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.

Art Practical Audio

Notes from MoAD: Episode 11 with Sydney Cain and PJ Gubatina Policarpio

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.

Notes from MoAD: Episode 8 with DeShawn Dumas and Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen

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.

Notes from MoAD: Episode 9 with Chanell Stone and PJ Gubatina Policarpio

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.

Notes from MoAD: Episode 7 with Rodney Ewing and Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen

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.

Notes from MoAD: Episode 6 with Indira Allegra and Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen

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

11.2 / In/With/For the Public: Constance Hockaday

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

11.2 / In/With/For the Public: Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada of Public Matters

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.

Live Series | Living & Working: Xandra Ibarra and Jakeya Caruthers

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.

Live Series | Living & Working: Mik Gaspay and Kija Lucas

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.

Live Series | Living & Working: Brontez Purnell and Sophia Wang

On April 11, 2018, legendary artist, activist, and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense Emory Douglas sat down with the California College of the Arts (CCA) Students of Color Coalition in a roundtable conversation. Douglas talked about his work in creating iconic images of Black liberation as a director, designer, and illustrator for the Panther newspaper, and heard from students …. This conversation was organized by Sita Bhaumik, Scholar in Residence at CCA's Center for Art + Public Life, as part of the Art + Survival program, supported by the CCA Center for Art and Public Life, the President's Diversity Steering Group, in collaboration with Diversity Studies, CCA Students of Color Coalition, and Art Practical

Live Series | Emory Douglas: Art + Survival

We close out the third season of the podcast with a conversation with Maya Stovall, a conceptual artist and anthropologist whose work deploys choreography, long term site research, experimental ethnography, and moving and still images to unpack the complexities of community survival, institutional disinvestment, and urban planning. Her layered approach comes through in the multimodal ways she speaks about her work, shifting between dense theory as almost poetic language, to a direct revelation of the pain and frustration in seeing how her family’s neighborhood has been rendered as a food desert with only liquor stores to serve them. Stovall is perhaps best known for her ongoing project, Liquor Store Theatre, an ongoing and long term exploration of her Detroit community. In video documentation of her artistic and anthropological dialogues with residents, we see her both performing in front of the city’s ubiquitous liquor stores and interviewing patrons and passersby, a juxtaposition of footage that manages to be revelatory while still withholding some things only for the people in the city who happen to be there to witness the live events. In her process, Stovall simultaneously interrogates ethnographic traditions and the expectations of artists in public practice. In our conversation, we talk about the roots of her practice, vulnerability, and resisting having her work being pinned down to any one reading of it. Stovall’s Under New Ownership, a solo exhibition jointly presented by Fort Mason Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, is on view through May 5, 2019. She will be enacting Theorem, no.1 a public performance winding through the streets of San Francisco on May 3rd. Click here for more information. Maya Stovall is a conceptual artist and an anthropologist, and she has exhibited in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2017–18 F-Series. Her book, Liquor Store Theatre, arrives from Duke University Press in spring 2020. Her second book on the imprint, Writing Through Walls, co-authored with her brother Josef Cadwell, is forthcoming. She has published peer-reviewed academic articles on her anthropological field research and her contemporary art practices in Transforming Anthropology and Journal of the Anthropology of North America, as well as in publications including Detroit Research Journal and The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Anthropology News. She lives and works in Detroit where she grew up, as well as in Los Angeles County, where she is an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona. ________ Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio Check us out on Instagram: @un_making

(un)making | Ep. 40: Maya Stovall

In an age where we are inundated by a seemingly endless scroll of images and living within an economy that demands an inordinate amount of our attention, it feels necessary to ask what is the value of doing nothing? It is much more evident now than ever before that social media platforms are another tool for advertisers and corporations to learn our desires through likes and clicks encouraging us to stay glued to our screens and monitors. In 2017, Bay Area-based artist Jenny Odell gave a talk at the annual EYEO festival titled “How to do Nothing,” which resulted in a book of the same name. I have been following Odell’s artistic practice and writing since she was in graduate student pursuing her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. With a background in literature and having taught Internet Art at Stanford University for several years, her wealth of knowledge related to networked culture to free things advertised on Instagram that aren’t actually free, she has an uncanny ability to craft a stories emblematic of our digital age. In this episode, The Value of Doing Nothing, I spoke with Odell about exercises in attention, space for refusal, bonding over our experience of an Ellsworth Kelly painting at the SF MOMA, and much more. The irony of Odell’s call to action, being that of doing nothing, leads us to the multitude of ways that stepping back from time to time enables and affords us the opportunity to learn how to observe the world around us, actively listen, and fastidiously mind the details we might normally overlook. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

