Wednesday, June 26, 2024
6:30pm (Doors at 6:00pm)
Free and open to the public

Join Praxis of Local Knowledge [2]exhibiting artists Miguel Arzabe and Daniela Rivera for a conversation about their work and process. Moderated by Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial associate at Berkeley Art Museum. 

ATTN! Artist Miguel Arzabe will raffle off three of his prints at this event. Attend to win! 

This program is planned in conjunction with the exhibition Praxis of Local Knowledge [2] on view at the SFAC Main Gallery through August 17, 2024.

About the Panelists

Miguel Arzabe is a visual artist who lives and works in Oakland. He had recent solo shows at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA). Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in museums and galleries including MAC Lyon (France), MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Oregon), the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Arzabe’s work is held in public collections such as the Harn Museum in Gainesville, Florida, Albuquerque Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, San Francisco Arts Commission, the State of California, as well as numerous private collections. He has attended many residencies including Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Millay Arts, and Santa Fe Art Institute. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2022 Arzabe was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. In 2023 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and and a Golden Foundation Residency. In 2024 he was a SECA award finalist.

Born in Santiago, Chile, Daniela Rivera received her BFA from Pontifcia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1996 and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston in 2006. She is currently Professor of Studio Art at Wellesley College. She has exhibited widely in Latin American cities including Santiago, Chile, as well as in the United States. She has been awarded residencies at Loghaven, Headland Center for the Arts, Surf Point, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires, Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture. And she has been the recipient of notable fellowships and grants including from The Chiaro Award, The Rappaport Prize, Now + There, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award, VSC, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The FONDART in Chile, and the Saint Botolph Club foundation Distinguish Artist Award. Recent or upcoming exhibitions include: New Worlds, NMWA, Washington DC, 2024, Donde el Cielo Toca la Tierra, Matucana 100, Santiago Chile, 2024, Praxis of Local Knowledge, San Francisco Art Commission, San Francisco, Labored Landscapes; Where The Sky Touches the Earth, Fitchburg Art Museum, Fragmentos para una Historia del Olvido/ Fragments for a History of Displacement, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (2018–2019); En Busca de los Andes, solo exhibition with Proyecto ACE, Buenos Aires, Argentina (June 2019); Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics), a public art project developed as her Now + There Accelerator Fellowship. 

Matthew Villar Miranda (he/they/siya) is Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In their former position as Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they worked on exhibitions by Julie Mehretu, Pao Houa Her, Paul Chan, and Pacita Abad. They serve on the Board of Stakeholders Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative of an intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing equity across the museum field. In 2021, they co-curated the Art for Justice Fund-supported exhibition Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). They received their BA in History of Art from UC Berkeley (2013) and graduated among the inaugural class of ASU-Los Angeles County Museum of Art Master's Fellowship in Art History (2021).