Imagine Freedom Art Works for Abolition by crnational

September 29 - October 13, 2020 A Benefit Auction in Support of Critical Resistance

imaginefreedom.art

Brief History of critical Resistance Critical Resistance (CR) is a grassroots organization building a movement to end the reliance on the interlocking systems of imprisonment, surveillance, and policing – what we call the prison industrial complex (PIC) – as a response to political, social, and economic problems. We run local and regional campaigns and projects to dismantle current structures of imprisonment and policing, change how communities and decision-makers understand punishment and safety, and build new institutions and practices to transform and prevent interpersonal, communal, and social harm.

Campaign and Project Highlights 1998

2008

Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex conference in Berkeley, CA

We stop a new jail in South Bronx, NY with the Community in Unity coalition (2006–08)

Stop Delano II campaign (1998–2008) halts California’s 20-year prison building boom

Critical Resistance 10: 10th Anniversary Conference and Strategy Session to Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex in Oakland, CA

2001 Critical Resistance East: Northeast Regional Conference in New York, NY

2003 CR cofounds Californians United for Responsible Budget (CURB), a coalition now counting 70 organizations as members Critical Resistance South: Southern Regional Conference in New Orleans, LA

2004 No New Jails campaign (2004–11), No More Jails coalition (2011–17), and JusticeLA coalition (2017–present) defeat every jail proposal to date in Los Angeles, CA

2005 We launch The Abolitionist, a bilingual newspaper that brings political education and organizing to over 7,500 imprisoned people across the U.S. for free

2006 With imprisoned people’s loved ones, we build a campaign for Amnesty for Survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, LA Victories against imprisonment Anti-policing victories and projects to build community self-determination

2011 Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition amplifies voices of California prisoners on hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013; our call to abolish solitary confinement leads to its international recognition as torture and a massive reduction of its use in California

2013 CR cofounds the No New SF Jail coalition, defying jail expansion in San Francisco, CA ever since

2015 We eliminate gang injunctions in Oakland, CA with the Stop the Injunctions coalition (2010–15) and launch Oakland Power Projects to build residents’ capacity to respond to harm without relying on the police

2017 With a network of organizations and families, we eliminate proposed visiting restriction in prisons from the 2017–18 New York state budget

Building power and campaigns with imprisoned people Movement-building through conferences and a movement center

2018 Care Not Cops campaign cuts proposed police expansions in Portland, OR in half No New Jails New York City coalition launches a campaign to close Rikers Island without building new jails We collaborate with public health workers to push the American Public Health Association (APHA) to declare “Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue” (2015–18) CR acquires 4400 Telegraph Ave, a 9,000-square-foot building in North Oakland, CA, with plans to turn it into an abolitionist movement center

2019 JusticeLA coalition makes history by halting a $3.5 billion jail expansion plan in Los Angeles Stop Urban Shield coalition (2013–19) defeats the world’s largest SWAT team training and weapons expo The Neighborhood and Visuals Committee – including several Imagine Freedom artists – activates 4400 Telegraph Ave by hosting community events and painting a mural inspired by stories of neighborhood elders and longtime residents

2020 No New SF Jail coalition wins our Shut Down 850 Bryant campaign (2018–20) Care Not Cops coalition in Portland, OR wins the city’s commitment to disband the anti-gang policing unit and to end both transit police and school police Design and construction plans for 4400 Telegraph Ave are underway, as we continue to do neighborhood outreach and expand the façade mural

Welcome Letter

September 29 - October 13, 2020

Host Committee: Amy Kisch Angela Hennessy Black Joy Parade Bryant Terry Calvin Williams Twenty-twenty is a critical year for movements for liberation, health justice, and self-deterCara Levine mination, and we are inspired by the fierce fights for freedom led by grassroots organizations Dana King Deanna Van Buren in these unprecedented times. In the creative and tenacious spirit of this moment, Critical Julia Chinyere Oparah Resistance (CR) is thrilled to host Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition, an online art exhiLeigh Raiford Ruthie Wilson Gilmore bition, benefit auction, and programming series. Emory Douglas Erin Christovale Critical Resistance understands the importance of cultural production to any movement Favianna Rodriguez for social change. Since our founding, we have modeled that cultural practice and art For areFreedoms Fred Moten critical components of the fight for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. To uplift the Indya Moore artwork emerging from the current landscape and to sustain our organizational work well Janet Mock into the future, CR has joined forces with celebrated movement printmakers, muralists, and KQED Arts Lateefah Simon grafiteras, as well as other internationally renowned painters, sculptors, photographers, and Michael Orange video-makers. Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition amplifies the freedom dreams that Minnesota our Street Project communities have nurtured for generations and demand unequivocally to have recognized Patrisse Khan-Cullors Pt. 2 Gallery and enacted today. See Black Womxn She Bends During the current political and economic uprisings and throughout the onset of the Soraya Rios Steven Canals COVID-19 global pandemic, CR has worked tirelessly to craft information, analysis, and This is Not a Gun references for understanding and imagining abolitionist responses to guide us toward the Vielmetter Los Angeles

future we want and need. At this juncture, our communities are mounting strong demands for structural change to remedy state violence and racial capitalism, including strategiesLead toCurator: Ashara defund police and cancel contracts or entire police programs and initiatives. Ten years ago, a Ekundayo protest sign that read “Abolish Police” garnered blank stares or even hostility. Now abolition Curatorial Committee: is becoming a household term. Our organizing has popularized the position that policing and Hans Kuzmich Jess Heaney imprisonment are not broken – but work exactly as they are designed to – and the belief that Maya Futrell our communities – not the prison industrial complex – have the solutions we need to resolve Mieke Marple Shirley Leslie harm and end state and interpersonal violence. Tahirah Rasheed

William Ramirez The success of this year’s art auction is crucial to our work and ability to continue to be timely and responsive. The majority of CR’s resources continue to come from grassroots supporters who give money, time, and skills to keep our organization stable and ready to carry out campaigns, projects, political education, and movement-building efforts. Every gift will help CR continue to chip away at the prison industrial complex and put abolition into practice. Every artwork amplifies the vibrancy of abolitionist organizing this year.

In this moment of upheaval, Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition is in invitation to organize. Join us – in freedom dreams, in strategy, in struggle. Abolition is irresistible. This artwork is also. Let’s work together – for abolition. Onward, toward liberation, Critical Resistance

1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504 • Oakland, CA 94612 • Phone: 510.444.0484 • crnational@criticalresistance.org

CURATORIAL COMMITTEE Ashara Ekundayo (Curator) Hans Kuzmich Jess Heaney Maya Futrell Mieke Marple Shirley Leslie T Rasheed William Ramirez

HOST COMMITTEE Amy Kisch • Angela Hennessy Black Joy Parade • Bryant Terry • Calvin Williams Cara Levine • Dana King • Deanna Van Buren Elena Gross • Emory Douglas • Erin Christovale Favianna Rodriguez • For Freedoms • Fred Moten Indya Moore • Janet Mock • Julia Chinyere Oparah KQED Arts • Lateefah Simon Leigh Raiford • Michael Orange Minnesota Street Project • Patrisse Khan-Cullors Pt. 2 Gallery • Ruthie Wilson Gilmore See Black Womxn • She Bends • Soraya Rios Steven Canals • This is Not a Gun Vielmetter Los Angeles

TABLE OF CONTENTS Brief History of Critical Resistance

Welcome Letter

Curatorial and Host Committees

Questions and Musings on Abolitionist Imaginations

The Abolition of Art, the Abolition of Freedom, the Abolition of You and Me

Exhibiting Artists

SPONSORS

Movement Partners: Artist as First Responder

Bayview Opera House

Black & Pink

California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP)

Dream Defenders

Essie Justice Group

EverGold Projects

H.O.L.L.A! (How Our Lives Link Altogether)

Law 4 Black Lives

Survived and Punished

TGI Justice Project

The Culture Ref

Women's Center for Creative Work

Forward Together

Minnesota Street Project

Vielmetter Los Angeles

DREAM DEFENDERS Art allows us to visualize and verbalize what a world without capitalism and prison industrial complex looks like. Through art, we can tap into our radical imagination. That is the embodiment of our Freedom Papers, our vision of a free Florida, that we explored through writing, collage, music, and video. Our membership is comprised of artists, poets, painters, dancers, writers, and all kinds of folks who love arts and culture. The art & culture of hip-hop is also baked into the DNA of Dream Defenders. We are young people who relate to struggle not only through organizing, but through art as well.

CALIFORNIA COALITION FOR WOMEN PRISONERS (CCWP) California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) has used art to reflect and amplify the voices of incarcerated women and TGNC people throughout our 25 year history. In 2015 the play Mariposa & the Saint, From Solitary Confinement, A Play Through Letters, was co-written by a CCWP member on the inside who was in solitary confinement and an advocate/performance artist on the outside. It was a wonderful example of the potential for art to empower expression and collaboration across the walls with the goal of the abolition of solitary confinement and the prison industrial complex. CCWP also built “A Living Chance”, a huge organizing art project that used stories, portraits and events (and other tools of the artworld) to get more publicity for the issue of Life Without Parole (LWOP) and to help support the organizing that imprisoned people were leading to “Drop LWOP.” Now we are using graphic arts to push out our #NoMore Deaths,#Clemency Now! campaign for mass releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, to Imagining Freedom! Caring Collectively- 25 Years Strong! Learn more about CCWP: https://womenprisoners.org/ Learn more about the Drop LWOP campaign: https://droplwop.com/

EVENTS

OPENING COCKTAIL HOUR CELEBRATION ARTIST ROUNDTABLES ON CR FACEBOOK LIVE Tue, Sept 29, 5-6 pm PST Co-hosted by the Bayview Opera House and Critical Resistance. Featuring: • Dana King (MC), artist and Host Committee member • Amy Kisch, Host Committee member • Steven Canals, Host Committee member • Film screening of Oklahoma is Black by Melinda James • Music by Amanda Joy, Atlanta-based, soul and funk singer + lead vocalist for The VIBErance • Cocktails + recipe with acclaimed chef and Host Committee member Bryant Terry

