Usable artworks in terrycloth
100% cotton towels
For the beach or the home
Designed by rising artists
Jacquard-woven in the USA
And never mass-produced
Limited editions for art lovers
And gourmet bathers alike
With other sunshine essentials
Handmade by our talented friends
A project by Jessica Thornton Murphy
In San Francisco, California
Made possible by:
ARTISTS
- Tyler Cross
- Mark Ochinero
- Rachel Kaye
- Chelsea Wong
- Rob Moss Wilson
- Kidtofer
- Lena Gustafson
- Charlotte Beavers
- Oliver Hawk Holden
- Maria Paz
- Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
- Momo Gordon
- Wardell McNeal
- Yulia Zinshtein
- Solange Roberdeau
- Daisy Sheff & Karen Barbour
- Craig Calderwood
- Tate Kim
- Aaron Elvis Jupin
- Molly Bounds
- Lucy Stark
- Natalie Bessell
- Jessica Thornton Murphy
Sun Buns | June 2020
Tyler Cross is an artist based in Oakland, California. Although he is best known for the ceramic sculpture he makes in collaboration with his boyfriend, Kyle Lypka, Tyler maintains a focused solo practice of sculpture, painting, and drawing which poetically explores his fascination with the complicated relationship between art and functionality. Using a private language of color and shapes, echoes of which dance fluidly from his flat to three-dimensional works, Tyler constructs paradoxical artifacts and the abstracted, uncanny landscapes from where they came.
photos by Macayli Hausmann
 |
 |
 |
A conversation with Tyler from June 2022
Featured in Plunge Rag Vol. 2
PLUNGE: What part of your art process excites you?
TYLER: Drawing in my notebook is my favorite part. It’s less risky. I think when it comes to making ceramic sculpture with Kyle, if it’s being made off of a drawing I know what the beginning point, is whereas with painting I don’t really know where it’s gonna go. If there’s anything I’ve learned from working with clay it’s that patience is really important and that’s something I’ve carried over to my painting practice. I’ve started to go a lot slower and take more time with things. I think it allows me to sit with things and have things arrive versus make them happen. I think the beginning is something that always excites me, or gives me an unknown feeling.
Do you spend most of your time working collaboratively with Kyle? How much of your practice is devoted to your own work?
Recently I’ve been working on my own stuff more but in all honesty I’m more excited about the work that we make collaboratively. There are things that I’m doing for my show that I haven’t done before, so I’m excited to see how that goes, like light sculptures, and also I haven’t made a lot of metal work so that’s gonna be a new thing.
Will this be your first solo show?
Yeah, it feels good. I feel like I’m just making what I want to see and before I was concerned about what people want to see. After talking to Kyle I realized it’s not important and I should really just focus on what I want to make.
Do those concerns come from thinking about how the work will sell?
Yep, I was making things and wondering, “Is anyone gonna buy that?”. I don’t really feel like that should be the reason why people make artwork. I should just make it because I want to. I don’t think I’m at the point in my career where I should be concerned if someone’s gonna buy something or not cause to even consider myself as an artist is kinda hard for me to think about.
Why is that?
I’ve done art for myself in a private way for so long that putting a word to it always felt uncomfortable to me. I don’t really want to consider myself as an artist. I think it’s hard to explain and I don’t really know how to put it into words…
Do you feel like the production jobs you’ve taken on, like making the JB Blunk cups and vases for Carter & Co, have pushed your practice because you’re doing things that you wouldn’t normally be doing?
Well, Kyle and I started making vases for fun and that’s what sparked our whole collaborative project. Making vases was the beginning, so it’s resorting back to something that we were already doing and it’s also a way to get back into the swing of things. When we moved studios and weren’t making as much work for a little while we started making vases to warm up.
How did you first start making vases together?
Kyle made a vase for me as a gift and I liked it and wanted to make my own. Then I started drawing sculptures and Kyle wanted to make them.
Was that your first time making ceramics?
No, I actually did a lot at San Francisco Art Institute. I could have minored in sculpture. I needed to take one more class but that would have required me to stay for another semester, which would have been a lot of money so I didn’t.
Where do you find your inspiration?
The graph paper in my notebook. I can start with straight lines, which I feel like is something that is reoccurring the sculpture that Kyle and I produce.
I like that because the Sun Buns towel you made has the grid on it. You have a snake shape that recurs often, too. Where does that come from?
When I was going to school at SFAI a lot of the paintings I was doing had these kind of forms, like an alphabet of shapes basically, and I wasn’t really aware that I was even doing that until we had a class visit by Jenny Gheith, who works at SF MoMA. She made me think about what I was doing a little more and pointed out that I was working with a reservoir of shapes.
Has that impacted how you go about making work now?
More so in the beginning, not as much now. The snake shape became a stamp that we put on the bottom of our production work and Kyle’s and my collaborative sculpture. That’s our signature now.
How often are you making art?
I feel like it’s not enough. I felt like when I wasn’t working as much I would be in here days during the week and on the weekend. But then I also spend my job making work, so I feel like I am always working on art but it’s for someone else. I work for the artist Liam Everett and have been for seven years.
Does making art with Liam give you momentum to work on your own projects?
Yep, totally. Because then I get to think about things in a different way. Here lately it’s been more sculpture and with him it’s painting. They’re not two different worlds but they’re two different mediums that function very differently. I joke with him that sculpture is harder because there are more things that can go wrong. I feel like you can finish a painting in a month but then working on a large sculpture and having it finished in a month is risky with dry-time.
In your personal practice are you mostly making sculpture? You mentioned making lights and metal objects for your upcoming show.
Well I don’t want them to be “lamps” so I’m trying to think about how to talk about them. At first I was thinking that the element that would cover the lightbulb would be ceramic and Kyle made me think about them being metal because a ceramic sconce is more common. But then also the lighting sculpture idea came from working at the JB Blunk Estate. In the Blunk house you could see all these lights on the wall attached to a pull chain… I used to think art and function should be two different things and now I don’t think it’s that cut and dry. I feel like design is a kind of high art just like a painting or a sculpture. So for me to be deterred from wanting to make a light because it’s something that has a function just isn’t a good enough reason not to make it. I wanted to see it in the world so we made it. Metal as a material is so foreign to me so I think I’ll be sticking with clay for this project.
It seems like it was inspiring to have spent time in a place like the JB Blunk house where art consistently meets functionality.
Totally, and I love that. Whereas I feel like Kyle’s and my work is going in the opposite direction and is seeming less functional.
But it’s a nice illusion — the sculptures look like functional vessels but they’re impractical and non-working. They become very painterly in that way... How does making art make you feel?
I feel like when I’m really in it, I’m in a trance or something… time kind of speeds up and I’m completely in what I’m doing.
How will you know when you’ve arrived or succeeded?
I don’t really know. In some ways I feel like I have because I’m still making work and I feel like a lot of people go to school for “art” and don’t really continue the practice, but I feel like I have to. I have to be working on something or something has to be in the works. Whether it’s Kyle making a sculpture, I’m glazing a sculpture, or there’s paint drying upstairs, et cetera…
What are you most proud of?
I think the sculpture work I’ve made with Kyle has been some of the work I’m most proud of, because we have arrived at something that we both didn’t know could exist.
☺
TYLER HAS BEEN BUSY OVER THE LAST SEVERAL MONTHS. SOME OF HIS WORK WITH KYLE WAS FEATURED IN A GROUP SHOW AT MARIN MOCA, HE HAD HIS FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION AT PART 2 GALLERY IN APRIL AND NEARLY SOLD OUT THE WORK, AND IN MAY HE CURATED HIS FIRST SHOW WHICH INCLUDED HIS AND KYLE’S COLLABORATIVE SCULPTURE ALONGSIDE SITE-SPECIFIC ARTWORKS BY LIAM EVERETT, LAEH GLENN, AND TERESA BAKER. TYLER AND KYLE WILL BE SHOWING EVEN MORE OF THEIR WORK AT BLUNK SPACE IN SEPTEMBER 2022.
Tyler's Instagram
Tyler & Kyle's studio instagram
I Surrender at Pt. 2 Gallery
What Part of the Whale at Pt. 2 Gallery
Gravity Corner at Blunk Space
Friendly Assembly
August 2020
Mark Ochinero is a Bay Area-born illustrator and photographer currently based in Seattle, Washington. His work captures the humor and irony of everyday life and objects: whether he's using a camera, gel pens, crayons, or ceramics, Mark always offers a playful change of perspective.
