Artist Risa Iwasaki Culbertson, Part 2 (S8E4)

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. It was 2010, and seeing that guy with the broken guitar on Risa’s next visit to SF was the nail in the coffin, so to speak. She was moving here. One of her friends who already lived here found a spot in The Sunset for her. She packed up a car and drove north with her dad. She didn’t necessarily have a plan back then, but Risa and I share how The City just got both of us and hasn’t let go. Risa tells the story of how her parents moved to Japan briefly when she was 18. She asked her mom, “So, why did you come back (to California)?” And her mom told her (paraphrasing), “Because you wouldn’t be able to do what you’re doing there, you wouldn’t have the same opportunities.” It further affirmed for Risa her decision to move to San Francisco and pursue art. I ask Risa to catch us up on the last 15 years of her life. Generally speaking, she’s been working to find her voice as an artist. She got into letterpress-printing, which she did for more than 10 years. She started a company with a friend and worked there for three years before branching out on her own. Doing so wasn’t easy, but in hindsight, it made Risa stronger. She talks about a specific strain of misogyny that presented itself to women printmakers as well as how Risa handled that nonsense. That solo venture started off as a stationery company. She reached back to childhood memories, of a time when she witnessed letters coming to her mom from Japan as well her mom’s messages back to her homeland. Risa saw those as lifelines to her mom’s people back home, and wanted to preserve those memories and emotions and help others to do the same. Papallama was born. Before we talk about another fun thing Risa is up to, I need to express my newish-found love for 540 Bar on Clement. It’s where Risa holds monthly “Drink and Draw” events, and it’s quickly become one of my new favorite spots in The City. Risa started her monthly art events at the bar in 2022. The idea came from her letterpress days, when she’d do frequent “Letter-Writing Saturdays.” She told her friend Leejay, one of 540’s owners, about it, and they decided to bring that same idea to the bar. Shortly after they hatched the plan, though, Risa’s dad passed away. The first drink and draw was a month later, and so many of Risa’s friends turned out for her. What started out as every second Thursday of the month now takes place at 540 Bar on the third Thursdays of every month. Risa speaks in a little more detail of the care and intention she puts into her Drink and Draw events. For me, it’s an extension of her art as well as her love of community. But it’s also just her being a good host. The next Drink and Draw takes place the same day that this podcast drops—October 16, 2025. See ya there! The conversation shifts to Risa talking about taking part in our Every Kinda People show at Mini Bar. And we end the podcast with Risa sharing all the ways to find her, both online and in real life. Follow her on Instagram @risa_iwasaki_culbertson. Her website is risaculbertson.com. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Risa Iwasaki Culbertson was born in Japan. In this episode, meet and get to know Risa, one of the 12 artists in Every Kinda People, our group show at Mini Bar. Please join us this Sunday, Oct. 19, from 4–7 p.m. at Mini Bar for our Closing Party happy hour. Some of the artists will be on hand, as will friendly bartenders and me (Jeff). Back to Risa, though. Her mom is Japanese and her dad is from Ventura County in Southern California. Risa spent her first five or six years in Japan before her parents moved to California. She has memories of life in Japan before they moved. And after the move, Risa often went back to visit her grandmother. Risa says that, as a kid, she loved going back and forth between two very different cultures Her dad was in the military, which is what brought him to Japan, where he met his wife. Risa is their only child, something she and I go on a bit of a sidebar about. I’m not an only child, but I’ve met and befriended my fair share of well-adjusted only children. Hell, I married one. Risa found creativity early, and ran with it. Her parents were older, and being half-American, half-Japanese, she didn’t feel like she fully belonged in either culture. Risa might’ve gotten her creativity from her mom, who did pottery, quilting, and other artistic things. Her dad was “a mad scientist of sorts,” she says. He was into taking things apart and repurposing found objects. In Southern California, Risa spent time with other Hapa kids. Her mom was part of a large Japanese community, and there were plenty of mixed-race kids among that group. She’s very much a product of the Eighties and Nineties and Southern California. She remembers the beginning of grunge and flannels. Risa remembers vividly when Kurt Cobain died (1994). Middle school for her happened in Orange County. Risa did hula dancing and tap dancing for many years, always while also painting and drawing. In high school, her art teacher was switched out and replaced with a nun who told the kids they couldn’t use black inks. It felt to young Risa like too religious of a message, and it instilled in her an attitude of not wanting anyone to tell her what she can and cannot do with her art. She never took another art class. She was also something of a social butterfly in her high school years. Risa had different friend groups and in hindsight, feels like they were constantly getting together and doing things. Then we turn to what got Risa out of Southern California. One friend she met in college moved back to San Francisco, and another friend from down south wanted to move here. She visited The City and remembers sitting in a cafe talking to strangers. She felt then and there that the friendliness was right for her, and something she wasn’t getting in Orange County. I share a quick