Afterparty on KQED Arts and CR IG Live featuring: • •

Pendarvis Harshaw, KQED Traci Bartlow, artist

CLOSING EVENT AND LIVE AUCTION Tue, Oct 13, 6-7:30 pm PST Featuring: • Dr. Leigh Raiford, Host Committee member • Poetry by Fred Moten, Host Committee member • “In the Studio” with Meryl Pataky, artist • Live Auction featuring auctioneer Gabriel Butu of artworks by Kenturah Davis, Theaster Gates, Wangari Mathenge, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Shawn Theodore, Lava Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas

INTERVIEWS ON KQED-FM KQED Forum Tues, Sept 22, 10-11 am PST Featuring: • Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Host Committee member and CR cofounder • Ashara Ekundayo, curator

KQED Arts with Pendarvis Harshaw Wed, Sept 23, 8-9 pm PST Featuring: • Leslie “Dime” Lopez, artist • Sam Vernon, artist • Deanna Van Buren, Host Committee member • Ashara Ekundayo, curator

Making Abolition Irresistible: Abolitionist Organizing and Arts Praxis Tues, Sept 22, 4-5:30 pm PST Join an array of powerful cultural organizers who discuss the abolitionist interventions of their artwork. Featuring: • Ashley Hunt, http://correctionsproject.com/ wordpress • Fernando Marti, Justseeds • gloria galvez, https://gloria-galvez.com • kai lumumba barrow, Gallery of the Streets • Kate Deciccio, https://kdeciccio.wixsite.com/k8deciccio • Melanie Cervantes, Dignidad Rebelde Moderated by Jess Heaney, Critical Resistance

A Portal for Liberatory Practice: A/R, Afrofuturism and Abolition Fri, Oct 2, 12-1 pm PST Join the Wakanda Dream Lab for a conversation exploring how Afrofuturism is a portal for Black Liberatory Practice. This interactive panel will utilize augmented reality (A/R) and feature Black Speculative Artists as they read from Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day and explore their role of culture keepers as worldbuilders in this time of resistance, renewal and reimagination. Featuring: • Amir Khadar • Damien McDuffie • Joshua Mays Moderated by Calvin Williams & Ashara Ekundayo

ARTIST TALKS ON CR FACEBOOK LIVE All talks begin at 4 pm PST Sat, Sept 19 – Rodney Ewing with Demetri Broxton, Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) Mon, Sept 21 – Melinda James with Elena Gross, MOAD Thurs, Sept 24 – Ed Ntiri with Demetri Broxton, MOAD Thurs, Oct 1 – Christine Wang with Mieke Marple Sat, Oct 3 – Sadie Barnett with Essence Harden Mon, Oct 5 – Hank Willis Thomas with Black Joy Parade Thurs, Oct 8th - Sydney Cain with Ashara Ekundayo (MOAD) Friday, Oct 9 - Kenturah Davis with Ashara Ekundayo (MOAD)

ARTIST BIOS

Brandon Andrew

as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in muBrandon Andrew is an LA-based artist whose work seums and galleries, including MAC Lyon (France), focuses on exposing the visual language of white MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI supremacy that permeates Hollywood and global Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Orpop culture. By exposing the underpinnings of sysegon), Berkeley Art Museum, Albuquerque Museum temic oppression in entertainment and advertising, of Art, the de Young Museum, and the San Francisco Andrew provides opportunities for his audience to Museum of Modern Art. He has held many residencontextualize their relationship to media and white cies, including Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for supremacy. the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, and Santa Fe Art Institute. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. Argote’s process-based practice is derived from her environment and its connection to her body. The act of walking and movement is an integral part of her practice and transforms the body into her studio. Mario Ayala was born in 1991 in Los Angeles. He The search for visual fragments in her embodied graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in state come forward to conceptualize the construc2014, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painttion of an idea and the aesthetics and materials being and Sculpture the same year. Painting in acrylic gin to emerge. and using an airbrush, Ayala works with and through Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico; lives vernacular modes of cultural expression, materials, and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA in and imagery, reconfiguring them to present a dis2007 from the University of California, Los Ange- tinctly visual lexicon in which elements contradict les, where she also received her BFA in 2004. Recent one another narratively and spatially. A diverse solo exhibitions have been held at Visual Arts Cen- range of specific historical and intimate referents ter, University of Texas, Austin (2020); New Museum, are deeply engaged and brought into discourse with New York (2019); PAOS, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019); the language and methods of Ayala’s own artistic Ballon Rouge Collective, Istanbul, Turkey (2019) and practice, ranging from the illustrations of his own New York (2018); Instituto de Visión, Bogotá, Co- father, who would make him ballpoint illustrations lombia (2018); Panel LA, Los Angeles (2017); Adjunct of everyday figures nightly, to 19th Century German Positions Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); MAK Center, painters or the surrealist compositions of Konrad Los Angeles (2015); Human Resources, Los Angeles Klapheck. Ayala pays particular attention to spaces (2014); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles and mediums associated with the representation (2013). Argote has been featured in group exhibitions of brownness and Latinx identity. The techniques at SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Hammer Mu- and symbology seen in the signage and advertising seum, Los Angeles (2018); Orange County Museum of Los Angeles’s landscape, and the applied arts emof Art, Santa Ana (2017); Los Angeles County Mu- ployed in auto customization and Lowrider subculseum of Art, Los Angeles (2017), Ballroom Marfa tures appear, recontextualized, in Ayala’s canvases (2017); and Denver Art Museum (2017). She is the as he investigates the practical and social roles they recipient of the Artadia Los Angeles award (2019), play culturally, politically, and historically. Part of Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Ayala’s practice is informed by underground archival Chicano publications and printed matter, such as Mi Rema Hort Mann Foundation. Vida Loca, Teen Angel, and the prison publications of San Francisco’s Doré Studio, all of which featured poems, artworks, and essays that documented the Chicano experience of the time and promoted disMiguel Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions – paper weavings, paintings, videos – to recover course among Latinx communities. Drawing inspimoments of uncanny human interconnectedness. ration from and giving agency to these often-overArzabe lives in Oakland and is a charter studio mem- looked communities and materials, Ayala explores ber at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. the slippages between shared cultural memory and Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals personal identity. Ayala’s work has been exhibited

Carmen Argote

Mario Ayala

Miguel Arzabe

at Sterns Gallery, Brussels; and Ever Gold [Projects], a lecturer in the Ethnic Studies department at UC San Francisco. Berkeley.

Saif Azzuz

Barraza has worked closely with numerous community organizations to create prints that visualize struggles for immigration rights, housing, education, Saif Azzuz was born in Eureka, CA in October 1987 and international solidarity. Printmaking allows and currently resides on Ramaytush Ohlone land Barraza to produce relevant images that can be put with his wife and two kids. Saif graduated from Caliback into the hands of his community and spread fornia College of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree in throughout the world. He believes that through 2013. The patterns in his paintings evoke the healing this work he plays a role in keeping the history of force of the land as a powerful source of intergenergraphic art activism alive. Barraza prides himself ational and cultural wellness. in his continued connection to his community and his availability as an activist artist who can be relied on for help.

Sadie Barnette

Sadie Barnette’s photography, drawing, objects and installations embody collective and familial histories. Grounded in acts of celebration and resistance, her work is also tethered to the other-worldly, offering glittering speculative spaces. Unconfined to a particular medium, her modular practice holds the poetics and politics of city space, adornment, and “the living room.” Recent projects include the reclamation of a 500-page FBI surveillance file amassed on her father during his time with the Black Panther Party and her interactive reimagining of his bar — San Francisco's first Black-owned gay bar.

Recent exhibitions include “Future Ancestors” at SoleSpace (Oakland, CA), “Chicano Dream” at the Musée d’Aquitaine (Bordeaux, France), and “Get with the Action” at the Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA). Barraza’s work will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Barraza was an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum in 2005. He is the recipient of the 2005 Art is a Hammer Award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, the 2015 Barclay Simpson Award, Born and raised in Oakland, California, she earned and the 2015 Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary her BFA from CalArts and her MFA from the Uni- Art Award. versity of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums such as LACMA, the California African As an Oakland native I have traveled the world as a American Museum, Brooklyn Museum, the Guggen- performance and visual artist and returned home heim, and The Studio Museum in Harlem — where to currently be the owner and operator of B-Love’s she was also Artist-in-Residence. She is represented Guest House. I am a dancer, choreographer, poet, by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. photographer, and cultural archivist who documents and preserves African American art and culture through dance and visual art.

Traci Bartlow

Jesus Barraza

Jesus Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist with an MFA in Social Practice and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. He also holds a BA in Raza Studies from San Francisco State University. Barraza is a co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde—a graphic arts collaboration that produces screen-prints, political posters and multimedia projects—and a member of JustSeeds Artists Cooperative. He was a partner at Tumis design studio (2003–10) and co-founded Taller Tupac Amaru (2003), a screen-printing studio that produced political posters and fine art prints. He is currently

As a dancer I am proficient in many styles and have been a principal dancer and soloist in many dance companies, international theater and television productions. Growing up in Oakland, California I learned early Hip Hop dance styles from some of the originators. I also have studied and performed African dance. As a young adult I won a scholarship to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center which launched my career as a professional dancer. My passion as a dancer/choreographer is to document and preserve black dance and culture. To that end I teach, lecture, perform, and curate themes based on the black experience.

As a photographer I own an archive of thousands of images I shot in the Bay Area in the 1990’s. My photos were featured in The Source, Vibe, Rap Pages, 4080, and Black Enterprise magazines. I also shot a host of portraiture, and publicity shots for local and national record labels. In 2020 I am premiering this archive of images in my home gallery in Oakland, California.

of the things that made me want to be a professional artist in the first place.

I have a unique experience in developing cultural institutions in the Bay Area. I was a youth dancer, faculty member and then on the board of trustees at Citicenter Dance Theater at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. I am also a founding member of Eastside Arts Alliance and Eastside Cultural Center in Oakland where I developed and curated many cultural programs.

Lukaza BranfmanVerissimo

With a longstanding career in arts and activism I am continuing my work of healing, empowering, and telling the vibrant and compelling stories of black people through performance and visual art.

