"Choose Kindness"
A Community Collaboration by Cedars and The San Anselmo Arts Commission
The art installation on Magnolia & San Anselmo Avenue in Downtown San Anselmo was inspired by Cedars Client Advisory Council, who represent and provide client input on Cedars residential and day programs. This project is part of their “Choose Kindness” Campaign, to encourage everyone to choose kindness for themselves and others.
Cedars artists along with artists from the San Anselmo community—over thirty-two in all—worked in tandem to create the entire work, with each artist painting a large panel that has been assembled ‘mosaic style’ on the wall to form a cohesive image. The colorful art installation is 8 feet high by 16 feet wide and consists of 32 panels. The installation incorporates the town’s beloved icon, Sugarfoot the deer, the beautiful Mt. Tamalpais, and words chosen by the Client Advisory Council that represent kindness to them.
A special thank you to the Cedars Team:
Suzanne Miazga and Gail Weissman who designed and coordinated the project; Gail, Joseph Kosdrosky and Claudia Tennyson who worked with Cedars clients on their panels; John Pope who engineered and installed the project; and Brian Elder who consulted on the project.
Brian Elder
Brian has been painting since 1964, making murals since 1967, he attended the School of Expressive Arts, 1970–72, he painted for Evans & Brown in the ’90s, and he has worked on 40 odd murals, private and public, worldwide.
John Pope
John Pope is Cedars Facilities & Organizational Safety Manager, whose position includes projects like engineering this large Art Installation. On his days off. John enjoys mountaineering, hiking, and riding his motorcycle.
Joseph Kosdrosky
Joseph Kosdrosky is a Cedars Art Instructor and Curator. He is also a visual artist, who received a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Claudia Tennyson
Claudia Tennyson is an art instructor and member of the Cedars curatorial team. She studied art and photography at U.C. Santa Cruz and received her M.F.A. from the California College of Art.
Suzanne Miazga
Suzanne Miazga is Cedars Development Coordinator as well as a visual artist and art educator. She lives in San Anselmo with her husband and two sons.
Gail Weissman
Gail Weissman holds an M.F.A. from JFK University in Arts and Consciousness and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. She teaches privately and for Cedars of Marin. Born in NY Gail now lives in Wood Acre, CA.
Mariana Abballo
Panel #21
Mariana is equally comfortable expressing herself through watercolor, collage, and jewelry making. In her watercolors she shows great sensitivity and inventiveness in her approach to the medium. Her colors are fresh and vibrant, perfectly suited to the flowers she loves to paint. As a jeweler she creates intricate pieces inspired by her love for the Edwardian period. With her pink or green hair and impish grin, Mariana is a sophisticated artist with a highly personalized aesthetic.
Cynthia Adams
Panel #12
Cynthia Adams has been making her joyful art at Cedars since 1996. Her drawings and painting shave bold, clean compositions, clear outlines, and bright, cheerful colors. Her favorite subjects are flowers, singers, animals, and anything Disney. When she finishes a new piece, she shows it to everyone she can, sharing her delight in her own creativity.
Amy Ades
Panel #25
Amy usually starts her day in art class by calling, “Yoo-hoo! I’m ready!” Amy is always prepared with a plan while keeping an open mind about how the process unfolds—and it most often unfolds with bursts of color, layers of paper and acrylic paint. She loves to explore how colors work together, using a brush freely to improvise fluid marks in her more abstract work, but she also likes to hunt for new ideas and inspiration from books and magazines. Because Amy is so engaged by the creative process, she loves to share her work with others whenever she has an opportunity.
Cheyanne Andrus
Panel #9
Cheyanne likes being part of a ‘team’ of artists, collaborating on larger community pieces, and in the process is learning how to paint using acrylics on canvas and panels. Kind and helpful, she enjoys connecting with her peers and has a ready grin and a good sense of humor. Cheyanne also creates colorful abstract drawings, layering color upon color to achieve rich depth and texture.
Amelia Aufuldish
Panel #15
Amelia Aufuldish is a non-binary queer artist and student. They grew up in San Anselmo and are currently studying Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University. Previously they studied life painting at College of Marin. Amelia primarily paints portraits in oil as well as in pen, paint markers and collage. They love working in color and bringing aspects of nature, like fruit trees, and figures together. They also paint furniture. Their website is Studioaka.me which is their Instagram handle as well.
Xoxa Bell
Panel #1
Xoxa grew up in Richmond and Fairfax, providing her with a wide range of experiences and memories that they express with her art. Most of her work is abstract acrylic painting, as well as some mixed media pieces, and lots of crocheting.
