Category: Press Release

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts Final Exhibition

June 13, 2023, San Francisco, CA — McEvoy Foundation for the Arts announces What are words worth? (June 16 – September 2, 2023), an exhibition of the expansive holdings of artworks in the McEvoy Family Collection that engage language, literature, and typography. The exhibition is joined by THESE ARE THE RULES, a program of film/video shorts on power and voice. Public events include a special 35 mm screening of Memento at the Roxie Theater in July and conversations in the gallery in August with writers Dodie Bellamy and Connie Zheng. What are words worth? is McEvoy Arts’ closing program and the last of over a dozen innovative exhibitions presented since its founding in 2017.

The exhibition’s title, What are words worth?, is borrowed from the Tom Tom Club’s 1981 song “Wordy Rappinghood” that references the poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Susan Miller, Executive Director at McEvoy Arts, states “The play on words of this lyric, and the song’s study of words as both form and subject, are reflective of the multi-layered way in which language is represented in this exhibition. The playful nod to Wordsworth sets up a dialogue across the artworks about poetry and its ability to stimulate imagination and creative thinking.”

Wordsworth, an iconic English Romantic, said poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Centuries later, LET IT COME LET IT GO (2017), by poet and visual artist John Giorno, channels a connection between Buddhism and poetry, both of which Giorno describes as best practiced “by developing the ability to see what arises in one’s mind.”

“Words exist as tangible sensory experiences,” notes Amanda Nudelman, Exhibitions and Public Programs Curator at McEvoy Arts, “but their meaning lives in our minds. Many of the works in the exhibition play in the blurry space between where words are seen as visual symbols and understood by the concepts they represent.”

Displaying a rich survey of the text-based work within the McEvoy Family Collection, What are words worth? includes modern and contemporary photographs, paintings, and prints. Featured within the exhibition is an expanded presentation of works by one of the collection’s quintessential artists Natalie Czech (b. 1976), a German photographer known for her visual and textual images that cleverly locate poems in everyday objects such as shopping bags, newspapers, and vinyl album covers. Among the works on view by Czech, A poet’s question by Allen Ginsberg 2 (2019) samples a passage from the Beat poet’s 1963 “I Beg of You to Come Back & Be Cheerful” and then recontextualizes the text using an Op Art print and graphite pencils into a new image that transposes the triangular form of the Ginsberg poem.

Mitchell Anderson’s 2017 oversized Kennedy campaign button is a painting that calls forth the evocative power of an iconic graphic. Ilse Bing’s Scandale (1947) and Lee Friedlander’s New Orleans (1975) are examples of a tradition in street photography that targets the advertising, signs, and text in the world around us.

Ed Ruscha’s pastel drawing, Idea (1976), muses on the word, its meaning, the letters it comprises, and the object the word itself represents. Speechless (2017), by Lorna Simpson, shows an image of a model’s face crowned with a hairstyle made of a collage of text in a curious statement about voice and femininity. 

Screening Room

THESE ARE THE RULES

Guest curated by film and video curator and scholar Steve Seid, THESE ARE THE RULES

includes works by ten Bay Area video artists on language and voice as both agents of control and resistance. Screened daily on the hour in McEvoy Arts’ Screening Room, artists include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jeanne C. Finley, Doug Hall, Tony Labat, and Valerie Soe, among others.

The exhibition and Screening Room program are free to the public. Visit mcevoyarts.org for details and gallery hours.

Events

Film Screening
Memento (2000)
In 35 mm
Wednesday, July 12, 2023, 6:40 pm
Roxie Theater – 3117 16^th Street, San Francisco
Tickets: $14 general, $9 under 12 and 65+

Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) is a neo-noir feature film about a man with memory loss seeking vengeance upon the person who murdered his wife. Adapted by Nolan from his brother Jonathan’s short story “Memento Mori”, the film unfolds along two reverse-engineered narrative tracks: one shot in black-and-white and proceeding in chronological order, the other shot in color and moving backwards in time. In each, the widower, Leonard Shelby, obsessively searches for clues about the wanted man, a certain “John G.,” defying his amnesia by writing new pieces of information on polaroid photos and even tattooing his own body.  

Starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Joe Pantoliano, Memento was nominated in 2002 for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing. Revisit the Nolan classic before his new epic Oppenheimer is released on July 21! 

Memento is a co-presentation of McEvoy Arts and the Roxie Theater on the occasion of What are words worth? (June 16 – September 2, 2023) at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.

Gallery Sessions

Dodie Bellamy
Saturday, August 12, 3pm

Connie Zheng
Saturday, August 26, 3pm

No reservations required. Admission is free.

Writers Dodie Bellamy and Connie Zheng join McEvoy Arts’ curator Amanda Nudelman for two Gallery Sessions that will address language and image in the exhibition What are words worth?.  Gallery Sessions bring artists, curators, writers, and thinkers into brief and informal conversations with McEvoy Arts’ staff on topics and ideas in the current exhibition. Admission is free.

