Art for the Winter Solstice: Gathering in Community
Dates: 12/6/24 – 12/28/24
First Friday: Dec. 6, 5-9 PM
Artists’ Reception: December 14, 3-5 PM
The Mercury 20 community welcomes the Winter Solstice with a collective exhibition of art. In this annual exhibition, artist members gather to share their works with the community. Please join us to bring light to the dark days of winter through art.
Also, unwrap the joy of artistic expression with the Backroom Gallery exhibit, WINTER LIGHT, a collection of smaller works.
List of Participating Artists:
Dalar Alahverdi
Andrea Brewster
Patricia Guthrie
Andrea Guskin
Gustave Carlson
Mary Curtis Ratcliff
Tara Esperanza
Leah Korican
Jill McLennan
Monika Mayer
Christine MeurisCharlie Milgrim/Tim West
Sara Lisch
Dr. KC Rosenberg, MFA, Ed.D.
Caity Salamanca
Emily Shepard
Elizabeth Sher
Abby Zhang
Gallery
Available Work
Tara Esperanza
Tara Esperanza resides in Oakland California, where succulents thrive year-round. When she is not painting, she is running and capturing the images that live on through her art. Esperanza earned a BFA in Painting and graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In addition, she studied plein-air painting in Brittany, France. As a representational painter inspired by nature, she has dedicated years to meticulously portraying succulents. Esperanza’s paintings have been included in several group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland CA. She has exhibited her paintings in galleries and museums throughout California and her work adorns the walls in private collections around the U.S.
Andrea Brewster
Andrea Brewster is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the intersection of nature, fiber art, and technology through intricate forms and layered textures. Brewster earned a B.A. in Sculpture from Pomona College and an M.F.A. in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. A 1993 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant recipient, she has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay Area, with solo shows at Mercury 20, The Lab, and Southern Exposure, as well as group exhibitions at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, The Oakland Museum, and the Peninsula Museum. Her work has been featured in fiber art exhibitions in Ireland and the U.S. She participated in the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and presented at the Doily Free Zone Contemporary Lace Symposium. In 2025, her AI work appeared at Load Gallery, Barcelona, and in the book “Neo Botanica.” She has been a member of Mercury 20 Gallery since 2020.
Andrea Guskin
Andrea Guskin is a San Francisco Bay Area based artist working across multiple disciplines including photography, sculpture, and painting to create objects and installations where the familiar converses with the existential. With interests in quantum physics, ancestral archives, and Buddhist philosophy, she transforms everyday materials—spices, funnels, foil, thread—to explore our relationship to the vast, from microscopic particles to deep space. After studying painting at Antioch College in Ohio, Guskin moved to New York City and became part of the art and songwriting communities on the Lower East Side. Since moving to California in 2003, she has regularly exhibited her work throughout California, often combining her experience in museum education (The Oakland Museum,The Contemporary Jewish Museum) with her creative practice to lead participatory art events throughout the Bay Area including the Richmond Art Center, Berkeley Art Center, The Drawing Room, and the Red Poppy Art House. Guskin graduated with an M.F.A in Interdisciplinary Arts from Mills College at Northeastern University.
Dalar Alahverdi
Dalar Alahverdi is a contemporary visual artist of Armenian descent working and living in California. Growing up in Iran, as a woman in a minority group, Dalar understood the value of social justice and freedom. Throughout her life, she has been fascinated by discovering the untold stories of people. She continues to explore the overlooked elements of daily life through social, cultural, and political lenses. Her paintings are metaphoric; the first thing you see is not the story she wants to tell. Her works often represent social justice and human rights.
Dalar received her BA in Painting from Tehran University, and an MA in Painting from Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts and a second MA in Art Education from California State University, Long Beach. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries abroad and in the United States. Dalar has also collaborated on several scenic designs for the theater in Iran. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches art at the Children’s Museum in Oakland and other studios in the East Bay.
Jill McLennan
is a painter, printmaker and teaching artist who has been living in Oakland, CA for 23 years. She is an active member of her neighborhood Jingletown, creating and organizing public art and beautification projects, and has her studio at Jingletown Art Studios. In 2023, she completed a large-scale public art project with the city of Emeryville, a steel fence depicting local views and shorebirds. Currently, she is focused on printmaking and is exploring several techniques and subjects. This fall, she is an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. As both an artist and a teacher, she is deeply invested in learning new things, exploring her environment, inspiring youth, and spreading hope and joy into the world.
