Color Council Chromatic Journey with Leah Rosenberg + Guests

Join Leah Rosenberg and six color experts on a chromatic journey through SFMOMA’s galleries. Rosenberg’s mural, Getting Better Everyday a Color, comprises fifty painted layers of color, each embedded with calls to action that promote happiness and healing adapted from the work of late artist Susan O’Malley. In the spirit of Rosenberg’s mural, each speaker will spotlight an artwork on view that features, includes, or otherwise encapsulates a single color, inviting the audience to look at art through a more colorful lens.

Color Council includes:

Lena Wolff on Ultramarine and Yves Klein’s Eponge (SE180)

Airyka Rockefeller on Silver and Alexander Calder’s Maquette for the Kite that Never Flew

Julia Goodman and Michael Hall on Green and Elizabeth Murray’s Things to Come

Tosha Stimage on Vermillion and Ellsworth Kelly’s Red on Red

Christine Wong Yap on Smoke and Studio Other Spaces’ The House of Peace, Copenhagen
 

This program is entirely free for Bay Area residents as part of our First Thursdays programming. Due to social distancing requirements, capacity in some galleries may be limited.

Speaker Bios

Leah Rosenberg works across artistic media to spark new experiences of color. Using painting, installation, printmaking, sculpture, performance, and video, she invites viewers to consider how color can be perceived both multi-sensorially and multi-dimensionally. By creating such enriched encounters, her work strives to deepen our understanding of the emotional and psychological impact of color in everyday life.

Julia Goodman gathers, sorts, tears, soaks, and pulps discarded bed sheets and t-shirts. She transforms fabrics closest to our bodies into malleable pulp to press against brick walls, concrete, textiles, woodcarvings, flat surfaces, and her own hands. Goodman earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University. Goodman has previously exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts; Contemporary Jewish Museum; San Jose Museum of Art; DePaul Art Museum; Poetry Foundation; the Berkeley Art Center; and Euqinom Gallery. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency; Recology SF; Creativity Explored; and Salina Art Center. Goodman is represented by Euqinom Gallery.

Michael Hall’s drawings, paintings, and videos question and rediscover ideas embodied in personal objects and ephemera, as well as create a space for future conversations and continued development with his toddler. Hall earned an MFA from Mills College and a BFA from California College of the Arts & Crafts. He is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, an Alameda County Arts Leadership Award, and an MFA Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts. In addition to the Headlands, recent residencies include Joan Mitchell Center and Montalvo Art Center. Recent Bay Area solo exhibitions include Catharine Clark Gallery and Townsend Center for the Humanities. Hall has taught throughout the Bay Area, including years at Creative Growth Art Center, where he began their video production and digital media program. He is currently an assistant professor of Fine Arts Practice at California State University East Bay.

Goodman and Hall live and work together in Berkeley with their young child.

Airyka Rockefeller is a San Francisco-based artist, writer, and photographer. A recipient of art residencies in India, the Czech Republic, and Montalvo Center for the Arts, her work has been exhibited broadly. She has taught workshops at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Peabody Art Museum. Her writing and photographs feature creative people and spaces within diverse fields of viticulture, food, art, and design. Airyka often works with other creatives to bring words, films, rooms, and cookbooks to life. She is the founder of REALM, an interview-based project exploring concepts of home, and Amending, an annual pop-up featuring vintage garments and functional objects.

Tosha Stimage is a multidisciplinary artist working in Oakland, CA. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, and a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. Stimage’s work centers language and examines its modality in relation to our human systems. Her installations involve painting, drawing, print, and collage work that reassign historical visual forms, their transmission, and context for the here and now. Stimage is currently facilitating programming through SAINTFLORA, a hybrid floral shop founded in 2020 that challenges the constraints of capitalism in the arts by fostering a wider aesthetic community.

Lena Wolff is an interdisciplinary visual artist, craftswoman and activist for democracy who has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s. Wolff’s work extends out of early American quilt-making traditions while at the same time being connected to minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, feminist and political art. Her broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based works, performance, music, and public projects. Her widely distributed political posters are visible across the country and have been collected by SFMOMA, Oakland Museum of California and the SF History Collection at the SF Public Libraries. Learn more about her work at www.lenawolff.com and www.yourvotecampaign.com.

Christine Wong Yap (she/they) is a visual artist and social practitioner working in community engagement, drawing, printmaking, publishing, and public art. She partners with organizations to conduct participatory research projects to explore dimensions of psychological wellbeing such as belonging, resilience, interdependence, and collaboration. She has participated in over a dozen residencies and studio programs. Her public artworks include installations in Times Square and billboards in London. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute and the Palo Alto Art Center. She is a longtime Bay Area resident who lived in New York City from 2010 to 2021.
 

Getting Better Everyday a Color was commissioned as part of Bay Area Walls, a series initiated in 2020.

Major support for Bay Area Walls is provided by the SFMOMA Roberta and Steve Denning Commissioning Endowed Fund.

Generous support is provided by the Mary Jane Elmore West Coast Exhibition Fund, Randi and Bob Fisher, the Patricia W. Fitzpatrick Commissioning Endowed Fund, Katie Hall and Tom Knutsen, the Elaine McKeon Endowed Exhibition Fund, the Diana Nelson and John Atwater Commissioning Fund, and the Denise Littlefield Sobel Commissioning Endowed Fund.

Additional support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Oya and Bulent Eczacibasi, and Linda and Jon Gruber in memory of Gretchen Berggruen.

Major support for First Thursdays is provided by the Hearst Foundations.
Generous support is provided by Nancy and Alan Schatzberg.