LOGIN REGISTER

LOGOUT MY ACCOUNT

       

MENU
  • Home
  • The Artists
  • About the Program
  • Home
  • The Artists
  • About the Program
Search by last name:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • Home
  • Artists
Facebook Twitter Linkedin
  • Pilar Agüero-Esparza
    Pilar Agüero-Esparza
    Visual Artist: Mixed Media, Print Maker, Sculptor, Textile
    Born in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, Pilar Agüero-Esparza was exposed to the potential of materials and the love of the hand-made working with her parents in their shoe repair shop. She received a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and MFA from San Jose State University. Pilar has been an active artist, arts educator and arts administrator in the Bay Area exhibiting her work in numerous institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Cruz Museum, MACLA, Palo Alto Art Center, Galeria de la Raza, and the De Young Museum. Her public art commissions include a series of murals in the main reading area of the Biblioteca Latinoamericana Branch Library in San Jose.
  • Diana Pumpelly Bates
    Diana Pumpelly Bates
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Diana Pumpelly Bates is a sculptor and public artist working in bronze, iron, and steel. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; The Triton Museum, Santa Clara, CA; the Oliver Art Center at California College of Arts and Crafts; the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee; and John Jay College, New York. She has completed several public art commissions for transportation agencies in the region, and a number of Public Art Programs in Northern California. She also exhibits in galleries and has served on numerous consultant teams, advisory committees, and review panels.
  • Terry Berlier
    Terry Berlier
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    “Terry Berlier makes conceptual art of unusual intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the impact of materials.”—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media.Her work is often kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice. Berlier has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Catherine Clark Gallery, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga CA, Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, Babel Gallery in Norway, Richard L. Nelson Gallery in Davis CA, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery in Berkeley, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, SECA nominee, Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Artist in Residence, Montalvo Arts Center, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany. She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Terry Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
  • Jaap Bongers
    Jaap Bongers
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Jaap Bongers is a practicing artist who has had many solo exhibitions in the United States, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark. He has authored a number of publications and has received many public commissions for his art. Born in Holland, he was educated both there and in Italy. He attended the Stads Academy of Fine Arts in Holland. This five-year, full-time (8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) program provided rigorous training in a broad spectrum of arts. Following this training, Bongers studied for a year at the Acadamia di belle Arti di Brera in Italy. Immediately thereafter he was accepted as a student at the Jan van Eyck Academy of Fine Arts in Holland. This prestigious two year program accepts only eight students out of 400 applicants per year. Following that experience, Bongers was given a grant by the Dutch government to study traditional tribal art and customs, as well as architecture, in Zaire. Three years later he returned to Zaire to study and live with a Pygmy tribe.
  • Ryan Carrington
    Ryan Carrington
    Visual Artist: Sculptor, Textile
    Ryan Carrington works as a lecturer at San Jose State University teaching sculpture, foundry work, and mold making. Having received his MFA in spatial art from SJSU he went on to earned his BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in ceramics and woodworking. Carrington also spent 18 months as an artist-in-residence at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, an experience that the artist credits with as having as much impact on my work as any formal education. His work deals with a wide range of issues that connect labor, class, work ethic and economics with his personal history and family. Using cast objects, construction materials, and tools that combine craftsmanship with symbolic irony, he touches on themes of labor through gallery installations, performances, and site-specific work. Artist Statement: My work addresses the shift in public perspective towards the culturally defined roles of blue and white-collar workers in the United States.  It bridges issues of labor, class, work ethic and economics with my personal and family history.  Within my studio practice I delve deep into processes that parallel the monotony and tedium that laborers endure.  By using construction materials directly off the shelf from Home Depot, pieces of uniforms that represent America’s workforce, and performing acts of labor while dressed as a CEO, I invite a discussion about the ever-changing class struggle in the United States.  My intent is to provide a conduit for empathy between our stratified society by inspiring dialogue across communities of people that represent the corners of our culture, history and socio-economic status.
  • Chris Eckert
    Chris Eckert
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, I worked for a number of years in Silicon Valley designing and building factory automation. While I enjoyed many aspects of this career, I rapidly became frustrated with its necessary emphasis on production. Equipment design has one goal: make widgets as fast as you can. I wanted to explore the artistic potential of factory automation itself. For me, the machinery was more interesting. What the machinery created was inconsequential. Art and engineering have much in common; both center on creation. But the motivation for creation separates these disciplines. Engineers focus on what they are making while artists concentrate on why they are making. For me why has always been some internal struggle, some idea or problem that makes me confused and slightly uncomfortable. I explore this in my art and the resulting sculpture remains as a record. Occasionally I find resolution, but often I emerged even more conflicted. The simplest question often demands a complex, nuanced answer and the resulting object remains open to interpretation and waits for someone to place it in their own context. It becomes a visual parable.
  • Yvonne Escalante
    Yvonne Escalante
    Visual Artist: Jeweler, Sculptor
    Yvonne Escalante is a metalsmith artist based in San Jose. She is a lecturer at San Jose State University in metalsmithing, jewelry, and small sculpture. In addition to metal, her work also incorporates wood, glass, and found objects. Using these media, she employs mostly traditional craft techniques to produce sculpture that evokes items of manufacture while attempting to bring humor and frank attention to issues of global importance and personal meaning. Recent works have been exhibited at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), City College of San Francisco, and the Oakland Museum of California.
  • Cynthia Handel
    Cynthia Handel
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Cynthia Handel is an Oakland based artist using metal and fabric to create immersive experiences.
  • Sam Hernandez
    Sam Hernandez
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Sam Hernández is a sculptor primarily known for his innovative work in wood. Hernández achieves poetic yet vigorous free-standing abstractions through such widely-varying tools as African adzes, Japanese saws, Native American crook knives, and high-powered sandblasters. From early work referencing the totemic, his more recent sculpture has moved in a looser, more lyrical direction as it simultaneously moves towards a powerful asymmetry and a more intuitively based manner of working. Although the work remains characteristically based in abstraction, the direction is being nourished by a more expressionist tone; works in steel and bronze, as well as inks and acrylics on paper, and oils on canvas and board, round out his current explorations. Recipient of numerous honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, a Senior Fulbright Scholar Award, and Silicon Valley’s Artist Laureate, Hernandez’s work has been featured in numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and articles, and has been shown in museum and gallery exhibitions internationally. It is included in numerous public collections including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Macedonia, the Cantor Center at Stanford University, the Oakland Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Professor of Art at Santa Clara University 1977-2013, Hernandez divides his time between California and Spanish Catalunya.
  • Pancho Jiménez
    Pancho Jiménez
    Visual Artist: 3D, Ceramist, Sculptor
    Pancho Jiménez holds an MFA in Sculptural Ceramics from San Francisco State University, and his BA degree from Santa Clara University. He has exhibited extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally at universities, private galleries, and in civic spaces. His work is part of numerous private and public collections including the permanent collection at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, and at the University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University Jesuit Community. He has been featured in Ceramics Monthly and numerous publications including, “The Ceramic Design Book,” “Extruded Ceramics,” “500 Ceramic Sculptures,” and “500 Figures in Clay Vol. II.” He has held artist residencies at Mission Clay Company and Annie Glass. He has taught courses at San Francisco State University, West Valley College and is currently a Senior Lecturer at Santa Clara University where he has been teaching since 1999.
  • Terry Kreiter
    Terry Kreiter
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    I have been making art in various media for more than 40 years. In the last 20 years most of my concentration has been in bronze cast sculpture. I still draw, paint and fabricate. I work in my studio / foundry which I designed and built behind my home. My current work is bronze cast and fabricated sculpture. The castings are unique (one of a kind ), and cast from my original wax patterns into sacrificial flasks. This method of finality makes certain that the sculpture has been well thought out and brought to a conclusion that meets my satisfaction and allows me to move on to the next piece. I think of my sculpture as personal artifacts. They are illustrations of literature, conversations, events and thoughts. My sculpture is preceded by many drawings and paintings which leads me to create relationships between the objects, symbols and images in a stream of consciousness sort of way; and, which allows them to take on a life of their own. In this way I’m assembling something like a montage; and in a way, I’m playing in the sandbox. I render the objects, symbols, details and surfaces in an intimate style. Using the sculpture as a code or coda I strive to offer more than enough details and symbolism to allow the viewer to complete the idea and make it their own.
