See & Experience

April 19 | Members Preview: 1 - 2pm
April 19 | Public Reception: 2 - 4pm

Marin County, the broader San Francisco Bay Area, California, and the Pacific Northwest have long captivated the imagination as backdrops for modern science fiction. From Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic Marin Center to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and George Lucas’s forest moon of Endor, this region has continually shaped some of the most visionary imagery in our collective consciousness. But beyond the mainstream narratives, feminist science fiction authors like Bay Area–born Ursula K. Le Guin and Pasadena-born, Seattle-based Octavia Butler crafted many of their groundbreaking works in this same terrain—approaching the future through a distinctly feminist lens.

While science fiction is often seen as a male-dominated domain, the genre’s origins trace back to a woman: Mary Shelley. Her Frankenstein (1818), often mistaken solely for a horror story, is a profoundly emotional and cautionary tale about cruelty, ambition, and consequence—an early critique of male hubris and unchecked power. Shelley established the genre as mode of inquiry and feminist empowerment, and generations of women and intersectional feminist artists have since expanded her legacy, using speculative forms to confront the conditions of their present and envision transformative alternatives.

Today, many contemporary Bay Area artists draw on both their surroundings and the visionary spirit of feminist speculative writing to inform their work. This exhibition brings together [#] artists who are reclaiming and reshaping sci-fi and speculative modes, highlighting their radical potential for critique, resistance, and hope. The title, The Sky Below, flips the genre’s typical, more masculine, upward and outward gaze. Instead of imagining distant galaxies and starships or obsessing over artificial technologies, these artists root their visions in the here and now—our histories, bodies, landscapes, and relationships. When they look beyond the stars or towards technological innovation, it is not driven by conquest or empire, but by interconnection, care, and resilience, positing that the infinite potential we often associate with the sky may in fact lie within our internal universes and beneath our feet.

Feminist speculative work gestures toward transformation through metaphor, myth, mutation, time slippage, and world-building—proposing futures without necessarily naming them. For many of these artists, futuristic vision arises from introspection or retrospection: revisiting what has been to better shape what could be. Their practices are not escapes from reality but interventions into it, dismantling dominant narratives to construct alternate, liberatory possibilities. The stakes they engage are social, political, environmental, economic, and deeply relational. Like the feminist writers who preceded them, these artists reveal that science and speculative fiction is not merely about the future—it’s about the urgency of the present and the power of our imaginations and mindsets to reframe it.