Gavin Benjamin Gavin Benjamin is a multifaceted artist who combines original analog photography and appropriated images with collage, paint and varnish to create rich, luxurious works that call back to baroque traditions, but use elements of current culture to provoke, critique, and explore. Born in Guyana, South America and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Benjamin received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. During this time, he interned with legendary portrait photographer Arnold Newman. Gavin also worked as black and white and color printer at LTI and Baboo color labs. From there, he went on to work at Edge Reps and Exposure NY, agencies representing commercial and advertising photographers, prop stylists, and hair and makeup artists. After Exposure NY, he went to work as a freelance production coordinator/ photo editor with stints at Kenneth Cole productions, Esquire Magazine, Hachette Filipacchi Media, and Good Housekeeping magazine.

Benjamin's work has appeared at the Slick Paris, Sotheby’s NY, Architectural Digest Home Design Show, Art Hampton, Affordable Art Fair, Scope Miami, Palm Beach Modern, Context Miami, Context NY, Art Silicon Valley, and the LA Art Fair.

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller & curator who after being based in Oakland, CA for 10 years, now lives and works in Richmond, VA. They got their BFA from California College of the Arts [Oakland, CA] and is currently getting their MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University [Richmond, VA]. Lukaza’s work has been included in exhibitions at Deli Gallery [Long Island City, NY], EFA Project Space [New York City, NY], Pt. 2 Gallery [Oakland, CA], Leslie Lohman Museum for Gay & Lesbian Art [New York City, NY], Signal Center for Contemporary Art [Malmo, Sweden] and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [San Francisco, CA], amongst others and performances at SOMArts Cultural Center [San Francisco, CA], Highways Performance Space [Los Angeles, CA], ACRE Gallery [Chicago, IL] and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [Berkeley, CA]. Lukaza has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Kala Art Center [Berkeley, CA], ACRE Residency [Steuben, WI], Vermont Studio Center [Johnson, VT] and CENTER [Grand Rapids, MI]. They are the Founder of Nook Gallery, a gallery that was located in their home kitchen from 20152020 & will take new forms in the future!

Kwame Brathwaite

Inspired in part by the writings of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Brathwaite, his older brother, Elombe Brath, and the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) popularized the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the late 50's and early 60’s. “Black Is Beautiful” is one of the most important political and cultural ideas of the twentieth century. Brathwaite and Brath did Benjamin investigates the intersection of their part to spread this idea through Brathwaite’s culture, media, politics, fashion, and dewritings and photographs and the activities of the sign, addressing questions that (continue two organizations they helped co-found: AJASS and to) confront a man of color in America today. Grandassa Models. My work reflects everything that I’m thinking – it includes everything that I love and everything that Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs were specifically I’m challenged by. It’s honest and curious and bright intended to shape the course of American visual disand thoughtful. And sometimes a little dark. It’s all course. His photographs foreground how artistic and

political vision can affect change in popular culture and how popular culture can affect change on culture at large. The subjects of Brathwaite’s carefully crafted photographs invoke the power of a range of objects, such as books, musical instruments and artworks. The dress and hairstyles of his subjects point to their sense of themselves, while the environs of his subjects direct the viewer to a community of artist activists—writers, painters, playwrights, fashion designers and musicians. Brathwaite’s work demonstrates the power of photography as an essential cultural tool in the dissemination of new political ideas, its power to stage visual rhetoric and its ability make language visible.

Demetri Broxton Demetri Broxton is a mixed media artist of Louisiana Creole and Filipino heritage. He was born and raised in Oakland, CA and holds a BFA with an emphasis in oil painting from UC Berkeley and an MA in Museum Studies from San Francisco State University. His training in oil painting helped him to develop a love for lush colors and a strong interest in composition. Demetri is influenced by craft and folk traditions and is passionate about infusing these traditions into fine art. Over the last five years, he has mastered various bead weaving and embroidery techniques and recently began assembling larger beaded sculptures. Broxton’s artwork illustrates his deep personal connection to the sacred art of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, beading traditions of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, and his love of hip-hop and graffiti. He sees his work as an active investigation of cultural continuities from Africa to America and is particularly interested in how these ancient cultural forms find their way into mainstream culture. Thus, elements of Nigerian royal regalia, sports equipment with significant ties to African American history, Southern voodoo/hoodoo traditions, and quotes from hip-hop artists are seamlessly blended with beaded patchwork employing the same techniques used by the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians.

production company, BurrowsINK, and husband to Laurielle, face of Guinness campaign that ran for over three years in all 26 countries of the Caribbean.

Sydney Cain Sydney Cain, aka sage stargate, was born and raised in San Francisco. Her multimedia work is largely on paper using dye, graphite, powdered metals, and chalk as emblems of impermanence and transformation. She investigates remembrance, evolution and spirituality from her perspective as a queer Black woman. Cain’s current work is founded on genealogy research alongside the effects of urban renewal/ colonialism and threats against Black afterlives. She has exhibited at Betti Ono Gallery, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery, SOMArts, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the African American Arts and Culture Complex. Cain is currently represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco.

Melanie Cervantes Melanie Cervantes (Xicanx) has never lived far from the California Coast. Born in Harbor City, California and raised in a small city in the South Bay of Los Angeles, Melanie now makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area where she creates visual art that is inspired by the people around her and her communities’ desire for radical social transformation. Melanie’s intention is to create a visual lexicon of resistance to multiple oppressions that will elicit curiosity, raise consciousness and inspire solidarities among communities of struggle.

Ainsley Burrows

In 2007 she co-founded Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaboration that produces screen prints, political posters and multimedia projects that are grounded in Third World and indigenous movements that build people’s power to transform the conditions of fragmentation, displacement and loss of culture that result from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, genocide, and exploitation. Dignidad Rebelde’s purpose is to translate stories of struggle, resistance and triumph into artwork that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it.

Ainsley Burrows is a Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-raised, world renowned poet, published author, slam champion, producer, and painter. He is the Creator and Artistic Director of The Sweet Spot, the longest running POC-led pop-erotica, burlesque cabaret show in the world. Burrows is the CEO of his own

Melanie has exhibited extensively nationally, including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco); National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago); and Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and internationally at the Musée d’Aquitaine (Bordeaux,

France), Galerija Alkatraz (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico City, Mexico). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, the Latin American Collection at the Green Library at Stanford University, the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, the Library of Congress, as well as various other public and private collections throughout the U.S. Melanie is the inaugural recipient of the two-year Art In Resistance Fellowship (2019-2020), as well as being recognized as Dignidad Rebelde with The Piri Thomas & Suzie Dodd Cultural Activist Award from Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (2016), Community Award, National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (2015), the NALAC Fund for the Arts (2012), and the Exemplary Leadership award from San Francisco State University (2010). She holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Brett Cook Brett Cook is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who uses creative practices to transform outer and inner worlds of being. His objects feature painting, drawing, photography, and elaborate installations to tell pluralistic stories that reinvent representation. His public projects typically involve community workshops featuring arts-integrated pedagogy, along with contemplative practices, performance, and food to create a fluid boundary between artmaking, daily life, and healing. Cook has served as Director of Social Practice and Pedagogy at San Francisco State University’s Health Equity Institute, and has been recognized with awards and fellowships by Duke University, UNC at Chapel Hill, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He was selected by the U.S. Department of State to serve as a 2012 cultural ambassador to Nigeria. Cook’s work is in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and Harvard University. He is currently a trustee of A Blade of Grass and the Inaugural Senior Fellow in Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

David Antonio Cruz David Antonio Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist and a Professor of the Practice in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Cruz fuses painting and performance

to explore the visibility and intersectionality of brown, black, and queer bodies. Cruz received a BFA in painting from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Yale University. He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and completed the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum. Recent residencies include the LMCC Workspace Residency, Project for Empty Space’s Social Impact Residency, and BRICworkspace. Cruz’s work has been included in notable group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Performa 13, and the McNay Art Museum. Most recently, he presented a solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery. His fellowships and awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund Award, the Urban Artist Initiative Award, the Queer Mentorship Fellowship, and the Neubauer Faculty Fellowship at Tufts University. Recent press includes The New York Times, Art in America, Document Journal, Wall Street Journal, WhiteHot Magazine, W Magazine, Bomb Magazine, and El Centro Journal.

Kenturah Davis Kenturah Davis is an artist working between Los Angeles, New Haven and Accra (Ghana). Her work oscillates between various facets of portraiture and design. Using text as a point of departure, she explores the fundamental role that language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. This manifests in a variety of forms including drawings, textiles, sculpture and performances. Davis was commissioned by LA Metro to create large-scale, site-specific work that will be permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX rail line, opening in 2020. Her work has been included in institutional exhibitions in Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. Davis earned her BA from Occidental College and MFA Yale University School of Art. Davis was an inaugural artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT.

Kate DeCiccio Kate DeCiccio is an Oakland–based artist, educator and cultural organizer.

Erica Deeman Erica Deeman is a visual artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. Originally from the U.K., she has lived in the States for 9 years. Deeman’s work

explores portraiture and its traditions through the intersections of gender, race, and transnational identities. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, UK; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, and New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA to name a few. Permanent collections include Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; and Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA. Deeman is represented by Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA.

Emory Douglas Emory Douglas created the visual identity for the Black Panther Party 1967/1980. Douglas continues to create art with social justice concerns.

Alyse Emdur Alyse Emdur is an interdisciplinary artist and the author of “Prison Landscapes”. Her drawings, paintings, videos, and photography-based projects use earnest humor to face loneliness, existential crisis, social struggle and the desire to escape. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Cabinet Magazine, Huffington Post, the Atlantic, BBC News, Wired Magazine, Vrij Nederland Magazine, Art Papers Magazine, and Foam Magazine. Emdur is a graduate of the Cooper Union and holds an MFA from the University of Southern California.

