Black Life: Sam Vernon June 25
Artist Sam Vernon’s creates installations that combine Xerox collages, photographs, paintings, and sculptural components in an exploration of personal narrative, identity, and historical memory. Her current interest in the visual language and imagery of The Black Scholar, the first journal of Black studies and research founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969, led her to an interview of artist Jacob Lawrence. In collaboration with BAMPFA Film Library & Study Center we were able uncover a 1994 conversation Jacob Lawrence had at BAMPFA.
Building on these connections between Bay Area print history and archive research, Sam Vernon offers a talk on the occasion of a new print project made in collaboration with the BAMPFA Film Library & Study Center. This special edition print piece, produced in the BAMPFA Art Lab, will be mailed to all who register for this event. Please join us on Friday June 25 at 6pm for an artist talk with Sam.
bio: Sam Vernon earned her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University in 2015 and her BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2009. Vernon is an assistant professor in the Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts programs at California College of the Arts (CCA) and a visiting assistant professor in Studio Arts at Bard College.
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Experience Sam Vernon’s work in-person at Southern Exposure: We use our hands to support
We use our hands to support is a group exhibition and a multi-layered project visioned and gathered by artist, educator and curator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, a member of Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council. When crafting this show, Lukaza was deeply inspired by the strategies that each of these artists hold in their practices. Their strategies, thoughts and work have guided the direction of the show. The overarching vision was to imagine an exhibition guided by the work of Fronteristxs Collective, Amanda Curreri, Kimi Hanauer, and Sam Vernon, living side by side.
We use our hands to support is a project, a manifesto, a tool for survival and continuing, a lens to see the world through, a cape, a mask, a screen, a pattern, a disguise, a pile of your favorite books, an abolitionist, a banner, a scream, a stack, a non-hierarchical space, a living organism. Activist, educator, thinker Grace Lee Boggs, asks us, “who is going to begin this new story?” and we answer that we need new language, we need to dig deep, pull up the unseen histories, look into each other’s eyes, tear all the walls down, center liberatory practices, use our hands to reimagine everything. This space commits to beginning this story and visioning that another world is possible, in honor of Grace, and in solidarity with the folks caged in detention centers, jails and prisons.
The physical space will be open by appointment from May 29- July 3, 2021.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12:00 - 6:00PM
Tuesday–Wednesday, by appointment only
Thursday–Saturday, walk-in viewing available
Mixtape #10: I WaaaAAANNT to Know; I neeeEEEDS to know
Jacob Lawrence’s “Catholic New Orleans” as seen at BAMPFA paired with Arthur Jafa on Many Lumens, Black Star’s new podcast hosted by Maori Karmael Holmes. AJ quotes Cornel West’s assessment of the under-development of Black visual tradition in the United States because of material conditions and goes on to elaborate:
“…the Black Church was the only institution that Black people had and the Black church being a Protestant church had a fundamental problematic with image making period unlike the Catholic Church. If you look at places where Black people found themselves in the West where [there were'] Catholic societies, Brazil, Haiti, Trinidad, those are the places where they have visual traditions that parallel musical traditions.”