SF Art Events: Week of 08.10.25
THING THREE: Dialogues:
Abi Joy Samuel & Zachary Oldenkamp
ONGOING–September 15, 2026
ABI JOY SAMUEL & ZACHARY OLDENKAMP
SLOW FREQUENCY
Oil, acrylic, charcoal, and graphite on paper mounted to panel
11 x 14 inches
Ryan Graff Contemporary is excited to launch the first in our Dialogues series: a conversation in images between Abi Joy Samuel and Zachary Oldenkamp. While the stylistic and scale contrasts between the two artists might appear incongruent at first glance, such surface-level differences quickly give way to a deeper, more nuanced exchange. Beneath the visible distinctions lies a shared sensibility: an intense emotional acuity, an awareness of an increasingly complex world, and a mutual effort to navigate it. This vulnerability, present in both artists’ work, forms the connective tissue of the exhibition and gives rise to a deeply felt visual conversation.
Samuel, with her English-Jewish heritage, brings a tenderness sharpened by history. Her work is bold and immediate in technique, and intense in mood. It is deeply physical, often portraying her own body in moments of quiet solitude: lying in bed, submerged in a bath, each position a visceral response to the socio-political weight of the world around her. These gestures, while personal, also speak to a broader inquiry: how the Jewish body exists and is pulled in conflicting directions in contemporary society. Her paintings are raw and unflinching, reflecting an urgent attempt to reckon with emotional and physical presence in uncertain times.
There is a striking immediacy and authenticity to Samuel’s work, a reactive and utterly necessary kind of energy. There’s strong sense of angst and anger, as if conflicting emotions are pulling at the painted figures, which appear almost carved into the surfaces through dynamic, gestural lines. The scale of the work contributes to this intensity, delivering the sense that the driving force behind the paintings needed to be expressed, demands attention, and refuses to be ignored. The work emanates from a deeply personal place, rooted in the artist’s effort to explore personal questions, unfiltered and urgent.
Oldenkamp, from San Francisco, draws like someone sifting through memory in the half-light, working on a smaller, more intimate scale. His pieces are subtle and tightly rendered, built slowly through layers of mark-making until light and form begin to surface. With a dimly lit palette and careful cropping, he blurs the boundaries between bodies: feet touching in the dark, limbs gently intertwined, a partner sinking into sheets while the other watches in silence. These scenes are tender, romantic, at times sexually intimate, and above all, deeply observant. His gaze lingers on the small details that make connection endure. There is something rare in his perspective: the gaze of someone utterly in love with the quiet moments that define a relationship.
These works emphasize the power of presence shared between individuals, positioning this presence as a quiet act of resistance in a world increasingly defined by distraction and disconnection. Through quiet repetition and subtle form, his drawings become meditations on tenderness, memory, and the fragile importance of peace with both ourselves and with one another.
Regardless of differences in medium and tone, Samuel and Oldenkamp share a focus on the private realm. Both artists turn away from public performance and spectacle, and instead direct their attention inward to the internal, intimate, and unseen. Their works are an exploration of vulnerability, memory, and emotional endurance. Whether it’s Samuel’s paintings or Oldenkamp’s drawings, each comes from a personal, internal, sensitive place: a place that comes from trying to understand ourselves and how to persist in a challenging environment. Their techniques, while divergent, are each in service of the same goal: to reflect the substance and stakes of their emotional worlds.
Together, Samuel and Oldenkamp offer a dialogue of contrasts and connections. Their work unfolds like a shared language, rooted in personal disorientation and political anxiety, but also in the search for solace in still, unguarded moments. What emerges is a profound conversation about what it means to feel, to remember, and to remain open in a world that often demands the opposite.
LOCATION: Ryan Graff Contemporary, 804 Sutter St, San Francisco, CA 94109 (map)
HOURS: Fri - Sat 12 - 5 pm or by appointment
Thing Two: Our Commons Are Free, A Project by Ben Kinmont
Installation view
ONGOING - August 10, 2025
Fort Mason Art presents Our commons are free, a project by artist Ben Kinmont exploring the rich history and lasting influence of the San Francisco Diggers – the radical community actors who emerged within the countercultural movement of the 1960s – at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC). Exhibiting the group’s innovative street sheets and printing operations, Kinmont tracks the Diggers’ push for new societies based on “free” ideals of individualism, community care, and a rejection of consumer capitalism. The show includes a comprehensive collection of rare Digger publications, facsimiles, ephemera, and photography, plus new film, wall, and assembly projects by Kinmont.
The Store House, Landmark Building D, across from FLAX Art & Design store
Free Admission
LOCATION: The Store House, Landmark Building D (across from FLAX), 2 Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, CA, 94109 (map)
HOURS: Wed to Sat, 12 pm - 6 pm; Sunday, 11 am - 5 pm
THINGS THREE: Routed West: Bay Area then
Carolyn Castaño, Chondua (Sierra Nevada de la Santa Marta), 2023
ONGOING–January 25, 2026
What does it mean to live with possibility? To live in a moment when artists and citizens reject fear and find power in discovery? For those who came of age in the Bay Area with the apocalyptic uncertainty of nuclear proliferation and the AIDS crisis; the devastation of the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Oakland firestorm; the audacious acquittal of LAPD officers Koon, Wind, and Briseno and the disembodied destruction of the first Gulf War; the road was bleak. And yet the energy in the cultural sector at the time was electrified.
Today we again find ourselves at a moment of consequence in need of radical thought, civic action, and relentless imagination. From Arnold Kemp’s bold letter forms to Alicia McCarthy’s rapturous woven lines; from Margaret Kilgallen’s intricate 2001 installation, Main Drag, to Rigo 23’s insurgent mural after Goya, Terra Nullius, Bay Area Then brings together historic and new works by artists who shunned despair to instead assert their unique vitality, resourcefulness, and camaraderie.
Central to 1990s Bay Area was a complex web of artist-run and alternative spaces that served as essential outlets for gathering, listening, performing, and learning from each other. Photographs, ephemera, and artworks on view here were shared by many individuals and serve to document these spaces, their activities and the formative role of these initiatives in the art ecosystem.
Bay Area Then presents works by Nao Bustamante, Carolyn Castaño, Bill Daniel, Sergio De La Torre and Chris Treggiari, Beatrix Fowler, Mike “Dream” Francisco, Johanna Jackson, Chris Johanson and Ajax Oakford, Arnold Kemp, Margaret Kilgallen, Josh Lazcano, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, Manuel Ocampo, Eamon Ore-Giron, Gina Osterloh, Rigo 23, Spie One, and others. Bay Area Then is organized by guest curator Eungie Joo.
LOCATION: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)
HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday / 11am - 5pm
