What Now?

Speakers: JD Beltran, Demetri Broxton (photo by Jessica Monroy), Maria Jenson, Dean Rader

Join JD Beltran, Demetri Broxton, and Maria Jenson in conversation with Dean Rader on the future of art and art-making and how to support emerging visual artists with mentorship, community, and new models for training in the shifting Bay Area arts landscape.

Presented by the University of San Francisco’s Ann Getty Institute of Art and Design and Thacher Gallery

Thursday, Sept. 10
5-6 p.m. Happy Hour, Thacher Gallery
6-7:30 p.m. Conversation, Xavier, Fromm Hall

University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street

About the speakers:

JD Beltran is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, designer, educator, and journalist and a co-founder of Art + Water.  She also has served for the past 17 years on the San Francisco Arts Commission and developed extensive community public art collaborations. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally, including at the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The M.H. de Young Museum, The Getty Institute, The Kitchen in New York, the MIT Media Lab, Cité des Ondes Vidéo et Art Électronique in Montreal, ProArte in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Fei Contemporary Art Center in Shanghai, China. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and was a longtime faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts. Beltran also is the recipient of design and art’s most honored awards, including awards for creating one of the top design works internationally (German Design Award 2019 and CES Innovation Award 2018) and creating one of the top public artworks in the US (Public Art Network 2009) and the world (New Technology Art Association 2014). Last Fall, she just launched her newest permanent community public artwork with middle and high schoolers—the first interactive electrical boxes in the country—for the City of East Palo Alto. She is a Professor in Design at SFSU.

Demetri Broxton is an Oakland-born multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and Executive Director of Root Division in San Francisco. He earned a BFA in Painting from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Museum Studies from San Francisco State University. His work explores ancestry, memory, and spirituality through labor-intensive beadwork, textiles, photography, and mixed media. Broxton’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), the Chinese Historical Society of America, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the de Young Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the Norton Museum of Art. Most recently, his work was featured in the solo exhibition Demetri Broxton: Ancestral Echoes as part of MoAD’s Emerging Artists Program. Broxton’s work is held in public and private collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young Museum), the Crocker Art Museum, and the Monterey Museum of Art. He is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles.

Maria Jenson is Creative and Executive Director of SOMArts Cultural Center, the 26,000-square-foot civic arts institution that has anchored San Francisco’s cultural ecosystem since 1979. Since 2016, she has built SOMArts into a launchpad for emerging, early-career artists and curators re-establishing solo exhibitions after a long pause, creating paid opportunities for artists to develop new work, and making the cultivation of the next generation of arts and culture leaders central to the institution’s mission. Before SOMArts, Jenson founded ArtPadSF, an independent art fair at the Phoenix Hotel, and served on SFMOMA’s External Relations team through its $600M expansion. A committed arts advocate, she works at the tables where arts budgets and cultural policy are negotiated. She serves on the boards of Art + Water, SF Arts Alliance, and Arts for a Better Bay Area, sits on the steering committee for the Further Triennial, and advises SF Art Week. A playwright and trained dancer, she was a member of Crowded Fire Theater’s 2021–23 Resilience & Development Cohort — an artist inside the very pipelines she works to strengthen.

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored thirteen books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April of 2023 and was named by Book Riot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. His essays and reviews have appeared recently in Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Alta, Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, and many others. His work has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, VCCA, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.