Wavy Blades
September 2020
Rachel Kaye is an artist based in San Francisco, California. Her love of fashion and textiles has informed a meditative study in collage, pattern, and movement where her paintings come to life in vibrant melodies of color and shapes.
Dans le Sable
October 2020
Chelsea Wong is a painter and muralist whose work reflects a deep love of her San Francisco, California community. Celebrating diversity and color and infusing happiness and joy, Chelsea creates flourishing scenes (both real and imaginary) that share some of life's best moments.
Chelsea's Instagram
Chelsea's Website
Chelsea on Its Nice That
Cumulus Humilis
November 2020
Rob Moss Wilson is an artist based in Martinez, California. His work captures the simplest things that make you feel the best: lying on your back and finding creatures in the clouds, doing cartwheels on grass, swimming in the buff under the warm sun. His words from an interview with It's Nice That ~ "I want people to feel good about being alive".
Wetboi
December 2020
Christopher Gale, also known as Kidtofer, is an artist and illustrator based in Oakland, California and originally from Bangkok, Thailand. His work in ceramic, paint, and illustration unabashedly celebrates sexuality, color, and pop culture.
Open Water
February 2021
Lena Gustafson is an artist from San Francisco, CA who lives and works in the East Bay. Between her multi-disciplinary art practice and Night Diver, the collaborative press she runs with her partner, Lena keeps pumping out incredible work that touches on transformation, the body, the environment, and connects herself to her community.
Lena's Instagram
Lena's Website
Night Diver Press
Poppies & Poppies 2
March 2021 & August 2022
Charlotte Beavers is a California artist currently based on a sailboat floating along the central coast. Her delicate and delightful watercolor paintings celebrate the magical landscapes found all across her home state.
Charlotte's instagram
Charlotte's website
Charlotte on If You Were Here Now
Shrimp Boy
April 2021
Oliver Hawk Holden grew up in a small coastal town in Maine before moving to San Francisco and giving it a go in the arts. He makes humorous, often kinetic sculpture, sculptural paintings, and runs a small art handling company called Expert Art Workers.
My Angels Are All Of You
May 2021
Maria Paz, born in Quilpue, Chile, is a self-taught sculptor based in Oakland, California. She paints gripping visions of her past on large ceramic vessels, using bright colors to tell intricate stories of her history, ancestry, and identity.
Center Black Rest
June 2021
In support of Headlands Center for the Arts
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller & curator who lives and works between Ohlone Land [Oakland, CA] and Powhatan Land [Richmond,VA]. Lukaza creates lyrical mixed-media artworks that weave craft, text, and bright color to speak about identity, activism, and community. Their diligent, immersive work is a call to action, reminding us all that positive change and a brighter future is possible through ongoing mutual support and organization.
Lukaza's website
Lukaza's Instagram
Lukaza's interview on Variable West
Chair Towel
June 2021
Momo Gordon is a self-taught artist born in Hessen, Germany and now based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Momo is focused on the emotional landscape; Working with graphite and handmade paper, their work explores sentient spaces, hostile architecture, and anthropized objects. In sequential works or standalone pieces, characters often have four walls.
Momo's Instagram
Momo's interview with Post-Comics
Momo in So Young Magazine
Moon Stories
August 2021
Wardell McNeal is a painter from San Diego who is currently making work in Oakland, California. His background in industrial design informs an introspective exploration of the emotional landscape in sensual color and wandering depths.
1-800-CALL-ME
August 2021
Yulia Zinshtein is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles who was raised between Moscow and Philadelphia. Through her paintings, photography, and illustrations she playfully explores themes like the beauty of longing, human connection and nostalgia.
Moonglade
October 2021
Solange Roberdeau is an artist and educator based in Elk, California. Her work focuses on her relationship to materiality and process; a maker deeply connected to the present moment and her practice.
Solange's Website
Solange's Instagram
Solange at Municipal Bonds
Blinky Dress
November 2021
Karen Barbour and Daisy May Sheff are a mother and daughter pair based in Inverness, California. Both are exquisite, prolific painters whose work dips into the subconscious and summons magical narratives overflowing with wild, fantastical color. Twisted folky fairytales swirl and swell, landscapes appear and disappear, characters spin within scenes that are at once comical and dark. Although they show work separately it is clear Daisy and Karen have influenced each other’s work immensely, making their towel collaboration extra sweet.