story of being in Orange County and getting phone directions to a bar. Unbeknownst to me and my friends that night, the map put us on a highway … on foot. Yep. We rewind a little to chat about Risa’s time in college. She always wanted to be at least art-adjacent, and so she took classes on manufacturing and even calculus. Thing is, she ended up liking calculus. Earlier in life, she sold stuff she made through catalogs she also created. That early entrepreneurship informed some business classes she later took in college, including business law. It all lead to Risa’s getting a business degree. Right away, she started recognizing a disconnect between art and business. Back to her first impression of San Francisco, that day in that Haight Street cafe made The City feel like a place where she could get to know people. Risa shares a story that happened right before her move here. It involves a man boarding a BART train she and her friends were on. He had a broken guitar. They’d made googly eyes at each other, but she and her friends were too scared to talk with him. When he got off the train, he looked back and waved. Risa figured she’d never see this guy again. Three months later, she was back to visit her friend who lived here. She’d thought about him, but figured there was no way to actually find him. Then, as you can guess, it happened. Risa says she’s still friends with that guy to this day. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Risa, which includes the story of her move to San Francisco. We recorded this podcast at Risa’s studio in the Inner Richmond in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I chat with Broke-Ass Stuart about, well, a lot of stuff. But we also talk about Stuart’s new book, The Worst of Broke-Ass Stuart: 20 Years of Love, Death, and Dive Bars. The book is available at your favorite local indie bookstore and also at Bookshop.org. And get very affordable tickets for next Friday’s (Oct. 17, 2025) book-launch party at Kilowatt here. We recorded this podcast at Emperor Norton’s Boozeland in September 2025. Photos of Stuart by Jeff Hunt

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. To get us caught up to what Lisa is doing these days, we go back to her arrival in The Bay. Her work at the prop shop led to some other jobs, but competition was fierce and she sought a way to integrate art into the labor she undertook. She found it when the production of James and the Giant Peach hired her to do puppet fabrication. The work took place in a warehouse in South of Market and it wasn’t quite as glamorous as people think. In fact, it was grueling, but rewarding. Her boss on that job was a woman named Kat. That was 30 years ago, and the two are good friends today. In fact, Kat is shooting a documentary about Lisa’s incredible life called Made of Iron. More on that below. Lisa wanted to stick with animation, but was never able to get an art director job. She considered moving to LA, but shut that down pretty quickly. And so she decided to learn a trade—something her dad did back in the day. She went to a job fair and asked what the hardest trade represented there that day was. Lisa’s trade became ironwork. Her introduction to the folks who did ironwork was a little rough. She was required to visit job sites and get an ironworker to sponsor her. It took her six months to get hired. She met a guy named Danny Prince who helped her get work in The City making precasts (think parking garages). She’d work during the week and go to classes for ironworking on Saturdays. Ironwork has, quite possibly since its inception, been very much a “man’s” world. Lisa ran head-first into bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination from the get-go. But a combination of her own drive and the advice of a few mentors helped her get through it. There might have even been some “Go fuck yourself”s along the way, too. That said, the highs were high and the lows were low. “I never cried on the job,” Lisa told me. But the tears would come once she was home in the evenings. Still, she persevered, and things got better and better for her. One of her early favorite jobs was on the then-new California Academy of Sciences. Besides it just being a really cool building, Lisa got to do many different jobs all around the place. She says it was incredible watching it all come together. Another job highlight was Lisa’s work on the arena that came to be known as Chase Center (and for Valkyries fans, “Ballhalla”). Photos of Lisa helping build Chase can be seen in the gallery to the left here. Another was Marin General Hospital. And then there was the Golden Gate Bridge. After Chase Center and another, lesser job (and a divorce), Lisa got offered a job working on the Suicide Deterrent Net on my favorite bridge. But it wasn’t just any job. She would be foreperson. She didn’t think she could do it because she didn’t know bridge work (despite working a little on the new Bay Bridge). After being told it was foreperson or nothing, she decided to take the job. Of course the crew she would oversee comprised all bridge-work veterans. Her approach was to be respectful of that. And her crew respected her back for it. The job entails taking out old pieces and beefing up the infrastructure of the bridge, which was finished back in 1933. Lisa talks at some length about a societal need for us all to have more respect for labor. I’m with her 100 percent. There’s a lot that we take for granted every day, all over the place. Many people worked and still do work hard as hell so that we can have shit like roads and sidewalks, transit tunnels, housing, and so much more. We should recognize and respect that work. We end the episode with Lisa’s thoughts about life, her work, and what she loves about San Francisco and the Bay Area. You can donate to help fund Kat’s documentary at the Made of Iron website. And follow that adventure on Instagram @madeofirondocumentary.

Lisa Davidson is an ironworker with Local 377 San Francisco. Her team currently does ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we’ll get to that. In this episode, S8 E3, meet and get to know Lisa. I first did that back in May at our Keep It Local art show at Babylon Burning (thanks, Mike and Judy!). Someone at the party that night approached me to let me know that there was a person there who works on the best bridge in the world (fact) and that I should meet them. I love when people really get me. Right away, I was drawn in by Lisa’s warmth, charm, and sense of humor. And so we sat down outside in Fort Mason in early August and Lisa shared her life story. She was raised feeling like she had complete freedom. It was something Lisa didn’t realize at the time, but looking back, it became clear to her. She was raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, in a liberal household. Her grandparents lived in Boston itself, and she loved visiting them when she was a kid. Her grandfather ran a tchotchke store in town called House of Hurwitz, and Lisa says that the place had a big influence on her outlook. It was located on the edge of what they call, to this day, the “Combat Zone” (think: red-light district). Her “wheelin’ and dealin’” grandpa sold mylar balloons to the Boston Gardens for events held there. He told young Lisa that she could blow up balloons and that that could be her future. Lisa has a brother four years younger than she is. Her dad was an electrician. One of his clients was a lithograph press in Boston. He’d sometimes get paged for a job and have to leave his family, although Lisa now wonders whether he just wanted to get away from time to time. When she was a senior in high school, her parents divorced, despite being a very loving couple up to that point. She says her mom was “crazy in an I Love Lucy way. She was raised in the Fifties the way many young women at that time were, in a way that did its best to stifle any creativity. Suffice to say that her mom had fun decorating the house Lisa grew up in. Despite her and her family’s Jewishness, Lisa revolted and wanted to go to Catholic school or just become a preppy L.L. Bean-type kid. She of course regrets rejecting the norms of her family nowadays. It was what it was. The family was more culturally Jewish than religious, though, something Lisa says was a huge influence on who she’s become as an adult. She graduated high school and went to college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It wasn’t Ivy League, but it was (and is) something of a preppy school. Where Lisa grew up, there was an expectation that kids would go to college, and so she went. It wasn’t super far from home, but it wasn’t close either. Her parents did suggest that Lisa maybe go to art school. But in her family, it was the kid dismissing that idea. “That’s a not real school,” young Lisa told them. She liked sports. At Amherst, she joined the crew team. She liked the competition and how good of shape it got you in. She liked it, but it was a lot of pressure. She graduated, took a year off working odd jobs, then dove into art school. So next up was Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She was surprised she got in, and even navigated a bit of impostor syndrome. Surprised by the school’s acceptance of her and feeling somewhat intimidated by other artist students, Lisa ended up doing printmaking. Rather than aiming for a master’s degree, she sought a second bachelor’s. Her studies had her spending a lot of time in the school’s foundry, where she discovered welding. She loved it. During her time back in Amherst, she’d heard of a guy who was going to Alaska. (Lisa and I go off-topic into our shared distaste for camping at this point in the conversation.) Back to the Alaska story, her mom was fully supportive and even took her shopping at an Army Navy store. She went there and worked in canneries through the summer between her junior and senior years at Amherst. While she was up north, doing jobs all over the state, she met folks from California. From the stories they told her, it became a place she wanted to go. But first, RISD. In Rhode Island, she met a guy from Danville in the East Bay. When his family learned of her interest in our state, they invited Lisa to spend a summer with them, which she did. And she and her friend came to The City as often as they could. After those few months, she knew that California—and specifically, The Bay—was for her. She needed to go back and finish that second round of college in Rhode Island, and she did. After that, Lisa “beelined it” back to Oakland. She found work in a prop shop making sculptures out of foam with a chainsaw. Check back this Thursday for Part 2 with Lisa Davidson. We recorded this podcast at Equator Coffee in Fort Mason in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

Listen in as I chat with Joanna Lioce all about the new Mabuhay Gardens. Joanna is booking monthly shows in the new legendary North Beach punk venue through the end of the year. Get tickets for the Oct. 3, 2025, Mabuhay Gardens show featuring Kelley Stoltz, White Lightning (PDX), and The Boars at EventBrite. We recorded this podcast at Vesuvio Café in September 2025.

