October 4, 2025 – January 10, 2026.
Fridays and Saturdays 12pm-5pm.
Get tickets here
500 Capp Street 2025 artist-in-residence Catherine Wagner’s work has long observed the philosophical and material qualities of the color blue. Continuing this line of inquiry into the spatial context of the David Ireland House, Wagner’s culminating exhibition of new work, Blue Reverie, seeks to forge linkages and lineages between the evocative, introspective nature of the color blue, its symbolism in history and music, and the environmental archive of the House. In Blue Reverie, the visuality of blue becomes an invitation, positioning itself as a channel to observe David Ireland’s legacy in a newly-imagined environment.
Having first met in 1999 while sharing a gallery for the show Museum Pieces: Bay Area Artists Consider the de Young, Wagner and Ireland engaged in many conversations in relation to conceptual thinking and artmaking, the residue of which is now rendered spatially and thematically in Blue Reverie. The exhibition covers installation, photography, projection, sound, performance, and sculptural objects, all of which allow for the formation of multiple, hybridized interpretations of the historic space.
“Blue Reverie allows me to have a visual conversation with David and his home,” says Wagner. “My responses to his marks, paintings, and sculptures add a set of spatial verbs to the language that exists. Through photographs, window interventions, and blue-leafed sculptures, a haiku emerges, suggesting more than is stated.”
In Blue Reverie, life-sized photographs of historic light bulbs coalesce in modern, sculptural forms, while blue filters positioned on windows become lenses into the urban landscape, creating dual visions from a point of translucency and opacity. These forms are met by wall drawings constructed with painter’s tape that perform spatial interventions by mapping abstract drawings in-situ. Pulling extensively from the Paule Anglim Archive Room, the exhibition proposes a synthesis of David Ireland’s work and Wagner’s broader investigation of blue through curatorial engagement.
Wagner has invited the members of her team to each contribute a piece to Blue Reverie installed in various sites throughout the house including work by Sophia Ramirez, Deirdre Visser, Nathan Kosta, Martín Rodriguez Serrano, Anika Murthy, and TZ Jiang.
Blue Reverie is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Teiger Foundation.
About Catherine Wagner
For over thirty years, Catherine Wagner (b. 1953, San Francisco, CA) has been observing the built environment as a metaphor for how we construct our cultural identities. She has examined institutions as various as art museums, science labs, the home, and Disneyland. Wagner’s process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti calls “the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves.”
While Wagner has spent her life residing in California, she has also been an active international artist, working photographically, as well as creating site-specific, public art, and lecturing extensively at museums and universities. She has received many major awards, including the Rome Prize (2013-2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, and the Ferguson Award. In 2001, Wagner was named one of Time Magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year. Her work is represented in major collections nationally and around the world, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, SFMOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA, Tate Modern, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Museum Folkwang, and MFA Houston. She has also published several monographs, including Place, History, and the Archive, and American Classroom, Art & Science: Investigating Matter, and Cross Sections.
Wagner is an Emeritus Professor of Studio Art at Mills College at Northeastern University. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles, CA.
