Complementing Way Bay 2, this is the third in our series of programs that pair five presenters with one artist each. This time out, the speakers offer fascinating personal and historical information about a sculptor, a photographer, a multidisciplinary artist, a painter, and a filmmaker.

Tom di Maria has served as director of Creative Growth Art Center since 2002, developing partnerships with museums, galleries, and international design companies to help bring Creative Growth’s artists with disabilities fully into the contemporary art world. He will discuss Judith Scott, about whom he writes, “For a woman, becoming an artist whose work is shown in the Venice Biennale is a significant accomplishment . . . even harder after spending the first forty years of life institutionalized. Scott’s path to achievement is nothing less than heroic.”

Sandra Phillips is curator emerita of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked since 1987 organizing innumerable critically acclaimed exhibitions of modern and contemporary photography. She will address the work of Lew Thomas, whom she characterizes as one of the more theoretically minded photographers, adding that in the 1970s Thomas managed the bookstore at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and made much of his work around the area where the museum is located.

Keith Wilson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and visual artist who has exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival, South by Southwest, the Berlinale Film Festival, and the National Gallery of Art. Wilson will discuss the artist, filmmaker, actor, and musician Frank Moore, about whom he is currently producing a documentary and virtual reality project, Deep Inside the Shaman’s Den. On Moore’s life and work, Wilson comments:  “There's something helpful, even transformative, to be learned by looking closer, longer, and with more openness at Frank Moore the wounded shaman.”

Brett Goodroad is a Montana-raised, San Francisco–based artist much of whose work, as he describes it, mimics nature. Evocatively conjuring Fred Martin’s work, he writes, “Martin’s fingerprints sensualize paint: a lone black drop, a bleeding red, long for you. Ginsberg performed HOWL in front of them . . . I still hear Fred saying to me, ‘FEEL.’”

Terry Cannon has been active in the artistic and cultural life of Southern California since the mid-1970s. He founded Pasadena Filmforum (now Los Angeles Filmforum) in 1975 and Spiral, a magazine devoted to experimental film, in 1984. About Sara Kathryn Arledge, whose glass slide transparencies he salvaged en route to a dumpster, he said, “Imagine such exquisite and sublime work by a pioneering artist lost for future generations. Arledge must surely dance with the angels!”