Karen's Instagram
Karen's website
Daisy's Instagram
Daisy at White Columns
Butterfly Sprain
December 2021
Often using affordable craft materials and found textiles, Craig Calderwood creates thoughtful and wildly intricate, vibrantly colored illustrations that offer a glimpse into their private world. Their artworks incorporate a personal language of signs, symbols, and patterns that are heavily researched and repurposed to narrate visual expressions of "desire, biodiversity, and otherness". Craig is based in San Francisco, California.
Craig's Instagram
Craig's website
Craig at George Adams Gallery
Swimmers Tee
February 2021
Tate Kim is a mysto artist from San Diego, California. He’s one of the most authentic people ever, a curious and prolific drawing maker who’s extra talented on just about every level and makes it all look easy ~ surfing, skating, making movies, drawing, existing. He’s creative and humble and respectful and sweet. The world is a much better, stranger place with Tate in it.
Sticky Everywhere
April 2022
Aaron Elvis Jupin is a painting and drawing maker based in Los Angeles, California. His work grapples with nostalgia, memory, and change; his subversion of symbols drawn from American suburbia and popular culture creates moments that are at once silly, uncanny, and sometimes too familiar.
Aaron's Website
Aaron's Instagram
Layman's Terms, Tongue Tied at Moskowitz Bayse
Body Heat
May 2022
Molly Bounds is a painter and printmaker currently living in Los Angeles. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she works to communicate the fault in the understanding of human agency. Torn between an aggravated still and a sequence of motion, subjects appear calm but unsettling, caught between frames as their states of being are exaggerated through posture and profile. In less than uncanny portraits, she instead dwells on the likeness of indecision, wavering through urgency, doubt, and complete ambivalence. Forcing viewers into spectating roles, she poses woulda-shoulda-couldas in windows and doorways leading to a purgatory of her design, stuck in an elongated moment where someone needs to make a decision.
Molly's Instagram
Molly on PLATFORM
Molly in Juxtapoz
Frutti di Mare
July 2022
Lucy Stark is a painter and printmaker living in Oakland, CA. In her art practice, she documents food and dishes with personal significance as a way to capture and celebrate the euphoric yet fleeting moment right before a meal commences.
Nude Beach
July 2020
Jessica Thornton Murphy is based in San Francisco, California. She started Plunge in May 2020 as a way to celebrate the work of the many talented rising artists in her community and beyond.
Jess's Website
Jess's Instagram
Hand Towel ~ September 2021
Butt Stuff ~ January 2022
COLLABORATORS
Sun Buns | June 2020
Tyler Cross is an artist based in Oakland, California. Although he is best known for the ceramic sculpture he makes in collaboration with his boyfriend, Kyle Lypka, Tyler maintains a focused solo practice of sculpture, painting, and drawing which poetically explores his fascination with the complicated relationship between art and functionality. Using a private language of color and shapes, echoes of which dance fluidly from his flat to three-dimensional works, Tyler constructs paradoxical artifacts and the abstracted, uncanny landscapes from where they came.
photos by Macayli Hausmann
|
|
|
A conversation with Tyler from June 2022
Featured in Plunge Rag Vol. 2
PLUNGE: What part of your art process excites you?
TYLER: Drawing in my notebook is my favorite part. It’s less risky. I think when it comes to making ceramic sculpture with Kyle, if it’s being made off of a drawing I know what the beginning point, is whereas with painting I don’t really know where it’s gonna go. If there’s anything I’ve learned from working with clay it’s that patience is really important and that’s something I’ve carried over to my painting practice. I’ve started to go a lot slower and take more time with things. I think it allows me to sit with things and have things arrive versus make them happen. I think the beginning is something that always excites me, or gives me an unknown feeling.
Do you spend most of your time working collaboratively with Kyle? How much of your practice is devoted to your own work?
Recently I’ve been working on my own stuff more but in all honesty I’m more excited about the work that we make collaboratively. There are things that I’m doing for my show that I haven’t done before, so I’m excited to see how that goes, like light sculptures, and also I haven’t made a lot of metal work so that’s gonna be a new thing.
Will this be your first solo show?
