Blog

The Andy Warhol Foundation Honors 500 Capp Street through “The Philanthropy Factory”

We are happy to announce that 500 Capp Street has been selected to participate in the inaugural “Philanthropy Factory,” a new initiative honoring Andy Warhol’s philanthropic legacy by providing recent grantees an opportunity to benefit from the sale of Warhol works from the Andy Warhol Foundation’s collection.

Highlighted above is a Polaroid taken by Andy Warhol of Halston’s partner and Warhol’s assistant, Victor Hugo. Hugo, a performance artist and window designer, was a constant figure in Warhol’s photographs. Usually depicted by Warhol in a sexualized and provocative context, often fully nude or with his penis out, here he is seen in a different facet, as a member of the Studio 54 royal court.

Our fall programming is proudly supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and we are honored to be selected for this fundraising opportunity. All proceeds from the sale of seven Warhol pieces will go towards supporting 500 Capp Street’s operations, enabling us to continue encouraging artistic experimentation through our programming and artist residencies.

This work and more are available here. Don’t miss this chance to support 500 Capp Street and grab yourself an exclusive Andy Warhol piece.

Artist conversation between Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo & David Wilson

Wednesday, June 23, 6 pm PT
In Person & Online

Join us for an intimate artist conversation between David Wilson and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo on Wednesday, June 23 at 6pm. Drop by in person, or tune in on Instagram Live @500cappstreet. David Wilson is the resident artist of The David Ireland House while artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is the curator of Southern Exposure’s current exhibition, We use our hands to support. They have previously collaborated with one another and now find themselves in the same neighborhood doing collective exhibition work. Join the artists as they check in on each other, share stories and, exchange experiences of their work processes in an intimate one-on-one dialog.

This program will take place outdoors on The David Ireland House terrace. Free and open to the public.

Doors: 5:30 pm PT
Program: 6:00 pm PT

Links to the shows:
We use our hands to support, Curated by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo at Southern Exposure @southernexposuresf

Sittings, David Wilson exhibition after 4 months of residency at The David Ireland House @500cappstreet

About the artists:

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller & curator who lives/works between Ohlone Land [Oakland, CA] and Powhatan Land [Richmond,VA]. Their work has been included in exhibitions and performances at Konsthall C [Stockholm, Sweden], SEPTEMBER Gallery [Hudson, NY], EFA Project Space [New York City, NY], Leslie Lohman Museum [New York City, NY], San Francisco State University Gallery, Signal Center for Contemporary Art [Malmo, Sweden], Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [San Francisco, CA] and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [Berkeley, CA], amongst others. For the past 5 years, Lukaza has been the Lead Curator at Nook Gallery [Oakland, CA], collaborating with over 80+ artists, writers, performers & musicians, in a gallery located in their apartment kitchen. They are currently enrolled in an MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.


David Wilson creates observational drawings based on direct experiences with landscape and orchestrates site-based gatherings that draw together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans into collaborative relationships. He organized the experimental exhibition The Possible at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 2012 SECA Art Award. He has exhibited his work with SFMOMA, was included in the 2010 CA Biennial, and presented a Matrix solo exhibition at BAMPFA. Wilson has received grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Southern Exposure, The Center for Craft and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. He is based in Oakland, CA.


One Hundred Year Old Water

Taking place in Los Angeles for Frieze 2026, 500 Capp Street is proud to be a part of One Hundred Year Old Water: Works by David Ireland & Anais Franco. Curated by David Horvitz and Sophie Appel, the exhibition brings together two artists known for their exploration of physical and historical materiality through their processes.

Ireland started making what he called Dumbballs in 1983, the name refers to the notion that they do not require any intellect to be made.  They were to him, a meditation, a refusal to do anything but pass concrete over and over again for 12 to 14 hours a day until it became perfectly round. Anais Franco’s Strawberries are inspired by the practice Japanese American strawberry farmers had of painting rocks red and placing them throughout the strawberry fields as a deterrent to birds. In order to make Strawberries, Anais first combines a red stain with piles of clay through a process of wedging, which is slamming the clay onto a wooden plank over and over again for hours on end, before making the clay into the shape of rocks, also a meditation on the material itself, similar to Ireland’s Dumbballs.

These works are situated in the 7th Avenue Garden where the ecological memory of a landscape that once was is evoked through native plants, within a palimpsest of histories of Los Angeles: remnants of the demolished LACMA building, seafood waste from various restaurants, sand from Japanese incarceration camps, etc. 