Later this fall, The Back Room at Small Press Traffic will publish texts by Bellamy and Zheng, commissioned in partnership with McEvoy Arts and in conversation with the exhibition. The Gallery Sessions and commissioned essays are a co-production of McEvoy Arts and The Back Room at Small Press Traffic on the occasion of What are words worth?.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist based in San Francisco. Her books and chapbooks specialize in genre-bending work that focuses on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts both high and low, and all things queer. In October 2021, Semiotext(e) published a new collection of Bellamy’s essays, Bee Reaved, and a new edition of her 1998 vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. Bellamy currently teaches at California College of the Arts.

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker based out of Oakland. Her works investigate relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Zheng’s projects have been exhibited and screened at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, California; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Framer Framed, Netherlands; and Salt Beyoğlu, Turkey. SFMOMA’s Open Space, Errant Journal, and the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change have published her writing. She is a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Image Credit:  Ed Ruscha, Idea, 1976. Pastel on paper. McEvoy Family Collection. © Ed Ruscha

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McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes present in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, McEvoy Arts creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, McEvoy Arts embodies a far-reaching potential of the McEvoy Family Collection’s to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. McEvoy Arts invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. These collaborations produce exhibitions in the McEvoy Arts gallery, film and video programs in the Screening Room, as well as many film, music, literary, and performing arts events each year. Exhibitions are free and open to the public. For more information, visit mcevoyarts.org.

March 17, 2023, San Francisco, CA – McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (McEvoy Arts) announced today it will be closing following the summer exhibition, What are words worth?, on view June 16 – September 2, 2023.

McEvoy Arts was launched in 2017 to share artworks from the McEvoy Family Collection with the public and encourage visitors to explore contemporary art and culture. Over the past five years, McEvoy Arts has presented dozens of free exhibitions, films, and events built from the themes found in the collection.

Since its inception, McEvoy Arts has been the premiere venue for numerous original exhibitions, beginning with la mère la mer (2017), a whimsical survey that accentuated connections across works about mothers and the sea. Other notable programs include Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour (2020-21), a powerful multimedia exhibition on the life of Frederick Douglass; Orlando (2019), an exhibition of photographs curated by actress Tilda Swinton that explored themes of identity central to Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name; and Ragnar Kjartansson: Scenes from Western Culture (2018), a multiscreen video exhibition from the collection to which was added a significant painting by French Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Fortune Teller (c. 1710), made possible through a loan from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

“It’s been a privilege to have a platform to accomplish what we set out to do,” stated Jason Fish, Board President, McEvoy Arts. “We created a welcoming space for the celebration of art and culture and promoted the value of access to the arts for all.”

McEvoy Arts has invited regional, national, and international artists and curators to create new programming to accompany the collection holdings. Guest video curator Steve Seid organized the screening of The Dilexi Series, the 1960s groundbreaking television experiment that allowed filmmakers and performers to broadcast their work to the public. Musicians and composers Theresa Wong and Danny Clay were commissioned to author an original score for Memories to Light, a film collage of Asian American life co-produced by the Center for Asian American Media and McEvoy Arts. Artists Sadie Barnette, Angela Hennessy, Clare Rojas, and Zio Ziegler created new works for the McEvoy Arts anniversary exhibition, Color Code. These and other guests have brought new perspectives to amplify exhibition themes.

Additionally, McEvoy Arts has modeled collaborative partnerships by co-producing many events and exhibitions with peer institutions. Partners have included Aperture, Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, CounterPulse, the Exploratorium, Film Quarterly, Kronos Performing Arts Association, Minnesota Street Project, Noise Pop, Now Hunters Point, The Roxie Theater, San Francisco Cinematheque, the San Francisco Public Library, Tiny Dance Film Festival, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the Watsonville Film Festival, among other leading public-serving institutions.

Executive Director Susan Miller states, “The programming at McEvoy Arts reflects the far-reaching vision of founder Nion McEvoy. Exhibitions and events leverage the ideas found in the rich holdings of the art collection he built. The imaginative offerings have touched a diverse and curious public.”

The McEvoy family furnished this statement: “It has been exhilarating to have an art space located within the dynamic gallery scene at Minnesota Street Project. Under Susan Miller’s direction, staff curators and guest curators have created innovative shows with lasting impact. The closing of the space and the foundation represents a pragmatic business decision after more than five years of providing philanthropic support. Although we will no longer have the physical space for curated shows, the art collection will remain with the McEvoy family and works from it will travel, as before, to select exhibitions.”

