Open on First Friday – Livia Stein: Silent Conversation

Transmission Gallery will be open till 8pm on First Friday, July 5th, for the Oakland Art Murmur Artwalk.

Stop by Transmission Gallery to see concurrent shows including Garret Compton Daniells’ installation, “Many Hands,” and Livia Stein’s solo painting and ceramics exhibition, “Silent Conversation.” While you’re in the building, check out GearBox Gallery, just downstairs.

Transmission Gallery presents Silent Conversation, a solo exhibition of figurative paintings and ceramic works by Livia Stein.
Animals, masks and mysterious characters act as stand-ins for the self and other in Stein’s ongoing investigations of the relationship between the two. With fearless use of color Stein pushes along the edge between frustration, fears, familiarity and affection in these nuanced and evocative works. Richly painted and expressive, they delve into the complexities of human interactions and the subtleties of unspoken communication. These pieces are not meant to be a quick read, rather one’s response shifts and changes over time, much as our personal relationships may shift and change in elusive quiet ways, not always immediately recognized perhaps but deeply felt, nevertheless.

Stein’s new ceramic works, also in the exhibition, boldly play off clown-like figures, reveling in playful/painful distortions. Slumped over, brightly standing, quizzical, they speak to various sensations and expressions of self.

Livia Stein was born in Dallas, Texas, and then raised in and around Los Angeles and Orange County. She studied History at UC Berkeley and pursued a master’s degree in South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent several months in India as a student and has continued to travel there during the past 20 years. Influenced to do photography by her father, a talented amateur photographer, she studied at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, though ultimately, she received her Master’s at San Francisco State University, Center for Interdisciplinary and Experimental Art, founded by Jock Reynolds, now the director of the Yale University Art Museum. Formerly a Professor of Art at Dominican University in San Rafael, Stein now lives in Oakland where she maintains a studio.

She received an NEA Fellowship while studying Indian History and Art at the University of Pennsylvania, after which she was an Artist in Residence in Baroda, India. In 2007 she had a Residency at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, which included a Solo Exhibition of her Paintings. She was again in India for a Painting Residency just outside New Delhi, winter 2012. In November of 2015 she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and completed a Residency in Morocco in 2019. Her most recent residency was in Mexico in 2024.

Stein’s work has been exhibited in Europe, South America, India and throughout the United States, and is in the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Oakland Museum of California, Dominican University, and University of Iowa Art Museum, to name a few.