  • Marianne Lettieri
    Marianne Lettieri
    Visual Artist: 3D, Mixed Media, Sculptor, Textile
    Marianne Lettieri creates art from commonplace objects that people have used over time and no longer find desirable or necessary. Her mixed media constructions explore the process by which relics of the past illuminate and inform current contexts.  Marianne is an artist-in-residence at the Cubberley Artists Studio Program, sponsored by the City of Palo Alto. Marianne is on the leadership team of Doing Good Well, a national initiative to empower next generation female arts and culture leaders. She is on the board of directors of Council for The Arts, Palo Alto and Mid-Peninsula Area (CAPA).
  • Ken Matsumoto
    Ken Matsumoto
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Ken is a well-established and respected sculptor who holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from San Jose State University. His extensive track record includes solo and group exhibitions throughout California since the mid-1980’s. His work has appeared at numerous galleries and shows, and has been showcased at a number of large corporate and government institutions, including Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Syntex, Saks Fifth Avenue, Price Waterhouse, the City of San Jose, the City of Sacramento, and Merrill Lynch. he has been profiled in numerous publications including the San Jose Mercury News, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Tribune, Artweek, and Art and Antique Collector.
  • Stephanie Metz
    Stephanie Metz
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Stephanie Metz lives and works in San Jose, California and was a featured artist in Bay Area Currents 2009 at ProArts Gallery, Oakland, CA. She has exhibited at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and New York, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Her numerous group exhibitions include Black Sheep: The Darker Side of Felt at the National Centre for Craft and Design in the U.K.,  Creatures: From Bigfoot to the Yeti Crab at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Idaho, Formex Stockholm 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden, and Transmission: Experience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Gallery, Singapore.  Metz was honored with two Center for Cultural Innovation Grants in 2011 and 2009. Her artwork has been reviewed and featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fiberarts Magazine, Craft Magazine, Artweek Magazine, and PBS. She received her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Oregon. Metz’s focus is overly domesticated creatures, especially those whose form has overgrown their function.
  • Harry Powers
    Harry Powers
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Potent childhood memories, those treasured experiences, often become the matrix of an artist’s work. So it is with Harry Powers who as a very small child saw a native American ceremonial dance around a bonfire at night. The intensity of watching the drama of flickering light and shadow, coupled with the presence of the proud focused dancers gave Harry a first glimpse into the passionate world of the imagination. He spent his boyhood years camping and fishing in the wilderness of Idaho with his father. He grew up watching the starry night sky slowly orbit its ancient path. Existential questions of the beginnings of time, the fluid development of the earth’s surface, and man’s place on this planet must have spun in his dreams. The intense and private childhood impressions grew over time to a deeper connection with some understanding of history, cosmology, and geology. These interests, aligned with the compelling fascination of light and shadow, have energized his work in various ways and materials in drawings, paintings, photography, and sculpture. During his early adult years Powers learned photolithography, traveled via the US Navy to South America and Italy. Meanwhile he gained a deep and lasting love of literature, classical music, and opera. He earned an undergraduate degree from San Jose State College, now University, where he taught for thirty years. He earned a graduate degree in painting and art history with a strong focus on the relationship of art and architecture from Stanford University. He began working with mosaic, concrete, and stained glass in architectural settings, concerned with the expression of the play of light on relief surfaces. When introduced to acrylic plastic he discovered vibrant qualities of refraction, color transmission, and light reflection as he began an intense productive period of using it to fabricate sculpture. These works were weightless structures of floating colored light, seemingly as much painting as they were sculpture. Eventually Powers stopped working with plastic due to the toxic effects of the fumes and solvents. Teaching in England was a vital experience which enlivened his interest in primal cultures as he visited Neolithic, Iron Age, and Roman sites. A trip to Venice and Florence reawakened his love of Renaissance art and architecture. Later, while conducting sculpture workshops in Australia, Harry explored the ancient rock paintings in the Kakadu area which became the inspiration for a large body of bronze and aluminum sculpture, paintings, and wash drawings. While an artist in residence in Provence, France, Powers’ interest in antiquities, both objects and the land, was reinforced. In content, Powers’ current work ranges from expressing the dignity of primal cultures, to references of Renaissance structure, and allusions to contemporary astronomy. He feels a resonance among these ideas/images. His aesthetic choices still echo those long ago childhood experiences of dramatic lighting and the mysteries of the timeless night sky.
