Mário Pires Cordeiro: REIMAGININGS
SFArtsED is thrilled to unveil a new mini exhibition series featuring rotating bi-monthly showcases of Artist Mentors’ works, paired with short interviews about their teaching and art practice. Presented adjacent to our gallery space upstairs at 1275 Minnesota street, the display will be visible during the building’s normal open hours, 11am – 6pm Tuesday through Saturday.
Mário Pires Cordeiro
July 7 – September 5, 2026
Mário Pires Cordeiro is an American-Portuguese artist and mentor based in San Francisco since 2015. His artistic practice explores the intersection of visual art and functional objects through experimentation with media and color. Central to his work is the exploration of color—ranging from personal tastes informed by social contexts to examining the symbolic and cultural meanings it carries in contemporary society. He sources colors from design trends, forecasts, and specific environments or publications, incorporating them into his art. Pires Cordeiro also draws inspiration from engineering and geometry, distilling complex ideas into distinct, minimalist forms. His diverse practice spans various media, including painting, apparel, sculpture, large-scale installations, public art interventions, as well as drawing and collage.
Karen Rose is a half Mexican painter with over 30 years of experience in New York City, San Francisco, and Raleigh. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York. Her practice includes a printmaking residency at La Maldita Estampa in Barcelona, supported by a North Carolina arts grant. Additionally, she was awarded a Kivunim Fellowship to Morocco, where she studied inter-religious and cross-cultural coexistence with a diverse group of 40 educators, 3 rabbis, and a Bedouin Palestinian peace activist. She recently had solo shows of her Border Paintings at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, CA and Diamante Arts & Cultural Center in Raleigh, NC. The Durham Convention Center is showing 10 of her large-scale Mexican Border and North Carolina paintings July through December of this year, courtesy of the Durham Arts Council. Karen Rose teaches art at the Urban School of San Francisco and lives and paints in both Richmond, CA and Raleigh, NC.
image: Karen Rose, Democracy is a Burro, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 2025
Erik Parra
January 15 – March 10, 2026
Artist Website
Erik Parra is a San Francisco-based visual artist and educator who holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Brazil, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, and New York. Locally, Mr. Parra’s work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, The Headlands Center for the Arts, The Berkeley Art Center, Johansson Projects, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery. In addition to having over 15 years experience working as a teaching artist he lectures extensively at universities and colleges including at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, North Seattle College, Hastings College in Nebraska, San Francisco State University, City College of San Francisco, and the California College of the Arts.
C.K. Itamura: Capacity
January 15 – March 10, 20226
Capacity appreciates three definitions of the word “capacity”: a specified role or position; the amount that something can produce; and the maximum something can contain. Puzzling together one-hundred and fifty individual pastel on wood drawings into a singular mass, C.K.Itamura offers a meditation on: an individual’s capacity for independent agency within groups; the capacity limitations of time, space and energy which cause either stagnation, overwhelm, or growth in a person’s life depending on non-action, reaction or actions taken; and on Dunbar’s* number, a measurement of the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.
About the Artist:
C.K. is a Yonsei, Nikkei interdisciplinary artist based in California. Her conceptual, interactive and performance art serves to engage intergenerational audiences in the exploration of observation, contemplation and expressive imagination.C.K. is a recipient of the Discovered Award for Emerging Visual Artists of Sonoma County, a recipient of the inaugural Boundless Residency of Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the founder and publisher of Kanreki Press, the editor of Chottohon magazine, a co-founder of Book Arts Roadshow, an artist/director on the board of Berkeley Commonplace, and a former director of San Francisco Center for the Book.
C.K. is an Artist-in-Residence of San Francisco Unified School District Library Department, an Artist Mentor of San Francisco Arts Education Project, a Teaching Artist-Lead of Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, and works with schools, libraries, organizations and museums to to create and provide: professional development art-making workshops for educators; hands-on art-making workshops for students; and to make art-making accessible to the general public.