PRNT SCRN | Ep. 6: The Value of Doing Nothing

In this episode, I talk with Honolulu-based artist, activist, and cultural organizer Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt. Rebecca’s winding path to her current practice reflects the complex layers of intercultural analysis and research she brings to her engagements with people and materials: growing up in Chicago’s Jewish community, her study of languages and photography, creative entrepreneurship, working as an educator facilitating Las Fotos Project with youth in Tijuana, and seeking out Hawaiʻi’s Filipino community to take part in Ilokano language and cultural reclamation within the diaspora. In one of her most recent projects, Nabanglo a lamisaan, she created a tasting table of sukang ilocos, sugar cane vinegar, to enable conversations about labor history, cultural practice, and imperialism. The project emerged from a collaborative exploration with botanists at the University of Hawaiʻi--where she attempted to make her own vinegar from local sugar cane--as well as research into anti-colonial resistance in the Philippines, such as the Basi Revolt. Over the course of our conversation, we talk about the trajectory of her practice and how she approaches Ilocano cultural recovery work while on the 'āina, Native Hawaiian lands. Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt is an artist, activist, feminist, and diasporic person engaging in place-based art-making and learning. Her current work reflects on studies and reclamation of the Ilokano language and her attempts to reconstruct connections with the land and cosmology of her ancestors which has been lost through displacement, colonization, and miseducation. Utilizing photographs, natural materials, handwritten words, as well as found images, she combines disparate information from various sites, sources, and time periods to explore how relationships to land/daga/'āina manifest in diasporic communities. Crossing into the realm of social practice, she often works in collaboration to facilitate the exchange of knowledge intergenerationally and interculturally. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in Honolulu. ________ Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch (un)making as soon as it publishes, or look for it here every other Wednesday! #APaudio Check us out on Instagram: @un_making

(un)making | Ep. 39: Rebecca Goldschmidt

Virtual reality is not a new phenomenon. From dioramas to panoramas, the allure of being enveloped in a place or tableau outside of one’s reality has mass appeal considering the popularity of virtual reality technologies such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Through 360 filmmaking and photography, the creation of space within the virtual realm has become commonplace. From journalism to entertainment purposes, while virtual worlds enable a new way of seeing fantastical worlds, artists and designers must consider format and aesthetics. In the second part of a two-part series, Not Your Average Playtest, I look at how artist Veronica Graham translates her drawings and paintings into digital architectures within the virtual world. She also touches upon how she must reconcile physical and digital perception to create immersive experiences. Veronica Graham is an Oakland based visual artist primarily working in print and digital mediums. Inspired by today’s rapidly changing environment, she sees her art practice as a form of world building. Each work is the creation of place or artifact, calling attention to how fiction is weaved into our reality. In 2012 she founded Most Ancient, a design studio focused on small press and digital production. Her books have been collected by SFMoMA, MoMA, The New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, Stanford University, Yale University, and other public and private collections. Graham has received grants from Kala Art Institute and Women’s Studio Workshop. She is now designing virtual worlds and her first VR project called “The Muybridge Mausoleum” was completed in 2017 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift platforms. In addition to her own practice, Graham is an active member on SFMoMA’s Games Advisory Board and an arts educator who has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, Southern Exposure, and Creativity Explored. -- Subscribe to Art Practical on iTunes to catch PRNT SCRN as soon as it publishes! Check us out on Instagram (@prnt_scrn_ap) and Twitter (@PRNTSCRN1). #APaudio.

PRNT SCRN | Ep. 5: Not Your Average Playtest, Part II

Art Practical explores contemporary art and visual culture on the West Coast. We produce two podcasts through Art Practical Audio--(un)making and What are you looking at?--and also release occasional special episodes documenting live events.

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