Charlene Tan is an Agent of Change

Artist Charlene Tan shares how her Research and Remembering series, on view in McEvoy Arts‘ exhibition In This Light, is a deeply personal act of resilience to reclaim and foreground the aesthetics of her Filipino heritage.

Over the next several weeks, McEvoy Arts interviews each of the four artists from The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program whose work is on display in In This Light, a virtual and offsite exhibition presented in conjunction with the Minnesota Street Project’s group exhibition Invincible Summer.

Our interview with Charlene Tan concludes the series. Make a reservation to visit the exhibition in person here.

McEvoy Arts: Can you share a bit about your practice and background?

Charlene Tan: I’m an interdisciplinary artist with formal training in the History of Contemporary Art from San Francisco Art Institute, where my focus on new genres/new media ultimately left me conflicted about the dominant narrative, and how I define my work relative to that. I’m currently working on a series, Research and Remembering, through which I’m investigating, physically deconstructing, and reconstructing patterns from indigenous weaving traditions of the Philippines. By learning a cultural language lost to me, I found this work to be about rediscovering and decolonizing my identity as a person of an immigrant diaspora.

McEvoy Arts: As an artist in The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program at 1240 Minnesota Street, the building’s temporary closure has forced you to embrace new working accommodations. How have you coped with the isolation of social distancing and uncertainty?

CT: It has been difficult transitioning from a very social, energizing art-making environment to an isolating one, where I find myself at home making work in my small bedroom and, at times, totally taking over the living room. To cope, I’ve sought connections through Zoom calls or FaceTime sessions with many in my social constellation and with whom I have found love and support. I’ve been managing my own actions and creating structure for survival, actively trying not to become paralyzed by adversity, and being honest when I feel overwhelmed in the face of uncertainty.

Installation view, In This Light, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco (June 30–September 26, 2020). Artwork courtesy of Charlene Tan  / © ⁠Charlene Tan. Photo: Shaun Roberts.

McEvoy Arts: Has the onset of the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement offered you new insights into preexisting bodies of work or motivation for new projects?

CT: Both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have motivated me to increase my participation in the art community as a way of helping to foster anti-racist change, counteract privilege, and nurture inclusive opportunities. I know how to demolish, build, and organize, and it is time for me to be that POC woman who will not be diminished by those blinded and deafened by hate. Black Lives Matter makes me hopeful about much-needed reform for our art institutions.

McEvoy Arts: How does your work on view in In This Light engage with the notion of resilience? When, where, and how was your work produced?

CT: The works on view are literal acts of resilience—deeply personal fights to reclaim my ancestral, culturally situated aesthetics from the often oppressive aesthetic values I was taught and internalized. This work reflects the value I place on my multiracial identity, and the process of reclamation, renegotiation, and reordering that I must do as I go about my work as an artist. In a sense, I feel like Research and Remembering, Pink Tapioca (2020) which I made by hand-gluing thousands of tiny, pink tapioca pearls onto a panel while sheltering-in-place, was in itself an act of not giving up. Using a pair of tweezers, I picked up and dipped in glue each of the tapioca pearls from which I assembled the pattern, putting each individual ball where it needed to be. I brought a semblance of order to the composition, but also to what felt like an especially chaotic time. I worked through some sleepless nights, gluing until I was so tired that my mind relaxed and I was able to reminisce about the past and feel a sense of hope.

An in-progress view of Charlene Tan’s Researching and Remembering, Pink Tapioca, 2020. Tapioca, giclee print, plywood, pva glue. 28 ⅜  x 23 ⅜ inches. Courtesy the artist.

McEvoy Arts: Do you have any suggestions for artists wrestling with making work amidst collective anxiety and uncertainty?

CT: Keep going, call/text people, help each other.

McEvoy Arts: What’s been most striking to you about the impact this moment is having on the making, presentation, and consumption of culture? What are your hopes for the future?

CT: I’m appreciating efforts made by galleries and art centers to engage with the public through digital platforms and sharing exhibition images. In the pre-pandemic world, I had issues with the lack of public engagement on digital platforms, especially for people who are less mobile or can’t afford to fly around the world.

McEvoy Arts: What is the responsibility of the artist in times like these? Has your sense of the role of art in society shifted?

CT: In my opinion, an artist’s responsibility right now is to survive, support others, and be an agent of change. Yes—my sense of the role of art in society has shifted—to one of hope.

McEvoy Arts: Lastly, is there a piece of art, literature, film, or music that has been a comforting touchstone for you through the pandemic?

CT: Currently, I’ve been taking comfort in online-based class lectures, in particular on the Bubonic plague. It helps a lot to see similarities of how society changed during those past plague years.


Charlene Tan’s interdisciplinary artworks focus on the immigrant diaspora and its repercussions, post-assimilation identity, and investigations of nationalism and cultural heritage. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, including Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; and Blank Space Gallery, Oakland. She received her BA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Born in Houston Texas, she lived in the Philippines before moving to San Francisco.

Richard T. Walker Finds Resolution in the Questions, Not the Answers

Artist Richard T. Walker discusses his fascination with landscapes and the American West and his work on view in McEvoy Arts’ exhibition In This Light.

Over the next several weeks, McEvoy Arts interviews each of the four artists from The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program whose work is on display in In This Light, a virtual and offsite exhibition presented in conjunction with the Minnesota Street Project’s group exhibition Invincible Summer.

Make a reservation to visit the exhibition in person here.

McEvoy Arts: Can you share a bit about your practice and background?

Richard T. Walker: I grew up in Shropshire, England. In 2007, I moved from London to San Francisco. I had been making work that meditated on the legacy of the American West from a British perspective. Once I was located on the West Coast, I had first-hand access to the vast open spaces I had read about and seen on film. Being in the presence of these expanses conjured very visceral, emotional sensations. I was fascinated by the relationship these feelings held with the cultural phenomena of the American West that had been so successfully exported to the UK. But these feelings went further, they were complex and confusing. I could sometimes quantify them intellectually by relating them to myths of Hollywood and Romanticism, but their reach stretched into things that felt like ineffable reconfigurations of reality and questioned the mechanics of perception.

I realized that the space of landscape is a platform to interrogate facets of the human condition, for it exposes the figure, the body and the interiority of being. This space pulls it all apart and allows a moment to see the constituent elements for what they are before they glue back together again. It is this juncture, this fulcrum, that continues to be a focus in my practice.

“The notion of solitude in my work feels more enhanced. Expanses seem more expansive, everything seems turned up and tuned in a little more.”