Rituals of Devotion (March 10 – May 27, 2023) celebrates profound acts of spirituality and love. The assembly of sculpture, painting, and photography, culled from the McEvoy Family Collection and elsewhere, illustrates the bridges that bond us to the otherworldly realm and each other. What are words worth? (June 16 – September 2, 2023) brings into view the collection’s expansive holdings of artworks about text, language, journalism, literature, and poetry.

San Francisco, CA. February 14, 2023 – McEvoy Foundation for the Arts announces the short film program and feature-length film screenings for Rituals of Devotion (March 10–May 27, 2023), its spring exhibition about the power of ritual to connect us to spiritual and otherworldly realms. Examples from the McEvoy Family Collection are joined by artworks in a range of mediums to construct a playful environment for thoughtful contemplation of the unknown. Rituals of Devotion is accompanied by We Begin Again, an original program of short films that screens daily in the McEvoy Arts’ Screening Room. Special screenings of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and the gospel documentary Say Amen, Somebody expand on the gallery exhibition’s spirited themes.

EXHIBITION
Rituals of Devotion

Organized from the McEvoy Family Collection and other contributions, Rituals of Devotion considers the many ways that artworks can be sites of ritual, connecting us to spiritual, otherworldly, and earthly realms. Performing as stand-ins for dreams, desires, or enlightenment, the assembled works are touchstones that trigger the imagination and produce connection to histories, cultures, and the unknown. Examples include works that draw inspiration from a variety of religious traditions and cultural belief systems, spiritual practices such as tarot, and imagined or extraterrestrial environments. The exhibition also explores more earthly considerations with its attention to human relationships that are reified and honored in portraiture.

“Rituals are most often intentional, affirming undertakings in a religious, spiritual, or social context, and they also develop organically in everyday life,” said Amanda Nudelman, McEvoy Arts exhibitions and public programs curator. “I’m interested in how returning to something again and again with purpose can be a transformative act that allows for deeper and more meaningful connection with the ideas, beliefs, and people that are important to us.”

Traditional religious imagery is used in numerous works to examine ritual in organized religion.Visions of and commentary on Christian traditions are seen in Edvard Munch’s Madonna (1895) and Mary Carlson’sdiminutive ceramic figures, with both examples upending and enlivening canonical visual narratives. Sahana Ramakrishnan’s Mother, Flower, Secret of the Flesh (2022) adapts elements of Indian miniature painting to reimagine Hinduism’s celebrated mother-son relationship between Yashoda and Krishna.

Alternative spiritual practices are seen in Mary Frey’s porcelain sculpture of a blood-red Kool-Aid Man, with a pentagram-emblazoned spoon, while Mamma Andersson’s striking and elusive painting The Song I Sang (2018) gestures to palmistry or a rite of anointment. Karla Knight and Suzanne Treister engage symbols of spirituality that are familiar in form, such as pictographs and tarot cards, and transform them to surface what often lies hidden.

Earthly ideas of devotion are expressed in Nan Goldin and Zanele Muholi’s chronicles of moments of tenderness between family, lovers, and friends. Dario Robleto traces a lineage of empathetic love in Melancholy Matters Because of You (2010), a sculpture that transforms his family’s shared fondness for vinyl records into a haunting intergenerational love letter cast in the form of skeletal hands. Sky Hopinka’s photographs of domestic and natural landscapes, bounded by text etched along their borders, create sites of exaltation and connection to the Heroka spirits who guide matters of life and death.

SCREENING ROOM
We Begin Again

We Begin Again is a program of short films that extends the gallery exhibition’s interest in the transformative power of loving relationships. The featured filmmakers weave past, present, and future together around a range of identity-affirming acts, engaging with archival materials and cataloguing enduring mythologies. The one-hour program screens each day in the McEvoy Arts Screening Room, at the top of the hour.

Partial list of films (in alphabetical order by filmmaker’s last name):

Bruce Conner, EASTER MORNING, 1966/2008
Cheryl Dunye, An Untitled Portrait, 1993
Zackary Drucker, At Least You Know You Exist, 2011 
Adrian Garcia Gomez, Mikveh, 2016
Kia LaBeija, Goodnight, Kia, 2017
Caroline Monnet, Mobilize, 2015
Alicia Smith, Teomama, 2018

FEATURE FILM SCREENINGS

Rituals of Devotion includes screenings of two feature-length films that explore and celebrate the realm of the spirit. Say Amen, Somebody (1982), a joyous American music documentary about some of the most prominent figures in the gospel world, and Spirited Away (2001), a beloved masterpiece of Japanese animation, present rousing transitions from the earthly plane to spaces beyond.

Spirited Away
Wednesday, April 12, 6:45pm
Roxie Theater– 3117 16th Street, San Francisco
Tickets: $9–$14 (roxie.com)

Hayao Miyazaki’s acclaimed masterpiece highlights the exhibition’s themes of transformation through labors of love. Wandering through an abandoned carnival site, 10-year-old Chichiro is separated from her parents and stumbles into a dreamlike spirit world, where she is put to work in a bathhouse for the gods. The film traverses the thin veil between earthly and spirit worlds in a deeply imaginative exploration of the power of courage and friendship in the face of the unknown.

Say Amen, Somebody
Wednesday, May 17, 7pm
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts – 1150 25th Street, Building B, San Francisco
Tickets: $7–$10 (mcevoyarts.org)

One of the most acclaimed music documentaries of all time is a joyous, funny, and deeply emotional ode to gospel music. Featuring the father of gospel, Thomas A. Dorsey; its matron, Willie Mae Ford Smith; and earth-shaking performances by the Barrett Sisters and the O’Neal Twins, Say Amen, Somebody extends the exhibition’s themes of faith, loving communal gatherings, and intergenerational mentorship. 
 

CREDITS
Rituals of Devotion is curated by Amanda Nudelman, McEvoy Arts exhibitions and public program curator. We Begin Again is curated by Amanda Nudelman and Dylan Sherman, McEvoy Arts communications coordinator and curatorial assistant.

Special thanks to the Roxie Theater, co-presenter of Spirited Away.

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McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes present in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, McEvoy Arts creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, McEvoy Arts embodies a far-reaching vision of the McEvoy Family Collection’s potential to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. McEvoy Arts invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. Each year, these collaborations produce exhibitions in the McEvoy Arts gallery, film screenings and exhibitions, as well as music, literary, and performing arts events each year.

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts is located at 1150 25th Street, Building B, San Francisco, CA 94107 and is open to the public Wednesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm. Exhibitions are free and open to the public. For more information, visit mcevoyarts.org.

High-resolution images and additional materials are available by request

Media Contacts:

Wendy Norris, Norris Communications
wendy@norriscommunications.biz
415.307.3853

Bill Proctor, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
bproctor@mcevoyarts.org or press@mcevoyarts.org
415.549.7689

Experimental Musical Performance and In-Depth Conversation Both Focus on Transformation of the Human Body to Achieve Greater Balance Our Environment

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, June 15, 2022 — McEvoy Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce two in-person live events to be presented in conjunction with its current exhibition MYR (May 27 – August 27, 2022). These events thoughtfully supplement the artworks on view in a variety of media that creatively explore deep time, natural stewardship, and human existence. On August 6, electronic musicians Red Culebra will present a newly commissioned expansion of their ongoing multimedia performance Let Us Speak Frog. On August 27, exhibition artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and writer Annalee Newitz will join us to discuss their shared interest in biotechnology as a place for important conversations about human futures, in art, fiction, and reality.

Guest curator Elizabeth Thomas notes, “Much like artworks in the gallery exhibition, Red Culebra’s performance posits an empathetic relationship to the natural world as a means for evolving together and repairing the damages humanity has wrought, bringing us to this point of climate emergency. Grounded in real science, Heather and Annalee both imagine futures that see biotechnology as both a way to augment the human body, and will offer an expanded discussion of the increasingly blurring lines between the natural and the unnatural, ethically, philosophically, and in practice.”

Visit mcevoyarts.org for tickets and information. At this time, face coverings are required to be worn at all times while inside the McEvoy Arts galleries for visitors two and older, regardless of vaccination status. Updates to health and safety policies can be found at mcevoyarts.org/visit.

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Let Us Speak Frog
Red Culebra
Saturday, August 6 • 7:00pm

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, 1150 25th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
$15 general admission / $12 students and seniors: https://www.mcevoyarts.org/event/red-culebra-let-us-speak-frog/

Let Us Speak Frog is an experimental music and multi-media performance. Responding to the Holocene extinction—the ongoing extinction event caused by human activity—electronic synthesizer duo Red Culebra uses generative composition to speak non-human languages and explore imagined ecologies. At this event, Red Culebra will premiere their two-hour durational performance during which time audiences will witness two musicians transform themselves, via sound, into flying snakes. As snakes, they will visit and attempt to apologize to frogs throughout the world. In addition, Red Culebra will collaborate with animator Christoph Steger and choreographer Gerald Casel to expand the telling of their story with interactive animated projection and live dance choreography.

Red Culebra is an electronic synthesizer duo and collaboration of Bay Area electronic musicians and performance artists gal*in_dog (aka Guillermo Galindo) and Cristóbal Martínez. Red Culebra’s performance art includes sound invocations, moving images, and movement by performers. Inspired by their complicated Post-Mexican backgrounds, Galindo and Martinez create and perform rituals based on cycles of repetition and uniformity. The sonic, graphic, and repetitive nature of their work requires both endurance and determination from their audiences, while denying participating publics the opportunity to fetishize ceremony.  Founded in San Francisco, Red Culebra has performed throughout the Bay Area at venues including the San Francisco Art Institute, The Lab, BAMPFA, and Southern Exposure.

