Painting (Painting)

Somewhere Along the Black Sea in the Distant North-East, or in Libya in the Furthest South, The Amazons – The Woman and the Girls Children – Exist Just Outside of the Range of Normal Human Experience

Painting (Painting)

Karla Black is a Scottish artist living in Glasgow . Her work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art performance, to formalism. Her large-scale sculptures incorporate modest everyday substances, along with very traditional art-making materials to create abstract forms.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank. The artist runs until exhaustion across a dirt field in what looks like a military site. Recorded for the camera, and projected on loop, the video performance was created for Documenta 14.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely. Meant to hang from the ceiling, Bowers’ neon is further weighed down by long wind chimes made of aluminum pipes and wooden wind catchers that drip unsteadily from their anchors. Poetic but frantic in its juxtapositions, Bowers’ work captures a certain paradoxical energy that echoes the current political climate—it is hopeful but hindered, cacophonous but well intentioned, uncertain but ominous.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra depicts the artist standing naked in a lush field that a bulldozer has broken up. The video references an incident in which innocent Guatemalans were brutally murdered and buried in a mass grave.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China. In this animation, layers of images, abstract forms, meaning, and metaphorical associations slowly unfold at the same time that more visual myths are created. The identity of the protagonist, a red-coated official, is indeterminate and suggestive of both the mercantilist policies that led to the Opium Wars with China and the cultural authority claimed by the Company school of painting over colonial India.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom. This composition is stuck to a metal plate by a series of button magnets, with interjecting phrases on them. The juxtaposition between the mysogynistic, almost puritan poetry that stripes across the bottom and the powerful crouching pose that the femme demon assumes inverts the hegemonic text , instead creating a space of alterity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red. Two muscular men with sledgehammers simultaneously pummel the blocks where Gilmore attempts to stand. Although we can only see the artist from the waist down, her body language reveals apprehension: her hands, tense, press against the wall in an attempt to maintain balance while the men come dangerously close to smashing her bare legs.

Photography (Photography)

In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain. She wears an expression of both pleasure and intensity as she points a gun at someone or something outside of the frame. Raven (gun) (1994) is not so much threatening as full of sexuality and potential energy.

Photography (Photography)

Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture. The Freeway Series was developed in 1995, right after the artist’s inclusion in that year’s Whitney Biennial. As if suggesting that her work should not be restricted to being seen through overtly political or activist lenses, this series lends insight into the city of Los Angeles via its most characteristic urban feature: its highways.

Photography (Photography)

Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender. The very practice of being photographed raises many complex issues around gender performance and the relationships between an inner self and an outer public persona. Even though Mike and Sky are cropped and obscure one another, many of their choices for self-presentation—as emphasized by their tattoos—remain visible.

Photography (Photography)

Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.

Photography (Photography)

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly.

Photography (Photography)

Angela (crotch grab)