SHACK15 Artist Fellow in Conversation | Em Kettner
Date and Time
- Tuesday, Apr 28, 2026 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Location
Located on the 2nd floor of San Francisco's Ferry Building. Use the elevator to come to the 2nd floor in the Ferry Building’s “Office Lobby” - located underneath the giant clock tower, on the left side of the main market entrance.
Details
Join SHACK15 for the fourth of seven inaugural SHACK15 Artist Fellow activations with artist Em Kettner.
The evening will begin with a presentation by SHACK15 Artist Fellow Em Kettner about her work, followed by a conversation with curator and writer MacKenzie Stevens. Kettner conjures miniature worlds of interdependence from her Richmond studio, where porcelain limbs break and bind together through cotton and silk threads that refuse to let go. Her figurative sculptures and glazed tile drawings celebrate the erotic comedy of care—bodies intertwined in gestures both assistive and desiring, knitted to each other and the furniture that holds them.
Program:
- 5:30 PM — Doors open, cash bar service & music
- 6:00 PM — Artist presentation and conversation
- 6:45 PM — Brief Q&A and closing remarks
- 7:00 PM — Open conversation
- 8:00 PM — Event ends
About the Artist:
Em Kettner’s recent solo exhibitions include Cyrano at Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco, CA), Homebound at François Ghebaly Gallery (New York, NY), Sick Joke at Chapter NY (New York, NY), Slow Poke at François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), The Eternal Worm at HARPY (Rutherford, NJ), and Play the Fool at Goldfinch (Chicago, IL). She’s participated in two-person and group exhibitions at F2T Gallery (Milan, Italy), Pangée (Montreal, Canada), Foundry (Seoul, South Korea), Pipeline (London, UK), Outer Space (Concord, NH), the MFA (Boston, MA), Winter Street Gallery (Edgartown, MA), Candice Madey (New York, NY), and Et al. Gallery (San Francisco, CA), among others.
Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; the Ohana Center, Monterey, CA; the DePaul Art Museum and The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, both Chicago, IL. She has received the Wynn Newhouse Award, and in 2026, Kettner was named one of 16 finalists for the SFMOMA SECA Art Award.
About the Moderator:
MacKenzie Stevens was Director of the Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin and has held curatorial and research positions at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives, amongst others. She has been Deputy Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at California College of the Arts since September 2025.