NEWS
August 2022
I’m very excited to be the current resident at Rogers Art Loft in Las Vegas! I had a presentation on August 4 about my curatorial practice and what I am working on while at the residency. Vegas really melts my heart with the community and support for artists, I love being here.
The image projected on the wall in the image here on the right is a document my grandmother had when she walked across the US/Mexico border. I could talk ALL DAY about what this form means to me and story telling in my family, and how it has influenced my curatorial practice.
Big thanks to the RAL support and to Lance Smith and Ash DelGrego
January 2022
I’m honored to join the John Michael Kohler Art Center staff as the Assistant Curator. I never thought the Midwest was in my future, but super pleased to keep doing what I love in Wisconsin.
May 2021
New catalog essay out by yours truly on a recent installation by Tiffany Lin at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.
Tiffany is such a gem! We were housemates at Wassaic Project and I have loved seeing the growth of her projects since then. Our talks about the desert, taxonomy, education, the interwebs, and weird bugs and snakes have been the best.
Special thanks to Alisha Kerlin and the Barrick team and to Forrest McGarvey for being my trusted editor friend 📝
TV Card for PROOF by Tiffany Lin, designed by Chloe Bernardo
March 2021
Pleased to announce Josephine Lee’s upcoming solo exhibition, Practice until you feel the language inside you, opening at Unrequited Leisure and curated by yours truly!
Josephine Lee’s work utilizes the tools of futility and humor to question the rules in which connection to environment, culture, and citizenship are established and known.
The show opens in the gallery April 3rd and runs through May 31st.
Josephine Lee, I think I Canada I know I Canada, performance, 13:21 min., 2018
October 2020
Hi friends! This month for Living Room Light Exchange we're so excited to be releasing LRLX publication 5, Rare Earth: The Ground is Not Digital 🌍 now available for pre-order.
🗣✨✨ALSOOO✨✨🗣
On Oct 20 at 7pm PDT, we'll be hearing from two of Rare Earth's incredible contributors: Praba Pilar, an independent artist and scholar disrupting the cult of the Techno-Logic and decolonizing initiatives in community; and Maya Weeks, a writer, artist, and geographer working on oceans, waste, gender, and capitalism.
Please join us on Oct. 20 at 7pm PDT!! To sign up and receive the Zoom link email livingroomlightexchange@gmail.com
💕💕💕Maya and Praba are super sweet souls I’m really looking forward to this—don’t miss it! And please consider buying a copy of the pub to support us! 💕💕
September 2020
It’s hereeeee! I curated Issue 11 of MAAKE Mag and it is available for preorder now! I’m so so enamored with all the selected artists and it was such a healing process to write and think about their work. This was my first project I worked on after my mother’s passing, so I just wanted to meet myself where I am. My introductory statement and theme of the issue deals with grief and actualizing the shape of care within community. I’m sure seeing all of the work and statement together will be a very tender experience.
The featured artists include Lina Agnes Buck, B Chehayeb, Adam de Boer, Nimisha Doongarwal, Katie Dorame, Sienna Freeman, Michelle Gonzales, Donté K. Hayes, Melissa Josepht, Anna Ortiz-Neustrup, Mary Laube, Josephine Lee, Tiffany Lin, Eugene Macki, Alison Owen, Erik Parra, Hae Won Sohn, Frank Wang Yefeng.
Spotlight artists are Aubrey Levinthal, Sidney Mullis, and Sonia Louise Davis
Artist-Run features include: LAUNCH F18 and See You Next Thursday
Conversations with: Nakeya Brown, Jon Key, Alex Paik, and Gil Rocha
Thank you so much to the MAAKE Mag team for working with me, thank you to all the wonderful artists who submitted, and deep gratitude to everyone who has provided a virtual shoulder to cry on these last few months as I process my loss 💛
June 2020
I am honored to be featured in Shelter in Studio, a project by Peter Foucault who asked a variety of Bay Area-based artists to talk about their experience of artistic practice (or in my case, curatorial practice) during the COVID 19 pandemic.
