Bathers Library & Future Finds Presents

Future Finds is a fictional store selling artifacts of ecological remnants from the Bay Area, set in the Year 2100. We will be populating the store front with artifacts that engage with the Bay Area ecosystem, contributed by artists and presented as rare, nostalgic ecological samples.

The Future Finds storefront will be activated by a series of talks, performances and workshops focused on the possible futures of Bay Area ecology from different intersectional lenses. 

Get Your Tickets Today!

Events Calendar

1.17
5 - 8 pm
Opening Reception
Join us in the celebrarion of  the opening of Future Finds!

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1.24
10 am - 12 pm
Workshop:
Mussel Memory
Kea Kahoilua Clebsch
Mussel Memory is a two-hour workshop exploring the resiliency of the mussel population in the Bay Area. Participants will create casts of mussel shells on clay bed and plaster, while learning about the history of the ecological system along the California Coast.

Limited to 12 participants • $30 (materials included)
Kea Kahoilua Clebsch is artist from the island of Hawaiʻi. Her art practice is grounded in a love for her ancestors and ʻohana, who she gets to honor and know more deeply through her work. Primarily working in oil paint, Kea's art opens portals to her history, where she momentarily lives with and learns from the kānaka who precede her. Contrasting moments of clarity and dream-like haze, Kea moves in and out of touch with her subjects until land and body are indiscernible, emphasizing the ways kānaka, our histories, and our political movements are embedded in land. Her practice aims to carve space for her ʻohana's moʻolelo in visual canons, honoring the strength of her predecessors who each resist in their own right. Kea is currently studying Art Practice at Stanford University with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

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5 - 7 pm
Cultural Memory Workshop
Danielle Siembieda
Read. Create. Comment.

The Cultural Commentary Project is a participatory art initiative designed to transform public and community spaces into forums for civic dialogue and creative response. Danielle Siembieda leads community sessions where participants of all ages and backgrounds can create visual responses to policies that shape their lives. Tables with accessible materials will support artmaking, while listening and reading stations will provide policy documents, related artworks, and critical perspectives. The project culminates in an evolving public exhibition and serve as a translator of complex policies, a catalyst for dialogue, and a living record of shared concerns.

Danielle Siembieda is a systems artist working at the intersection of emerging technology, climate science, and community. Her practice translates institutional critique into actionable climate strategy, including a nationally recognized Carbon Art Program with the City of San José. She has garnered significant support for this work, including funding from Silicon Valley Energy Watch, and has applied her approach in partnership with the City of San Francisco and institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Siembieda has served as an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute—home of the Genome Browser—where her contributions were further advanced through UCSC’s Arts Research Open Lab. Her work has been presented internationally, from the 01SJ Biennial in Silicon Valley to the National Gallery in Copenhagen and the CYLAND International Festival.

Siembieda holds an MFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University’s CADRE Media Art Lab, with a focus on green technology and sustainable materials. She also plays a civic role in strengthening the creative economy and cultural engagement in Silicon Valley through her work with the City of San José. Her tenure as Chief Creative Officer of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) reflects sustained leadership at the convergence of art, science, and public impact.

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7 - 8 pm

On Futurities
Kola Heyward-Rotimi
When the future is spoken of in an aspirational tone, it gains a lot of constructive power that is assumed to be a positive force. In this talk, we will look at examples of futurity in different urban configurations, and how visions of a world yet-to-come are used as tools by people in the present day. In the context of contemporary life, concepts like worldbuilding and speculative subgenres like Afrofuturism become ambiguous in terms of who they are meant to support and what they aim to build. What are the material effects of “envisioning the future”? How does futurity as a tool shape the places we live?.

Kola Heyward-Rotimi is a writer and PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, researching virtuality and the influence it has on urban environments. Currently, Kola's work focuses on smart city projects, particularly how computer simulations and the narrativization of climate change factor into their construction. He aims to delineate how the roles of speculative fiction, scenario planning, speculative finance, and architecture converge to validate the development of multibillion-dollar projects.

