Jessalyn Aaland is a Bay Area interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator. Working across social practice, painting, and sculpture, she explores how systems function as sites for both conformity and resistance, and how individuals find autonomy within sytems. Her socially-engaged projects address education and organized labor, often taking the form of workshops and Risograph-printed posters and booklets. Aaland’s project Class Set has provided over 15,000 Risograph-printed, artist-designed posters featuring social justice quotes to schools, libraries, and educational non-profits nationwide, and the designs and accompanying curriculum are available for anyone to download online for free. Her ongoing project Organizing Power, developed as a 2018-2019 Political Power fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, provides arts/nonprofit workers with free resources to unionize their workplaces. Southern Exposure, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission have all financially supported her projects. Aaland has been an artist-in-residence at Facebook (Menlo Park, California), Real Time & Space (Oakland, California), and SÍM (Reykjavik, Iceland). A former San Francisco public high school English teacher, she worked for five years coordinating teacher programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is currently a curator in Facebook’s Artist-in-Residence program.

Kevin B. Chen has been involved in the Bay Area arts community for over two decades as a curator, visual artist, and educator. He currently serves as faculty at San Francisco State University’s School of Art and at Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History, a member of Recology’s Artist in Residence Program Advisory Board, and a Curatorial Committee member of Root Division. He recently served as co-chair for the City of Oakland’s Public Art Advisory Committee and managed the de Young Museum’s Artist Residency Program and Public Programs. He has curated projects for Headlands Center for the Arts, Minnesota Street Project, University of Nevada Reno, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, and Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco & Kearny Street Workshop. He was the Program Director of Visual Arts at Intersection for the Arts for over 15 years, where he curated over 70 exhibitions and hundreds of public programs. He is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Hana Chung is the Assistant Director at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto. A graduate of San Diego State University, she has been with the gallery for 4 years. Chung assisted on the Pace Art + Technology program in Menlo Park, which featured the immersive exhibition, Living Digital Space and Future Parks by the Japanese art collective teamLab. She has also contributed in the development of the Palo Alto gallery since its inaugural exhibition of works by James Turrell. Chung has also assisted on exhibitions by Tara Donovan, David Hockney,  Agnes Martin, and Pablo Picasso.

Mel Day’s interdisciplinary work combines new technologies and the virtual with traditional media and generative experiences. Recently awarded the 2019 Silicon Valley Creates Artist Laureate Nexus Award for her ‘pioneering work in art and technology’, Day has exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, at venues that include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Film Festival, The Berlin Office in Germany, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, ZERO1 Biennale, and Peak Gallery in Toronto. Residencies include Stanford University’s Experimental Media Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts (Alumni New Works Award and UC Berkeley MFA Fellowship), Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Schwandorf, Germany), and The Lab (San Francisco). As part of her inclusive practice, Day founded an IDEO-Awarded Youth Fellowship in collaboration with the Djerassi Resident Artist Program and co-founded Wall of Song Project with Michael Namkung. Previously at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and University of Toronto Mississauga/Sheridan College, Day currently teaches at San José State University. She holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and a BFA from Queen’s University, Canada with a year’s scholarship exchange to the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. // mmd.ca; wallofsongproject.com

Native to San Jose and the Bay Area, Daniel Garcia’s entrepreneur journey began as a fashion photographer in the 1980’s. After a decade of running his own photo business, he launched out to start non-profit work focusing on the spiritual formation of college students. Feeling a strong leading to bring his two passions together, the artist and serving the community, Content Magazine began.

As the Cultivator of Content Magazine, Garcia seeks to grow and develop a high-quality designed magazine that reflects the diversity of the people of South Bay and how their lives, work, and art are affecting our society.

Besides his creative ventures, Garcia enjoys spending time with his wife Sarah tinkering on their downtown Victorian, playing and watching soccer with his son Jesse (19yrs) and attending his daughter Gabriella’s (17yrs.) music and dance performances.

IG: TheCultivator
IG: Contentmag

Best known for his eponymous Guerrero Gallery, artist and curator Andres Guerrero continues to make an impact within the Bay Area art scene as one of the area’s leading voices. To the unknowing eye, an entrance to his current Bayview space sees the cavernous warehouse as a tool of perpetual deflection— redirecting our focus to the objects within the space, yet for those closer to Andres each wall and angle is embedded with the gallerist’s considered thought, keen eye to craft, and refreshingly DIY approach to labor.  And while so much of Andres’ work falls behind the scenes and under the larger umbrella of the gallery, his personal practice provides an intimate and rarely seen glimpse into the artist’s motivations and background.   

Beverly Rayner is the director and curator of the Cabrillo Gallery and teaches photography and mixed media courses and workshops at Cabrillo College. In her ecclectic mixed media artworks, she combines photographic images with objects and a great variety of other materials. She is represented by Themes + Projects Gallery in San Francisco and has shown her work extensively in galleries and museums nationally and abroad for over 35 years. Her work is included in the collections of a number of museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art.

Meg Shiffler assumed the role of Gallery Director for the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2005. The SFAC Gallery has three distinct exhibition spaces in San Francisco’s Civic Center, and Meg curates and/or organizes nine exhibitions annually, featuring regional artists alongside artists from across the globe. In 2008 she curated a major project by internationally renowned artist Bill Fontana. Spiraling Echoes, sited at San Francisco City Hall, was the first substantial installation of Fontana’s in his hometown since an SFMOMA commission twenty years previous. The project highlighted Fontana’s ongoing contribution and influence in the field of sound sculpture, and later that year SFMOMA honored him with their Bay Area Treasure Award. Meg is also a visiting faculty member in San Francisco Art Institute’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies graduate program. Prior to arriving in San Francisco, she worked in New York as a freelance curator, researcher and consultant for the New Museum of Contemporary Art; the Andrea Rosen Gallery; and the Ursula Meyer Art Conservancy. She co-founded, with Matthew Richter, the multidisciplinary art center Consolidated Works in Seattle, WA, and was the Gallery Director there from 1998 to 2003. Prior to that, she was the Director of 20th Century Masterworks at Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates, and the Gallery Director for MIA Gallery, both located in Seattle. Meg attended the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. Meg lives in Oakland with her sweet and supportive fiancé Steve and their rambunctious and brilliant five-year-old son Sam. Image: John Trippe snapped this at the SFAC Gallery opening of _Trace Elements_. Meg is in front of an installation by Kelly Tunstall & Ferris Plock.