About this Event
Arion Press invites you to celebrate the release of our current fine press publication, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with artwork by Rupy C. Tut.
The program will feature a dynamic conversation between curator Deena Chalabi, Arion's Creative Director & Lead Printer, Blake Riley, and artist Rupy C. Tut on the making of the book.
Printed by letterpress at Arion Press in San Francisco, Arion's edition imagines Alice as you have never seen it before.
Doors open at 2:30 PM at the Bayfront Theater on the third floor of Landmark Building B at Fort Mason.
This talk will coincide with an open house & activity day taking place directly before the event at Arion Press, located on the ground floor of Landmark Building B.
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Deena Chalabi is a strategist, curator and writer whose work explores how individual and collective creativity can unsettle inherited narratives and expand ethical imagination. Her leadership roles include founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, and the inaugural Barbara and Stephan Vermut Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She previously taught graduate courses in Curatorial Practice, Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts, and currently teaches in the Museum Studies graduate program at the University of San Francisco, where she and her students are curating What We Carry, an exhibition of five Bay Area artists working with inheritance as raw material, opening in December. She lives in Oakland.
After serving in multiple for-profit and nonprofit arts sectors ranging from opera to film to graphic design, Blake Riley joined the Press as its first apprentice in 2001. Since then he has spent time in all three production departments, learning the tradition from the inside out and ultimately mentoring with longtime Master Printer Jerry Reddan. In 2018, he led the executive transition team which hired the first Executive Director in the Press’s history and shortly after became Creative Director, collaborating closely with artists and helping shape the current program. He now has the privilege of working daily alongside one of the most experienced and knowledgeable production crews in the craft.
Rupy C. Tut is a painter dissecting historical and contemporary displacement narratives around identity, belonging, and gender. Tut migrated from India to the United States at age 12, an experience reflective of her Sikh ancestors, who were repeatedly uprooted and transplanted. A polyglot who speaks English,Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Spanish, Tut often reflects on the psychology of diaspora, confinements of gender, and fears of climate disaster. She is not just an innovative painter, but an ambitious mythologist using her mastery of traditional Indian painting to point toward nobler futures.Tut has enjoyed solo exhibitions at SFMOMA, ICA San Francisco, and Triton Museum of Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Asian Art Museum, and Cantor Arts Center, among others. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at National Portrait Gallery, Phoenix Art Museum, and Fowler Art Museum. Tut was a 2024 recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award, and her other honors include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. She lives and works in Oakland and is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bayfront Theater, 2 Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, United States
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