About this Event
What can the things we make with our hands tell us about who we are, where we come from, and how we connect with one another?
Join KALW at 220 Montgomery to celebrate Interlaced, a new exhibition at the Mills Building. We'll be in conversation with five of the exhibition's artists — Miguel Arzabe, Charlene Tan, Pilar Agüero-Esparza, Terri Friedman, and Gabby Severson — exploring the ideas, materials, and personal histories woven into their work. From the traditions of weaving and beadwork to contemporary approaches to abstraction, image-making, and storytelling, the conversation will consider how artists use material, pattern, and repetition to explore identity, memory, cultural inheritance, labor, and belonging.
Come explore the exhibition, meet the artists, connect with fellow art lovers, and enjoy an evening of creativity and connection in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
About the Exhibition
Presented by The Swig Company and curated by Artsource Consulting, Interlaced brings together ten contemporary artists whose practices expand the languages of weaving, beading, and fiber through processes of reconstruction and material accumulation.
Long associated with domestic, ceremonial, communal, and decorative traditions, textiles and beadwork carry histories that extend well beyond conventional distinctions between art and craft. In Interlaced, individual threads, beads, fibers, and fragments become building blocks for larger structures and images — connecting personal experience with broader stories of family, identity, cultural memory, and belonging.
About KALW
KALW is the Bay Area's original public media organization. Through live conversations, performances, exhibitions, and community gatherings, KALW brings people together to explore the ideas, creativity, and stories shaping our region.
Exhibition Details
Interlaced
October 2, 2026 – February 5, 2027
Mills Building
220 Montgomery Street, San Francisco
Exhibition viewing hours: Monday–Friday, 8 AM–6 PM.
Miguel Arzabe creates colorful and dynamic abstractions across weaving, painting, and video. He begins by finding outdated beauty in paper ephemera from art exhibitions, modernist paintings, and discarded audio recordings, which he methodically analyzes, deconstructs, and reverse-engineers. Drawing inspiration from the techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves these fragments together, revealing unexpected intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, and failure and recuperation.
Charlene Tan is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work is thematically focused on the immigrant diaspora and its repercussions, post-assimilation identity, and anthropological investigations of nationalism and cultural heritage. Her work is inspired by her Filipina-Chinese-American identity, reconnecting her artistic cultural heritage of tribal weaving patterns of the Philippines. Using found images by means of digital scanning, these images are edited to pare down to the essence of the pattern.
Once free of scale and color, Tan retraces the patterns with beads, pearls and rhinestones to attempt to create a muscle memory of a cultural expression that was once commonplace with her ancestors.
Pilar Agüero-Esparza is recognized for her installations, paintings, and objects reflecting the palette and politics of skin tone, specifically Brown and Black skin. Her paintings are a hybrid of formal, hard-edged geometric abstraction, accentuated by her coded color palette, intersecting with her family’s tradition of huarache-making (woven leather Mexican sandals). The paintings assume the direct, flat linear approach of geometric abstraction, but with a palette describing hierarchies of color, mitigated by gridded intersecting leather strips. She extolls the craft and indigeneity of her family’s Mexican history, electrifying disparate and formidable concepts.
Gabby Severson is a mixed Indigenous visual artist working across photography, beadwork, basketry, and sculpture. Rooted in her Oregon upbringing, her work engages themes of identity, memory, and culture, drawing inspiration from her Siletz heritage.
She is a proud member of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians, located on the Oregon coast. She takes photographs as a way to record evidence of her Indigenous identity. By working with these pictures, she uses mapping technology to draw a gridded plan for beaded works that regenerate these images. Once the picture has been pixelated through the software’s filter, she hand-beads the resulting pattern. Beading from the digital patterns becomes a visual metaphor for how cultural knowledge travels across generations, is distorted, filtered, and shifts.
Terri Friedman’s textile works move between material object, image, and emotional register. Trained in kinetic sculpture, she turned to weaving after encountering a monumental Joan Miró tapestry in Barcelona and has since approached the medium as a sculptural form capable of holding feeling, memory, and presence. Drawing from decades of collected fibers Friedman builds each work through an intuitive yet structured process of color and repetition. For Friedman, the accumulation of thread becomes a record of time and touch, creating pathways through memory while offering moments of respite and connection.
There is a $10 - $20 sliding scale suggested donation for this event. Nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.
Please become a KALW member today and receive your first drink on us at all 220 Montgomery events.
📍 220 Montgomery St., San Francisco, 2 blocks from BART/MUNI
🚪 Reception opens at 6:00 PM
🗣️ Panel begins at 7:00 PM
🆓 The event is free with an RSVP — and you are welcome to donate what you want
Please note:
- The event space is just to the left of the main entrance to the Mills Building at 220 Montgomery Street
- We recommend taking BART/MUNI, exiting at Montgomery, and walking two blocks north
- Ride-shares can drop off and pick up directly in front of the venue
- If you drive, there are several garages within two blocks of the event location
Agenda
🕑: 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Explore the Exhibition
🕑: 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Conversation & Party
Event venue & nearby stays
220 Montgomery St, 220 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.