May 2020
Together with Amelia Brod, Rose Liang, and Addy Rabinovitch, we have launched TBD Salon––a series of community-funded virtual studio visits to support artists and arts organizers who have been economically impacted by COVID 19. In partnership with a series of artist-centered organizations, TBD Salon builds community while supporting artists and arts organizers, creative practices, and critical connections during this uncertain time.
We invite folks who can support to donate $10 per program to attend and support honorariums for the participants. For those who can’t donate at this time, but want to attend, we welcome your participation as well! We’re raising funds for artists and arts organizers because of the financial strain that they have experienced due to cancelled speaking engagements, postponed exhibitions, income loss, lay offs, closed studio spaces, barred access from print shops, and arts supply stores, while at the same time, noting the multitude of connections happening virtually during the pandemic. TBD Salon formed as a means to support artists and arts organizers both monetarily and programmatically during this time.
April 2020
Interview with Joe Brommel*
*a note about the interview linked here: I am attempting to sort through labels, a white-man’s-idea-of-history, colonization, and US-focused markers of identity in order to find the words for my own identity. The latinx and Mexican-American signifiers are *completely* messy as it can signify so many languages, nationalities, traditions, and so forth. As I continue to study, listen, and learn, I don’t stand by everything that I said in this interview here. I haven’t received any messages from anyone regarding the content, but I do want to say that how I talk about my identity is in flux, and it is ok to be in flux, and I hope you, dear reader, can appreciate the evolving nature of finding out who we are, who others are, and how we move through the world. In reflecting back on this conversation, I don’t think ‘racial imposter syndrome’ is the right way to talk about what I talk about below. I recognize the privilege I have of white skin to not always have my identity in question from others, and I am actively working on breaking down the definition of 'latinidad' and ‘whiteness’ etc, because when I don't, it is a form of oppression of Black lives. When we don't understand how we participate in oppression we risk muting Black voices who need their stories told over others as a form of safety, preservation, life, and enjoyment. For now, I am choosing to keep this interview up here to display a process and changing vocabulary as I continue to write and curate exhibitions about the subject matter, as I look into family history, and as I find the right (?) words to describe my past and present. Thank you for joining me (or not) on this journey and if you want to discuss more, please, email me to get in touch.
April 2020
October 2019
I recently had an essay published in Living Room Light Exchange’s fourth annual publication, Spellwork: Technologies and Conjurings. The issue calls forth the techno-witches, wizards, sorcerers, animists, and magicians. Featuring LRLX artists Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Ingrid Burrington, Yetunde Olagbaju, and Cassie Thornton, Spellwork provokes the possibility that technology and magic have always been entangled rituals. These artists explore the double bind of magic in technology and the technology of magic. This publication also includes a limited edition Silicon Beach crystal pendant bookmark by artist Nina Sarnelle and a survey of LRLX season 5 by Bay Area arts writers. Together we embrace the technologies of witches, demons and goddesses, and we seek the benign magic of the everyday.
September 2019
I started full time work at SFMOMA! This is the first job I’ve landed that covers dental benefits…
September 2019
I’m back Chief Curating the sound art and performance festival Soundwave for a second time! Now it its 9th season, this year we’re focused on the theme of Time and including art parties, performance, dance, video, and music for our boldest, most interdisciplinary festival to date. Artists explore a range of subjects: intergenerational history, the cultivation of safe spaces for healing and joy within black, brown, and queer communities, art grown out of migration and displacement, and our current political reality.
Events include Twerk 4 Mother Earth featuring artists Fela Kutchii, known for her outdoor parties (Best of the Bay 2018); DIALECTS, a sober and ecstatic experimental performance by New Mexico-based new media artist Szu-Han Ho, exploring earth and migration; Just Ahead is Darkness, a Japanese obon-inspired evening of performance by contemporary Bay Area choreographers and sister duo Megan and Shannon Kurashige (Sharp & Fine); and Nochtlaca: Todos, todos, todos, with fierce, LA-based Latinx ranchera artist San Cha, and other musical guests.
