Celebrating a Vision

Tony Pedemonte
Tony Pedemonte started at Creative Growth making abstract drawings, rarely limited by the paper’s edge. Often incorporating his surroundings, Pedemonte used nearby objects, including other artists’ paints and any other materials within reach. These tendencies eventually resulted in his shift to three-dimensional work and the obsessively wrapped sculptures he now makes exclusively. Pedemonte works with wooden armatures or repurposed items like bicycle wheels, wrapping with one spool of thread after another until the structural frame is nearly concealed. Distinguished by their smooth texture, a monochromatic palette, and geometrically driven configurations, Tony’s sculptures exude a presence that is both tactile and enigmatic

Ann Meade
Ann Meade’s art is a combination of geometric abstraction and figuration. Not unlike artwork associated with San Francisco’s Mission School, Meade creates art that features the everyday, such as baseball players and cats, roughly hewn and snuggled amidst a gridded decorative field.

Meade explains that she enjoys working in ceramics “because you cannot avoid getting your hands dirty.” She also notes that, “the stripes and patterns sported by my cats, although colorful, really represent my feelings as I am glazing them.”

In 2015, Meade’s work was featured in Art Night SF at San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza and in Art Slam at the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Gerald Wiggins
Gerald Wiggins uses colored pencil, marker, graphite, and watercolor to create portraits and detailed natural iconography. His portraits–precise and spare–contain controlled lines and careful coloring to convey the sense of a rotating cast of figures. Wiggins’ practice has expanded to include ceramic sculpture. Whether a mask of a vampire-like character or a fully realized likeness of a modern-city dweller, his sculptures display the virtuosity and joyful spirit of his drawings. Wiggins explains, “I am not necessarily trying to say something to people with my art. I’m just trying to make them happy, because there is not enough happiness.”

In addition to numerous exhibitions at Creativity Explored, Wiggins' work was included in Outsider Artists at the Oakland International Airport, Oakland, California; Undercover Genius: The Creative Lives of Artists with Disabilities at the Petaluma Arts Center, Petaluma, California, 2013; and Creativity Explored at Ambach & Rice, Los Angeles, California, 2012.

Monica Valentine
Often sporting perfectly monochrome outfits complete with a matching flashlight necklace, Monica Valentine is enamored with color. Based on her artwork, it comes as a surprise to most that she is completely blind and uses prosthetic eyes.

Valentine is incredibly adept with her hands, creating works that are as tactile as they are visually rich. She speedily threads sequins and beads onto thin pins and covers the entire surface of foam shapes. These shapes vary between spheres, cubes, and cones, but are always so densely covered that they sparkle like crown jewels of a lost disco civilization. She considers these objects decorative and celebratory, and she revels in others’ visual delight over them.

Dan Miller
Dan Miller’s artwork reflects his perceptions. Letters and words are repeatedly overdrawn, often creating ink-layered masses, hovering on the page and built up to the point of obliteration or destruction of the ground. Each work contains the written recording of the artist’s obsession with objects like light bulbs, electrical sockets, food, and the names of cities and people.

In 2007, Miller was featured in a solo exhibition at White Columns, New York, and participated in group shows at ABCD in Paris and The Armory Show in New York. Miller’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Collection de L’ Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Peter Cordova
Incorporating images from his birthplace in the Philippines or his abiding interest in Native American culture, Peter Cordova produces detailed glimpses into aspects of these cultures in his drawings, paintings, and ceramics. Everything is included, from carefully delineated tools and instruments to accurate yet stylized depictions of topography. The completed piece emulates an eyewitness account.

Cordova is also an accomplished ceramicist. The carefully incised marks that adorn his clay forms–often elaborately worked masks or vessels–echo the precise qualities found in his drawings, while the forms themselves add an element of abstraction to his otherwise representational art. 

Cordova’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In addition to numerous exhibitions at Creativity Explored, Cordova was featured in Dialogue Project at Funabashi Cure Gallery, Funabashi, Japan in 2003, and Radiant Spaces: Private Domain, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, California in 2004.

