Find group descriptions below—organized by genre. Each listing includes info about the facilitator, their proposed meeting times and locations. Most groips meet every other week. Many groups will meet in group-members studios or other spaces around the bay.
The sign up button will lead you to a form where you can choose your preference for which group you'd like to join. Cohort facilitators will do their best to accommodate everyone—if the groups fill up we'll follow up to try and form some more groups. Sign ups close on April 15th, and participants will be notified of their group assignment by the 22nd. If the groups fill up we’ll do our best to form new groups to accommodate everyone.
We ask Cohorts participants to sign up for a Bathers membership at the $20 per month level (funds go to paying facilitators and guest speakers, and hopefully to keeping the lights on at the library!). We’ll follow up about signing up for membership once you’re placed in your group. Also, groups are NOTAFLOF, so if you can’t afford the membership don’t sweat it!
FACILITATOR Izzy K-A
MEETING TIME Tuesdays • 7-9pm (monthly)
MEETING LOCATION Oakland
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR IK-A makes art, currently sculptural and functional objects in wood, metal, and fiber. She’s often thinking about infrastructure and following desire paths. She lives in San Francisco and works building cabinets and furniture.
ABOUT THE GROUP
Our group is composed of people working as architects, interior designers, furniture makers, artists, and academics. We’re interested in the entangled relationship between social/political conditions and the design/aesthetics of the built environment. Our monthly meetings are led by one member who directs the group’s attention toward something of interest. Our goal as a group is to spend the session helping that week’s facilitator explore and expand upon ideas that are preoccupying them, whether these are manifesting as physical objects, realized or imagined projects (buildings, essays, exhibitions, magnum opi), thought experiments, or one’s current obsessions. In addition to our meeting we often attend relevant events or shows together and have an active Discord chat.
*This is an already existing group looking to add a few people.
FACILITATOR May Oskan
MEETING TIME Sundays • 11am
MEETING LOCATIONEast Bay
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR May Oskan is an agented fiction writer based in Oakland. Two of her pieces, both YA literary novels, are in various stages of the submission process, and she’s currently making the jump to writing adult commercial fiction. She looks forward to connecting with other fiction writers, especially those involved with or interested in traditional publishing.
FACILITATOR Alison Y. Jeon
MEETING TIMESaturdays • 12pm
MEETING LOCATION Downtown Oakland
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Alison Y. Jeon is a writer born in 1997. Her works are studies of the spaces between language and silence, where meaning gestures toward the unsaid, the unsayable.
THE FACILITATOR’S NIGHTSTAND Robert Musil, Agathe, or The Forgotten Sister Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression Emily LaBarge, Dog Days Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hello, the Roses
FACILITATOR Bee Gray
MEETING TIME Wednesdays • 7pm (weekly)
MEETING LOCATION Bathers Library
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Bee Gray is a writer and multimedia artist living in Oakland, California. Her work pays homage to women artists, dyke + trans lineages, queer archiving, and performance. She’s inspired by minor, mundane things like bodily byproducts, text messages, and American cultural fragments. She creates hybrid memoirs with printmaking, wearables, zines, prose, poetry, and autofiction. Bee has exhibited in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. She holds a MFA in Transmedia Art from the University of Texas at Austin.
FACILITATOR Xiaowei Wang
MEETING TIMESundays • 4pm
MEETING LOCATION East Bay
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist and writer. As a writer they are interested in writing about/with technology, and non-fiction writing that pushes the boundaries of form. As a facilitator they are interested in how we can balance affirmation and criticality for works-in-progress. Xiaowei’s work has been supported by Eyebeam, MacDowell and published by The Nation, Guernica, Slate and more.
FACILITATORNathan Cordova
MEETING TIME Wednesdays • 7pm
MEETING LOCATION San Francisco
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Nathan Cordova (he/they) is a queer/pansexual artist and educator based in San Francisco. His work explores the mobilizing potential of somatics in connecting shared desires to political practice, weaving together theories of the glitch, emergence, the abject, the erotic and others. He completed his MFA in Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona (‘24) and currently lectures in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University.
FACILITATOROlive Mugalian
MEETING TIMETuesdays • 7:30-9:30pm
MEETING LOCATION East Bay
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Olive is a writer, painter, mystic, and obsessional swimmer based in Oakland, CA.
*This is an already existing group looking to add a few people.
FACILITATOR Regina Napolitano
MEETING TIME Thursdays • 7pm
MEETING LOCATION East Bay
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Regina Napolitano is a writer and teacher from Oakland, California. She has an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Hot Pink Magazine, and Noir Sauna.
FACILITATOR Rivka Weinstock
MEETING TIME Sundays • 6pm
MEETING LOCATION East Bay
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Rivka Weinstock is an artist, translator and educator originally from Brooklyn, NY. Her current work includes painting and collage and investigates the body, everyday objects and landscapes as polyvalent lenses of history, memory and trauma. Rivka’s praxis is informed by a poetics and aesthetics of the scrap--embedding found images and materials into much of her work, she’s interested in what is left behind, unseen, or forgotten. Outside of her studio practice, Rivka directs educational programs at an urban farm in Berkeley.
FACILITATORSarah Moss-Horwitz
MEETING TIME Tuesdays • 6pm
MEETING LOCATION East Bay
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Sarah MH is a painter, textile artist, natural dyer and designer based in Oakland, California. Her practice centers on the act of making materials themselves—foraging and growing natural pigments and inks, blending them with synthetic and mineral elements. This process of gathering and transforming raw matter grounds her work in a direct relationship with the physical world, even as the imagery reaches toward something more elusive. Outside of her studio and creative practice, she is a designer and researcher working in civic technology.
GENRE
FACILITATOR Matt Goldberg
MEETING TIME Saturdays • 3pm
MEETING LOCATION SOMArts
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR Matt Goldberg is an artist and educator in San Francisco. He helps manage the ceramic studio at Somarts, where he teaches both ceramics and collage. In addition to visual work, he has been writing poems for the last few years.