Radical Matriarchs | Lena Wolff & Miriam Klein Stahl

Radical Matriarchs brings together the work of Bay Area artists and wives Lena Wolff and Miriam Klein Stahl. For this exhibition we invite you to an intimate extension of Stahl and Wolff’s home, offering a glimpse into their lives together as artists, as a couple, as activists, and members of a broader community.

The exhibition features years of ephemera and selections of their private art collection, a well as modular furniture by local woodworker Nobuto Suga. Elements from their home are paired with paper collages and wood sculptures by Wolff that form an interplay of repeated interconnected cosmic symbols found in the patterns of 18th and 19th century American quilts. Linked to craft, female creative production, and folk art, her work adapts and upholds the American quilt as a formidable predecessor to geometric abstraction, minimalism, Op art, feminist art, as well as an emblem of democracy at large. Alongside Wolff’s pieces, Miriam Klein Stahl’s original papercuts from the New York Times bestselling children’s books Rad Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide populate the walls, celebrating the lost, incomplete or untold stories of countless women throughout time.

Together Wolff and Stahl have been a steady force in the arts, activist, and queer community of the Bay Area for over two decades. More recently, since the 2016 presidential election, they have placed their home at the intersection of these communities, providing a space for political activism and feminist meetings every month which take the name of Solitary Sundays. The duo is also behind the Oakland/Berkeley Stands United Against Hate posters, made in collaboration with designer Lexi Visco. This is the first time Wolff and Stahl have exhibited in a two-person show that focuses not just on their work but their lives together as artists and a couple.