Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today, Emily chats with Miguel Arzabe, a engineer turned artist based in Oakland, Ca...

About Artist Miguel Arzabe:

Miguel Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions - weavings, paintings, videos. He starts by finding outdated beauty in paper ephemera from art shows, modernist paintings, discarded audio recordings. They are methodically analyzed, deconstructed, reverse-engineered. Drawing inspiration from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves the fragments together revealing uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation.

Arzabe lives and works in Oakland, CA. He had recent solo shows at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA). Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in museums and galleries including MAC Lyon (France), MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Oregon), the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Arzabe’s work is held in public collections such as the Harn Museum of Art in Gainseville, FL; the de Young Museum; Albuquerque Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; San Francisco Arts Commission; the State of California; as well as numerous private collections. He has attended many residencies including Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Millay Arts, and Santa Fe Art Institute. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2022 Arzabe was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. In 2023 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and and a Golden Foundation Residency. In 2024 his work was featured in the exhibitions About Place at the deYoung Museum and The Poetics of Dimensions at the ICA San Francisco. His work is featured in the 2025 contemporary art survey TEXTILES x ART published by Thames and Hudson AU.

Visit Miguel's Website: MiguelArzabe.net

Follow Miguel on Instagram: @Miguel.Arzabe

--

About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily welcomes Paola de la Calle, a Colombian American multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Her work spans textiles, ceramics, printmaking, and writing, and often explores themes of immigration, land sovereignty, family memory, and diaspora identity.

About Artist Paola de la Calle:

Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. In her practice, De la Calle combines photographs sourced from family albums and found images which she prints on textiles, as well as poetic texts, paintings made with coffee instead of paint, and found objects, to mine the aesthetics of nostalgia and examine the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia.

She is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza in 2020. She was awarded fellowships at KALA (2022) and The Studios at MassMOCA (2025). She has attended residencies at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY and Casa Lu in Mexico City, MX. ​De la Calle was awarded the 2026/2027 Ann Chamberlain Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco State University.

She’s been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, “Through My Eyes” on Hulu, NPR, Refinery29, The Boston Art Review, Latina Magazine, Glasstire, and VOGUE among others.

Visit Paola's Website: PaoladelaCalle.com

Follow Paola on Instagram: @PaoladelaCalle

--

About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.

This week, Emily Wilson sits down with Julia Goodman, a San Francisco-based artist who makes paper and textiles, as well as paintings and sculptures. They meet on the campus of the California College of the Arts — the last art school in San Francisco, set to close at the end of the 2026–27 school year — where Julia has been teaching. Their conversation covers Julia's winding path to art, the meditative and cathartic labor of making paper from recycled fabrics, grief, and an ongoing audio archive project about astronomy and motherhood.

About Artist Julia Goodman:

Julia Goodman is an artist and educator working at the intersection of papermaking, textiles, sculpture, and painting. Her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), DePaul Art Museum, Recology San Francisco, and Google. Unimaginable Units of Time marks her first solo museum exhibition, presented at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Recent group exhibitions include NMWA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, and Berkeley Art Center. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency, Recology SF, Creativity Explored, Salina Art Center, The Space Program SF, and The Eames Institute. She is a recipient of the 2020 Women to Watch Award from the San Francisco chapter of NMWA. She is a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and started making paper in 2003 with a kitchen blender and old window screens.

Visit Julia's Website: JAGoodman.com

Follow Julia on Instagram: @JuliaAnneGoodman

Learn more about Julia's Wrenching News Workshops HERE.

--

About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:

Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil

Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast

--

CREDITS:

Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.

Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.

For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.