Nov 15 - Dec 5, 2025
Pissed off Moms 2.0: The Village is Rising
Art Catalogue
Curated by Krystal Lauk
@pissed_off_moms
The "Pissed Off Moms 2.0: The Village is Rising" is an intimate and deeply moving exhibition—about empathy, honesty, and the shared experience of motherhood. It reminds us that every child is our child, and every story of motherhood deserves to be seen and heard.
"This show reflects on the shared struggle for survival and dignity, the fight for fertile land, safe shelter, and the right to raise children in peace. Through art, we invite viewers to imagine a fabric of interconnected villages: where nurturing each other here strengthens our ability to stand with those enduring devastation elsewhere."
~Krystal Lauk
"Our Village, Near and Far" is both a mirror and a call: to see the threads that bind us together and to ask how we can repair and extend them in the face of fracture.
For this show, we're inviting everyone to get low to the ground—to meet the eyes of your kids and the people around you. We will be gathering like a village, sharing space, chai, and conversation. Think pillows, warmth, and connection. Not your usual gallery fare—but more like a sanctuary.
Krystal Lauk
Krystal Lauk is a San Francisco–based artist, illustrator, and mother who’s channeling her creative momentum into something deeply transformative: curating Pissed Off Moms!, her first art exhibition celebrating maternal voices. The show spotlights raw, unapologetic work by moms who refuse to hide the intensity, grit, and complexity of their experiences.
Drawing from her own journey through motherhood, Krystal created this exhibition to give visibility and space to mothers navigating trauma, patriarchal systems, and global crises—all while raising the next generation. As she puts it, motherhood opened her eyes to the badassery of moms, and now she’s giving that power a public stage. Krystal’s years running an illustration studio shape her approach to fine art—clear, approachable, and deeply heartfelt. That spirit runs through Pissed Off Moms, which isn’t just an art show—it’s a movement.
“Animal” 2025, 18” x 24”, acrylic on canvas, $3400
"I always longed to know what it’s like to be an artist. To not be afraid of the vision inside of you, but rather express it freely outside of yourself- and proclaim it. I was not brave enough until now in my life to do such a thing. After running an illustration agency for several years, I hit a wall in my psyche with the existential threat of AI and took up painting. I also felt incredibly alone, angry, and lost as a new mother, and painting pissed off moms was a way through that pain. Making motherhood visible with art, through other mothers and myself- in its many layered facets, has led to self acceptance, understanding, and meaning beyond what I thought I was ever capable of feeling."
~ Krystal Lauk
“Allison” 2024, 18” x 24” , acrylic on canvas, NFS
"Allison was just another acquaintance who had recently had a baby, and we organized a call to talk about baby stuff. You know, surface stuff like sleep hacks and favorite stroller brands. But something cracked the both of us that day, and we learned a raw truth about each other's experiences of motherhood, and the people who had let us down. These are often the things we keep hidden. Truths that don’t want to seep out because they evidence our painful reality. I remember telling her that no matter what happens, she’ll always have a relationship with her daughter. That is a beautiful bond. I wanted to paint her resolute, standing tall in her painful truth, with her baby- a soul that will come to be and the everlasting bond that comes with it."
~ Krystal Lauk
"Nightbitch" by Krystal Lauk, giclee print, $80
"Sleepless" by Krystal Lauk, giclee print, $60
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Angela Chu
Angela Chu is a self-taught artist whose work spans paintings, illustrations, and murals. Her art speaks to the interplay between our inner landscapes and the surrounding environments –– centering moments of connection and quiet wonder as portals into rest. Currently, as a new mother, she explores how matrescence shapes one’s emotional and somatic terrain.
”To Hold and To Be Held”, 23” x 30”, watercolor, acrylic, silk & thread on canvas, NFS
"This first year of motherhood has been a brutal, beautiful awakening—wearing away so many hard-edged boundaries of self. To care for another is to exist in a messy mosaic of interdependence: hand-me-downs from Buy Nothing, breast milk donations from a kind stranger, accepting help from the grandparents you struggle to be honest with, impromptu neighbor play dates when you’re late to pick up, leaving your screaming child with her aunties for a monthly date night. Caregiving is only made possible by seeking care from the community around you. "To Hold and To Be Held" explores this tender truth. As a mother cradles her child, she is cradled by a delicate patchwork of relationships, coming together to form the fabric of a village."
~ Angela Chu
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Ariadna Anisimov
Ariadna “Ari” Anisimov is a climate justice researcher working in policy and community-empowered climate solutions. Outside of her professional work, art has been a form of escapism. Her style combines graffiti influences with real-life sketching, inspired by her 9th-grade photography teacher, who was also a street artist.