Kola's fiction has been nominated for the Nommo Awards and the BSFA Awards, and can be found in Logic(s), Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and more. Recurrent themes across his fiction include climate change, the entanglement of magic and technology, and depictions of Black queerness that are critical of mainstream Afrofuturist tropes.


1.31
5 - 6 pm
Tea & Tropical Technologies
Anastasha Rachel Gunawan
Ancient tropical systems constitute sophisticated technologies for managing climate over long durations. Drawing from community-based practices and spiritual pillar systems from Indonesia and Myanmar that birthed resilient systems, Anastasha challenges one-dimensional definitions of innovation and technology today that privilege efficiency, speed, and control.

Engaging a tropical lens, what counts as technological success when we adopt a different metric system? What do we lose when we reward short-term optimization? Who awards legitimacy, and what path can we build for reconciliation between ancient spiritual cultures and modern socio-technical contexts?

Anastasha explores how histories of technology are constructed, whose knowledge is archived, and what kinds of technologies we want to endure.
Anastasha Rachel Gunawan is anIndonesian artist and technologist, born and raised in Southeast Asia, whose practice explores speculative relationships with technology in tropical worlds and futures. Spanning interactive artifacts, teaching, and worldbuilding, her work draws from Southeast Asian material and spiritual cultures to dig for new rhetoric and imagination. She is currently an MS Design student at Stanford with a focus on designing for emerging technologies.

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6:30 - 7:30 pm
History and Stories of Climate Migration
Rwaida Gharib
 How do we live in a drowning world? To inhabit a changing planet is to dwell in difficult thresholds—between staying and leaving, repair and rupture, continuity and loss. Climate migration is not only a policy question or a future risk; it is a deeply human negotiation with land, memory, and belonging.This session blends conversation with guided reflective writing. Participants will be invited into quiet, personal reflection—through journaling or free-writing—on their own relationships to nature, climate change, and anticipated environmental and personal change. No prior writing experience is required; curiosity and openness are enough.

Rwaida Gharib is an African scholar and writer whose work explores climate migration as lived experience, cultural rupture, and political ecology. Her  PhD Research examines how climate change reshapes relationships between people, place, and movement, particularly across the Global South. Grounded in fieldwork across East Africa and Central America, her scholarship uses long-form research and storytelling to study how narratives, legal categories, and language shape understandings of climate harm, mobility, and responsibility—revealing whose lives are protected, whose are rendered vulnerable, and whose movements are made visible or invisible.

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2.7
5 - 6 pm
California’s Food Sovereignty

Elias Aveces + Song Wu
How would we buy food if there is no grocery store left in California? This panel discusses the logistics of food production and distribution that underpins California, and explores how we can engage with a more local supply chain.  
Proceeds from this talk is dedicated towards land acquisition and other organizing efforts led by Plurinational Land Reform in CA Working Group.

Elias Aveces is the founder and research director of the Plurinational Land Reform in CA Working Group. The group emerged in 2023 as a grassroots collective of students & researchers seeking to bridge the gap between (farm)working and professional classes. It takes inspiration from the tactical innovations plus lessons which indigenous-peasant movements based in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile have experimented with to advance what they have coined as "plurinationalism". Aveces holds a MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University.

L. Song Wu is a figurative painter originally from Tampa, Florida, currently dividing her time between Northern California and Milan. Her paintings explore the tension between intimacy and alienation, challenging viewers to confront their own sense of belonging and constructions of place and femininity. Drawing on sources such as anime, YouTube thumbnails, and memory, Wu creates a meticulously crafted world that refracts her ideas of place and self in today’s dizzying contemporary landscape. Wu’s work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has been selected as a finalist for the AXA Art Prize and the Tournesol Award.

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7 - 8:30 pm
beyond a thermodyanmic energy future: taoist natural philosophy, qi, science (&) fiction

Kelsey Chen + Wendi Yan

What is energy? In this conversation, artist-researchers Kelsey Chen and Wendi Yan examine competing conceptions and mistranslations of qi, Taoist scientific imaginaries, and practices of synthetic biology and biodesign, situating these frameworks within the energetic logics that underpin the many futurisms of the Bay Area.

