on view
PAINTING OURSELVES INTO SOCIETY
Safe communities use art and inclusion as a solution, not prisons!
September 21st, 2024 — January 12th, 2025
Curated by orlando smith & rahsaan thomas
Empowerment Avenue and Berkeley Art Center co-present Painting Ourselves into Society. This exhibition is co-curated by Orlando Smith aka “O. Smith” from inside San Quentin Prison and Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, who has returned to society after 22 years inside. It features the works of eight currently and formerly incarcerated artists nationwide exploring what it means for incarcerated people to stay connected to the larger community and to challenge the idea of what healing looks like together.
Alvin Smith, Outside The Rusting Decay Of Confinement, 2024
UPCOMING
Archives Yet to Come
February 8 - May 4, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, February 8, 3-5pm
Curated by Hannah Waiters
Archives Yet to Come is an exhibition that explores the potentialities of archives born out of artistic strategy and action, investigating the history and creative uses of archival preservation. The exhibition and accompanying programs set forth themes of archives, ways of knowing, diasporic narratives, and education creating new futures through the past. Archives Yet to Come features eight artists working across sentimental and familial archives, social practice, and time-based media. Constructing their own aesthetic language to rethink archival memory that exists as documents, photographs, and other enduring artifacts whose interpretation changes over time, these artists pursue collective memory.
For artists like Lynse Cooper, Charles Lee, and Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola archival imagination relates to: care, erasure, displaced memories, marginalized archives, Black American memory, and visual cultural depictions. Cooper presents a photo series Myrtle Vista (2021-present), wherein the artist spent time making a family archive from their sold home. In the years after the creation of this place-based series, Cooper described they sensed that their family home could be read as an '“archive” in itself signaling a refusal of dominant Western collection traditions. The artist draws from their family’s experiences and archive, complicating our concept of home, portraying homeland as an archive. Lee’s archival process involves remixing civic object histories, images and vernacular. In the large-scale commissioned installation Lee has recreated casts of Greek pillars in black paint: accompanied by a display of archival reprints of family members, offering an examination of Black American endurance, Blackness, and ways of knowing, through generations. Underscoring the importance of archival process in art, Gabiola’s artwork is filled with collective memory and it cultivates and amplifies familial immigration stories.
The artworks of Mary Graham and Qadir Parris are grounded in histories of Black American education and ways of knowing; they offer an approach to, historical, imagined, and family narratives. Graham’s impulse to wander her imagined archive, memorializes the enduring struggle of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South through. Graham draws on the nature of the “brown paper bag tests” used to discriminate through colorism in the twentieth century. The imagined archive being such an important factor in this process, speaks to Graham’s subjects in her artworks as symbolic representations of erased historical narratives. Highlighting connections between past and present educational endurance, Parris’s commission renders visible traces in his family’s legacy with Black Colleges and Universities. Both interspersing remnants linked to Black American education, these artists speak to the complexities of communal resilience and historical preservation.
Lindsey Filowitz and Nneka Kai‘s work is situated within expression, performance, and bodily practices as a radically democratic way of knowing. Working through sentimental materials like Black hair, Kai emulates the experience of the Black female body as an archive.
Similarly, Filowitz archives embodied and shared female experiences; these are cornerstones of Filowitz’s practice which invests in deep engagement archiving transformational narratives.
Helmed by curator Hannah Waiters, this exhibition reflects the embodied, collective and enduring memory of the spirit of histories in the Bay Area presenting works that address local historical materialism. Archives Yet to Come is organized by Hannah Waiters, Curatorial & Project Assistant with UCR ARTS Museum of Photography.
Artists: Lynse Cooper, Lindsey Filowitz, Jy Jimmie Flora, Mary Graham, Nneka Kai, Charles Lee, Qadir Parris.