Sarah Shepard Gallery is pleased to announce Return Focus: A group show featuring Hyun Jung Ahn, Diane DallasKidd, Isadora Gullov-Singh, Marta Elise Johansen, Serena Mitnik-Miller, and Lena Wolff.

Lena Wolff is an interdisciplinary visual artist, craftswoman, and activist for democracy who has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990s. Wolff’s work extends out of American folk art traditions while at the same time being rooted in minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, and feminist and political art. Her broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based works, music, and public projects. On the public art front, for the election year of 2024, a new round of images by Lena Wolff and Hope Meng are in the works to circulate across the country in the form of billboards, physical posters, postcards, and free downloadable files. Learn more about Art for Democracy here.

Lena's work has been exhibited nationally and collected by One National Lesbian and Gay Archives, the Berkeley Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco History Collection at San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Arts Commission, Alameda County Arts Commission, Cleveland Clinic, University of Iowa Museum and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, among others.

We have been exhibiting Lena's work since 2019 and are showing a large-scale hand-cut paper collage from Wolff's Circle System series.

Hyun Jung Ahn is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist from Seoul, South Korea. Through her work, she investigates enigmatic abstract forms, which she references as “shapes of mind.” She begins by drawing from her visual diary, which captures feelings, personal connections, and emotional states of being. She then translates these notions into minimalistic drawing, painting, and sculpture.

Ahn was selected as the 'Emerging Young Artist' at La Mer Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, and was the winner of the Emerging Art Award at Baditto Art, Tuscany, Italy. She has attended residencies including Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Trestle Art Space, Brooklyn, NY. Ahn Graduated from Duk-Sung Women’s University, Seoul (in 2010 B.F.A and 2013 M.F.A) and received her second M.F.An in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

The gallery is pleased to be collaborating with 3walls to present 5 new paintings by Ahn in varying sizes.

Serena Mitnik-Miller is an artist and designer working in California. Serena’s paintings are created by hand using watercolor pigment on paper. The compositions are fashioned by interconnecting patterns of color and concentric shapes where structures break apart, bubbles stack, and pyramids multiply. Her artwork usually begins with an impression from the natural environment, where proximity to the ocean and coastal habitats, often become symbolic permanent points of reference. She splits her time between being a mother, painting, and running The General Store in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Mitnik-Miller earned a BA in Photography and Printmaking from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was an artist-in-residence at Art Park in Byron Bay, Australia and her work has been extensively exhibited in New York, Tokyo, and Australia. Mitnik-Miller is included in the Art In the Embassies collection in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. She is the co-author of Abode: Thoughtful Living with Less.

Our first exhibition with Serena was in 2020 and we are showing a large-scale sky-blue watercolor in her signature geometric style.

Diane DallasKidd is a Bay Area-based artist whose work addresses the boundaries of craft and contemporary art. Using the language of traditional textile techniques as a foundation, DallasKidd’s work is both exploration and meditation on the primal act of making things.

Born and raised in San Francisco, she graduated from San Francisco State University with a BFA in Textile Art. She traveled to Japan to continue studies under Tsuyoshi Kuno, a 4th generation master dyer who adapted centuries-old dyeing techniques to create new material for avant-garde designers and high-end theatrical productions. She was a 2019 Facility Artist at 1240 Minnesota Street Studios and has exhibited at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Root Division, and galleries throughout the United States.

We have been exhibiting Diane’s work since 2020 and have included a piece from her Tracing Waves series, an ongoing series documenting SF Bay tide levels using thread and paper.

Marta Elise Johansen is an artist who makes sculptural, methodical, and immersive line drawings. Working only in natural light from a studio on the Bay, Johansen meticulously draws with one pen at a time, one line at a time, one drawing at a time - never overlapping - until a drawing is complete.

Johansen was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and studied at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture. She has taught Graduate and Undergraduate art and design at The California Polytechnic Institute and The University of Southern California. Johansen’s mother, an American textile designer, and consultant for the United Nations, met her father, a Norwegian engineer who designed railway systems in Asia, while working in Pakistan. Growing up in a household that was frequently visited by her parent’s friends from all over the world, including her mother’s circle from the Black Mountain College scene, led her from a young age to appreciate the cultural arts.

The gallery has worked with Johansen since 2021 and will be exhibiting two drawings in her identifiable linear style.

Isadora Gullov-Singh is a mixed media artist based in Berkeley, California. She creates soft abstract minimalist art inspired by nature and architecture. She earned her BA from Columbia University, where she studied drawing and painting.

Born in Rome, she spent her younger years in Paris and moved to Australia in high school before coming to the United States. Isadora has lived in California for the last 20 years and exhibited across the Bay Area. Her work is often described as quiet and meditative and she hopes to give viewers a space for reflection and connection.

We are exhibiting two canvases from a new series by Gullov-Singh inspired by new beginnings and the colors of daylight.