Awol Erizku Awol Erizku is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, film, sculpture and installation creating a new vernacular that bridges the gap between African and African American visual culture. His work references art history, hip hop and spirituality. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, Crystal Bridges Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, among others. He also brings high concept to commercial photography highlighting cultural and creative leaders for publications such as The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ and Vanity Fair. He

is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Ben Brown Fine Arts in London and Hong Kong.

rafa esparza rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces. esparza is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014), and Art Matters Foundation grant (2014). Solo exhibitions have been held at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio, TX (2018); Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA (2017); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA (2015); Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2015); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2013). esparza has performed at art institutions including Performance Space New York and the Ellipse, Washington, D.C. (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and Clockshop, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles (2014). Selected group shows were held at San Diego Art Institute, CA (2019); DiverseWorks, Houston, TX (2019); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); GAMMA Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019); Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NV (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); LA><ART, CA (2017); PARTICIPANT, INC., New York (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2015); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013).

Rodney Ewing Rodney Ewing is a San Francisco-based visual artist. His drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate. His work has been exhibited at Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, CA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Root Division, Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Alter Space Gallery, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Ictus Projects. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts both in San Francisco, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, California, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, and Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking West Virginia University.

trial design studies in his formative years, studying at City College in New York and the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit It is Futrell’s belief that “the old is forever new”, and that works of art are evidence of human’s attempt to define and describe their existence within society, by leaving evidence and signs of evolving consciousness and spirituality in various forms of artistic manifestation. Through a restless determination, Futrell’s preferred form of expression speaks to a relentless energy of convulsive, gestural, brushstrokes, vivid bursts of color, movement, and emotion featured in his paintings and in other forms of his artwork. Futrell’s work is beauty wrapped in a culmination of what life was and what it was destined to become.

Through the usage of modern materials and an improvisational style with no identifiable fixed image, Futrell’s work reflects a diverse and innovative palette that works in unison to create a transparency of thoughts and ideas through time and space: impassioned, intense, dynamic, and powerful - the artist's own particular brand of anima forges a body of work aware of its own connection to art history and to Venezuelan-born and currently based in Oakland, the artistic axiom present within today’s contempoCalifornia, Figueroa is an artist working in drawing, rary art canon. His artwork resides in many private photography, and sculpture. He studied at the Skow- collections, and has been included in various public hegan School, Cooper Union (BFA), and received his collections throughout the U.S. MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Best Futrell lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. known for his map-like drawings that document (in playful detail) his surroundings, Figueroa is a keen observer of life. A self-described "impressionist" his recent travels to Paris, Cherry Grove, and around San Francisco have provided much inspiration for his gloria galvez is Los Angeles–based and maintains a growing archive of queer spaces: clothing-optional practice committed to creating and expanding access to physical and abstract spaces of possibility, beaches, clubs, and others. imagination, and self-determination, especially for individuals for whom it is constantly denied. She has organized with community organizations like the Youth Justice Coalition – who works to challenge Hermon Futrell (b. 1940, Parkin, AR) is a multi-disand transform punitive models of judicial justice ciplinary artist whose works include non-objective that youth, especially youth of color, are submitted paintings, sculpture, photography and art furniture to – and Mutual Aid Action Los Angeles – a grassdesign. roots group promoting a culture of community mutual aid, especially around food justice. With a career that spans over five decades, Futrell’s story began during The Great Migration, escaping the perils of the Jim Crow South at a time when deep-seated racism permeated most every corner of American life. Defying the notions of what a Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago. He cremulti-disciplinary artist could be, Futrell soon re- ates work that focuses on space theory and land defined a life full of a multitude of possibilities and development, sculpture and performance. Drawing immersed himself within architectural and indus- on his interest and training in urban planning and

José Figueroa

gloria galvez

Hermon Futrell

Theaster Gates

preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art-world capital, Gates creates work that focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” Gates smartly upturns art values, land values, and human values. In all aspects of his work, he contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist. Gates has exhibited and performed at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013); Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy (2013) and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012). He was the winner of the Artes Mundi 6 prize and was a recipient of the Légion d'Honneur in 2017. He was awarded the Nasher Prize for Sculpture 2018, as well as the Urban Land Institute, J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.

tity. Last year, she won the San Francisco Artadia Award.

Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts. He also serves as the Senior Advisor for Cultural Innovation and Advisor to the Dean. Gates is Director of Artists Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art and the 2018/2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute (GRI).

EJ Hill is a visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Much of what he knows, he has learned from: Estelle Thompson, Karen Thompson, Ernest Hill Jr., Margaret Nomentana, Joan Giroux, Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson (Industry of the Ordinary), Andrea Fraser, Mario Ybarra Jr., Matt Austin, Young Chung, Jordan Casteel, TLC, Lauryn Hill, and Augie Grahn. He is forever indebted to these educators and thanks them endlessly.

Lena Gustafson Lena Gustafson (b. San Francisco 1989) is a painter and multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Oakland, CA. Her paintings depict scenes of transformation, often with figures or plants merging with their environment. Primary themes in Gustafson's work include body memory, repression, sequential evolution, and reciprocity. She received her BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2011.

Angela Hennessy

In 2015, she survived a gunshot wound while interrupting a violent assault on the street in front of her house. Her manifesto, The School of the Dead, was written in the following months of recovery. Alternating between poem, prayer, and call to action, The School of the Dead is in development as an educational program for aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead. As a hospice volunteer, she has worked with with families on home funerals, death vigils, and grief rituals. She is certified in the Grief Recovery Method and trained with Final Passages and the International End of Life Doula Association. She serves on the advisory boards of Recompose and Death Salon. She lectures and teaches workshops nationally.

EJ Hill

Ashley Hunt Ashley Hunt is a visual artist, writer and teacher who has dedicated the last 20 years of his artistic life to documenting the expansion of the U.S. prison system and its effects on communities, alongside other projects that engage social movements, the exercise of political power, and the disciplinary boundaries that separate our art worlds from the larger worlds in which they sit. Hunt's works have been exhibited in venues ranging from PS1 and the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Hammer Museum, and Tate Modern, to grassroots community centers and alongside activist campaigns, including the organizing work of Critical Resistance. Hunt teaches in the Photography and Media program at CalArts.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. She uses a spectrum of color and other phenomena of light to expose mythologies of iden- Melinda James is a Black/Thai cinematographer and image maker whose work encompasses documen-

Melinda James

taries, narratives, installations, commercials, and music videos. Centering her work on women, QTBIPOC, and underrepresented communities, Melinda is drawn to the process of unearthing the nuances of people’s everyday lives. She believes a good image is the starting point for communication, but it’s in the space between them where dialogue happens.

in different materials, like plaster and bronze. I prefer sculptures because they take up space and space is powerful. Sculpture allows us to shape our story and determine how we are remembered.

Research is foundational to my work. When digging for threads to weave together stories of our past, there are historically generalized and racist ideologies that demand a wholesale upheaval of the normative misrepresentation of our ancestors’ emotional and physical sacrifices. African descendants Chris Johnson is a photographic and video artist, deserve public monuments of truth that radiate the curator and writer. He is a Full Professor and Chair of powerful and undying resilience of our people crethe Photography Program at the California College ated from a Black aesthetic point of view. of the Arts. Johnson’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums and art institutions, including My sculptures link generations by revealing comthe Smithsonian Museum and the Oakland Museum mon threads: shared values, experiences, and aspiraof California. tions. I believe they help those alive today compare and contrast their world with that of social pioneers, Johnson is the author of “The Practical Zone System both enslaved and free, whose courage and commitfor Film and Digital Photography,” currently in its ment to excellence helped create modern society. I 6th edition. He has served as President of the San hope you see yourself and those you love in my work. Francisco Camerawork Gallery, Chair of the City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission (1999–2005), and Director of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography (1997–2000). Zahyr Lauren, also known as The Artist L.Haz, creJohnson co-produced “Question Bridge: Black Males” ates in order to share light and love with community. with Hank Willis Thomas and a team including Ka- Each piece is a time period of meditative peace for mal Sinclair and Bayeté Ross Smith. The project won Zahyr. Z is the youngest of four siblings from San the 2015 International Center of Photography’s In- Jose, California. Z comes from a powerful, southern finity Award and was acquired by the Smithsonian black matriarchy that migrated from Oklahoma and Museum of African American History and Culture, Mississippi to California with nothing, and made the Oakland Museum of California, and the Harvey something for generations to come. Z is a West Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture. Coast-based artist, humanstorian, former Human A book of the project was published by Aperture in Rights Investigator, and former Attorney who began 2015. drawing in 2015. The practice of meditative art, for Z, has become a mental and emotional salve, helpJohnson’s other major projects include “Who is Oak- ing to cope with the trauma of coming from comland?,” a major multimedia exhibition at the Oak- munity most heavily targeted by injustice systems. land Museum of California, featuring his installation The practice provides a meditative reprieve from the “The Best Way to Find a Hero” (2016); “A Question world and the artist hopes the work engulfs other of Faith,” a billboard and bus shelter project for the people in the same kind of peace that was felt during Oakland Museum of California (2018); a three- each works creation. year creative documentation project for ArtPlace America and PolicyLink (completed in 2020); and “WisdomArc Time Machine,” an installation at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Shaun Leonardo’s multidisciplinary work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities, along with the notions of achievement, collective I am a classical figurative sculptor who believes identity, and experience of failure. His performance in the power of commemorative art. I study the practice, anchored by his work in Assembly – a distrength and resilience of African Americans and version program for court-involved youth at the create pieces in clay by my hand that are then cast

Chris Johnson

Zahyr Lauren

Shaun Leonardo

Dana King

Brooklyn-based non-profit Recess – is participatory and invested in a process of embodiment.

cluding the Wattis Center for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, YoungArts Miami Art Basel and The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. She has Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, been a recent artist in residence at The Arctic Circle New York City. He received his MFA from the San Residency, Sim Residency in Iceland, and Anderson Francisco Art Institute, is a recipient of support from Ranch in Colorado CO. Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice and A Blade of Grass, and was recently profiled in the New York Times. Leonardo’s work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, Leslie Lopez, known as “Dime,” was born and raised the High Line, and the New Museum, with a recent in Oakland, CA. As a self-taught, fourth-generation solo exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art artist, she began painting murals on the walls of East (MICA). From fall 2018 through spring 2020, LeonOakland at the age of 10 and tagging graffiti at 12. ardo enacted socially engaged projects at Pratt InShe now uses that technique to create powerful pubstitute as the School of Art Visiting Fellow. lic art all around the world, working as a muralist, painter, print-maker, designer, and educator.

Leslie "Dime" Lopez

Ali LeRoi

Ali Rahman Talib LeRoi was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois during the turbulent 60s, a time that gave birth to black activism and empowerment movements that resonate even more today than when they were conceived. With a love for photography that began with his fascination at the photojournalism in Life Magazine, as well as the culturally significant editorial and street imagery found in the iconic periodicals Ebony and Jet Magazine, Ali has found inspiration for his street work in the black diaspora, and in the depictions of black people in particular, as full human beings; people with complex narratives, members of families, people with desires, men women and children with hopes and dreams and experiences that extend beyond an all too familiar framing of the black life as pain. His imagery offers representations of a black experience, the black space, broken yet thriving, a people in search of a ground zero, a place to call home. This work is an attempt to know these people, so that we might all see a bit of ourselves. Photography is Ali's latest expression of his art, following his long-standing career as a television producer and director.

Well-known for her funky graffiti letters and fierce characters, Dime has exhibited her work in galleries, museums, apparel, print, and fashion. She finds inspiration in her surroundings and the stories and spirit of resistance that abound there. Dime continues to bring her art, style, and big heart to many low-income and struggling communities by organizing large projects and free events with her husband to give back and uplift the block. Dime began her path as an educator and mentor while still in high school. At 16, she began to assist with teaching art at continuation schools, after school programs, university workshops, and youth re-entry schools. She went on to develop and teach her own curriculum in middle and high schools. Called SHE'Rose, the program focused on empowering teen girls through visual art.

Dime is a founding member of Few and Far Women and a member of BSK Bomb Squad Kingz. She currently serves as the Visual Arts Director of EastSide Arts Alliance, where she curates exhibitions, coordinates visual arts classes, and brings art opportunities and programing to youth. Dime has worked collaboratively with artists and communities from all over the globe, including OG print-makers and artists like Emory Douglas, Juan Fuentes, Malaquias Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles, CA. Levine is an Montoya, Rupert Garcia, Jesús Barraza, and Xochitl artist exploring the intersections of the physical, Nevel Guerrero. metaphysical, traumatic, and illusionary through sculpture, video and socially engaged practice. She is the founder of This Is Not A Gun, a multidisciplinary project aiming to create awareness and activism Kyle Lypka (b. 1987 Philadelphia, PA) and Tyler Cross through collective creative action. She is currently (b. 1992 Lancaster, CA) met in 2013. They initially an Associate Adjunct at Otis College of Art and De- started making vases together in 2016, which led sign. She received her MFA in sculpture from CCA to a fully collaborative sculpture and multi-media in 2012 and has shown work in various places, in-

Cara Levine

Kyle Lypka & Tyler Cross

art practice. They currently live in Oakland, CA and work out of their studio in Pope Valley, CA. Their third body of work is on view at Pt.2 Gallery from September 12 to October 2, 2020.

standout in numerous exhibitions, including the well-received "Greater New York" show at PS1 in Long Island City, NY and "Freestyle" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as in the current traveling exhibition, “Black Refractions.” Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Barbican Gallery London; the New Museum, New York; The Museum Mieke Marple is an artist and writer living in San of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA; The Santa MonFrancisco. She was co-owner of Night Gallery, Los ica Museum of Art, CA; and the Contemporary Art Angeles, from 2011 until 2016, and has been written Center, New Orleans, LA. Millett recently had solo about by The New York Times and W Magazine, shows at the California African American Museum among other publications. She received her B.A. and Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, CA. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 and has had recent solo exhibitions at 1301PE (Los Angeles) and Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco). She is represented by Ever Gold [Projects] (SF). Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She works primarily in the fields of Juxtaposing modern and contemporary references, large-format photography, experimental video, inKenyan native Wangari Mathenge's work is dedi- stallation and performance art. Her work has been cated to the investigation and incorporation of an exhibited nationally and internationally at the Naintegrated visual testimony of the oft-discounted tional Gallery of Jamaica, the Photographic Center black female experience within the context of Northwest, and the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery. both traditional African society and the Diaspora. Shifting the dialogue around painting and identity, Mathenge’s portraits highlight these silent exchanges and hierarchal dynamics. Often depicting Ed Ntiri is a writer, photojournalist and filmmaker people with whom she has significant relationships, who has been based in the Bay Area since 2007. her paintings are realized through structured com- Originally from Ghana, Ed was raised in New York positions emboldened with gestural strokes and and attended GWU, where he studied finance with mark making. a minor in philosophy. After working for several years as a corporate banker, Ed moved to Oakland, where he received an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. He has since worked as a documenBorn in Denver, Joshua Mays has lived and worked tary photographer, copywriter and screenwriter. His in Philadelphia from 2002 to 2011 before becoming photography and writing have been featured in Vice, a nomadic traveling artist. He now resides in Oak- WaxPoetics, Oakland Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2017, Ed wrote and directed his first land, CA. short film, “Snow Mountain,” which won audience choice awards at the SF Urban and Liberated Lens film festivals. His first feature, “A Lo-Fi Blues” was Githinji Mbire is a Kenyan-born artist based in Oak- awarded the SFFILM Rainin Grant for screenwriting in 2019. He is currently completing a SFFILM House land, CA. Residency in 2020.

Mieke Marple

Courtney Desiree Morris

Wangari Mathenge

Ed Ntiri

Joshua Mays

Githinji Mbire

Adia Millett

Currently living and working in Oakland, CA, Adia Millett received her BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York, followed by a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Millett has been a

Ruben Ochoa Ruben Ochoa lives and works in Los Angeles. He graduated with a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1997 and an MFA from the University of California Irvine in 2003. He is currently a fulltime faculty member at USC Roski School of Art and

Design. Ochoa's work has been exhibited widely at institutions such as The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Contemporary Austin; Art + Practice; The Wadsworth Antheneum Museum; Site Santa Fe; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; El Museo del Barrio; The Hammer Museum; The Denver Art Museum; The Nasher Sculpture Center; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, among others.

Crystal Paris Crystal Paris is an award-winning, self-taught Fashion Artistry Designer specializing in Wearable Art. Building on her love of high fashion and art, Crystal’s debut into the Hive Gallery solidified her place in the downtown Los Angeles art scene and sparked the development of Wearable Art. Crystal’s eclectic “southern belle meets avant-garde” style pays true homage to her Southern roots. Born in Augusta, GA, her fondest memories are of being in awe at her family’s great sense of style. As an artist, Crystal strives to create works of art that capture the same sense of pride and elegance that went into each detail of their garments. Crystal’s eye for beauty developed at the age of five while attending an arts magnet school. Her unique fashion sense won her “Best Dressed” superlative in high-school, and eventually led her to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design. Crystal’s story is one of perseverance, innate talent, and drive to succeed despite obstacles. After having a child at 19 years old and battling homelessness, she sought to provide stability for her family and turn her passion for fashion into a budding business. Crystal Paris Designs LLC was created in 2012 as a brand to empower and educate others through Fashion and Art.

eration Next Generation Scholarship. Her “CP ICE” mask was featured in Daniel Lismore’s 2017 book “Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken.” Crystal strives to use her platform to inspire young women, particularly those in underrepresented communities. She aspires to create art in the form of clothing to shape and propel the evolution of fashion and art while empowering women and young girls to dream big while authentically being themselves.

Meryl Pataky Originally from South Florida, Meryl Pataky moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the Academy of Art University. She fell in love with the tactile nature of sculpture and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture. An artist of many disciplines and mediums, Meryl focuses on the relationship between her own hands and material. Informing her material selection is a meditation on the elements of the periodic table from noble gases to metals and organics. She is aware of the history of her elements from their origins in the universe to their applications in culture and myth. The artist derives deeper meanings from these histories to add layers to her concepts. Both a personal and process-driven narrative drive the work further forward. Meryl is currently working on exhibitions in Oakland, California as well as curating the all-female, all neon exhibition entitled, "She Bends." The exhibition features female benders from around the world.

Maria Paz

Maria Paz (b.1989 Quilpue, Chile) is a self-taught Latinx sculptor based in Oakland, California. Her work explores the bond broken with her home country and how this duality of identity has shaped her experience as an immigrant in the United States. Through the painting of vibrant pictorial scenes on Crystal’s work has been recognized nationally with numerous awards across the art and fashion indus- ceramic forms, Paz pays homage to the palette of try. Her Circle of Life Collection, inspired by Disney’s Latin America while confronting her personal his“The Lion King” and the Kikuyu tribe, was recently tory. showcased at the WACO Theater Center’s Third In 2015, Paz began to work as a lab technician in the Annual Wearable Art Gala. The designs were feaceramics department at Fort Mason in San Frantured on Oprah's OWN television network, gaining cisco, CA. In 2017, Paz exhibited her work in London, the attention of celebrity Beyoncé Knowles Carter. Britain at Something Gallery and New Image Art in Crystal received the Emergent Talent Award from Los Angeles, CA. She has recently exhibited at The the National Black Arts Festival, earning her design Tallest Part Of The Arch at Southern Exposure (SF) ""Opulent"" a chance to be showcased as part of a Neiand was a finalist for the 2019-2020 TOSA Studio man Marcus window display in Atlanta, GA. Crystal Award. She was featured on KQED’s Rightnowish also represented SCAD Atlanta in New York City segment in August 2019 and is currently preparing as a semi-finalist for the 2017 National Retail Fedfor a solo exhibition at Pt. 2 Gallery in Oakland, CA

opening May 2021. She will be exhibiting new works at both Personal Alchemy, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Arts and Come To Your Census, YBCA (both exhibitions are currently postponed due to Covid-19). Paz was recently awarded the recipient of the Bed Stuy Arts Residency in Brooklyn, New York.

