Bronwyn Dexter is Bay Area visual artist and per-forming musician. When she’s not blowing up the stage with her Cowboy Glam Rock band, Raven Marcus, she can be found covered in ink in the printmaking lab. A Seattle native, Bronwyn moved to San Francisco in 2009 and has been building communities in queer culture, art practice and musical awareness ever since.

Arion Press matches the finest contemporary art with the finest literature, past and present, in books that are beautifully designed and produced. Founded by Andrew Hoyem in 1974, the Arion Press publishes deluxe, limited-edition books, many of them printed by letterpress, illustrated by prominent artists, and some accompanied by separate editions of original prints. Since 2001, Arion Press has been a cultural tenant at the Presidio, the National Park in San Francisco, where it shares a handsome industrial building with its second division, M & H Type—the oldest and largest type foundry in the United States, serving the font and typesetting needs of letterpress printers around the world—as well as its nonprofit adjunct, the Grabhorn Institute.

City College of San Francisco offers a wide variety of classes at two sites in the city. For Open Studios we are highlighting our Fort Mason Center facility. We offer affordable Credit, Continuing Education and Older Adult classes during the day, evenings, Saturdays and online - all taught by practicing Bay Area artists. Classes include sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, painting, watercolor, drawing and art history. Please come by during Open Studios to see our facilities, meet our students and instructors and get information about joining us!

“I enjoy blending narrative and portraiture into my paintings and prints. Thematically, my works invoke varying degrees of emotions such as tension, desire, restlessness, self-doubt and vulnerability.  The works explore how one may approach and process these learned insecurities.  Visually, my style is influenced by the German Expressionists and the American Social Realists.”

Catherine Small studied visual art, art history and design at The University of Texas at Austin and Sam Houston State University where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, graduating with honors.  After a career in graphic design, and on the same day she signed the last check to her daughter’s private college in 2003, Catherine began working full time as an artist concentrating on painting and printmaking.

Her work has been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally.

seeing is just your best guess ...

“I delight in the unforeseen, the happenstance, the incongruities of things!”
—The Impoverished Landscape Painter Reflects on Art, by Carla Sweet Chlouber

The fragility of life and its ever-changing nature, both beautiful and tragic, sometimes ugly, compel me as to explore what gives us meaning and hope.  Over the last ten years, my work has considered our relationship to other animals and the earth, exploring ideas such as communication, compassion and sustainability.

My most recent body of work is a “collaboration” backward through time, inspired by the writings and poetry of my mother, Carla Chlouber, and her father (my grandfather), Arthur Sweet. Within my mother’s papers we found a trove of her and my grandfather's unpublished poems and writings, which were hidden in old trunks and file cases—scraps of family history.  Using fabric and embroidery, along with printmaking, encaustic, acrylic and oil paint, these mixed media pieces hold for me a haunting beauty and a transformation of family, love and loss.  

Exploring their writings has made me see the past differently, not as something that ends, but as ever continuing. 

Belinda Lee Chlouber