Kelsey Chen (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford and a multidisciplinary artist. In her scholarly work, she studies speculative and science fiction grounded in scientific/technical traditions outside of a Western techno-science, focusing on _silkpunk_ and Taoist scientific imaginaries. In her art practice, she is dedicated to trying to picture the true form of things, particularly those which are typically occluded or diffused (hyperobjects), working across painting, sculpture, weaving, book-making, and performance.

Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to probe and play with the artifice of knowledge. She also collaborates frequently with scientists and engineers, from synthetic biology to astrophysics, to explore the frontier between science and fiction, between imaging and imagining. She was an inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow and the 6th VH Award Grand Prix recipient.

2.14
5 - 7 pm Workshop:
Handmade Pigments From Natural Materials
Catherine Wang McMahon

Join artist Catherine Wang McMahon for a hands-on workshop creating handground pigments from locally sourced natural materials. Participants will learn to transform charcoal, oyster shells, redwood bark, and serpentinite into natural pigments and take home their own jar of handmade color.

Catherine will demonstrate practical techniques for grinding and preparing pigments while sharing the histories and ecological significance of each material. Charcoal connects to California’s cultural burns and the history of fire on the land. Oyster shells reflect coastal ecosystems and cultural heritage. Redwood bark honors California’s iconic trees, and serpentinite reveals the geological forces shaping the region.

This workshop offers participants both practical skills and a deeper understanding of the natural and cultural stories embedded in these materials, fostering a mindful, hands-on connection to art, ecology, and place.

Limited to 20 participants • $40 (materials included)
Catherine Wang McMahon (b. 1999, San Francisco, CA, USA; they/she) is a queer, biracial Chinese-American artist whose practice began at age five at Xing Xing Art Studio in San Francisco. They hold a BFA in Studio Art from New York University.

Shaped by their multicultural family, with a mother from China, a stepdad from India, a stepmom from Brazil, and a father who is a Vietnam War veteran and son of Italian and Irish immigrants, Catherine’s work explores the complexities of kinship through ecological and transgenerational landscapes. They aim to challenge dominant narratives and legacies of extraction, exploitation, and destruction across borders and barriers. Their site-specific works are grounded in a belief in the life force of nature (氣, qi, प्राण, prana, força vital).

Working with handground pigments on unstretched, grommeted paintings, their practice rejects the 15th-century European invention of the stretched canvas as a vehicle for Renaissance illusionism and draws instead from the format and fluid spatial logic of traditional Asian watercolor landscape scrolls from the 10th to 14th centuries. The work’s adaptability echoes protest architecture such as tents and temporary shelters and the site-specific ethos of 1960s and 70s Land Art. Emphasizing mobility and impermanence, the practice engages traditions that challenge fixed boundaries and the Western art canon’s codification of painting.

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2.21
7:30 pm2.22
8:30 pm
Site-specific Performance
Date #0 (Working Title)
K. Sid Zhang
with Isabella Terrazas and Sam Howell Petersen

Special exhibition: two people go on their first date. We may be at the end of the world, but in our souvenir gallery, you can still find accounts of human courtship with a live demonstration of its motives, procedures, and consequences. Devised on-site at Future Finds, this immersive physical theatre performance presents a miniature view of human genesis within a piece of our everyday life. As our spectatorship connects the present and the future, we cast our eyes onto the precious absurdity of our ephemeral being, clumsily recreated through an exhibition in a submerged world in the year 2100. Involves audience interaction. Audience will stay outside of Bathers Library for most of the show. Limited outdoor seating available, with priority given to people with accessibility needs.

K. Sid Zhang is a director, dancer, and poet from Nanjing, China and currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She searches for space between words and their silence and creates visual poetry out of interdisciplinary, movement-based performances. 

Sid received a BA (Hons) in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a Minor in Creative Writing (poetry). She is a recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts. She is a former member of the Chocolate Heads Movement Band. Her work has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and Stanford University.  Sid directs, designs, crafts, and sometimes thinks. She performs when needed. 



Get Your TIckets Today!