McEvoy Arts: As an artist in The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program at 1240 Minnesota Street, the building’s temporary closure has forced you to embrace new working accommodations. How have you coped with the isolation of social distancing and uncertainty?

RW: At first I wasn’t really coping in terms of art-making. The world suddenly spun much faster and it was hard to keep balance. The ability to zone in, to focus, to look and think about something in a way that allows an idea to unfold and reveal itself wasn’t there anymore. Perhaps this was because everything was unfolding or unwinding, so the notion of picking something apart felt like the inverse of what was desired. The questions one asks in their studio about the characteristic of this or the significance of that seemed insufficient and also less relevant. This said, the undoing of normal life outside the studio is bizarrely reflected in the intentional dismantling of something in the studio. I think I need to embrace this parallel.  

Richard T. Walker Ourself, 2019 Two archival pigment prints, slide projector, slide, modified rock, motion sensor Dimensions variable overall; framed print: 18 x 30 inches Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Richard T. Walker, Ourself, 2019, two archival pigment prints, slide projector, slide, modified rock, motion sensor. Dimensions variable overall; framed print: 18 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

McEvoy Arts: Has the onset of the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement offered you new insights into preexisting bodies of work or motivation for new projects?

RW: Making my work is a solitary activity. I go into landscapes by myself and report on my findings through visual means. As a straight white man, I can feel somewhat safe going into the depths of rural California, which is a privilege not afforded to everyone. This is something I have considered before, but it now feels more pronounced within the work, as does the problematic associations with wilderness and the politics of landscape. The notion of solitude in my work feels more enhanced. Expanses seem more expansive, everything seems turned up and tuned in a little more. Perhaps it is in reflection to the domestic spaces that we have been inhabiting so intensely.  The city has shifted away from being a city and has become a coarse collection of buildings, roads, cars and people. Nature, on the other hand, still maintains its position. The only change to nature is that it has new emphasis: it is even more of a respite, even more a refuge.

McEvoy Arts: How does your work on view in In This Light engage with the notion of resilience? When, where, and how was your work produced?

RW: The disparate particles of light emanating from the slide projector bulb are forced to coalesce through the gaps in a slide that projects the word “ourself” onto an image of Mount Shasta. The image is made up of two collaged photographs: one color, one black and white. Combined, these elements form a gesture of togetherness, of overcoming separation and the trappings of singularity. But also, and importantly, they instill a reflection of the aggregate power of words and language to form meaning and action – a collective symbiotic confluence of gestures. The work was produced in 2019, but in light of the current situation, the ideas within it seem to garner new and expanded relevance.

McEvoy Arts: Do you have any suggestions for artists wrestling with making work amidst collective anxiety and uncertainty?

RT: For me, the following has helped: “Keep it open, allow fluidity and repetition. Direct it outward and then inward, not inward then outward. Find meaning in the search for meaning. Find resolution in the questions and give less weight to the answers. Act like it matters less than you know it does.”  

Richard T. Walker’s studio in the Excelsior. Courtesy the artist

McEvoy Arts: What’s been most striking to you about the impact this moment is having on the making, presentation, and consumption of culture? 

RW: With two small children, I don’t consume as much culture as I’d like, so this is a tricky one to answer, and honestly think it may be too soon to make an assessment. However, I know that people are fed up with Zoom and fed up with looking at everything online, and so I think the importance of witnessing and consuming culture in the real world has become more apparent than ever. Will this change things when we enter back into the world of physical art spaces, theatres, and galleries? I’m not sure. One thing I hope is that museums restrict taking photos in the galleries and that more emphasis is spent on encouraging visitors to share moments with the work, unmediated. 

McEvoy Arts: What are your hopes for the future?

RW: That social distancing goes back to being optional. That Trump loses. That we collectively feel the tangible urgency of saving our planet. That we reopen our borders to those in need. That resolving social inequality and racial injustice is prioritized in all communities and that we have free national healthcare ASAP. Also, I hope the future provides a substantial and significant increase in government funding for the arts.    

McEvoy Arts: What is the responsibility of the artist in times like these?

RW: Each artist has their own role that is personal to them. For me, I see the work I put into the world as being a way to communicate something universal, even if what is being communicated are the challenges inherent in communication. In acknowledging the limitations and the fallibility of the individual, I want to produce art that brings people together in collective experience. To the best of my ability I would like to make work that prioritizes experiences that reflect on the nature of experience itself. I want to produce work with multiple entry points that emphasizes the universality of being human, of having consciousness, of feeling, having emotions, of existing. And how the power of the visual enables us to share and communicate who and what we are.  

McEvoy Arts: Has your sense of the role of art in society shifted?

RW: My wife Blaine Bookey is an attorney battling the current Republican administration for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. Her daily job is directly helping people in desperate circumstances. In relation to this, the various decisions and deliberations that occur in my studio seem somewhat indulgent. It’s something I have often thought about, but now it feels particularly acute. However, in defiance of the question mark that looms large I keep going to the studio and I keep making work. I can’t articulate it in a way that feels satisfactory, but my own actions tell me that art still has a role. How that role has changed is something that continues to unfold. What is clear is that the role of art should be one that is broad, inclusive and doesn’t rely so heavily on wealth and the economically privileged. The elitism of the art world has always been problematic and now it feels especially so.  

McEvoy Arts: Lastly, is there a piece of art, literature, film, or music that has been a comforting touchstone for you through the pandemic?

RW: Eluvium’s Pianoworks has provided a needed center of late, when all else has appeared to be drifting endlessly outward. 


Richard T. Walker employs a variety of media including video, music, photography, sculpture and performance. These media are often intermixed to explore and question the experience of the individual within the natural landscape. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kadist Foundation, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), amongst other institutions. He has exhibited and performed worldwide including at The Contemporary Austin; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; The Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; the Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Walker has been an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center as well as participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received an Artadia Award in 2009. He received his MA from Goldsmiths College and lives in San Francisco.

Alison Pebworth On Pulling Form Out Of Chaos

Artist Alison Pebworth details how meditative making exercises and Octavia Butler steered her practice during this tumultuous time and inspired her installation for In This Light.

Over the next several weeks, McEvoy Arts interviews each of the four artists from The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program whose work is on display in In This Light, a virtual and offsite exhibition presented in conjunction with the Minnesota Street Project’s group exhibition Invincible Summer.

Make a reservation to visit the exhibition in person here.

McEvoy Arts: Can you share a bit about your practice and background? 

