Dive deep into Way Bay with this multipart program. Each of the varied and provocative speakers takes on one Bay Area artist, sharing fascinating histories and individual stories.

Dena Beard, executive director of The Lab in San Francisco, talks about Xara Thustra, whom she describes as an “activist and artist and key player in San Francisco’s Mission School who has been pushing the envelope socially and artistically for their fifteen-plus years in San Francisco.”

Jeffrey Spahn, an art dealer specializing in twentieth-century American, British, and Japanese studio ceramics and sculpture, focuses on Kay Sekimachi. He says, “Drawing from her deep Japanese heritage and modernist California aesthetics, Sekimachi’s work both honors tradition and breaks new ground for contemporary design and sculpture.”

San Francisco Art Institute librarian and archivist Jeff Gunderson discusses Carlos Villa. He describes Villa as “one of the most distinguished and accomplished Filipino-American artists of all time” and his art as “complex and accessible, elegant and raw, personal and political, as well as riddled with rasquache and funk.”

Steve Anker, co-curator of film at REDCAT and former dean of the CalArts School of Film/Video, presents filmmaker Alice Anne Parker. Anker says her films from the early 1970s, when she was known as Anne Severson, are “still revolutionary experiences that explore gender and sexuality with an intimacy, frankness, eye for detail, and sense of mystery that only an artist could achieve.”