Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Christine Miller, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Sam Hiura, and Nia-Amina Minor pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Calli: The Art of Xicanx Peoples
Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
June 14, 2024 to January 26, 2025
On one of the most beautiful days of an unusually warm June, the Oakland Museum of California celebrated the opening of their new exhibition, Calli: The Art of Xicanx Peoples, with music and community gathering. The exhibition explores art and aesthetics of the Chicanx movement historically and contemporarily through the format of a group exhibition, claiming a focus on intergenerational, feminist, and queer perspectives.
What I appreciate about this exhibition is the way in which it goes beyond a historical reflection of the Chicano movement of the 20th century, instead, reflecting on its legacy as it appears in contemporary creative communities. A prime example is rafa esparza’s adobe installation, which calls upon stylized and recognizable Mesomaerican aesthetics and materials, connecting cultural and historic legacy to contemporary creative practice. For artists like esparza, the use of such recognizable and culturally specific aesthetics can act as a representation of queer BIPOC belonging within this larger cultural canon.
Reflection: With the recent news of an informal San Francisco-based RV community—composed largely of Lantinx individuals and families—being displaced by a repaving project, I wonder what it means to have a celebratory exhibition like this just across the Bay Bridge? How do we serve the communities we claim to “celebrate,” and how can we in the arts actually support the livelihood of said communities?
J Rivera Pansa: Imagers and Ian James: RIP Hard Rock Cafe, Myrtle Beach
Et Al., San Francisco, CA
June 7 to July 20, 2024
Recently, San Francisco gallery Et. Al opened three new simultaneous exhibitions, each featuring the work of a single artist: Ian James: RIP Hard Rock Cafe, Myrtle Beach, J Rivera Pansa: Imagers, and Danielle Lawrence: Gravity and Grace. Penetrating the gallery’s book shop in the front are two partially-deconstructed printers. At first I avoided looking at them, thinking them to just be forgotten-about office storage. The longer I looked, I began to see small, scratchy writing within them that matched the work just around the corner in Ian James’s exhibition RIP Hard Rock Cafe. Much of the work uses the repeating motif of the Hard Rock Cafe in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, its distinctly uncanny pyramid shape immediately recognizable. This icon of the pyramid—something ancient, something sacred and pious—becomes a site of late-capitalist appropriation transmuted into a new kind of temple, one that worships the icons and memorabilia of yesteryear’s music legends. Images of the pyramid become even more uncanny and unsettling in James’ work, as they are applied across pieces of metal and disused printer parts.
In the next gallery was J Rivera Pansa’s exhibition, Imagers, which greeted visitors with a poetic text about the land and our vast and varied relationships to it, in lieu of a traditional press release. Contained in wall-mounted chain-like sculpture works are seemingly hundreds of images of shifting landscapes. In some works, these images form a gradient that replicates the layers of the earth—water to sand, desert ot trees, and trees that lead into sunsetting, rising, and midday sky. Among these is also large floor works, housing different materials, such as metal beads, held gently within a glass grid that resembles those of the wall works. Just as the title Imagers alludes to processes of enlarging and minimizing, Rivera Pansa intervenes into our bodily relation to the land through scale by the minimization of the otherwise boundless earth and augmentation of the sizes of the sculptural forms.
What excites me about Et Al. is the way in which they push the boundaries of experimentation in both art and writing in the commercial gallery space. Their work is ambitious, yet constantly exciting on account of the depth of their conceptual play with the artist’s works and ideas. Their current shows are not only aesthetically provocative, but also conceptually rich in their reflections on the land in flux, our bodies in relation to it, and the role that images play in the intermediary.
Reflection: How can art about the land incite tangible political and social action towards a more just and habitable world? How can we begin to think more explicitly about the ways in which ecological justice directly translates to socio-political and economic justice?