A: You can purchase a Season Pass (60 USD) to access the lectures throughout the month; this also comes with access to all six (6) talks happening on Jan 24, Jan 31 and Feb 7. You will also get three (3) limited edition 4” x 6” postcards.

Q: What if I only want to attend to one of the days?

A: There will be a limited number of tickets released before each day and walk ups at the door to the talks, based on seat availability. 

Q: How do I participate in the art workshops?

A: Workshops are add-ons and not included in the passes. You do not need a pass to reserve a seat in the workshop. Workshops are subject to cancellation if a minimum number of participants is not reached (full refunds will be issued for any cancelled workshops).

Artists & Speakers

Featured Artists

Official List of Artists  

Alex Uranga (@alex_uranga) is an artist, builder and educator based in Oakland California. His work investigates the interwoven nature of spirituality, manufacturing and technology as it relates to his upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Centered in material, history and intimacy he creates objects that omit logic in exploration of a bygone future and fleeting past. He is a high school shop teacher and co-director of Glue Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective based in San Francisco.

Alice Grace (@funkyfermi) is a recent graduate of Art Practice from Stanford University. Her interdisciplinary practice spans music, printmaking, sculpture, and performance art. She is most alive when she combines these modalities to create ritualistic art objects and interactive performances for her communities.

Alison Cao (@4447111s0007) is a poet, artist and designer based in the Bay Area, CA. They use language, installation, and sculpture to investigate how memories, experiences, and emotions are archived, embodied, and expressed. They are currently pursuing a B.S. in Physical Design & Manufacturing at Stanford University.

Amy Balkin is an artist whose work involves land and the geopolitical relationships that frame it. Her solo and collaborative projects, including Public Smog and Invisible-5, consider political and legal borders and systems, environmental justice, and the allocation of common-pool resources. Balkin received her MFA from the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited internationally, and her project This is the Public Domain was included in the publication Situation (MIT Press, 2009).

Andrew Kodama (NOSEI SUN ROOM) (@andrewkodama) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. He seeks to use his practice to explore themes around healing, practice, learning & unlearning, and communal connection. He sees creative collaboration as an important part of his practice and believes in its power to imagine new ideas and transform the way we move through the world.

Anna Brown (@tulsi.and.friends) is a ceramicist based in San Francisco whose work explores the imaginary worlds that children often create to find safety and peace. Her sculptures represent a renewed dialogue with her younger self — a relentlessly creative child who spent hours searching for newts, frogs, and salamanders in her backyard, crafting elaborate stories about them. She uses grief as fuel to create creatures and worlds that strive to offer a sense of unconditional protection and presence to herself and others.

Ariel Cooper (@arielcooper.net & @Sausalcreek.art) is a multidisciplinary artist working through visual storytelling and social/ecological/material interventions. She connects personal shatterings and mendings to collective and historical events and processes. This manifests as experimental narrative comic books and tapestries populated by animal and spiritual critters, haunting visitations, landscapes, psychological domestic interiors and playful expressions of nonlinear time. As well as through experiments in open-source landscape art projects like the Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative, all of which seek to work in opposition to the alienation processes inherent in the capitalist project.

Berru Koksal (@zbkoksal and @brutpen) is an architectural designer and artist working between architecture and object-making. Her work explores how permanence and restraint can be embedded into utilitarian forms. BRUTPEN is part of an ongoing material practice investigating durability, tactility, and the emotional presence of functional objects.

Bonwoo Kuh (@bon.woo) is an Oakland based interdisciplinary artist and researcher where they often examine trans and diasporic identities through time, body, and place. They work primarily with mixed media installations blending archival practices and material with traditional art techniques.

Catherine Wang McMahon (@catherinewangmcmahon) is a San Francisco born and based artist whose work explores the complexities of kinship through ecological and transgenerational landscapes. They aim to challenge dominant narratives and legacies of extraction, exploitation, and destruction across borders and barriers. Catherine’s site-specific works are rooted in the belief in the life force of nature (氣, qi, प्राण, prana, força vital). They seek to foster symbiotic, sustainable relationships with Earth, advocating for the legal personhood and protections of the land, living beings, and one another in the fight against climate change. Climate issues must be seen as inherently intersectional, recognizing the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and cultural dynamics. To care for Earth is to care for each other.