Yeah, it feels good. I feel like I’m just making what I want to see and before I was concerned about what people want to see. After talking to Kyle I realized it’s not important and I should really just focus on what I want to make.
Do those concerns come from thinking about how the work will sell?
Yep, I was making things and wondering, “Is anyone gonna buy that?”. I don’t really feel like that should be the reason why people make artwork. I should just make it because I want to. I don’t think I’m at the point in my career where I should be concerned if someone’s gonna buy something or not cause to even consider myself as an artist is kinda hard for me to think about.
Why is that?
I’ve done art for myself in a private way for so long that putting a word to it always felt uncomfortable to me. I don’t really want to consider myself as an artist. I think it’s hard to explain and I don’t really know how to put it into words…
Do you feel like the production jobs you’ve taken on, like making the JB Blunk cups and vases for Carter & Co, have pushed your practice because you’re doing things that you wouldn’t normally be doing?
Well, Kyle and I started making vases for fun and that’s what sparked our whole collaborative project. Making vases was the beginning, so it’s resorting back to something that we were already doing and it’s also a way to get back into the swing of things. When we moved studios and weren’t making as much work for a little while we started making vases to warm up.
How did you first start making vases together?
Kyle made a vase for me as a gift and I liked it and wanted to make my own. Then I started drawing sculptures and Kyle wanted to make them.
Was that your first time making ceramics?
No, I actually did a lot at San Francisco Art Institute. I could have minored in sculpture. I needed to take one more class but that would have required me to stay for another semester, which would have been a lot of money so I didn’t.
Where do you find your inspiration?
The graph paper in my notebook. I can start with straight lines, which I feel like is something that is reoccurring the sculpture that Kyle and I produce.
I like that because the Sun Buns towel you made has the grid on it. You have a snake shape that recurs often, too. Where does that come from?
When I was going to school at SFAI a lot of the paintings I was doing had these kind of forms, like an alphabet of shapes basically, and I wasn’t really aware that I was even doing that until we had a class visit by Jenny Gheith, who works at SF MoMA. She made me think about what I was doing a little more and pointed out that I was working with a reservoir of shapes.
Has that impacted how you go about making work now?
More so in the beginning, not as much now. The snake shape became a stamp that we put on the bottom of our production work and Kyle’s and my collaborative sculpture. That’s our signature now.
How often are you making art?
I feel like it’s not enough. I felt like when I wasn’t working as much I would be in here days during the week and on the weekend. But then I also spend my job making work, so I feel like I am always working on art but it’s for someone else. I work for the artist Liam Everett and have been for seven years.
Does making art with Liam give you momentum to work on your own projects?
Yep, totally. Because then I get to think about things in a different way. Here lately it’s been more sculpture and with him it’s painting. They’re not two different worlds but they’re two different mediums that function very differently. I joke with him that sculpture is harder because there are more things that can go wrong. I feel like you can finish a painting in a month but then working on a large sculpture and having it finished in a month is risky with dry-time.
In your personal practice are you mostly making sculpture? You mentioned making lights and metal objects for your upcoming show.
Well I don’t want them to be “lamps” so I’m trying to think about how to talk about them. At first I was thinking that the element that would cover the lightbulb would be ceramic and Kyle made me think about them being metal because a ceramic sconce is more common. But then also the lighting sculpture idea came from working at the JB Blunk Estate. In the Blunk house you could see all these lights on the wall attached to a pull chain… I used to think art and function should be two different things and now I don’t think it’s that cut and dry. I feel like design is a kind of high art just like a painting or a sculpture. So for me to be deterred from wanting to make a light because it’s something that has a function just isn’t a good enough reason not to make it. I wanted to see it in the world so we made it. Metal as a material is so foreign to me so I think I’ll be sticking with clay for this project.
It seems like it was inspiring to have spent time in a place like the JB Blunk house where art consistently meets functionality.
Totally, and I love that. Whereas I feel like Kyle’s and my work is going in the opposite direction and is seeming less functional.
But it’s a nice illusion — the sculptures look like functional vessels but they’re impractical and non-working. They become very painterly in that way... How does making art make you feel?
I feel like when I’m really in it, I’m in a trance or something… time kind of speeds up and I’m completely in what I’m doing.
How will you know when you’ve arrived or succeeded?
