Luz Marina Ruiz’s studio at 1890 Bryant St. displays both her artwork and her ways of living as an artist: Fun and whimsical. A string of paper lanterns. Puppets from “The Lion King.” Six-foot-long paper cut-out installations hanging from the ceiling. And, right behind her art supplies, Ruiz has her kitchenette set up with a toaster oven, a hot plate and a mini-fridge.
This weekend, more than 100 artists like Ruiz will open their studios to the public at 1890 Bryant St. starting this evening at 6 p.m.
The former mayonnaise factory turned artist studios at Bryant and Mariposa streets, created by late landlord Vera Cort, has been home to artists including painters, photographers, ceramicists, jewelers and more for almost 20 years.
“Have brunch in the neighborhood, and come to the studios to see where artists work,” Peggy Li, a jewelry artist, who has been in the building since 2017, advises guests. “Smell the paint, see the work.”
Meet some of the artists now, and drop by the studios to meet more this weekend.
Luz Marina Ruiz
On a large piece of linoleum, Ruiz starts out with sketches. Then she traces and carves out the drawing by hand. After the piece is inked, printed and colored, Ruiz deconstructs it into layers that become a tunnel book with intricate cut-outs on the side.
Water and boats are the constant subject in Ruiz’s work. “The boat, to me, is a metaphor for our journeys in life. We start in water, and then before we have any other kinds of transportation, we get from one continent to another by boat.”
For Ruiz, although her works are inspired by dreams and nature, the point isn’t doing a straightforward portrait of the natural landscape, but taking people on a journey and being whimsical about the art.
“I don’t paint about angst. We have enough of that,” she said. “I want these pieces to take people somewhere else; a place we could have a little fun, where we can imagine that we’re in that boat or under the moon.”
Peter Howells
Peter Howells knows his art probably won’t last. Looking as colorful as Brazilian decorative tiles, Howells’ pieces are all made from cardboard.
The reason? Cardboard is widely available, and offers Howells the freedom to experiment.
“I can cut it and make a piece any size, and I can continue making this piece bigger, taller, in any direction,” Howells said.
His works are built on maps of his hometown Pontiac, Ill., with squares of farmlands and rivers flowing through. They explore how humans are transforming the planet: One shows the monarch butterflies and milkweeds that are cut down as weeds, while another depicts ash borer beetles that kill off the ash trees in his home state.
In his series “Rearranged World,” Howells placed tiny cut-out pieces from maps he collected into boxes on a Chinese printing type tray, representing “the human way of organizing, understanding and rearranging the world.”
The concrete pole in the middle of his studio is covered in yellow post-its, with scribbles of ideas and concepts he accumulated: paper tiger, rivers and oak trees, just to name a few.
Howells became a full-time artist last year, after “being liberated” from his tech job. “To my artist friends, I’m the guy that works in tech. And to my tech friends, I’m the tech guy who is an artist,” Howells said of his time at Google.
“I have that opportunity now,” Howells smiled as if he felt shy saying this. “You know, if not now, when?”
DK Haas
As a full-time employee at the University of California, San Francisco, for DK Haas, working in the studio is like “going to church.” But it’s a church where she “plays with color and paint and experiments.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Haas, who has been working in this studio since 2009, is wearing a blue striped oversized shirt — its front covered in paint — and blue epoxy gloves. She’s ready to play.
“We’re not really encouraged, as a society, to find our play, in paint or drawing or writing or poetry or music,” Haas said. “That authenticity is what people respond to.”
She has experimented a lot, indeed: Printmaking, still-life, figurative painting and now completely abstract painting with oil paint and cold wax.
In a series called “Ordinary and Extraordinary,” she painted everyday vessels, like coffee mugs and vases together with “things that are awesome and unimaginable” such as the ocean, sky and volcanos.
“Just think about those ways that this life is so big and beautiful and expansive, but also we have to eat and poop and love,” Haas said. “The question for me now is, ‘How do we show up when things are really hard, as well as when things are easy and beautiful?’”
Trudy Chiddix
In a bright floral blouse and a denim apron, Chiddix was listening to her audiobook while getting ready for the open studio.
Her pieces, a marriage of opaque clay and transparent glass, are mostly inspired by her travels across the world: One impressed by a wooden paddle gifted by an artist in Myanmar, another inspired by the vibrant colors from Indian Sarees.
Starting in college, Chiddix, 72, has been working with ceramics for more than 50 years, and only in the past 20 years began to combine glass and ceramics.
She layers glass together and fires it in a special kiln, which she and other artists in the building share. The ceramic part is fired separately, as the firing temperatures are totally different between the two materials, Chiddix said.
“I’m always looking for textures,” she said, touching a piece of dead coral stone that she brought back from a recent trip to the Virgin Islands — she envisions doing a piece with textures from the coral stone with turquoise glass that represents the ocean.
