Jacqueline Francis's blog

Last month, we were lucky to have filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara in San Francisco, where he talked about his friend and fellow artist, David Hammons. A contemporary New York-based artist, Hammons has been the subject of a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings, aptly called "David Hammons Is On Our Mind." It was my great honor to introduce Diawara at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco on March 3. After Professor Diawara's lecture, which related the late philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant's concept of claimed and deliberate opacity to Hammons' enigmatic project Dak’Art 2004 Sheep Raffle (2004), I talked with him about the these these thinker-artists affinities and variances.

Diawara's lecture on Hammons and Glissant is now available on YouTube. 

Weston Teruya welcomes artists, arts administrators, and cultural workers of color to get real about their lives, practices, and careers. Each Art Practical podcast is an in-depth look into how art gets made, but more importantly how these folks are seeing to the system of art’s (UN)making.Weston Teruya spoke with with curators Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur about the nuances of place, the movement of people and ideas, and working in dialogue with artists in Where is Here, the exhibition they co-curated at the Museum of the African Diaspora (on view through April 2, 2017) and Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back, an exhibition at the San Francisco State University Fine Art Gallery, which Zarur co-curated with Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Mark Johnson, and Sharon Bliss (on view through March 16, 2017).Listen to the interview here.

Last week, radio host Joseph Pace of "Citiy Visions" interviewed Kathy Zarur and I about our exhibition Where Is Here, on display at the Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco (through April 2, 2017). It was a great discussion about the show, which present the works of contemporary artists who are developing personal and engaged visual and musical systems to claim, make, and describe space. You'll find the City Visions podcast of the interview here.

Check out the upcoming programing related to Where Is Here here and here. 

Yesterday afternoon, we had a great visit to GW High School in San Francisco's Outer Richmond neighborhood. At GWHS saw the monumental Athletics (1942), a mural by African-American artist Sargent Claude Johnson (1888-1967) on the school's ball field. Inside the main building were the provocative Life of Washington murals (1935) by Johnson's contemporary, the Russian-born Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979), and a response to them by contemporary African-American artist and San Francisco Institute of Art Professor of Fine Arts Dewey Crumpler (born 1949).

Thanks to GW Principal Susan Saunders, Librarian Marianne Philipp, and the GW student body for making us feel welcome and at right at home!

"Refracting Abstraction" was a three-day program (Jan. 26-28, 2017) at the Anderson Collection Museum at Stanford University.

On Jan. 27-28, discussion centered around what constitutes the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism continues to recur despite decades-long attempts by revisionists. Most provocatively, Ann Gibson's book, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997) demonstrates how women, artists of color, and queer artists were systemically left out of the canon. Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline remain the familiar anchors of Abstract Expressionism. The Anderson Collection showcases important works by the above-mentioned names. Yet there are many artists not currently a part of our permanent collection whose involvement in the movement has been omitted from the oft-repeated narratives of the period. The Anderson Collection Museum takes this opportunity to look in depth at black artists working abstractly at mid-century as a case study in order to nurture the growing scholarship in this area. 

The proceedings were recorded, and hopefully will be published soon. I'm looking forward to their availability because I missed the first day's panels. (It was the first day of my Spring 2017 SFSU class.) On Friday evening, I did catch abstract painter's Stanley Whitney's conversation with art historians Andrianna Campbell and Alexander Nemerov: it was illuminating and entertaining. Whitney talked about the New York art worlds of the 1960s and of our time; his brilliantly colored geometric paintings; and the dedication to his artistic practice.

On Saturday, I moderated the "Politics and Abstraction" panel with art historians Campbell, Sarah Louise Cowan, Lauren Kroiz, and Lucy Partman. We had a lively discussion about the careers of artists Norman Lewis, Howardena Pindell, and Hale Woodruff, and about connoisseurship and canons. 

David Hammons (born 1943, Springfield, Illinois) is one of the most innovative artists of our times.  Hammons studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts), and is a radically experimental printmaker who trained with master draftsman and printmaker Charles White at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the 1960s.

Hammons is a conceptual artist, known for his engaging projects that satirize the modern art market and its commodification of the created art object.  In 2004, he was invited by curators Cheryl Finely and Salah Hassan to make art in Dakar, Senegal.  Hammons' project, Dak'Art 2004 Sheep Raffle, is the subject of the essay, co-authored by me and artist-writer Tina Takemoto: it is published on the website of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.  Takemoto and I are part of a Wattis research group, and David Hammons has been on our minds over the last year.

 Photo by Salah Hassan, documenting the staging of David Hammons' conceptual art project Dak'Art 2004 Sheep Raffle, published in Flash Art 308 (May 2016), online.

Artist and intellectual Christopher Cozier makes art to create conversation about misuse of power and resources.  Cozier's art address the complex history, culture, and politics of Trinidad & Tobago, and explores the ethics of the contemporary international art industry.