Alison Pebworth: Originally from the piney woods of East Texas, I have been living and working as an artist in San Francisco since 1991.

McEvoy Arts: As an artist in The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program at 1240 Minnesota Street, the building’s temporary closure has forced you to embrace new working accommodations. How have you coped with the isolation of social distancing and uncertainty?

AP: Isolation isn’t an issue for me—I’m a hermit by nature.  But the closure of the studios definitely affected my practice as I could no longer work large, dirty, or have access to shop tools. Projects I was working on were cancelled or postponed, so there was definitely a period of reorienting myself to what I could do from home from a desk. I had already been feeling a need to weed out distractions so I embraced the opportunity to find the space I needed by turning inward and developing badly needed meditation and writing habits that I hope to take with me to the other side of this pandemic.

Alison Pebworth's studio at The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program. Courtesy the artist
Alison Pebworth’s studio at The Minnesota Street Project Studio Program. Courtesy the artist

McEvoy Arts: Has the onset of the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement offered you new insights into preexisting bodies of work or motivation for new projects?  

AP: It takes time to process important events- the more profound the event the more useless artists feel to meet the profundity of it. However, both the pandemic and the problems of white supremacy and cultural segregation have given me stronger resolve to put more focus to building long term visionary projects and less importance to career achievements.

McEvoy Arts: How does work on view in In This Light engage with the notion of resilience? When, where, and how was your work produced? 

AP: Feeling inadequate to meet the big questions, I started looking at what I could do in and with people in my  own neighborhood. In order to keep my hand engaged in “making,” I started using my handmade walnut ink to make stains on aged paper I had been collecting and then using colored pencils to pull forms out of it. I had to let go of creating anything “good” and just think of these “drawings” as meditation exercises: metaphorical acts of pulling form out of chaos. I called them “spirit drawings,” since the more I thought, the worse they got. 

<i>We Are Earthseed</i>
Alison Pebworth’s installation We Are Earthseed on view in In This Light.

Over the past year, I have been challenging myself to create installations in 24 hours using the many materials accumulated in my studio space at 1240 Minnesota Street. These exercises helped me find connections between seemingly disparate ideas. While sheltering in place, I occasionally helped Andrew McKinley (the founder of Adobe books) sort through three huge warehouses of books, and in the process salvaged old books and collected random passages. When the call for work went out for In This Light, I initially didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute. But then a narrative started to emerge between the passages I was collecting, and the ephemerality of the old books and paper I was using, and everything clicked: I can do this! I added selections from handwritten cursive letters I had been collecting as a third paper element, and over 24 hours in the exhibition space, I channelled personal and collective anxieties over the past few months into this installation. Wire and paint salvaged from the MSP studios became the connecting element.

McEvoy Arts: Do you have any suggestions for artists wrestling with making work amidst collective anxiety and uncertainty? 

AP: Just do something every day. When you can’t think, feel, and let go of the pretense of making anything good. The act is more important than the outcome.

McEvoy Arts: What’s been most striking to you about the impact this moment is having on the making, presentation, and consumption of culture? What are your hopes for the future? 

AP: I don’t take it lightly that it was a privilege to even be in this show. My hope is that the forced pause that the pandemic brought has a lasting effect on our priorities and that we never return to what we previously thought was “normal.” 

McEvoy Arts: What is the responsibility of the artist in times like these? Has your sense of the role of art in society shifted? 

AP: The only responsibility I see is to keep making something out of nothing and facing the unknown whether you’ve been granted the permission, space or resources to do so or not. I’m learning to let go of wondering what my role as an artist is and trust that the small actions and I make  in my immediate world will prepare me for the visionary role I aspire to, should it arrive.

McEvoy Arts: Lastly, is there a piece of art, literature, film, or music that has been a comforting touchstone for you through the pandemic? 

AP: A phrase from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the SowerWe are Earthseed. The life which perceives itself. Changing.”—inspired the title of my installation for In This Light and ties together the found passages in the installation with the “spirit drawings,“ which feel like primordial earth seeds to me. Though my interest in Butler and her writing pre-dates the pandemic, her vision of Afro-Futurism feels particularly relevant in these uncertain times that our salvation lies in our ability to embrace change.


Alison Pebworth is a San Francisco-based artist who engages painting, installation, and social interaction in her work. She has exhibited at Southern Exposure, San Francisco; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; the Oakland Museum of California; the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and the New Children’s Museum, San Diego. She is the recipient of awards from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The Center for Cultural Innovation, and The San Francisco Arts Commission. She has held residencies at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; Recology, San Francisco; Ucross Foundation, Wyoming; and Space, British Columbia.

McEvoy Arts Picks: Ala Ebtekar

Artist Ala Ebtekar revisits details of his photographic work Thirty-six Views of the Moon (2019) for the latest installment of McEvoy Arts Picks.

McEvoy Arts Picks brings you a curated selection of what to listen to, read, watch, and do while at home, selected by our staff and networks of artists, curators, and partners. For more at-home activities with McEvoy Arts, click here.

In May, McEvoy Arts invited Bay Area-based artist Ala Ebtekar as one of several artists and curators asked to share their cultural touchstones during the pandemic for the McEvoy Arts Picks series. Rather than offering a mixture of media and culture available at large, the artist returned to specific texts and book pages included in his artwork Thirty-six views of the Moon (2019), on display as part of McEvoy Arts’ exhibition What is an edition, anyway? Mixing poetry, critical theory, and literature, Ebtekar recontextualizes the resonant themes of this work to speak to questions of community, justice, and history in the zeitgeist today.

Ala Ebtekar, Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019, 59 individual cyanotypes on found book pages exposed to moonlight, dimensions variable. Spring 2019 edition. McEvoy Family Collection. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line. Photo: Henrik Kam

A Statement from the Artist
The Spring edition of Thirty-six Views of the Moon, a series in four seasons, produced on the occasion of McEvoy Arts’ exhibition, What is an edition, anyway?, marked both the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 9, the first Lunar Module test flight, and the momentous Apollo 11 Moon landing, as well as the Black Panther Party’s “United Front Against Fascism” conference that took place that same weekend [July 18-21, 1969] in Oakland, California.

Thirty-six Views of the Moon is a collection of night exposures, left from dusk till dawn and exposed by moonlight on book pages from texts referencing the moon and night sky spanning the last ten centuries. Working with photographic negatives of the Moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California and treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive, the pages are then exposed overnight by the UV-light emitted by the moon. The work takes its cue from a poem by Omar Khayyam that imagines us as the objects of the Moon’s omnipresent gaze and, in response, produces a vignette of windows on the Moon that abstract the typical celestial gaze, merging galaxy with ground to collapse space and time.


