On the Late Work of Carlos Villa
Mark Johnson, Jenifer K Wofford, and friends
Saturday, September 6, 3pm

In conjunction with Carlos Villa: The Code

On the Late Work of Carlos Villa
Mark Johnson, Jenifer K Wofford, and friends
Saturday, September 6, 3pm

An informal conversation to mark the closing of The Code.

San Francisco artist and educator Carlos Villa worked in a dizzying array of forms, and with a materials list as diverse as mirrors, feathers, shells, and his own blood. He felt there was no “authentic” Filipinx identity, and so he afforded himself the freedom to poke, prod, borrow, examine, and interrogate various global signifiers — identity, like migration, was fluid, he thought.

What inspired his late in life engagement with minimal abstraction, and to questions he’d ostensibly left behind in the bustling New York art world of the mid 1960s? How can we read the mysterious, heavy, and hinged artworks on view at Cushion Works — the final objects he ever made — in the context of an artist who played a significant role the the invention of Bay Area multiculturalism?

In a recently unearthed artist statement from the final decade of his life, Villa reveals that “[a]lthough my work as an activist and exploring personal identity has received greater attention, my interest in issues of minimalism has remained at the foundation of my work and my teaching.”

So how best to understand the role of minimalism in Villa’s career-defining work that appears to eschew it?

Cushion Works is pleased to host Mark Johnson, a colleague, friend, and later co-curator of Villa’s retrospective, and Jenifer K Wofford, a student, collaborator, and confidante, in conversation. Friends, intimates, and former students are invited to participate.

The event is free and open to the public. Limited seating available. Wheelchair accessible freight elevator.

Mark Dean Johnson is Professor Emeritus of Art at San Francisco State University. He worked with Carlos Villa at SFAI in the 1980s and 1990s and Villa became a lifelong friend and inspiration. Johnson was co-curator of the retrospective Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision that premiered at the Newark Museum of Art in 2022 with catalog published by UC Press.

Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work is informed by hybridity, history, and calamity. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio MOB. She attended SFAI for her BFA and UC Berkeley for her MFA. She currently has work on display at SFMOMA, and was recently named a 2025 Artadia San Francisco Bay Area Awardee.