In Conversation: Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Annalee Newitz
Saturday, August 27 • 3:00pm

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, 1150 25th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
Free with registration: https://www.mcevoyarts.org/event/heather-dewey-hagborg-annalee-newitz/

Join artist and biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg and science writer Annalee Newitz for a lively conversation exploring the generative intersection of art and science. Dewey-Haborg’s 2019 installation Lovesick, on view in MYR, was made in collaboration with research scientists and depicts a custom retrovirus that increases production of oxytocin (the “love hormone”) in the human body. Newitz explores both science fiction and nonfiction in their award-winning articles, books, and podcasts. Together, the two will discuss the ethics of approaching science through the lens of art and other “unscientific” methods. This conversation is co-presented with the Exploratorium, where Dewey-Hagborg is Artist-in-Residence.

Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Dewey-Hagborg has shown work internationally at venues including SFMoMA, the World Economic Forum, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Walker Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is held in public collections at the Centre Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others, and has been widely discussed in outlets such as the New York Times and Artforum. Dewey-Hagborg is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at NYU Abu Dhabi and an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium. She holds a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, and the novels The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. Newitz has also published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, and The Atlantic, among others, and is the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. They hold a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

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MYR is a multimedia art exhibition exploring deep time, natural stewardship, and human existence. The artists on view bring science and speculation together to explore how deeper visions of space and time relate to contemporary existential anxieties, particularly the imminent climate emergency. Taking its title from the unit of measurement equaling one million years used in earth sciences and astronomy, MYR presents diverse creative approaches to depicting the intersection of time, space, and life. The result thoughtfully de-centers humanity and instead places Earth as the protagonist of its story. For more information, visit mcevoyarts.org.

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McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes present in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, McEvoy Arts creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, McEvoy Arts embodies a far-reaching vision of the McEvoy Family Collection’s potential to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. McEvoy Arts invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. Each year, these collaborations produce exhibitions in the Foundation’s gallery, new media programs in the Screening Room, as well as many film, music, literary, and performing arts events each year. Exhibitions are free and open to the public. For more health, safety, and admissions information, please visit mcevoyarts.org/visit.

Image credits: Red Culebra photos courtesy of the artists, Heather Dewey-Hagborg photo by Ana Brigada, Annalee Newitz photo by Sarah Deragon.

Opening Reception
Saturday, June 4, 5–7pm

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce the upcoming spring opening of MYR, an exhibition of multi-media sensorial artworks exploring the impact of humans on the planet, nature, and climate change. Featuring an international selection of artists, the exhibition considers the concept of deep time in relation to both past and future human hazards, anxieties, and potential survival through a range of creative viewpoints informed by science and technology.

Guest curated by Elizabeth Thomas, MYR borrows its title from the commonly used abbreviation in earth sciences and astrology for a unit of measurement equaling a million years. Within that context, the exhibition draws particular focus on the Anthropocene epoch, the period in which human industrialized activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Through immersive works, moving images, and animated and interactive sculpture, scientific fact and speculative fiction compel consideration of such theories and concepts including augmentation of human emotions through biological intervention, future study of humanity’s physical remains, and the perception of non-linear time.

Thomas notes, “The vastness of geologic time stretching backwards remains an abstract truth, while its reach into the future is increasingly apocalyptic as humans confront the climate crisis. To imagine the millions of years behind us, we must also imagine the millions that might pass after us, on earth and throughout the universe. MYR features artists who manifest the spectrum of deep time, both past and future, proving art’s power to contend with the biggest of ideas and the most abstract states.”

The artists featured in MYR represent several distinct approaches to the study of time, space, and life. A floating sculpture by Tomás Saraceno offers the possibility of ecological harmony through spatial unification. Speculative landscapes by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Candice Lin depict scenes of abundant flora and fauna—both on and beyond Earth—that might thrive in the absence of human dominance over the environment. Heather Dewey-Hagborg utilizes video and sculpture to explore the viability of biological intervention to alter and augment human feelings and engender a version of utopia.

Amy Balkin’s ongoing archival project collects what “will have been” from places around the globe that may literally disappear due to forces of climate change, including sea level rise, erosion, desertification, and glacial melt. Whereas works by Katie Paterson consider how the abstract, non-linear essence of time can be perceived and portrayed through text and kinetic sculpture. MYR includes a program of films, running concurrently in the Screening Room, that further explore the exhibition’s themes.

“The breadth and depth of the McEvoy Family Collection,” notes McEvoy Arts executive director Susan Miller, “provides the ability to articulate upon contemporary global conversations within the visual arts and create opportunities to facilitate timely discussions and moments of personal contemplation around issues of climate change, social justice, and even speculative futures, as well as art history, language, pop-culture, and politics.”

