Engineer's Daughter

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with(out) with(in) the very moment

Ed Aulerich-Sugai: Power in Storage Mask 3, 1989. Watercolor, mixed media on paper, 28 ½ x 27 in. Courtesy of Ed Aulerich-Sugai Collection and Archive.

Mere months ago a headline in The New York Times trumpeted "HIV Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic," and the world reacted with a complicated kind of joy. A similarly complex set of emotions permeate the excellent group show With(out) With(in) the very moment currently on display at the SFAC Main Gallery: the poignancy of remembering the countless we lost, mixed with the defiance of activism and the joy of liberation. Curator Margaret Tedesco centers the work of Ed Aulerich-Sugai, a local artist and gardener at the SF Conservatory of Flowers who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994, alongside 7 other Bay Area artists, some of whom have been living and working here for decades. According to Tedesco, who as an artist and long-time SF resident herself has made powerful work about the HIV/AIDS crisis, “This show attempts to revisit a lineage common among artists in the 1980s who witnessed and embodied the activism and community—and to continue our discourse that effects all of our lives today.” As is customary with the exhibitions she curates, Tedesco commissioned an essay for the show, this time from writer Anton Stuebner, and visitors receive a beautifully-produced edition of his writing as they exit the gallery (you can also download a pdf here). I read it over dinner tonight and was crying by the time I got to the end:

Joy feels increasingly precarious, perhaps even irresponsible, when faced with our deeply troubled and fucked-up world. And there are many days when it's just too damn hard and painful to muster it up. But when I remember those queer ancestors, and the people who came before me, I also think about how they shaped my relationship to art and activism. Hell, I think about how they shaped my sense of self; without them, I wouldn't have the tools to figure out who I am. That's something to feel pretty fucking joyful about.

And it's my responsibility—and yours—to honor those we've lost by feeling joy and rage and loneliness. It is our responsibility to carve out livable lives for ourselves. Denying our own capacity to feel, and the capacity of others to feel—that's the killer. And we certainly need hope, for fuck's sake. Without it, what's the point?

the jungle

Just adding my voice to the chorus around the Bay Area to insist that you hasten to see The Jungle at the Curran, which drops you directly into the middle of a replica of the refugee camp that sprung up in Calais in 2015. I kept thinking about how the production was such a brilliant way of combating compassion fatigue, as the stories are ones you are (sadly) familiar with but by putting you side-by-side with the characters their plight takes on new immediacy. From the Curran's website:

British playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, founders of Good Chance Theatre, established Good Chance’s first temporary theater space, an 11 meter geodesic dome, in the heart of the refugee and migrant camp in Calais in September 2015, where they lived for seven months before writing THE JUNGLE after the demolition of the camp.

“The Jungle was a reluctant home for thousands of people from all over the world. It was a place where people built temporary lives and communities formed out of necessity. People who visited asked why we built a theater in a refugee camp, but it’s always seemed clear to us that theater should be at the center of the conversation,” said Robertson and Murphy. “We’re thrilled to bring this play to West Coast audiences with its premiere at the historic Curran and look forward to sharing these timely and important stories.”

The play ends with a heartbreaking reminder that the refugee crisis continues, and with a chance to offer help by donating to the Jungle Fund.

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Next up: Roger Beebe films at Artists' Television Access!

an evening with kahlil joseph

 

Black Mary – A Film by Kahlil Joseph from Jacob Marley on Vimeo.

Having met Kahlil Joseph when he was a resident at Headlands last fall, I leapt at the chance to see more of his work in a program presented by SFFILM at the Victoria last night. From the Headlands website: "Co-director of Beyonce’s Lemonade, winner of a Sundance directing award, and a participant in the upcoming Venice Biennale, Joseph has been carving out a place for himself as an auteur whose eclectic artistic modes—music video, installation, narrative, and nonfiction film—always lovingly celebrate Black culture while simultaneously addressing Black people’s precarious and complicated status in society at-large." Black Mary, posted above, was a standout from the work screened last night, and we were also treated to a segment from Joseph's ongoing project BLKNWS, his amazing video for Flying Lotus's "Until the Quiet Comes" (which Duane Deterville wrote about beautifully in a 2-part essay on Open Space), a short film about a black rodeo in Oklahoma, and the extraordinary Fly Paper, during which special Funktion-One speakers rattled the Victoria's light fixtures and my heart deep in my chest. After the program Joseph conversed with author Rachel Kushner about his process in front of a appreciative sold-out crowd. If I only catch one SFFILM presentation this year, I'm glad it was this one.

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Next up: The Jungle at the Curran!

xicanx futurity

Installation view of Xicanx Futurity exhibition. Photo by Drew Altizer.

