SF BALLET X LEGION OF HONOR

Isabella Lores-Chavez is Associate Curator of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she is responsible for the collection’s Dutch and Flemish paintings. She is the curator of the exhibition “Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor,” on view through November 2. Isabella completed her Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia University in 2022, with a dissertation about plaster casts in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Her doctoral work was supported by prestigious fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. After completing a B.A. in Art History at Yale, in 2013 Isabella curated a small exhibition at the Met, entitled Dutch and French Genre Drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection. Born in Colombia and raised in Los Angeles, she has also worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana,Grace Maduell Holmes was promoted to a company position in San Francisco Ballet in 1983 and danced with the company as a soloist until 1995. She then was a senior soloist with Birmingham Royal Ballet. Her repertoire includes over 100 ballets and has performed at major theaters internationally. She was Academy Director for Tapestry Dance Company in Austin, Texas, was a Professor of Dance at University of Texas, and was the School Director of Kansas City Ballet for nine years.

Brenda Way received her early training at The School of American Ballet and Ballet Arts in New York City. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of ODC/Dance and creator of the ODC Theater and ODC Dance Commons, community performance and training venues in San Francisco’s Mission District. Way was instrumental in forming an inter-arts department at Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music in the late 1960’s before relocating to the Bay Area in 1976. She has choreographed more than 100 pieces over the last 53 years.

Ranu Mukherjee (b. 1966, Boston) makes hybrid pieces in painting, moving image, and installation. Her practice is marked by a deliberate use of saturated color, the collision of tempos, and sensual materiality. The numerous and often imperceptible layers she employs evoke questions of visibility, legibility and abstraction. Her recent artwork is guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood and transnational feminisms.

Mukherjee’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (2022-2023) de Young Museum, San Francisco (2018-2019); the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design (2017); the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2016); the Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL (2016) and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA (2012) among others. Her immersive video installations have been presented in Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, Karachi Biennial (2019) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016) as well as numerous group exhibitions internationally. Mukherjee has been the recipient of the 16th annual San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awards (2023); a Pollock Krasner Grant (2020); a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (2019-2024); an 18th Street Arts Center Residency, Los Angeles(2022); Facebook AIR (2020);  de Young Museum Artist Studio Program (2017); the Space 118 Residency, Mumbai (2014); and a Kala Fellowship Award and Residency, Berkeley (2009). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; De Young Museum, San Francisco; the JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; the Oakland Museum of California; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the San Francisco International Airport, among others.

Mukherjee co-created Orphan Drift, a London-based cyber-feminist collective and avatar making combined media works since 1994. They have participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally including in London, Oslo, Berlin, Oberhausen, Glasgow, Istanbul, Vancouver, Santiago, Capetown, and the Bay Area.

Mukherjee received her B.F.A. in Painting, from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA in 1988, and her MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK in 1993. She lives and works in San Francisco, and is the Dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).