Crocodile Tears

Crocodile Tears Prints, Paintings and Drawings Sanaa Khan Mariangela Le Thanh February 13th to April 5th Reception for the artists February 20th from 7-9 Our upcoming exhibit, Crocodile Tears, is a culmination of a rather long relationship Nielsen Arts has developed with an extraordinary group of young artists and printmakers. Years ago, Nielsen hosted a popular San Francisco printshow called Lotte Arts. Several lovely young Berkeley women organized the show drawing in printmakers from all around the Bay Area with an emphasis on affordable art with 100% of proceeds going to the artists. Nielsen was pleased to host that year's exhbition and made lasting contacts and relationships with many of the artists, notably, Max Stadnik and Sanaa Khan. Max and Sanaa run a local lithography press, Max's Garage Press, which hosts the annual East Bay Print show offering prints from dozens of local printmakers. A couple of years ago, we had the audacity to pair Max Stadnik with friendly local subversive printmaker, Sam Vaughn, in a lithography show we called "Stone Soup". Since then we've been looking for an opportunity to show Max's partner and printmaker Sanaa Khan. So, finally, this long rambling relationship comes to this, latest bloom...Crocodile Tears. Crocodile Tears features a number of Prints, Paintings and Drawings exploring the tragicomic way us animal humans take ourselves too seriously. The artists share a sensibility in their art portraying the human condition with tenderness, humor and a just a nibble of satire. Sanaa Khan grew up in Silicon Valley as a California kid with an appreciation for creatures, puns, intricate illustrations, cartoons and the Indo-Pakistani motifs that adorned her Pakistani-American home. Sanaa went to UC Santa Cruz, discovered printmaking, and was hooked on the ability to make editions of original multiples. A small community of printmakers from Santa Cruz migrated to SF and the East Bay, and she and her partner started Max's Garage Press. The shop drew in talented, hard-working, like-minded printmakers from all over. In this exhibition Sanaa shares the space with her friend and colleague, Mariangela Le Thanh. Mariangela Le Thanh grew up in Italy as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and then moved to the States as a teenager. Being an immigrant has always been a huge part of how she perceived herself, but becoming part of Max’s Garage Press two years ago, a welcoming and inspiring community, has made it so that she looks back on that immigration experience with a smile, and transformed her introspection into a process of recording her integration in a community and culture less and less foreign; a process that sees her work, so often in the past about being lonely in a desolate land, more often now multiple characters appears in the drawings, wearing trendy clothes and displaying attitude! To learn more about these artists and a sample of their works www.SanaaKhan.com www.MaxsGaragePress.com www.TinySplendor.com www.candy-falls.com