Check out next week's screening of Richard Fung's documentary Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier (2005) at the Museum of the African Diaspora/San Francisco on Wednesday, January 25, 2017, at 6:30 p.m.  Richard will be present at the event.  After the screening, he will be in conversation with Chris Cozier via Skype about the changes in the decade since the film was made and life and politics in Trinidad today.  I will facilitate the discussion between Chris and Richard.

Christopher Cozier in his studio in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 2014. Photo by Sean Drake at ozy.com

With artists Rodney Ewing and Ron Moultrie Saunders of the 3.9 Art Collective, I co-curated "Call For Beauty," an exhibition featuring the work of more than two dozen San Francisco Bay Area black artists. The exhibition opened Jan. 11 and will be on view at Root Division Gallery until Feb. 18, 2017. 

Saturday's reception will include performances by artists Anthony Julius Williams and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo. Drop by! The reception begins at 7 p.m. and the performances start soon after. We wrap up at 10 p.m.Rodney, Ron, and I are members of the 3.9 Art Collective. Formed just prior to the 2010 census, the 3.9 Art Collective took its name from a report in The San Francisco Bay View, a weekly newspaper that predicted that the city’s black population would decrease dramatically—to 3.9 percent of the total population. While the number of black San Franciscans has not fallen to this level, there has been a black migration out of San Francisco, driven by wave after wave of gentrification, stubborn social inequities, and the under resourcing of minority communities. The 3.9 Art Collective has adopted this statistic as an act of resistance and a commitment to the ideals and narratives of a diverse San Francisco.

The 3.9 Art Collective mission is to create and claim space to display their work; to nurture young artists of San Francisco; to develop educational programs for students; and to write about and curate exhibitions meant to generate productive, cross-cultural dialogues.

THIS THURSDAY: A Evening of Comics, Conversation and Creativity! 

Make your own drawings and cartoons of places close to your heart, soul, and mind with comic artists at the Museum of the African Diaspora on Thurs., Dec. 15, 2016, 5-8 p.m. And chat with professional cartoonists about their latest projects and creative process.  

Admission is free and there will be a wine reception, too.  

Check out the exhibitions on view at MoAD, including Where Is Here (curated by 2016-17 Corrigan Visiting Professor Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur [BA, SFSU Art Department 2004]): https://www.artforum.com/uploads/guide.003/id32048/press_release.pdf

Getting to the Museum of the African Diaspora (685 Mission Street [at Third Street]), San Francisco, CA 94105):

https://www.moadsf.org/visit/getting-here/

This commissioned essay briefly introduces the modernist and contemporary approaches of artists Romare Bearden, Aubrey Williams, McArthur Binion, Cullen Washington, Nate Young, Blessing Ngobeni, Tony Lewis, and Johnathan Payne. Their work is on view now in group exhibition, entitled Viewpoints:http://www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com/exhibitions/viewpoints

The exhibition is free and open to the public through Jan. 14, 2017. For gallery hours and location, see: http://www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com/gallery

Curator Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur will walk through their current exhibition Where Is Here with participating artists David Huffman, Adia Millett, and Allan deSouza next Wed, Nov. 16 at 6:30 p.m.http://www.moadsf.org/event/where-is-here-in-gallery-talk-with-curators-artists/?instance_id=13572

For more on the artists, see their websites:

David Huffmanhttp://david-huffman.com/

David Huffman, Berkeley, 2016 (acrylic, glitter, spray paint on canvas; 40 x 30 in.)

Adia Milletthttp://adiamillett.com/

Adia Millett, The Fire Next Time (detail), 2016 (wood panels, shingles, paint, models of birds hung with filament from ceiling)

Allan deSouzahttp://allandesouza.com/

Allan deSouza, Actions for the Motion of Light in Water (detail), 2016, video installation

On the group exhibition Where Is Here, see: http://www.moadsf.org/exhibition/where-is-here/

Charles Burnett made his best-known film Killer of Sheep (1978, 73 minutes) with less than $10,000.The film tells the story of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the mid-1970s. Stan's job at a slaughterhouse is taking a toll. He is frustrated by money problems.But he still finds moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a coffee cup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife in the living room,holding his daughter. 

The Library of Congress considers this film a national treasure and the National Society of Film Critics considers it one of the “100 Essential Films” of all time.

Killer of Sheep brings together a directorial style that is indebted to the work of Federico Fellini, a filmmaker much admired by David Hammons, as well as the realities of Watts, where Hammons lived in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This screening is following by a rare in-person appearance by the director himself, in conversation with art historian Jacqueline Francis, Associate Professor at CCA. This event is co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque.

This is the third event in our year-long season about and around the work of David Hammons.

For more info:http://www.wattis.org/view?id=375