Cheryl Derricotte: A Consideration of Trees

March 7 - April 11, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 14 from 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: Weds - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present, A Consideration of Trees, a solo exhibition of new work by Cheryl Derricotte. The opening reception is Saturday, March 14 from 5-7pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco. The exhibition runs through April 11, 2026.

Exhibition Statement

Cheryl Derricotte's second solo exhibition, A Consideration of Trees, invites us to see San Francisco through its trees. Urban trees function as site-specific records of a city's environmental and infrastructural conditions, an alternative mapping system through which climate, planning, and maintenance become legible. Their growth bears the marks of heat, pollution, soil constraint, and species migration, encoding the social, political, and historical forces that organize land use.

Through photographic textiles and glass works, the exhibition proposes a cartography that extends beyond zoning, administrative boundaries, and the optimized flows of capital and information. Selecting one tree from each of the city's thirty-six neighborhoods, Derricotte assembles a portrait of San Francisco as a living network of adaptation, persistence, and kinship. Indigenous California species appear alongside Australian imports, including the contested eucalyptus, whilst Southern magnolias, displaced from their southeastern origins, flourish across the city. These trees trace patterns of dispersal and settlement: which species were moved, by whom, and to what end. They embody the friction between private and public land and expose the city's ongoing negotiation with ecological precarity.

Thirteen of the photographic textile works, annotated with latitude and longitude coordinates, position trees as points of orientation across the city. The coordinates anchor each image in the specificity of place while opening onto broader narratives of coexistence. The trees are relational organisms, bound to their neighbors through root systems and shared soil, exchanging nutrients, signaling stress, sustaining one another across difference.

They register the forces of geology, history, ecology, and power as structural, written into their very form. The eucalyptus carries its colonial introduction in the particular way it grows. The magnolia carries its southeastern origin into the specific weight of its presence on a San Francisco street. Each tree contains the historical and moral arc of its coming into being. A Consideration of Trees asks us to attend to that curvature and an ethic of living-with, in which adaptation and consideration unfold slowly, rootedly, and in shared time.

PROGRAMMING

In Conversation: Cheryl Derricotte x Mike Sullivan
Saturday, March 28 from 2-3pm
re.riddle, 1275 Minnesota Street, SF

Join us for an engaging conversation about San Francisco through the standpoint of its trees with artist Cheryl Derricotte and Mike Sullivan, author of Trees of San Francisco and President of the San Francisco Environment Commission.

BIO
Mike Sullivan is the author of Trees of San Francisco, published in a 2nd edition in 2013, with a 3rd edition expected in late 2026. He served for many years on the board of directors of Friends of the Urban Forest, including service as board president. He is currently President of the San Francisco Environment Commission. He served on the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission from 2007 to 2010 and the San Francisco Urban Forestry Council from 2014 to 2023.

ARTWORKS

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