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.

Mark Johnson, professor of art at San Francisco State University and director of the SF State Art Gallery, discusses Saburo Hasegawa. He calls Hasegawa a “brilliant artist, theorist, writer, teacher . . .  sometimes deemed the most literate artist of his generation in Japan.”

A Bay Area gallery owner for thirty years, Claire Carlevaro is the biographer of Ruth Wall, whom she characterizes as “a reclusive and remarkable artist and poet who grew up on a Native American reservation and flew a plane during World War II.”

Jack von Euw, curator of the Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection, addresses Ludwig Choris. He observes, “The various first names given to Choris—Louis/Ludwig/Ludovik—suggest a complexity of heritage that may be indicative of his problematic representations of the indigenous peoples he encountered in California” on an early nineteenth-century Russian expedition to the region.

Kevin Killian, a novelist, poet, playwright, and art writer, looks at Harry Jacobus. “As one of the founders of King Ubu,” Killian asserts, “Jacobus’s place in the history of Bay Area art would have been assured had he never lifted a paintbrush. While his art—simultaneously abstract and figurative, of subtle yet highly colored brushwork—is just as significant.”