Complementing the MYR exhibition, a related series of public programs will focus on specific actions underway and further actions needed to address climate change locally and globally.

MYR is on view from May 27 through August 27, 2022. A public opening reception is scheduled for Saturday, June 4, 5–7pm. Admission to McEvoy Arts is free.

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Elizabeth Thomas is a Bay Area-based independent curator and writer and a Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She was previously Director of Public Programs at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and MATRIX Curator at BAMPFA, where she considered central questions of interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and political and social engagement through commissioned research-based projects with artists. Other exhibitions she has organized include The F-Word at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Empathetic at the Temple Gallery of Art, Philadelphia; and The Believers at MASS MoCA, North Adams. She holds a BA in Anthropology from George Washington University and a MA in Contemporary Art History, Theory and Practice from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Artists

Amy Balkin is an artist whose works propose alternatives for conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems, addressing property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change. Her work has been exhibited in Sublime (Centre Pompidou Metz), Hybris (MUSAC), Rights of Nature (Nottingham Contemporary), and dOCUMENTA (13), and published in Decolonizing Nature (Sternberg), Materiality (Whitechapel/MIT) and Critical Landscapes (UC Press). She lives in San Francisco.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed gum) collected in public places. Dewey-Hagborg has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at NYU Abu Dhabi, a Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program Art of Practice Fellow, an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium, and an affiliate of Data & Society.

Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Ginsberg’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, and video. Her work is multi-sensorial and often includes living and organic materials and processes. Lin lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture.

Katie Paterson is known for her multi-disciplinary and conceptually driven work with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology, and cosmology. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. She received her BA from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, United Kingdom in 2004 and her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, United Kingdom in 2007.

Tomás Saraceno is a contemporary Argentine artist whose projects—consisting of floating sculptures, international collaborations, and interactive installations—propose and engage with forms of inhabiting and sensing the environment that have been suppressed in the Capitalocene era.

•••

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes and ideas in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, McEvoy Arts creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, McEvoy Arts embodies a far-reaching vision of the McEvoy Family Collection’s potential to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. McEvoy Arts invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. Each year, these collaborations produce exhibitions in McEvoy Arts’ gallery, new media programs in the Screening Room, as well as many film, music, literary, and performing arts events each year. Exhibitions are free and open to the public.

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts proudly announces three distinctive Spring public programs that explore modern and contemporary perspectives on the self and representation. From February through April, 2022, visit McEvoy Arts to see the exhibition Image Gardeners and experience these related events that include a film screening, panel, and live performance about and by a diverse group of guest artists, curators, and scholars. The programs address topics as varied as the direct intimacy of analog film to the whimsical potential of inter-galactic performance. Tickets go on sale in January 2022.

The series kicks off on Saturday, February 5 with LIVING IN MIRRORS: the life that belongs to me, a program of short films from 1966 to 2019 that explore the diversity of women’s voices in film in 16mm and digital formats. On Saturday, March 5, Person. Woman. Camera. TV. is a conversation on the body and the camera with pioneering media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and feminist scholar Peggy Phelan. Andon Saturday, April 30, McEvoy Arts presents the premiere of Genevieve Quick’s Hello World, a radical sci-fi fantasy of Otherness told via a live performance and video game.

Spring 2022 programs are presented in conjunction with Image Gardeners (January 14 – April 30, 2022), the McEvoy Arts exhibition thatjoins a broad selection of photography by women and non-binary artists from the McEvoy Family Collection with new commissions by three local artists to probe a spectrum of aesthetics and personal expression through portraiture. In the Screening Room, Gina Basso guest curates seen only, heard only through someone else’s description, a related program of experimental films that explore how images and narratives construct meaning, artifice, and memory.

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McEvoy Arts Public Programs
February – April 2022

Film Screening
LIVING IN MIRRORS: the life that belongs to me

Saturday, February 5, 2022 • 6pm | McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
$10 General Admission • $7 Seniors (65+) and Students with ID

This program features short films in 16mm and digital formats by women artists who turn the cameras on themselves and others to activate interior worlds. Illustrating the endless possibilities of film and the moving image, the selected filmmakers envision the screen as fertile ground for examination and construction of the self and collective selves. LIVING IN MIRRORS is guest curated by filmmaker and curator Gina Basso and San Francisco Cinematheque director Steve Polta. Films by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Julie Dash, Anne Charlotte Robertson, and Stephanie Barber, among others, are presented.  

LIVING IN MIRRORS is co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque.

Conversation
Person. Woman. Camera. TV.

Saturday, March 5, 2022 • 3pm | McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
Free with registration

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s arresting photograph Seduction (1986) is the jumping off point for an illustrated discussion on technology and the female body led by curator Corey Keller. Hershman Leeson, whose pioneering work has long investigated the impact of technology on society and the self, is joined on the panel by Peggy Phelan, a renowned feminist scholar whose work in the field of performance studies is foundational.

