Contributors

S. Anne Steinberg is a writer living in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Short

Julie Zigoris is an author and award-winning journalist whose work explores the intersection of art, memory and loss. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, HuffPost, Atlas Obscura, Lit Hub, The San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. A former culture reporter for The San Francisco Standard, she has written hundreds of articles covering art and ideas of the Bay Area.

Gabrielle Selz is an art historian, fine art appraiser, and award-winning author. Her most recent book, “Light on Fire: Art and Life of Sam Francis,” was the first comprehensive biography of Sam Francis and received the 2021 Silver Medal for Best Nonfiction by the California Book Awards. Her previous book, “Unstill Life: Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction,” received the Best Memoir of the Year Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was named as one of the best books of 2014 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beat, Literary Hub, Berkeleyside among others. Her art criticism has appeared in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Art Papers. In her previous life, she won the Moth Story Slam in New York. She lives in Oakland with her corgi.

Julia Gwendolyn Schneider is a Berlin-born critic, writer, and editor. Her reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in art magazines, daily newspapers, monographs, and catalogs. She is the editor of “Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir: Rhythm of Labor / Taktur í verki” (Berlin: Distanz, 2025).

Terri Cohn is an independent curator, writer, and art historian dedicated to preserving and contextualizing the contributions of women and underrecognized artists in the Bay Area and California. Her work focuses on oral histories, ecological practices, and the legacy of community and artist-run spaces. Cohn has contributed to numerous publications including Art in America, Art Practical, Artweek, caa.reviews, Frieze, Public Art Review, Sculpture Magazine, SFAQ, and Stretcher. She has authored or edited books and catalogs including Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport (2012) and co-authored the book Sonya Rapoport: Objects On My Dresser (2022, with Alla Efimova), a deep dive into this underrecognized early feminist computer art project. Central to her work are in-depth interviews with artists including Betsy Damon, Terry Fox, David Ireland, Tom Marioni, Linda Montano, John Waters, Pippilotti Rist, and Bonnie Ora Sherk. She has curated numerous exhibitions for museums and galleries, including the de Saisset Museum, Kala Art Institute, Mills College Art Museum, San José Institute of Contemporary Art, the Berkeley Art Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum, where she served as interim Matrix curator. She has lectured widely in the US and abroad, and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley’s Art and Design Extension Program. Through Terri Cohn Art Services she advises estates, and offers comprehensive consulting services, supporting artists, institutions, and collectors with her research, writing, curatorial expertise, and professional appraisals.

Emily Davis Adams is a visual artist dedicated to representational painting, its various technical histories, and its continued relevance as a vehicle for meaning and critical thought. Her practice often weaves together investigations of cutting edge technologies such as generative artificial intelligence with references to art history. Adams attended UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and UC Berkeley, where she studied in both the Department of Art Practice and the College of Natural Resources and was awarded a Townsend Center for the Humanities mentorship grant for a research project exploring the early depiction of science and scientists in European drawings and paintings. Her studies have included technical training in traditional academic figurative painting as well as in the practice of the Byzantine iconographic tradition through an apprenticeship with a monk. She holds a BS from UC Berkeley and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in New York City, where she was also awarded the 2011 Postgraduate Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in several publications including the Los Angeles Times and Artillery Magazine. She has taught at Queens College in New York City, Sonoma State University and Stanford University, among others. Adams is currently based in the Bay Area.

John Seed is a retired art professor living on California's Central Coast. His life in art began with studies at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley and was shaped by interactions with notable artists including Nathan Oliveira, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Diebenkorn. For over three decades Seed taught Studio Art and Art History at Mount San Jacinto College. He also taught Modernism at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and Theory and Criticism for the MFA program at Laguna College of Art and Design. Since 2013 Seed has served on the boards of the Sam Francis Foundation and the Cambria Center for the Arts. Seed’s writing has appeared in Art Ltd., The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Arts of Asia, and other publications. His book “Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World” (2019) features the works of contemporary artists who add subjectivity and disruption to their imagery. A sequel, “More Disruption: Representational Art in Flux” was released in 2023. Seed is currently working to develop a conference on Bay Area Figurative Art planned for the Fall of 2027.

