Jean Goldman
From January 19, 2010, to July 1, 2023, Jean Goldman served on the City of Emeryville’s Public Art Committee and was elected unanimously as Vice Chair for many of those years. Ms. Goldman advocated for the adoption of the Emeryville Public Art Master Plan and was tireless in her efforts to build support for its implementation. In the over 13 years during which Ms. Goldman served on the Public Art Committee, the City Council was aided in its efforts to expand public art investments and to successfully launch the Mural Program and the Visual Art Grants Pilot Program.
A graphic artist by training, Ms. Goldman was delighted to see the Rotten City Cultural District receive increased funding in 2023 and is eager for the district to create an identity leveraging Emeryville’s reputation as a center of art and innovation. A staunch supporter of the development of an Emeryville Arts Center, Ms. Goldman served on the Blue-Ribbon Panel for developer selection and continues to seek support for a new vision for the Art Center. In her last year of service, Ms. Goldman represented the Public Art Committee on the Sharon Wilchar Bus Shelter Art Program Selection Panel, heralding in the next era of local artists representing Emeryville through the display of artwork in four bus shelters through 2025.
Sharon Wilchar
Sharon Wilchar served on the City of Emeryville Public Art Committee for over 30 years, initiating the Art in Public Places Ordinance and its eventual expansion to cover residential development, after launching the Emeryville Celebration of the Arts annual exhibition and serving for nearly 30 years as the Community Liaison for the Emeryville Artists’ Cooperative, beginning in 1983. Sharon was elected Chair of the Public Art Committee for her entire membership, due to her charming, calm leadership and broad and deep relationships in the community. The Emeryville Celebration of the Arts, an annual month-long exhibition of local artists first held in 1987, was initially conceived as an event to recognize the City’s support of the Emeryville artist community through the purchase of the Emeryville Artists’ Cooperative; it quickly expanded to embrace the entire artist population of Emeryville and the broader community, and annually, Ms. Wilchar secured a building owner partner to host the show, exhibiting over 100 artists’ work from throughout the City each year. Ms. Wilchar’s advocacy for the City’s investment in public art and artists residing and/or working in Emeryville predates the establishment of the Public Art Committee and the Emeryville Annual Art Exhibition, with Ms. Wilchar working as the Community Liaison for the Emeryville Artists’ Cooperative beginning in 1983, facilitating the Cooperative’s incorporation as the 45th Street Artists’ Cooperative in 1986, and helping increase the 45th Street Artists Cooperative’s impact on the community by participating in the inaugural Artist in the Schools Program beginning in 1983.
In the decades that Ms. Wilchar has served as the Chair of the Public Art Committee, the City Council has been aided in its efforts to expand public art investments since 1990, when the City commissioned its first public art installation, Peninsula Tell Tail by Anita Margrill, starting a collection that has grown to over 70 permanent artworks placed Attachment 1
throughout the City, establishing Emeryville as a leader in supporting public art. Over this same time span private developers, through the Art in Public Places Ordinance, have installed over 230 publicly-accessible art pieces on building façades, lobby walls and within landscaped spaces and courtyards throughout Emeryville.
In 2006, the City began the Purchase Award Program, whereby the City purchases artworks shown in the annual Emeryville Celebration of the Arts Exhibition, initiating an ongoing collection of works by local artists and installed in City facilities. In 2009, the City initiated the Bus Shelter Art Program, now entering its seventh phase, which displays local artists’ work in four bus shelters in Emeryville. In 2017, on behalf of the 45th Street Artist Co-op and the Emeryville Celebration of the Arts, Ms. Wilchar partnered with the City and other cultural leaders to form the Rotten City Cultural District, one of just 14 statedesignated Cultural Districts. Under Ms. Wilchar’s leadership, the City commissioned the Public Art Master Plan, launched a smart phone guided audio tour of the art works in City Hall, and installed banners in City Hall featuring the works of 30 local artists.
The City’s reputation and identity as a center of Art and Innovation is, in large part, a direct result of the work of Ms. Wilchar and so many of the buildings and artwork in Emeryville, as well as the community itself, have been touched by the tireless efforts of Sharon.