On a day like today where the news is yet again making me speechless with rage, it did my soul a whole ton of good to (finally!) visit the new Manetti Shrem Museum on the UC Davis campus and revel in the strong female voices forefronted in their Xicanx Futurity group show. I inadvertently arrived on Picnic Day which meant contending with more fellow humans than I was anticipating, but the atmosphere was convivial and I got a free "Abolish Borders" screen print out of it besides.

The curatorial statement in the exhibition handout (all wall texts are in both English and Spanish):

Xicanx Futurity features the work of six artists, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Gina Aparicio, Felicia 'Fe' Montes, Margaret ‘Quica’ Alarcón, Melanie Cervantes, and Gilda Posada. This exhibition presents an intergenerational exchange of artists who center Indigenous forms of communal and hemispheric ceremony rooted in sacred practices that center ancestors, community, family, and all our relations. These artists have emerged from or have been influenced by the Chicano/a Art Movement of the late 1960s. One aspect of this movement was to create a new identity formation for a community that had been historically marginalized by taking "Chicano," which was then a pejorative term, and signifying it with new meaning informed by a politic of self-determination and social justice. Queer Chicanx and Chicana feminists critiqued the movement for its exclusionary and hetero-patriarchal practices. Xicanx takes root in that critique advancing a new iteration of "Chicano." The "x" at the beginning of the word references Nahuatl, a significant Indigenous language of Mesoamerica, and the "x" at the end represents a contemporary challenge to the gender binary. This new signification is not only a marker of identity for the artists in this exhibition but a critical praxis advancing new theoretical models and alternative sources of knowledge in the production of socially engaged art.

Xicanx Futurity looks to queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz's definition that imagines a "futurity that is attentive to the past for the purposes of critiquing the present" while simultaneously gesturing toward "future possibilities" that are not yet realized in society. Futurity, not to be confused with futurism, is a distinct idea. Scholar Curtis Marez draws "a distinction, however, between futurism—the projection of a particular, determinant future social order—and futurity as open-ended desire for a world beyond the limits of the present." For Marez futurity captures "the expectation of the future as possibility, not guaranteed but also not foreclosed." In this regard, futurity represents a horizon of social justice or a utopian vision that may be restricted by conditions of possibility but yet still imaginable. Futurity describes the actions that are rooted in an understanding of the past while advancing new possibilities for the future, thus constantly building, creating, engaging, and transforming the present. Futurity does not prefigure the future. It creates the future in the daily praxis of seeking to transform community.

Together, Xicanx Futurity represents that the central ideas of the Chicana/o/x movements are continuously in formation and illuminates the multiple paths towards creating social justice, equality, and manifesting decolonization as an everyday, life-long, and generational process. The works and the artistic practices highlighted in this exhibition simultaneously seek to trace the Indigenous lineages, knowledges, and spiritual paths for diasporic Xicanx communities as detribalized Indigenous peoples of the Americas while building decolonized visual and political formations for the present, new constructs that do not replicate settler colonial ideologies of genocidal displacement or vanishing of Native and Indigenous peoples on this hemisphere now and in the future.

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Next up: Headlands Spring Open House tomorrow!

sustaining small & alternative art spaces

David Keenan, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Devi Peacock

Just got home from a very inspiring and informative talk at the fab CTRL+SHFT Collective about sustaining small and alternative spaces, and in the interest of amplifying the work the amazing people are doing (and of waking this blog up again after too-long hibernation) wanted to post a bit about the orgs who graciously shared their knowledge tonight.

Our hosts CTRL+SHFT Collective, one of my fave artist-run spaces in Oakland, are composed of a group of 13 cis-women, trans-spectrum, gender non-conforming, queer, and PoC members. The artists have their studios in the building, and then they also have an exhibition space where I have seen some truly great shows over the last few years. I finally just joined their Drip and you should too!

The Center for Cultural Innovation organized the panel tonight and offered it completely free of charge to attendees. Their mission is "to promote knowledge sharing, networking, and financial independence for individuals in the arts by providing business training, grants, and incubating innovative projects that create new program knowledge, tools and practices for artists in the field, and conditions that contribute to realizing financial self determination." 

Devi Peacock was there representing Peacock Rebellion: "an SF Bay Area -based, queer + trans people of color crew of artist-activist-healers. We make sassy sexy art to help build a culture of social justice, with an emphasis on healing justice."

David Keenan is the co-founder of both Omni Commons, incubator of "Bay Area collectives with a shared political vision of more equitable commoning of resources and meeting human needs over private interests or corporate profit," and of Safer DIY Spaces, a crucial resource after Ghost Ship that keeps vulnerable Bay Area residents in their homes.

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist (and CTRL+SHFT Collective member) with a practice deeply rooted in activism and social justice, and she's also the proprietor of the wonderful Nook Gallery, which she operates out of a literal nook in her home's kitchen.

Did I mention it was a truly inspiring panel? Here's to people who are doing the damn work.

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Next up: a mini road trip to Davis this weekend to see the Xicanx Futurity show at the Manetti Shrem. More soon...

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