”Tele-Connected Care: Holding Many Villages”, 12” x 17”, markers on paper, Sold 
"Tele-Connected Care: Holding Many Villages" reflects the emotional weight of caring across distances. A mother prepares dinner for her child while witnessing images of injustice and suffering in places like Palestine and Ukraine. The piece explores the emotional labor of engaging with global crises while staying present in daily life, holding attention across many “villages” at once." ~ Ariadna “Ari” Anisimov
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Giselle Gyalzen
Giselle Geronimo Gyalzen was born and raised in the Philippines. She immigrated to San Francisco at the age of 16 and has not yet found a compelling enough reason to move elsewhere. She lives in Bernal Heights with her husband, their 2 kids and 2 dogs. She occasionally takes advantage of the opportunity to carve time out of her busy life to make art and share it with the community.
”Entwine”, 12” x 19”, weaving made with scrap fabrics and findings from her home and from scrap, $90
"My weaving is made from found objects and scraps from Scrap SF and my home. While making this weaving, I meditated about the fellow moms in my life who make up my village. The women I voice my worries to and who listen without judgement, the women who have driven my kids across the city when I couldn’t, the women I laugh with and cry with. These women wove me into their own lives and we have supported each other for 10 years through life’s in and outs and I see no end to our friendships. How did I get so lucky? They are the gift that I wasn’t expecting would come with being a mother." ~ Giselle Gyalzen
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Melissa Mohammadi
Melissa Mohammadi is a visual artist. She believes that deep communion with botanical and marine lifeforms is a portal through which we may heal from the trauma of disconnection. Through her practice, Melissa explores evidence of growth and the physical properties of plants, shells, fossils, sandworm colony remnants, forgotten vertebrae—our seemingly quiet, earth-bound non-human neighbors. She draws on layers of knowing and communication beyond the limitations of our various umwelts, beyond the boundaries of our sensory experiences as different species.
Melissa begins by creating meticulously observed drawings and prints of each of her subjects. It is important to Melissa to remain open through this process to whatever each being is offering. She does not seek to idealize or simplify the image, but to capture how these lifeforms present themselves in that moment. Sometimes this takes her in unexpected directions, as when a pool of grainy pigment or the crisp edge of cut paper better captures the energetic presence of the being in front of her.
This meditative process slows Melissa's focus and teaches her how to grow, how to mother, how to endure. Her resultant drawings, prints, paintings, books, and installations are records of her gratitude and awe, and an invitation for others to slow down, find respite, and connect with their own inner wisdom so that they too may embark on the journey of nature healing itself.
”Nomadic Study”, NFS
"My practice investigates vegetal intelligence and the living cosmos as models for reimagining human relationships to care, creation, and community. Through drawing, printmaking, and installation, I explore the adaptive logics of plants, shells, and minerals as systems of distributed agency and collaborative survival. Rooted in ecofeminist and posthumanist thought, my work draws on philosophers Val Plumwood, Freya Mathews, and Michael Marder, who challenge the separations between human and nature, mind and matter. My process is one of listening and synthesis, co-dreaming with nature to reveal non-hierarchical, cooperative forms of being. My work is created lustily, in healing, joyful service, a proposition for renewal through reciprocity, attention, and the radical equality of all life.
I painted ‘Nomadic Study’ as I weaned the last of our three children and recommitted to my studio practice. Watercolor, coupled with the small, erratic pockets of time that appear throughout the long days of mothering, led to layered marks and small moments of meditative observation.
Then and now, I approach drawing and painting as meditative acts of listening, where observation becomes a pathway into deeper awareness. In studying plants, shells, and other nonhuman forms, I seek to make visible the unseen intelligence that animates all life. I approach this inquiry as both an artist and a mother, studying natural forms as teachers in care, endurance, and interdependence."
~ Melissa Mohammadi
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Meg MacLeod
Meg MacLeod is a mixed media, abstract painter and member of the ICB Artists Association in Sausalito, CA.
MacLeod’s work is inspired by innovation through spontaneity, the universality of intuition, adventure travel, natural cycles, archetypal symbolism, dreams, divination, and ecofeminist considerations.
Her interest in gynocentric iconography, including works of Af Klint, Carrington, Chicago, Saint Phalle, Mendieta, Saar, and Sjoo, led her to studies in art and psychology at the University of Michigan. She then completed her doctorate at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, specializing in creative arts-based counseling.
Since 2022, MacLeod’s work has been exhibited, commissioned, and collected nationally and internationally. Her art has been featured in West Elm and Room & Board showrooms, Ritual Coffee Roasters as well as SF galleries including Voss, 111 Minna, Drawing Room, UCSF Women’s Health, SFDA’s office, and SFWA Gallery.
Her work has been juried into O’Hanlan Center for the Arts, Marin Society of Artists, Charles Krug Winery, Women Made Gallery, NWCA, Rock Ink, Greece, Canvas Art Fair, Italy, and the London Contemporary.
In 2025 she received third place award from the Sebastopol Center for the Arts and the Top Five Artists Award by SF ArtSpan. In addition to coaching and consulting, MacLeod juries and curates exhibitions throughout the Bay Area.
“Egg Poacher” 2025, 30” x 40”, acrylic on panel, $3,000
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Natalie Dunnege
Natalie Dunnege is a California-based artist living in San Francisco. Raised in Central Florida with an unconventional upbringing, she spent much of her socially awkward childhood outdoors, finding solace in photography and journaling. As a young adult, she studied black-and-white film photography and creative writing between the Northeast and Florida. A cross-country road trip eventually brought her west, where she settled in San Francisco, earned a Master’s in Psychology, and began exploring oil painting, abstract art, and contemporary dance.
”Immigration”, 13.7” x 20.6” (including frame), oil on recycled cardboard in a black frame, Sold
“I sat in my grandparents’ yellow Florida trailer as a child, listening to their broken English, blended with Russian, as they recounted a long journey on a boat. Most didn’t make it to New York. They were the fortunate ones to survive the journey. They didn’t know who was living behind them, but they witnessed who died along the way.
When the Internet evolved, my mother discovered some of the family members they were forced to leave behind. Family living in a place my grandparents described as the “Old Country.” My child’s brain envisioned this as rolling hills, skirts flapping in the wind on clothes lines, milk spraying into buckets. She was able to facilitate a call over the Internet between my grandparents and the relatives my grandparents thought surely had died decades before in the war. I remember standing on our wood floor under the archway to our living room and hearing the first “hello?” come through, and then a sudden rush of weeping overtook the room."
~ Natalie Dunnege
”I’m Here”, oil sticks on Moleskin paper, $120
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Rebecca Szeto
Rebecca Szeto is a Dogpatch, SF-based interdisciplinary artist interested in the poetic intersection of the material and immaterial. Through themes rooted in the human condition and the domestic: togetherness, solitude, fragility, and resilience, her practice investigates notions of beauty and value, highlighting what is often overlooked or marginalized.
She combines familiar materials in unfamiliar ways that draw connections between art history, current events and detritus from her personal life, creating layered and deliberate moments of tension that invite fresh interpretations and meaning.
The works in this show are responses to current war-time atrocities but also speak to the triumph and resilient spirit of humanity’s need for creativity and the arts as a support structure when all else has collapsed.
"Creativity and Play as a forceful gesture of Resistance.
In the middle of all the craziness in the world I often find it hard to justify hiding in my studio ignoring the news and making art. I'm left thinking a lot about the role of daydreaming and play as survival skills for humanity.
I'm reminded of my Drawbridge Youth Arts after school kids (many of whom were new to the country and language, often seeking asylum from other countries and unspeakable situations, and additionally unhoused). Despite all that, they could still find joy, laughter and friendship week after week with each other and with me creating art ..." ~ Rebecca Szeto
”Daydreaming in Wartime”, 2011-2025, 4” x 6”, oil on italian gessoboard, $300
" ... Having taught art to unhoused kids - many of them refugees, asylum seekers or undocumented in San Francisco for a decade, I’ve always marveled and admired my kids’ ability to laugh, play, and think creatively under extreme pressure. Daydreaming is an essential service for hope. Everyone, essential workers."
~ Rebecca Szeto
”The Last Piano”, 2025, 8” x 8”, oil on found canvas, $500
“The Last Piano” refers to the last surviving piano in Gaza at the Edward Said Conservatory of Music. It has survived multiple bombings and been rescued and repaired multiple times over the 20+ years since Japan gifted it to the Palestinian authorities. An inimitable symbol of hope and survival. The painting also gives a nod to artist Joseph Beuys’ felt covered piano, meant as a symbol of healing in post-war Germany." ~ Rebecca Szeto
”In Between”, 2006-2025, 8” x 10”, oil on white out on clayboard, $600
"... Family, per Nietzsche “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.” ~ Rebecca Szeto
“Burning from Both Ends (Matches of Temperament)”, Sold
Parenthood is a rewarding struggle. The materiality of the sculpture captures its quality; it’s wonky, imperfect, improbable in all its incandescent warmth, beauty, chaos, and humor.
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Ruochen Wang
Ruochen Wang (若琛) is a Chinese-born artist and landscape designer based in San Francisco. Her artistic journey began on her son AJ’s playmat, where casual sketches unfolded into a deeper creative exploration. Trained in both studio art and ecological design, her practice interweaves psychological symbolism, embodied motherhood, and spatial imagination.
Through mixed-media drawings and immersive installations, she explores the porous boundaries between inner and outer landscapes, translating emotional terrains into visual form.
Wang holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley and currently works as a landscape designer in San Francisco. Her ongoing project, Inner Landscape, reclaims the maternal psyche as a site of mythic power, rupture, and transformation. These works trace a psychic initiation—where caregiving becomes an alchemical space for creative emergence, and inner rupture is not pathology, but fertile ground for becoming.
”Even the Grass Whispers of It”, 4 ft x 15 ft, Chinese calligraphy ink and painted by dried Festuca californica (California fescue), NFS
"I often wonder why I have always felt so deeply, to the point where it leaves me feeling out of place, making it hard to fit in. Two years ago, when I became a mother to my son, this sensitivity shattered me into a thousand pieces. I felt a deep, gravitational force dragging me down, a part of it not rooted in my own psyche but in the echoes of time and space belonging to those who came before me ... "
"... In my quest for understanding, a visa crisis earlier this year led me to spend four months in my homeland China, where I uncovered the stories of the women who shaped my lineage.
My maternal grandmother lost her mother at a young age and endured the cruelty of an abusive stepmother. She became like a mother to her younger siblings, trying to survive in years of extreme hardship. My paternal grandmother, born into privilege, witnessed her family collapse; her mother married a household servant just to survive, and forced her to adopt his surname. At just eight years old, she bore the heavy burden of protecting her half-deaf mother during the bombings of the Japanese invasion. From that tender age, she became her mother’s protector.
My mother navigated the chaotic market reforms of the ’90s, arguing and fighting back against police harassment- late-night knocks by drunken officers that sent me scrambling under my covers, paralyzed by fear and too small to intervene ... "
" ... Motherhood opened a portal within me. I carry the weight of these stories in my bones, feeling the echoes of generations—mothers’ pain whispering through my heart.
When I witnessed the violence unfolding in Gaza, a deep, generational rage was awakened within me. I know that while people may forget, the land remembers. It holds the truth in its soil. I draw from the whispers of dried grass, for there lies the voice of history.
Because even the grass whispers of it." ~Ruochen Wang (若琛)
”The Promised Land”, 19” x 23”, China marker, acrylic paint, and pencil on watercolor paper, NFS
"As a mother, witnessing children suffer is a pain beyond words. In the final months of my pregnancy two years ago, I turned my focus to Gaza. In the two years since, while raising my son, my understanding of motherhood has been shaped by a stark truth: every day, on our phones, we witness a genocide unfolding before us. The horror, the grief, the sheer weight of it all is unbearable.
So I draw. Drawing is how I refuse to look away, how I hold these lives, however briefly, with care. It’s my body that brought a soul into this earth, still recovering from that soul-rending opening, screaming for so many more dying children.
And I ask a simple question: who gives you the right to take a life? Even in God’s name, even in your promised land. Where is that promised land with so many innocent souls unable to rest?"
~Ruochen Wang (若琛)
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Our Family Wall
This exhibition brings together a Family Portraits Wall—portraits and artworks contributed by artists throughout San Francisco. Together, they echo our guiding truth: every child belongs to all of us, and every story of motherhood deserves visibility, care, and voice.
Featured artists:
Lily Sloane | lilymakessound.com | @atherapistwalksintoabar |
Angela Chu | angiechu.com | @angiejchu |
Ruochen Wang (若琛) | rcwland.com | @r.c.w.land |
Christine Rhee | christinerhee.com | @christine.rhee |
Natalie Dunnege | themapplescanvas.com | @Themapplescanvas |
Krystal Lauk | krystallauk.com | @krystallauk |
Abo Greenwald
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Official Pissed Off Moms! Merch
Be part of the squad! Whether you're a human child mom, a dog mom, a plant mom, or an ally.
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Natasha Tsozik
Natasha Tsozik is a fine line tattoo artist and mixed media artist based in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. She runs a private, eco-conscious studio at 2344 3rd St., where she specializes in custom black & grey tattoos inspired by botanicals, animals, and portraits. Her approach is deeply personal, blending thoughtful design with sustainable practices—from vegan inks to biodegradable supplies (and yes, even vegan snacks).
Beyond tattooing, Natasha’s studio doubles as a creative hub for art shows and community events. Hosting Pissed Off Moms! is part of her ongoing mission to support local artists, foster honest expression, and create space for connection through art.
Follow along through her newsletter or blog at NatashaTsozik.com to stay updated on future gatherings and exhibitions.