I have assembled a multidisciplinary lineup of guest curators working in theater, dance, film, community building, social practice, and music to produce events that investigate sound and its relationship to time. While essential, the inherent acceptance of time creates both cultural, artistic, and biological limitations. An artistic exploration of time opens up a consideration of movement and duration, of soundwaves traveling over distances, of bodies moving in rhythm across the globe. Soundwave 9 uses time as a theme to explore the process of hearing, the possibility of slowing down time, the power of time as an organizing principle of life, and to consider the normative roles that time has constructed around us. Soundwave runs September through October 2019 at Bay Area venues like CounterPulse, El Rio, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
The full schedule, line-up, and tickets are available at www.soundwavesf.com
Events Include:
Twerk 4 Mother Earth: Throwing It Back & Forth: Musical artists Fela Kutchiii, Namaste Shawty, Onmommas, and Red Corvette perform at an art-saturated party curated by The House of Malico, a culturally progressive production house. Twerk 4 Mother Earth will be a ‘time’ themed artist experience cultivating safe(r) spaces for healing and joy within black, brown and queer communities. September 21, 2019 at El Rio.
DIALECTS: Artist Szu-Han Ho presents an experimental sound performance that draws from sounds, songs, and stories about migration and displacement, both human and nonhuman, curated by Patricia Cariño Valdez. Ho’s performance will explore the relationship between bodies and the spaces/sites of interwoven histories and memory. October 24, 2019 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Just Ahead is Darkness: In a highly multidisciplinary program, choreographers/dancers Megan & Shannon Kurashige; composer/performer Cory Wright; author/reader Ben Loory; and dancers from Sharp & Fine collaborate in an event curated by Megan & Shannon Kurashige. Inspired by the bon dances in Hawaii, a traditional Japanese celebration of the spirits of family ancestors, the performance explores how time transforms the relationships between fact, story, and truth. October 26, 2019 at Counter Pulse.
Nochtlaca: Todos, todos, todos: Artists San Cha, Persia, and Guillermo Galindo explore borders, walls (physical & psychological), and a disruptive “us vs. them” mentality in a multidisciplinary program curated by Christo Oropeza. The program emphasizes the importance of sound as a vehicle for a shared cathartic experience during difficult times. Date and location TBA.
Soundwave is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Zellerbach Family Foundation and produced with support from the Center for New Music.
August 2019
Excited to announce that I will be guest curating
Living Room Light Exchange this Fall and Spring!
Living Room Light Exchange (LRLX) is a monthly salon dedicated to new media art forms and dialogues that meets in rotating living rooms. In each ‘season’ of LRLX, we hold monthly salons where we curate three artists or cultural producers who present recent work. Engaged discussions and dialogue with attendees follows. LRLX was founded in 2014 to delve more deeply into the intersection of art and technology, highlighting current creative undertakings, unanswered questions, and the ways artistic practice can challenge a changing technological world. This work is particularly essential in the Bay Area—the heart of tech industry—where technology and art are more often united as the more superficial ‘techno-fetishism’. As an organization, we are dedicated to the interconnections between arts and humanities, and foreground dialogues facilitated by curators, art writers, artists, professors, and scholars—all of whom we consider to be humanities practitioners. We meet in living rooms out of a founding belief that artists need spaces to disrupt the formality of the lecture hall, speak freely, and emphasize the vibrant flourishing of process. LRLX emphasizes inclusion and access to expand ethical concerns at the intersection of art and technology. We focus on programming historically marginalized and intersectional voices to amplify the historical absence of such perspectives. Visit www.livingroomlightexchange.com/ to check out upcoming salons.
July 2019
This July I am in residence at The Wassaic Project, a quiet artist residency in upstate New York. I’ll be working on a new curatorial project, so I’ll be knee deep in books, lurking on artist websites, and making a few studio visits in New York City. Excited for fireflies and summer rain storms :)
Here’s me in the barn, where all studios are located.
