At Montalvo Arts Center, it’s okay to put your feet in the clay. Your footprints will wind up in Palo Alto.
This Friday night, Montalvo Funk, the center’s annual free art party, takes over the property and celebrates the opening of Montalvo’s current exhibition, a collection of nine sculptural works installed throughout the landscape, as well as 18 other works on view in the Cottage Gallery.
Inspired by the California Funk Art movement of the ’60s and ’70s, the exhibit, When the World Is Beautifully Strange, features artists transforming clay into meditations on identity, social dialogue, collaborative ecosystems and resilience. The community festival will feature music, dancing, artist engagements and live performances. All parking will be at West Valley College lots 4 and 5, with a free shuttle to and from the Montalvo grounds.
At Montalvo, the curators live to explore how artists, in this case sculptors, can activate a public space in new ways. Modern provocative works are often juxtaposed with others that were installed 100 years ago by Montalvo founder James D. Phelan, whose legacy has not exactly aged well.
“Something we’re always keeping top of mind is how the works respond to the landscape, sort of settle in, nestle in the landscape, but also push against the histories embedded in this landscape, which feels really important,” said Kelly Sicat, the exhibit’s co-curator. “So you’ve got original historic works that were placed on these grounds next to contemporary works, kind of contending with each other.”
Montalvo co-curator Judy Koong Dennis said it all began with Socrates.
“When we started putting this show together, I started working from a quote by Socrates where he said, ‘Wisdom begins with wonder.’ And so the premise of the show really began there.”
Now, throughout Montalvo, on the grass, in the gardens, up the hillside, and in the gallery, one can spot funky clay and ceramic sculptures by renowned contemporary practitioners. During the VIP reception a few weeks ago, UC Davis art department chair Annabeth Rosen compared California Funk to the ’70s punk scene in New York, because it broke rules about material and medium, transforming clay from a utilitarian practice into a viable sculptural medium.
That same night, many of the participating artists explained their practice for attendees. Bay Area sculptor Wanxin Zhang talked about his work, Color Face, in part a self-portrait inspired by Chinese opera masks and the abstract coloring style of his friend, Manuel Neri. Likewise, sculptor and chef Niki Ford, previously a Montalvo Lucas Artist Fellow in Culinary Arts, talked about her sculpture, Child on High, in terms of gender identity, hymns to the queer divine and boy-child archetypes—wild, intuitive and unruled.
Guest artist Woody De Othello, a major player on the scene, recently had his patinated bronze sculpture, seeing both sides, installed on Montalvo’s front lawn. (The work was gifted to Montalvo by the Lipman Family Foundation.*) At the reception, he explained the influence of West African theology in the work. A maquette can also be viewed in Montalvo’s Cottage Gallery.
“I think that the show is really different from the ones that we’ve done,” Dennis explained. “There are so many layers. You can approach it however you wish.”
Dennis emphasized the influence of the California Funk Art movement, “which used humor, irony, playfulness, and even strangeness to draw viewers in and really challenge them or delight them to look at the work and try to figure out what is it that the artist is saying here and figuring out their own response to it.”
The Montalvo Funk party on July 18 will even feature a performance by artist Ashwini Bhat, originally from South India, but who now lives in Sonoma County. “Earth Under Our Feet” will invite anyone to leave their footprints in a giant clay mandala that Bhat will later install at the Palo Alto Art Center. The participatory activity will be documented by a videographer. The video will accompany the show in Palo Alto, where the mandala will be on display for a year. Each person who leaves a footprint will be credited in the creation of the work.
The exhibit When the World Is Beautifully Strange will be on view through Nov. 9. Montalvo Funk, an annual free art party, takes place 6–10pm on July 18 at Montalvo Arts Center, 15400 Montalvo Rd, Saratoga. montalvoarts.org
*Edited July 16, 2025