I don’t really know. In some ways I feel like I have because I’m still making work and I feel like a lot of people go to school for “art” and don’t really continue the practice, but I feel like I have to. I have to be working on something or something has to be in the works. Whether it’s Kyle making a sculpture, I’m glazing a sculpture, or there’s paint drying upstairs, et cetera…
What are you most proud of?
I think the sculpture work I’ve made with Kyle has been some of the work I’m most proud of, because we have arrived at something that we both didn’t know could exist.
☺
TYLER HAS BEEN BUSY OVER THE LAST SEVERAL MONTHS. SOME OF HIS WORK WITH KYLE WAS FEATURED IN A GROUP SHOW AT MARIN MOCA, HE HAD HIS FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION AT PART 2 GALLERY IN APRIL AND NEARLY SOLD OUT THE WORK, AND IN MAY HE CURATED HIS FIRST SHOW WHICH INCLUDED HIS AND KYLE’S COLLABORATIVE SCULPTURE ALONGSIDE SITE-SPECIFIC ARTWORKS BY LIAM EVERETT, LAEH GLENN, AND TERESA BAKER. TYLER AND KYLE WILL BE SHOWING EVEN MORE OF THEIR WORK AT BLUNK SPACE IN SEPTEMBER 2022.
Tyler's Instagram
Tyler & Kyle's studio instagram
I Surrender at Pt. 2 Gallery
What Part of the Whale at Pt. 2 Gallery
Gravity Corner at Blunk Space
Friendly Assembly
August 2020
Mark Ochinero is a Bay Area-born illustrator and photographer currently based in Seattle, Washington. His work captures the humor and irony of everyday life and objects: whether he's using a camera, gel pens, crayons, or ceramics, Mark always offers a playful change of perspective.
Wavy Blades
September 2020
Rachel Kaye is an artist based in San Francisco, California. Her love of fashion and textiles has informed a meditative study in collage, pattern, and movement where her paintings come to life in vibrant melodies of color and shapes.
Dans le Sable
October 2020
Chelsea Wong is a painter and muralist whose work reflects a deep love of her San Francisco, California community. Celebrating diversity and color and infusing happiness and joy, Chelsea creates flourishing scenes (both real and imaginary) that share some of life's best moments.
Chelsea's Instagram
Chelsea's Website
Chelsea on Its Nice That
Cumulus Humilis
November 2020
Rob Moss Wilson is an artist based in Martinez, California. His work captures the simplest things that make you feel the best: lying on your back and finding creatures in the clouds, doing cartwheels on grass, swimming in the buff under the warm sun. His words from an interview with It's Nice That ~ "I want people to feel good about being alive".
Wetboi
December 2020
Christopher Gale, also known as Kidtofer, is an artist and illustrator based in Oakland, California and originally from Bangkok, Thailand. His work in ceramic, paint, and illustration unabashedly celebrates sexuality, color, and pop culture.
Open Water
February 2021
Lena Gustafson is an artist from San Francisco, CA who lives and works in the East Bay. Between her multi-disciplinary art practice and Night Diver, the collaborative press she runs with her partner, Lena keeps pumping out incredible work that touches on transformation, the body, the environment, and connects herself to her community.
Lena's Instagram
Lena's Website
Night Diver Press
Poppies & Poppies 2
March 2021 & August 2022
Charlotte Beavers is a California artist currently based on a sailboat floating along the central coast. Her delicate and delightful watercolor paintings celebrate the magical landscapes found all across her home state.
Charlotte's instagram
Charlotte's website
Charlotte on If You Were Here Now
Shrimp Boy
April 2021
Oliver Hawk Holden grew up in a small coastal town in Maine before moving to San Francisco and giving it a go in the arts. He makes humorous, often kinetic sculpture, sculptural paintings, and runs a small art handling company called Expert Art Workers.
My Angels Are All Of You
May 2021
Maria Paz, born in Quilpue, Chile, is a self-taught sculptor based in Oakland, California. She paints gripping visions of her past on large ceramic vessels, using bright colors to tell intricate stories of her history, ancestry, and identity.
Center Black Rest
June 2021
In support of Headlands Center for the Arts
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller & curator who lives and works between Ohlone Land [Oakland, CA] and Powhatan Land [Richmond,VA]. Lukaza creates lyrical mixed-media artworks that weave craft, text, and bright color to speak about identity, activism, and community. Their diligent, immersive work is a call to action, reminding us all that positive change and a brighter future is possible through ongoing mutual support and organization.