June 2019
I’m curating an exhibition titled My Mother’s Maiden Name opening on June 8 at At Root Division! On view through June 25.
My Mother’s Maiden Name analyzes a governance of individual history seen in security questions and implements this question and answer protocol as a precedent to discuss online authorship, culture-construction, and systems of knowledge. The selected artists take a considered approach to the fragility of memory and identity amongst digital data noise to account for information that cannot be quantified through such constructs like security systems.
The artists evaluate elements that are not concrete in text, visible data, or public, and instead entrench themselves in the emotions and values that come with answering a security question or using an Apple-patented gesture, for example. Albeit a coping mechanism or performance to satisfy interfaces with limited language and context, these actions tell important histories and beliefs that go beyond what is typed, selected in a drop down menu, or tracked via wifi. My Mother’s Maiden Name confronts this regulation of bodies to reveal requisite activism, awareness, and dialog to make changes to systems that shape identity and culture in facilities that are otherwise untraceable.
Exhibiting artists are:
Terry Berlier, Michelle Bonilla Garcia, Kira Dominguez-Hultgren, Joty Dhaliwal, Sarah Lee, Kim Miskowicz, Margaret Nobel, Mimi Onuoha, Julien Prévieux, Deborah Stein, tamara suarez porras
I’m pinching myself that I get to work with all these fantastic humans. Hope to see you at the opening!! 💕❤️
Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Across_1, 2018, Image courtesy of Phillip Maisel Photography
June 2019
I am co-curating an exhibition opening at CCA Hubbell Street Galleries with Beth Abrahamson, Sarah Hobstetter, Mik Gaspay.
Opening reception: Saturday, Jun 15, 2019, 3PM—6PM
Additional gallery hours: June 15—July 26
For the second iteration of the college’s biennial series of alumni exhibitions programming, CCA Exhibitions and the CCA Alumni Association will partner to highlight the idea of process within the practices of recent alumni from across the college’s four divisions: Fine Arts, Design, Architecture, and Humanities and Sciences. The exhibition will explore shared threads in artistic practices of sketching, note taking, modeling, mapping, drafting, and rendering. These process-based methods expose the pathways creative individuals depend upon to obtain a final product or idea. By celebrating this amorphousness through the form of an exhibition, Alma Mater: Methods will move beyond what is often exhibited within the white cube—finality, succinct expression, monetary value—and will instead prioritize a thinking-through-making approach that is shared among the college’s creative communities and disciplines. It is here where conversations begin, new connections form, and low stakes are valued.
Exhibition graphics by Eggy Press / Graham Holoch
March 2019
January 2019
On the opening day of Portals: A Space for Color, a solo exhibition of works by Phillip K. Smith III, I moderated an artist lecture with Phillip K. Smith III.
October 2018
Soundwave featured in East Bay Express
September 2018
Soundwave featured in KQED
September 2018
Soundwave featured in 48Hills
August 2018
Soundwave featured in UC Santa Cruz Newscenter
July 2018
Soundwave ((8)) is finally live! You can view the line up of artists, venues, guest curators, and all the thematic descriptions. So proud to be apart of this team.
June 2018
I will be presenting some in process research and curatorial projects at the CODAME Festival at the Midway on June 6! I'll be talking about those weird security questions we're subject to online (you know, "what is your mother's maiden name?), it'll be weird! I'd love your feedback if you can make it. My festival section is produced through Living Room Light Exchange. You can see the schedule line up here
June 2018
February 2018
For this year's California College of the Arts Gala I will be curating an exhibition that features CCA alumni from all ages. The Gala takes place in May and the exhibition wil be located in the Nave of the SF Campus. I've been told I can commission large installations! Super excited!
