2024–2025 Graduate Fellowship Exhibition
“I write for the future because my present is demolished. I fly to the future to retrieve my demolished past. To see what isn’t hard to see, in a world that doesn’t.”
Borrowed from Palestinian poet and physician Fady Joudah, the line to see what isn’t hard to see, frames the practice of this year’s fellowship cohort, a gesture of both clarity and insistence.
The 2024-25 Headlands Graduate Fellows cohort summons histories embedded in clay, rock, metal, fiber, rubber, and fossil fuel, tracing the sediment of memory in materials and moments that predate—and may very well outlast—us. They attend to the folds and fissures of deep time and tectonic force; the layered textures of domestic life under militarized skies; the chemic residue of desire, extraction, and sacred entanglements; the chronic veil of fog as both shroud and shelter; the play and provocation of objects that toy with function and failure.
Extending beyond the wall, the works in the exhibition occupy space in environmental and relational ways, inviting viewers to move through and alongside them. Opacity and ambiguity are deployed as tactical methods of reflection and attunement, guiding more ethical engagements with what is already here. Through careful repetition, transmutation, and unexpected arrangements, these artists set the conditions for encounter, opening new ways of sensing and inhabiting time, material, and relation.
Curators
PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Vanessa Pérez Winder
Participating Artists
Salimatu Amabebe, University of California, Berkeley
April Camlin, University of California, Davis
Leah Koransky, San Francisco State University
Joanna Keane Lopez, Stanford University
Duma Mock, California College of the Arts
About the Program:
Headlands’ Graduate Fellowships provide yearlong studio residencies to recent, promising MFA graduates in partnership with esteemed schools in the region. Bringing together representatives from each of these institutions, this exhibition provides a composite view of Bay Area graduate art programs.
The Fellowship culminates in an exhibition featuring the work each Graduate Fellow produced during their year in residence at Headlands.
Join us for the exhibition’s opening reception on Sunday, September 7, from 4–6PM. A Sunday Supper in the Mess Hall will follow at 6PM. Purchase your Supper tickets here to join us for a celebratory meal with the Graduate Fellows.
The exhibition is on view September 11– November 2, 2025 during Headlands’ Open Hours (Thursday–Sunday, 12–5PM).
