Galleriest Trish Bransten of Rena Bransten Gallery will moderate a panel discussion with artists whose work is featured in San Francisco Arts Education Project’s exhibition Rise Up! Art As Action.  Panel participants include Chester Arnold, Michele Pred, and Wanxin Zhang.
 
American by birth, but raised in post-war Germany during the formative years of his childhood, Chester Arnold is interested in the capacity of painting to convey the complexities of the human psyche. His compositions present skewed linear perspectives that place the viewer at a remove, above and beyond an unfolding narrative. The romantic beauty of natural landscapes, in part informed by historic master Caspar David Friedrich, is subverted by Arnold’s preoccupation with the detritus of human accumulation.
 
His work is currently part of a travelling museum exhibition, Environmental Impact, which opened at The Canton Museum in 2013, with continuous touring in 2015 across the United States. His recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Sonoma County Museum (2013) and American University Museum, Katzen Art Center (2012). The Nevada Museum of Art’s 2010 exhibit of Arnold’s work, On Earth as it is in Heaven, was accompanied by a catalogue. In 2008, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s exhibition highlighted Arnold and other recipients of the 2005 Eureka Fellowship. Arnold’s exhibition history includes Donald Kuspit’s selection of his work for New Old Masters at the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland in 2006, and a major solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, which was also accompanied by a catalogue. Arnold’s work is further represented in the public collections of many institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the di Rosa Preserve: Art and Nature, the Tacoma Museum of Art, and the San Jose Museum of Art. He has been critically reviewed in Artforum, Works + Conversation, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives and works in Sonoma, California, and had his first exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery in 2003.

Michele Pred is a Swedish-American conceptual artist. She works with found and confiscated objects and technology imbued with cultural and political meaning. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries, art fairs and museums in London, Stockholm, Sydney, New York, Bologna, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Her work is part of the permanent collection at The 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, The Berkeley Art Museum, The 21st Century Museum, The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) New York, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and is held in numerous corporate and private collections. 

Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, The New York Observer, The International Herald Tribune, Hyperallergic, Yahoo News, ARTnews, Art in America, WIRED, American Craft Magazine, Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, ReadyMade Magazine, TimeOut New York, New York Magazine, Bustle, BUST, Bitch Magazine, Travel and Leisure Magazine, Associated Press Television, CBS Evening news with Katie Couric, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, ABC, The San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera (Italy), TV4 and Dagens Nyheter (Sweden). Michele Pred received her BFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. She is represented by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. She received a Pro Choice Leadership Award from Personal PAC in 2016, a Chicago based Super PAC. Visit www.michelepred.com
 
Wanxin Zhang was born in ChangChun in China, and spent his formative years in the 1960's and 70's under Mao's regime. He was part of the first generation to receive a formal art education in college subsequent to the Cultural Revolution in 1976. In 1985 he graduated from the prestigious LuXun Academy of Fine Art with a degree from their sculpture program.
 
During his early years, Zhang participated in many avant-garde activities and exhibitions in China, before Chinese contemporary emerged at the forefront of today’s contemporary art world. His work was presented at the National Museum in Beijing, which then collected his prize-winning sculptures. In 1992, after Zhang established his art career as a sculptor in China, he came to the United States to continue to his development as an artist, he was a recipient of the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant in 2006, and the Joan Mitchell Painter and Sculptor Grant in 2004. His first solo museum exhibition was at the University of Wyoming Art Museum, curated by Susan Moldenhauer and accompanied by a catalogue (2006). In 2010, Wanxin Zhang: A Ten Year Survey, was organized by Peter Held for the Arizona State University Museum. Zhang’s sculpture was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum in California in 2007 and the Alden B. Dow Museum of Science and Art in Michigan in 2008. Zhang's works were part of the 22nd UBC Sculpture Biennial in Japan in 2007, the Taipei Ceramics Biennial in Taiwan in 2008, and the Da Tong City 2nd International Sculpture Biennial in China in 2013. In 2019, Zhang will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.
 
Zhang’s sculptures have been included in books such as Confrontational Ceramics by Judith Schwartz and his work was highlighted in Clay in Art. His sculpture has been reviewed in major art magazines such as Art in America, Sculpture, and American Ceramics. In 2012, the San Francisco Chronicle picked Zhang's exhibition at the Richmond Art Center as one of the Top 10 Exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Zhang lives and works in San Francisco, California. He has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2013.