ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE 2023-2024

Chelsea Ryoko Wong is one of our "keynote artists" and our first artist in residence. Wong is a painter and muralist whose vibrant figure compositions reflect the diversity and style of her home in San Francisco. Through the use of watercolor, gouache and acrylic techniques, Wong creates busy scenes of co-mingling people drawing from real-life events and her imagination. Her work is known for celebrating racial and cultural diversity, promoting working class communities and evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder.

Martin Machado is our other keynote artist and will be in residency in mid January. For two decades Martin Machado has had his feet in two very different endeavors, that of the art world and of the maritime industry. His labor on the water has taken him around the globe on international containerships, commercial fishing vessels, and sailing boats. The ports and people he has worked alongside have become intertwined with the layers of his art, a visual story-telling which at times reaches back into the dark depths of maritime history. Machado also has an art & cider project called Pleiades Cider which creates feral-foraged, wild-fermented, barrel aged ciders in Northern California.

Jeffrey Sincich is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco who, as a former sign-painter, looks to signs and architectural details around the city for inspiration. Signs on the street constantly compete for our attention; they emit sounds, light up with neon and tower above with vibrant colors. His work uses quilting and found objects to represent feelings of comfort, tradition and history.

Shara Mays is an abstract landscape painter living in Oakland and working in San Francisco. She creates large-scale paintings which take the shape and form of both landscape and intuitive figuration. Her works are performances of subconscious motions and are in constant conversation with the natural world. Her art practice represents an evolution of narrative, from a focus on literal, southern landscapes, and family struggles, to chasing freedom through the act of gestural abstraction. Shara looks forward to working on plein air landscape paintings while out at Nick’s Cove.

Lindsey Ross is a California-based artist who primarily works with large format photography and the 19th century process, wet-plate collodion. Ross started working in this process in 2011 and she quickly realized it was the ideal format for her artistic practice. Ross seeks autonomy yet, at the same time, a sense of connection. The slow pace of collodion requires a presence and intimacy that connects Ross to both the physical and spiritual world.

Sirima Sataman is an interdisciplinary artist primarily working in traditional media, printmaking, and sculpture. She is captivated by form, texture and pattern in the natural and built environment, and is inspired by place, and the history of land and buildings that speak to her. For Sirima, her art is an expressive response to her environment and culture. In addition to making art, she also stewards the land at Blackberry Farm in Bolinas, works full-time at Fibershed.org, and creates art at her home studio on the farm. While in residency at Nick’s Cove, Sirima looks forward to observing the atmospheric changes on the bay, the light on the rustic historic buildings, and sounds of the environment.

Liana Steinmetz started painting landscapes after graduating college, when her brother gave her an outdoor easel. Since then, she has been making paintings that reflect her gratitude, excitement and awe for the natural world. For education, Liana has created her own path, choosing teachers and books to learn from as she goes. Although Liana has traveled across the US, Latin America and China with her easel, nothing compares to painting her native home of California.

Sophia Mackell and Lili Arnold are lifelong friends who will be doing a collaborative residency at Nick’s Cove this March. Lili Arnold is a Santa Cruz based printmaker and illustrator specializing in botanical block prints made with water-based inks on archival printmaking paper. Sophia Mackell is a Portland based illustrator and textile designer creating works on archival papers with watercolor, pen & ink, and block printing. These two creative collaborators are both deeply inspired by the natural world, specifically botanical studies and abstract landscapes, and at Nick’s Cove they aim to seek inspiration from the pristine shorelines of Tomales Bay.

David Benzler lives and works in San Francisco as a commercial sign painter and muralist, working with businesses to realize their visions. He also works as a fine artist focused primarily on plein-air landscape painting, as well as commissioned representational painting for private clients.

Bob Dinetz is a member of The Potter’s Studio in Berkeley, California and is trained as a graphic designer. Collecting Japanese and American ceramics inspired him to explore making pottery of his own. The functional pieces Bob makes are simple, modern forms with surfaces that are elegantly glazed or left raw to highlight the natural clay.

Erin McCluskey Wheeler is a painter, collagist, writer, curator, and teacher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work is all about reinvention and restoration. The artist cuts up, groups and rearranges her paintings on found papers in a process of transformation - an intentional act of breaking apart and putting things back together. Erin approaches her work almost as an art restorer - completing shapes that have been cut, finding the forms under the layers, and matching the colors found with paint mixed directly on the surface. This way of working is a direct result of Erin’s work as a caretaker for both her parents with early onset dementia. As her parents’ sense of self, autonomy, and connection to the world got smaller and more fragmented, Erin found beauty in reconstruction and in the careful placement of small things.