Drink wine and look at the moon
and think of all the civilizations
the moon has seen passing by

Omar Khayyam, eleventh-century mathematician, astronomer, and poet

The small man 
builds cages for everyone 
he knows,
While the sage, 
who has to duck his head 
when the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long 
For the 
Beautiful
Rowdy 
Prisoners.

Hafiz

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019
Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page*

*book: Divan-i Hafiz by Hafiz, self-published, 2001

The small man
builds cages for everyone
he knows,
While the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.

Hafiz

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019
Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Hafiz. 2001. Divan-i Hafiz. Self-published.

Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon—every thing belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these "men" who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother--a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom. (pg. 162)

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019
Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Morrison, Toni, Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987

Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon—every thing belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother–a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose–not to need permission for desire–well now, that was freedom. (pg. 162)

Toni Morrison

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019
Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

8th century Persian Poet Rudaki. Ghazals. Lithograph edition. Iran: 1876

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019. Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Text by 9th century Persian Poet Rudaki. Rudaki. 1876. Ghazals. Iran: Lithograph Edition.

I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land–every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike — all snored in the same language.

Malcolm X

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019
Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: X, Malcolm & Alex Haley. 1992. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Random House Publishing. From Chapter 18, “El Hajj Malik El Shabaz.”

Recreation

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.

Audre Lorde

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019
Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Lorde, Audre. 1970. Cables to Rage. London: Paul Breman Limited.

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019. Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Heinlein, Robert. 1950. The Man Who Sold the Moon. Chicago: Shasta Publishers.

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019. Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Burckhardt, Titus & Bulent Rauf. 2001. Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ‘Arabi. Fons Vitae.

The Lunar mansions according to Ibn ‘Arabi. The system is consciously relating creation itself with each Mansion embodying its own sound, related to the 28 sounds of spoken Arabic.

In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron released the song “Whitey on the Moon” from his album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. As a response to U.S. astronauts setting foot on the moon on July 21, 1969, Scott-Heron, whose poignant songs about personal loss and public failure would continue throughout his brilliant career, saw this national adventure as the epitome of hubris amid raging Black discontent and a brutal imperial war in Vietnam. He asked in song form, “A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey’s on the moon. . . . No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey’s on the moon. . . . Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?”

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019. Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Daulatzai, Sohail. Black Star, Crescent Moon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2012

Scott-Heron’s ironic yet biting commentary on white supremacy and national arrogance was emblematic of the larger criticisms of and challenges to U.S. power by Black activists domestically and Third World revolutionaries globally. In fact, though Scott-Heron’s critique of the moonwalk came a year after the event, cosmic forces almost seemed in order, for on that day of July 21, 1969, other monumental historical events were taking place as well. As the United States imagined possibility by looking to outer space while profoundly and criminally neglecting racial injustice and imperial power, Black radicals in the United States looked to not-so-faraway places, such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America, for hope and possibility. In fact, July 21, 1969, the very day that U.S. astronauts actually set foot on the moon, was also the first day of the landmark Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Algeria, where internationally recognized artists, writers, musicians, and revolutionaries from all over the African diaspora and the Third World gathered. And on that same twenty-first day of July 1969, thousands of miles from Algiers and many more miles from the moon, three thousand people gathered in Oakland, California, at the opening of the Black Panther Party conference “United against Fascism,” an assembly of activists who sought to forge an anti-imperialist front in the United States to challenge racist state violence both domestically and globally.

While the United States sought to conquer outer space and to expand its already broad dominion over the Americas, Africa, and Asia, U.S.-based Black activists, artists, writers, and others joined forces with like-minded radicals from throughout the Third World to challenge imperial power and to support national liberation struggles that the United States and Europe were hell-bent on destroying under the banner of the Cold War. Having just fought a successful but brutal anti-colonial war against the French that captured the hearts and minds of revolutionaries in both the Third World and the United States, Algeria became a flashpoint for revolutionary internationalism that connected Oakland to Algiers and Black peoples in the United States to the Third World. Chapter Two [pg. 45-46]

Thirty-six Views of the Moon (detail), 2019. Cyanotype exposed by moonlight on found book page. Book: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1916. Emerson’s Epigrams. London: George G Harrap.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these papers and leather boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us, — some of them, — and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to.


Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978) is a visual artist who works primarily in painting, drawing, photography, and installation between his native San Francisco Bay Area and Tehran, Iran. Born to Iranian activist/artist parents, he developed an interest in various notions of in-betweenness, which has led him to explore the juncture between history, myth, and culture. Ebtekar’s works are included in the collections of BAMPFA, Berkeley; Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions. He teaches in Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, where he leads the Art, Social Space, and Public Discourse Initiative.

Poem by Omar Khayyam (top). Book: Khayyam, Omar. 1946. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Translated by Edward FitzGerald. New York: Grossett & Dunlap.

McEvoy Arts Picks: Exploratorium Cinema Arts

The Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Department shares cross-disciplinary and inter-media recommendations for the latest installment of McEvoy Arts Picks.

McEvoy Arts Picks brings you a curated selection of what to listen to, read, watch, and do while at home, selected by our staff and networks of artists, curators, and partners. For more at-home activities with McEvoy Arts, click here.

This edition of McEvoy Arts Picks was finalized on May 21, 2020 before widespread protests against police brutality, systematic racism, and in defense of Black lives began. The Exploratorium Cinema Arts Department has approved the publication of these Picks with the acknowledgment that curators and institutions alike must continue to take responsibility for their roles in the amplification of artists’ voices.

In 2018, Kathleen Maguire and Samuel Sharkland co-curated the cross-disciplinary Screening Room program Take Only Memories, Leave Only Footprints in conjunction with No Time, an exhibition that explored human relationships to the natural world in the past, present, and future. Here, Maguire and Sharkland join with Liz Keim, their colleague at the Exploratorium Cinema Arts Program, to share recommendations for McEvoyArts Picks that explore how the presentation and experience of various mediums are influenced and transformed by the shelter-in-place vantage.