Conor Buckley
Panel #8
As a commercial illustrator, Conor Buckley, collaborates with national brands (Lyft, Google) and local institutions (SF Chronicle, Outside Lands, the Fillmore). He lives in San Anselmo with his wife and two daughters. In the quiet times between he tackles absurdity, whimsy and dread in a variety of media. You can see more at conorbuckley.com.
Trey Buder
Panel #11 & #17
Trey Buder is a cartoonist. He is clearly delighted and amused as his drawings of animals and people come to life with expressions of glee, or puzzlement, or worry. Many of Trey’s drawings are self-portraits, always containing very animated hairstyles. Trey also loves the challenge of learning to paint, and the physicality of construction and the use of tools. He applies this passion to building and assemblages made of recycled materials.
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Yuan Chen
Panel #4
Yuan Chen is a California abstract artist born in Fuzhou, China. She earned a B.A. in the Practice of Art from UC Berkeley and graduated from UC Davis with an M.F.A. degree in 2017.
Art is her perfect second language. It frees her from the limitations of verbal communication and allows her to speak her inner authenticity. Her abstract art is a conversation with herself, with others, and with the natural world. It is a reflection of her struggle to reach inner peace and inspire empathy towards one another.
Michael Cocchiarella
Panel #14, 18, & 32
Michael has strong drawing skills and pays close attention to the source he is drawing from. He will often choose subjects he wants to learn more about and is always up for a new challenge. In addition to his drawing skills, Michael is comfortable and fluid with both watercolor and acrylic media. Michael loves to document his work in progress and finished pieces, taking photos to share with his friends and family.
Marc Cohen
Panel #2
Marc Cohen has a long and varied art training past, spanning more than 60 years. He studied with numerous unknown teachers in formal and informal schools in New England and North Carolina. During this time he paid his bills by practicing mathematics at various research institutions. He currently works in studio 23 at Artworks Downtown in San Rafael.
Brianna Cutts
Panel #26
Brianna Cutts is a museum designer and decorative artist who designs story-inspired patterns. She has directed over 100 design projects and collaborated with IDEO, the National Park Service, and numerous museums. Brianna spent her childhood in Pasadena, where she painted murals on her bedroom walls, practiced cello, and made dioramas. As a museum designer, she reviews large quantities of information to synthesize insights that inform tangible design solutions. In her free time, she uses these same skills to notice interesting patterns that she reshapes and combines into unexpected layers. She paints mostly in gouache, and silk screens to play with color combinations and vibrancy.
Anna DellaValle
Panel #13
Harmonious colors and lively patterns define Anna’s work as a fine artist, weaver and jewelry maker. Her abstract drawings are puzzle-like fields of shapes and colors showing a pleasing balance between variety and repetition. In her representational art, she often builds the image through multiple overlapping patterns. Anna is always eager to learn a new technique or approach and takes pleasure in the company of her fellow artists. She highly values the fact that people love and buy her work.
Patricia Drake
Panel #24
Patricia is driven to document the events of her daily life, whether it is her travels, herself, her friends, or her dinner (or lunch, or breakfast). Patricia’s creative process involves photographing her subject, printing the image, and sharing it with others through the use of many small photo albums and Facebook. These images then become the subject matter for multiple iterations in other media. Patricia is also an excellent weaver and enjoys the use of many fiber textures and colors to produce fabric.
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Kathleen Edwards
Panel #7
Kathleen Edwards, San Anselmo resident since 2000, is a painter, illustrator, muralist, bookbinder, and graphic book author. Her work has been widely exhibited since 1986, including at the 2020 de Young Museum Open Exhibit. Her work can be seen at kathleenedwardsartist.com and on Instagram at @kathleenedwardsartist
Jeff Haines
Panel #28
Jeff fills sketchbooks with drawings of people, places and symbols, continuously honing his style and expanding his cast of characters. Influenced by graffiti, cartoons and video games, his line is fluid and energetic. When looking for new visual inspiration, he gravitates towards powerful imagery such as volcanoes, lighthouses, and pre-Columbian masks. He often incorporates these new images, as well as his alter ego character, Spray Can Man, into fantasy scenes that are both sophisticated and surprising. In the studio, Jeff manifests kindness and sly humor.
Jennifer Hall
Panel #9
Jennifer creates vibrant, layered collages on paper using watercolor, ink and found imagery. She lays out her compositions in shingled rows, overlapping shape and color to fill the ground inch by inch. Jennifer is also an avid gardener and cook, and has a knack for remembering birthdays (sometimes with a gift of cupcakes). Jennifer loves to tell stories about her guinea pig, Tyler, a bright spot in her days at home.