Chiddix’s studio is full of her materials and tools: Rolling pins, paddles with various textures, gold leaves. In another smaller one across the hall — she likes to keep her glass separate from dusty clay — there are sheet glasses and stringers, which Chiddix calls “glass spaghettis.”
Her engineer husband helped her install the LED lights in her pieces, illuminating the glass and making the colors more vibrant.
“I’ve been focusing on making most of the ceramics black and white,” she said. “That gives me total freedom to use whatever color I want in the glass.”
Wendy Miller
No brushes, no pallet knives, Wendy Miller paints with a silicone scraper, the same type for cutting dough. She stopped mixing her own pigments. “I just want to continue working in this limited palette,” Miller said. “Some black, mostly browns, reds, golds.”
The abstract paintings on her studio wall show those earth colors: raw sienna, iron oxide, burnt umber. On top of the paintings reads her motto on spontaneity: Wherever I thought I was going, it’s not where I found myself.
Miller began working with these limited colors and tools after a workshop in Spain. She started with smaller six-inch canvases and went as big as 20-inches but when it goes any bigger, she said, “They lose their spontaneity, and they start to feel overworked for me.”
Her paintings are a reflection of the natural world, she said. They don’t start with sketches. Instead, she just makes marks on the canvas and “looks for happy accidents.” The Earth Series, shown at the Open Studios, explores her emotional connection to the geography and human history of the desert southwest.
Miller, who lives in Bernal Heights, has been in the building since 2005. She has been holding open studios since 1998 and her favorite thing about them is having great conversations with strangers who are connected through art.
“When somebody who’s never been here to this building comes in and they’re just overwhelmed,” Miller said. “But you give them a few minutes and they’ll perk up, and they’ll talk about art.”
Kathleen Rydar
On Tuesday afternoon, Kathleen Rydar was printing postcards with pink dogwoods on her 116-year-old platen press machine. The machine came from a 92-year-old man who was not able to do letter printing anymore.
Rydar remembers the first time she encountered letterpress in her 20s. She had just started her first job out of graduate school as a reporter: She walked into the back composing room of the newspaper, where a few men in their 50s showed her how they set out the type to print the papers.
As computers changed things, those men had to work from computer strips. “They showed me, with great sorrow, these sheets laid out for the newspaper that were just beautiful. But they were relics now,” Rydar recalls.
Fast-forward to 15 years ago, Rydar took a letterpress printing class at San Francisco Center for the Book and realized, “Oh my gosh, this is the process that those men used all those years ago.” She has been hooked on it ever since.
Now, not only does she use antique type and vintage printing presses to print books and cards, Rydar also does historic and contemporary book-binding. She hand-makes paper boxes that are inspired by cultures around the world, with beads at the top bought from the Alameda Antique Fair.
“What I want to do with my work is I want everything to be affirmative and inspiring, because there’s so much in the world that’s a challenge,” Rydar said.
Simo Neri
At studio No. 308, viewers will first be greeted by a spring-like breeze, blowing through silk scarves floating from the ceiling. “Walking” by Simo Neri, is a digital photograph that captures people walking in Paris and New York over the course of two years.
Neri photographed walking styles from both cities and combined them into “a graphic language” of how people move across cities. “I was caught by the game,” she said. “I thought, my god, this looks like a hieroglyphic language.”
In the Steam Series, Neri photographs steams building up on the bathroom mirror, where patches of colors are reflected, blurry and vague. Many of Neri’s works consist of similar images that reveal a pattern, but none of them are repetitive. “There’s always movement,” she said.
“As a photographer, you become kind of a visual opportunist. You train your eyes to see things that most people just pass by,” Neri said. “So I noticed, every city has a different color. I notice sidewalks, I notice things on the ground.”
Working at 1890 Bryant St. draws a full circle for Neri. She was born in Rome and moved to San Francisco in her mid-20s. At the time, she lived across the street at Project Artaud and even recorded the sounds of the train taking mayonnaise away from its factory at the Bryant Street location.
“It was fascinating for a young European girl who was used to a whole other type of city environment,” Neri recalls. “It was so free and open.”
Today, Neri, who turns 76 in September, finds herself “so happy” working in the same neighborhood she spent time in her 20s. She takes frequent walks down Florida Street all the way to 20th and comes back on Alabama Street.
“At my age, you’ve done so much, you’ve been to so many places,” Neri said. “The Mission still feels real.”
1890 Bryant Street Studios will be open to the public for a preview on Friday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m.
Thank you @JunyaoYang for this portrait of just a handful of the artists of this unique community within 1890 Bryant. It is in so many ways a reflection of the best of San Francisco, and a testament to survival of artists in these times of hyper change. There’s more at Mission Artists: https://www.missionartists.org