YBCA Announces Artists in Influential Triennial Exhibition
SFGate
June 5, 2018
By Charles Desmarais
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has announced the artists selected for its closely watched, more or less triennial survey of contemporary art in the region. For the first time, six architects and design collaboratives will participate, along with 19 individual artists.
The “Bay Area Now” series and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s long-running “SECA Awards” exhibitions are the two most prominent samplings of current art in the Bay Area, with the YBCA show generally taking a broad brush to the topic, while SFMOMA gives more space to fewer artists. Last year’s SECA show, for example, featured five people, each with a dedicated gallery.
“Bay Area Now 8” is a return to the time-honored model of selection by a small curatorial team, after an experiment at “decentralization” in which 15 smaller organizations were invited to organize independent sub-exhibitions for the last iteration of the show. “BAN7” was widely panned.
“Bay Area Now 8” has been organized, says YBCA, “without a thematized curatorial agenda” by the organization’s director of visual arts, Lucía Sanromán, and associate curator Susie Kantor, with public programs manager Martin Strickland producing the architecture and design section.
The artists selected range from “the author of the seminal work on architecture and race” to a (presumably self-described) “writer, new media artist, game designer and dead swamp milf.” All but one are from San Francisco or Alameda county.
The participating visual artists will be Sadie Barnette (Oakland), David Bayus (San Francisco), Sita Bhaumik (Oakland), Sofía Córdova (Oakland), Caleb Duarte (Oakland), Josh Faught (San Francisco), Nicki Green (San Francisco), Porpentine Charity Heartscape (Oakland) and Jamil Hellu (San Francisco).
Also, Constance Hockaday (formerly Oakland), Rhonda Holberton (Oakland), Carrie Hott (Oakland), Sahar Khoury(Oakland), Charlie Leese (San Francisco), Woody De Othello (Richmond), Marcela Pardo Ariza (San Francisco), Taravat Talepasand (San Francisco), Cate White (Oakland) and Andrew Wilson (Oakland).
Architects and designers invited to exhibit are Darell Fields (Berkeley), Hyphae Design Laboratory (Oakland), modem (Berkeley), Nemestudio (Emeryville), Stamen Design (San Francisco) and Urban Works Agency (San Francisco).