Elias Herdocia
Panel #11 & 25
Elias Herdocia is an inquisitive young artist who reveals a love of reptiles and griffins in highly expressive imagery full of spines, horns and teeth. Elias’s vivid imagination comes naturally into play in his artwork, but he is also very capable when it comes to rendering images from life, the use of photographs and his smart phone image bank. Elias is a guy on the go, often full of stories about visits to Bay Area museums and being first in line for the latest sci-fi and action-adventure movies.
John Hersey
Panel #5
I have been a working artist for over 40 years. I am a Canadian and grew up in Vancouver, Canada .My graphic design and illustration work is in collections of the SFMOMA and in the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). I have worked for Apple, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Le Monde, Cal Tech, and many others. I am considered to be one of the founders of digital illustration. I have designed fabric patterns for Espirit. I have designed digital fonts that have been used by Odwalla, Macdonald’s, Popeyes, Toyota and many others in their product packaging and advertising campaigns.
In 2006, the G8 Recruit Design Gallery of Tokyo exhibited my work in a mid-career exhibition which featured 60 of my ground-breaking works. I taught at CCA for 13 years
I have 4 children—Cassidy, Dyllan, Wyatt and Cole. I also have an apparel brand called Dia de Los Todos. In the last 10 years I have fallen in love with plein air painting. Watercolour is my medium of choice for its expressive character and its simple ease of use when I am out in the field.
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Gill Hines
Panel #17 & 23
Gill Hines loves mountains, UFO’s and Big Foot, but admits to a fear of heights. In his drawings, Gill leans toward exploring the magical worlds of the supernatural, folktales and myth, searching for symbols in these worlds and making them his own. Gill has mastered working in detail with colored pencil, building up brightly colored layers to a velvety sheen. Gill saves all of his pencil shavings in a big can, which he later bottles and adorns with a hand-drawn label.
Sara Korn
Panel #24 & 31
Sara works in multiple layers to create expressive faces, flowers and animals in brightly colored mixed media. She is always eager to try new materials and to explore media that can be combined in different ways. Sara is very social and draws lots of creative energy from her peers in the art studio.
Darwin Lawson
Panel #20
Darwin is our newest artist. He comes from Inverness California and is currently living at Peterson Residence. He is very talented and has a natural ability to create outstanding works of art. He is a positive person and enjoys coming to the program. His love of color and line is apparent when you see his skills in action. We are lucky to have him and are excited to see what comes out of his relationship with Cedars.
Katya McCulloch
Panel #6
Katya McCulloch, Director, TeamWorks Art Mentoring Program is a community artist whose work is exhibited internationally and in private and public collections including the Library of Congress, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Emory University, and other special collection libraries. As TeamWorks founding artist, she has made art with justice system involved youth in Marin County for 20 years. She has created community murals and public art in a wide-variety of unconventional settings: Music Outback Foundation“MobFest”, Marin County Fair “Public Art Days”, Italian StreetPainting Festival. Katya has 19 years experience teaching printmaking at San Quentin State Prison through the William James Association Prison ArtsProject. Ms. McCulloch has an MFA in Printmaking from San Francisco Art Institute, BA in Studio Art and German Language & Literature from UC Berkeley. Katya spent most of her early life in Germany, Afghanistan and Washington, D.C.,where she graduated from public school. She believes strongly that art is not just a profession, but a universal human need that marks our humanity. TeamWorksArt.org @katyaprints
Sheri McSweeney
Panel #22
Sheri channels her love of animals into her charming drawings, paintings, and mixed-media representations of horses, cats and other animals. She is most comfortable drawing in pencil as she can erase and redraw until she is satisfied that she has captured the essence of whatever imagery she has chosen as her model. Sheri is also a writer and bookmaker who has written and illustrated poignant memories of her grandmother, who was also an artist and serves as a source of inspiration and strength.
Nish Nadaraja
Panel #3
During Covid, Nish started taking photos of his old Star Wars action figures in modern settings and has already been in a few group shows in Marin (one of them at Cedars!). He also works in other mediums when the occasion arises, so jumped at the chance to be a part of this mosaic mural. Nish also serves as a member of the San Anselmo Arts Commission. Find him at @I'veGotNissues and @Cult.Figures.
