Trinh Mai, Begins With Tea (2013), family photos printed on Joss paper, grains, seeds, herbs and dried noodles, encapsulated in Bà Ngoại’s (Grandmother) used tea bags.
Cynthia Brannvall, Generations (2019), printed on rice paper and beeswax on wood panel.
New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) presents an exhibition of five women artists who explore concepts of memory as it pertains to generational and cultural experience, immigration and migration. Through various media, they explore their experience of inherited memories and unveil personal stories of family and heritage while inviting us all to consider the deeper themes that connect us with the past, and with each other. Engaging with culturally significant materials and symbolism, these works examine the vicarious nature of memory, and present implicit meanings carried in ancestral artifacts that are passed from one generation to the next. Each artist meaningfully conveys the idea that we are all shaped not only by our personal experiences, but by those of past generations.
This exhibition can be found in the Main Gallery.
About the Artists
Cynthia Brannvall
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Cynthia Brannvall is an art historian and a multi-media artist who teaches art history as a full-time faculty member of Foothill Community College. She is a California native of African American and Swedish descent. Cynthia has undergraduate degrees in Art Practice and Art History from UC Berkeley where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Ronald E. McNair scholar and was awarded the Departmental Citation for her research in Art History.
She has an MA in Art History from San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art.
An advocate and ally for social justice and equity, Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations of body and spirit.
Her artwork has selected for juried group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington DC. Cynthia was selected for the 2022-2023 Emerging Artist’s Program at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco where she had her first solo exhibition March 29-June 12, 2022. Cynthia has published short essays for exhibition catalogs, has juried The Wild Side exhibition at Arc gallery in San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include works in the On Land exhibition at Marin MOCA and a solo exhibition Constellating Narratives at Butte College. Cynthia is currently making new work during a 4 Year studio residency award at Cubberley Art Studios Program in Palo Alto California.
Dana Harris Seeger
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Dana Harris Seeger was born in El Granada, California. She received her MFA in Printmaking from San Jose State University in 2011 and her BA in Painting from Anderson University in 2004. She has been a member of the California Society of Printmakers since 2011 and a board member until 2014. In 2014 she co-founded an art studio and school in San Jose called the School of Visual Philosophy. She exhibits her work nationally and has been published in Studio Visit Magazine. She has won awards for her work and recently had a solo exhibition at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, CA. She was named one of KQED's inaugural 10 Bay Area Women to Watch in 2016. She currently resides in Poulsbo, Washington with her husband Yori Seeger, daughter, and twin boys.
Trinh Mai is a California-based visual artist who works with a breath of natural, traditional, and inherited media that hold histories of their own. Her work examines the ways in which past weaves into present within our refugee and immigrant communities, while documenting the ways in which our nuanced experiences—communal and personal—are shared among all of humanity, then and now. Mai continues visiting academic and arts and cultural institutions, and diverse communities nationwide to speak about her art practice and engage communities in creative storytelling. Her art practice is driven by the desire to document memory, coupled with the desire to help usher us into communal healing and an enduring hope that might help ground us in a fractured world.
Priyanka Rana
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Born in India in 1980, Priyanka Rana’s early inquiries into aesthetics and philosophy and professional work in exhibitions led her to establish a full-time sculpture practice in 2018. Largely self-taught, Rana’s experiments with various sculptural materials have led to a nearly-singular engagement with untreated wood. Her practice is rooted in ecology and sustainability; she works with local trees, transforming naturally felled trunks into abstract sculptures using a range of power tools. Rana chars many of her surfaces, which she likens to “painting with fire.”
Priyanka Rana, Destiny II (2023), Found wood, charring, Indian Lungi fabric sealed and dipped in resin.
Central to Rana’s work is the interplay between that which is dangerous and delicate. While the main tools for sculpting with wood – chainsaws, handsaws, and a torch – require extreme care, including protective clothing and safety protocols, many of the artist’s works are completed amidst the sociality of a home dinner table. The artist collects domestic and intimate materials, such as fabric from saris and children’s toys that are then treated with polyurethane and spray paint, using these to intervene in the wood.
Through pairing with softer household materials, Rana’s largely abstract works invoke questions of migration and nostalgia, with individual toys speaking to specific moments and places that her multicultural community calls home, as well as her own personal history across three continents.
As Rana continues to grow her practice, she has embarked on exploratory projects in other mediums including aluminum and processes such as 3D printing, and has engaged with figural and symbolic forms that extend her central concerns.
Living and working in San Francisco, California’s Bay Area, Rana’s work has been shown widely in the region, including at a number of arts festivals and through prestigious and highly visible public art commissions.
Shirin Towfiq
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Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. Towfiq focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and her artwork reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.
Shirin Towfiq, Looking for a Sign, 2024, Sadaf special blend tea with cardamom, gold thread with printed family and cultural images
About the Curators
Allison Railo
Railo received an MA in Art History and Visual Culture from San José State University, specializing in contemporary alternative process photography. Her MA Thesis grew into the 2020 Image + Object Exhibition at NUMU, where she also curated the NUMU’s Los Gatos History Project. She earned her first MA in Museum and Gallery Management from City University in London, and her BA in World Arts and Cultures from UCLA. Allison has been active in the arts community for more than 25 years having worked in museums and galleries in the Los Angeles area prior to moving to the Bay Area in 2005.
Michèle Jubilee
Michèle Jubilee has over six years of experience working in interdisciplinary education, public programming, curating, leadership, and community engagement for arts organizations both large and small. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in both Art History and Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia (UBC). Michèle is also a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator making art about the body and soul, our relationships to ourselves and each other, emotions, and our unique journeys of growth as human beings.
“Museum work is my passion, and I have a deep interest in fostering authentic spaces for connection, belonging, and learning for audiences of all ages and backgrounds through the arts. The overarching aim of my work as a curator is to bring people together through meaningful shared experiences, as arts deeply shape culture and society at the grassroots level.”
