Sara Lisch and Mary Curtis Ratcliff: Emotional Landscapes / Internal Atmospheres
July 18 – August 23, 2025
- Artists’ Reception: Saturday, July 19, 3 – 5 pm
- Oakland Art Murmur / First Friday: August 1, 5 – 9 pm
Emotional Landscapes / Internal Atmospheres brings together the figurative collage work of artists Sara Lisch and Mary Curtis Ratcliff, whose distinct yet complementary practices explore their inner worlds. Lisch’s work delves into intimacy, identity, and layered emotional landscapes and spiritual currents held in the body. Through vibrant fragments of paper and color, her figures emerge as expressive forms that speak to vulnerability and strength. Ratcliff’s pieces blend delicate figure drawings with photographic backgrounds, placing the human form in surreal, atmospheric settings. Her work evokes a sense of movement, reflection, and internal atmosphere—bridging the physical and ephemeral. Though stylistically different, both artists explore how memory, feeling, and physical presence shape the stories they tell through the figure. Together, their work creates a dynamic visual conversation, offering viewers an invitation to engage with the poetic, personal, and layered experience of being human.
Gallery
Available Work
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.
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.