COMMISSION. Oakland, CA, 2024. On the 10 story concrete facade of the new Samuel Merritt University Health Campus in downtown Oakland, Hughen/Starkweather’s painterly waterways of local landmark Lake Merritt are layered with concrete molds of recognizable human cellular shapes — endoplasmic reticulum and golgi — alluding to the relationship between waterways, ecosystems, and human health. The repeated cell forms ascending the facade also reference the wings of birds or butterflies, and patterns of light on water’s surface. These are elements central to Lake Merritt, a tidal marsh and the oldest wildlife refuge in the United States, as well as a beloved center of community life in Oakland. The facade will be completed in November 2024.

EXHIBITION. For-Site, San Francisco, Oct. 2023. Hughen/Starkweather’s sculpture and video are featured in For-Site’s Keepers of the Fire: WATER, October 2023, curated by Veronica Roberts, Cantor Museum, Stanford University. Hughen/Starkweather’s glass and sand installation references water dowsing — the practice of using a tree branch, metal rod, pendulum, or similar device to locate underground water. This method has been used for centuries by water dowsers (also called diviners or water witches) who rely on intuition and special tools to guide them. Rendered in glass, these tools are useless, decorative, extremely fragile, and point to dwindling hopes and magical thinking about finding enough water. (Additional images of the installation here.) Hughen/Starkweather’s 9 minute video looped behind the installation. Titled Sea Winnowed Light, the abstract video references the ominous orange sky and violently shifting landscape of a raging wildfire on the landscape as seen from a distance. More on the video here.

ARTISTS RESIDENCY, July 2023: Hughen/Starkweather will be Artists in Residence at Vashon Island Artist Residency Washington State, July 2023. This unique thematic residency session explores the histories and futures of the Salish Sea through research, site visits, and interviews with a variety of community members and specialists. Hughen/Starkweather is specifically interested in the unintended consequences of seawalls, which impact intertidal zones (critical nursery and feeding areas for plants and animals), disrupt natural sand replenishment, and strip away beaches. As a result, replacement sand is trucked in from inland mines, or dredged from other parts of the coast and offshore, further impacting other ecosystems. Alternatives to seawalls include restoration. “Natural coastal ecosystems—tidal marshes, barrier islands, coral reefs, seagrass beds, dunes, gravel beaches, kelp and mangrove forests—have the ability to sustain themselves. …they slow fresh and tidal water, acting as a buffer, providing flexible and resilient protection for human communities.” (Erica Gies, Water Always Wins)

PUBLIC PROGRAM Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, June 2023. As part of the group exhibition On Land, join artists Claudia Huenchuleo Paquien and Hughen/Starkweather to describe a landscape that has personal meaning to you. When permission is granted, the interviews will be recorded for possible inclusion in a future audio artwork. The seemingly simple process of inviting people to describe a landscape or ecosystem touches on many questions and ideas, including: What is the power of language and memory to shape our sense of place in the natural world? Can the act of describing a landscape be a transformative process? Can increased awareness of a place lead to an increased sense of responsibility? What is the role of deep listening in today’s attention economy? In light of dramatic changes in ecosystems, can art foster resilience and action amidst loss and uncertainty? More about the role of conversational interviews in our work here. The program takes place on June 25, please see MarinMOCA website for more info.

GROUP EXHIBITION Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, June-Aug 2023. Hughen/Starkweather is included in On Land at MarinMOCA thru Aug 27. On Land presents the work of eleven artists who mine a range of explosive and restorative approaches to the natural world. Their artworks address spiritual and sensorial interdependence with the Earth. Their variety of mediums and vista points on land encourage and enact widening relations with nature and place and thus deepening experiences of each other. Artists: Cynthia Brannvall, Victor Cartagena, Ocean Escalanti, Don Hankins, Hughen/Starkweather, Colter Jacobsen, Vanessa Norton, Claudia Huenchuleo Paquien, Rachelle Reichert, and Angelica Trimble-Yanu. Curated by Chris Kerr. June-August 2023

ARTISTS TALK, April 2023. Hughen/Starkweather will speak at Art Market, San Francisco on April 22, 2023 about Convergence: Commute Patterns, their new large scale artwork in the Union Square subway station in downtown San Francisco. The translucent glass artwork is the ceiling and roof deck of the station, and is comprised of a topographic map of San Francisco layered with painted circles that reference data from Bay Area commute pattern densities. As commuters enter the subway station and descend underground into the topography of the city, their movement creates a real-time layering of abstraction and its source materials.

ARTISTS TALK, Hydrocolonialism Conference, U.C. Berkeley, March 2023. At the 2023 Hydrocolonialism Conference at U.C. Berkeley, Hughen/Starkweather presented their series Pipe Dreams, which explores engineered systems that control water. Many of these water infrastructures are inextricably interwoven with natural ecosystems, and mostly hidden from view. Can art offer new possibilities for people to approach the vast uncertainties, complexities, and ambiguities of the climate crisis as it impacts landscapes and ecosystems? March 22, 2023, more info at link above.