1911 7TH AVENUE, LOS ANGELES

VIEWING 
FEBRUARY 26 – MARCH 1, 2026 
FROM 11 UNTIL 5 O’CLOCK

CELEBRATION 
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 28 FROM 3 TO 6 O’CLOCK 
WITH DAVID IRELAND’S PURPLE PASTA & ANGEL FOOD CAKE MADE BY GILES CLARK 

2026 International Artist in Residency: Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez

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. 

It’s a Lamp! Opening Reception

Celebrate SF Art Week with us at 500 Capp Street as we open It’s a Lamp!, our concept store’s new show with San Francisco artist and electrician Rico Duenas. Featuring never-before-seen works, the exhibition continues Duenas’ ongoing dialogue with the late artist David Ireland, nearly five years after his celebrated project Light Repair. In this new body of work, Duenas expands his poetic relationship to illumination—treating lamps not merely as functional objects, but as sculptural vessels in active dialogue with the architecture and icons of the David Ireland House.

Date: January 20, 2026
Time: 4-8 pm
Price: Free
Register Here

Trina Michelle Robinson: Open Your Eyes to Water

500 Capp Street and Root Division present Open Your Eyes to Water, a solo exhibition of the work of San Francisco-based visual artist Trina Michelle Robinson that spans both venues.

Exhibition run: February 13th-May 16, 2026

Fridays and Saturdays 12pm-5pm at 500 Capp Street

Wednesday to Friday 12-6pm at Root Division; Weekends by Appointment at Root Division

View Gallery

For nearly a decade, Robinson has utilized an embodied, research-based, and multidisciplinary approach rooted in personal and historical archives to create immersive installations that engage ancestry, memory, and the layered geographies of Black migration. Robinson’s interdisciplinary practice moves fluidly across film, printmaking, sound, and installation. 

At 500 Capp Street, Robinson will create a living installation tracing her years-long cross-continental engagement with family lineage and movement from Senegal, to Kentucky, Chicago, and California. At Root Division, the artist will present an expanded version of Elegy for Nancy (2022)—a tender tribute to her oldest known ancestor, a woman named Nancy who was born in 1770s Kentucky, then still part of Virginia. The installation will feature special altar contributions from Bay Area Black women artists, highlighting how collective knowledge, imagination, and care can reframe historical erasure.

About the Artist

Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco-based visual artist. Her work has been exhibited at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, ICA San José, Minnesota Street Project, New York’s Wassaic Project, Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and For-Site’s Black Gold: Stories Untold. Her work is also included in Paper is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, a traveling exhibition co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, which was at San Francisco Center for the Book in 2024 and in Atlanta in 2025. She had a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), a Smithsonian Affiliate. Robinson is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and  was recently nominated for the 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) Award. Her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage?, published in 2023 by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. She received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2022.

Open Your Eyes to Water is supported at 500 Capp Street by Teiger Foundation and at Root Division by Grants for the Arts and San Francisco Arts Commission.

Image Design by George McCalman

It’s a Lamp!

 San Francisco–based artist and electrician Rico Duenas is back at 500 Capp Street with It’s a Lamp, a solo exhibition presented in the foundation’s concept store, The Accordion Shop. Featuring never-before-seen works, the exhibition continues Duenas’ ongoing dialogue with the late artist David Ireland, nearly five years after his celebrated project Light Repair. In this new body of work, Duenas expands his poetic relationship to illumination—treating lamps not merely as functional objects, but as sculptural vessels in active dialogue with the architecture and icons of the David Ireland House. Working with humble and often discarded materials, Duenas transforms the familiar into something quietly radiant. Through these objects, Duenas frames light as a tactile, living material that softly shapes our interactions with the environment around us.

Duena’s exhibition can be viewed January 20 till February 3 in the Accordion Shop at 500 Capp Street, Fridays and Saturdays from 12-5 pm.

Rico Duenas was born and raised in San Francisco. As a child, he spent time on the east coast with his grandfather, a sculptor and founding member of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In San Francisco, he also often accompanied his father to flea markets and garage sales, where his father bought, fixed, and re-sold furniture. It was there that he was introduced to artist Kevin Randolph, who was repurposing lights, and quickly developed a love of lighting and sculpture. He lives and works in San Francisco as a union electrician and artist.