Work
Press Release
Sparkle ∙ Splat ∙ Spin
at MSP, San Francisco
Artists: Pliar Agüero-Esparza, Jen P. Harris, John Paul Morabito, Uma Rani-Iyli and Cornelia Schulz
Exhibition: Sparkle, Splat, Spin
Location: Minnesota Street Projects, 1275 Minnesota Street, Suite 211, San Francisco
Exhibition Dates: Wednesday, October 14 – Saturday, October 31, 2026
Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 3-5:30pm
In Conversation:
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Saturday, October 17th at 2pm – John Paul Morabito, Jamie Vasta
Saturday, October 24th at 2pm – Pilar Agüero-Esparza, Uma Rani-Iyli
Saturday, October 31st at 2pm – Cornelia Schulz in conversation with Patricia Sweetow
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to do a month-long pop-up at Minnesota Street Projects, where the gallery will present 2–2-week exhibitions. This is Part 2, Sparkle, Splat, Spin which continues our exploration of artists who work with or reveal textiles, stretching traditional and non-traditional materials as a cultural medium in their practice. Artists include Pilar Agüero-Esparza (San Jose), Jen P. Harris (Cleveland), John Paul Morabito (Ohio), Uma Rani-Iyli (San Francisco), Cornelia Schulz (San Francisco), and Jamie Vasta (Oakland). Themes of legacy, race, politics, and gender fluidity continue.
CONVERSATIONS:
Saturday, October 17th at 2pm: Uma Rani-Iyli & Pilar Agüero-Esparza
Both artists will discuss how family legacy, tradition, and culture inform their respective studio practice. We’ll also learn about Agüero-Esparza’s remedial mural project, La Vida en Los Dichos, her 1999 work commissioned by the City of San José and the San José Arts Commission for the Biblioteca Latinoamericana—a multi-panel work on San José’s history and community, one panel of which depicts César Chávez. The conversation turns to her transformation of that panel following public allegations about Chávez and to the community engagement process guiding the work.
Saturday, October 24th at 2pm – John Paul Morabito, Jamie Vasta
The use of fiber and non-traditional materials to animate queer themes is front and center in Jamie Vasta’s narrative portraiture, Jen P. Harris’ loom paintings, and John Paul Morabito’s beaded tapestries. A great opening for further conversation!
Saturday, October 31st at 2pm – Cornelia Schulz in conversation with Patricia Sweetow
Please join us on the last day of our pop-up to celebrate Cornelia Schulz, a Bay Area treasure and artist who has contributed mightily to the artistic reputation of this region since her regional debut at SFMoMA SECA in the 70s. She is Professor Emeritus at UC Davis, where she taught for 34 years. She has been a mentor for Bay Area, national, and international students who received degrees at Davis and was foundational in Arts Bridge, an arts education initiative to bring MFA students to schools in underserved areas.
PSG has represented Cornelia Schulz since 1998. Schulz’ painting practice spans over 55 years. Schulz has had multiple one-person exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions at PSG throughout the years. The gallery has presented Schulz’s work at numerous art fairs with three solo presentations. Every Schulz exhibition was reviewed by the former San Francisco Chronicle art critic, Kenneth Baker, along with many other critics. She was formerly represented by Hansen, Fuller, and Goldeen Gallery.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Pilar Agüero-Esparza’s striped color field paintings mesmerize with unexpected intersections of woven leather and fringe, extolling the skill and indigeneity of her parents cobbler tradition, specifically the crafting of woven huarache sandals. Her exquisite chromatic stripes act as proxies for the categorization and hierarchies of skin tones and discriminatory practices. As Pilar describes, “By melding abstraction with the making strategies learned in childhood, I aim for a radical authenticity that generates tension along with material freshness and contradiction. Employing the language of abstraction, I delve into the tropes of Color Theory, blending a skin-tone palette with prismatic colors to highlight the complexities of skin color. I aim for viewers to perceive my works as ‘racialized abstractions’ and prompt contemplation of social dynamics and colorism within our culture.”
In lesser hands, the inclusion of material, tradition, theory, practice, heritage, race, and aesthetics might implode, but instead the elegant grace of the woven and the symmetry of the color fields present a striking attunement—a singular approach to how Agüero-Esparza navigates the politics of color.
In 2025, Agüero-Esparza received the prestigious Eureka Fellowship Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. She’s exhibited her work in institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, the De Young Museum, and the Montalvo Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in the exhibition “The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, as part of the Getty Foundation Southern California initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art. In 2019, the U.S.-Mexico Border exhibition traveled to Lille, France, as part of the Eldorado Lille 3000 arts festival. In 2022, as an artist-in-residence and Lucas Artist Fellow, she was commissioned to create a large-scale outdoor work for the exhibition “Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape” at the Montalvo Arts Center.
