2025

Employing the Zine Machine and/or the Mobile Art Bike/s and inspired by Yousif’s and Ossei-Mensah’s exhibitions, students will create their own zines using a Mobile Zine-Making Studio designed by Artivate artists Chris Treggiari and Amy Berk. As an artform, zine-making employs inexpensive materials and DIY methods to publish voices that are unique, authentic, and often on the periphery, resulting in a democratized publication process.

The Mobile Zine-Making Studio offers all the tools and materials needed to make your own zine, crafted from either pre-designed pages and prompts or open-ended personal exploration. Here we can challenge the youth to alchemize everyday materials into poetic landscapes of text, texture, shape, rhythm and form as in the group show and explore their own personal cultural narratives like Yousif.

This almost year-long program culminated in an exhibition in the bank vault, a book designed by TA Vicky Li, two zine interactives, and a poetry reading and exhibition walkthroughs by all the participants.

City Studio was invited by the Fine Arts Museums to create original silkscreens for their 100th Anniversary Year over the course of three public events in fall 2024 through fall 2025.

For the first event, we worked with the artists-in-residence at the DeYoung and created posters of “The Thinker” by Hatoshi Shiegta, an ode to the film “Vertigo” by Rapheal Noz as well as unique points honoring the architecture of “The Legion” by Chris Treggiari and a nod to the Legion’s benefactress “Big Alma” by Amy Berk and Vicky Li.

For the closing event, we invited City Studio high school students to visit the Legion and create work inspired by the collection. Amaris Medina-Kelley and Esme Charles created an ornate frame housing selected pieces from the collection; Lyla Davis and Claribel Caamal also used an ornate frame with an architectural rendering of the building itself and Kim Lee highlighted the extensive collection of ceramics.

City Studio was invited to provide drawing instruction for the public every Monday afternoon from 4-6 pm in San Francisco’s Union Square.  Our roster of artist/educators use a range of drawing materials and cycle through figure drawing, architectural drawings,  botanical illustrations and more!  Artist/educators are graduates or students from California College of the Arts and the University of San Francisco. Come join us!

Monumental Elegies explored the ideas of personal histories and identities through the deconstruction and reimagining of legacies and temporary monuments.  In this robust summer program, students first encountered 500 Capp Street’s artist in residence Mildred Howard‘s wrapped Junipero Serra, pointedly asking questions about what a legacy is, why it is important, and whose legacy should be remembered and why. Students embedded themselves into the activities of neighbor Ruth’s Table‘s community, doing chair yoga, making floral collages and other activities in the spirit of Ruth Asawa, whose dining room table is the centerpiece of this community gallery. Students also visited the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA, continuing their investigations into legacy and process-based artmaking.

This fellowship for community college students is an opportunity to blend journalism and art, drawing attention to certain experiences, issues, and stories of local communities in Oakland through creative visuals.

Over the course of 10 weeks, we’ll work with each News/Print fellow to select an issue or story they want to elevate and collaborate on making an original screenprinted poster that we will create through our in-house print studio.

This fellowship is presented by the Oakland Lowdown, a nonprofit news and arts organization in Downtown Oakland that operates as a hub for artists, journalists and community members to amplify local stories, shed light on important issues and share vital information that our communities need to thrive.

For our 2025 Spring Break Intensive, talented teens and tweens enrolled in SF Park and Rec’s Mission Art hub to explore the work of local internationally known artist David Ireland through his house at 500 Capp Street and through the eyes of artist-in-residence Minoosh Zomorodinia.  Students first created plaques memorializing their own personal “mistakes” in “Accidents Happen.” Next, students worked with Minoosh to create storyboards and then their own unique stop-motion animations.  For our culminating event, students made and served David’s “purple pasta” and Minoosh’s Shirazi Salad and showed their plaques and stop-motion animations to an eager audience of parents and friends.