NOW OPEN: Excited to share images of my solo exhibition, Move The Plot, at the San Josè Museum of Art, curated by Juan Omar Rodriguez.
“Christine Howard Sandoval: Move the
Plot, on view from April 10 through October 18, 2026. This solo exhibition brings together sculpture, drawing, and large-scale installation to examine the layered histories and forms of knowledge embedded in California’s wetlands. Featuring a new body of work focused on the Bay Area and Central Valley marshes, the exhibition foregrounds landscapes shaped by centuries of Indigenous stewardship, colonial intervention, and modern engineering.”
Installation photos of Christine Howard Sandoval: Move the Plot on view April 10–October 18, 2026 at the San José Museum of Art. Photo by Glen Cheriton.
@sanjosemuseumofart@juanomar.r
Honored to be included among such an incredible group of artists in #waysofknowing @walkerartcenter
A special thank you to the brave visionary that brought us together @rosarioguiraldes . The show holds so many beautiful connections across a diverse range of art practices. I hope you will visit and experience the magic IRL!
Ways of Knowing includes work by losu Aramburu, Sammy Baloji, Anna Boghiguian, Cabello/Carceller, Chang Yuchen, Petrit Halllaj, Sky Hopinka, Christine Howard Sandoval, Eduardo Navarro, Gala Porras-Kim, & Rose Salane.
Drain, 2026
Blackened steel, California coastal soil, clay, sand, cotton t-shirt, paper, MDF, and casters
With a view of a photograph of a California twined water basket.
📸 2 +4: Installation photo of Christine Howard Sandoval: Move the Plot on view April 10–October 18, 2026 at the San José Museum of Art. Photo by Glen Cheriton.
📸 4: Objects: tools, baskets, and painted or carved walls or rocks P7:17
C. Hart Merriam Collection of Native American Photographs, BANC PIC 1978.008–PIC:P7:17
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
#movetheplot
@sanjosemuseumofart
thoughts on smuggling, the archive, and language
A conversation between myself and literary scholar Zac Zimmer. 🔗in bio🔗
Published in the beautifully designed catalogue for Weather and the Whale. The catalogue is filled with artist essays, scientific research, transcribed conversations and visual information from 2 years of our work as an interdisciplinary cohort @ucscias
🐋 @rachelnelson19@alex.charlotte.m 🌺
Still life can feel monumental.
I’ve been living with this image for two years since encountering it in the C. Hart Merriam archive.
The water basket is made by twining grass into a spiral weave. The interior is coated with tar, a naturally occurring part of the geology along the California coast line, which provides a waterproof seal.
The image itself has no provenance and is among a series of similar baskets photographed on a white fabric against a white airy background. The set of images are anomalies in the collection, and might have been gifts.
Tracing the basket’s origins brought me to the story of a woman who lived on what is now called San Nicolas Island. The accounts of her story inspired the fiction “Island of The Blue Dolphins”. There is an etching published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1901. The caption reads, “Within The Inclosure Sat The Object of Their Search”. She avoided capture, it is said, for 15 years on the island. She is object, and thus she can be captured. In the background there is a slight outline of a basket resembling the form of the basket in the still life. The form is unique within Californian basketry, the tall neck and wide gourd-like base is designed for pouring and heating.
This image of this particular basket is where I started the journey that led to my newest body of artwork that will open in April at the San Jose Museum of Art in CA.
I feel like I’m teaching like my life depends on it right now.
I’ll do whatever it takes to use my platform, the classroom, to teach students to read challenging texts about love, what we can do to insist on our humanity, and that art and aesthetics are a door into symbolic realms that have agency to create new paradigms. I leave the classroom these days feeling like I’ve given everything, like we’ve given everything in that sacred space of study, and yet the feeling of failure is always there. I know my time is limited, nothing is permanent, stability is a myth among many. And so, it feels so urgent to put it all on the table right now. We are out of time.
A genealogy of the stack.
Which continues to question our own erasure amidst the abundance of evidence of our existence.
1. Archie Moore, ‘kith and kin’ 2024, Australia Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2024.
2. Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Installation view of inaugural solo exhibition, Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY, 1990.
Thrilled that The Document Mounds have been acquired by @sanjosemuseumofart 🙏🏽and are currently on display in Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection.
Probably my most autobiographical work to date, the sculpture incorporates a bureaucratic document my great grandfather Juan Antonio Feliz submitted to the BIA- just to see his handwriting spoke volumes. The work uses weaving and piling as a gesture towards redaction, a way to reclaim the Chalon ancestral tree he identified as proof of his connection to the land. While my generation had to turn to the archive to know our relations, he just knew. What happened to this knowledge in just two generations?
This work couldn’t have found a better home in the town where I grew up. Grateful to be in dialogue w @elrafaesparza , Jay DeFeo, and the brilliant Ruth Asawa. Too many layers for an IG post- but this has me UP today!☝🏽
Document Mounds- Application for Enrollment with the Indians of the State of California Under The Act of May 28, 1928 (6 pages), 2021, 24H X 16 X 7D inches each, inkjet print on vinyl, tape, adobe mud, and steel.
📷by Glen Cheriton
🙏🏽 @juanomar.r
🙏🏽 @parraschheijnen
Love the pedagogical role that university galleries can play in the study of art. Makes me smile every time I get an image of students and researchers gathered around my work deep in conversation- what an incredible privilege to have an audience like this.
The Whale & The Weather will be up until March, 2026
🙏🏽 @ucscias
#thefirstcolorisred
🥂The last day of an exhibition is as important as the first.🥂
Thank you to everyone who visited Ways of Knowing and sent treasured messages of support and appreciation. It’s been an honor to be included in such an expansive exhibition. I had followed Rosario’s curatorial pursuits for years, specifically her deep study of the unwieldy field of drawing, hoping to work together. I am thankful my manifestations worked.
🏆Thank you to the team at the Walker who cared for, installed, wrote about, and lived with these works for several months.
#waysofknowing
@walkerartcenter@rosarioguiraldes
