—Frederick Douglass

visage, Julien weaves passages of Douglass’s writings with filmed reenactments of the abolitionist’s travels in the United States, Scotland, and Ireland. These are interspersed with contemporary protest footage that makes Douglass’s modern-day relevance and resonance both palpable and undeniable.

Lessons of the Hour is presented across 10 video screens of varying sizes, creating a 29-minute, mesmerizingly lush, ever-changing montage of image and sound. It includes sequences shot in Washington, D.C., at The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, where Douglass lived late in life, and where his house in Cedar Hill has been kept conserved as it was during the abolitionist’s time. Other sequences were filmed in Scotland, where Douglass was an active member of the “Send Back the Money” movement and delivered anti-slavery speeches, and in London’s Royal Academy of Arts, to an audience which includes both 19 th century characters, and contemporary, real-life scholars and Royal Academicians. The installation is accompanied by a significant catalogue available in the JSMA store, including scholarly essays by Henry Louis Gates, Deborah Willis, and others.

Born in London’s East End to parents who migrated from the Caribbean Island of Saint Lucia, Isaac Julien is an internationally renowned filmmaker and artist whose work has been shown in major exhibitions and film festivals since the 1990s and collected by museums worldwide. Before focusing on video installations such as Lessons of the Hour, he became known for early films such as Looking for Langston (1989), about the Harlem Renaissance figure Langston Hughes, and Young Soul Rebels (1991), which won the Semaine de la Critique prize for best film at the Cannes Film Festival. His films, photography, single-channel and multi-screen video installations are featured in Isaac Julien, What Freedom Means to Me, a retrospective exhibition from April 23 to August 20, 2023 at the Tate Britain in London, surveying his work across four decades. In 2022 Queen Elizabeth knighted Julien “for services to diversity and inclusion in art.” He divides his time between his London studio and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is a distinguished professor of the arts.

Strange Weather: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Barker Gallery

October 21, 2023 - April 7, 2024

The JSMA is pleased to present Strange Weather : From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, an exhibition featuring contemporary artworks which explore the relationships and boundaries between bodies and the environment. Co-organized by Dr. Rachel Nelson, Director of the UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and her colleague, Professor Jennifer González, UCSC Visual Studies, Strange Weather will be on view in the Barker Gallery from October 21, 2023 until April 7, 2024.

The artworks in Strange Weather span five decades, from 1970 to 2020, and include work by some of the most influential artists in the United States today, including Leonardo Drew, Kehinde Wiley, Lorna Simpson, Julie Mehretu, Terry Winters, Nicola Lopez, Edgar Heap of Birds, Carlos Amorales, James Lavadour, Kiki Smith, Hung Liu, Joe Feddersen, Wendy Red Star, Alison Saar, and more.

The exhibition features Drew’s immense installation, Number 215b, a floor-to-ceiling assemblage of found materials that evokes a chaotic storm exploding off the gallery walls. Moody and darkly threatening, it strikes the dominant note in an exhibition with a remarkably wide and nuanced range of artistic methods and attitudes.

“For Strange Weather, we selected artworks from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation with climate change weighing heavily on our minds,” Dr. Nelson explains. “While this is certainly not a didactic exhibition, living through wildfires and drought motivated us to explore the impressive collections of over 16,000 objects for the different aesthetic approaches artists use to illuminate the histories, experiences, and socio-political contexts that led to this moment.”

“It has been such a pleasure to work with my colleague Rachel Nelson in selecting works by some extraordinary contemporary artists,” Prof. González adds. “The exhibition provides a glimpse of the richness of contemporary art, and its capacity to enliven both our understanding of human history and the critical questions facing us today.”