Charles Goldman: Bellow
Exhibition run: December 18, 2026 – February 19, 2027
Public Opening
Saturday, December 19 2026
6-9 PM
500 Capp Street Foundation presents BELLOW, a solo exhibition by San Francisco-born artist Charles Goldman, in the Accordion Shop of The David Ireland House. The exhibition is on view December 16, 2026, through January 30, 2027, with an opening reception on Saturday, December 19, and remains open through San Francisco Art Week and FOG Design+Art. More than 35 years after assisting David Ireland with a survey of his work at UC Santa Cruz’s Sesnon Gallery, Goldman returns to the late artist’s iconic home with work of his own.
The exhibition presents recent work centered on CARDINAL BELLOW, a large sculpture built from wood, carpet, steel, ratchet straps and RE>CRETE, a recycled material of Goldman’s own devising. Alongside it are a sculptural edition cast in stone, a RE>CRETE>I>BEAM, a limited-edition zine, and a sound piece made in collaboration with his sister, Jennifer Graves, among other works.
Developed in 2010 and supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, RE>CRETE is made from everyday refuse: pulped newspaper and junk mail, cut-up household electrical wire, ground packing foam, credit cards, dryer lint, bleach, lime and a little cement. It appears often in Goldman’s sculpture and installations, paired with other discarded materials such and architectural fragments. Here Goldman’s practice draws a direct line to Ireland’s process-oriented approach, in which playful experimentation brings out the conceptual possibilities of materials usually overlooked in art.
Goldman’s practice spans sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, sound and performance, and is concerned with the cycles of daily life and standard units of measurement. He takes to heart Ireland’s maxim, “You can’t make art by making art.”
Charles Goldman (b. 1966, San Francisco) received a BA in Studio Arts and American Studies from UC Santa Cruz and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, SculptureCenter, Artists Space and The Drawing Center in New York, and in the Bay Area at Southern Exposure. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011. From 2010 to 2020 he ran GRIDSPACE, an artist-run space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which presented more than 80 exhibitions, concerts, screenings and readings. He lives and works in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, New York.
500 Capp Street is a non-profit arts organization located in the Mission District within late artist David Ireland’s prior home and studio. It is a 360-degree portrait of one of the West Coast’s most important practitioners of conceptual and installation art and a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Foundation conducts artist-led public tours, presents a dynamic program of exhibitions and public events, maintains a permanent archive of the artist’s extant body of work, and hosts visiting artists locally and from around the world.
Image credit: Charles Goldman