500 Capp Street is proud to announce Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez (she/her/ella) as our 2026 Artist in Residence. We are deeply grateful to the many remarkable artists who responded to this year’s open call. This year, our call brought us an incredibly strong cohort of artists with whom we look forward to working with in the future. Our 2026 Artist in Residence was juried by Jo-ey Tang, Julio César Morales, Amy Berk, and MJ Brown.

Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural producer born and raised in Bolivia. For more than a decade, her practice has focused on extractivism and its devastating effects on the environment and surrounding communities. Through her work, Aranibar-Fernandez brings material and history into dialogue with one another—etched copper plates depict aerial views of active mining sites, strings of beads and sequins trace trade routes across maps of South America rendered in floral embroidery—bringing to light lived narratives of resilience and healing within communities shaped by extraction, colonization, and displacement.

During her time in residence at the David Ireland House, Aranibar-Fernandez will spend time with our archives, studying David Ireland’s material practice and the layered history of the Bay Area. Her project will center on the stories that materials carry, with a focus on the region’s soil and water, exploring the millions of years of history embedded in these elements. Her research has recently brought her to the study of phytoremediation, where she is currently looking at regenerative organisms in the Amazon jungle on the side of Bolivia, and how organisms can heal and regenerate water and soil after heavy metal contamination. At Capp Street, Aranibar-Fernandez hopes to develop an understanding of the different re-mediators that exist in the Bay, bridging information from her material research and the knowledge she brings from her home country of Bolivia.

500 Capp Street’s International Artist Residency is generously supported by the Sanger Family Foundation.