Kelley Finley and Tricia Rainwater: I Split the Ground, So It Would Not Close Over Me — Artist Tricia Rainwater in Conversation with Larissa Nez @ SFAC

Art Bae Event Link Kelley Finley and Tricia Rainwater: I split the ground, so it would not close over me @ SFAC Join us for the closing week of "I split the ground, so it would not close over me" with a conversation with exhibiting artist Tricia Rainwater and Larissa Nez , Curatorial Associate of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. The dialogue will center around art as a pathway towards healing, particularly in f emme Indigenous spaces. Using Rainwater's work as a framework, the talk will also touch on how the body responds in these healing journeys and how the body responds through sharing space and making art. "I split the ground, so it would not close over me" is on view through August 29. Larissa Nez is a Diné scholar and curator from the Navajo Nation. Her doctoral rese arch and curatorial practice examine the intersecti ons of Indigenous Critical Theory and the Black Radical Tradition. Focusing on Afro-Indigenous, Black, and Native modern and contemporary visual artists and filmmakers, she studies how artistic practices articulate memory, interiority, and embodied relationships to land and water, foregrounding sacred geographies and ecologies as critical sites for understanding race, settler colonialism, capitalism, kinship, and collective futurity. She is a Curatorial Associate of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA and is concurrently a doctoral student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. About the Exhibition San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Galleries is excited to present " I split the ground, so it would not close over me ," a two-person exhibition featuring the work of two emerging Bay Area artists Kelley Finley and Tricia Rainwater, curated by independent curator Shirin Makaremi. "I split the ground, so it would not close over me" opens on May 28, 2026 at the SFAC Main Gallery in the War Memorial Veterans Building and will be on view through August 29, 2026. In the exhibition, Finley and Rainwater approach survival as both a personal and collective experience. Delving into personal and communal histories, the artists explore what it means to sustain communities and how resilience is an ongoing process. "I split the ground, so it would not close over me" is part of SFAC Galleries’ new mentorship fellowship program, now in its second year, where two emerging artists work closely with a curator for seven months on their professional development and to create new work for an exhibition in the Main Gallery. Nearly 130 artist applications were submitted when SFAC Galleries launched an open call for artists in July 2025. Kelley Finley and Tricia Rainwater were selected a panel of both SFAC staff and stakeholders in the Bay Area arts community. Kelley Finley is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is autoethnographic, primarily working in sculpture, textiles, and performance. In "I split the ground, so it would not close over me," Finley, reflecting on the resilient symbolism of birds, draws parallels between a Chinese folktale of a two-headed bird and Chinese immigrant communities in cities. Allowing for the complexities and strengths of hybrid identities, she considers how these communities sustain the cities they inhabit and survive within the boundaries and constraints it imposes on them. Tricia Rainwater is a Choctaw multimedia artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with roots in the Central Valley and New Mexico. Her multimedia practice spans self-portraiture, sculpture, large-scale murals, and installation and is grounded in themes of identity, loss, and survival. For "I split the ground, so it would not close over me," Rainwater confronts her past as a grounding act in her survival, tenderly holding space for her younger self and other victims as she stands in the presence of places and objects that hold her violent past. About the artists Kelley Finley is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is autoethnographic, prim…