Mary Curtis Ratcliff
Mary Curtis Ratcliff studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and then participated in the early video movement in New York City, from 1969 to 1972. Ratcliff’s fifty-year career has seen her explore many different media including kinetic and freestanding sculpture and 2D photo-based mixed media, often using imagery stemming from nature. Her artwork has been featured in over thirty solo exhibitions and more than one hundred and thirty group shows. Her work is represented in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California.
Leah Korican
Leah Korican is a visual artist and writer. She has lived around the world, including Cave Junction, Oregon; and Florence, Italy. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally including at the Richmond Art Center, Bedford Gallery, and the Triton Museum. Her public art commissions include a large-scale site-specific cut-out for the Nashville International Airport, and permanent artworks for Kehilla Community Synagogue and Rumsey Engineers in Oakland, California. Her writing has appeared recently in Heartwood Literary Magazine.
Monika Mayer
Monika Mayer is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Berkeley, CA. She grew up in a rural area of Germany where she was exposed to a rich tradition of textile craft and making from a young age. Drawing inspiration from nature and personal experiences, Mayer’s multidisciplinary practice is based on experimenting with everyday material texture, pattern, color; and repetitive mark-making. Working across a broad range of media, including inner tubes, soccer balls, canvas and paint, Mayer creates abstract two- and three-dimensional work. She often incorporates traditional textile techniques such as knitting or embroidery in unusual ways to give her artwork additional color and life. Her approach is experimental, her creative process intuitive and iterative, often layering techniques to create organic textures and dimensions.
Jessica Cadkin
Jessica Cadkin was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in Napa, California. She received a BA in Sculpture and Painting from San Francisco State University and currently works out of her studio in Oakland, CA. Her work has appeared in group shows internationally and throughout Northern California including Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, di Rosa Preserve, Bateman Foundation Gallery of Nature, Bedford Gallery, Root Division, and the Berkeley Art Center.
Laura Malone
Charlie Milgrim
Charlie Milgrim is an Oakland based sculptor, installation artist, photographer and painter. She has had major solo exhibitions at OK Harris, New York City; Haines Gallery and Gallery 16, San Francisco; The Oakland Museum and the Richmond Art Center. She has been an active participant in the Bay Area arts community through exhibition and curation, and is a member of the Mercury 20 Gallery, where this will be her fifteenth solo show.
Dr KC Rosenberg
Dr. KC Rosenberg is an Associate Professor at California College of the Arts. She also conducts ethnographic research that emphasizes the power of visual arts education to teach critical social skills. Rosenberg simultaneously collaborates in a duo artistic practice as RoCoCo with Bay Area artist Modesto Covarrubias. Rosenberg’s solo exhibitions include Casserole Night at Mercury 20, ; dam’zel at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA,; and Sedimental Sentiments at Introductions, Sacramento. Alameda County Art Collection includes KC’s artwork. She earned her Ed.D. in Organizational Change and Leadership from University of Southern California in 2020, and her MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Davis in 1994. She was awarded a residency at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1993), and earned a BFA in Printmaking with high distinction from CCAC in Oakland (1987)
Sara Lisch
Sara Lisch is a San Francisco Bay Area multimedia artist who graduated from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her work has been exhibited at the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts, the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, Santa Fe Clay, Virginia Brier Gallery in San Francisco, and other national and local venues. She also curates an outdoor art gallery in Berkeley, CA, and has been a member of Mercury 20 since 2017.
Elizabeth Sher
Bay Area artist and filmmaker, Elizabeth Sher is Professor Emeritus of Art at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she taught painting and media arts. Currently working in video, artist books, digital mixed media on canvas, paper, and metal, Sher passes freely between static and moving images, paint and pixels, traditional and new media. She mixes these with a strong basis of formal discourse and a quirky sense of popular culture blended with insightful honesty and humor. Career highlights include her work being widely collected including SFMOMA and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum of California; her films have been broadcast on PBS and internationally including “PENNY: Champion of the Marginalized” Film (writer, director, editor) and “Rituals of Remembrance: Exploring the Art of Mourning” (co-director and producer); exhibits such as “Good Coffee, Bad News” solo Show at Mercury 20 Gallery in 2024 and “Ten Years of Artist Books” curated by Donna Seager at the Brooklyn Central Library; an artist residency at Studi D’arte Nel Castelio, Aragonese, Castle, BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy; and as a featured artist at the Bioneer International Conference in 2022.