The American War

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...

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...

Sound of Ice Melting is based on the ancient Zen Buddhist koan about the sound of one hand clapping...

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey...

Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...

In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks...

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon...

Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance...

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...

In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity ...

Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...

Do ut des (2009) is part of an ongoing series of books that Castillo Deball has altered with perforations, starting from the front page and working inward, forming symmetrical patterns when each spread is opened...

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object...

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...