Publications
Jim Marshall: Show Me The Picture
by Amelia Davis (editor), Karen Grigsby Bates, Michelle Margetts, Joel Selvin, Meg Shiffler
Chronicle Books, August 2019
ISBN: 9781452180373
Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture is a definitive portrait of one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century—a fiercely independent artist who captured the soul of American counterculture. Marshall’s lens documented seismic moments in music history, civil rights, and everyday life with unflinching intimacy and raw honesty. From the backstage calm before Dylan took the stage to the spiritual intensity of Coltrane in performance, from the defiant gaze of civil rights protestors to the electric chaos of Woodstock, Marshall didn’t just photograph icons—he helped define them. This book gathers hundreds of his most enduring images, revealing a visual legacy as bold, soulful, and uncompromising as the man himself.
Marshall's legacy is the subject of a documentary feature film, Show Me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall.
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Melissa Stern: Strange Girls
By Meg Shiffler and Melissa Stern
Garvey/Simon Gallery, NY, October 2018
Sugar and Spice and Everything Strange
Strange Girls brings together Melissa Stern’s wildly imaginative and psychologically layered sculptures to explore girlhood as both a tender fiction and a charged emotional state. Drawing on pop culture detritus, vintage imagery, and the worn textures of memory, Stern crafts a sisterhood of misfits—pin-up girls, fragmented forms, and doll-like figures who are equal parts seductive, defiant, and unmoored. Balancing formal elegance with discomfort and disorientation, these works suggest that girlhood is a space of contradiction: alluring yet unstable, armored yet exposed. With wit, grit, and a knowing wink, Strange Girls invites us into a world where playfulness masks vulnerability and humor edges into melancholy—a world not so unlike our own. Stern says, “we are all strange girls”—outsiders seeking belonging in a world that rarely makes room for our full contradictions.
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O Glorious City: A Love Letter to San Francisco
by Jeremy Fish and Meg Shiffler (essay and interview with the artist)
Chronicle Books, June 2017
ISBN: 9781452156040
O Glorious City is an exuberant love letter to San Francisco from Jeremy Fish, a beloved artist who enjoys a massive fan base for his graphic artwork. When Fish was invited by the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries to create 100 new works of art in honor of City Hall's 100th birthday, he moved his studio into a tiny office off the grand Rotunda to become the first-ever SF CIty Hall Artist in Residence. This celebratory book gathers all 100 drawings featuring the city's famous architecture and treasured local landmarks as well as portraits of colorful local residents in a gallery of "unofficial mayors." Together these images form an energetic, visual tour de force showcasing San Francisco's vivacious spirit and vibrant history.
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SHIFT: Three Projects Constructing a New Dialogue About Race in America
by Meg Shiffler (introduction and exhibition curator), Kamau Bell, Enrique Chagoya, Derek Conrad Murray PhD, Kymberly M. Pinder PhD, Post Brothers
Publisher: San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, October 2011
Editors: E. Maude Haak-Frendscho and Meg Shiffler
Photography: Alice Shaw and Ellen Shershow Peña
Design: Joshua Singer / atomtan design
Printer: Edition One Books, Berkeley CA
Supported by: National Endowment of the Arts
SHIFT was a multi-sited exhibition and accompanying catalogue featuring newly commissioned projects by Elizabeth Axtman, David Huffman, and Travis Somerville—three Bay Area artists whose work confronts race as a shifting and deeply personal construct. While distinct in medium and aesthetic, the artists are united in their efforts to illuminate how prejudice, historical trauma, and systemic inequities reverberate in the present. From Axtman’s disarming use of radical forgiveness in The Love Renegade to Huffman’s Afrofuturist sculptural cosmos and Somerville’s monumental tribute to Bay Area protest histories, the exhibition invites viewers into complex narratives of resistance, memory, and transformation. The richly illustrated catalog features contributions from scholars Derek Conrad Murray, Kymberly N. Pinder, and the Post Brothers, and conversations with Enrique Chagoya, W. Kamau Bell, and Ishmael Reed, making it not just documentation but a vital extension of the project’s provocative and timely dialogue.
I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer…
SFMOMA Open Space Blog, Columnist in Residence
I jumped at the chance to write for SFMOMA’s experimental blog Open Space, edited by the fabulous poet Suzanne Stein. As a curator, first and foremost, my impulse was to use the platform as a frame to share time and create something with artists I admire. The result is six collaborations presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response, often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.
The Marriage of Figaro with Anne Colvin: Part 1, Part 2
Maple Jesus: In Brooklyn with Gretchen Bennett and Emily Hall: Part 1, Part 2
Andy Goldsworthy and Big Tears in the Backyard: Part 1, Part 2
Sequent Occupancy: A Brief History of the SFMOMA site for the past 900 Years with Joshua Singer: Part 1, Part 2
Rhyme & Reason: Jude Gabbard y Munoz Responds to the Collection: Part 1, Part 2
imPOSSIBLE! Eight Chinese Artists Engage Absurdity
by Clark Buckner, Hou Hanru, Meg Shiffler, Michael Zheng
San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, February 2009
Artists: Lu Chunsheng, Xing Danwen, Ni Haifeng, Zhu Jia, Xu Zhen, and Michael Zheng
This publication accompanied a two-venue exhibition (San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and MISSION 17) featuring eight Chinese artists whose video and photographic works use absurdity and dark humor to explore rapid social, political, and economic changes in contemporary China. Organized by Michael Zheng, imPOSSIBLE! brought together perspectives from artists in China and the diaspora, reflecting on themes like booming capitalism, systemic corruption, and urban chaos. Alongside the exhibition, a series of events at the San Francisco Chinese Culture Center deepened the conversation around these urgent issues in Chinese contemporary art.