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE: Google X. Summer 2022. For our residency at Google X, we created works that connect the infrastructure of the building and the work of the engineers inside with references to local ecosystems past, present, and future. Marks and forms are ambiguous: Are the white diaphanous layers fog or smoke? Do pink forms reference a sunset, air pollution, or encroaching wildfire? Are the bold, straight lines a supportive infrastructure or a rift in the system? How can future technologies and engineered infrastructures support the complex, interwoven reality in which all of these possibilities exist? To create this artwork we looked at the annual cycles of fog, rain, drought, and wildfire integral to this ecosystem. Straight lines of engineered infrastructure refer to systems that distribute and capture water: culverts, canals, reservoirs, and pipes. The color palette is a nod to the thousands of acres of fruit orchards that were once planted in this area (once known as “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”) replacing miles of native oak forest and chaparral ecosystems.

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE: The Space Program. Oct-Dec 2022. For our residency at The Space Program, we worked with ceramics and printmaking on new works in our Pipe Dreams project including the ongoing drought in the American West, and the connections between dams, fires, and flood. More information about those artworks can be found here. 

SITE-SPECIFIC COMMISSION. Infrastructure: Cloud/Orchard/Creek. Hughen/Starkweather was commissioned to create a site-specific painting for the lobby of the Google Cloud complex in Sunnyvale, CA. The site is powered by 100% renewable energy, and has zero plastic waste. The on-site water recycling captures, stores, and filters 260,000 gallons of rainwater on average per year. This building was the site of the historic R&D facility that launched the first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, in the early 1960s. Our artwork, titled “Infrastructure: Cloud/Orchard/Creek” references the complex histories of this site — ecological, agricultural, and engineering — including water infrastructure, fruit orchards, the Guadalupe Slough watershed, and the complex layers of the engineered cloud stack. MORE ON THIS PROJECT HERE. Photography © Marco Zecchin. Art Consultant: Heather Marx; Architects: Lundberg Design, IA Architects.

ARTISTS TALK: Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose
Hughen/Starkweather with Ala Ebtekar, December 13, 2021, at Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose. Topics: site-specific projects about water systems, commute patterns, abstraction, aquifers, upwellings and downwellings.

SITE-SPECIFIC COMMISSION: Hughen/Starkweather have been commissioned to create a four-story, hand-painted mural of engineered and natural systems that deliver clean water to millions of people in Northern California. With the pressures of climate change, how will these increasingly fragile, interwoven systems succeed or fail together? Short video about the project can be seen here. More info and images here. For Meta Open Arts; Architect: Frank Geary; Collaborators: New Bohemia

April 2021 PANEL: RESEARCH AS ART: Jenny Odell, Mike Arcega, and Hughen/Starkweather in conversation with Victor Yañez-Lazcano, organized by Recology Artists Residency Program. Tuesday, April 27, 2021. 5pm PST. We will discuss the role research plays in artwork, including works about climate change, shorelines, and compost. Panel discussion will be recorded and can be viewed here.

ARTISTS RESIDENCY: Hughen/Starkweather will be Artists in Residence at Vashon Artist Residency on Vashon Island, Washington State, June, 2021.

HUGHEN/STARKWEATHER VOTE PROJECT
In support of voter registration efforts for the 2020 election, Hughen/Starkweather created a series of VOTE images — 100% of proceeds will be donated to voter education organizations. A VOTAR bandana proceeds go to Voto Latino and Mi Familia Vota to support voter empowerment. ORDER THE A VOTAR BANDANA here; we also have a series of free VOTE postcards available — please contact us directly and we will figure out how to get them to you!

EXHIBITION: de Young Museum, San Francisco
Hughen/Starkweather’s Snowpack (Water Systems) is included in Open at the De Young Museum, San Francisco. This artwork is part of Hughen/Starkweather’s Water Systems series, learn more here.

SITE-SPECIFIC PUBLIC ARTWORK IN DOGPATCH, SAN FRANCISCO
A series of 5 site-specific public artworks on metal panels are located in a public pedestrian thoroughfare at 950 Tennessee Street in Dogpatch, San Francisco. The title of this series of artworks, And with the mountain had gone the marshes, is taken from an 1889 article in the San Francisco Examiner about the surrounding neighborhood, and refers to the hills that once existed nearby which were leveled to make room for development. More than 100,000 cubic feet of serpentine rock from these hills was dumped into San Francisco Bay to create additional land for industrial expansion. More about this project here.

San Francisco Arts Commission Grant 2020
Hughen/Starkweather has been awarded a $20,000 Individual Artists Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

SITE-SPECIFIC COMMISSION, DALLAS/FORT WORTH
Hughen/Starkweather has completed a large scale, site-specific commission in Dallas/Fort Worth. The artwork reflects the connections and intersections between two metroplex areas — the San Francisco Bay Area and DFW — focusing on the natural and built environments that make these places unique. In addition to visits to the site and researching maps and photos of these landscapes, the artists invited people living in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to describe the landscape in their own words, and used these words as visual source materials for creating the artwork. View additional images of the project here.

EXHIBITION: SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION IN MIAMI
Hughen/Starkweather will be part of the exhibition Futurescape Miami: Skyline to Shoreline at the untitled art fair in Miami Beach December 4-8, 2019. The artists’ site-specific hanging fabric artworks are installed alongside audio excerpts from their interviews with Miami residents about their personal experiences with flooding. Each day during the art fair, Hughen/Starkweather will lead a 1-hour Flood Walk from the beach to Biscayne Bay to investigate complex narratives around development, geology, and sea level rise. The installation and Flood walk are part of Hughen/Starkweather’s ongoing Climate Narratives project, which invites new perspectives and connections on climate change in a time of catastrophic rhetoric and divisive conversation. More about this project here.