Kate Haug's 'Collaborative Practices' exhibit opens at Sebastopol Center for the Arts tomorrow

This fascinating meditation on the collision of art and politics comes with a full slate of events in August

Kavya Krishnamurthy and Laura Hagar Rush

Aug 07, 2026

One of the installations in Collaborative Practices is “Public Post,” which uses humor to express the hollowness of digital communication. Haug and two fellow artists pasted these up in the Valencia neighborhood of San Francisco in 2014.

“Collaborative Practices,” a new exhibition of the work of artist, mother, and Sebastopol political critic Kate Haug, opens at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts on Saturday, August 8, from 2 to 6 pm.

Sebastopol Times readers may know Haug as a frequent commenter at Sebastopol City Council meetings and a tireless crusader on the part of Sebastopol’s water and sewer ratepayers. You might be surprised to learn that she is also a well-known conceptual artist. Her new show at SebArts is both a retrospective of her earlier work and an invitation to participate in her newest work, “Mothership.”

The exhibition runs from August 8 to September 9. Haug has planned a series of exhibition-related community workshops and events throughout the month of August. Most of these are a part of “Mothership,” but the final event is a “Neighborhood Cocktail Hour and Ratepayer’s Town Hall” on Friday, August 28.

That may seem like a non-sequitur, but it’s actually right in line with one of the main themes of the exhibit: turning politics into art through collaborative participation.

Haug, who was born in Missouri and grew up in California, got her BA in Art History from U.C. Santa Cruz. She was selected for a prestigious curatorial program at the Whitney, where she curated a show called “Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine” in 1991. She worked at a gallery for a while, then went to graduate school at UC San Diego. She got her MFA in experimental film and critical theory, after which she taught screenwriting and filmmaking as an adjunct professor. Now she and her husband, Kurt Noble, run a digital services business, KNI, in San Francisco.

Collaborative Practices: five intriguing installations and a chance to collaborate in art and politics

The exhibition at SebArts features five installations, made up of multiple art pieces, created over the last 12 years. Her work is diverse—some use archival photographs and political ephemera, while others are performance-based.

The exhibition’s featured image is from a performance on November 6, 2024, the day after Trump won his second presidential race. Haug commissioned a plane to fly a banner above New York City, displaying the message “We Hold Democracy Together.”

In titling the show Collaborative Practices, Haug draws attention to both the collective nature of politics and to the way some of her works are produced—with the help of other people.

“Like…I obviously didn’t fly that plane,” she said, laughing.

The subjects of Haug’s works are distinctly political: the absurdity of municipal bureaucracy, the decentering of mothers in pronatalist dialogues, the detachment created by digital culture, the forgetting of whole activist movements.

At the core of this body of work is a critique of how democracy—which is itself necessarily a collaborative practice—works or doesn’t work.

One of the installations in the exhibition, “News Today: A History of the Poor People’s Campaign in Real Time,” presents archival photographs from AP News. The photographs are arranged among text from activists, journalists and others involved in the Poor People’s Campaign, the last great protest led by Martin Luther King.

A portion of “News Today: A History of the Poor People’s Campaign in Real Time.” (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

From “News Today: A History of the Poor People’s Campaign in Real Time.” (Photograph by Kavya Krishnamurthy)

“News Today” hinges on the murder of King and showcases the arc of Resurrection City, an encampment on the National Mall that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign for economic parity. Although Resurrection City was conceived before King’s death, it was also a response to his death. It was a massive, sustained, 420-day protest against economic inequality.

It has also been largely forgotten.

“No one really knew about the Poor People’s Campaign, which is amazing because it’s the thing that happened right after Dr. King was murdered, right? You’d think it’d be more prominent in part of our national discussions, but it was basically erased,” Haug said.

“News Today,” made in collaboration with several other artists, restores this event to collective memory and offers a critique of the way that history is written. The title also suggests that not too much has changed; contemporary protesters are still fighting war, poverty and racism.

While “News Today” is tonally reverent, other works by Haug critique by way of irony and humor.

“Public Post” is a project from 2014 in which Haug and artists Veva Edelson and Ivan Uranga put up text-based wheatpaste posters all over Valencia Street in San Francisco. The piece uses humor to express the hollowness of digital communication. Here’s a brief description from the project’s website:

Our work asks questions about technology and its influence on our culture and our economy.
As public posters, we work with anonymity, random encounter, and public space—concepts which have been enlarged and complicated by the expansion of the internet.
All posters are individually produced silk-screen prints. We post in public spaces in an on-going dialogue with advertising, other anonymous posters, and the convivial flotsam of urban landscape.

From the installation, “Public Post.” (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

Across from “Public Post,” a different installation displays feminist ephemera. Haug calls it “The Feminist Memory Shop.”

“It’s a joke concept…”The Feminist Memory Shop” is just a defunct thrift store basically. It’s the type of store that would have been closing down and abandoned in San Francisco at the time, Valencia 2014.”

“The Feminist Memory Shop” (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

From “The Feminist Memory Shop.” (Photo by Kavya Krishnamurthy)

The piece plays on the forgottenness of objects, curated as a bunch of thriftable objects in a store that’s about to go out of business. They are purposely and humorously detached from their original contexts, unlike “News Today,” which organizes historical narrative so that it can be remembered.

“Mothership,” a new, in-progress installation, features multiple different works by different people and several events.

The events connected with “Mothership” begin on the opening day of Haug’s exhibit. There will be a Drawing Rally with the theme, “Draw Your Mother/ Draw Your Child,” running from 2 pm to 4 pm tomorrow, in the two hours before the opening Reception. The works made at the drawing rally will be hung in the “Mothership” section of the exhibition.

As part of “Mothership,” Haug has also organized a series of workshops called “15 Minutes for Moms” with Sebastopol Regional Library Family Storytime. The workshops address different issues and provide actionable advice—how to reduce stress through pressure points, postnatal health, and how to save for retirement. Haug wanted the workshops to be short because, as she half-joked, “Moms have no time.”

Images made by the mothers and children who participated in a previous drawing session for *Mothership.* (Photograph by Kavya Krishnamurthy)

Other events connected to “Mothership” include a motherhood mandala drawing studio, a zine workshop and a clothing swap. There’s even a Science Buzz Cafe connected to the exhibit. (See the full list of events at the end of this article.)

“Mothership” also includes a collaborative piece, called “Mothership: Stellar Nursery” by mother-daughter artists Yoko OK, who lives in Portland, and Helen Oji, who lives in New York. Helen said Haug had a few suggestions for the type of work she was looking for. “She said, ‘I really want this piece to be about childbirth and a mother and child experience or giving birth.’ And then she sent us some pictures that were of her home birth and her friends’, and of babies and that sort of thing. And she said, ‘I want it to feel cosmic or celestial.’”

Looking at the photos, Yoko had the idea of doing simple hand drawings, inspired by constellations.

Helen, who has also worked in set design, said Haug wanted their piece to be on a medium that light could shine through. So Helen came up with the idea of having it digitally printed on theater scrim. Yoko and Helen collaborated on the final design via their iPads.

Mother-daughter artists Yoko OK and Helen Oji with their piece, “Mothership: Stellar Nursery,” which will be hanging as a part of the “Mothership” installation. (Photo by Laura Hagar Rush)

Haug said “Mothership” comes as a response to a larger discourse about birth rates that seem to neglect the fact that mothers are people. “Mothership” operates differently from her other works in its mode of political engagement—the work is more personal.

“I wanted to express the intimacy between mothers and children and the universality of it,” Haug explained. “Being a mother is an intimate act. You share your body with someone, you breastfeed someone, you change their diapers, but there’s also this whole other world, and you have to exist in society.”

Mothership does not function on the level of history, news headlines, policies and theories, but rather in the bodies and lives of real people. The political critique within Mothership rests in the idea that in a world which abstractly politicizes human beings, shifting one’s attention to the personal is a form of protest.

Another installation, “Summer of Love Trading Cards,” features prominent figures from San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Created as a San Francisco Arts Commission series, the large, poster-sized “trading cards” hang in the SebArts auditorium.

Local politics as a political art piece

The last event connected to the exhibit is a performance piece called “Water & Sewer Ratepayer’s Town Hall,” which will take place in the SebArts auditorium on August 28. In it, Haug will lay out the three-year saga that began with looking at her water bill and wondering why it was so high and ends with her efforts to get the city of Sebastopol to reimburse millions of dollars to its Water and Sewer funds. (That effort is still a work in progress.)

Sign for *Ratepayer’s Town Hall* made by Erin Hentz (Photo by Kavya Krishnamurthy)

Haug went from a civilian critic of how the city handled its water and sewer funds to a member of Sebastopol’s Enterprise Funds Oversight Committee (EFOC), a committee she lobbied the city to create. In June, Haug and the committee released an exhaustively detailed 22-page report, detailing where the city had erred over the years in its handling of its water and sewer funds—and how much money it needed to repay those funds. (See our article on her report here.) The Sonoma County Grand Jury released a similar (though less detailed) report around the same time that suggested that the city owed its enterprise funds $5.5 million. (See our article on the Grand Jury report here.)

Haug sees her report as a roadmap for putting the Grand Jury’s recommendations into practice. At a city council meeting in June, she was given just two minutes to explain the report and her recommendations.

Kate Haug at the June 2 city council meeting, attempting to explain three years of work in two minutes. (Photo from city of Sebastopol video)

The Ratepayer’s Town Hall will begin with a lecture that is more comprehensive than the one she was allowed to give to the city council.

“It’s to give people a broader understanding of what the laws are. What’s going on here? What is this system? What is Prop 218? What is Prop 26?” Haug said.

And then there will be a discussion. “It’s going to be participatory because I want to actually hear what people think because we’re at this juncture, which is that the money for the infrastructure is not there, but we really need to get the infrastructure going. It’s pretty critical.”

The “Water & Sewer Ratepayer’s Town Hall” will be a performance piece, a PSA breakdown of a complex issue and a community meeting to find a practical path forward.

More broadly, “Ratepayer’s Town Hall” will open up a discursive meditation on municipal politics, bureaucracy and what it means to live in a democracy.

“There are precedents for artists, instead of just protesting, going into the system and seeing what happens to it,” Haug said.

She said she was inspired by artists like Susannah Dakin, who ran for president in 1984; Lowell Darling, who ran for governor of California in 1978 and 2010; Ravio Puusemp, who ran for mayor of Rosendale, New York, won and dissolved the town as a conceptual project in social sculpture.

She reflected on all her time spent in the world of Sebastopol’s politics: “It’s almost like being in a reality TV show…but that is democracy. That’s the thing. It’s civil bureaucracy. It’s people trying to be heard.”

The “Water & Sewer Ratepayer’s Town Hall” performance will take place on Friday, August 28, from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm with a cocktail hour beforehand.

The opening reception for “Collaborative Practices” is tomorrow, Saturday, Aug. 8. The drawing rally, with the theme of “Draw your mother or child,” is from 2 pm to 4 pm, while the opening reception is from 4 pm to 6 pm. The reception features a performance from 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm.