Two Major Cities Curate Community and Art at Their Joint Exhibition

Presenting almost 60 artworks from more than 40 artists— many making their West Coast debut at the San Francisco gallery— the combined show highlights conversations between intersecting communities and promotes overcoming the isolative habits of a post-pandemic society. 

The dual exhibitions are also organizing multiple public programs to enhance connectivity and engage as wide an audience as possible. With an emphasis on mutual aid and the power of community support, the participating artists tackle the winding process of personal and communal healing through art-making.

In an era where so many of our daily rituals involve driving, screen-time, or capital-leaning commitments, Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions sets out to break those monotonous routines by reminding the collective they are part of a whole. 

Drawing from Judtih Butler's concept of "intertwinement," curators from KADIST, Lindsay Albert, Joseph del Pesco Jo-ey Tang, and The Blaffer’s Erika MeiChua Holum aimed to explore the notion that acting collectively is in and of itself a form of revolution that sustains liberation. 

Interspersed throughout the show is the theme of grief paired with the spiritual perseverance born out of support, and though that string can be found in individual work exhibited, each artist has chosen a different subject and medium to translate the overarching themes through. 

Brook Andrew, for example, used their multidisciplinary practice to collage newspaper clippings of tragedy, photographs of natural disasters, science journal articles, and manuscript pages to create a choir of lineage. The topics which Andrew focuses on are not easy realities to face, but the media archive on display does more than just proliferate fear and despair. 

By physicalizing the history of activism, hope is also rendered in the process. The work encourages viewers to continue a fight for visibility in a time when positivity can feel like a limited resource. 

Created during the outbreak of COVID-19, Andrew’s piece intended to recreate the immersion of the 24-hour news cycle, paired with the urgency of climate change and human rights. Despite a media machine that is obsessed with the portrait of catastrophe, Andrew’s work also brings people together, to make the viewer aware of both historical and contemporary communities who are constant in their efforts to reach tangible solutions. 

Indira Allegra is another artist whose focal point lies in the collusion of material and archive. Their piece is a five minute recorded performance that delves into the reckoning of life after loss. Once the divorce is finalized, once the money is gone, once the doctor calls back, what then? 

Entitled After My Death / A Mutable Decision (2021), Allegra is seen attempting to explore the liminal space of reconstructing oneself after total destruction. By dancing in the available shafts of sunlight that enter an empty studio, the artist culminates the movement practice in the embodiment of grief expressions. 

Allegra has also collaborated with local Houston musicians for a live soundscape piece that will be featured at the entrance and exit of the Blaffer. Transforming the museum’s stairwell into a percussion studio, Allegra aims to weave multiple senses together in order to embody the unseen forces of healing. 

Buenos Aires-based artist Eduardo Navarro also embraces healing in his animation, Breathspace (2020). Projected onto the side of KADIST and visible to the public from the sidewalk outside, a breathing head is seen expanding and contracting. Paired with the soundbite of the artist's own focused breathing, a viewer is invited into the emotional space and conceptualization of the show before even physically entering.