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Title:	Rose B. Simpson: LEXICON
Date:	8/30/2025 - 8/2/2026
Address:	de Young, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118
Location:	San Francisco, CA
Hours:	Tuesday – Sunday: 9:30am – 5:15pm
Cost/Cover:	free - $20
Web Page:	https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/rose-b-simpson
Contact Info:	415-750-3600

Details:

This exhibition brings together two seemingly distinct art forms: Pueblo pottery and classic cars. In 2014, Rose B. Simpson, a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, refurbished a 1985 Chevy El Camino, transforming it with a black-on-black Tewa pottery motif. Simpson titled her work Maria in honor of renowned artist Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1887–1980), who popularized the distinctive black-on-black style. Ten years later, this exhibition debuts Simpson’s second customized car, a 1964 Buick Riviera painted in vibrant polychrome. Both cars are presented against an expansive geometric design, evoking the environment of the Southwest and transforming Wilsey Court into a bold, contemporary expression of Pueblo pottery traditions. Through this use of scale and space, Simpson forges connections between the ancestral and contemporary, and forms a new visual vocabulary, or lexicon, to assert her cultural heritage and its continuity.