As a recurring survey exhibition, Bay Area Now 9 (BAN9) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts takes on the slippery task of describing today’s zeitgeist. Such an undertaking is made especially challenging at a time as the Bay Area struggles to define its post-pandemic identity in the face of contrarian messaging. For its ninth iteration, curators Fiona Ball and Martin Strickland have assembled a cast of thirty artists, possibly their most diverse yet, attending to questions about heritage, intimacy, and local environments. Many resist what’s given at face value, instead engaging with the complexities of knowledge production and creating methods to describe a fragmented present.
Looking at Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s and Jeffrey Cheung’s community-centered figurative paintings featured in the opening gallery is like playing hooky to drive to Big Sur with your best friend—they relish the eclectic charms that arise from spontaneity. Even Wong’s cool-toned paintings radiate warmth and delight, despite the potential singular representation of thin millennials enjoying the Bay’s elevated pleasures such as skiing and sun-bathing. In Cheung’s square paintings, cherubic, outsized bodies swirl around and embrace each other in close quarters. Cheung, whose work adorns skateboards as much as local queer haunts, is increasingly defining a new San Franciscan aesthetic.
Janet Delaney’s photographic diptychs counterbalance the joyous tone, highlighting San Francisco’s developmental changes. Saturday Afternoon, Howard between 3rd and 4th Streets (1981) shows a man striding down a deserted, hazy street towards a low sun, while Oracle Convention, Howard between 3rd and 4th Streets (2016) presents a less romantic shot of a cloud computing conference. Both photographs, shot from similar overhead perspectives, were taken on the corner of YBCA and SFMoMA, hinting at the local art scene’s hand in gentrification. The curatorial decision to highlight the diptychs with navy backdrops and intersperse them throughout the exhibition serves to anchor viewers back to a time unfamiliar to a transplant population. At times, however, this decision felt misguided when their placements imperil visibility. Delaney’s photographs do more than record change; they bear witness to an ever changing landscape charged with emotional register.
In search of belonging, other artists position their present lived experiences in relation to the quicksands of personal histories, even if their artifacts are inaccessible, opaque, or absent. Tracy Ren’s concept of “wayfinding” helps characterize this condition. To make As Above, So Below: She Knew Me Before I Knew Myself (2023), Ren knitted a hanging constellation of tendrils from materials with astrological significance as a means for self-discovery, comfort, and validation. Similar to Theseus tracing a thread to find the maze’s exit, working backwards is necessary and urgent but can also risk confrontation with lurking traumas.
Indeed, artists display anxiety and ambivalence as they search for meaning from the past. Ashwini Bhat’s multimedia piece Earth Under Our Feet (2023) features a video of feet pressing into a small rectangle of red clay, projected onto presumably the resulting product of that labor. A voice wonders aloud about imagined predecessors, invoking the ways land can bear invisible records of harm and collectivity that undergird everyday existence. Connie Zheng takes a more methodical approach to pursuing such records. In her three-piece work Guest Passage (2023), Zheng’s How to Make a Golden State stands out for its dedication to portray inherently incomplete narratives. Zheng painted a map representing California’s Asian farmworker history, stringing annotations detailing labor movements and anti-Asian sentiment to place names like coronary arteries. The painstaking effort to vivify this history, which is also the story of California’s environment and Asian Americans, underscores how representation cannot solve decades of erasure alone.
Trina M. Robinson’s Likoum (2023) reveals the underside of mapping opaque versions of the past onto the present. Robinson stitched archival footage with nonlinear snippets of her trip from the Bay to Cameroon for a naming ceremony, projecting the video onto one side of a frame while the other side depicts a ritual vessel awash in pink light. The dual projection echoes Robinson’s examination of the recto/verso of her self-knowledge, especially when grappling with the dissonances between African and Western forms of tradition. The anguish on Robinson’s face during her psychological and spiritual journey suggests that knowledge gain can have its own tax, especially when it grates against what a person already knows. With several BAN9 artists looking outward to environments and ancestral knowledge to construct personal meaning, I wonder if curators had considered also including the perspectives of Native American artists in the Bay Area who have been making work in this direction.
BAN9’s critical scope widens when artists examine narratives of the United States. Stepping into Michael Arcega’s installation, Trophy Room (2023), I was brought back to offputting antique malls in the Deep South. Nostalgia reverberates among the precarious array of souvenir kitsch depicting the pride and beliefs endemic to various U.S. cities. Undertones of conquest lurk in anagrams of “hegemony” and “manifest destiny” painted onto objects, indicating how certain cultural values memorialized through objects can gain collectible status, taking new life instead of remaining in the past.
In contrast, Arlene Correa Valencia installed steel doors and benches from a decommissioned ICE detention center, intact with individuals’ carvings, serving as unromanticized records of anonymous migrants once imprisoned there. Additionally, the quiet, stunning movement of Persian rugs printed onto silk gauze and tacked onto walls like photographs in Shirin Towfiq’s Thinking about Migration (2020), for me, remarks on the transience of memory among those affected by diasporas. By animating ordinary objects with the perspectives of those empowered and disempowered, these artists address how systems of knowledge production limit or elevate the circulation of alterous narratives. While the sheer scale and proximity of multi-component artworks sometimes felt overwhelming, Paz G’s You Have a Broken Heart (2023) provided a welcome refuge with its outdoor sculptural, sound, and visual setting inspired by “song as a medium for revolution” that slowed my heartbeat as its music mingled with the city sounds. Despite this (and mainstream perceptions), the electric atmosphere of BAN9’s opening night was a comforting sign that the Bay Area may be paying attention to ambitious art asking of-the-moment questions after all.
Bay Area Now 9
October 6, 2023 to May 5, 2024
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA