Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Mariah Green, Vanessa Perez Winder, Jas Keimig, and Sam Wrigglesworth pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Alejandra Rubio and Saraí Montes: Chismosas
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco, CA
January 26 to February 23
Artist talk February 7, 6-8 PM
A culmination of their 2023–2024 Artist Apprenticeships at MCCLA, this month Bay Area printmakers Alejandra Rubio and Saraí Montes will present a new body of work together, Chismosas, printed at the center’s Mission Gráfica studio, a near 50-year old hub for Chicanx and Latinx graphic arts activism.
Although the show hasn’t opened yet, both artists—who often explore themes of political resistance, responses to ongoing struggles for liberation, and cultural inheritance—describe their new print work as transpiring from chismeando, deep and generative conversations had between the two over the last year.
They’ve noted how their frequent presence in Gráfica over the last year has allowed them the opportunity to hold space for a diverse community of established and new printmakers, in Montes’ words, “with the intent of challenging what feels to be a cis-het male-dominated world of printmaking.”
I think Chismosas, in all of its pink poster glory, reclaimed title, and Rubio and Montes’ printing praxis, will speak to the subversive role of the feminine (and informed gossip and discussion!) as catalysts for revolution and help to further cement this legacy within Mission Gráfica’s broader historical narrative.
Admittedly, I have a deep fondness for the MCCLA. As a teen visiting the Bay from Portland, it was the first place I ever witnessed the power of printmaking as a means of organizing, educating, and healing communities. In 2022, I learned how to screen-print at Gráfica through the free/low-cost classes they continuously hold and found it to be a safe and liberating space to experiment creatively and peruse necessary archives.
Reflection: How might we understand “chisme” not merely as gossip, but also as an oral Latin American tradition rooted in solidarity, protection, and awareness?
Moving Clouds
Curated by Cathy Lu
Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA
January 27 to March 9
Curator and artist Cathy Lu is bringing together the work of ten Bay Area artists of color working across disciplines, poetically described as “necromancers, ancestor callers, and those unafraid to call upon that which was proclaimed dead and over, but in fact has been fully alive and permeating every aspect of our worlds and beings.”
I’m real excited to see this show because 1) this is an excellent and thoughtful grouping of artists whom all work experimentally and conceptually with medium and material and 2) exploring ideas around ancestral futurisms, understanding necropolitical histories and contemporary realities amongst communities of color, and sustaining and developing queer practices of cultural preservation and memory are matters near to my own he(art).
Reflection: How do you keep the “dead” alive? How can the methods and materials we employ become conduits of resurrection?
In The Presence Of: Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association
Curated by Christina Hiromi Hobbs
Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA
January 27 to April 20
A 35th anniversary celebration of the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA), a resource/platform/cultural production organization committed to material support and bolstering dialogue around the contributions of Asian American women artists specifically in the Bay Area, In the Presence Of will feature an archive of works by a diverse group of seventeen prolific artists and poets, both living and deceased.
Curated by PhD student Christina Hiromi Hobbs, the exhibition aims in part to respond to the question posed by the late art historian and curator Karin Higa in the title of her 2002 essay, “What is an Asian American Woman Artist?” in Hiromi Hobbs’ own words, “through the frameworks of kinship, mentorship, intergenerational friendship, and community-building between artists in the group.”
I find the show’s curatorial focus exciting, first as someone personally obsessed with historic and contemporary instances of feminist social and creative artist networks as examples of alternative arts ecologies. And secondly, as a person in the arts interested in the contentions and contradictions of how issues of gender, racial, or cultural identity and their preceding histories of exclusion from mainstream visibility are/can be catalogued, curated, and critiqued in 2024 and beyond.
Reflection: How do we locate the value of identity-based categories of art and how can we work to unsettle their meaning?
Saif Azzuz: Cost of Living
Institute of Contemporary Art SF, San Francisco, CA
January 16 to May 19
Through my experiences in the Bay, I’ve found myself slowly developing a more pronounced interest in issues of architecture, urban planning, and environmental justice, and naturally, how local artists are inquiring about and responding to these collectively felt impacts in their practices.
I’m eager to see how artist Saif Azzuz (b. 1987 Eureka, CA) will transform the large open space at the ICASF in his first institutional solo exhibition, Cost of Living, where the artist will present a mixed-media installation of “readymade sculptures, large-scale wood assemblage, found objects, and paintings” that refer critically to the relationship between modern gentrification and histories of settler-colonialism and allude to its financial and emotional price in the Bay Area.
The materials that Azzuz uses in his constructions are the most defining and distinguishing aspects of his work, in this exhibition using found materials that carry histories of isolation, segregation, and land degradation under the guise of urban renewal; items like barbed wire, mesh, and construction fencing. A Libyan-Yurok artist based in Pacifica and originally from the Northern Coast, Azzuz’s practice is informed by his environment and ancestral histories, and “guided by the signs and teachings of Indigenous resilience, learned from both plants and people.”
Reflection: What parts of your natural environment feel most un/welcoming to you?
Final note from Vanessa:
As the visceral, necropolitical violence of empire carries on—and in synchronism—I’ve found myself returning frequently to the language used by Gran Fury in New York: “art is not enough, seize power through direct action.” Yesterday as I was writing this, I also heard the words of Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza in a news interview, warning: “Don’t call yourself a ‘free’ person if you can’t make any changes, if you can’t stop [a] genocide that is still ongoing.” Both facts of the present moment feel difficult and uncomfortable to reckon with truthfully, but I believe we should all be tasked with heeding these calls toward resistance and refusal.