Events

Take a moment to slow down with art and experience the special exhibition Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros. Each month, a Harwood educator will lead you through a series of exercises to explore a single work of art. This 30-minute conversation in the galleries will open your eyes and deepen your connection with art. This program is free for Members or included with Museum admission. View our admission rates and free categories here or become a Member.

November Focus: Patricia Michals Collaboration by Deborah Lujan

December Focus: San Fransisco de Asis

January Focus: …one day the machines stopped by rafa esparza

February Focus: Land Form III – Mother Ditch by Christine Howard Sandoval

Image: Harwood Museum of Art. 

Aldo & Estella Leopold Residency | Artist Talk

at Harwood Museum of Art

Free & Open to the Public

Join artist and writer Alex Arzt for a multimedia reading from her forthcoming book, Becoming Naturalized to Place: California’s Feral Cabbages (Heyday), which explores how a seemingly ordinary vegetable intertwines with histories of migration, colonization, domestication, and belonging. Currently a writer-in-residence with the Aldo & Estella Leopold Residency, Arzt maintains an interdisciplinary practice in Oakland, CA exploring relationships between plants, people, and place. Her work encourages renewed curiosity about the plants around us and a deeper awareness of the ecological and cultural histories embedded in familiar landscapes.

About the Artist

Alex Arzt is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and gardener based in Oakland, California. Her collaborative, research-driven, place-based practice moves across artist books, essays, installation, lectures, interactive objects, and living material processes. Through long engagements with landscapes, archives, plants, and overlooked histories, she creates work that traces how human intervention, migration, and time reshape ecologies and produce new forms of relation and belonging. She runs A Magic Mountain, a Risograph press publishing artist books and zines, with publications held in the collections of Stanford, the Getty Research Institute, and SFMOMA. From 2018 to 2022, she was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and has received grants from the Puffin Foundation and the East Bay Community Foundation. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her residencies include Ucross, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. From 2015 to 2023, she taught at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, SFAI, and VCU, and she currently works as a grant writer for the arts.

** THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT **

Join SOMOS for an exciting night celebrating Prose Month with acclaimed authors Rebeca Solnit and Ben Gucciardi. Book purchases available on-site through op.cit books. Tickets: $10/SOMOS members or $15/nonmembers.

About Rebecca Solnit
​​Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. ​Her newsletter of essays and analyses can be found at meditationsinanemergency.com.

Rebecca’s most recent book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (2026).

About Ben Gucciardi
Originally from San Francisco, California, Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of Arguments (Persea Books, 2026), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, and named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020).

His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Orion, and POETRY. Recent work has been featured by Poetry Daily and On Being’s Poetry Unbound. He
has received the James Dickey Poetry Prize from Five Points, the Booth Prize for Unexpected Literature and the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate. Support for his work includes fellowships and residencies from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Jentel Foundation, PLAYA, and Artsmith.

He founded Soccer Without Borders in 2006 and continues to work with refugee and immigrant youth through soccer, education, and community-building.