"I like to make representational art, strip it down to its pure form, and imbue it with emotion," says Marina Berlin, a Soviet-born immigrant and former makeup artist turned painter who ultimately and unexpectedly found her true medium: chicken wire ("It cuts you. I have no fingerprints left.")

"I work in industrial wire mesh because it’s such a simple, utilitarian medium, but it’s so expressive at the same time. It’s usually hidden under the structure, but I want to bring it to the surface so that my work can have a transparency about it, literally and figuratively."

Her pieces reflect on a wide range of topics, from wildlife conservation to women's rights.

// Visit Marina Berlin at Hunter's Point Shipyard Artists Studios, Building 101, Studio 1405; shipyardartists.com/artist/marina-berlin.

“I’m attracted by geometric forms and thought I was going to be an architect,” says Santa Fe to San Francisco transplant Howard Hersh, whose sometimes bright, somewhat trippy, and always architectural wall sculptures are made of bass and birch wood custom-milled at a shop in the Bayview.

// Visit Howard Hersh at Hunters Point Shipyard Artists Open Studios in Building 117, Studio 3103; shipyardartists.com/artist/howard-hersh.

An African immigrant from Kenya, Stephen Namara, who's been living and working in SF since the late '80s among such local luminaries as Diebenkorn and Thiebaud, is aware that most people, before meeting him in person, assume he is Japanese rather than Black. It's thanks to that last name but also to a minimalism in his paintings that could almost be called zen; this style applies, whether he's painting a self-portrait or a Thiebaud-esque still life. "It definitely adds an ironic and complicated layer to the situation when it comes to being a Black man in America,” Namara says.

// Visit Stephen Namara at Hunters Point Shipyard Artists Studios in Building 101, Studio 1510; shipyardartists.com/artist/stephen-namara.