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Young Bay Mud
July 11, 2025
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February 22, 2026
Young bay mud—a scientific term for ecologically rich and water-saturated deposits that are less than ten thousand years old—underlies much of the San Francisco Bay Area. A ground that uniquely encourages biodiversity but resists human development, young bay mud shapes human experience of and interaction with the region and offers a potent vantage point to consider artistic explorations of ecological entanglement and belonging in the Bay Area.
Each artist in Young Bay Mud has lived in Northern California and has developed practices that are informed by the region's histories and environmental concerns. Their work confronts local issues—such as resource extraction, pollution, military activity, climate upheaval, and the housing crisis—rejecting industrial, militarized, and extractive human interactions with the land. Instead, they draw on indigenous, ancestral, and multispecies knowledge to propose alternative ways of relating to the environment.
“Young Bay Mud explores the ecological and social challenges of the Bay Area, highlighting the tensions between human impact and our responsibility to local ecosystems,” said Nidhi Gandhi. “The artists offer diverse approaches to environmental justice, sustainability, and the future of human habitation amid climate change and ecological degradation.”
The exhibition includes:
- Ashwini Bhat, whose ceramic sculptures of bodies and organic forms evoke South Asian mythology and philosophy, suggesting a spiritual link between humans and the unstablesurfaces of Northern California that are wracked with seismic shifts and wildfires.
- Mercedes Dorame reflects on Tongva knowledge systems informed by the earth and stars in her photographs and installation pieces.
- Joanna Keane Lopez utilizes techniques learned from adoberas (women specializing in earthen architecture) to explore the shifting meaning of finding home in areas burdened by colonial and military histories.
- Futurefarmers turned data from Moon soil simulants and Central Valley mud into sonic scores performed by San José State University’s marching band in their 2022 project with the university. These sound explorations mark the resonances between human aims to colonize the Moon and extractive drilling in Northern California.
- Tanja Geis, in her 2023 project Mud Will Remember Us, creates imaginary zoomorphic forms from bay mud containing byproducts of human activity. Installed in a fluorescent space, this installation envisions a future where ecosystems have adapted to human pollution.
ADDITIONAL INFO & URLS
SOME INFO AND URLS
Joanna Keane Lopez will be including a "film brochure" as part of her installation, a printable document of 5 ½ x 4 ½ in. cards.
https://www.joannakeanelopez.com/
Mercedes Dorame
Los Angeles-based artist Mercedes Dorame calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of visibility and ideas of cultural construction. She part of the Tongva tribe, who were original residents of the Los Angeles area. Since the tribe has no federal recognition and therefore no reservation lands. " I feel deep loss at not having space to gather to perform ceremony, at not having a space that is really ours. Working as a cultural resource consultant on development sites has also giving me small windows into what lies beneath the earth we walk, drive and exist on. It reveals a past that is rich with meaning and history. I reconnect and have a deeper understanding of the city from this work."
https://blogs.chapman.edu/collections/2022/06/27/mercedes-dorame-gabrielino-tongva/
The following Tongva phrases are included on the canvas that form part of her installation in Young Bay Mud. The Tongva phrases appear as rings of text interspersed with prints of the inside and outside of abalone shells. The English interpretations aren't included in the wall label.
'Wiishmey Nepuushten - Love is my strength
‘Wiishmenokre - I love you
Shyee'ey ‘Wiishmey - Healing is love
Shyeenaxre - I am healing you
Naxaakw’aa moshuuno - Listen to your heart
There will also be two Tongva greetings going around the edges of her video, and these are translated to English in the title of the video (which will be in the wall label for the work):
Aweeshkone xaa, 'Ekwaa'a xaa - I am happy you are here
Neshuun'e Mochoova xaa - My heart is with you
Tanja Geiss
San Francisco Bay Area artist Tanja Geis proposes a speculative future in which a submerged former military guard station is home to new marine life forms adapted to and thriving amidst polluted, warming, acidifying, and rising oceans.To create her installation, Mud Will Remember Us, the artist foraged local San Francisco Bay mud—containing byproducts of human activity such as plastics, heavy metals, and chemicals—which she hand-formed into hundreds of sculptures suggesting simple-bodied organisms in evolutionary transformation.
https://www.tanjageis.com/portfolio/mud-will-remember-us-2023/
Ashwini Bhat
After thirty-five years in Southern India, transdisciplinary artist, Ashwini Bhat now lives and works in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. Coming from a background in literature, translation, and classical Indian dance, Bhat works in clay and bronze, often creating large-scale installations with sculpture, video, text, and performance, developing a unique visual language to explore the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her practice draws from her rural agrarian community upbringing. Her work is influenced by syncretic shrines, rituals, and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human. Bhat’s work, in part, is an act of (re)mapping consciousness, contributing to a spiritual or psychological archive, with an emphasis on the transformative aspects of place.
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