Chris Combs (@ccombsdc) is an artist based in Washington, D.C and Mount Rainier, Maryland whose sculptural artworks both incorporate and question technologies. He was the 2025 artist-in-residence at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Before becoming an artist, he was a photojournalist, a photo editor for National Geographic, a product manager, and ran a media website.

Cyan D’Anjou (@cyandanjou) Each of Cyan D’Anjou's creative projects begins with a question—an invitation to introspect on the values that govern how we navigate contemporary environments. She materializes potential answers by writing speculative manifestos and societal principles for participatory alternative realities to unfold. Rooted in uncovering each-time-altered stories of her own family's global migrations, her work creates tactile experiences around AI, robotics, and media technology’s presence in everyday life.

Daniel Brickman (@danielbrickman_art) came to California for graduate school and earned an MFA in Studio Art from UC Davis in 2012. He moved to the Bay Area after school and managed an art studio/shop cooperative in West Oakland. His studio is currently based in the Peninsula of the Bay Area. Daniel's artwork combines aspects of sculpture and painting with an emphasis on process and craftsmanship. Brickman's professional focus has included teaching art, theater and dance set fabrication, and assisting artists.



Danielle Siembieda (@AlterEcoArtist) is a systems artist working at the intersection of emerging technology, climate science, and community. Her practice translates institutional critique into actionable climate strategy, including a nationally recognized Carbon Art Program with the City of San José. She has garnered significant support for this work, including funding from Silicon Valley Energy Watch, and has applied her approach in partnership with the City of San Francisco and institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Siembieda has served as an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute—home of the Genome Browser—where her contributions were further advanced through UCSC's Arts Research Open Lab. Her work has been presented internationally, from the 01SJ Biennial in Silicon Valley to the National Gallery in Copenhagen and the CYLAND International Festival. Siembieda holds an MFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University's CADRE Media Art Lab, with a focus on green technology and sustainable materials. She also plays a civic role in strengthening the creative economy and cultural engagement in Silicon Valley through her work with the City of San José. Her tenure as Chief Creative Officer of Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) reflects sustained leadership at the convergence of art, science, and public impact.

Deep Time Press (@deep_time_press) - Founded in 2020 by artists Justin James King and Leah Koransky, Deep Time Press is an independent publisher rooted in limited edition photographic books and prints. Our content is connected thematically by concepts of time and place. We celebrate work that embraces cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research as an essential component of the artistic process. We publish both our own creative work and that of our collaborators. We are inspired by the potential for books, prints, and works on paper to serve as a space where concepts, questions, and actions can be exchanged.

Defne Beyce (@defnebeyce) is a queer Turkish/American/Panamanian artist and printmaker who immigrated to California as a child. She worked with livestock around the Colorado front range before turning her focus toward art. Defne has an animal science degree from Colorado State University, a post-bac in design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from California College of Art in San Francisco. She learned to screen-print from the cohort of radical Oaxacan printers at Mission Graffica in San Francisco. She has taught printmaking at Kala Art Institute, UC Berkeley, and the Palo Alto Art Center and managed the print studio and poster program at Facebook's Analog Lab. Defne currently prints out of her backyard studio in Redwood City, California, at the base of the San Francisco Bay.

Elizabeth Estrada (@elizabethroseestrada) is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles. Their practice is woven between painting, poetry, sculpture, and performance, often intertwining these mediums to explore themes of spirituality and body politics, alongside the internal and external processes of decay and regrowth. Recently, their work has focused on assemblage and collage/decollage, incorporating natural and found materials. Currently residing in the Bay Area, Elizabeth recently completed a bachelor's degree in Art Practice and Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley and was a recent student A.I.R with Recology SF. 

Emma Fenton-Miller (@emmafmade) is an artist and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her art practice focuses on hand-processed pigments and fiber sourced from her immediate surroundings. Their work explores belonging and alienation in the systems of our time and is a practice in experiencing the world as alive. Emma has spent over a decade working in community-based accessible art spaces and currently works as a Studio Facilitator at Creative Growth in Oakland. Emma is a member artist of the Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative, an urban lands art project in east Oakland.

evan pettiglio (@mellowecho) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in California. They earned an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. Their research-based sculpture practice is informed by geology, quantum physics, and zen buddhist theory and guided by a formative interest in the interwoven nature of time and place. Their work has been exhibited at Minnesota Street Project, Your Mood Gallery and 100 Million Space. Their writing has been published in Spectra.
Grace Jin (@graceejin) - Born in Ohio and raised by her grandparents in a fishing town in southeastern China, Grace Jin descends from generations of village physicians whose lineage she continues as a medical student and artist working in painting, calligraphy, installation, bookmaking, and social practice. Her work emerges from the dual training of medicine and art—two disciplines that touch, diagnose, render, sanctify, regulate, and imagine bodies. Moving between clinic and ritual, Grace examines how diasporic femme bodies absorb, resist, and remember systems of care and control. Guided by Traditional Chinese Medicine as a living epistemology, Grace works with herbal dyes, medicinal ink, mineral pigments, joss paper, and pharmaceutical ephemera to create sensorial environments that illuminate the relational nature of healing. Her art is an imagined pharmacopeia that refuses purity, and instead braids science with spirituality, diasporic histories with anti-colonial futures. Grace received a B.A. from Yale University, and is currently pursuing a MFA at California College of the Arts while studying at Stanford School of Medicine. Her work has been exhibited at ICA SF, SOMArts, Bass & Reiner Gallery, Kearny Street Workshop, Root Division, Ruth's Table, Silicon Valley Asian Art Center, Stanford Hospital and Harvard Divinity School.

Jessica Nguyen (@phantomcardium) is an elusive native of the Bay Area's ecosystems. She specializes in insects, arachnids, puppetry, and storytelling, and runs a speakeasy-style cafe, menagerie, and botanical conservatory.


Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch (@keas.art) is a visual artist from the Island of Hawaiʻi. Her art practice is grounded in a love for her ancestors and ʻohana, who she gets to honor and know more deeply through her work. Through painting, Kea activates family and historical archives to bring her ancestors and the practices that sustained them into space and vibrant color. Her work reflects a personal reclamation of her mo’okūʻauhau (genealogical story) in a settler-colonial context, where knowing and reciting ones genealogy often requires re-learning — calling out, listening, diving and digging. Painting has enabled this process, allowing an intimate engagement with her own genealogy. As she gathers stories from her grandmother, spends time in the guava fields her grandpa once tended to, paints the hands of her great-grandma she never knew, she reclaims her right to remember while creating space for her familyʻs moʻolelo in historical and visual canons. Kea is receiving a B.A. in Art Practice from Stanford University and was previously a fellow at the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

Kelsey Chen (@silkpunkbaby) (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist. She studies global scientific imaginaries. In her art practice, she is dedicated to trying to picture the true form of things, particularly those which are typically occluded or diffused, working across painting, sculpture, weaving, book-making, and performance.

Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩 (@kristi_chan) (she/they) is a first generation Chinese Malaysian artist, and educator from the American South based in the Bay Area. Her work examines the material memory of the landscape and the excluded histories of the Asian American diaspora. She researches the political, historical, and environmental heritage of the landscape and its material elements and organisms incorporating their properties into her processes. She is interested in the relationships between themes of migration, labor, trade, and symbiosis with the natural world, challenging ideals of extractive capitalism and grounding her objects in material tactility.

Lark Chang-Yeh (@larkie.poo) (they/he) is a stop-motion and scratch film animator, and a self-described professional rummager. They dig through archival videos, old magazines, and their grandfather's 16mm film collection, reconstructing both impersonal and personal fragments together. They create films and sculptures that are trans* in all senses of the term—transgenerational, transgressive, transgender, and transformational. Their work reimagines and restructures their childhood's rigidity—grasping at lost memories and connections to heritage, and simultaneously pushing forward into new, queerer territories.

