Artists Talk with Craig Calderwood and Didier Willam

Craig Calderwood (b. Bakersfield CA,1987), is a self-taught artist who has been living and working in San Francisco for 15 years. Though They studied printmaking and life drawing at Fresno City College for a short period of time, they flunked out and continued their arts education though the Binge Watching of PBS art documentaries and a rigorous studio practice.  

Their detailed Drawings and Paintings are rendered through a personal vernacular of symbols and patterns. Recalling the private languages that underground communities of queer and trans people used for safety for decades, developing these patterns and symbols though historical research, personal narratives, and pop cultural moments. Utilizing low-end materials like fabric paint, found fabrics, and fibre tip pens, Calderwood flexes the intended use of their mediums, forming images whose lines and textures teeter between thread and paint, blurring not just the binaries of my materials, but of their subjects. 

Calderwood has been the recipient of Several awards including the Eureka Fellowship,San Francisco Arts Commission IAC grants, the A.P.I. Residency at Mills College and Recology AIR program. In 2024 Calderwood created a large scale mural commission in SFO’s Terminal-1 with the San Francisco Arts Commission and Precita Eyes Muralists. And in he summer of 2026 Will be creating a Mural Commission with SFMOMA. Calderwood has shown Locally, Nationally, and Internationally, notably at Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA, Transpallette-Centre D’Art, Bourge, France, The Luggage Store, SF, CA, and George Adams, NYC, NY. 
 

Didier William is originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He earned an BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Bronx Museum of Art, The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, The Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Carnegie Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Figge Museum Art Museum.

He is represented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich, Switzerland. William was an artist-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, a 2018 recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2020 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants, a 2021 recipient of a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and a 2023 recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant. He has taught at several institutions including Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, UPenn, and SUNY Purchase. He is currently Associate Professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
 

Robert Cozzolino is an independent curator, art historian, and critic based in Minneapolis. Dr. Cozzolino is especially drawn to artists who aspire to visually express the intangible, and considers himself a curator of fluid time, not bound to imposed labels and bins. First trained as a musician, he has played free-improvised music as a percussionist for over 30 years. He has curated over 40 exhibitions, including Reimagining Native/American Art (2023-24), Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021-22), World War I and American Art (2016), Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (2014), David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014), and With Friends: Six Magic Realists 1940-1965 (2005), among many others.

Headshot of Bob courtesy of Barbara Katus