Listen in as I chat with David Gonzales, creator of Homies and this year’s San Francisco Lowrider Parade Grand Marshal. We recorded this podcast over Zoom in September 2025. Photo of David by Anthony Gonzales

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Although it made all kinds of sense for Shrey to move halfway around the world to go to art school, he says it was "an uphill battle” convincing his parents of the plan. Still, his mom was and is a champion of her son and his art. It was 2018 and Shrey was 20. We talk about his experience of arriving in San Francisco, a city that was “such a beacon of hope” for him. He dedicated himself to his studies at CCA. He also paid serious attention to the news, and even attempted political art. When that didn’t pan out financially, a professor at CCA strongly encouraged Shrey to stay with painting, that it was his lane. This was just before the pandemic. When he got his first stimulus check, Shrey bought an easel and began going out and painting en plein air. He did this so much and promoted his art so well that, by the time he graduated, he had started getting commissions. He was able to become a full-time artist—a dream of his. Shrey is such an artist, through and through, that he even has an art job. Like, a job-job. Four days a week, Shrey works for ArtSpan—a local arts nonprofit possibly best-known for Open Studios. Shrey shares the history of ArtSpan and OpenStudios. What began in 1975 in South of Market as a way for artists shunned by galleries to show their art and sell it today sees around 600 artists opening their studio doors all over The City. Shrey manages the Arts and Neighborhoods program for ArtSpan. That group helps organize exhibitions during Open Studios at non-studio locations. Mission Bowling Club is one such location. In fact, Shrey got his first art show after graduation through help from ArtSpan. It’s a beautiful full-circle story. That first show led to other shows. And Shrey credits his entrepreneurial brain for recognizing an opportunity in all of this—if a cafe has suitable walls, you can talk with the owner about hanging art by local artists, promote an opening, and make things happen. And so that’s what he did. Partly because putting on one art show, not to mention doing multiple shows at the same, is what the kids refer to as a lot, Shrey focussed his efforts at one location. Ballast Coffee on West Portal became the home of Ingleside Gallery. The first art show at his gallery brought in more than $10,000 in sales. I have to insert some editorial here, so thanks for indulging me. Shrey and I recorded this podcast before our Every Kinda People show. I won’t pretend that my own art curation is anywhere close to the level that he (and my friend Anita of KnownSF and countless others around SF, The Bay, and the world) operates on. But Shrey does speak to the nature of both the volume and the intensity of the work that goes into putting on an art show. In my own way, I relate. Back to my and Shrey’s conversation, I ask him to talk about how our lives intersected. It was earlier this year after I recorded with Ellen Lo of Ask Me SF. I needed to drop off a Storied: SF hoodie for Ellen, so she asked me to meet her one Saturday morning on Ocean Avenue. She and some friends and community members would be out there painting a mural over a dilapidated street wall in front of a PG&E substation. Sign me up! After politely declining to add my own (attempted) artistic touch to their creation that day, Ellen introduced me to a friend of hers. Right away, I got a sense of that exuberance Shrey embodies, a trait I am now very familiar with. We end the episode with thoughts about the Every Kinda People show, up at Mini Bar through October 19. Follow Shrey on Instagram @shreypurohit and @inglesidegallery.

Shrey Purohit is the kind of person everyone should know. Not know about (although obviously that’s what this podcast aims to do), but know personally. In this podcast, Episode 2 of Season 8 of Storied: San Francisco, meet and get to know Shrey. A few of his art pieces are up at Mini Bar through Oct. 19 in our Every Kinda People show. And at the risk of being hyperbolic, through the experience of putting that show together, I am very happy that I’ve come to know Shrey. We begin with Shrey’s birth, which happened in Mumbai, India, in 1997. Both his parents are doctors. Shrey’s mom comes from a family of doctors going back four generations. Her dad (Shrey’s grandfather) was driven out of what is now Pakistan and went to Mumbai with his possessions in hand to start a new life at just 15 years old. Shrey speaks of how fond he was of that grandfather, even describing some of his hobbies and wardrobe choices (bow ties because regular ties would get in the way of his medical duties). Shrey’s family was rooted in the Sindhi culture in India. It’s a community steeped in entrepreneurship, and his grandfather was one of the first in his area to be a male gynecologist. His wife was an anesthesiologist and worked with her husband. Shrey jumps ahead to note that his parents, too, worked together in the medical field. His dad specializes in diabetes treatment. The two met when Shrey’s dad was treating his mom’s aunt. It was what Shrey calls a “semi-arranged marriage,” but to my understanding, more like a “hey, here’s someone who might be good for you” type of situation. He says his parents’ coming together had some love to it, which is probably more than most arranged marriages. They built a medical practice that became very successful, he says. So successful, in fact, that it allowed both of their children—Shrey and his younger sister—to live abroad. Because his sister was born when he was three or so, he got to help name her. “It was my first creative project,” Shrey says. Shrey lived in Mumbai until he finished school. His formative memories take place in his neighborhood of Colaba in South Mumbai, near the water and the Gateway of India. He says it has “big-town energy with a small-town vibe.” Everyone knows everyone else, and Shrey has brought that same spirit with him halfway around the world. We go on a sidebar about how San Francisco can have that big city/small town feel. Shrey got started doing graphic design while still living in India. He even went to school for it over there. He did well in it, so well that he hired a few employees. But he soon found that people don’t take kindly to being bossed around by a 17-year-old. He pivoted from design to art, something he’d always wanted to do. A formative experience for Shrey was going to an event a Kulture Shop in Mumbai, where he met Jas Charanjiva. Jas, who’s originally from Napa, helped open Kulture Shop to support Indian artists. He was 15 and had found a mentor in Jas. Shrey has an uncle in Millbrae whom he had visited with family a few years before. His uncle took them to several spots around town, including to AT&T Park for a Giants game. His Indian school credits transferred, and so, when Shrey was 19, he moved to The Bay to attend California College of the Arts and study comics, illustration, and painting. Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Shrey. And on Friday, look for a bonus episode with the 2025 San Francisco Low Rider Parade Grand Marshal, David Gonzales. This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Root Division in South of Market in August 2025. Photography by Nate Oliveira

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Marga had just arrived in San Francisco and lived in a collective house with a lesbian and two gay men ("of course, the decorations were fabulous"). It was a bit of a party house, known for throwing spectacular Halloween fests. Marga talks about collective living, chore charts and stuff like that. Eventually, the woman Marga drove across country with split from her, as so often happens (I certainly relate). Everyone who lived in that first house, she says, was into rolfing and coffee enemas. Marga wasn’t too keen on any of it. The meals were vegetarian and bland, and perhaps most importantly for her, not Cuban. Her roommates gave painful hugs and held hands before they ate. It just wasn’t her scene. And so she found work in a Hippie coffeehouse called Acme Cafe on 24th Street. All her coworkers there were performers. She was just happy to make omelettes. Underground celebrities like R. Crumb and John Waters came in regularly, and Marga loved it. Her fellow cafe employees, many of whom were artists, would ask her, “So, what do you do?” And she would answer, “I make omelettes.” She also worked at a bath house on Market called Finilla’s Finnish Baths. Marga’s job there was to hand out towels to spa-goers. She later learned that the owner sexually abused and exploited workers there, mostly the masseuses. A perk of her job, though, was access to the steam sauna, and Marga took advantage of that as much as she could. That sauna room also served as a meeting space for a group of older women. One of them, an older Mexican woman, would leave her Chihuahua in the lobby while she steamed, the idea being that Marga would take care of the dog. Eventually, Ms. Montoya got 86’d from the bathhouse for steaming flour tortillas in the sauna on the hot stones. Another regular, a famous singer whom Marga won’t name, was kicked out for a different reason. Marga takes a sidebar to explain what a “primal scream” is. Then she takes us back to the sauna and the famous singer, who proceeded one day to launch into her own primal scream. Marga describes other women from the sauna running out frantically. Meanwhile, she says, over in the men’s sauna, “there was a different kind of screaming.” She goes on another sidebar about the time she got crabs at the bathhouse. You just have to listen to that one. Marga also had a job as a gardener at a house in Pac Heights, despite not loving that kind of work. She shares a story of using the “servant’s bathroom” on that job and discovering that she had crabs. Then the conversation shifts to Marga’s next show—Spanish Stew. It will be her 15th one-person show, which she began developing at The Marsh here in The City, where she did her first-ever one-person show back in the day. The New Conservatory Theater Center commissioned the show, which is set in 1976 San Francisco, the year that Marga landed here. It’s also about cooking, something near and dear to her heart. Marga points out that the New Conservatory Theater Center recently lost its NEA funding thanks to the fascist US regime, but that the community is helping keep the theater afloat. Please go see this show. I know I will. It opens October 17, 2025. For more info and to buy tickets, please visit Marga’s website. Follow her on Instagram @themargagomez to keep up with everything she does and says. This episode is brought to you by Standard Deviant Brewing. We recorded this podcast at Noe Cafe in Noe Valley in August 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt