Name: Arion Press Craft Talk #5 – Meditations on Gold with Maya Kini
Start: 2026-02-19T18:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-02-19T20:30:00+00:00

“Meditations on Gold With Maya Kini” Presented By Arion Press

Join Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture’s resident organization, Arion Press, a fine art, handcrafted artist book publisher, for “Craft Talk #5: Meditations on Gold With Maya Kini,” part of a continuing series of events.

EVENT DETAILS

Local goldsmith and poet Maya Kini shares insights into her creative process. 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 with 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.

Maya Kini is a poet and goldsmith based in San Francisco. Her writing explores the intersections of craft, language, and the body – examining how making and materiality shape perception, memory, and repair. As a goldsmith, Kini 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.

Kini’s jewelry and sculptural work have been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in numerous publications. She has taught at Penland School of Crafts, California State University (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. Kini works out of a studio cooperative on historic Varda Landing in Sausalito, CA.