Lizzy Brooks (@lizzymbrooks) is a photographer, technologist and social practice artist based in San Francisco. Working in community, she merges personal and political narratives to trace the nuanced boundaries of the self, as it bleeds into cultural identity, the city and the land, and technology. Her recent work explores the relationship between our bodies and our machines.


M Kuznetsov / Ratdog Etc (@ratdog.etc) (they/them) is a futurist, technologist, and artist from the Midwest who leans on their background in sociotechnical systems and biology to create placemaking, visceral work about existing in a world that is still coming to be. They explore the tension of the unnatural natural, the friction of technology and our desires. Often situated within nightlife or rituals, their multimedia work seeks to foster vulnerability and collective yearning.

Matthew Caren (@matthewcaren) is a musician, computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and multimedia artist. His work explores the affordances and opacities of technologies that mediate human expression, spanning composition, instrument design, installation, and research. He studied computer science, music, and literature at MIT, and is currently a PhD student at Stanford. He is a fellow of the Hertz Foundation and Steve Jobs Archive.

Michelle Cai (@lichenlvr) a multidisciplinary artist from the Chicago area currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their drawing, sculpture, and sound expose the temporalities that sediment in the relationship between their body, the paths of migration they inhabit, and the materials and processes of their practice. The renewed perspectives on time that emerge from these layers are a route to healing and rest from capitalist and colonialist violence. Michelle’s work has been supported by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Kearny Street Workshop, Stanford Asian American Theater Project, and the Cantor Arts Center. 

Mukethe Kawinzi (https://vsco.co/negrograzier/) is a shepherd and regenerative land steward. She is the author of touching grass (Porkbelly Press), Koans to a Young Cowboi (Bottlecap Press), rut (Ghost City Press Summer Series), and saanens, nubians, one lamancha (Winner, Quarterly West Chapbook Contest). Her practice illuminates the smut and splendor of the natural world, race in rural spaces, and the pains and pleasures of contemporary farm labor. She herds goats on the open range in coastal California.

Nibha Akireddy (@nibhaakireddy) is a Bay Area-raised artist currently based in San Francisco. Her work is an exploration of settling into the body. She creates multi-layered figurative oil paintings that merge personal narratives with speculative futures, cultural memory, and vernacular art forms to examine the body as a vessel for storytelling. In her work, she explores skin as its own medium. Her paintings focus on color in skin, particularly on the way brown skin holds and reflects light. She is interested in the way fat, muscle, wrinkles, scars, and tan lines hold stories as physical imprints upon the body. Her work and her perspective are deeply influenced by her life in the Bay Area and her connection to its various communities, cultural conversations, and histories.

Noe Naranjo Arias (@digitaldreambf) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the computer as speculative consciousness and emotional software. Working within the unstable architectures of the digital, they investigate the "third space" as a metaphysical topology where flesh and pixel collapse, and subjectivity is rendered fluid, recursive, and perpetually unresolved. Currently based in San José, California, and pursuing a BFA in Digital Media Art at San José State University (expected Fall 2026), Arias traces how algorithms, image systems, and networked environments reconfigure identity, collectivity, and presence in a reality that is always rendering, never rendered.

Phia Scolini (@phiascolini) - Hi! My name is Phia, and I am an artist from the Bay Area. My practice ranges from zine making, collage, painting, sculpture, photography, and bio/eco art. In this body of work, my work echoes the fragmented pieces from all different times and places. The main themes touch on food sovereignty, the exploration of ongoing colonial violence in the global south, and the ephemera/memories from a time that no longer exists. Some of my work is a direct reflection of my inner world, spanning from film and digital photos I have taken over the years, while other work reflects issues much larger than me and connects us in all sorts of unthinkable ways. With art, I create as a pathway towards collective healing, community building, and fostering relationships with ourselves and the Earth. If you are interested in learning more about the project's origins, my website is phia333.cargo.site.

Shreya Shankar (@shreya360)’s practice is where ancestral forms and futurisms meet across the mediums of design, production, policy, worldbuilding, place-keeping, myth-making and meaning-making. Their work engages collective memory and the radical imagination, seamlessly prototyping across diverse mediums and forms to create functional ritual sculptural art objects, sets, and visual art. With degrees in Environmental Policy, Urban Planning, and Architecture from UC Berkeley and CCA, Shankar draws from spiritual ecology, folklore, and foresight to explore the rich territory between ancestral cosmologies and liberatory near-futures.

Vanesa Gingold (@vanesagingold) - I was recently asked how I came to be a sculptor, and I answered honestly, "Well, one thing led to another". I was born in Ukiah, CA and grew up in Mendocino County. When I was seven, I had a favorite plant, Castilleja mendocinensis. I spent weekend afternoons digging up invasive gorse to protect its habitat and rallied the teacher and class with my passion, we wrote a song together about the flower and performed it in the auditorium. Now, I'm an artist, mother, and teacher. My work is not so literal, but I still believe in the possibilities of dedicated attention and responsiveness to the environment as a means of shaping ways of seeing. I still extend my arm out of the window of the car, waiting for the light to change, and exclaim to my daughter, "Look! It's a red tail hawk, circling!"

Zoë Rehnborg (@protozo.e) is currently pursuing a double major in Biology and Art Practice at Stanford University in California. Informed by her experience in fungal ecology labs, she is particularly interested in the ecological and existential dimensions of decay, and the role of microorganisms and fungi as agents of transformation – both in natural systems and in human narratives. Through her interdisciplinary practice, she investigates how cycles of decomposition can reveal new ways of understanding identity, loss, and interconnectedness.

Zoelle Egner (@zoelleegner) is an artist working in mixed metals and stone, creating wearable remnants of lost Bay Area biomes.

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Curatorial Team

Future Finds:

Est. 2100

Jan 17 2025 - Feb 22 2025


Welcome to the future! Coming from the year 2100, our gift shop carries artifacts of an ecological past. What you see here is what remains of the Bay Area ecology in 75 years: replicas, nostalgia, and rare finds of nature. 


In 2100, what has the world gone through? Well, the IPCC 2023 says we would be experiencing a warming of 3.3 to 5.7ºC. For the San Francisco Bay Area, this may mean 48 to 166 square miles being submerged due to a combination of land subsidence and sea level rise. California Climate Adaptation Strategy suggests an extended droughts in the region’s water supply, coupled with development in the wildland-urban interface, will lead to increased fire risk.


Perhaps we have witnessed it all. But all we can share with you today is evidence of speculations, because now, back in 2026, there may be a different future in the making.


Future Finds sells souvenirs of this world we inhabit now. Artists and future-makers create them as marks on our century: some are depictions of the Bay Area changed by incoming times, while others meditate on our environment with hindsight. To activate the possibilities of alternative futures, we also host a lecture series, workshops and performances over weekends throughout our stay at Bathers Library. Through an interdisciplinary lens, our artists and speakers thoughtfully explore different issues under the guiding themes:

Feral Ecology: What might ecosystems -- human and non-human -- shaped by climate change, look like in the future? Perhaps, 2100 is a year where the non-human takes over, and we marvel at the resilience of ecology. Extinction Studies: What ecological loss do we mourn? What are the legacies of the models of wilderness of the American West? Perhaps we time travelled back from a post-apocalyptic world to reminisce on the lushness of the present. Becoming Good Ancestors: What systems of care do we work towards amidst this environmental drift? Who can we look to as a model of resilience, and what kinds of ancestors are we hoping to become? What futurities do we want to tend to, with the slow-onset violence of climate uncertainty and crumbling capitalist ruins? 

After all, the statistical projections of the year 2100 offer concrete parameters, but we must understand for ourselves how such futures might be lived, felt, or negotiated. In our short stay in 2026, we hope to make all the mundane things we already hold dear to us legible, and take better care of them. It is here that art becomes essential: not as prediction, but as a speculative and affective space in which uncertain futures can be imagined, rehearsed, and collectively processed, so we can care for our present a little better. When setting up the storefront, we often looked back at 2026, at today, a time that we have experienced as the past, the present, and the future. It surfaces so vividly that we cannot remember from which point in time, in which one of the many futures, we are looking at ourselves. But we sure hope it is a good one.