  • Tim Ryan
    Tim Ryan
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Tim’s work is 3-D, spatial sculpture that generally begins on a constructive surface Tim builds upon. Sometimes he paints or collages on the surface. He uses electro-mechanical, time-related aspects as well, but right now he is making an effort to reduce these elements. “I’m returning to working on panels,” he says.  “For artistic reasons, I’m in a reductive phase with my work.” Tim’s art career has taken him up and down the West Coast, from Oregon to Alaska to California. He currently resides in North San Jose, where he alternates remodeling his home with working in his studio. “I need a lot of space to walk around in, to think in. I always end up pushing myself out of my work space. My tools take up too much room.” If Tim could have anything, it would be a bigger studio. “And time,” he adds. “I always need more time.” After attending Portland State University, Tim found the Visual Arts Center in Anchorage, Alaska. After he received his BFA, Tim stayed on at the VAC for eight years. “I learned how to be an artist there. My biggest influences were the artists who came to VAC.”  At the time, Alaska was flush with oil money, and a young, liberal population that supported the arts.  Well-known artists made the trek to Alaska, living, working and teaching other artists. Although Tim showed talent as a child, drawing obsessively, his father insisted he “learn a trade.” Tim worked at construction jobs for several years before moving to Alaska. “It helped my art,” he states. “I’d give the same advice to other artists. It’s hard to count on art as a sole means of making a living.”  For the last eleven years, Tim has worked as a facilities manager at the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose, and designed several of its exhibitions. He also spends up to twenty hours a week making art. In the past, he taught art at local community colleges, where he told his students, “Do one thing, then drop it.  Then do another and drop that.  You have to work on a lot of projects to get one really good one.” Tim noticed the tendency of students to become discouraged if they didn’t make a masterpiece the first time they tried.” “You have to work and work and work. Make a thousand pieces. You might get ten you want to keep.” Tim came to San Jose from Alaska in order to get his MFA, and though his career as an artist is clearly mature, he doesn’t feel established. “I’m always trying new things. Artists need to stretch themselves all the time.” Right now Tim would like to find an agent – someone with a grasp of the business side of art. “I’ve never been much good at marketing myself. The business side takes too much time, time I’d rather use to make things.” All art is connected, Tim notes:  “poetry and art get closest to the transcendental world. I find it interesting that people seem willing to accept religion, but are resistant to art. Maybe it’s fear-based, I don’t know – to me, they’re both saying the same thing about the world.”  
  • Randall Shiroma
    Randall Shiroma
    Visual Artist: Sculptor
    Randall Shiroma is a sculptor who works in a terrazzo medium creating works that also evoke the natural elements and forms of nature. Shiroma’s polished and patinated concrete sculptures seem to reflect the mountains, sky and water, while revealing his search for the nature of being and his desire to create a sense of presence.
  • Stan Welsh
    Stan Welsh
    Educator; Visual Artist: Ceramist, Mixed Media, Sculptor
    Stan Welsh was born and raised in Southern California in the town of Claremont. He currently has a home and studio on three acres of property in the coastal mountains of Santa Cruz California.  For the past 20 years Stan has been a professor at San Jose State University in the School of Art and Design where he is currently the Graduate Coordinator.  Welsh has been honored with the Meritorious Performance Teaching Award, and has received arts grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council and the Arts Council Silicon Valley 2005 Fellowship Award.  His work has been recently collected by the San Jose Museum, Ca. the Santa Cruz Museum, Ca. and the Daum Museum, Missouri.
  • Shannon Wright
    Shannon Wright
    Visual Artist: 3D, Architecture, Mixed Media, Sculptor
    Shannon Wright is a sculptor and installation artist based in San José, California. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wright is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of the Spatial Art Program at San José State University. She is represented by ADA Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Wright’s recent exhibition venues include the Dallas Art Fair; Untitled Miami Beach; Mulherin + Pollard Projects, New York City; ADA Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and Scope Art Fairs in New York, Miami and London Wright was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up primarily in Sydney, Australia. Her formative years as an artist were spent among the iron trestle bridges and abandoned turn-of-the-last-century hydroelectric power plants and foundries of Richmond, Virginia. She considers this environment to be the single biggest influence on all the artwork she has made since college. 
  • SHOW MORE

    Find An Artist

    Search by Keyword
    Search by last name:
    ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

    MADE POSSIBLE WITH SUPPORT FROM

    knight WFHF_logo200

    © 2023 | Produced and presented by Silicon Valley Creates

    powered-by-artsopolis