SERENITY: Nature and Nurture
The Serenity series art exhibit at the UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women's Health
San Francisco Women Artists (SFWA), curator for the art exhibitions for the UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women's Health, selects works by SFWA Member Artists throughout the Bay Area. SFWA's artists are creating and exhibiting work that will enhance the healing environment of the Women's Health Center, engaging and uplifting visitors, practitioners and staff. The exhibit changes three times a year and is displayed on five floors of the Women's Health Center. Each of the selected artists display a body of work related to the exhibition themes on their respective floors.
Now in it's 16th year, the "Serenity" series continues to provided opportunities for local artists working in all mediums - with a focus on positive, healing and uplifting artwork. Since 2007 more than 180 Bay Area artists have participated in this show.
A presence in the San Francisco art community for over a century, SFWA supports, empowers, and expands the representation of women artists. They continue their commitment to diversity and encourage aspiring artists at all stages of their careers. "With the understanding that wellness is a holistic ideal, we acknowledge the transformative power of art as a core belief of SFWA. Art inspires, produces profound insights, and can serve as a healing force." - San Francisco Women Artists
Sarah Huxtable Mohr
BIOGRAPHY
I started painting seriously in high school and continued to study art through junior college and college, taking classes in theory, history, drawing, design, and painting at Rhode Island School of Design, College of Marin, and Dominican University. My art focuses on the way art functions as a manifestation of sacred space, like those who once and still make sacred space – European Iconographers – any artist who sees the sacred as a malleable force, open to containment in ways that serve GOD's expansion. I see art as effective for good in human affairs.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Art holds energy, invokes a thought, and manifests a vision in concrete form. In this recent body of work there is an exploration of geometric shapes and patterns in the tradition of Islamic art. Pattern is the structure of life, balanced by a free-flowing realization of wisdom and the essence of all. The secret heart of hearts is limitless, pattern-less, yet bound and informed by form. I have several hopes for my work as I bring it into the world. One is the simple desire to create beauty. As the saying goes, “God is beautiful and loves beauty.” It is also and especially my prayer that just as people inspire me, I can, in turn, further spark the creative process for others.
“Now is the time to know that all that you do is sacred... Now is the time for you to deeply compute the impossibility that there is anything but grace.” – Hafez
Roz Isabella della Giordano
BIOGRAPHY
I began taking pictures for my college yearbook as a freshman. As I fell in love with the medium, I took every course offered and even created a few electives including a 30-minute slide show on the environment set to music. After graduation I enrolled at Utah State and received a BFA in photography. In 1980 I arrived in San Francisco where I began a career working in the darkroom at a photo lab where I moved to sales. After I purchased my home I built my darkroom to begin working as a fine art photographer. I soon joined the Pacific Art League and City Art Co-Op. The last six years I’ve been a member of SF Women Artists Gallery.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
After 48 years shooting film and 46 of them working with a Pentax 67 format, I’ve gone digital. The beautiful paper I printed on is all gone and my energy to spend a day in the darkroom is no longer with me. I’ve purchased a Fugi500X designed to produce very large images at 102MP. I’ve started producing large images – up to 60 inches. Now I show both film and digital images and images produced digitally from my negatives with wonderful results. My forte is landscape and genre pictures. I hope you enjoy the beauty of the works and my mastery of composition and printing.
Meghan Lewis MacLeod
BIOGRAPHY
Influenced significantly by Bay Area landscape, both literally and culturally, as a queer, mixed media, abstract painter, Meghan Lewis MacLeod also delves continuously into transpersonal terrains wherein unseen forces and inspiration take shape. Her interest in eco-feminist spirituality and contemporary Goddess iconography led her to study fine art and clinical psychology as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2000, after completing her doctorate at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, CA specializing in perinatal mental health and creative expression, she later became the founding Director of the LGBTQ Perinatal Wellness Center. During SIP, Meghan turned once again to her easel full-time and has since become an award winning, published, internationally exhibiting and collected artist, with works in group shows throughout the Bay Area, including commissioned works for private collectors across the United States. Additionally, Meghan maintains an active arts-based counseling and consultation practice.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Cycles of the seasons, moods of the moon, morphogenetic fields, dreamscapes, perinatal processes, and subtle nuances in nature continuously inspire MacLeod’s creative musings. The mixed media abstract painting process she employs includes several iterations – initially as a kind of dowsing experiment – the brush or oil stick becomes a kind of rod which she moves across the substrate guided by seemingly liminal, alchemical currents. Next she employs sgriffito, scratching into the layered surface as if on an archeological dig with utmost care and concentration, uncovering nascent configurations. Then she adds clarifying marks delineating structures integral to the composition. With each declarative layer, she begins to intuitively perceive the painting’s inherent essence hinting at its unique meanings or messages. The universal truth of intuition infuses, inspires, and guides each piece. MacLeod’s art-making process is a contemplation on the ever-interconnected, non-dual nature of psyche and its inherent evolutionary capacities. The profoundly poignant images of Mendieta, Chicago, Af Klint, and Saar’s purpose-laden works continually fill her with visual hope. She holds the intention that viewers who engage with her paintings may likewise find some moments of reflective reprieve and resourceful renewal.
Victoria Drake
BIOGRAPHY
Since childhood, Victoria Drake has been interested in the arts and all forms of crafting. She went to SCPA, a performing arts high school in San Diego where she studied theatre, costuming, and set design. These interests carried into UCSD where she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Media/Visual Art. She moved to San Francisco in 1992, working in special effects for film and television; later finding her niche in stop-motion animation (fabricating puppets and their animatable costumes). With this background in textiles and mixed media, she enjoys working with a wide array of materials. She has a strong focus on recycling and repurposing, giving materials new life and meaning through her work. Victoria's love of movement – belly dance and skating –inspires and brings a focus to the feminine in her work.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Victoria uses recycled sash windows as a canvas to transport viewers through and into a spiritual journey of luminosity and ever-changing color and perception. Inspired by stained-glass church windows she loved as a child; she visualized the design of her own windows for decades before she began to make them. The ever-present interconnecting golden strings in her work are part of a greater spiritual metaphor, weaving together the threads of our own complex life stories and how we influence each other. Each piece is a journey and there is a journey within each piece. Through these “lifelines of hope” she would like us to create better, more empowering lives for ourselves and each other. The work is a tapestry of life and history, with each individual story blending with stories around us and collectively to elevate humanity in each of our own small yet powerful ways.
Abi Mustapha
BIOGRAPHY
Abi Mustapha is a Sierra Leonean-American contemporary artist. She holds a BA in Political Science with an emphasis on sustainability from Indiana University. After working for several years in sustainable agriculture and permaculture, she relocated from Indiana to the Bay Area in 2013 to pursue a career in the arts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the Midwest and Bay Area including Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Garret Museum of Art, and The Richmond Art Center. She was the 2021 Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History Artist in Residence. Her work is inspired by human connection and nature. Murals, illustration, digital art, and portraiture make up her day-to-day work. When she’s not in her studio she can be found camping, hiking, playing with her friends, or curled up with a good book.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I create representations of the world in variations of how I would like to see it – often including traditional hair styles and adornments interwoven with natural elements. Art is how I communicate what I think is beautiful to the world. My art feels like a meditation, which is significant for someone who has never been able to sit still. It focuses me and lets me release all those pieces of myself that can’t be contained in a coherent independent creature. It is rare that I have only one medium in my art. I explore combinations of illustration and painting. My current body of work explores how illustrative lines can be used to hold space rather than being filled with color.