Kreative Growth 2026: MAHAL Opens at CAST's Historic 447 Minna Arts Hub

Through photography and sculpture, two Bay Area artists explore what it means to love, care, and belong—drawing from Filipino cultural heritage, diasporic experience, and acts of community care that resonate far beyond any one identity.

Kreative Growth 2026: MAHAL opened last Thursday at CAST SF Gallery — and the community showed up.

Hosted at CAST SF's 447 Minna Arts Hub in San Francisco's SOMA Pilipinas Cultural Heritage District, MAHAL marks a new chapter for Balay Kreative's artist development program, bringing together the work of Gelli Pascual and Tanza J. Solis in an exhibition centered on love, legacy, and care.

Visitors gather inside CAST SF's 447 Minna Arts Hub during the opening reception of MAHAL, the 2026 edition of Balay Kreative's Kreative Growth artist development exhibition | Photo: Jy Jimmie Gabiola

On the first day of Pride Month, we return to an exhibition that opened last Thursday in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood — one that asks a question at the heart of both Filipino culture and queer experience: what does it mean to love, and what does that love cost us?

On a warm Thursday evening, visitors stepped into 447 Minna Street and were greeted not with a typical gallery opening but with an invitation: "As you enter, take a moment to soften and remember the people, gestures, and sacrifices that have taught you what love means."

This was MAHAL — the 2026 edition of Balay Kreative's annual Kreative Growth exhibition, presented by Balay Kreative and hosted at CAST SF's 447 Minna Arts Hub located in the historic Dempster Building. The show features two Filipinx artists: photographer, filmmaker, and poet Gelli Pascual, and multidisciplinary painter, sculptor and material necromancer, Tanza J. Solis. Together, their work forms a meditation on love as inheritance, practice, and responsibility.

Gelli Pascual, Pamana (Heirloom), from Mana ng Mahal / The Legacy of Mahal | Photo: Jy Jimmie Gabiola

What Mahal Carries

Mahal is a Tagalog word with roots in both Arabic and Malay. It carries a dual meaning: beloved, and expensive — suggesting that what we love costs us something. For Kreative Growth 2026, Balay Kreative Program Manager Dre Sibayan and Program Coordinator, Jy Jimmie Gabiola and the exhibition team invited artists to interrogate what that mahal looks like across Filipino and diasporic communities. The result is a intergenerational, mixed medium show that feels less like a gallery and more like a a testimony of love.

Pascual's series Mana ng Mahal / The Legacy of Mahal fills the brick walls of CAST SF with intimate portraits of caregiving across generations. "Panalagin" — Prayer — captures an elder's hands holding a well-worn rosary, terracotta beads smoothed by years of the same petition. "Lemuel" is a portrait of her father in barong, made because she wanted everyone to see him the way she always has. "Salinlahi" — Lineage — documents three generations in a single frame: love not spoken, but witnessed and passed on without even realizing it.

Guests encounter Tanza J. Solis's sculptural works, which transform reclaimed and found materials into meditations on care, memory, and renewal. | Photo by: Jy Jimmie Gabiola

Solis brings a different kind of devotion to the space. His sculptures — Gaia, Mother Oceania, and Promised Land — are built entirely from upcycled, second-hand, and found materials: beach microplastics collected from Alameda, recycled PET plastic from salad containers, rattan, wire, rice paper, shells. Through what he calls "material necromancy," Solis transforms dead materials into new life, proposing upcycling as a ritual act of love — tending to the planet the way one tends to a person.

Both Pascual and Solis bring to their work the particular knowledge of people who have loved across distances — geographic, generational, and cultural. As queer Filipinx artists, they understand intimately what it means to hold mahal in forms that aren't always legible to the world around you — love that shows up in care rather than declaration, in presence rather than performance. Their work doesn't announce this. It simply lives inside it, the way real love does.

Photo by: Cesar Rubio

The Space Holds

447 Minna has long been a home for Filipinx and diasporic artists in SoMa — a neighborhood shaped by decades of displacement and cultural erasure. Donated to CAST by Brookfield Properties in 2019 as part of a community benefits agreement with the City of San Francisco, the historic Dempster Building was reimagined as a permanently affordable cultural space for exactly this kind of work. On opening night, that history was palpable.

A father and his young daughter stood together reading Pascual's artist statement, her pink backpack still on her shoulders. | Photo by: Jy Jimmie Gabiola

Guests moved through the gallery slowly. They stopped in front of Pascual's close-up of a mother's eye — "Tingin ng Nanay" or A Mother's Gaze — reading the wall label quietly. They leaned into Solis's altar-like installation, taking in the shells, flowers, amber glass, and found objects arranged with the care of an offering. Children came with their parents. Friends came in groups.

At the back of the gallery, a community board invited visitors to respond: What kind of love do you want to pass on? What is one act of love or care you inherited? By the end of the night, the board was covered — "cutting fruit," "carrying each other's burdens," "laughter that echoes around a table of food and family," "radical self-acceptance," "showing up every single day, before you're even awake."

What kind of love do you want to pass on? Visitors responded with memories, rituals, and acts of care, revealing how mahal lives beyond the gallery walls and within community. | Photo by Jy Jimmie Gabiola

Community as Practice

Kreative Growth is Balay Kreative's annual artist development program, supporting diasporic and bay area artists through residencies, mentorship, and public exhibition. This year's cohort worked with Creative Director Dre Sibayan and Communications Manager Jy Jimmie Gabiola to bring the show to life — from the jury process and exhibition design to the community programming and opening night experience.

This Pride Month, MAHAL offers something quieter than a declaration — an invitation to sit with the love you have inherited, the love you are still learning to give, and the love that has carried you further than you knew it would.

The exhibition runs through June 12 at CAST SF Gallery, 447 Minna Street, San Francisco. It is free and open to the public. Visitor hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM–6PM.

Kreative Growth 2026: MAHAL is presented by Balay Kreative, a program of Kultivate Labs, with support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and CAST SF.

Exhibition produced by Dre Sibayan and Jy Jimmie Gabiola. Special Thanks to Jared of CAST SF and the team at Brave New Spaces