Lukaza's website
Lukaza's Instagram
Lukaza's interview on Variable West
Chair Towel
June 2021
Momo Gordon is a self-taught artist born in Hessen, Germany and now based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Momo is focused on the emotional landscape; Working with graphite and handmade paper, their work explores sentient spaces, hostile architecture, and anthropized objects. In sequential works or standalone pieces, characters often have four walls.
Momo's Instagram
Momo's interview with Post-Comics
Momo in So Young Magazine
Moon Stories
August 2021
Wardell McNeal is a painter from San Diego who is currently making work in Oakland, California. His background in industrial design informs an introspective exploration of the emotional landscape in sensual color and wandering depths.
1-800-CALL-ME
August 2021
Yulia Zinshtein is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles who was raised between Moscow and Philadelphia. Through her paintings, photography, and illustrations she playfully explores themes like the beauty of longing, human connection and nostalgia.
Moonglade
October 2021
Solange Roberdeau is an artist and educator based in Elk, California. Her work focuses on her relationship to materiality and process; a maker deeply connected to the present moment and her practice.
Solange's Website
Solange's Instagram
Solange at Municipal Bonds
Blinky Dress
November 2021
Karen Barbour and Daisy May Sheff are a mother and daughter pair based in Inverness, California. Both are exquisite, prolific painters whose work dips into the subconscious and summons magical narratives overflowing with wild, fantastical color. Twisted folky fairytales swirl and swell, landscapes appear and disappear, characters spin within scenes that are at once comical and dark. Although they show work separately it is clear Daisy and Karen have influenced each other’s work immensely, making their towel collaboration extra sweet.
Karen's Instagram
Karen's website
Daisy's Instagram
Daisy at White Columns
Butterfly Sprain
December 2021
Often using affordable craft materials and found textiles, Craig Calderwood creates thoughtful and wildly intricate, vibrantly colored illustrations that offer a glimpse into their private world. Their artworks incorporate a personal language of signs, symbols, and patterns that are heavily researched and repurposed to narrate visual expressions of "desire, biodiversity, and otherness". Craig is based in San Francisco, California.
Craig's Instagram
Craig's website
Craig at George Adams Gallery
Swimmers Tee
February 2021
Tate Kim is a mysto artist from San Diego, California. He’s one of the most authentic people ever, a curious and prolific drawing maker who’s extra talented on just about every level and makes it all look easy ~ surfing, skating, making movies, drawing, existing. He’s creative and humble and respectful and sweet. The world is a much better, stranger place with Tate in it.
Sticky Everywhere
April 2022
Aaron Elvis Jupin is a painting and drawing maker based in Los Angeles, California. His work grapples with nostalgia, memory, and change; his subversion of symbols drawn from American suburbia and popular culture creates moments that are at once silly, uncanny, and sometimes too familiar.
Aaron's Website
Aaron's Instagram
Layman's Terms, Tongue Tied at Moskowitz Bayse
Body Heat
May 2022
Molly Bounds is a painter and printmaker currently living in Los Angeles. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she works to communicate the fault in the understanding of human agency. Torn between an aggravated still and a sequence of motion, subjects appear calm but unsettling, caught between frames as their states of being are exaggerated through posture and profile. In less than uncanny portraits, she instead dwells on the likeness of indecision, wavering through urgency, doubt, and complete ambivalence. Forcing viewers into spectating roles, she poses woulda-shoulda-couldas in windows and doorways leading to a purgatory of her design, stuck in an elongated moment where someone needs to make a decision.
Molly's Instagram
Molly on PLATFORM
Molly in Juxtapoz
Frutti di Mare
July 2022
Lucy Stark is a painter and printmaker living in Oakland, CA. In her art practice, she documents food and dishes with personal significance as a way to capture and celebrate the euphoric yet fleeting moment right before a meal commences.
Nude Beach
July 2020
Jessica Thornton Murphy is based in San Francisco, California. She started Plunge in May 2020 as a way to celebrate the work of the many talented rising artists in her community and beyond.
Jess's Website
Jess's Instagram
Hand Towel ~ September 2021
Butt Stuff ~ January 2022