Today's guest is Demetri Broxton, someone who I think practices radical attention in his artistic practice as well as in his general disposition toward the creative community he builds at Root Division as executive director. Demetri is an Oakland-born artist who takes photographs of ancestors, some named, some lost to time, and brings them back through an act of almost impossible attention.

Bead by bead, stitch by stitch, he places them into futures they were never allowed to have. His work is in the collection of the de Young, and right now he is having a moment. His very first museum solo at MOAD and a public art piece going up in the community where his own family put down roots. We sat together inside an interactive art installation, fabric all around us filled with lavender, the warm air carrying the scent through the [00:02:00] whole conversation.

It felt like the right place to talk about what it means to lead for other artists while keeping your own creative fire alive, what his family thought when he chose art over everything else, and what happens when a stranger stands in front of your artwork and starts to cry. This one felt like a conversation I needed to have, and I hope you feel the same way.

CCA — California College of the Arts — is closing. Vanderbilt University is buying the campuses. And decades of art education, community, and institutional memory are being sold off with them.

In this episode, recorded at Goat Hall in San Francisco's Potrero Hill, I sit down with two people who lived it from the inside: Elizabeth Travelslight, who taught in CCA's Critical Studies program and was also present for the closure of SFAI, and Melissa Leventon, who has taught fashion history and theory at CCA for 27 years. Together they trace the risky financial decisions and leadership failures that brought the institution to this point, the history that gave rise to both CCA and SFAI, and what it means — for students, for faculty, for the Bay Area — when places like this disappear.

We didn't plan it this way, but the conversation took on a shape of its own: part mass, part confession, part hail mary, and somewhere at the end, something like a benediction.

SFAI is already gone. Now CCA. The question is what we're willing to lose next.

The night before Valentine’s Day, artists gathered at SOMA Arts to talk about saving the San Francisco art scene.

It felt less like a policy meeting and more like couples therapy.

In this special Art Yap episode, Shawna asks three simple questions:
When did you fall in love with the SF arts ecosystem?
What broke your heart?
And why are you still here?

From naked violinists in backyard performances to the grief of losing beloved venues and institutions, Dreamers & Lovers captures a city mid-reckoning. Artists reflect on open studios, weirdo energy, long-distance devotion, peanut butter budgets, and the stubborn belief that art is not ornamental — it’s essential.

At the center of the night is a reminder: grief is a clearing. And if we hold our anger too tightly, our hands aren’t free to build.

This episode is a love letter to the Bay Area arts community — flawed, fickle, resilient, and still here.

Happy Valentine’s Day.