On July 13, Sanchez Art Center will present three new exhibitions, featuring Cryptic Intersection with mixed media artist Silvia Poloto and sculptor Marc D’Estout in the Main Gallery. The East Gallery will present the Pacifica School District Invitational, with art by children in grades K–8. In West Gallery the Art Guild of Pacifica exhibits withLetters / Numbers / Symbols. The opening reception for all three shows is on Friday, July 13, from 7 to 9 pm, with music by Jamey Brzezinski.

Brazilian-born Silvia Poloto works in a range of visual disciplines. She is known for her lively abstract canvases and mixed-media sculptures. Using a variety of media, she explores juxtapositions that unfold in rich, textured hues and expressive gestures. The result is a body of work characterized by equal amounts of surprise, playfulness, and provocation. We are honored that Poloto has created a new series for this exhibition, including many large collages. While the Bay Area is Poloto’s current home, her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, including United Arab Emirates, France, Spain, Jordania, Italy, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, and China. In the Bay Area, her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Italian American Museum, and the DeYoung Museum, where she was an artist-in-residence. Poloto’s work has been acquired by more than 80 institutional and corporate collections around the US and by more than 900 private collectors around the world.

Marc D’Estout’s hand-crafted metal sculptures are surprising, minimalist yet rich with surrealist narrative. His work often reveals a dark humor, a sense of the uncanny. or vaguely threatening. D’Estout has a deep connection with materials and process. He has mastered the challenging skills of hand-shaping and fabricating sheet metal forms, which he then finishes with carefully crafted surfaces. His style of metalsmithing or metal-shaping falls somewhere between the fine art metalsmith and the artisans who hand-form custom car bodies. This combination of D’Estout’s vision with highly disciplined craft-based processes makes his work unique in contemporary art. His work has been shown at numerous venues, including University of Hawaii Art Gallery; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery; San Jose Museum of Art; de Saisset Museum; San Jose ICA; and the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, among others. D’Estout’s sculpture is also shown in furniture and design galleries, such as LIMN and Coup d’Etat in San Francisco and Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica. He is currently represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco.

To learn more about these fascinating artists, visit the show and then come to their joint Artist Talk on Sunday, July 29, at 3:30 pm in the Main Gallery.

Also opening July 13 is the Pacifica School District Invitational,displaying work by young Pacifican artists from various local schools. Since 2008, Sanchez Art Center has provided the support needed for an arts education program at Sunset Ridge Elementary School, so this exhibition celebrates 10 years of the “Sanchez Goes to School” program. The exhibit is coordinated by Amanda Vaughn, the current art instructor for the Sanchez Goes to School project at Sunset Ridge.

Concurrently, the Art Guild of Pacifica presents Letters / Numbers / Symbols in the West Gallery, a themed exhibition by AGP members exploring the confluence and interactions of visual images with graphic content.

Sanchez Art Center is located at 1220 Linda Mar Blvd in Pacifica, about a mile east of Highway 1. Following opening night, the galleries are open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 1–5 pm, and by appointment, through August 12. For more information, call 650.355.1894 or visit SanchezArtCenter.org.