Daniel Green
San Francisco native Daniel Green’s artwork conveys an intense and playful fascination with American entertainment and popular culture. Working with wood, cardboard, and paper, Green uses ink to draw figures from television, politics, sports, or history, and then carefully lists dates, titles of shows and songs, cities, and names. The extensive listings crowd the surface in sculptural columns and are seemingly unrelated to his delicately rendered drawings.

Green’s work has been exhibited in the United States and England. In addition to Days of Our Lives, a solo exhibition at Creativity Explored in 2015, Green has participated in numerous exhibitions, including This Will Never Work, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, 2013; Create, University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2011; and The Museum of Everything: Exhibition #4, Selfridges, London, 2011.

Susan Wise
After being institutionalized for most of her youth, Susan Wise became interested in crafts in a vocational training program. For more than two decades, Wise has explored numerous craft forms, including quilting, embroidery, and ceramics—but Wise’s true masterworks are baskets.

Unlike traditional basket making, which uses a very regimented procedure to tightly and firmly weave the materials, Wise invented her process. First, she lays out twine or rope and begins shaping it into the vessel. Then, using a different diameter of string or yarn, Wise lashes the coils into place.

Wise notes, “From choosing materials to final completion, each basket takes me several days to make. I get really caught up in the process. It feels like I’ve made several hundred baskets, though I’ve really only made about sixty.”

John Patrick McKenzie
John Patrick McKenzie moved from the Philippines to the United States with his family in 1964 and joined the Creativity Explored studio in 1989. Text functions as the basis of his practice and is used for both its visual and scriptural qualities, creating work that simultaneously serves as visual image and as poetry. His original scripts and arrangements of text with complex and repetitive sequencing of calligraphy are tactile examples of his interpretation of the world, and can be both hilarious and poignant. 

McKenzie’s work was nominated for SFMOMA’s prestigious SECA Art Award in 2012. His artwork has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Create, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2011; Collected Fragments, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, Sunderland, England, 2009; and Whipper Snapper Nerd, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1997.

John Hiltunen
Prior to commencing his focus on making collages in 2006, John Hiltunen created art through rug making, woodwork, and ceramics. His clever juxtapositions, which typically merge animal and human subjects derived from fashion and natural history magazines, are provocative in their humor and yet surprisingly earnest in intention. In Hiltunen’s world of animal-human hybrids, landscapes are turned upside down and runway models have furry ears or whiskers instead of pristine, camera-ready features.

Hiltunen’s work was the focus of a major group exhibition at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, now Anglim Gilbert Gallery. He also exhibited at White Columns and Rachel Uffner Gallery, both in New York, the Oakland International Airport, and traveled to contemporary art fairs, including NADA Miami, the Independent, and Frieze New York.

Marlon Mullen
Marlon Mullen bases his paintings on found photographic images, mostly from lifestyle magazines, newspapers, and contemporary art periodicals, which the artist uses as inspiration for his work. In the process of developing a painting, Mullen’s original magazine pages become obscured or abstracted as the image is reduced to a graphic schema of interlocking colors and forms.

“His advertency to the nuance of shape is idiomatic and completely fearless,” explains Manhattan’s JTT Gallery Director Jasmin Tsou, “and yet these are not aggressive works, but rather, beautiful and buoyant compositions. His is a truly unique vision that is as equally abstract as it is emotive.” 

Mullen’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and MADMusée, Belgium.

Jeremy Burleson
Using tightly rolled paper to create tubular shapes, Jeremy Burleson crafts lyrical lamp shapes. Vaguely allegorical, the structures are designed to hang from the ceiling, but some are large enough to be placed on the floor. His interest in lamps may have originated during an accident while on a shopping trip to a local warehouse store.

Burleson’s creations were included in the travelling exhibition Create, co-curated by Lawrence Rinder and Matthew Higgs, which opened at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2011 and has appeared in museums across America. Burleseon’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and MADMusée, Belgium.