Every artist carries a lineage. Not always a formal one, not always acknowledged, but it's there in the work if you know where to look. 

A certain use of color that echoes someone who came before. A refusal to do the expected thing that traces back to the first time they saw someone else refuse it.

At our recent artist talk for Arboreal Alchemies at Shop Camino, something wonderful happened. Terri Loewenthal, Sarah Bird, and Laura Plageman named the artists who shaped their seeing, and suddenly the conversation deepened. The work on our walls opened up into a longer story, one that connects these three Bay Area artists to the painters, photographers, and thinkers who made their vision possible.

We found those moments so compelling that we wanted to share them with you, whether you were in the room or not.

Below, we've paired images from the exhibition with work by the artists who influenced them, a visual lineage that reveals how ideas travel from one practice to another, sometimes across generations, sometimes across mediums, always transformed in the passage.

Sarah Bird and William Kentridge

Terri Loewenthal and Dan Flavin

Laura Plageman and Gerhard Richter

This is one of the things we love most about working closely with artists. The work you see on a wall is never made in isolation. It is part of an ongoing conversation, one that stretches backward to the artists who opened a door and forward to the viewer who walks through it. When you collect a piece, you enter that conversation.