As a kid growing up in Berkeley, I oriented myself by the silhouette of Mount Tamalpais, crisscrossed its slopes on foot in every season, even touched fingers to a rare flocking of snow at its peak. That an artist living 5,500 miles away might pay homage to this local landmark without ever having seen it in person—as the London-based painter Caragh Thuring has done—was a compellingly fantastical proposition. My mind, of course, went to Etel Adnan, whose vivid, Platonic paintings of the mountain are among her most iconic. From the time the Lebanese-American artist and writer moved to Sausalito in the late 1970s—where it was in plain and constant view—and well after her move to Paris in later years, Adnan painted hundreds of views of Mount Tamalpais, which she described as “the very center of my being.” You cannot look at Thuring’s string of small canvases (smaller than she has worked on for years), and not think of Adnan’s intimate, lapidary portraits of the same landmark. Yet Thuring swiftly and assertively makes the subject her own. The painting opening the exhibition, Given Enough Goading (all works 2024), transforms Mount Tamalpais into one of the artist’s recurring subjects: a volcano, replete …

I learned about the life and quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins (the pseudonym of Effie Mae Howard) from my mother. She was an art teacher—my art teacher—and would routinely give short presentations about local artists, usually women, to teach her students about art made in Northern California. I knew that Tompkins was born in Arkansas in the 1930s, had settled in Richmond, California, and that her work was considered part of an African American quilting tradition, but I had never seen the quilts in person until early March 2020, when I visited the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) to view “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.” The previous day, the Grand Princess cruise ship had pulled into the Port of Oakland carrying thousands of passengers exposed to the novel coronavirus; I walked through the museum in suspense, my thinking fragmented by constant notifications about the future. Yet Tompkins’s quilts pulled me into the present: I was mesmerized by the nearly seventy works on display, which revealed her fascination with color, the consistency of her inconsistency, and her use of fabrics that carried with them generational shorthands depending on pattern, texture, and material. Nearly a year later, a small …