Minnesota Street Project is a vibrant new Dogpatch complex providing affordable spaces to galleries and artists. The studio building now houses 36 painters, sculptors, photographers and multidisciplinary artists; here, five reflect on the transformative impact a room of one’s own can have on a practice.
Photographer Klea McKenna often works with “big materials, outdoors and in uncomfortable situations,” she observes.
Her exquisitely detailed images of spiderwebs and rainstorms often require her to be out at night, and her new series—rubbings of cedar, redwood and cypress tree rings onto photo paper—is physically demanding.
“I’m trying to have one thread of practice that lets me have that experience in the landscape, and another that allows me to make day-to-day work in the studio,” says McKenna. She now has a dedicated space for the latter.
The artist, who lives in Bernal Hill with her husband and two-year-old daughter, says of her studio at Minnesota Street Project (MSP): “I feel absolute gratitude. I needed space and privacy to really see my work. There’s a test gallery space here, a place to shoot my work, a place to install. For years, I was wondering why someone didn’t do this!”
McKenna’s latest work can be seen in “Of Many Minds” at Euqinom Projects through October 29.
“Drawing shapes out of the paintings into sculptural forms, and translating the sculptural forms back into two-dimensional paintings,” is how painter Rebekah Goldstein describes her interdisciplinary approach.
“I’m drawn to ambiguous forms that have multiple reference points.”
Goldstein, a 2012 CCA MFA graduate whose work Lights Down Low was recently acquired by the Berkeley Art Museum, has a solo show this month at Cult/Aimee Friberg Exhibitions.
She says of MSP, “For me, just the space, the light, is amazing—having these tall walls. I didn’t have space before to work on this many pieces at once. The ability to work on sculpture and painting at the same time has helped expand the possibilities of what I thought my work could be.”
Photographer Sean McFarland, a 2017 SECA Art Award finalist, is one of most accomplished artists in residence at MSP.
Recognized for his haunting, lyrical landscapes, McFarland’s images are in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum and many other institutions.
McFarland says of MSP, “In 2014, like so many artists in the last few years, I left San Francisco, leaving behind a community struggling to survive. A year later, a teaching position brought me home.”
“Many friends had left and so many galleries and institutions had closed in just one short year.”
“Minnesota Street Project is helping to rebuild what has been lost, and with a long-term commitment to arts in the Bay Area, provides me and so many others invaluable resources for survival; a place to work, security and a framework for a strong community.”
Brittany Atkinson graduated from CCA’s MFA program just last year, but a 2016 SECA Art Award nomination and her selection for a coveted studio at MSP points to a bright future.
She says of her process-driven photography practice, “I’ve always been interested in the ways I could use my hands and additional tools, and in having an element of unpredictability.”
Her work features silver gelatin prints that capture the luminosity of digital devices. “I have a handheld scanner, and I scan my computer screen—I scan the digital light,” she says. “When I’m satisfied, I print it on film digitally and bring that into the darkroom to print. I love the fact that I don’t know what’s going to be at the end of the tunnel.”
Atkinson says of MSP: “I’m so used to having to go everywhere, to taking everything to the photo lab. At MSP the facilities are all here. This will give me so much more time to work.”
With degrees in mechanical engineering, environmental fluid dynamics, and fine arts, it’s only logical that Miguel Arzabe has a multidisciplinary practice.
One can see his engineer’s mind at work in everything from the custom stretcher bars he designed with a team from One Hat One Hand in Bayview—with digital instructions accessible via phone—to his meticulous paper weavings made from art flyers, posters and ephemera.
Arzabe’s left brain, however, is balanced by his creative sensibility. As he notes of his “strip paintings,” vibrant, large-scale works he slices into strips and then fastens into forms: “I’m not trying to predict how it [the painting] will look. It allows a letting go of the result, because I have the intention of cutting it. It frees me up.”
Arzabe, who shares his studio with artist Rachelle Reichert, says of MSP, “It’s crucial to have a space where we can cultivate a thoughtful, long-term community, without fear of displacement.”
“The substantial investment made in the facility demonstrates that our work is valued as an important contribution to society.”