Performance
Hello World

Saturday, April 30, 2022 • 6pm | McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
$15 General Admission • $12 Seniors (65+) and Students with ID

Genevieve Quick’s Hello World is about CETI (Celadonian Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a research consortium that facilitates communication between Planet Celadon and Earth. As the narrative unfolds in a live performance and video game, the cast of self-identified Asian American women encounter a black hole, the multiverse, and communication outages that they attempt to remedy. Hello World offers a two-way channel between earth and the multiverse, a bridge across time, and a metaphor for the Asian diaspora.

For registration and ticket information, visit www.mcevoyarts.org/events. All events are presented in accordance with current health guidelines.

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Participant Biographies

Gina Basso is a San Francisco-based independent film programmer and visual artist. She has organized programs for San Francisco movie houses including The Roxie Theater, The Castro Theater, and Alamo Drafthouse. She has curated programs for Design Within Reach, San Francisco, CA; Hunter’s Point Shipyard, San Francisco, CA; and the Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA and is the former film curator for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In her creative practice, she uses video to explore transitional or altered states of being. Her video work has been presented by San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival; Artist Television Access, San Francisco; the Roxie Theater; HAXAN Film Festival; Antimatter Experimental Film Festival Vancouver, BC; and online via publicrecords.nyc.

Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American artist and filmmaker whose work transgresses art, social commentary, technology, and media. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the New Museum, New York; The Tate Modern, London; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Her films have been exhibited at the Berlin Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival, among others. Her work is held in collections including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Prix ars Electronica, and Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives and works in San Francisco and New York.

Corey Keller is a historian of photography and independent curator based in Oakland. From 2003 to 2021, she served as curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where her exhibitions included monographic surveys on Dawoud Bey, John Beasley Greene, and Francesca Woodman as well as the thematic exhibits About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change and Brought to Light: Photography and Invisibility, 1840-1900. Recent writings include essays on Eliza Withington, Susan Meiselas, and Clare Strand. She has lectured and taught widely, and is currently adjunct professor in the photography program at California College of the Arts (CCA).

Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English at Stanford University. Her widely influential work covers an extensive range of subjects including feminism, photography, dance, film, music, and poetry. She most recently edited, contributed to, and co-curated with Richard Meyer Contact Warhol: Photography Without End (MIT Press and Cantor Art Center, 2018). Phelan has been President of Performance Studies International, a fellow of the Getty Research Institute, and a Guggenheim Fellow. 

Steve Polta is the director of San Francisco Cinematheque. He is a co-founder and current curator of Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS film festival, presented annually since 2010. He holds an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University. He is co-editor, with Brett Kashmere, of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documenting the film and curatorial work of the Bay Area artist to be co-published by Cinematheque and INCITE Journal of Experimental Media in 2022. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Genevieve Quick is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist and critic whose work explores global identity and politics in speculative narratives, technology, and media-based practices. She has exhibited at institutions including the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Asian Cultural Center, Gwangju, South Korea; and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Quick has been awarded visual arts residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology, and the de Young Museum, among others. She has contributed essays and reviews to publications including 48 Hills, Artforum, cmagazine, and Art Practical.

Friday, September 17, 2021 • 6pm
Watsonville City Plaza
Presented by McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy with the Watsonville Film Festival

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy and the Watsonville Film Festival celebrate Mexican Independence Day and the region’s community of essential farmworkers with Celebrando la Cultura, a free outdoor concert in Watsonville City Plaza on Friday, September 17 at 6pm. The concert features performances by Los Cenzontles and other Mexican American cultural organizations. Celebrando la Cultura is organized in conjunction with Next To You an exhibition of artworks from the McEvoy Family Collection that encourages community connection through visual and performing arts. A virtual showcase of Los Cenzontles’ films, including a screening of the award-winning documentary Linda and the Mockingbirds, is available from September 15 through 18 via the Watsonville Film Festival.

Celebrando la Cultura celebrates the creative impact of Mexican American music and dance on the region’s performing arts traditions, as well as the essential labor of agricultural workers in the Pajaro Valley. The concert coincides with the weekly Watsonville farmers market and features traditional folk music and dance performances by Los Cenzontles, Los Originarios del Plan (presenting Tierra Caliente and Arpa Grande music), and the Watsonville-based Estrellas de Esperanza youth folkloric group. Additional support is provided by the City of Watsonville and the Watsonville Campesino Appreciation Caravan, a volunteer-run organization that provides assistance and support to farmworkers in Watsonville. Organizers have partnered with the nonprofit healthcare organization Salud Para La Gente to provide a mobile vaccination clinic to concert attendees.