January 2018
This fall I will be Chief Curating the Soundwave ((8)) Biennial. This biennial focuses on sound art and performance in across multiple Bay Area venues and with a variety of artists. I will be working on developing this year's theme of infrastructure, hiring five guest curators, lining up venues, and producing my own exhibition. I'm looking forward to working in new (to me) arts communities in the Bay and expanding how we think about sound art. More soon...!
December 2017
Pleased to announce I'll be speaking about my new work for Living Room Light Exchange! Living Room Light Exchange is a lecture series featured in rotating living rooms around the Bay Area. Lecturers are artists, curators, writers, performers, etc involved in new media. I'm so happy to have a chance to introduce my new work to a brilliant audience and receive some much needed feedback!!
November 2017
I was recently accepted as a researcher in residence at Signal Culture in Owego, New York for two weeks in November! Signal Culture establishes an environment where innovative artists, toolmakers, curators, critics, researchers and historians who are contributing to the field of media art will have time and space to make new work and to interact with one another Signal Culture offers residencies in a live/work space in the beautiful village of Owego in central New York State. They believe in the importance of fostering a community of people working with experimental media art and host multiple residents concurrently to set a stage for conversation, networking, and possible collaboration.
I'll be working on a short essay and developing an exhibition proposal in connection to my critical writing on security questions and their ability to skew memory, history, and identity.
September 2017
I am curating a show for the SonicLab ((8)) Biennial featuring the artists Neotenomie, Porpentine Chairty Heartscape, and Rook.
The theme for SonicLAB ((8)) is Infrastructure and is intended to provoke conversation around ideas such as: isolation amid interconnectivity; environmental degradation caused by mass consumption of electronics, the politics of energy infrastructures including fossil fuels and renewables; the movement of goods and services across roads, bridges, railways, channels, and ports; and other often invisible protocols that affect our daily lives. Featuring site specific works spread across San Francisco, the festival will contain events at diverse venues including the sonically pristine Dolby Cinema at Dolby HQ by Cullen Miller and duo Shane Myrbeck/Emily Shisko, a teleportation by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Neotenomie, and Rook at Gray Area’s restored Grand Theater, a special event in conjunction with SPUR (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association), and a one of a kind performance curated by Tiare Ribeaux in the Yud Gallery at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
July 2017
I started working at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art as the Exhibitions Manager. Come visit!
April 2017
It's live! Check out the one-off podcast that I made with Eden Redmond and Forrest McGarvey for a publication produced by Living Room Light Exchange.
Feburary 2017
I recently recorded a conversation between Eden Redmond, Forrest McGarvey, and myself for a publication produced by Living Room Light Exchange. Stay tuned for further details on its release date and where you can pick up a copy/hear the conversation! Eden, Forrest and I talked about Artsy's Art Genome Project. We discussed the format the database uses to categorize artwork and the company's interest to assign numerical values to 'feminist' or 'political' artworks. An artwork might be 30% feminist, for example.
It was a engaging conversation, and we had a lot of snacks as you can see in the photos below!
Nov. 2016
On November 6, 2016 I will be opening an exhibition titled Third Party at CTRL + SHFT Gallery, Oakland, CA
Artists: Lark Buckingham, Joanna Cheung Rhonda Holberton, Zoe McCloskey, Erica Scourti, Angela Washko
Lark Buckingham, Image still from Tattletale Heart, video, 2016
Show Concept:
“The era of personalization began on December 4th, 2009” declared author Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble. The date marks the introduction of the patented algorithmic filter Google established to track users online. This filter is designed to predict accurate recommendations in search results and advertisements in correspondence with user preferences that are monitored online. Many large tech companies such as Apple and Facebook now employ this personalization filter as third parties who employ codes to mine individual characteristics and subsequently calculate relevant content. Although individual traits are documented within these transactions, the results one ultimately receives are often one-size-fits all categorizations, and frequently skewed by a Western male perspective. The exhibition Third Party intends to examine the technological systems that distinguish aspects of individuality and the implications of quantifiable coded traits in everyday online environments.
