Headlands Center for the Arts

Join artist-publisher Vivian Sming of Sming Sming Books, artist and designer Helen Shewolfe Tseng (Designer in Residence ’19), and artist and writer Alex Arzt (Affiliate ’18–’22) for a conversation and hike/reading in the land surrounding the Headlands campus.

Published in 2026 by Sming Sming Books, Helen Shewolfe Tseng’s Trickster at the End of a World is a field guide for relearning how to be an animal in the aftermath of rupture. Guided by an obsession with coyotes and in search for things lost, Tseng considers the highly adaptive wild canid and its often-mythologized archetype, the Trickster, as a mirror, foil, and portal. Much of the book takes place in the Headlands during Tseng’s time here as Designer in Residence, at the start of what has become a long-term observational practice.

Through long engagements with landscapes, archives, plants, and overlooked histories, Alex Arzt creates work that traces how human intervention, migration, and time reshape ecologies and produce new forms of relation and belonging. Her forthcoming book about California’s feral cabbages sprouted on Point Bonita back in 2019 while she was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands.

Following a conversation involving and responding to the Headlands’ landscape and its inhabitants in their work, Helen, Vivian, and Alex will invite participants to join them for a hike/reading near Headlands campus.

3PM Conversation in The Eastwing
3:30PM Guided Hike Begins in The Commons
4PM Hike Concludes 

About Coastal Trail Hike and Accessibility
This section of the Coastal Trail runs parallel to Simmons Rd and Rosenstock Rd right behind the historic military housing, parade grounds, and near the Headlands Center for the Arts  in Fort Barry. This section is considered easy, with some gentle inclines. Most of the hike consists of unpaved dirt paths with some walking along paved roads. The terrain may be difficult to navigate for people using mobility aids.

We recommend dressing in layers and wearing comfortable walking or hiking shoes.

If you have any questions, please contact Juliana Gerdts, Headlands’ Program Manager, at jgerdts@headlands.org.

Bios

Alex Arzt
Alex Arzt is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and gardener based in Oakland. Her research-driven, place-based practice spans artist books, essays, installation, lectures, and living processes. She runs the Risograph press A Magic Mountain and was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts from 2018 to 2022. She is currently writing her first book about California’s feral cabbages, forthcoming from Heyday.

Helen Shewolfe Tseng 

Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, wildlife naturalist, and computational poet based in San Francisco. Her practice emerges from the crossroads of mythology, ecology, and technology, and has taken the forms of works on paper, experimental publications, games, rituals, performance lectures, conceptual research labs, browser-based works, long-term observational studies, and more. Coyotes and wild canids are a recurring motif and enduring obsession in her work.

Vivian Sming

Vivian Sming (she/they) is an artist-publisher who experiments with books as art, discourse, exhibition, and archive. Since 2017, Sming has published a wide range of artists’ books through their studio, Sming Sming Books, where they work in close collaboration with artists whose works and ideas inform design, material, and printing choices.