Among but not surpassing the more unusual gifts that artist and Alameda Floating Museum founder Marta Thoma Hall has received from husband and work partner David Hall is a tugboat.
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“To move a barge — they don’t have motors — you need a tugboat,” Thoma Hall says. “David took me tugboat shopping. It was a birthday present.
“We’re hesitant to move the barge around the (Oakland-Alameda) estuary because of the museum’s art, but I was delighted to have the tug. The barge is actually tied down with huge ropes and has an anchor as big as a car, although we don’t use it. To access the museum, you cross the gangplank.”
Atop the barge is a manufactured structure that for a time was the couple’s home and served as an ideal workplace for her spouse, a tech entrepreneur and inventor, to develop boat stabilization company Velodyne Marine. The company is among several tech-centric ones he has created to address audio acoustics, autonomous vehicles and rocket-launching systems.
After finding a home in Berkeley, they founded the Hall Art + Technology Foundation in 2021. The nonprofit arts entity focuses on the powerful, culture-changing crosscurrents of art and science and seeks to raise the visibility of underrepresented voices within the local community and world at large.
Converting their houseboat-like building into five gallery spaces in 2024, Thoma Hall launched her dreamed-of Alameda Floating Museum. The first exhibit, this past summer’s “Rising Tides” (hallartandtechnologyfoundation.com/rising-tides), celebrated work created by women and people of color — groups she says have been largely left out of art history and that the art industry continues to silence, ignore, downplay or render invisible.
“These artists, many in the Bay Area, bring their artistic voices,” she says. “It’s exciting to learn what they know, do and will say. In the last 10 years, the work of women artists like Hung Liu, M. Louise Stanley, Michelle Pred, Mildred Howard and others has gained international attention.
“Their artistic expression and technical skills are equally fantastic to male artists. (For) so long, women’s art was considered lesser-than. It remains only 10% of collections at major art institutions and White men are still at the very top of museums and write most of the art history books. All of it should be proportional, 50-50, for both women and artists of color.”
Thoma Hall admires the Afrofuturism movement, which she calls “a gift to the nation, to the world.” Afrofuturism is said to be a whole culture, not just a one-act novelty.
“Studying it educated me, and I’m interested in doing the same in ‘Fem Futurism.’ I looked that term up and their are some bizarre, weird things out there, but it showed me someone else is thinking about women-centered narratives in art and science too. There’s so much I don’t know. I want to keep learning. Otherwise, life is boring.”
Thoma Hall grew up in Nebraska and a home in which both parents encouraged creativity.
“Our house was modest, but my sister (artist Kim Thoman) and I had lots of materials: blocks crafted by a local lumber shop, colored paper and scissors, a dress-up box filled with colorful gypsy clothes — scarves, blouses, bangles, high-heeled shoes — and hundreds of books my grandmother shipped to us after the school library where she taught closed.”
Memories of marvelously rich, illustrated books with realistic or otherworldly stories fired her imagination. Later, studying fine arts at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, Thoma Hall developed artwork that includes painting, sculpture, steel and glass installations and more.
Her work is recognized (martathomahall.com/mthcv) worldwide for its fusion of surreal imagery and social, feminist and environmental justice activism. Among her large public artworks in the Bay Area is “Journey of A Bottle,” a sculpture commissioned by the Walnut Creek Public Library and created using discarded glass bottles positioned to resemble a giant tidal wave.
Thoma Hall says the manufactured home that’s now a floating art museum docked in Alameda in the Oakland Estuary’s tidal canal features large windows and is “a fabulous gallery space.” The view of the estuary includes the marshland, and during high tide, the barge rocks subtly and bounces lightly on the water’s surface. When water levels are low, the marsh basin is visible.
“We put a duck house out there and plan for an artist to create something out there making the tidal changes more evident.”
The idea supports what Thoma Hall says are her gallery’s three passions: “Environmental caretaking, feminism and amplifying the voices of women who’ve been silenced and addressing social justice areas, including immigration and (increased representation of) the cultures of other countries, especially those in which people of color reside.”
She suggests that artists who identify as women, feminists and/or people of color (the gallery does exhibit works made by men if the works serve the gallery’s mission) are not solely public, big-issue activists. Artists alternatively may look inward — to dreams, memories, spirituality and more.
“The masculinity and patriarchy that has led to honoring war, aggression and to women’s (objectified or hypersexualized) bodies in artworks has been celebrated for so long. Now there are artist like Chie Aoki, Leanora Carrington, my sister Kim and so many others considered feminists who’ve brought forward feminine perspectives that include the power of healing, caretaking, birthing, nature.”
Aoki’s black lacquer work “Body” shows a figure, head bowed, spine curved forward. Long hair descends like a curtain or shield behind which she is protected. “Tree Figure” (by Thoma Hall’s sister Thoman) is reminiscent of a human body’s outlined form. A “wound-like” opening in the trunk pulses with blood-red paint in an oval area with orange and soft peach patches resembling Band-Aids; black marks might be suggestive of staples or stitches. The tree stands in front of a swirling dynamo of graphic lines and color blocks that add cosmic energy.
Thoma Hall says her unusual life has flowed organically and is steered by enthusiasm for innovation in art and science.
“Art can influence the world. David’s electronics, mechanics and engineering can come up with inventions that change the world. It’s not easy and sounds ambitious, but it’s what we’ve been excited about for decades.”
Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.