As an all female artist exhibition, each artwork serves to critique the male gaze evident within personalization filters. The selected artworks question the authority to distinguish individuals through coding, while also questioning who has access to determine economic and informational value through the use of these codes. Not only do the artists employ the use of technology and an online environment to grapple with how one is seen through code, but the artists also directly involve the physical body. In doing so, the individual is reinstated as a priority within an intangible online system that impacts information, objects, and ideas. Third Party creates a platform that questions the perpetuation of dominant ideologies through methods of algorithmic categorization.
Fall 2016
This fall I will be curating an exhibition titled Humor US, opening on September 9, 2016 at Embark Gallery in San Francisco, CA
Show concept:
Philosopher John Morreall famously defined humor as amusement that takes pleasure in a cognitive shift. The opening of this exhibition presents a timely connection with the presidential elections, begging the questions: How might emerging artists convey religious and racial discrimination, a crippling economy, or housing costs through humor?
Artists: Douglas Angulo, Nathan Becka, Boris Scherbakov, Kaitlin Trataris, France Viana, Hui Meng Wang, Jin Zhu
(Installation images to come...!)
May 2016
I finished my thesis!
Thesis Abstract:
In the early 2000s mobile applications began organizing user data similar to archives of the early 1900s. If there is a correlation between these categorical methods, what does this mean for identity and culture that is constructed through these digital platforms? In a compression of theoretical distance between Archive theory and Media Studies, the mobile app Timehop will be analyzed within this thesis to uncover its relationship to preservation tactics associated with archives. Through my coining of the term the hybrid reflection process, my theoretical framework negotiates software development and algorithmic design to question systems of categorization that write our histories for us, and thus our beliefs, customs, and values. By analyzing these systems and their intentions, this thesis advocates for the individual to take part in digital processes to generate information that is more personalized and representative of the self.
If you're interested in reading the whole thing, email me and I'll send you a pdf version.
April 23, 2016 – Visual and Critical Studies Spring Symposium
A public lecture of my thesis work titled Archives and Algorithms: Compressing Sociohistorical Distance
Lecture abstract:
The video performance Life in Adwords by Erica Scourti documents an eight month journey through codes, categories, and sweeping generalizations. Scourti’s work highlights how her identity online is subjected to algorithmic calculations through the adwords located in her Gmail interface. In this presentation, I will argue that the mathematical procedures used to reflect individual characteristics seen in this work are not only a product of the digital age. A similar method can be located in archives of the late 19th century. The compression of historical distance between algorithms and archives illuminates a continuum of categorical systems that define an individual and their relationship to knowledge.
April 17, 2015
The exhibition I co-curated, Painting is Forbidden, featured on Hyperallergic:
April 17, 2015
The exhibition I co-curated, Painting is Forbidden, featured on Artnet:
March 13th, 2015 6:30-8:30pm
Martin Wong: Painting is Forbidden The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA
Chinese-American artist Martin Wong (b. 1946) is best known for the paintings he produced while living in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, where he was involved in the dynamic subcultures of the Nuyorican poets and graffiti artists. But it was in San Francisco, where he grew up, and in Eureka, California, where he studied, that Wong established himself as a prolific poet and ceramicist, a psychedelic painter, an artistic collaborator in the radical communal theater of the Angels of Light, and a self-described “Human Instamatic.” These various influences and interests are reflected in the eclectic body of work he developed in an intense 30-year period of production, before his premature death in 1999 from AIDS-related illness.
Painting Is Forbidden seeks to develop a fuller picture of Wong and his wild and expansive body of work by presenting over 150 works by the artist, spanning all aspects of his artistic production and encompassing writing, calligraphy, drawing, ceramics, ephemera, theatrical set design, painting, and collage. Also presented for the first time are Wong’s sketchbooks and journals, his private archive, offering an inside look into his approach to his art and his life.
April, 2017
Martin Wong: Painting is Forbidden featured on Juxatopoz:
March 20, 2015
Kenneth Baker features Martin Wong: Painting is Forbidden on SFGATE:
