Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Books and Prints
Website: basementsf.com
Ross Waitman is a San Francisco-based artist, publisher, and co-founder of Basement, a collective studio and VHS archive located in the city’s Mission district. Working at the intersection of fine art and independent publishing, Waitman has built a practice that spans intimate figurative drawing and the production of art books through his publishing imprint, Amaya Productions.
As the founder and operator of Amaya Productions, Waitman has served as publisher, designer, and producer of a growing catalog of monographs and artists’ books. Notable Amaya Productions titles include Electronic Resistance (2021), a comprehensive survey of industrial music pioneer Nigel Ayers’ mail-art, collages, flyers, and ephemera from 1980 to 1992, printed as a limited-edition hardcover in Oakland; and Correlations, a monograph on artist Sam McKinlay (The Rita) exploring noise, minimalist design, and choreography. Amaya Productions has also co-published titles with Colpa Press, the San Francisco design and print studio founded by Luca Antonucci and David Kasprzak, with whom Waitman shares studio space at the Basement.
Waitman maintains his studio at the Basement alongside artists Mitsu Okubo and David Bayus, among others. The Basement, situated at 23rd and Capp Streets in the Mission, serves as a collective workspace and archive housing more than 3,000 VHS tapes, and hosts regular film screenings and a radio show on Radio Valencia.
Waitman’s drawing practice centers on the portrait. Working in charcoal and pen-and-ink, he produces images that move along a spectrum from close naturalistic observation to near-total abstraction, testing the threshold at which a face or figure remains legible. Gesture, the tilt of a profile, or a single isolated feature — a set of teeth, the line of a jaw — become the anchors that keep the figural present even as mark-making loosens into something more open. His series Undiscovery, published as an edition through Printed Matter, collects this work in a format that includes an original card by Waitman tucked into each copy, placing the drawing directly in the hands of readers.
His publishing practice extends a similar attention to material form: Amaya Productions books are produced with care for scale, print quality, and object-hood, treating each volume as a considered artifact rather than simply documentation.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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