July 2026
Nineteen of the wiki’s listed artists also appear in Kadist’s collection database — the San Francisco- and Paris-based contemporary art foundation, which keeps a space in the Mission District a few miles from where many of these artists live and work. Checked against Kadist’s public artist and work records; each match verified by bio, not name alone.
Ten of the nineteen are tagged Oakland on this wiki, more than double San Francisco’s five. Ten work in video and nine in installation, against only six in painting — despite painting being one of the wiki’s most common mediums overall. Six trained at the San Francisco Art Institute (closed 2022), more than any other single school; five more at California College of the Arts. Eight of the nineteen carry a birthplace or heritage outside the continental United States in Kadist’s own records, Mexico three times over. Kadist’s own location data drifts from the wiki’s over time: Tammy Nguyen and Indira Allegra are currently recorded at addresses outside the Bay Area (Easton, CT and New York, respectively), though both keep their Bay Area connection on this wiki. Julio César Morales’s Kadist record lists Phoenix, AZ, but he has since moved back to the Bay Area.
Julio César Morales, Ana Teresa Fernández
Kadist’s holdings echo a pattern already on this wiki’s Commonalities page: Morales and Fernández are two of the four wiki artists whose work treats the US-Mexico border as a sustained subject, not a topical backdrop. All five of Morales’s Kadist-held works circle that terrain — a neon sculpture on loss (There’s Gonna Be Sorrow, 2006), watercolor diagrams of smuggling hideouts (Undocumented Intervention, 2006), a restaged nineteenth-century border crossing (Interrupted Passage, 2008), the informal economy of Contrabando (2011), and a lit sculpture of a drug tunnel (Narco Tunnel, 2012). Fernández’s Borrando La Frontera (2011) documents her performance painting over the Tijuana/San Diego border fence’s train rails. Two curatorial processes, working independently, landed on the same two artists and the same subject.
Kota Ezawa, Astria Suparak
Both artists’ Kadist-held works are built entirely from existing moving images rather than original footage. Ezawa rotoscopes and re-animates a courtroom broadcast, Hollywood heist scenes, and a Jackson Pollock documentary (The Simpson Verdict, 2002; Paint, Unpaint, 2014; The Crime of Art, 2017) to expose what the original footage was already doing. Suparak’s Virtually Asian (2021) and Asian futures, without Asians (2022) comb six decades of science-fiction cinema for its recurring Orientalist tropes. Neither artist stages a new scene — both re-cut what mass media already produced.
Sadie Barnette, Carolyn Drake, Heesoo Kwon, Marcel Pardo Ariza
Four artists, four different Kadist-held pieces, each built directly from an existing personal or community archive rather than a staged image. Barnette’s Winfield St (2018) enlarges a found photograph of her father — Black Panther Party chapter founder Rodney Barnette — and two cousins who died before turning twenty. Drake’s Jackie and Chloe and Megan and Hazel Sue at Creekmore House (both 2018) come from an ongoing collaboration with a self-organized group of women in Mississippi who call themselves Knit Club. Kwon’s A Ritual for Metamorphosis (2023) inserts a 3D avatar into her own family’s home-video footage. Pardo Ariza’s Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018) (2018) connects Bay Area queer archival photographs to people living today. Each work treats an existing photograph or tape as material to be worked on, not just referenced.
Chanell Stone, Leila Weefur, Sadie Barnette
Three Oakland artists, three mediums, three Kadist-held works that make Blackness the work’s organizing content rather than incidental context. Stone’s In Search of a Certain Eden (2019), from her Natura Negra series, examines the Black body’s relationship to nature within built environments. Weefur’s Between Beauty & Horror (2018) is tagged by Kadist’s own system simply “race” and “racism,” addressing the racialized materiality of Blackness. Barnette’s Winfield St sits in this group differently — its own tags are family, domesticity, and nostalgia, not race — but it’s drawn from the same body of work in which she has said she makes space for tenderness and kinship as part of, not apart from, the political history of her father’s Black Panther membership.
Sourced from Kadist’s public collection database (kadist.org), July 2026.