Cube Space Gallery

The City of Berkeley Cube Space is a contemporary art gallery located in the heart of downtown Berkeley at 2010 Addison Street. Unlike traditional galleries, its curated exhibits are always visible to the public through three glass walls in a 200 sq. ft. space. The space features a rotating series of three-month exhibitions by emerging and mid-career Bay Area artists.

Current Exhibition 

In Abundance, by Abiam Alvarez

On display July – October 2026

Based in Gilroy, CA, Abiam Alvarez’s practice is deeply rooted in the agricultural landscapes of California’s Central Valley. Born in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, Alvarez immigrated to California in 1999 and grew up in the farming community of Firebaugh, located 40 miles west of Fresno. His early experiences working in the fields continue to shape his work, which explores labor, immigration, consumerism, and the socio-political realities of agriculture.

Alvarez creates lifelike ceramic depictions of produce – such as oranges, tomatoes, cantaloupes, and squash – often paired with the vessels, soil, and tools used to grow them. These forms honor farmworkers while drawing attention to the physical and often overlooked labor behind food production. His work frequently contrasts abundance with decay. Fruit may appear plentiful at first glance, but closer inspection reveals signs of rot or imperfection. Through repetition and scale, Alvarez highlights both the bounty of agriculture and the demanding labor required to sustain it, prompting reflection on our own patterns of food consumption.

Embracing the tactile and unpredictable nature of clay, Alvarez values its physicality and its origins in the earth. His process requires both hands-on construction and a willingness to accept uncertainty, particularly during firing, when outcomes remain partially beyond the artist’s control. As Alvarez notes, “A lot could go wrong in the kiln – cracking, exploding, colors not turning out how you envisioned. Even if it survives the first firing, the second could prove disastrous.” This element of risk mirrors the precarity embedded in agricultural labor.

In addition to produce, Alvarez incorporates worn or rusted machinery, pointing to the essential yet often undervalued role of human labor. His work poses a critical question: what would remain if that labor disappeared? His sculptures act as both tribute and warning, emphasizing the deep connections between land, labor, and the food we consume.

Do you know where your food comes from, or how it reaches your table? During the COVID-19 pandemic, workers across critical infrastructure sectors – healthcare, food service, agriculture, transportation, and public safety – continued reporting to work on-site despite widespread lockdowns. Labeled “essential workers,” they kept society running while often facing heightened risks and long-standing inequities. Six years later, many of these workers remain disproportionately represented among low-wage earners, women, and people of color. This installation invites reflection on that reality and recognition of the labor and sacrifice of farmworkers, whose work sustains us every day.

@abiam.alvarez
www.abiamalvarezsculpture.com
Curated by Kevin B. Chen

Past Exhibitions

Zahāk, by BSisters (Behnaz & Baharak Khaleghi) 

April – July 2026

Working across a range of media, BSisters (Behnaz & Baharak Khaleghi) explore alternative approaches to feminist art-making within a Middle Eastern context. While each maintains an independent practice, they have collaborated for several years, producing textile sculptures and short videos. Originally from Iran, both earned MFAs in the Bay Area – Behnaz from UC Berkeley and Baharak from San José State University.

Their collaborative work centers humor and pleasure, intertwined with aesthetics of disgust and horror to challenge conventions of propriety. By disrupting dominant notions of “good taste,” they reimagine beauty as rooted in women’s desire – self-defined, unruly, and resistant to male-centered standards and claims of cultural ownership.

This work unfolds in the shadow of recent events in Iran. In January 2026, millions of Iranians protested nationwide, chanting “Down with Dictator,” “Down with Khamenei,” and “Long Live Shah,” a call for the return of the exiled prince and a central figure in the opposition movement. Demonstrators demanded an end to the Islamist regime and the restoration of human rights, freedom, and self-determination. The protests were met with a brutal crackdown, with more than 40,000 people massacred in the streets.

Following these events, tensions between the Islamic Republic, the U.S., and Israel escalated, culminating in war in February. As devastating as it has been, many Iranians, both inside and outside the country, have viewed it as one of the few remaining paths toward freedom after years of enduring a regime marked by extreme brutality. Long at war with its own people, the state has drained national resources while waging a relentless campaign of repression, one that has received far less attention than the bombs themselves. Since then, conditions inside the country have grown increasingly restrictive. Expanded surveillance, internet shutdowns, checkpoints, and arbitrary searches have transformed daily life into a system of control, where even private spaces feel subject to scrutiny and interrogation.