Tanya Noske
Panel #23 & 24
Tanya says she just loves working with her hands. She is very accomplished as a weaver and creates beautiful, soft blanket fabrics of natural fibers. Tanya is also experimenting with Native meditative drumming as a way to calm and focus her mind. Her work in drawing and painting is a more recent vocation, and the use of repetitive patterns produced in both weaving and drumming is apparent in the kinds of imagery found in her artwork. Tanya has made use of drawing templates of her own, tracing them in overlapping layers that radiate out from the center of the page in mandala-like forms.
John Peterson
Panel #14, 18 & 32
John has found a ‘second act’ later in life with a new vocation in painting and drawing. John carefully follows the slow rhythm of his brush as he builds layers of paint, forming waves of color and repeated pattern. His calm and quiet nature is uniquely expressed in his approach to the subject of seascapes. He is originally from the East Coast and brings his love and appreciation of both coasts to this work.
Cathy Pitzak
Panel #19
Cathy is an enthusiastic, multidimensional artist always eager to try new techniques and mediums, from drawing and painting to mixed media and collage. She works quickly and has a natural flair for abstract pattern and color. Many of her pieces, such as her painted mobiles and paper bowls, incorporate patterns easily adaptable to surface designs for cloth or paper goods. Her signature “little people” drawings have become best-sellers at the Cedars Gallery.
Mary Porter
Panel #16
Mary Porter is an artist who lives and works in San Anselmo. She grew up in upstate New York, received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and has taught Studio Art and Art History at RIT and a handful of bay area colleges. She has exhibited her work in museums and galleries throughout the United States. Mary is the proud parent of a person with Autism and is pleased to be contributing to this project. Her daughter Leah is a happy member of the Cedars Textile Arts Center community.
Anna Price
Panel #27
Anna approaches art-making with joyful confidence. As she says, “Art is so easy!” Whether using a paintbrush, colored pencil, or ballpoint pen, Anna makes marks with energy and vigor. She is as adept at working from her imagination as from a visual reference. When working from a source, she studies it carefully, analyzing its colors and shapes. Her dramatically composed paintings often feature powerful figures with geometrically abstract features and many-fingered hands. Anna additionally expresses her exuberant spirit as a singer, dancer, improv actor, and puppeteer.
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Shermae Randle
Panel #29
Shermae’s warm-hearted, exuberant nature and raucous sense of humor are apparent in her art. Her paper mache animals are full of personality and energy. The forms are bold and surprising, the colors are saturated and whimsical. Whether painting on a sculptural form or on a canvas, Shermae applies heavy coats of thick paint in bright colors
Robynn Vaughn
Panel #24
Robynn loves to travel and is an adventurous artist and weaver who is always looking for a new challenge. She enjoys exploring a variety of media, and her subject matter comes from a love of art history: patterned abstraction, architecture and portraiture. She prepares for her creative work with a thorough search for images and ideas in books and magazines, then proceeds in her own direction. Robynn has a defined vocabulary of bold forms she returns to again and again; some are playful while others seem to dig deeper at strong emotion. Robynn also has a talent for vocal impersonation and a background in theater, which might explain her flair for dramatic images.
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Zina Walker
Panel #30
No matter what medium she uses, Zina forges her own unique path. When drawing, she uses stencils and colored pencils. She loosely fills in the openings in the stencil, drawing with speed and energy. Then she moves the stencil and repeats until the page is covered with overlapping layers of color, pattern, and line. When painting with a brush, she throws her whole body into it, diving across the canvas to reach the farther end. When painting with a twig, she delicately skitters the inked end across the surface, sensitive to subtle variations of line and sensation. Zina is also an avid jewelry maker.
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Johnny Wall
Panel #18
Johnny is a huge fan of movie, television, and rock-and-roll narratives, which are subjects he returns to again and again in his artwork. Carefully drawn from the perspective of seeing his subject matter onscreen, Johnny pays close attention to gesture, movement and use of negative space. Crowding the edges of the composition, the action in Johnny’s version of these stories seems to continue beyond the scene. The strength of Johnny’s ties to family, friends, and celebrity heroes can be seen and felt in his sensitive portrayals of the people and animals in his world.
Julia Wise
Panel #10
Julia Wise is a young artist on the San Anselmo Arts Commission who currently attends Archie Williams high school. She has lived in San Anselmo most of her life and loves all different forms of art. Along with visual arts, she is passionate about music and is the lead singer of her band “Mystery of Birds.” She incorporated her love of music into her panel with the addition of a guitar on the left side. She wanted to keep it abstract while still adding something real and meaningful to be discovered if one looks hard enough.
