Arion Press Craft Talk: Meditations on Gold with Maya Kini

Please join us for Maya Kini's "Meditation on Gold," the first installment of the 2026 Craft Talk Series!

Grounded in goldsmithing practice, these meditations reflect on craft as a site where memory, history, and value converge. Gold is approached as a performative material—its worth activated through labor, display, exchange, and inheritance. Through heirlooms and handmade objects, this talk considers how intimate acts of wearing and passing down gold are entangled with histories of labor, displacement, exploitation, and environmental destruction, and how contemporary goldsmithing might hold, reveal, or resist these layered legacies.

Doors open at 6 PM at the Bayfront Theater on the third floor of Fort Mason Building B. The talk will be 1 hour with a reception to follow in the Arion Press Gallery.

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Maya Kini is a poet and goldsmith based in San Francisco, California. Her writing explores the intersections of craft, language, and the body—examining how making and materiality shape perception, memory, and repair. As a goldsmith, Maya reflects on material transformation, endurance, and loss, as well as the many ways gold has shaped history and carried stories across time. Part artist, part historian, her practice seeks to understand how materials perform both physically and poetically.

Her jewelry and sculptural work have been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in numerous publications. Maya has taught at Penland School of Crafts, CSU Sacramento, and Sacramento City College. She holds an MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA in Spanish Literature from Reed College. She is a 2025–26 Brown Handler Resident with the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Maya works out of a studio cooperative on historic Varda Landing in Sausalito.

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