Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift
de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA
August 10 – November 30, 2024
Some of my favorite contemporary artists appear in About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, the second exhibition in a series dedicated to showing new additions to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s permanent collection. This iteration reflects on varying interpretations of place, and themes associated with place including home, belonging, climate change, and cultural heritage.
A sculpture by Guillermo Galindo anchors the gallery from its core. An elegant cluster of a chair and a bicycle found along the U.S.-Mexico border, Ready To Go or Listo is a criticism of the ineffectiveness of border wall expansion. This composite of found relics evokes both anguish and hope, leaving me wondering to whom these objects belonged and how they are faring today. On the wall behind Galindo’s piece is a painting of a figure cloaked in gray, walking alongside a fence of the same color. As they tread forward, they are showered with a slew of multicolored lines that travel both with and against them. A meditation on embodiment and being a product of one’s environment, Clare Rojas’ Walking in rainbow rain functions as a love letter to San Francisco. The rainbow rain references SF’s storied history as a sanctuary for the LGBTQ+ community and a battleground for their rights, while the gray palette represents the city’s omnipresent fog.
Varied paintings and photographs circumnavigate these works, including artists like Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Katy Grannan, and Wesaam Al-Badry. Exhibitions like this—displays of “newness” as they say in the retail biz—affirm a shift in museum collecting priorities that I find significant. While this particular show comes down at the end of November, I hope to see these works again in the de Young’s permanent galleries one day soon.
Reflection: What is your relationship to place?
Linked To Home
Mercury20 Gallery, Oakland, CA
October 25 – November 30 2024
In my last in-person semester of undergrad, I took a textiles class at CCA’s Oakland campus (R.I.P.) where I had the opportunity to learn to weave on a floor loom. Nearly five years later, my experiences with weaving continue to have a profound impact on how I understand and approach process. The initial warping of the loom was heavily involved and required frequent intervention by my professor. My lifelong struggle with patience came to the forefront, inspired by a preoccupation with efficiency—an inexplicable high from starting and finishing as soon as possible that has followed me since grade school. But once the weaving process could finally begin, the slow, languid nature of it put me in a flow state, and the devotion to the craft overruled my restlessness.
As weaving has existed since the beginning of human civilization, the historic nature of it lends itself to authentic representations of the human experience in its purest form. Linked To Home investigates weaving as a vehicle of further engagement with not only ourselves, but history, memory, and ancestry. Curated by Ollin Ramirez, and featuring Annika Javier, Rami KD, Diwa Malaya, Clansi Barreno, Fiorella Lema, and Juana Ramirez-Avalos, this artist-organized exhibition will be up until the end of November.
Reflection: What practices ground you and deepen your connection with yourself?