In Conversation: Zully Adler and Marin Sarvé-Tarr on Marie Wilson

On Thursday, February 19, Gallery Wendi Norris will host a conversation on Marie Wilson between Further Triennial Director Zully Adler and Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA Marin Sarvé-Tarr, in celebration of , Marie Wilson's first exhibition in San Francisco since 1984, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti staged Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson at City Lights Bookstore.

Over the course of six decades, Marie Wilson produced a revelatory and singular body of work that was rooted equally in the cultural and spiritual milieu of Northern California and the Bay Area of her youth, and in the intellectual currents of European surrealism, which she experienced while living and working among the movement’s central figures. Through biomorphic and geometric forms—ranging from semi-abstract arrangements to the exactingly symmetrical compositions of her mature period—Wilson created oil paintings, drawings in ink and pencil, lithographs, and ceramics that explored new surrealist horizons and expanded the possibilities of modern art.

This event is free; however, reservations are recommended.

Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris January 20 – March 14, 2026.

About the speakers

Zully Adler, PhD, is the Director of Further Triennial, which will debut across Bay Area museums and art spaces in 2027. Adler’s curatorial projects often focus on art and counterculture in California, including Ariel: Parts I & II, Charlie Tweddle: Better Than Normal!, Melvino Garretti: Space Versus Space, Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess & California, co-curated with Nancy Lim at SFMOMA, and the music anthology Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California. He is the recipient of the Watson Fellowship, the Marshall Scholarship, the Shorenstein Research Fellowship, and the Clarendon Scholarship at the University of Oxford.

Marin Sarvé-Tarr is an assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She recently organized New Work: Sheila Hicks (2025) and co-organized exhibitions including SFMOMA’s presentation of Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975 (2023) and Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections (2022). She contributed to Ruth Asawa: Retrospective (2025) and Joan Mitchell (2021) and writes on twentieth-century art in France and the US. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago and was previously an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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