Hank Willis Thomas, “Black Righteous Space: The South African Edition”, 2014. Image courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
On-going to April 9th – Hank Willis Thomas: The Evidence of Things Not Seen at Kadist SF: Borrowing its title from James Baldwin’s 1985 essay on the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-81, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, this solo exhibition amplifies notions of presence and absence, sound and silence, and visibility and invisibility in the work of Hank Willis Thomas. Through his installations, photography, videos, and media works, Hank Willis Thomas uses images and themes from advertising and pop-culture to expose their reinforcement of generalizations surrounding gender, race and ethnicity. In his legibly present, but audibly absent text-based works, ‘voices’ are disembodied or silent, but their narratives and images reveal a hauntingly voluble history of resistance. Similarly, where figures are visually present, words are absent, suggesting a tension between when, how, why, and who society enables to speak. In conjunction with his exhibition at Kadist SF, the artist has curated a films series, find more information here. Kadist SF is located at 3295 20th Street in San Francisco.
Liam Everett, “Untitled (Teotihuacan)”, 2016. Image courtesy Altman Siegel Gallery.
Ongoing to April 23rd – Liam Everett: The Elephant Calf at Altman Siegel Gallery: The Elephant Calf includes new paintings on linen completed in Everett’s indoor/outdoor studio in Sonoma County. For his exhibition the artist presents artworks wherein the viewer encounters numerous layers and arrangements within individual paintings. These complex configurations move the eye at different speeds across the canvas. Everett’s paintings do not attempt to narrate or define content, rather Everett allows for his heavily layered compositions to rise up out of what he calls the “original reality of the studio.” For Everett this reality is an acknowledgement of his surrounding environment, and allows for him to consider his spatial and temporal conditions when building his paintings. Altman Siegel Gallery is located at 49 Geary Street in San Francisco.
Digital rendering of the new gallery complex at 1275 Minnesota Street. Courtesy of Minnesota Street Project.
Friday, March 18th, 6-10 pm – Grand Opening of Minnesota Street Project: The brand new Minnesota Street Project comprises three main buildings on Minnesota Street that offer affordable, below-market rates to Bay Area artists and dealers: 1150, a storage and handling facility for collectors and galleries, provides over 100,000 square feet of space, a portion of it climate controlled; 1240, a former T-shirt printing factory, is a cavernous barn with aluminum siding and soaring ceilings that houses studios for 27 long-term tenants (who have the option to stay indefinitely), selected from almost 300 applicants, as well as additional short-term rotating spaces that will accommodate around two dozen artists a year; and 1275, an unassuming two-story warehouse structure once occupied by a furniture maker, now renovated and redesigned by Jensen Architects and encompassing 11 contemporary art galleries, the nonprofit San Francisco Arts Education Project, a pair of rotating exhibition spaces, a media room, plus a café and restaurant.
Carrie Hott “The Key Room”
Sunday, March 20th, 12-5pm – Carrie Hott: The Key Room opening reception at the Headlands Center for the Arts: The Key Room is a multifaceted multi-media project created by artist Carrie Hott to serve as both permanent art installation and visitor resource center on the first floor of Headlands’ main building. As the newest addition to Headlands Commissions Program, The Key Room builds on Headlands’ history of inviting artists to creatively reinterpret place while stewarding the campus through site-sensitive rehabilitation. Explore the in’s and out’s of this new commission as you take a self-guided exploration of Headlands with prompts written by Walter Kitundu (AIR ’08), Constance Hockaday, and Scott Oliver (AIR ’09), listen to true stories told by Holly Blake (staff, 1988–present), Phoebe Brookbank (AIR ’88), Sarah Fran Wisby (AIR ’14), Mark Thompson (AIR ’86), and others, and view a display of over 600 objects from Headlands’ history. The Headlands Center for the Arts is located at Fort Barry in the Marin Headlands, 944 Simmonds Road, Sausalito.
Jason Middlebrook “21 Ways to get your Groove On” 2016. Image courtesy of Gallery 16.
Friday, March 25th, 6-9 pm – Jason Middlebrook opening reception at Gallery 16: This is the first West Coast solo show by the New York based Middlebrook, a California native, in over a decade. This exhibition will include 20 of Middlebrooks signature towering “Plank” paintings, these are geometric abstractions painted directly onto internally cut trunks from the local mill in Hudson New York. Middlebrook’s signature patterning weds the geometry of modern abstraction with the lines of wood grain to “create a tension between something organic and something man-made.” Gallery 16 is located at 501 3rd Street in San Francisco.