Nancy Karp
Nancy Karp has been making work in San Francisco for four decades. She has created more than 80 dance works for her San Francisco-based company Nancy Karp + Dancers founded in 1980. Karp and the company have toured throughout the U.S. and abroad, including extended artist residencies in Germany, the former Yugoslavia, India, and Japan. She has been awarded commissions by the Für Augen und Ohren and the Sprachen der Künste Festivals in Berlin, the Cabrillo Music Festival, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, among others. As an artist-in-residence at the Kyoto College of Art in Japan in 1990, she choreographed Terrace Canon, a site-specific work for 32 performers as part of the Kyoto International Contemporary Music Forum.
Site-specific performance work has been an important part of Nancy Karp + Dancers’ programming. Performances have included site pieces commissioned for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, and a commission for the Choreographers’ Festival at Yerba Buena Gardens for the work, La Processione with music performed by the Green Street Mortuary Band. Ms. Karp has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including the Bay Area Dance Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (1995-96) to India, where she worked for five months with dancers and actors from the Kerala Kalamandalam, choreography fellowships and dance company grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Rockefeller Foundation/MAP Fund. An active member of the San Francisco Bay Area arts community, she served as a trustee of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, chairing its Arts Committee from 1993-2000 and was a mentor in CHIME Program, Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange, in 2004-05.
In 1993, Karp’s evening-length work, Kristallnacht, Night of Broken Glass, created in collaboration with composer Alvin Curran and designers Jack Carpenter and Sandra Woodall, was premiered before sold-out houses at San Francisco’s Theater Artaud.
Kristallnacht was Karp’s first work with a historical context and received widespread critical acclaim. Subsequently, in 1995, Ms. Karp was invited to return with the Company to Theater Artaud for a second two-week sold-out run of the work. Other major works which have toured internationally include Prima Materia (1987), with music by Ingram Marshall and visual decor by Carol Law, First Light (1985) with a sound score by Bill Fontana and visual decor by Berlin-based artist Wolfram Erber, and Dot Bunch (1984) with music by Charles Amirkhanian and visual decor by Carol Law.
In 1986 she published Six Dances/Nancy Karp, a limited boxed edition of dance scores, and in 2003 published a second edition of scores, photographs, essays and drawings entitled Nancy Karp + Dancers: Dances 1977-2003. Karp and the dance company also released Four Dances: The Music, a selection of music compositions commissioned by the New Arts Foundation/Nancy Karp + Dancers for choreography by Nancy Karp.
Memory/Place, in a limited edition of 50, was released in April 2019, and is a collection of selected drawings from Karp’s notebooks from this work.
Frances Phillips
For nearly 30 years — since it came into being — Walter & Elise Haas Fund Arts Program Officer Frances Phillips served as director of the Creative Work Fund (CWF). At the 25- year anniversary she had oversight of 384 grants, averaging $35,531, for a total of $13.5 million in support of partnerships between artists and nonprofits. Frances started her career in arts philanthropy with the Fund. She started in started in 1994 and the CWF had been designed over the nine-month period immediately preceding her arrival.
Frances is a poet and prior to the CWF had been Executive Director of Intersection for the Arts prior to joining the Walter & Elise Haas Fund.
Trained as a poet to hear authenticity, Francis notes she uses that skill “all the time as a grant maker; to sense when people are telling me what they think people in philanthropy want to hear and when they’re telling me what’s really going on.” CWF was designed to respond to the shifting national attitude in the early 1990s towards supporting artists with public funds. This dialogue arose from public outcry over support of provocative artists, such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, and it resulted in the National Endowment for the Arts’ budget being cut dramatically with almost all of its fellowships for individual artists eradicated.
In 1993-94, there was also a lot of reconstruction of cultural facilities that had been damaged in the 1989 earthquake. It was a moment of “Oh my, there’s going to be no money for individual artists, but we’re going to have some really nice buildings to put art in…” Foundations began pooling funds to offer grants that would benefit individual artists.
