Artists with Marin ties take part in new Eames show

Ten years have passed since the Petaluma Arts Center presented “Work & Play: The Eames Approach,” an exhibition examining the design legacy of Charles and Ray Eames. In the years since, the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity has emerged to extend the Eameses’ influence, focusing on the intersection of design thinking, problem-solving, curiosity and play.

Now, as Llisa Demetrios, chief curator of the Institute and granddaughter of the Eameses, prepares to develop a new art and design museum in Novato’s former Birkenstock building, Petaluma Arts Center revisits the Eames story with a new exhibition.

The current exhibition, “Crafting Curiosity,” brings together work produced during the inaugural artist residencies at Eames Ranch. Over the past year, two three-month cohorts of invited Bay Area artists had access to the Eames archive in Richmond, research materials from William Stout Architectural Books (now part of the Eames Institute) and the ranch land in the San Antonio Valley, a site shaped by intersecting natural and human histories.

In return, the artists produced new work grounded in the Eames ethos, drawing from both archival material and the surrounding landscape. Their daily routines took them through the woodshop, metal shop, fiber studio, ceramics studio and farm, each space offering a different lens on the land’s properties as they moved between disciplines.

The workspaces, adapted from former barns and farm buildings, are managed by Jay Dion, who also coordinated the residency program and appears in the exhibition.

“I feel very grateful to have been able to work alongside these artists as a kind of facilitator,” Dion said. “Each person approached this with authenticity and openness to explore, change, test, prototype.”

Demetrios said she was proud of the artists’ “fearless investigations into materials,” several of whom experimented with mediums they had never worked in and often learned from one another.

“People were not working in silos,” she said. “There was an intentional sense of community.”

Residency artist Windy Chien confirmed that all this creativity happened “with no agenda save the Eameses’ clarion call to serious play.”

The residency operated as a laboratory, asking artists to set aside expectations and allow process to shape outcome. The resulting work maintains a balance between visual and conceptual integrity.

The exhibition opens at a moment of transition. California College of the Arts, where several participating artists studied, will close after the 2026-2027 academic year, following the San Francisco Art Institute’s closure in 2022. As the future of art schools becomes increasingly uncertain, the need for spaces that support experimentation across disciplines and media grows more urgent.

Farm to table

Several artists turned their attention to food and its production and presentation, reflecting Petaluma’s agricultural roots.

Pierre Thiam, a James Beard Award-winning chef from Senegal, was curious about the Native Americans who first walked the ranchland and the crops they grew. Thiam built a wood-burning clay oven on the ranch, using straw, sand and wood.

“I became the farmer, the builder of the kitchen and the maker of the serving vessels,” he said.

Kristen Stain’s work, shaped by a sense of ancestry and place, includes vessels and tableware formed from a mix of commercial and ranch-sourced clay.

“Conversations with my co-residents deepened my understanding of ceramics glaze chemistry, leaving me feeling optimistic about how my practice will continue to evolve,” Stain said.

Masako Miki entered the residency without prior experience in ceramics. Drawing inspiration from the ranch’s palette, she created ceramic plates in a range of glazes, each incorporating imagery from the Eames archives. In the exhibition, her tablescape appears alongside Stain’s, setting up a dialogue between their approaches.

Listening notes

Yvonne Mouser spent much of her residency engaged in material experimentation, collecting grasses and soil and fabricating bio-based resin tiles. Her field instruments, reminiscent of turntables, were designed to play love songs to the setting sun.

“The residency gave me space to follow wild ideas in a setting close to nature,” said Mouser.

Chris Kallmyer, who was an artist in residence twice at Sausalito’s Headlands Center for the Arts, works at the intersection of sound and design, applying his background in acoustics to architecture and landscape. During the residency, he examined bells as both social and ecological tools, drawing on the presence of livestock on the ranch. His work, focused on the craft of bell-making, anchors the far end of the gallery.

Nobuto Suga and Amy Rathbone of Suga Studio based their process on attentive listening to place, prioritizing process over finished product. Their abstract tables, made in the woodshop, take their forms from the microscopic contours of lichen, allowing the land to guide the work.

Common threads

Windy Chien is best known for her work “The Year of Knots,” in which she learned to tie a new knot every day for a year.

For this exhibition, Chien produced a knotted alphabet and a 30-foot knotted chain, underscoring the range of scale that defines her practice.

Chien also learned weaving during the residency, drawing on the expertise of fellow artist Travis Meinolf. Meinolf, who runs a weaving school in San Anselmo and has a background in craft and industrial arts, contributed a woven coat in vivid reds that echoes the palette of Kallmyer’s bells, highlighting the exhibition’s attention to visual relationships.

“A photo or painting of a field can convey much,” Meinolf said, “but wrapping yourself in a jacket made of wool from the sheep who roam the field daily offers a tangible connection to process and place.”

Color studies

Rie and Jay Dion, working together as Dion Ceramics and known for their colorful mugs produced in Richmond, focused on color and glaze testing for this project. By combining iron, cobalt, and copper, they produced 21 distinct glazes. Their studies, exploring gradations of primary colors and pigments, reimagine the color wheel in triangular form.

Lena Wolff, who was born in Larkspur, created a spectrum of botanical inks from flowers, plants, trees, and fungi gathered on the ranch. The progression of colors appears in small vials and jars, each labeled with its source. Wolff used these inks to produce a geometric work on paper, displayed alongside the samples. She titled the series Repair Work, framing it as an effort to address the disconnect between people and the land and among people themselves.

Behind the scenes

The North Gallery at Petaluma Arts Center provides a behind-the-scenes view of the artists’ processes, with a photo collage and early prototypes on display.

As part of “Crafting Curiosity,” a panel discussion moderated by Dion with Eames Institute Farm Manager David Evershed and several residency artists is scheduled from 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Later in the exhibition, Wolff will lead a botanical ink-making workshop from noon to 3 p.m. Feb. 15, followed by a closing event from 2 to 4 p.m. Feb. 21.

If you go

What: “Crafting Curiosity”

Where: Petaluma Arts Center, 230 Lakeville St., Petaluma

When: Through Feb. 21; Noon to 4 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays

Admission: Free

Information: PetalumaArtsCenter.org or EamesInstitute.org