Mutual Stores is a studio collective located in a pair of storefronts on Seminary Avenue in Oakland. Our mission is to expand the field of ceramics and to cultivate mutually supportive relationships with the beings, places, and materials we come into contact with as artists in an urban environment.
The collective is comprised of six artist studios, a brick library and studio archive, a shared experimental gallery, and the Mutual Artist in Residence Program. Our studio members are Ken Becker, Nicki Green, Rosa Novak, Brendan Page, Kate Pruitt, MJ Sasaki, and Hannah Volckmann.
Juan Huerta's residency show
Open until November 25th
July 27th, 2-5 p.m.
Paper and Clay Brick WorkshopAugust 24th, 1-4 p.m.
IMITATION & REPLICA by Maya GooUp in the front space until June 7th
May 5Audio Class Level 1, with Graham LeBron
May 18Movie Night: Spirited Away, 6pm
May 13 - 28People, Places, Things by Tracy Ren
Kate Pruitt is a multimedia artist making ceramic objects, sensory environments, and sculptural videos. Through touch, temperature, language, and movement, her work seeks out a playful somatic space, where slipperiness reigns and the boundaries of self soften.
Born in NH, Kate received her BA in Art & Art History from Stanford University and her MFA in Studio Art at Mills College, where she was awarded the Jay DeFeo MFA Prize for her thesis exhibition, “Touch Language”. Her work has been exhibited at venues throughout the Bay Area, including Underline Gallery in Berkeley, Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Blankspace Gallery in Oakland, and Little Paper Planes in San Francisco.
Hannah Volckmann is a mix media Oakland based artist working in set design, photography, performance and sculpture. She received her BFA in photography from California College of the Arts in 2017. She often works with objects, using them to recreate and document parts of interiors that no longer exist, creating a false reality of the past. Currently Volckmann is working in a bakery, using her creative energy to cake decorate and tart bake, her second creative love.
Cathy Lu (b. Miami, FL) is an artist working in ceramics, sculpture, and painting. Her work explores traditional Chinese art imagery and presentation as a way to explore cultural authenticity in relation to objects and contemporary identity.
She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her BA & BFA from Tufts University. She has participated in artist in residence programs at Root Division, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Recology SF. Her work has been exhibited at Johansson Projects, Somarts, Aggregate Space, and Berkeley Arts Center. She currently teaches at California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Mills College.
Mutual Artist in Residence was a subsidized studio residency program hosted by Mutual Stores. Participants in the first round of the Mutual Artist in Residence program were given one material resource: waste produced by the studio's clay and water recycling sink. This closed system piece of plumbing produces an accumulation of ceramic waste material that is ever fluctuating and dependent on the work produced and materials used by Mutual Stores studio members. Participants were asked to research and find an experimental use for the studio's collective waste while in residence. In its second round, the Mutual Artist in Residence program was translated to a remote format. In the absence of sharing waste and studio space and sharing work within that studio space with the public, participating artists created a riso-printed publication in collaboration with Mutual Stores that was distributed by mail in the summer of 2021. The mailing acted as a type of remote exhibition format and as a capstone project for the Mutual Artist in Residence program as a whole. The artists who participated in the program, in chronological order, are: Ken Becker and Torreya Cummings, Tracy Ren, Maya Gulassa, Kari Marboe, Brooke Singer, Juan Huerta Coello, Michael Berens, Alyssa Block, Penelope Anstruther, Kristiana Chan, Caroline Meyers, and Almaz Wilson.
The Mutual Garden is both a garden and community space, used for gardening, movie nights, natural dye workshops and more. Our raised garden beds were built by Kate Pruitt and Kim Zitzow and will be used to grow plants for our natural dye workshops. Everything from our raised garden beds to AV equipment for film screenings is made from recycled or salvaged materials. Our movie nights consist of a range of media, from art films to classic American kitsch. Our first film was “Spirited Away” and our second will be “Ghost”.
If you want to stay in the loop about upcoming movie nights or workshops, email us or follow us on Instagram!
Brendan Page is an illustrator, musician, and aural artist. The focus of his work is play: how can illustrations draw from shared experiences to communicate new ideas, when can listening be an interactive activity? Having illustrated and written music for his own practice for years, Mutual Stores is his first experience within a collective art space. He provides graphic illustrations for the collective and leads pay-what-you-can workshops on audio engineering. Brendan graduated from San Francisco State with a BA in broadcasting with an emphasis in audio production.
Rosa Novak is an artist and archival researcher in Oakland, CA. Novak earned her BFA in ceramics at California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2017 and has since been working on an ongoing body of historical research about Bay Area artist and designer, Edith Heath. She has given talks about Heath's values-based design ideology at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in 2017, and the Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley in 2019. Novak was a 2017 Windgate Fellow and has done residencies at Textile Arts Center (NY), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (ME), the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CA), and This Will Take Time (CA). Novak is a co-founder of Mutual Stores, and facilitates our studio's residency program.
NICKI GREEN is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness. Green has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum, New York; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Rockelmann & Partner Gallery, Berlin, Germany; [ 2nd floor projects ] San Francisco. She has contributed texts to numerous publications including a recent piece in Duke University Press’ Transgender Studies Quarterly and a piece in Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen. In 2019, Green was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award. She is also the recipient of a 2018 Graduate Fellowship from Headlands Center for the Arts, and of a 2019 Arts/Industry Residency from the John Michael Kohler Art Center, among other awards. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Mutual Stores gallery hosts rotating events, including shows from artists in residence and studio members, artist talks and workshops.