Frances put together panels of experts who come together from around the country, and when she is reviewing applicants for traditional arts grants, “I don’t only need to have people who know craft and dance and music, I also need to have people who know China, Japan, Afghanistan… because many applicants represent the cultures that make up the Bay Area.”
Holly Alonso
Holly Alonso is the Director of the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park which has the mission to engage people of the many cultures that have formed, and are still transforming California, moving towards greater equity, environmental resilience, and a sense of belonging for all.
Exhibits, events, and youth and community programs centered at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park–community hub and nationally significant historic site in Oakland’s Fruitvale district bring people together to understand each other’s cultures and heal historical wounds, take care of the land we depend on, celebrate our rich and varied identities through culture and the arts, and engage in civic life, creating a model for communities nationwide.
Peralta Hacienda Historical Park is a six-acre community park and museum in the Fruitvale district of Oakland and one of the most significant historical sites in Northern California. The site, replete with outdoor exhibits, special gardens, and built structures— both new and historical—holds the history of the Peralta family, one intertwined with that of the native peoples of the East Bay. The family lived in three dwellings from 1820 through the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. eras, reflecting the transformations of California.
The Peralta House is now a city and state landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A multisensory museum inside tells the story of this family whose experience profiles the history of their times. While the makeup of the area has certainly changed since the construction of the Peralta House in 1870, an IMLS Museums for America grant-funded program helps the local community to recognize the significance of its history.
Archana Horsting
Archana Horsting received a B.A. with honors from U.C. Santa Cruz, studied art history at the University of Padova, Italy, as well as art practice at L'Academia di Belle Arti di Venezia before working for the Italian sculptor Carlo Schiavon. She pursued independent post-graduate study with Krishna Reddy and Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris.
She later studied with Akira Kurasaki from Japan, and Sandro Martini from Italy. She cofounded Kala Art Institute, and remained its executive director for 48 years.
Archana has served as a visiting artist at U.C. Santa Cruz and Mills College, a site visitor for the National Endowment for the Arts, and as a panelist for the California Arts Council.
Her artwork has been exhibited and collected throughout the U.S. and internationally. She was awarded the Arts Leadership Award from Alameda County in 2012 for Kala Art Institute, and the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Award from the Berkeley Community Fund in 2015.
Kala’s mission is to support artists with an international residency program rooted in the local community and a forum for ideas with a unique space for artists to share artmaking equipment, exchange ideas, be in dialogue with one another, and experiment with technology, media, and techniques. With vision and leadership she has had a profound influence on generations of artists and artist communities while steadily making work in her Emeryville studio. Archana is a resident of the 45th Street Artists’ Cooperative in Emeryville.
In 2023, Kala Art Institute hosted a retrospective exhibition of Ms. Horsting’s work:
Archana Horsting, On the Fringe of the Field, A Survey of Works 1972–2022, featuring prints, drawings, and paintings by Ms. Horsting. The show celebrates her artistic vision and art practice, creativity, and contributions as an artist and arts leader—building vibrant cultural communities at Kala, in the Bay Area, and beyond.
Ms. Horsting’s studies and art practice include printmaking, sculpture and painting, art history and philosophy. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein especially left a long impression in her creative mind. Her studies overseas and interactions with artists and art communities from around the world have also inspired her artistic endeavor.
Jose R. Rivera
José R. Rivera has over 25 years’ experience in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors in leadership roles spanning the arts, foundation giving, family services, environmental and high-tech industries. For twelve years, he provided instruction to minority individuals transitioning to the role of entrepreneur at various workforce development agencies. As interim CEO and COO of major venture-philanthropy in the Bay Area, José supported founders of emerging companies and mentored first-generation minority university students. He joined Richmond Art Center from Lincoln Families in West Oakland, where he was Director of Administration, Privacy and Compliance. Prior to that, José was Executive Director at Stagebridge in Oakland, the oldest performing arts entity in the nation for older adults. A former professional theater and film producer, screenwriter and classical pianist, José has resided in Albany for three decades. Jose holds a B.S. and M.B.A., both from Northeastern University in Boston, and certificates in Organizational Behavior, Psychology and Music from Harvard University.