Programs and Events- Fueling Creativity, Building Community

Mother opened January 10th 2026 at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley, California.  The exhibit gathered artists who are excavating the oldest, most shape-shifting force we know: Mothering. The act of making, tending, holding, breaking, and becoming. Rather than defining “mother” as a role or identity, the works in this exhibition treated it as an elemental impulse, a generative engine that builds worlds as easily as it dismantles them. Across sculpture, painting, textiles, sound, film, and written language, the artists explored the ways care can be both tender and volcanic, how lineage can illuminate or obscure, and how the daily labor of sustaining life coexists with myth, memory, and revolt. The pieces moved between the intimate and the archetypal: a small gesture becomes a tectonic shift; a universal symbol arrives cracked, reimagined, or lovingly defaced. In a cultural moment saturated with performative dominance, where extractive, competitive, and hyper-individualized modes of power often shape public life, Mother proposed a counter-framework. The exhibition elevated relational intelligence, interdependence, and generative attention as vital creative alternatives. Power was not asserted through force or spectacle but cultivated through connection, insight, focus, and care.  Mother was not a portrait but a constellation. It invites viewers to consider mothering as a form of world-building: messy, porous, inventive, and profoundly human. In this gathering of perspectives, the maternal reclaimed not as a biological fact or sentimental trope, but as a radical, expansive framework for making meaning and making art.  

The North Street Project is an artist-driven initiative designed to help artists move into the next stage of their work. Through structured support, community exchange, and deep engagement with personal sources of inspiration, North Street provides a space where artists can reconnect to what animates their practice. The project centers curiosity, collaboration, and the slow-building of creative momentum, helping artists locate both each other and themselves in their evolving trajectories. 

Cohorts meet regularly for roundtables, workshops, and shared experiments that unfold across the months. The continuity matters: ideas don’t just spark, they build; relationships don’t just begin, they deepen; and new work doesn’t just start, it takes shape. Each cohort contributes to collective projects such as exhibitions, journals, or performances that carry the work into the public sphere.

We publish writing and visual work that challenges, inspires, and speaks to the creative life with honesty and depth. Our first issue, "Mother," was published in January 2026 with the support of the talented designer, Molly McCoy.  Online Flipbook 

Step away to step deeper into your work. This retreat isn’t about escaping—it’s about returning. To what matters, to what’s next, to the work that’s calling you forward. Rooted in nature and creative discipline, it’s a time to listen, to question, and to create without distraction. The next retreat will take place in December 2026.

The North Street Substack → A space for thinkers, makers, and the creatively restless. This is where we wrestle with ideas, share what we’re working through, and explore what it means to be an artist today and how to get your work "to the next level". Essays, reflections, provocations—this is where the conversation continues. Topics range from creative doubt and discipline, the role of slowness in art, and interviews with artists pushing the boundaries of their medium.