Art Practical Audio

This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, visual artist Sydney Cain and curator/organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio meditate on the vision and process that inspire Cain’s upcoming show "Refutations" at Museum of African Diaspora. Cain, a third-generation San Franciscan, talks about living and making art in the city, reclaiming its Black past, present, and future.

"Refutations" is an ongoing body of work exploring ancestral memory and the power of Black myth. The project includes various multimedia series of artwork, publications, and exhibitions emerging from personal genealogy research alongside process documentation through photography and drawing. Through play between ephemerality and figurative representation, Cain teases resistance against erasure while also celebrating metamorphoses that occur in the voids of invisibility. The work is an exploration in the perimeters of both existing and not existing through imaginative landscapes.

Due to the current world health crisis, the Museum of the African Diaspora is currently closed. They are closely monitoring the changing status of COVID-19 and taking the necessary steps to reduce the spread of the coronavirus disease. All exhibitions have been postponed until further notice including "Sydney Cain: Refutations." For all updates on openings, please visit www.moadsf.org or follow MoAD on social media @moadsf.

For episode 8 of the Notes from MoAD series, visual artist DeShawn Dumas and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss the fragility and resilience of glass, the terrifying and meditative properties of art and shooting guns, and the qualities and limits of the art institution as community space. In conversation about the creation of his works, Dumas describes how the “performance” of creating the works embodied the navigation required to survive in this landscape. By creating abstract works, the artist shifts from the narrative of race in America to the visceral experiences of those most affected by the oppressive systems and violent tools of Colonialism.

DeShawn Dumas’s solo exhibition, "Against the End of History," presented painting, video, and the artist’s self-described ballistic monochromes in a multimedia installation that situates the sacred within the political. Dumas counters the assertion of liberal democracy as the final form of human government and defender of human dignity as established by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay “The End of History?”. Dumas deploys the visual languages of abstraction and minimalism to explore the psychic and historical afterlives of slavery, the increasing cultural predominance of militarized policing and the ecological catastrophe of climate change. Inhabiting the terrors of a past, not yet past, "Against the End of History" offered a space to contemplate the struggle for future(s) worth living. "DeShawn Dumas: Against the End of History" was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program September 4 through November 15, 2019.

This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, photographer and visual artist Chanell Stone and curator/organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio revisit "Natura Negra (Black Nature)," Stone’s exhibition at Museum of African Diaspora. Stone walks us through the various parts of the show and gives us the behind-the-image process for her compelling black-and-white self-portraits that anchor the exhibition. Additionally, Stone reflects on her family’s ties to the American South, their eventual move to Los Angeles, and how these intertwined landscapes and narratives influence her image-making.

Through the use of black-and-white analog photography, "Natura Negra" aims to expand the canon of traditional photography. Specificity is placed on urbanized African Americans living in dense cities and the disconnection from nature that often inherently follows this lifestyle. Stone analyzes the Black body’s presence within urban “forests” as an effort to reclaim and reconnect to nature itself, even within the confines of the man-made environment. Through a compilation of environmental portraits, Stone explores the notion of “holding space” within one’s environment and the nuances of compartmentalized nature. "Natura Negra" was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program, from December 4 through March 1, 2020.

Welcome to Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. For our sixth episode of this series, multidisciplinary artist Indira Allegra and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss an expanding of world and experience, the interplay of consent and complicity, exhaustion of identity-based inquiry, and the temperature of colonialism. Indira’s faceted explorations of weaving through performance, textile, video/new media, and performance have documented and deconstructed physical, psychological, historical, social, and practical tensions. In conversation, Allegra and MacFadyen deliberate on these vectors of power and the reality that nothing is neutral.

BODYWARP was a solo exhibition by Indira Allegra exploring weaving as performance requiring a unique receptivity to tensions extant in political and emotional spaces. BODYWARP explores looms as frames through which the weaver becomes the warp and is held under tension, performing a series of site-specific interventions using her body. Like the accumulation of memory in cloth, looms and other tools of the weaver’s craft become organs of memory, pulling the artist’s body into an intimate choreography between maker, tool, and the narrative of a place. BODYWARP was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program, from September 19 through November 4, 2018.

This is Notes from MoAD: Emerging Artists and Critic Series, dedicated to the Museum of African Diaspora’s 2018-20 Emerging Artist Program. In this episode, visual artist Rodney Ewing and curator/organizer Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen talk about institutions, what the word “emerging” means when you’ve been an artist for fifteen years, and the things we learn about our work when we listen openly. As discussion about fact and truth leads to a deep-dive, head first, into the murky waters of the art market’s influence over what cultures get to have a brief and specific moment in the sun, the erasure of 200,000 years of Black art, and the long path to institutional diversity, they come up for air to affirm the power of creating our own spaces and communal opportunities.

Re-examining complex and marginalized social histories, Longitude + Latitude presented an installation of mixed media works on paper created during Ewing’s residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Exploring social and historical narratives of forced migration or displacement, the exhibition considered mnemonic geography and the intersections of body, place, and memory within the African diaspora. Longitude + Latitude was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program from May 8 through June 23, 2019.

A Conversation with Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada of Public Matters about expanding the notions and boundaries of expectations for public practice.

Constance Hockaday on what it means to take risks in public art practice and how our desires can dictate the world's infrastructure.

How does one survive and thrive as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area? The art world is inundated with stories from the community and media about artists being displaced in the face of great wealth disparity, a crushing housing crisis, the lack of sustainable employment in the arts, and a threatening decrease in exhibition and funding sources. Living and Working consists of a multi-author column, a video series, and live events where artists and cultural workers answer the question “How do you live and work in the Bay Area?”

For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area. Join Jakeya Caruthers and Xandra Ibarra in the Growlery’s kitchen to commemorate the many conversations had in each other's kitchens.

For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area.

Join Brontez Purnell and Sophia Wang for a late-night conversation at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, where the two of them met and later co-founded the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. We’ll hear about the communities have shaped their practices, and how the two work together through dance and movement.

For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area. Join Mik Gaspay and Kija Lucas in an intimate conversation about their experiences growing up in Palo Alto, and the paths that led them to becoming Bay Area-based artists. Learn how they continue to survive and thrive in the ever-changing ecosystem of the Bay.

Gaspay's work can be seen at a permanent public art installation in Chinatown, San Francisco's Portsmouth Square bridge, he's a graduate of California College of the Arts. Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the Bay Area and nationally.