Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Calling all Bay Area art students and recent graduates! Show your art at the inaugural SLIDESLAM at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and see the latest ideas and trends in the Bay Area art scene. All participants will have samples of their work displayed on one of the SLIDESLAM displays in the YBCA Forum or Grand Lobby, while panelists Steven Wolf of Steven Wolf Gallery, Tanya Zimbardo of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Meg Shiffler of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and Elizabeth Thomas of the Berkeley Art Museum ponder the SLIDESLAM artworks, along with musing on the present and future of Bay Area art.

The SLIDESLAM program will be followed with a reception. Participation and Gallery Admission to YBCA’s current exhibition “Bay Area Now 6” is FREE for all art students with a current ID, or proof of art school graduation within the past three years (e.g., diploma, expired ID, transcript).

For instructions on how to submit your work for the SLIDESLAM, go to http://www.slideslam.info.

The SLIDESLAM is sponsored by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Panelist Bios:

Steven Wolf is the founder of Steven Wolf Fine Arts. Since 2000, the gallery has evolved from a private, secondary market space with a Tenderloin storefront to a genre-breaking contemporary exhibition hall with a no-holds-barred curatorial program that combines all media, generations and ideas in provocative and confounding ways. The new gallery is 1600 square feet of natural-light-filled space at the corner of 19th and York Street in San Francisco.

Tanya Zimbardo has been the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art since 2005. She earned her masters degree in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts and curated the video art exhibition "The Studio Sessions" at SFMOMA. She is a consultant for Matters in Media Art, a consortium of curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers from the New Art Trust, the New York MoMA, the SFMoMA, and the Tate Museum in a multi-phase project designed to provide guidelines for care of time-based media works of art (e.g., video, film, audio and computer based installations). She was the co-curator of the museum’s 2010 SECA Award and authors the blog, “Feedback to the Future.”

Meg Shiffler has been the Gallery Director for the San Francisco Arts Commission since 2005. She is also a faculty member of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, and a columnist for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog. Prior to working at the Arts Commission, Shiffler worked in New York for the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Andrea Rosen Gallery. She co-founded the multidisciplinary art center Consolidated Works in Seattle, WA, and was the Gallery Director from 1998 to 2003; prior to that, she was the Director of 20th Century Masterworks at Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates, and the Gallery Director for MIA Gallery, both located in Seattle. Meg attended the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York.

Elizabeth Thomas has been the curator for the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive since 2007. She formerly was assistant curator and then associate curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and prior to that served as a curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Thomas completed her graduate work in modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received her BA in anthropology and art history from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. In addition to her curatorial practice, she was the co-founder of TENbyTEN Magazine, a former arts and culture publication based in Chicago.

SLIDESLAM Mediator

JD Beltran is a conceptual artist, filmmaker and writer who currently is serving as the Interim Director of Cultural Affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen in New York, the MIT Media Lab, ProArte in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in the 2006 and 2008 ZeroOne San Jose New Media Biennials. She writes columns on art and culture for both SFGate.com and the Huffington Post, and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her newest film will be debut in January 2012 as part of the Getty Research Institute’s watershed “Pacific Standard Time” project. Beltran is also on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, where she is Director of the school’s City Studio after-school arts education program for under-served youth.