“We are thrilled to partner with Los Cenzontles and McEvoy Arts to present this beautiful program,” says Consuelo Alba, director and co-founder of the Watsonville Film Festival. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to celebrate Mexican-American culture, honor our farmworkers for their essential work and build bridges between urban and rural communities.”

Extending the celebration nationally, the Watsonville Film Festival organizes a virtual showcase of documentary films featuring Los Cenzontles, (“mockingbirds” in the Nahuatl language), a Bay Area-based artist-driven nonprofit, band, arts academy, and production studio committed to amplifying the roots of Mexican culture. Screening September 15–18, Linda and The Mockingbirds (2020) pairs acclaimed musician Linda Ronstadt with musician Jackson Browne and a busload of Cenzontles to journey to Banámichi in Sonora, Mexico, where Ronstadt’s grandfather was born. The film details Ronstadt’s long friendship with Eugene Rodriguez, a third-generation Mexican-American and musician who founded Los Cenzontles thirty years prior. The virtual screening follows the film’s recent theatrical premiere in July 2021 at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, co-produced by McEvoy Arts. A Zoom panel discussion about Los Cenzontles’ extensive short film catalogue with Rodriguez and invited directors is scheduled for Thursday, September 16 at 6pm.

“Celebrando la Cultura and the Watsonville Film Festival program delivers the power of traditional Mexican folk music to stage and screen,” says Rodriguez. “The concert is Los Cenzontles’ first live appearance together in more than a year—we’re looking forward to sharing the dignity and beauty of this traditional music with families in Watsonville.”

Virtual Screening: Linda and the Mockingbirds
September 15–18, 2021 | www.watsonvillefilmfest.org

Zoom Panel: Los Cenzontles and Filmmakers in Conversation
Thursday, September 16, 2021 • 6pm | www.watsonvillefilmfest.org

Celebrando la Cultura: Los Cenzontles in Watsonville
Friday, September 17, 2021 • 6pm | City Plaza • 358 Main St, Watsonville, CA

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Partners

Los Cenzontles is a grassroots artist-driven organization committed to amplifying the roots of Mexican culture through classes, events, media, and performances. Founded in San Pablo, CA in 1994 by musician and educator Eugene Rodriguez, Los Cenzontles provides the local community with a family-friendly setting for traditional arts education and cultural events. The Los Cenzontles Academy connects students of all ages with maestros of traditional Mexican genres instilling a sense of cultural pride and participation in living traditions. Our full calendar of events features performances by our students, our own professional touring group, Los Cenzontles, and well-known world musicians and visiting artists. Los Cenzontles documents this journey of continuing the long tradition of authentic Mexican art with CDs and DVDs to share with the world and future generations.

Estrellas de Esperanza is a youth folkloric group that has been performing throughout Santa Cruz County and beyond over the past 13 years. Estrellas members not only learn traditional dance steps, they also learn about the different regions the dances come from and their history, ultimately instilling pride of culture, language, and music in the youth. Founder and maestra, Ruby Vasquez has an extensive background having danced for Esperanza del Valle for 34 years. Because of her deep passion for traditional dance and music, Ruby often brings Maestros from Mexico to teach the youth authentic dances not often seen in the area.

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes present in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, McEvoy Arts creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, McEvoy Arts embodies a far-reaching vision of the McEvoy Family Collection’s potential to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. McEvoy Arts invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. Each year, these collaborations produce exhibitions in the Foundation’s gallery, new media programs in the Screening Room, as well as many film, music, literary, and performing arts events each year. Exhibitions are free and open to the public. For more health, safety, and admissions information, please visit mcevoyarts.org.

The Watsonville Campesino Appreciation Caravan is a volunteer-run organization providing much-needed and much-deserved supplies, information, food, and appreciation to farmworkers in Watsonville. The group is made up of community members, educators, and students who provide crucial information about health & safety regarding COVID19 and resources that are available to them in the Watsonville community. Every penny of the funds they raise goes directly to local farmworkers and their families via https://gofund.me/877ba13a.

The City of Watsonville is located ninety-five miles south of San Francisco and has 51,000 residents. It is a rich agricultural community famous for its fresh berries, apples, and cut flowers. Watsonville, located in the lush Pajaro Valley, offers an ideal climate and the small-town charm of a rural community. Watsonville is more importantly recognized for its ethnic and cultural diversity, history of activism, generations of artists, dancers, and filmmakers. More than 80% of its population is Latino, and 31.5% of its population is under nineteen years of age.

The Watsonville Film Festival showcases Latinx filmmakers and stories that illuminate our shared humanity and inspire positive change. Founded in 2012, WFF developed from a grassroots collective into a non-profit arts organization offering year-round programming that celebrates powerful filmmaking and local creativity. WFF strives to make its programs accessible to all, leveraging the power of film to build bridges, spark conversations and imagine new possibilities in the heart of the Monterey Bay.