Opening Reception for "PULLEY" at Berkeley Art Center

pulley

september 20 - november 16, 2025

A collaborative exhibition with NIAD Art Center

Curated by christopher robin duncan

Opening reception: Saturday, September 20, 2025, 3 - 5 pm.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

Arstanda Billy White, Deatra Colbert, Felicia Griffin, Karen May, Mat Van Dongen, Mireya Betances, Peter Harris, Richard Naranjo, Shantae Robinson, Shawn Sanders, Sylvia Fragoso, and Christopher Robin Duncan. 

What does an exercise in true collaboration look like? 

PULLEY: a collaborative exhibition with NIAD Art Center, presents a radical experiment and mutual exchange between artists from NIAD Art Center, a progressive art studio for adults with developmental disabilities in Richmond, CA, and Christopher Robin Duncan. The show’s punchy title refers both to the physical mechanism that allowed for these works to be created and to the greater concept of a pulley system: a collection of wheels and ropes that operate in concert to lift an object. NIAD, an acronym that stands for Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development, likewise functions as a sort of pulley system offering the support and scaffolding for these artists to explore, experiment, and elevate their creative practices within a collective and collaborative environment.

The artists in PULLEY upend the convention of the traditional group show as a collection of individual artists presenting individual works, instead prioritizing the magic alchemy of working in tandem with one another, with light, with space. The exhibition features fabric canvases, wearable fabrics, and ceramic sculpture. Guided in a workshop facilitated by multidisciplinary artist Christopher Robin Duncan, the NIAD artists prepared fabrics to go up via pulley to the building’s roof to be exposed for three to six months without emulsion or chemical accelerant- just sun and time, before being “harvested.” A signature of Duncan’s practice, these sun-bleached fabric canvases are site-specific and durational documentation of the adaptive, responsive, and warmly generous relationships between artists working across the disability spectrum.

Far from privileging or prioritizing one artist’s singular hand or genius, PULLEY emphasizes the generative capacity of skillsharing, of radical experimentation, of creative fearlessness and building trust by building together. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication designed and published by LAND AND SEA with essays by Duncan and Elena Gross, writer, curator, and Director of Exhibitions & Public Programs at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support by the City of Berkeley, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and BAC’s members and donors.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Christopher Robin Duncan (b. 1974, Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Duncan utilizes the sun and the moon as well as time and the tides as conceptual and compositional prompts for both sonic and visual work. In his long term sun exposure works, sunlight and the passing of time are harnessed to create images which exist in a liminal space between painting and photography. Each work on fabric is meant to honor time and capture the energy of the locales in which the exposures occur. Duncan's sonic work consists of lush, tonal, open compositions created with harmonica, tuning forks, percussion, electronics, and field recordings of the ocean. Part ritual, part ceremony, Duncan's live performances often employ candle light, circumambulation, and evoke time passing in the form of setting suns and full moons. In recent years, Duncan has begun frequently experimenting with clay. With a similarly intuitive and sensitive approach, he produces ceramic instruments, vessels to hold the ocean, and functional ceramics such as cups and bowls. Outside of his studio practice, he runs LAND AND SEA, which publishes books and records, with his partner Maria Otero. Duncan received his BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and his MFA from Stanford University. He is represented by Rebecca Camacho Presents and Halsey McKay Gallery.

RELATED PROGRAMS 

• Saturday, September 20, 2025, 3 - 5 pm: Opening Reception.
• Saturday, October 18, 2025, 12 - 4 pm: Artist Conversation & Potluck in the park. 
• Saturday, November 15, 2025, 3 - 5 pm: Book Launch & Closing Reception. 

All public programs will take place at the Berkeley Art Center,
1275 Walnut street, Berkeley, CA 94709