Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Climate Week Art Exhibition at the Mills Building

KALW & the Swig Company are proud to present a look inside the new installation at the Mills Building. Earth, Air, Fire, Water, is a multi-media exhibition featuring Bay Area artists that focuses on climate change and elemental forces. KALW Executive Producer Ben Trefny will be in conversation with curator Kerri Hurtado and artists Tanja Geis, Andrew Owen, and Lordy Rodriguez. This exhibition, which runs now until May 8, 2026, invites viewers to consider climate change as an ongoing condition embedded in everyday life. This special event will occur in KALW’s Live Event Studio at the Mills Building.

Featuring photography, drawings, paintings, and collages, artists Francis Baker, Tanja Geis, Hughen/Starkweather, Cynthia Ona Innis, Andrew Owen, Lordy Rodriguez, and Arngunnur Ýr use data, direct observation, and materials including sun and soil, to translate environmental systems into artworks that emphasize accumulation, transformation, and time.

This exhibition is a part of a rotating exhibition program sponsored by The Mills Building for the benefit of its tenants and visitors, curated by Artsource Consulting. The Mills Building is located at 220 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, open Monday-Friday, 7am-6pm.

Guests include:

Tanja Geis is a visual artist who creates site-responsive installations, sculptures, and drawings that emerge from intimate encounters with edge ecosystems disrupted by human activity. Her practice explores how drawing close to, making strange, and engaging with the often overlooked impacts of humans on non-human lifeways might foster empathy and transform our perception of ecological responsibility.

Andrew Owen is a photographer working primarily in the tradition of large-format landscape photography. Since 2021, he has followed the cycles of fires and floods
reshaping the California landscape, documenting major ecological events and their aftermath to understand the impact of climate change.

Lordy Rodriguez makes works exploring the human urge to locate/define oneself by charting the environment in precise detail. Using the language of cartography, he makes drawings that go beyond map-making into abstracted, imaginary terrain.

Kerri Hurtado is a San Francisco Bay Area–based art advisor and curator with over 25 years of experience working at the intersection of artists, collectors, and institutions. As a principal at Artsource Consulting, she leads the development of thoughtfully curated art programs for private collectors, corporations, and public art projects, guiding everything from acquisition strategy to large-scale commissions and installations. Her work is rooted in a deep knowledge of contemporary art and a commitment to supporting artists through meaningful, context-driven placements.

Ben Trefny has been part of the KALW family since 2003, where he currently serves as Executive Producer. As Executive News Editor, News Director, and Interim Executive Director, he helped the news department win numerous regional and national awards for long- and short-form journalism. He also helped create numerous training programs — for teenagers, incarcerated people, and early-career journalists — and has taught hundreds of audio producers. His current work focuses on journalism, live events, and partnerships.

Come early to see Raymundo Valdez’s Prismatic City: Landmarks in Light, a solo art exhibition showing the city as it lives: layered, luminous, & constantly changing.The show is on view at KALW’s Live Event Studio Art Gallery through April 10.

There is a $10 – $20 sliding scale suggested donation for this event. Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.

Please become a KALW member today and receive your first drink on us at all 220 Montgomery events.

220 Montgomery St., San Francisco, 2 blocks from BART/MUNI

Reception doors open at 5:00

️ Program begins at 6:00

🆓 The event is free with an RSVP — and you are welcome to donate what you want

Please note:

• The event space is just to the left of the main entrance to the Mills Building at 220 Montgomery Street
• We recommend taking BART/MUNI, exiting at Montgomery, and walking two blocks north
• Ride-shares can drop off and pick up directly in front of the venue
• If you drive, there are several garages within two blocks of the event location; free street parking is available across from the venue at 7:00 pm