Larissa Archer is a freelance writer and theatre worker based in San Francisco and New York. She writes on the visual and performing arts, as well as fashion, events, social issues, and travel. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The London Times, San Francisco Examiner, SF Weekly, Hyperallergic, and others.

Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.

Theodore (Ted) Barrow is an art historian, writer, curator, and lecturer whose work bridges academic scholarship and contemporary currents. Born in Bolinas, California, he holds a Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he explored the Florida paintings of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent through an ecocritical lens. Barrow has taught at Barnard College, Baruch College, City College of New York, and the University of San Francisco. Outside of art and academia, he is a distinctive voice in skateboarding culture, known for This Old Ledge, a video series that investigates the cultural and architectural significance of global skate spots."

John Held, Jr. is a San Francisco artist and writer active in the alternative arts for over five decades.He has interviewed such notable figures as Clement Greenberg, John Cage and Ray Johnson. The author of books on Mail Art, artist postage stamps, rubber stamps, and the Bay Area Dadaists, his forthcoming, "Zinelandia: Cover Art from the Factsheet Five Era, 1982-1998" (Fluke Publishing, 2025), examines the impact new printing technologies had on self publishing. Held has had over thirty exhibitions in twelve countries, with works in the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and MoMA (New York). His Papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D. C.).

Julia Couzens lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta. Her work has been recognized with a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship and is held in such public institutions as the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Yale University Art. She’s been a contributing writer to Sacramento Bee, SquareCylinder, and Two Coats of Paint. Follow her on Instagram@thumbnailreview for free range intermittent thumbnail reviews.

Patricia Albers is the author of “Everything is Photograph: A Life of Andre Keresz,” "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life" and "Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti." Visit Patricia Albers website at https://patriciaalbers.net

Renny Pritikin is a San Francisco Bay Area based curator, art writer and poet. He’s been chief curator at New Langton Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. He’s the author of five books of poetry and a memoir. Pritikin lives in Oakland with his wife, Judy Moran. Renny Pritikin, born in Brooklyn, New York, received a BA from New School College, NYC, and an MA from San Francisco State in Interdisciplinary Arts. Career highlights include a lecture series in Japanese museums as a guest of the State Department and as a Koret Israel Prize winner toured extensively in Israel. He was the curator for the United States exhibition at the Cuenca, Ecuador Biennal, presenting the work of Don Ed Hardy, and was a Fulbright Scholar lecturing in museums throughout New Zealand. Pritikin was a senior adjunct professor in the curatorial practice graduate program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco fror twelve years.. The author of five published books of poetry, he was poet-in-residence at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. He is the United States correspondent for the Portuguese art magazine, Umbigo, and a regular contributor to the art review site, squarecylinder.com.

Barbara Morris is a Bay Area-based writer and artist. She has written art criticism for SquareCylinder, Artillery, Sculpture Magazine, Art Ltd., Art Practical,WEAD, and stretcher.org. She also was a contributing editor to Artweek for over 10 years. Morris has written numerous catalog essays for galleries and individual artists. She recently authored a monograph contextualizing the work of a group of Bay Area women artists for “BAWALP the 90s.” Morris holds an MFA in painting from UC Berkeley, and is passionate about social justice and the environment.

Max Blue has contributed art criticism and reporting to Artsy, BOMB and Hyperallergic, among others, and he is a regular columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. His short fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. He lives in San Francisco. https://maxbluewriter.com

DeWitt Cheng is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and Bill Lasarow.

Mark Van Proyen has written commentaries emphasize the tragic consequences of blind faith placed in economies of narcissistic reward. In 2020, he retired from the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught Painting and Art History. From 2003 to 2018, he was a corresponding editor for Art in America. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Bill Lasarow and DeWitt Cheng. Photo credit: Mary Ijichi

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, and publisher based in the Bay Area. Art criticism and comics appear in Hyperallergic, Momus, and the Chicago Reader, among others. Other works include The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press, 2022), The Strangers Among Us (Astrophil Press, 2017) and The Chronicles of Fortune (Radiator Comics, 2017). More at her website, https://cocopicard.com.