Exhibition run: July 24, 2026 – October 17, 2026

Public Opening
Saturday, July 25 2026
5-8 PM Remarks 7 PM

RSVP here

500 Capp Street Foundation is pleased to present Abstract Objects of Devotion, a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Amy Trachtenberg.

Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, and language the exhibition unfolds through a series of intimate gestures and spatial propositions developed in dialogue with David Ireland’s former home and studio. Returning to a decades-long exchange with Ireland that began in the late 1980s, Trachtenberg approaches the house not simply as a site of exhibition, but as a living structure of memory, friendship, transmission, and reflection.

“The house is a refuge, a studio, a lab, a depot, an invitation, a magnet, a tuning fork, a plinth, a lookout, a lighthouse.” — Amy Trachtenberg

Across the exhibition, folded and crumpled steel mesh and linen structures, silver pigment, ochre soil, human hair, bronze casts, poems, and archival correspondence become carriers of duration and attention. Each piece unfolds less as a fixed object than as a site of conversation: part poem, part proposition, part accumulated trace. Throughout the exhibition, materials gather into arrangements that resemble forms of concrete poetry assembled across space.

The exhibition also revisits the long correspondence between Trachtenberg and Ireland: letters, postcards, aerogrammes, collages, observations, and exchanges that unfolded over decades between artists deeply invested in material thinking and everyday transformation. Their friendship forms an underlying architecture throughout the exhibition.

Trachtenberg’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, collage, sculpture, installation, language, public commissions, theater and dance design in collaborative works. Her hybrid approach explores the emotional, political, and perceptual charge embedded within materials and the experience between objects, space, and memory.

Amy Trachtenberg’s work has been exhibited at BAMPFA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, The Luggage Store, The San José Museum of Art, and The Crocker Museum, and is held in public collections including BAMPFA, The San José Museum of Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Crocker Museum, The Haitian Embassy in Paris, and The De Menil Collection. Site-specific installations include the 1000’ long platform of the Milpitas BART station, the façade of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, Montalvo Arts Center and Hillview Branch Library in San Jose. She is represented in San Francisco by Catharine Clark Gallery. Trachtenberg received a BA in French and Liberal Studies from CSU Sonoma and the Diplôme des Arts Plastiques from L’Ecole Nationale Superièure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where she lived for six years. She is based in San Francisco.

Exhibition catalogue forthcoming with text by Jarrett Earnest. 

This exhibition is part of 500 Capp Street’s evolving program supporting artist-driven experimentation, made possible in part through support from the Teiger Foundation.