Joel Daniel Phillips Joel Daniel Phillips is an American artist whose work focuses on the tenets of classical draftsmanship employed in monumental formats. Inspired by the depth and breadth of human experience, he strives to tell the personal and societal histories etched in the world around him. The focus of his work centers on questions of truth, historical amnesia, and the veracity of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective pasts. The drawings are re-contextualizations of archival historical material, and walk the line between describing a shared, forgotten history and prophesying a terrifying, Orwellian future. Phillips’ work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries across the United States as well as abroad, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, The Art Museum of South Texas, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Gilcrease Museum of Art, and the Ackland Art Museum, among others. In 2016 he was the 3rd prize recipient in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the artist is currently a Fellow at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Phillips’ is represented by Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, CA and New York, NY. His drawings can be found in the public collections of the Ackland Art Museum, the Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art, the West Collection, the Gilcrease Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum.

items after 9/11, the cultural background of the fight for reproductive rights, using thousands of expired birth control pills, and the continuing economic and political struggle for women’s rights, represented by her modified vintage handbag editions. In December 2017, Pred organized the Parade Against Patriarchy in Miami during Art Basel. In November 2018, Pred lead We Vote, an art and social justice parade in New York City, to coincide with the midterm elections. We Vote took place during her solo exhibition “VOTE Feminist” at Nancy Hoffman Gallery. Pred has been represented by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 2004. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Berkeley Art Museum, the 21st C Museum, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York. Pred received a Pro-Choice Leadership Award from Personal PAC, Chicago, and has shown at Jack Shainman Gallery as an original member of the first artist-run super PAC, For Freedoms. Pred has exhibited both nationally and internationally at the Neuberger Museum, White Plains NY; Bild Museet and Kulturhuset in Sweden; University of Westminster, London, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco; University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Omi International Art Center, Ghent, NY; ASU Museum, Tempe, AZ; the Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Museum of Design Atlanta, amongst others. Pred received her BFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland, California. She was born in San Francisco and lives in Oakland, CA.

Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Vanity Fair Magazine, Ms.Magazine.com, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The International Herald Tribune, ARTnews, Art in America, WIRED, BUST Magazine, American Craft Magazine, Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, ReadyMade Magazine, TimeOut New York, Travel and Leisure Magazine, AsMichele Pred is a Swedish American conceptual art- sociated Press Television, CBS Evening news with ist whose practice includes sculpture, assemblage, Katie Couric, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, ABC, and performance. Her work uncovers the cultural KQED, The San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della and political meaning behind everyday objects, with Sera (Italy), TV4 and Dagens Nyheter (Sweden). a concentration on feminist themes such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and personal security. Pred’s projects also contain social components that drive the conversation into public spaces. Examples inHis portraits, drawings, flags, maps, battle scenes, clude her exploration of the intersection of personal and other artifacts continue the long history of space and security by using airport-confiscated

Michele Pred

Umar Rashid

Frengland—an ongoing project Rashid began working on in 2006. In Rashid’s history, the dates of the Frenglish Empire (1658-1880) roughly correspond to the actual English Civil War and the abolition of slavery in Brazil respectively. Fourteen years in the making and spanning almost 140 years of Frenglish time, Rashid’s global empire has developed a complex, global history, much like the trajectory of actual colonial enterprises. Similarly, his work references a panoply of cultures that collapses geography and time. Stylistically, Rashid alludes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American hide paintings and ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts to name but a few. Rashid’s compelling cast of characters are diverse and often of mixed race and ethnicity. His world is not guided by simplistic dichotomies of white and black, master and slave, captor and captive, but challenges viewers to consider the range of humanity involved in a global empire. Thus, his people of color are just as likely to be heroes as villains, revealing the duplicity and complicity of these individuals but also acknowledging their agency as historical actors. The lengthy, sometimes humorous, titles of Rashid’s works often reference hip-hop song lyrics, urban expressions, and current events. The artist intentionally strives to bridge the gap between contemporary popular culture and “official” history, which often seems like a distant, untouchable past especially for many young people today. By making history relatable, Rashid reminds us of the cyclical nature of history and universality of the human condition. —Ellen Caldwell

Favianna Rodriguez Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her practice boldly reshapes the myths, stories, and cultural practices of the present, while healing from the wounds of the past. Favianna's projects include Ben & Jerry's Pecan Resist, two large scale public art commissions with the City of San Francisco, a partnership with Jill Solloway to create 5050by2020.com, and an upcoming storytelling initiative at the US-Mexico border. Her work serves as a record of her human experiences as a woman of color embracing joy, sexual pleasure and personal transformation through psychedelics as an antidote to the life-long impacts of systemic racism. Her signature mark-making embodies the

perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in Oakland, California.

Jimena Sarno Jimena Sarno is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. With a focus on spatial and sonic experience, she works in installation, sound, video and sculpture. She has exhibited at MASS MoCA, 18th Street Arts Center, LACE, Visitor Welcome Center, Grand Central Art Center, Museum of Latin American Art, The Mistake Room, Human Resources, San Diego Art Institute, The Luminary, and Centro Galego de Arte Santiago De Compostela among others. A recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship and the 2019 Rema Hort Mann ACE Grant, she is a 2019-2022 Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Art Center.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. He is Acting Associate Professor in Media Arts at University of California San Diego. Current exhibitions include a survey of work at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and a project for the Whitney Biennial 2019, and group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Guggenheim Museum, and Contemporary Art Museum Houston.

Travis Somerville Travis Somerville was born in 1963 in Atlanta, GA. Growing up in towns throughout the southern United States and along the eastern sea board, he briefly studied at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, finally settling in San Francisco where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. His large scale oil paintings on paper mounted to canvas incorporate collage and present images of political and cultural icons associated with the history of the south. His work explores the complexities of racism and serves as a point of departure for discussion about US oppression and colonial attitudes abroad. It has been included in numerous museum exhibitions: Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga, Malaga, Spain; Walker Art Center,Minneapolis,MN; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna

Beach, CA; Charles Wright Museum, Detroit, MI; The Bass Art Museum, Miami Beach, FL; Frederick Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA.

Jean-Marcel St. Jacques My great-grandmother made patchwork quilts. My great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk and re-sold it for a living. As a visual artist, I work mainly with wood and junk. As the great-grandson of hoodoos, I work folk magic. These wooden quilts are my way of being with the spirits of my late great elders. They are also my way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris hurricane Katrina left me with. Much of the wood used in this work is salvaged from my Katrina-damaged home in the Tremé.

Emanuel Tegene Emanuel Tegene (b. 1985, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works as a full-time studio artist in Ethiopia. He has shown at important galleries and exhibitions in Ethiopia and internationally, and at major art shows such as “The Armory Show” (2016).

Shawn Theodore Shawn Theodore (b. 1970, Germany) is an award-winning photographer whose work opens broad conversations regarding the role of the photographer in the shaping of agency and imagery, engages in new forms of storytelling, and impacts the trajectory of the collective Black consciousness.

Theodore has participated in exhibitions at various institutions, galleries, and fairs, including the African American Museum in Philadelphia (2017, 2018), Mennello Museum of American Art (2018), Steven Kasher Gallery (2018), AIPAD (2018, 2019), Hudson Valley Community College (2018), Catherine Edelman Gallery (2017), The Bakalar & Paine Chanell Stone (b.1992) is an artist photographer liv- Galleries at MassArt (2017), Philadelphia Photo Arts ing and working in Oakland, CA. Stone earned her Center (2018), University of the Arts (2019), Photo BFA in Photography from the California College of LA (2020), Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art the Arts in 2019. Notable accomplishments include (2020), and the Center For Photographic Art (2020). her 2019-2020 solo exhibition "Natura Negra" at the Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco and His commercial projects include works for Apple, her inclusion in the 2019 Aperture Summer Open at Showtime Networks, Roc Nation, Paper Magazine, the Aperture Foundation New York. Stone's work New York Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, The can be found in the permanent collections of the Atlantic, The New York Times, PDN, and many othCenter for Photography at Woodstock and the Myer ers. Library at California College of the Arts. Theodore was awarded the prestigious PDN’s 30

Chanell Stone

Shanna Strauss Shanna Strauss is a Tanzanian-American based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang (Montreal). She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the California College of Arts and has exhibited in solo and group shows in Tanzania, Canada, the U.S and Senegal. Recent exhibitions include “Relations: Diaspora and Painting” at the PHI Foundation, “Women PathMakers” at Euphrat Museum of Art, and “Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in several publications, including Le Devoir, La Presse, CBC Arts, M – Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Magazine and Americana Journal.

New & Emerging Photographers to Watch (2019), the Getty Images/ARRAY Where We Stand grant (2018), and a grant from the Knight Foundation for A Dream Deferred (2018). He is a two-time nominee of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship, and a nominee of the Magnum Foundation Fund.

Theodore earned his BA in JPRA (Journalism, Public Relations and Advertising) from Temple University. He currently attends the MFA for Photography program at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD Atlanta).

Hank Willis Thomas Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist

working primarily with themes related to perspec- He is also a member of the Public Design Commistive, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. sion for the City of New York. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. Solo exhibitions of his work have been featured at Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AK; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA, among others.

Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017. In 2019, Thomas unveiled his permanent work “Unity” in Brooklyn, NY. In 2017, “Love Over Rules” permanent neon was unveiled in San Francisco, CA and “All Power to All People” in Opa Locka, FL.

Lava Thomas

Lava Thomas' multidisciplinary practice centers ideas that amplify visibility, resilience and empowerment in the face of erasure, trauma and oppression. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, CA; Major group exhibitions of his work include the 2017 the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, inaugural show at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Berkeley, CA; and the US Consulate General in JoArt Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; P.S. 1 Contemhannesburg, South Africa. porary Art Center, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Zacheta National Museum of Art, Poland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Orange Sam Vernon earned her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2015 and her BFA from County, CA. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science Thomas’ work is included in numerous public col- and Art in 2009. Her installations combine xeroxed lections including the Museum of Modern Art, New drawings, photographs, paintings and sculptural York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New components in an exploration of personal narraYork, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New tive and identity. Sam lives in San Francisco, CA and York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; High teaches Printmedia as an Assistant Professor at CalMuseum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the National Gal- ifornia College of the Arts (CCA). lery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Sam Vernon

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006).