The installation draws on millennia-old Persian mythology, particularly the enduring narratives of the struggle between good and evil, as seen in Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic, the Shahnameh. Among its figures is Zahāk, a tyrant who ruled Iran for 1,000 years, marked by serpents growing from his shoulders and fed daily with human brains – a potent symbol of insatiable power. Here, cannibalism functions as a conceptual lens for examining consumption, desire, and extraction. It becomes a metaphor for how systems – social, political, and psychological – feed on what surrounds them. Within this sculptural environment, bodies, objects, and ideas circulate in cyclical, sometimes parasitic relationships, highlighting tensions between creation and destruction, survival and excess – forces that shape both mythology and contemporary artistic practice.

@bsisterskhaleghi
www.behnazandbaharak.com
Curated by Kevin B. Chen

BaZi 八字: Ancestral Intelligence, by Ahn Lee

January 2026 - April 2026

Ahn Lee’s ceramics practice brings together personal storytelling, historical inquiry, and material experimentation. Their work draws on archival research into the Cantonese diaspora while engaging traditions of craft, cosmology, and community knowledge. Through a queer Cantonese lens, Lee examines how histories of capitalism and imperialism shape identity, while imagining futures grounded in ancestral connection. Though academically trained, their approach remains intuitive and embodied, weaving critical history with direct lived experience.

For Lee, ceramics function as both vessel and archive, carrying stories of migration, kinship, and survival while holding space for speculation and transformation. Their practice deepens understandings of Chinese American histories without fixing them in the past. Informed by doctoral research in historiography, Lee expands ceramics beyond object-making, incorporating performance, collaboration, ceremony, and kin-making as integral components of the work. These gestures transform historical absence into presence, foregrounding community as both method and material.

Material process plays a central role in Lee’s exploration of identity. Their study of crystalline glaze chemistry, an ancient technique with origins in China, bridges craft and technology, linking material transformation with cultural meaning. The crystalline surface, formed through precise conditions yet yielding unpredictable results, becomes a metaphor for queer Chineseness: complex, luminous, and continually in flux. Through process and material, Lee positions ceramics as a site where history, identity, and imagination converge.

Lee also draws on BaZi, or the Four Pillars of Destiny, a traditional Chinese metaphysical system that interprets birth data to reveal one’s life path. Studying under a queer Chinese astrologer in the Bay Area, trained by Masters Meng Yu and Zhongxian Wu, Lee reimagines BaZi through a queer framework. They translate their personal chart into ceramic forms representing astrological creatures associated with zodiac animals, elements, and yin–yang energies, mapping identity across past, present, and future.

In a contemporary world where identity is increasingly mediated through social media performance, Lee proposes an alternative mode of self-presentation. By playfully redefining “AI” not as Artificial Intelligence but as Ancestral Intelligence, their work invites consideration of forces beyond individual agency, rooted in lineage, memory, and cosmological time. Through the use of millennia-old systems and material, Lee presents ceramics as a means of connecting ancestral knowledge with present-day lived experience.

@ahnleestudio
www.ahnleestudio.com 
Curated by Kevin B. Chen

Après moi, le déluge by Mary Anne Kluth

October 2025 – January 2026

Mary Anne Kluth creates landscapes that never quite come together, reflecting the uncertainty in how we see and understand the world around us. Her installations piece together clouds, rivers, cliffs, and glowing horizons, but stop short of forming a complete picture. The result is a space that feels both beautiful and fragile, reminding us that landscapes, like identities, are often constructed.

This sense of fragmentation mirrors our current moment. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st Century, we find ourselves in another technological revolution. If the first 25 years were defined by the internet’s reach into daily life, the present is marked by the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. AI is beginning to reshape how we think, work, and create. Where it will lead remains unknown, and Kluth channels this ambiguity into her practice. 

Kluth’s fascination with illusion began with childhood visits to theme parks, fabricated “outsides” built indoors, and was deepened through time spent in real landscapes with her geologist parents. She also draws on 19th Century painters of the Hudson River School and Western Romantic traditions (Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Moran), whose dramatic compositions mythologized American expansion into the West. Adapting their visual language through theme park imagery, from Disneyland rides to Sanrio Puroland, she employs devices such as darkened foregrounds and glowing horizons while leaving the wooden supports exposed to highlight the artificial nature of both theme parks and the national myths these painters helped create.

With a background in stage-set construction at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, Kluth builds her installations from handcut wood painted with acrylics. More recently, she has turned to the generative AI program Stable Diffusion, prompting it with Romantic landscape titles to produce synthetic versions of canonical works. She then repaints these computer-made images by hand. In doing so, she draws attention to the hidden act of theft behind the technology – AI companies training their models on artists’ work without permission. By folding this act of appropriation back into her own landscapes, Kluth asks us to reconsider authorship, illusion, and the stories we attach to land and identity.

@makluth  
www.makluth.com 
Curated by Kevin B. Chen