Jen P. Harris repositions the relationship between painting and weaving. Their paintings pose an intersection of ambiguity, where neither painting nor weaving resolves without the slippage between both. Suspending expectations, Harris obscures their paintings by animating the painting as a loom, stretching a warp of yarn from the top profile of the painting to the bottom of the stretcher, whereupon they needle weave the weft in response to the newly camouflaged composition. Harris’ unique approach electrifies the dance between media, each transgressing the space and story held by the other. Their paintings become a queer metaphor where concrete morphs and dissolves into a river of nonlinear multiplicity.
Jen P. Harris, (b. 1977) received a BA in Studio Art from Yale University, and an MFA in Painting from Queens College CUNY. She was awarded a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012, a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2025, and a 2026 Albee Fellow from the Edward Albee Foundation AIR at The Barn. Her works are in numerous public and private collections and are featured in the upcoming book TEXTILES x ART, published by Thames and Hudson, 2025.
Uma Rani Iyli, with her wrapped sari silk ‘paintings,’ opens our views with vibrant sunsets and nocturnal fields of color. Having grown up in India’s traditional caste-based society, Iyli identifies as belonging to the female Indian weaver’s community. She references weaving, stitching and pattern making in her art spinning remnant silk sourced directly from weaver communities that she collects during her annual trips to Southern India. Through her use of spun silk and plexiglass tubes, Iyli spends hours spinning silk around plexiglass tubes, both a creative and meditative process which unfold in vibrant compositions inspired by the motifs, traditions and colors found in 7 yards of exquisite Indian Saris. Uma Rani Iyli is included in national collections, with a recent acquisition by the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums.
Improvisation guides John Paul Morabito’s woven abstractions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of “the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat.” Morabito’s work delivers “a spark of divinity,” reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. Their unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—“where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light open embodied pathways to find something greater than yourself.” Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility, defying voices that would choose to turn back the clock of time.
John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University in Ohio. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural production. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China and their recent solo exhibition at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.
Cornelia Schulz’s high rise oil paintings defy the structural limits of oil paint. Even the best photo reproduction fails to impart the physical and spiritual authority of her small, shaped, chromatic paintings. Schulz has evolved a contemporary synthesis of Abstract Expressionist painting, such as the likes of her San Francisco Bay Area contemporaries, Jay DeFeo and early Joan Brown. Her masterful manipulation of paint, yielding to the subtly shaped support, is an incessant call and response forming high and flat passages, a testament to her vision, skills and willingness to risk failure and loss.
“Not all abstract painting spurs me to its defense as something spiritually sustaining and necessary, as Schulz’s work does. Her art fits within an American lineage descended from a pivotal decade, roughly mid 1950s to mid 1960s, during which the ambiguous formal limits of paintings and sculpture, and of their reach, were freighted with larger questions of art’s self-definition and of the values that a wider culture wished to ascribe to it.” (Kenneth Baker, “On Fire,” Cornelia Schulz 2021 – 2018)
PSG had our first exhibition with Cornelia Schulz in 1998. Schulz (b. 1936) lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her early education in the arts began at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954 through 1957, the heyday of the California Ceramics Revolution. She studied sculpture in clay and wood with Renzo Fenci (1914 – 1999), and drawing from Herbert Jepson (1908 –1993). She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting (1959) and her Master of Fine Arts in welded steel sculpture (1961) from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Schulz became the first woman Chair of the University of California Davis Department of Art from 1998 to 1992, she retired as Professor Emeritus in 2002 after 34 years.
Ballroom culture as imagined through 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings is front and center in Jamie Vasta’s glitter works, a celebration of the shimmering, diverse expressions of queer identity. The composite glitter portraits draw inspiration from the opulence, bearing, and metaphor found in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Rousing in lush outdoor environs and restaged with queer identities in full bloom, Vasta’s fictive family are gorgeous, tattooed, costumed, commanding and heralded by community—they refuse the lassitudes of erasure and closeted thinking, Vasta’s work “…defies traditional notions of beauty and representation.”
Jamie Vasta received her MFA from the California College of Arts in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in Artillery, Art in America, Artforum, art LTD, Modern Art Obsession, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, SF Weekly, and The Bay Guardian. Vasta is included in prestigious public and private collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Arizona State University, the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento and the Beckstead-Lerma-Annala Collection of The University of Texas at San Antonio, UTSA Libraries and Museums.