Ariane Vielmetter

Ariane Vielmetter (b. 1987, Tübingen, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles. Vielmetter’s work uses the conventions of still life and trompe l’oeil painting as a way to explore the image-making process and realism’s ability to convey both plausible fictions and uncanny truths. She draws from a variety of source materials, ranging from re-purposed studio scraps and unfinished drawings, to specimens collected from her compost pile and garden, anthropological illustrations, and works by artists and writers who have been historically overlooked or underesti-

mated. She often creates artist books to accompany each body of work. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles (BA, 2008) and California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2012). Her work has been featured by Fabrik Magazine, Artnet, LA Weekly, and The Art Book Review, and has been shown in recent solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, and Ever Gold Projects, San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include “Arrangements in Undertone” at Pomona College (Claremont, 2017); “The Furies” at Visitor Welcome Center (Los Angeles, 2016); “Modern Arts and Crafts” at Eastside International (Los Angeles, 2016); and “Demolition Woman” at Chapman University (Orange, CA, 2013).

Domenico Villeda Dominic Villeda is a multi-disciplined artist from Oakland, CA – a third-generation gold and silversmith, second-generation calligrapher, and first-generation sign painter. Out of a desire to create functional and accessible artwork, he has spent the past 19 years working as a professional sign painter and muralist for mom-and-pop shops throughout all of California. Mindful of those in need, he uses a sliding fee scale to ensure that smaller businesses are given the opportunity to be visually represented in an artistic and professional way. Dominic's work is guided by a deeply rooted intention to uplift himself and others by spreading positivity in the communities in which he creates art. His hope is that, through his work, he can carry on the torch for all of the great Oakland artists that came before him, upholding their high standards and representing their rich Oakland roots in the best way he knows how.

Christine Wang Christine Tien Wang (b. 1985 Washington D.C) received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA in painting from UCLA in 2013. Wang completed residencies at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, VCUQatar, Chashama North, and Skowhegan. Wang's solo exhibition Crypto Rich is currently on view at Galerie Nagel Draxler Kabinett space in Berlin. Selected group exhibition venues include Rachel Uffner, Magenta Plains, The Prince Street Gallery. Wang is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne and Berlin. Wang is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at California College of Art and lives and works in San Francisco.

Lewis Watts Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz where he taught photography for 13 years. Before that he taught at UC Berkeley for over 25 years. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African diaspora. He is the co-author of “Portraits” (Edition One Books, 2020), “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” (Chronicle Books, 2006; Heyday Books, 2020), and “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” (UC Press, 2013). His work has been exhibited at and is in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Citè de La Musique, Paris, France; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; The Oakland Museum of California; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, CT; Light Work, Syracuse, NY; and The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco among others. He is currently working on photographic projects on “the Black Presence in France,” migration throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa and a portrait series of creatives, academics and street photographs of people of African descent in different parts of the world.

Ricky Weaver Ricky Weaver is an Image-based artist, educator, and mother from Ypsilanti, MI. She received her BFA from Eastern Michigan University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently serves as Part-time faculty in the Art and Art History department at Wayne State University. Weaver has shown work at Page Bond Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, The 2013 Havana Biennale and more. Weaver’s practice prioritizes the ways in which image ontology materializes within a spatiotemporal collapse. Her application of scripture, hymn, and colloquial passages activates a portal through black semiotics to worlds that don’t require escape. She addresses the sonic, linguistic, and visual as a way to posture the body as a central mechanism for storing, downloading and transferring archives.

Leila Weefur Leila Weefur (She/They/He) is a trans-gender-noncomforming artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through video and installation they

examine the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging present in our lived experiences. The work brings together concepts of the sensorial memory, abject Blackness, hyper surveillance, and the erotic.

2017. Wilson’s work has been exhibited in many galleries and institutions, including: The Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOMArts, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. He has received such awards and honors as: the Jack K. and Weefur is a recipient of the Hung Liu award, the Mur- Gertrude Murphy Award, an Emergency Grant from phy & Cadogan award, and the Walter & Elise Haas the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, the Carr CenCreative Work Fund. Weefur has worked with local ter Independent Scholars Fellowship, the McColl and national institutions including SFMOMA, The Center and more. He has also worked with Carrie Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Mae Weems on “The Spirit that Resides” in Havana, Film Archive, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New Cuba alongside the Havana Biennial and The Future York. is Now Parade for the opening of The REACH in Washington D.C. His work is collected by Michigan Weefur is a lecturer at the University of California, State University and the University of New Mexico. Berkeley, and a member of The Black Aesthetic.

Joshua Whitaker

Glen Wilson

Joshua Whitaker is a Black-American artist residing in Freedom, CA. His visual work incorporates a narrative highlighting the beautiful struggle inherent within life, while also reflecting an affinity for found objects, mainly wood, in a way that explores new possibilities of form, collage, photo-transfer as well as the natural patinas that time, weather and age have on organic materials.

Glen Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Anchored in photography, his works range from single frame street imagery to photo-based woven assemblages and public, neighborhood installations.

Shadi Yousefian

Shadi Yousefian is an artist whose mixed media work reflects and addresses issues that touch on universal themes such as loss, dislocation, alienation, and reinvention. She received both her Bachelor's Bob Williams Jr. is an artist and writer at San Quen(2003) and Master's (2006) of Fine Arts in photogratin State Prison. He entered prison in 1996 at age 20 as a condemned man, but has found his freedom phy from San Francisco State University. Her work through disciplined study and painting the natural engages personal and social issues of contemporary world he loves and remembers. He writes and illus- life, particularly, cultural identity, and the immigrant trates a zine, "The Meanderings of a Deathrow (San experience. Shadi has been the recipient of several Quentin,East Block, Yard 3) Inmate", that has been awards including the Best of Photography Award selling at Needles and Pens in San Francisco for the at 13th Annual Stillwell Show, The International Photo Awards (IPA 2004 and 2005), The Murphy & past ten years. Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, and the International Photography Competition (Latitude Life). Her work has also been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She currently lives and Andrew Wilson is a multimedia artist working in the works in Berkeley, California. intersections of ritual and funerary rights honoring the deceased. He is interested in the ways objects accumulate spirit particles and how these collide to open portals to different dimensions. His work is at once beautiful, with an attention to craftsmanship, and repulsing in its graphic subject matter. He wants to create an extra moment of counfoundment for the viewer to contemplate their relationship to the work and the imagery and histories it evokes. He received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013 with a concentration in Jewelry/Metals and his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in

Bob Williams

Andrew Wilson

Curatorial Committee bios Ashara Ekundayo, Curator Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, artist, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement-building. Her intersectional worldview offers both an Afrofuturist and radical Black feminist framework to the public sector by centering the lives, traditions, and expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. Currently, Ashara serves as Chief Creative Catalyst at the Bay Area Girls & Womxn of Color Collaborative and sits on the Advisory Board of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music and the Regional Advisory Board for Arts Web Alameda County. Her newest creative projects include BLATANT - a multi-disciplinary, monthly forum presented in collaboration with the Museum of the African Diaspora as well as a published maga(zine) offered in conjunction with her platform Artist As First Responder which excavates, documents, and archives the stories of present-day and next generation cultural workers whose art practices heal communities and save lives. Ashara recently launched a mutual aid fund for Black Bay Area creatives and is co-founder of Black [Space] Residency, a physical container for imagination, inquiry, activity and rest. Ashara.io

Maya Futrell Maya Futrell is an Independent Curator, Art Consultant/Advisor, and Artist Liaison, currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. With the soft launch of her new venture, MAYA Arts Management, Futrell exists at the intersection of art, music, TV+film, and contemporary culture. Through collaboration with artists, collectors, creatives, and cultural institutions, her work is primarily focused on the ideation and creation of opportunity through an amplified connection and convening - and its utility.

As an arts and culture facilitator, Futrell navigates the contemporary art canon through the lens of the artistic purview of Los Angeles and that of the global arts community at-large, fueling her curiosity in pursuit of purposeful engagement with artists and their artwork. Inspired by her eclectic parents - with the memory of her late Mother, who was a Social Worker, Public Health Educator, Cultural Advocate and practicing Astrologer, and her Multi-disciplinary, Abstract artist Father - Futrell has led a varied and chromatic career existence within the creative sector. She has held positions within the music industry, initiating a dynamic exploration into music publishing, initially with EMI, followed by Paramount Pictures’ Famous Music Publishing, then aptly arriving at Sony/ ATV. Embarking on an industry career pivot, yet in keeping with an enterprising narrative found within creative industries, Futrell then ventured into the innovative, global lifestyle world of fashion sportswear, with an inspiring term spent at Nike, Inc., working within the West Coast Leadership Team C-Suite. Futrell has since established her commitment to a career amidst the compelling, high-powered world of Contemporary art. Having launched her art practice with the curation of an art exhibit for an emerging, LA-based artist, Futrell is currently lending curatorial guidance and support to Critical Resistance - an organization dedicated to social justice - with the launch of their major online art exhibition, benefit auction, and programming series, powered by Artsy.net. As Futrell continues her rigorous practice of visiting artist studios, art galleries and museums, she is also looking forward to the continued collaborative conceptualization of various upcoming projects and events, while cultivating additional creative partnerships for the remainder of 2020 and beyond.

Jess Heaney Jess Heaney began organizing with Critical Resistance Oakland chapter in 2010 through the Stop the Injunctions Coalition. Inspired by the peer mentorship, political rigor, and organizing that CR members demonstrated in outreach, media work, and legislative mobilizations, Jess joined the Oakland chapter as a volunteer member. From 2010 to 2014, she sup-

ported the 2013 California Prisoner Hunger Strikes efforts to end solitary confinement and helped seed the Oakland Power Projects, an alternative to policing initiative. Jess joined CR National staff in 2014 as Development Director, working both nationally and locally on fundraising, programming, political education and member development, and movement-building efforts. In her time at CR, she has supported hundreds of political education workshops, events and grassroots engagement projects including the Profiles in Abolition series, Breaking Down the Prison Industrial Complex Video Project, the 4400 Telegraph building project in North Oakland Visual and Neighborhood committee and Second Saturdays series.

Hans Kuzmich Hans Kuzmich (b. Bobruisk, Belarus) is an artist and PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. His current research and film/installation work is concerned with developing abolitionist representational strategies that address gender normativity as a product and producer of the prison industrial complex, and racialized anti-trans/ queer violence as its expression. Kuzmich received a BFA from the Cooper Union, an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and attended the Whitney Independent Study program. His work has been exhibited in art spaces, film festivals, and community centers internationally, and his writing has been published in: Art Journal; Theory, Culture & Society; The Abolitionist; and Native Strategies.

