.A. from Hunter College (CUNY) in 1985. His oil paintings have been shown in the Bay Area, New York and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA. Making digital collages, videos, 8mm films, animated cartoons, and gif anims are his hobbies.His piece, The Good Life, was in the 2020 “de Young Open” exhibition, and featured in a de Young video on the show.

Daniel McClain was born in San Francisco, and is a graduate of the California College of the Arts. He works at his Berkeley, California studio.

Mark McGown has an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has worked in a number of media over many years — including filmmaking, printmaking, photography, painting, and sculpture, on occasion, mixing them up together. He was the Art Director at the Exploratorium for over 25 years, designing exhibitions, magazines, and many print pieces. He plays the Blues harmonica.

From early on, the main focus of Debbie Patrick’s work has been portraiture. She works in both oil and pastels, letting the subject and the quality of light dictate which medium to use. She is a member of the Pastel Society of the West Coast, Pastel Society of America, the Marin Society of Artists and the Golden Gate Marin Artists. She has exhibited and won awards in juried shows across the United States and was named Marin County Artist of the Year in 2017.

Laura Smith Blair lives and works in Marin, where she paints modern and abstracted landscapes of California. She began her arts education at the University of California at San Diego where she earned her B.F.A. Smith Blair has exhibited in numerous galleries, and currently shows her work in Marrow Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in many public collections including Stanford Hospital, Children’s Hospital in Oakland, St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco, and Pacific Catch Fish House.

Carol Thomas was twelve when she received her first Brownie camera before a family trip to Yosemite National Park, fueling a lifelong passion for travel and photography. With a Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley in educational research and development, she believes in lifelong learning, and photography has opened her eyes and heart to the beauty of the world, and allowed her to meet new people and hear their stories. She belongs to numerous photography groups and has exhibited widely.

Susan West learned the basics of photography in the mid-1970s. In the 1990s she had the good fortune to study with master printer and documentary photographer Frank Espada. However, life and work left little time for creativity. Since 2015, however, she has returned to photography full time. Her work has earned honors in national and international shows, and her photos are in private collections in the Bay Area, New York, Paris, and elsewhere.