Through November 13 - Carrie Mae Weems: Witness at Fraenkel Gallery
In a week where we learned that U.S. police killings were undercounted by more than 17,000 over the past 40 years, it felt like a gift to be able to survey the work that Carrie Mae Weems has created over that same period of time. While her photographs could easily fill an entire floor of a museum, Fraenkel has curated a focused selection that displays the breadth of her practice and creates meaningful juxtapositions besides. Two pieces from her famous Kitchen Series are here, in which Weems places herself into quiet scenes of domesticity and relationship, as well as heartbreaking newer work that speaks directly to police violence against Black bodies. I also loved the cluster of photos from her series Family Pictures and Stories with their depictions of family dynamics and Black joy. And then I stepped out of the gallery and directly into Market Street to join the Women's March and to yell for choice and reproductive rights.
Other things I liked this week:
- Motley Stones by Adelbert Stifter. Set in the Austrian/German countryside and written in the nineteenth century with a surprisingly modern sensibility, these thematically-linked short stories are pure poetry, especially in the translation by Isabel Fargo Cole. Stifter wrote, "We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race."
- Working Girls by Lizzie Borden. Sex work is nothing but work in this 1986 masterpiece that follows a day in the life of working girl Molly at a high-end brothel in New York. With innovative cinematography and realistic interactions amongst Molly and her fellow workers nothing is gratuitous either.
- With virus transmission still at Substantial in Alameda and San Francisco counties I'm still opting for virtual culture where I can, and Crowded Fire's fantastic play The Displaced, written by Isaac Gómez, still managed to scare the bejeezus out of me even from the safety of my couch. What happens when the ghosts of gentrification become real?
- I was similarly grateful this week for Opera San José and their wonderful online presentation of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri, an opera that just goes to show artists have been exploring the fraught relationship between the two composers long before Amadeus.