Shirley Leslie Shirley Leslie is the National Development Coordinator for Critical Resistance. Before ending up in abolitionist organizing, she worked as an administrator and an independent music publicist. This refined skills in bolstering interpersonal relationships and conducting general outreach to community members. After gaining a fuller understanding of the nature of the prison industrial complex, she shifted toward working for abolition, and will continue to do so for years to come.

Mieke Marple Mieke Marple is an artist and writer living in San Francisco. She was co-owner of Night Gallery, Los Angeles, from 2011 until 2016, and has been written about by The New York Times and W Magazine,

among other publications. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008 and has had recent solo exhibitions at 1301PE (Los Angeles) and Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco). She is represented by Ever Gold [Projects] (SF).

William Ramírez William Ramírez, is a Graphic Designer and Frontend Web Developer with more than 15 years of experience. A transplant from the D.R., William holds a Graphic Design and Illustration degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Previously, William worked as a graphic designer and web developer with the Design Action Collective where he helped stablished during the start-up times from 2006 until this year. He was one of the founders of the award winning independent arts & culture magazine, La Vaina, as well as having worked for commercial companies, non-profit organizations, and independent artists.

Tahirah Rasheed Tahirah Rasheed joined Critical Resistance in 2019 as the Building Project Manager, Critical Resistance’s new national offices and new freedom movement center. Born in West Oakland, Ca, home of the Black Panther Party and daughter of two Black Panther Party members, Tahirah Rasheed is a scholar, organizer and artrepreneur. As an internationally traveled Disc Jockey, former lab assistant, and published biomedical researcher, Tahirah lends her many talents and experiences to each venture in service of community. Tahirah is the co-founder of “See Black Womxn,” a Bay Area collective of artists, activists, curators and writers raised on Black feminist theory. Tahirah is the catalyst behind “Imagine Freedom: Art works for Abolition” after imagining the auction with close friend Ferrari Sheppard in the Fall of 2019. She has recently been focused on how art and business can fortify broader movements for justice. Tahirah is working toward a day in which her ventures are part of the sustainable support of black art in service of black freedom, black love, and black prosperity.

Statement on Visual Politics Since the founding of Critical Resistance (CR), we have modeled that cultural work and art are crucial components of the fight for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition. Creative practice – as well as the process of reclaiming culture taken from communities through centuries of colonization, genocide, and repression – is an act of resistance. We intentionally and strategically intertwine art and abolition because both rely on and nurture the imagination. Cultural workers, artists and abolitionist organizers activate communities to dream wildly about the world we want to live in and what we need to build to get there. This is perhaps why CR has always counted many artist-organizers among its members and fellow travelers. Visual art, banners, painting, design, film, theater, help people with their imagination in a truly unique way. All of these are opportunities to listen and learn: for people to discover themselves and for others to discover ideas about the way the world could and should be.

Graphic for Critical Resistance’s 20th anniversary; design by Sarah Crumb; art by Jason

In the history of organizing on the Left, all successful social justice movements Luz; featured posters by Melanie Cervantes, 2018 have had powerful aesthetic programs. They have used poetic words, stirring sounds, and bold images. Particularly for politics that are visionary and fundamentally challenging to the status quo, art-making creates a powerful dynamic (a dialectic) between the tools that we have available to us and the future we want to see. In giving concrete form to these imaginative leaps, art is an essential plank in the bridge between what is and what ought to be. Therefore art is not “a thing” but a strategy: to fortify our will to struggle, to lay bare the contradictions we face, and to sharpen our vision of the world we want to live in. Because our adversary – the interlocking forces of repression that make up the prison industrial complex – require an inhibition of human power and creativity, we know that they thrive when people cannot see their past, present, and future. In turn, when people can see and recognize the past, present, and future as shared and collective, their analysis – attached to a winning strategy – becomes powerful. Three main orientations anchor CR’s strategy regarding art and abolition: highlighting liberatory images, centering grassroots people, and memorializing rebellions and losses as movement-building. We use these

Banner series for The Plan for a Safer Oakland (PSO) project (2005–10) of Critical Resistance and All of Us Or None, 2009

political approaches – often hand in hand with each other – to challenge the political, social, and economic legitimacy of the PIC. First, we use liberatory images as an essential visual politic of abolition. The poster for CR’s first conference in 1998 – Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex – featured a print of an eye by Rupert Garcia. Conference organizers imagined this eye – open, watchful, and unflinching – to be staring back at the state to challenge its harms. This eye represented active subjects, not passive “problems,” as people at the brunt of PIC’s violence have been construed. Through the analysis and the people power developed at the conference, together with images, that highlighted the power of everyday people to make meaningful change, CR re-ignited a grassroots movement to challenge the idea that imprisonment and social control create safety. Over time, images of birds in flight, unbounded and free, also became iconic expressions of our emergent “Dismantle, Change, Build” framework. Our visual politics have become more committed since: no bars unless being broken, no razor wire unless being torn down, and no people Poster for Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex conference; art by Rupert suffering the PIC’s opGarcía, 1992/1998 pression. We choose to elevate images of people fighting back and inspiring us to keep going. This shift of frame to an abolitionist visual focus is a major contribution that CR has made to the anti-prison movement. Second, CR is committed to centering real people who are doing the organizing in our visual materials and graphics. Part of the change work in our “Dismantle, Change, Build” framework is shifting who is recognized as a movement expert; part of the build work is building leadership and Postcard design by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde, 2016 movements. In all of our organizing, whether speaking to the media or planning a rally, we seek to center people of color, formerly imprisoned people and loved ones, survivors of police violence, and queer and trans people and to build capacity to organize. The abolitionist movement’s images must reflect our movement. Third, we remember rebellions and memorialize lost lives as part of movement-building. We commemorate specific people who have been swallowed up by the system, making visible the losses our communities have endured. In this way, we turn from collective grief to collective, emboldened resistance, fueled by passion for life, people, and land. With abolition as our strategy, we move toward a world without cages and policing, where self-determined communities thrive. We keep our tools accordingly sharp, ready to dismantle institutions of oppression, to change common sense about what safety is and who the experts are, and to build for the world we need. CRITICAL RESISTANCE

Vigil for the loved ones lost to the violence of policing as part of Stop the Injunctions Coalition’s week of action, Oakland, CA, 2011

TOWARD LIBERATION!

Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex

“No Bars Unless Being Broken…” A Letter to Collaborators

Dear Artists and Designers, Thank you so much for accepting our invitation to participate in Imagine Freedom: Art Works for Abolition, a benefit for Critical Resistance (CR). We are thrilled to be working with you because we respect your art practice, your politics, and your creative voice. CR has some visual politics criteria that we would like to guide our collaboration and we hope that you can work with us to fulfill this direction. Critical Resistance is committed to always using images that invoke liberation. We steer away from representations of people being locked in gloria galvez, Critical Resistance Breaks the Chain, flag for For A World Without cages, confined, or cuffed; of barbed wire, guard Prisons: Visual Resistance as Abolitionist Strategy exhibition, 2019 towers, or other symbols of the prison industrial complex (PIC). If the tools of state violence are depicted, then only in ways that show them being dismantled and defeated. No bars unless they are being broken, no fences unless they are being torn down, no chains unless people are breaking free. Imprisoned people represented with dignity and power, not at the brunt of confinement and dispossession. We intentionally do this to disrupt the symbolic and material violence of having our communities consistently positioned as objects of carceral brutality. This is a political choice. We want our messaging and framing to center self-determination and resistance, to show people striving towards or achieving freedom. There are already so many images of state repression in our society. We find that even when meant as critique, making captivity the visual focus often doesn’t disrupt the narrative or enliven our fight. It expands the PIC’s grip over our imagination by making it all we can see. As Critical Resistance, we choose not to reproduce oppression, but to make abolition and the future that we want and need irresistible. We also strive to amplify the images and practices of defiance that we know exist but that get drowned out by depictions of coercion. Envisioning freedom is an abolitionist practice. Art that gives form to our collective dreams of liberation has the potential to advance abolitionist creativity. When state violence is the topic – without grassroots resistance and people’s courage and brilliance on the stage – we inadvertently re-center the PIC as normal, as legitimate, as permanent. Yet when we make self-determination the subject of our work, then we are practicing radical imagination that abolition needs. This has been a major intervention that CR has made in the last two decades in the anti-prison movement, and we hope that you will work with us to continue to advance these politics. In struggle,

Poster for Critical Resistance 10: 10th Anniversary Conference and Strategy Session; design by Design Action Collective, 2008

Critical Resistance

CONTACT: For Artwork and Artist Inquiries Ashara Ekundayo, Curator ashara@ashara.io 303.260.9209

For Info on Critical Resistance and Sponsorship Jess Heaney, Development Director jess@criticalresistance.org crnational@criticalresistance.org

MISSION

Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope.

VISION

Critical Resistance’s vision is the creation of genuinely healthy, stable communities that respond to harm without relying on imprisonment and punishment. We call our vision abolition, drawing, in part from the legacy of the abolition of slavery in the 1800s. As PIC abolitionists we understand that the prison industrial complex is not a broken system to be fixed. The system, rather, works precisely as it is designed to—to contain, control, and kill those people representing the greatest threats to state power. Our goal is not to improve the system even further, but to shrink the system into non-existence. We work to build healthy, self-determined communities and promote alternatives to the current system. Critical Resistance (CR) is building a member-led and memberrun grassroots movement to challenge the use of punishment to “cure” complicated social problems. We know that more policing and imprisonment will not make us safer. Instead, we know that things like food, housing, and freedom are what create healthy, stable neighborhoods and communities. We work to prevent people from being arrested or locked up in prison. In all our work, we organize to build power and to stop the devastation that the reliance on imprisonment and policing has brought to ourselves, our families, and our communities.

For Donations:

criticalresistance.org/donate 1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504 • Oakland, CA 94612 Phone: 510.444.0484 • crnational@criticalresistance.org