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Aaron Straup Cope

@thisisaaronland.bsky.social
122 followers 150 following 61 posts

maps and museums and airports / I have come to see these spaces as the absolute worst for anything resembling "conversation" / but I like you all so here I am for now / likely lurking for a while as I figure out how to think about this place

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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
mia ridge @miaout.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
ICYMI, ace work from @thisisaaronland.bsky.social on shared vector embeddings for images as 'an exercise in practicing agency in our work [,] in producing tangible and reusable artifacts which have a longer shelf life' www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
shared vector embeddings (fantastic futures '26)
Shared vector embeddings simply makes it possible to do something similar at a smaller, more targeted, scale with fewer resources and less coordination.
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
Josh Hadro @hadro.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
“For anyone who needs reminding: The ability to do this is, and has always been, the promise of open data.” This could apply to basically every useful and interesting thing I’ve done in my career!
Screenshot of the post from which the quote above was sourced
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
two completely different talks in three days / "shared vector embeddings" at #ff26 – aaronland.info/weblog/2026/... / followed by "the story I want to remember" at #papercamp 5 – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/... / let us now praise flight delays and planes lacking in-flight entertainment systems
aaronland.info
shared vector embeddings (fantastic futures '26)
Shared vector embeddings simply makes it possible to do something similar at a smaller, more targeted, scale with fewer resources and less coordination.
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
"If you happen to be the recipient of juicy subsidies from a frontier lab to tokenmaxx your collections or have secured a fat cheque from an extra-national organization to build a niche data center, that’s great ... but those projects, alone, are not enough." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
shared vector embeddings (fantastic futures '26)
Shared vector embeddings simply makes it possible to do something similar at a smaller, more targeted, scale with fewer resources and less coordination.
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I was invited to speak at #papercamp 5 which was a treat because I also spoke at the first #papercamp, way back in 2009, and because I love that @designswarm.bsky.social has revived the event in recent years / this is what I said – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
the story I want to remember (papercamp 5)
In 2026, not being asked about something rarely prevents any of us from telegraphing whatever is on our mind anyway and I think that may be the point.
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
endless fiddling / in advance of speaking remotely at papercamp tomorrow / I wish I could have rationalized making the trip to attend in person / but with everything else going I think the journey would have broken me
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
in the course of doing this work I learned that overture still classifies individual galleries at sfo museum as "museums" / and that there is a museum in minneapolis called the "museum louvre it or leave it" – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/09...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Making the SFO Museum geocoder less Who's On First specific, reusable JavaScript components and experimental vector search
The hope is that this change will make it easier to use the geocoder tool for other data sources without the need to maintain a separate lookup tables of string-to-numeric identifiers. We like using W...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
for example, searching for "ham and cheese" and getting back results for towns called "Sandwich" is... kind of not-wrong? / blog post to follow – github.com/sfomuseum/ge...
github.com
GitHub - sfomuseum/geocoder: Who's On First-focused multi-lingual "coarse" geocoder.
Who's On First-focused multi-lingual "coarse" geocoder. - sfomuseum/geocoder
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
"With few exceptions, most geospatial tools, tools for working with place and space, are linear affairs. There is only the perpetually updating present." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/08...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
A new geocoder for Who's On First and SFO Museum (and TGN) data
Cultural heritage organizations, on the other hand, are looking for things in the past as much, if not more so, than they are looking for things in the present.
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
I wrote a thing on the other site / about the hustle / and jackets / which for reasons of character limits I am just going to link to here – orthis.social/@thisisaaron...
orthis.social
thisisaaronland (@thisisaaronland@orthis.social)
I know that you are not supposed to apologize for the hustle / but I am allergic or at least uncomfortable with the hustle / however this feels like as good a time as any to mention we made jackets of...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Jun Kaneko arrived in California from Japan in 1963 to study painting and encountered the revolutionary work of Peter Voulkos, who was using clay as a sculptural medium. The experience was transformative, and he devoted himself to working in clay and experimenting with large-scale ceramic sculptures
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
"In the end I did have just enough googly eyes..." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
Postcards from Montréal, 2026
We were in Montréal recently. I made some postcards while we were there.
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
At SFO Museum, mounts are custom made for each object before they’re put on display. Our upcoming exhibition “Heroes of the City: Early Firefighters of the San Francisco Fire Department” will feature several firefighter helmets, each of which will require their own mount #behindthescenes #sneakpeek
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
"Maybe we will [sign those files] if only to highlight why it feels important for institutions to assert, as best they can using the cryptographic means at hand, that the things bearing our names really were produced by us." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/06...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Asserting claims: Cryptographically signing the digital artifacts we produce
Why is SFO Museum signing the vector embeddings that we’re producing? To provide an additional guarantee that the data we are publishing is, in fact, the data we published. Vector embeddings are, by t...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
one way to account for the inherent shonkiness of print-on-demand / is just to treat it like an underpainting
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
"...and a whole bunch of updates to the tooling used to generate and query vector embeddings targeting local-first and consumer-grade hardware" – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/05...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Shared vector embeddings updates
There is a lot of ground to cover in this blog post: The Met publishing their own vector embeddings, SFO Museum publishing 1152-dimension vector embeddings for its images, SFO Museum producing 1152-di...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
"The reality is that we have learned a number of tricks to coax these systems in to doing things but our understanding of how or why they do is still basically on par with that of a rat in a Skinner box." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
"On bad days, I fear it will only re-enforce the existing power dynamics in museums: That there has only ever been a thin crust of well-paid senior executives operating museums built atop the bones of an army of replaceable grad students crushed under foot." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
Weird-shaped tools
My point here is not to say that the foundations of large language models and intersectionality are the same. My point is to say that if you understand that things (people) are not static and that the...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
"The ability to automate software production has ... had the interesting side-effect of validating the Cooper Hewitt's approach to collecting software in 2013." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
Weird-shaped tools
My point here is not to say that the foundations of large language models and intersectionality are the same. My point is to say that if you understand that things (people) are not static and that the...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
"These common attributes are meant to be the least amount of metadata necessary to provide a simple preview and suitable attribution for the item for which vector embeddings have been produced." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
OEmbeddings - What is the least amount of metadata necessary for shared vector embeddings?
This is a blog post describing a proposal for a set of common attributes to include with shared vector embeddings. These common attributes are meant to be the least amount of metadata necessary to pro...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
it is 2026 / and I am wondering why my email client needs access to the GPU
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
"In as much as no one seems to really understand what’s happening inside the guts of any given machine model, and in as much as the cultural heritage sector is still a consumer rather than a producer of these models..."  – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/04...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Shared cross-institutional vector embeddings – how we might get there
We are proposing a simple‑is‑best approach to sharing vector embeddings of our collections, a step that moves us closer to realizing the long‑standing ‘holy grail’ of cross‑institutional collections s...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Maxine Crookston (1915–2016) was known as “The Voice of San Francisco Airport” from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Born in Salt Lake City, Crookston dreamed of flying as a child and recalled jumping as far as possible from her parents’ porch while flapping her arms as wings. #WomensHistoryMonth
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
Stamen Design @stamen.com · 23/03/2026
Nobody asked, but hey we just enabled HTTPS on Pretty Maps, an old project from 2010 by Stamen alum Aaron Straup Cope (@thisisaaronland.bsky.social). Amazing that it still works! Enjoy it here: prettymaps.stamen.com #ttmprettymaps #prettymaps #maps #cartography #design #flickr
A colorful abstract map of TokyoA colorful abstract map of BeijingA colorful abstract map of New York
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
here is a picture / to tell you that I will be speaking (remotely) at papercamp 5 / later this year in london / about postcards / with a throwaway placeholder title / that seems more likely to stick with each passing day – www.designswarm.com/papercamp-5/
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
this morning / I briefly considered making Larry Wall's 1999 talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" my AGENTS.md file / then I went back to doing something else – www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/...
wall.org
Perl, the first postmodern computer language
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Exciting News! We’ve added a new feature to the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website! You can now see similar object images derived using machine-learning computer-vision models on object pages. Check out our collections page at: bit.ly/4r8R8IC
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
"Here is a silly example summarizing each paragraph in this blog post." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/02...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Updates (and additions) to machine-learning tools running on consumer hardware
These are not “silver bullet” tools. Rather, they endeavour to be part of a set of building blocks for creating an infrastructure that preserves and guarantees the cultural heritage sector some agency...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
See more of Afatasi the Artist’s Afrofuturist designs in "Women of Afrofuturism" on display, post-security, in Harvey Milk Terminal 1 and online at: bit.ly/Women-Afrofu... #AfatasiTheArtist #BlackHistoryMonth #Fashion #Afrofuturism
bit.ly
Women of Afrofuturism | SFO Museum
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
"Obviously, the circles could also just be seen as bagels. That wouldn't be wrong either." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
stones and cans and comic books in a kettle
In this way those four plates could just as easily be used as the symbology for an updated coat of arms for the city of Montreal, the province of Quebec or even Canada as a whole, but one thing at a t...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
"As such these objects are included because they are generally similar in nature, or spirit, and as a way to help you discover things in our collection which you might have otherwise missed." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2026/01...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Similar object images derived using the MobileCLIP computer-vision models
Like a lot of things involving machine-learning, the image similarity results while not always right aren’t necessarily wrong either. In the same vein as searching collections by color this “fuzzy” an...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
fish-waves / and lemon-hills – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2026/...
aaronland.info
Noren 415 / 514 (2026)
I am very fond of the fish-waves and still on the fence about the lemon-hills. We'll see if I change my mind before the weather forces decisions for me.
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
If you would like our 200+ page exhibition catalog, please email us at curator@flysfo.com and we will send you one, free of charge! bit.ly/FashioninFli... #FashionInFlightFriday
bit.ly
Fashion In Flight: A History of Airline Uniform Design | SFO Museum
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
"At the end of the day it’s a jacket. We hope the certificate of authenticity offers some guarantees, or comfort, if you need to treat it as a financial asset but, mostly, we hope you just enjoy wearing it." – shop.orthis.social/pages/certif...
shop.orthis.social
Certificates of Authenticity
For as long as we have had material “things” people have made replicas of those things and tried to pass them off as originals for fun, profit or both. This is especially true in a world awash in gene...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
The @sfomuseum.bsky.social aviation collection has new aerial imagery / and we have published some experimental work about hosting and serving the entire planet OSM @protomaps.com pmtiles database, locally and offline, on a recycled ipad – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2025/12...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
Map updates, December 2025 - Now with more PMTiles
In addition to 2025, we’ve also added new imagery from 1920, 1936 and 1961 all produced using the Allmaps Editor to georeference existing collections materials. I’ll talk more about some of the tools ...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
In October, SFO Museum conducted a special tour of “Women of Afrofuturism” lead by our curatorial consultant Ingrid LaFleur and San Francisco artist Afatasi The Artist. Watch the video on our YouTube channel! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0upz... #WomenofAfrofuturism #IngridLaFleur #AfatasiTheArtist
youtube.com
Women of Afrofuturism Exhibition Tour with Ingrid LaFleur
YouTube video by SFO Museum
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SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
See “49 Scenic Mile Drive” by Bradley Smith and Tyler McPherron in the Video Arts Gallery, located pre-security in the Mayor Edwin M. Lee International Terminal Departures Hall, and open daily from 8:00am to 10:00pm. Learn more about this month’s films at: bit.ly/Video-Arts #VideoArts #VideoArtsSFO
bit.ly
Video Arts | SFO Museum
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
Protomaps @protomaps.com · 03/12/2025
SFO Airport Museum's map viewer is powered by a raster pmtiles archive + leaflet millsfield.sfomuseum.org/map/#2025/fg/
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
I wrote up the notes for the talk I gave to a museum studies class at USF / titled "everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...
aaronland.info
Everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels
It is difficult to separate the issues and questions that contemporary machine-learning and “artificial intelligence” technologies raise in the context of museum without addressing the long history of...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
"Raven had been sleeping so long, he had molted and regrown a full coat of feathers and his new feathers were white and beaming light all over the world and everybody laughed at Raven as he danced around like a kite playing in the wind. ... " #PrestonSingletary #GarthStein
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
"Conversations with Large Language Models: Memory Rain, Echo Rain and Echo Cubes" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...
aaronland.info
Conversations with Large Language Models: Memory Rain, Echo Rain and Echo Cubes
That large language models are able to accomplish this and somehow make these texts even duller than they already are is, let's be fair, an accomplishment but if these same texts being immitated are t...
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
"Dancing like no one is watching in a panopticon of slop" – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...
aaronland.info
Dancing like no one is watching in a panopticon of slop
We are all living through a time which is noticeably fallow in good will and good intentions. Increasingly there is no discovery, organic or otherwise, and the value of participation can not be measur...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
In the era of cell phones, it seems difficult to imagine how revolutionary telephone technology was for its time. Transcontinental telephone service, made possible by the tube amplifier, officially launched on January 25, 1915. #GiveMeARing #Telephones #TelephoneRetrospective
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
"And yet, in as much as everything we do and say online, and increasingly offline, is being recorded, archived and strip-mined for meaning you can rest assured that this is kind of crap that will most certainly go down on your permanent record." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...
aaronland.info
Conversations with Large Language Models: Battle Decks
So here we are—at the intersection of rockets, rainbows, lava lamp goo, and machine-generated soldiers who think math is hard.
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Our newest exhibition “Give Me a Ring: A Telephone Retrospective” is now on display in Terminal 2. Early types of telephones ranged from large wooden wall telephones to candlestick desk sets. The rotary dial telephone, with a handset on its base, permeated American homes by the 1930s. #GiveMeARing
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
can someone who is comfortable at the intersection of atproto, "did:plc:" and Go confirm for me that is (or is not) the correct way to mint a new "did:plc:" DID / it seems to work but the documentation on all this stuff is squiggy enough that I am not really sure – gist.github.com/thisisaaronl...
gist.github.com
Create new "did:plc:" DID (Go)
Create new "did:plc:" DID (Go). GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Marshall Moxom (1916–2007) was a San Francisco-based photographer active between the late 1930s and mid-1970s. Moxom frequently worked at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), where he made aerial photographs and documented terminal construction, events, and airport personnel. #MarshallMoxom
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Aaron Straup Cope @thisisaaronland.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
"There is simply no universe, in 2025, where a museum app (which doesn't exist by the way) will "let you skip the security line [at an airport] if the museum is at peak occupancy"." – www.aaronland.info/weblog/2025/...
aaronland.info
Conversations with Large Language Models: “Tell me about SFO Museum”
Given two incorrect statements the probability that one of them is less wrong than the other doesn't somehow transmogrify it, like water in to gold, into a correct statement. It is still wrong but the...
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Reposted by Aaron Straup Cope
SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
What’s happening at SFO Museum? We’re preparing for our newest exhibition “Give Me A Ring: A Telephone Retrospective!” #GiveMeARing #BehindtheScenes #SneakPeek
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SFO Museum @sfomuseum.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Working with a team of artists at his studio in Seattle, Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary (b. 1963) finds innovative ways to push the boundaries of modern Native art and glass sculpture. First, objects are created in the hot shop by glassblowing, hot sculpting, and casting. #PrestonSingletary
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