Cadavre Exquis from Physics Reimagined

“An exquisite corpse between scientists and creatives in time of confinement.” This visual epistolary was launched at the beginning of shelter-in-place as a rebuff to mandated distancing. Reminding us that connection and cross-collaboration is not only still possible, but also essential if we are to generate imaginative solutions when we don’t know what’s going to come next. 


https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBzcAuAFtEW/

“Remains to be Streamed” with Mark Toscano (@preservationinsanity)

The absence of communal cinema spaces, particularly those that are informal, community driven and delightfully chaotic, has been greatly felt. With his weekly Instagram live screenings, archivist and curator Mark Toscano crafts an experience that is comfortingly parallel to the real thing. Toscano’s living room becomes an inviting space from which he shares rare 16mm films and his deep knowledge of experimental cinema with eager viewers who flex their own erudition in the rolling comments.


You Must Remember This: Emergency Dispatch The 1918 Flu and the Movie Industry

Karina Longworth’s deep dives into classic Hollywood cinema are redolent of rich research, compelling social commentary and the right amount of gossip. In this recent dispatch about the 1918 Flu pandemic, a fascinating cinema-going history opens up a space to reflect on current circumstances and – as history tends toward repeating itself – an encouraging vision of a vibrant future.


The Sound We See: COVID Quarantine

Structured as a day with each hour captured in one minute by a different filmmaking team, this piece is the latest edition in Echo Park Film Center’s The Sound We See series. The series began in 2010 and is an ongoing international collaboration of community-made analog films celebrating contemporary urban (and not-so urban!) environments. This COVID edition is marked by its panopoly of diverse styles that, in their observation of how our worlds have become smaller, provide communal solace.


Otis at Monterey Pop

Captured by the forebears of cinema vérité at the beginning of the Summer of Love, this ecstatic performance of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” cuts through the decades with it’s ebullient grain. In this style, the filmmaker captures their surroundings as a live witness. So, we too, feel the soulful mourning of Otis Redding’s performance and experience the grief and anguish of an undefined loss. 


McEvoy Arts: What’s been most striking to you about the impact this moment is having on the making, presentation, and consumption of culture? How do you see it evolving in the weeks, months, and years to come?

Keim, Maguire, & Sharkland: Commonly, cinema is experienced alone and in the dark, with no tangible connection to other viewers. Yet, now that we are barred from gathering and audiences have scattered, the absence of those other viewers is painfully felt. Previously, the privilege of movement allowed audiences endless opportunities to move through manufactured arenas, venture out and take in cultural offerings for as long as they had the attention. This feeling of being short on time, but with endless horizons is now reversed. Now our space is limited and time feels to have slowed to an irrelevant pace; we are forced to intentionally schedule our engagements with culture as we yearn to find connection. Absent physical interaction, we are resensitized to culture and art as a conduit of shared experience, rather than a spectacle of consumption.

The modes and scales of culture are shifting to fit the time, as they will once more when this period is behind us. However, there will be no mistaking the earnest offerings and amateur efforts from all culture-makers from this era. Like the best experience of cinema, we now value anew the gift of the other and relish the feeling of being together, apart.


Liz Keim is the Director of Cinema Arts and Senior Curator at the Exploratorium. She founded the Cinema Arts Program and film collection in 1982, is published in Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theaters, a collection of literary essays on the city’s thriving cinema culture, and her film In the Red (co-directed by Karen Merchant) has screened internationally. On occasion Liz co-teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of San Francisco; she has served on many local film juries, participates in symposiums nationwide, and has curated cinema programs internationally.

Kathleen Maguire is a media arts programmer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Her work includes designing screenings for intergenerational audiences, working closely with artists to craft media-based performances, and curating media works for the Museum galleries. Recent projects include Light Play: Mechanical Entry Points, a multi-year engagement highlighting artists who explore light art through mechanical technologies and Field of View: Mapping Emerging Technologies, a series of temporal engagements examining cutting-edge use of immersive technologies in science and the arts. She was previously a part of the temporal programming group at the American Museum of Natural History and is a graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.

Samuel Sharkland is a Bay Area film exhibitor and event producer focused on audience experience through interactive performance and direct engagement. He graduated with a BA in media studies from the University of San Francisco and expanded his interest in performing arts through celebrating cult cinema with Peaches Christ Productions (2004 – 2018) and honing visitor engagement while co-operating the Red Vic Movie House (2008 – 2012). He has worked as a part of Cinema Arts at the Exploratorium since 2008, gaining a deep appreciation for experimental film forms and site-based screenings. He curates short film programs, outdoor screenings, and expanded cinema performances.

McEvoy Arts Picks: Alison O’Daniel

Visual artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel highlights Lonnie Halley, Pedro Costa, and more in the latest installment of McEvoy Arts Picks.

McEvoy Arts Picks brings you a curated selection of what to listen to, read, watch, and do while at home, selected by our staff and networks of artists, curators, and partners. For more at-home activities with McEvoy Arts, click here.

Three short films from Alison O’Daniel’s ever-expanding media project The Tuba Thieves (2013–) were guest curated by Tanya Zimbardo in conjunction with the 2019 exhibition What is an edition, anyway?. Since the exhibition, O’Daniel has joined the faculty of the California College of the Arts and received the 2019 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. In this edition of McEvoy Arts Picks, the visual artist and filmmaker shares movies and music she has enjoyed while sheltering in place as well as some reflections on the culture industry during COVID-19.


Speed
Jan de Bont, 1994

This 1994 movie is bringing me joy. Watching this group of unsuspecting bus riders go through so much trauma in one day feels sort of quaint right now during this global pandemic.  I love watching films that took place pre-cell phones – I find it very soothing to watch people be disconnected and therefore more connected, not documenting, just living their fantastical, high action, dramatic lives. Also, I’ve been thinking through strategies for keeping an audience completely engaged from the minute a film starts to the minute it ends and watching something so over the top helps me brainstorm strategies for my quiet, slow, arty films.


The Films of Pedro Costa

The cinematography and lighting is heartbreakingly beautiful. The hybrid approach of documentary and fiction in his films is beautifully composed. And all of the actors are so tender and brutal. I’m afraid of them, afraid for them, and I love them.


The Music of Lonnie Holly

A friend introduced me to his music last year and I’m in love. His music holds so many emotions. It calms me and breaks me at the same time and I need to listen to something that lets me feel the devastation and despair while also soothing me.


McEvoy Arts: What’s been most striking to you about the impact this moment is having on the making, presentation, and consumption of culture? How do you see it evolving in the weeks, months, and years to come?

Alison O’Daniel: I’ve had a somewhat side-eye skeptical view of the cultural response to fill everything up with video and media work. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve loved being able to watch some things that were previously inaccessible, but I’ve also questioned the impulse to fill a void or be entrepreneurial. I think it is time to pause and reflect. I realize, like many people, that stopping feels healthy and necessary and attuned to the devastation that is happening right now. We have a collective opportunity to hold capitalism to the fire and honor what many people are experiencing first hand and the rest of us know is coming closer everyday. I don’t buy into the collective complaints about boredom. Now is the time to explore the value of slowing and to restructure and reimagine our values and our lives. I don’t mean to sound soap-boxy, but I’m crossing my fingers for more reflection and less reflexive responses.


Alison O’Daniel is a visual artist and filmmaker working across sound, narrative, sculpture, installation and performance. Her work has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; and Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France. Her film, The Tuba Thieves, has received support from Ford Foundation JustFilms; Creative Capital; Sundance; IFP; Points North; Field of Vision; and Chicken and Egg. She is a recipient of the SFFILM Rainin Grant for Filmmakers with Disabilities, a 2019 Louis Comfort Tiffany award and has received grants from Art Matters; the Rema Hort Mann Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation; the California Community Foundation; and Franklin Furnace Fund. She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film and writing on O’Daniel’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; Artforum; The Los Angeles Times; BOMB; and ArtReview. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Rosa John Outlines Ambiguity as the Definition of Identity

Austrian filmmaker Rosa John muses on creating work from minimal elements, the idiosyncrasy of the camera, and the liberating power of ambiguity in our ongoing conversation series for McEvoy Arts at Home.

Guest curator and San Francisco Cinematheque director Steve Polta speaks each Wednesday with artists in the Screening Room exhibition certainty is becoming our nemesis, which was interrupted by McEvoy Arts’ temporary closure due to the coronavirus. The program is now available to view online in its entirety.

Steve Polta: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your current artistic concerns or projects? Where are you answering this Q&A from? 

Rosa John: I am a visual artist and filmmaker with a background in media studies, and I am based in Vienna, Austria. In my work I like to follow multiple paths, thematically and methodically. But my main project of the past few years has been a series of works concerning the idiosyncrasy of the camera. I’m interested in how the material and the visual co-depend. I am currently doing some interdisciplinary work on the materiality of the camera and the use of metaphoric language to grasp the logic of a camera. I am also working on finalizing my PhD project in which I am pursuing a media archaeological approach to the history of the camera. Specifically, I am investigating the history of the company Paillard Bolex and the Bolex H-16 camera and its implications on visual culture, particularly artists’ film.

SP: How does your film in this program relate to your ongoing practice or body of work?

RJ: The film Rote Linie (Red Line) incorporates elements like a performative and self-empowering way of filmmaking, the depiction of fragments of the human body, monothematic reduction, and perhaps also the visual balance of recognizable specifics and abstraction which are characteristic of my work. But it was not conceived as a conceptual addition to my body of work, it’s one in a variety of approaches or paths (as put above). Likewise, it’s not part of the previously mentioned project on the camera, but it does make use of camera-specific potentials. The film was shot on Super8, but I also work with 16mm or occasionally video. I love Super8, working with it is so flexible and playful and it opens up possibilities of very spontaneous filmmaking while still being film: a strip with tiny images on it. It is also a very simple film in the way that I worked with very basic means and by myself. I like to give myself that challenge to build something with minimal elements, things or people that are more or less already around.

Rosa John Rote Linie, 2015/2016, Super 8mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 3 min. Courtesy the artist

I think ambiguity is the only valid definition of existence or identity.

Rosa John

SP: As you know, certainty is becoming our nemesis is inspired by McEvoy Arts’ exhibition Orlando, itself inspired by Virginia’s Woolf’s 1928 novel and Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation starring Tilda Swinton. What, if any, is your prior relationship to the work of these artists?

RJ: I’ve encountered these artists and their work (particularly regarding Orlando) many years ago as an adolescent or young adult, and have been intrigued by all of them—but I never yet engaged with their body of work profoundly, like really delved into it, as I would definitely like to. All the more so I was very happy that you as a programmer saw a connection. Such incidents assure me to keep going even if one sometimes doesn’t know where a path leads to.

SP: The program explores themes of transformation, self-invention, and gender performance and suggests that ambiguity of identity can operate as an emotional survival strategy and act of defiance. Are these themes something you consider in your artistic process or as central to your work exhibited here?

RJ: I think ambiguity is the only valid definition of existence or identity. Every other sort of definition of the human identity just feels like cutting off air to breathe. Acceptance of ambiguity is just so liberating in so many regards of life. That’s my personal opinion or feeling or experience, and as such it probably plays into my work while not being explicitly about it. Just as I am a political person but don’t consider my work to be political art, or wouldn’t even insist to call it art, while I just want to make films, photographs, objects, arguments as a means of communication.

SP: In what way has your inclusion in this program (or in conjunction with the larger Orlando exhibition) impacted your view of the work itself?

RJ: To make a film or any work of art implies a lot of decisions and thoughts, some more explicable than others. In that regard I often argue with myself while I also think it is important for me to trust something beyond knowledge or understanding. A film or any work of art can and should open up different layers in different contexts. So I definitely reacted to the idea of body norms and transformation when making the film, but it came from a very personal place and the inclusion in the program shows me that it speaks to a larger frame of discourse. Also the gender aspect is intrinsic to the work, it’s not a coincidence that I used a lipliner for the body marking rather than any other sort of pen. But when I made that film I wasn’t even sure if I was ever going to show it to anybody. So I guess the inclusion in this particular program and exhibition also supports that approach of sharing. We might not be that different in our doubts and wishes after all.

Rosa John Rote Linie, 2015/2016, Super 8mm screened as digital video, color, silent, 3 min. Courtesy the artist

SP: How are you coping with the current public health crisis? How has it impacted your approach to art-making?

RJ: In the last weeks I’ve really felt a whole range of different sentiments, and then again there was not much time to give into these feelings as I am at home with a toddler and a preschool-aged kid during this lockdown, and they keep me occupied with the most ordinary things. And while my partner and I are splitting our efforts, it’s difficult to manage everyday tasks and also get work done. So far, I don’t think the current situation is impacting my personal approach to art-making, but it further challenges the circumstances that allow me to find the resources to make art. I do find comfort in a sort of general slow down and the questioning of values that is taking place, although I’m afraid it won’t have a lasting effect.

Besides that, experiencing art is a very sensual thing for me, and while all those current efforts in the digital realm are great, the situation only nourishes my need for haptic, site-specific, “odorant” encounters with art. 

SP: Lastly, what’s the last piece of art, media, or culture that exerted a profound impact on you?

RJ: I had several wonderful and informative experiences of art in the last few months (like retrospectives of Margaret Tait at the Austrian Filmmuseum, Maria Lassnig at Albertina, Constantin Brancusi at Bozar in Brussels). The most profound (and still ongoing) impact on me has come from the broad cultural discourse on climate change and ecological matters, which had developed so intently before the current public health crisis. It should prompt us to reevaluate ways of doing things that we have gotten so used to, to reevaluate what to wish for – and this concerns the art world just as much as everyone else.


You can watch Rosa John’s Rote Linie (Red Line) (2015/2016) here. For more from McEvoy Arts at Home, click here.

Rosa John

Rosa John is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria.

No Space for Self-Indulgence with Zackary Drucker

Interdisciplinary artist Zackary Drucker reflects on witnessing lineage and shifting consciousness through lyrical film-making in our ongoing conversation series for McEvoy Arts at Home.

Guest curator and San Francisco Cinematheque director Steve Polta speaks each Wednesday with artists in the Screening Room exhibition certainty is becoming our nemesis, which was interrupted by McEvoy Arts’ temporary closure due to the coronavirus. The program is now available to view online in its entirety.

Steve Polta: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your current artistic concerns or projects? Where are you answering this Q&A from? 

Zackary Drucker: I am safe and secure at home in Los Angeles and very grateful for the many blessings in my life. It’s Earth Day (April 22, 2020), my dad’s birthday, and the kind of beautiful spring day that Los Angeles is famous for. There are carnations and poppies blooming in my garden, and pomegranate blossoms on the trees. For years I’ve been bouncing around, feeling like I’m maintaining a home that I don’t spend any time in, and now I’ve only got time at home. I’m working full-time (remotely) on a television project. I’m also writing a text for a performance and creating photographs at home. 

SP: How does your film in this program relate to your ongoing practice or body of work?

ZD: Unison is the last film I made with Flawless Sabrina, which also includes many of my biological and chosen family. Different phases of it were filmed over several years. The film explores traveling through time to witness one’s lineage, speaking to our predecessors and successors, and pondering what it means for a lineage to end with a gender non-conforming body.

Working within limitations can be a tremendous gift, and this is one of those times when artists who are really committed to shifting our consciousness and shattering our social mores will shine.

Zackary Drucker
Zackary Drucker Unison, 2013–2017, HD digital video, color, sound, 8 min. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Zackary Drucker, Unison, 2013–2017, HD digital video, color, sound, 8 min. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

SP: As you know, certainty is becoming our nemesis is inspired by McEvoy Arts’ exhibition Orlando, itself inspired by Virginia’s Woolf’s 1928 novel and Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation starring Tilda Swinton. What, if any, is your prior relationship to the work of these artists?

ZD: I’m a huge fan of Tilda Swinton starting from the moment that I saw Orlando when it was released on video in 1993 or 1994. As a young person in Syracuse NY, the media that I was able to find at the local independent video store and library were a lifeline, and Orlando was one of the first trans characters I recall seeing. It was so magical to see a boy character inexplicably become a woman overnight (if it were only that easy). It inspired my imagination and informed who I am today.

SP: The program explores themes of transformation, self-invention, and gender performance and suggests that ambiguity of identity can operate as an emotional survival strategy and act of defiance. Are these themes something you consider in your artistic process or as central to your work exhibited here?

ZD: Yes, I’m always looking for survival strategies from elders. I hope to live a long life. We should be so lucky. I think that trans people’s mere existence is a multiplicitous form of defiance everyday, even in isolation.

Zackary Drucker Unison, 2013–2017, HD digital video, color, sound, 8 min. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

SP: In what way has your inclusion in this program (or in conjunction with the larger Orlando exhibition) impacted your view of the work itself?

ZD: Tilda Swinton, Aperture did an incredible job with Orlando—the Aperture edition and the exhibition. I’m thrilled that the exhibition has had a sustained life online where people can witness their brilliance.

SP: How are you coping with the current public health crisis? How has it impacted your approach to art-making?

ZD: I think the current health crisis deepens my commitment to human values. I think that it may change much of human behavior. There’s really no space for self-indulgence or narcissism in this time, and those are the values that our culture has been predicated on for many years. Working within limitations can be a tremendous gift, and this is one of those times when artists who are really committed to shifting our consciousness and shattering our social mores will shine. A lot of the bullshit will fall away. Few people will have time for petty, decorative or otherwise superfluous art.

SP: Lastly, what’s the last piece of art, media, or culture that exerted a profound impact on you?

ZD: This text message from Nao Bustamante on a neighborhood group thread today:


You can watch Zackary Drucker’s Unison (2013–2017) here. For more from McEvoy Arts at Home, click here.

Photo: Danielle Levitt

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This is Me, as well as a Producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning series Transparent.

McEvoy Arts Picks: Kevin Moore

Curator Kevin Moore shares some reading and watching recommendations from home in the latest installment of McEvoy Arts Picks.

McEvoy Arts Picks brings you a curated selection of what to listen to, read, watch, and do while at home, selected by our staff and networks of artists, curators, and partners. For more at-home activities with McEvoy Arts, click here.

In addition to helping build the McEvoy Family Collection and curating several exhibitions at McEvoy Arts, Kevin Moore is artistic director and curator of FotoFocus in Cincinnati, which plans to distribute the funds from its recently canceled 2020 edition as artist grants instead. In the latest installment of McEvoy Arts Picks, Moore shares some of his current cultural touchstones and thoughts on the health crisis’s impact on art from home in New York.


The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera and 1988 film by Philip Kaufman

The backdrop of an appallingly cruel political regime (the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) incites all kinds of struggles and conflicts in the lives of the main characters, yet the section I fixate on mostly is the final chapter, when Tomas and Tereza retreat to the country and find contentment outside the crushing political circumstances.


The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004

We must find some sort of pleasure in imagining the worst—or maybe it’s instructive and contributes to a sense of preparedness. The Jewish family’s vacation to Washington, amidst a fictionalized fascist insurgence, is harrowing and upsetting for its sense of immediate probability.


Babylon Berlin
Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten, 2017–present

This great German television series is like a primer for today’s political struggles, showing a previous generation of extremist factions on both the Left and the Right, spurred on by greedy capitalists and ex-military egos, duking it out in the streets, requiring the police and the journalists to try to maintain a reasonable, central order. The other great thing about the show—besides the acting, the costumes, the musical numbers—is the reminder of the abject suffering, caused by war, poverty, and all kinds of social discrimination people endured between the World Wars. We’ve no idea today.


The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard
New York: Penguin Random House, 2018

I’ve been rereading parts of this novella Nion [McEvoy] recommended a couple of years ago. It’s an improbably light-hearted, almost comical treatment of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in 1938, revealing both the corporate-industrialist backing and charismatic buffoonery that almost destroyed democracy that other time, not so long ago. It pairs nicely with Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth-Century, if you want a “lite” weekend crash course in fascist history.


Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler edited with text by Tom Eccles, Maja Hoffmann, Beatrix Ruf
Zürich: JRP|Ringier, 2016

Because I’m working on a show with Tony for 2022. This richly mysterious catalog, produced by the LUMA Foundation, features Tony’s vast and eccentric collection of vernacular photographs, including ephemera depicting the occult, fake mediums, spirits, UFOs, and other forms of irrational, pseudo-scientific (ultimately anti-scientific) imagery. We’re both struggling at the moment with how to position and talk about such work in an era of denigrated science and dangerous “mind control” of various kinds.


McEvoy Arts: What’s been most striking to you about the impact this moment is having on the making, presentation, and consumption of culture? How do you see it evolving in the weeks, months, and years to come?

Kevin Moore: After the mounting terror and frenzy of the past few years, it is in some ways a welcome relief to have just stopped everything. The sensation, at its most pleasurable, is a feeling of reconnection to self and earth, like one experiences during a relaxing vacation. Yet at its most uncomfortable, it’s an awareness of suspended animation, of being tossed up in the air and waiting to fall to earth. So I’ve been having some admittedly fractured and dark experiences with books and films, revisiting passages from old favorites and relying heavily on the example of history to orient myself in this new—though not so new—historical context.


Kevin Moore is a writer and curator based in New York. In addition to helping build the McEvoy Family Collection, he is the Artistic Director and Curator of FotoFocus, Cincinnati. Moore has curated exhibitions at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, including la mère la mer and True Blue Mirror: Ellen Berkenblit and Sarah Braman. Moore has produced numerous museum exhibitions and accompanying catalogs, most recently, Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (Taft Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2018), Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks (Contemporary Arts Center/Damiani, 2018), and “Emulsion Society,” in Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern (Museum of Modern Art, 2019).

Antoinette Zwirchmayr on Balancing Irritation and Accommodation

Austrian filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr reflects on the resourceful nature of artists in our ongoing conversation series for McEvoy Arts at Home.

Guest curator and San Francisco Cinematheque director Steve Polta speaks each Wednesday with artists in the Screening Room exhibition certainty is becoming our nemesis, which was interrupted by McEvoy Arts’ temporary closure due to the coronavirus. The program is now available to view online in its entirety.

Steve Polta: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your current artistic concerns or projects? Where are you answering this Q&A from?

Antoinette Zwirchmayr: I have been isolated for about five weeks in the country, in a wine region in Austria, from which I can constantly observe Spring developing. My family has a house here, which we have been renovating for eleven years and is still far from finished. It is a versatile place. We have an outdoor kitchen, weeping willows and a fireplace. There is always something to do here. In the last few weeks I had the idea to write a script just for this house: the house as a starting point for a story.

SP: How does your film in this program relate to your ongoing practice or body of work?

AZ: Jean Luc Nancy was my first commissioned work. An Austrian museum and a festival gave me a complex two-page concept for an exhibition, some money and very little time. I was kind of irritated by this approach, and in the end they didn’t even integrate the film into the exhibition. I was under a lot of pressure and I started thinking about the outside all the time. The question “will they like the film?” was always floating in the room. This thought is deadly for the artistic process. You should always think the opposite: “Let’s hope they don’t like it!” Unfortunately, we all become so accommodating, we all want our work to be loved. But to return to the film, I have to say that I have become very fond of it. And I would never have made it, if the circumstances hadn’t been the way they were. So, in hindsight, I am grateful for everything.

Life as an artist is so uncertain and unstable. Every day, every year is different. You always have to keep busy and drive yourself, because nobody else does. You’re never used to a lot of money or other conveniences and in times like these, that can be an advantage.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr

SP: As you know, certainty is becoming our nemesis is inspired by McEvoy Arts’ exhibition Orlando, itself inspired by Virginia’s Woolf’s 1928 novel and Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation starring Tilda Swinton. What, if any, is your prior relationship to the work of these artists?

AZ: The invitation to this program was special in the sense that I have been working for several years with the writer Angelika Reitzer on a script for a feature film called I am my hideaway. We wrote the screenplay for Tilda Swinton from the very beginning. Of course, we know that she will never play the role, but she helps us imagine the main character. It is a feature film script for a sci-fi movie. It’s very uncertain if this film will ever be realized.

There is another temporal connection to the exhibition. A few months ago, the FIRST full-length work by a female composer was performed at the Vienna State Opera. The piece was Orlando. I was very disappointed that I could not see it. There were conspicuously few performances, and the tickets were expensive. It was a great spectacle and there was an exceptionally large media response. The conservative opera audience reacted with outrage, of course. The fact that it took so long for a woman to get such a commission is revealing—it shows, once again, how far we are from an equal society.

SP: How are you coping with the current public health crisis? How has it impacted your approach to art-making?

AZ: The current situation is particularly challenging for all of us. Nevertheless, as an artist one is equipped with certain survival strategies. Life as an artist is so uncertain and unstable. Every day, every year is different. You always have to keep busy and drive yourself, because nobody else does. You’re never used to a lot of money or other conveniences and in times like these, that can be an advantage.

SP: Lastly, what’s the last piece of art, media, or culture that exerted a profound impact on you?

AZ: Probably the most impressive pieces I saw last year were Bakchen, a theatre play directed by Ulrich Rasche and two dance pieces by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. And there was a performance by Meg Stuart. Terrific! These are rare moments when you are in the theatre and wish it should never end. 

This crisis has shown me personally very clearly how important art is. I go to the theatre and cinema a lot. Often, I just took it for granted.


You can watch Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s Jean Luc Nancy (2015) here. For more from McEvoy Arts at Home, click here.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr

Antoinette Zwirchmayr was born in 1989 in Salzburg, Austria and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her works have been featured internationally at festivals such as Berlinale and The Hong Kong International Film Festival.