Last year, former San Jose Museum of Art curator Nidhi Gandhi, now at the Oakland Museum of California, began organizing “Young Bay Mud” after noticing a theme shared among a group of mostly Bay Area artists using young bay mud either as a medium or as a source of inspiration.
Young bay mud is a geologist term for a soft mix of clay, silt, sand and organic matter that’s less than 10,000 years old and is deposited into the San Francisco Bay, though the mud can be found in the bays and estuaries in other regions and countries, such as Cape Cod, Florida Bay, Denmark, China and the United Kingdom.
The exhibit, which runs July 11 through Feb. 22, highlights those five artists whose recent sculpture, ceramics, installations, video and sound pieces address several ecological issues, whether it’s climate change and land development or land acknowledgement and ancestral connections.
“Nidhi noticed this kind of thread among different practitioners that she had been in conversations with,” says current curator Juan Omar Rodriguez. “And she realized that this interest in thinking about the land and the history of San Francisco was a kind of platform, a place to think about climate change, our future and what happens on the actual land that we stand on.”
Tanja Geis, for example, who’s originally from Hong Kong and lives in Oakland, hand shaped hundreds of sculptures out of multiple mud forms for “Mud Will Remember Us.” The zoomorphic-looking sculptures are set against fluorescent red-painted walls and hang off of fishing lines that resemble mobiles.
“There’s supposed to be a sense of alarm in terms of thinking about the rising toxicity and rising sea levels,” says Rodriguez.
Similar to Geis, Ashwini Bhat’s art focuses on California but also makes references to her homeland: rural Southern India. Her series of glazed ceramics consists of clay, lava rocks and other materials found along various lakes and trails. “Yakshi Nature Spirit,” which is a nod to the nature spirits that are common in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain mythology, is made of rocks taken from her property in Sonoma.
“When she moved she really wanted to develop a relationship with her new home,” Rodriguez says. “Part of that was going on nature walks and doing field research in the different parks and trails around the Bay Area. She started collecting clay, as well as different minerals that she would use as glaze for some of these works.”
L.A.-based artist Mercedes Dorame draws inspiration from her Tongva heritage in “Return to the Place of Mud—Guashna Shyeenaxre,” which features cast resin objects suspended above bowls, stone stars, abalone and other natural materials on a canvas painted like tie dye. Another piece, “Aweeshkone xaa, ‘Ekwaa’a xaa/ Neshuun’e Mochoova” (displayed last year in L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall), is a single-channel video projection that includes the greetings “I am happy you are here” and “My heart is with you” in the Tongva language.
“Her work draws on the Southern California of her tribe, really connecting the land with the sky, and how we connect differently with the Bay Area, but through thinking about her own background,” Omar says.
Joanna Keane Lopez pays homage to her New Mexico family, who taught her how to work with adobe mud. “Roadtrip Adobe Theatre of the Bay Area” is a video projection of two adobe panels and shots of Lopez moving around different adobe buildings.
Perhaps the show’s most unusual works are by Futurefarmers. In 2022, the San Francisco artist collective teamed up with the San Jose State University marching band, who played their instruments while walking on piles of two types of soil (one taken from San Joaquin Valley and the other found on the moon). The clay was later transformed into hollow instruments and an electronic mechanism was added to produce sound. The collaboration resulted in a vinyl recording of the performance.
“The exhibit’s takeaway message is to really think about the places that we move through,” says Omar. “Our sense of place is really important for thinking about our future, that we can’t think about our future generations without thinking about the way that we’re actually going to take care of the places that we live in.”
Young Bay Mud opens July 11 and runs through Feb. 22 at the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St., San Jose.
