Zeina Barakeh. Homeland Insecurity, 2015; single-channel animated video; 6:00. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Scott Chernis.

Bring It Home consolidates several generations of self-consciously multiculturalist impulses in contemporary U.S. art practices. Layered on top of an even-handedness toward gender and some range of age representation, the attention to artist demographics in this show is evident, touching on cultural antecedents originating in far-flung points on the globe, from Asia to the Middle East to south of the U.S. border.

Noticeably balanced, for instance, are neighboring installations by Zeina Barakeh and Dana Harel. Barakeh is a Lebanese-born Palestinian video artist whose project manages to animate, at once playfully and seriously, a wordless narrative of power. Harel is an Israeli artist whose flowing pencil strokes and overlapping stucco relief form the image of a single human body intertwined with a vine-y plant onto a blank gallery wall. The other pieces in the exhibition are diversely arrayed in their placement, media, and materials as well. The insistently vertical physical presence of Ramekon O’Arwisters’s highly textural knitted sculptures evokes the artist and his grandmother as abstract statues of sorts, and are counterpoised to the smooth, low, horizontal pool of Jeremiah Barber’s dark, body-sized platform for a single human body to be laid out and/or performed upon. A text-based wall piece by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the detailed collage works of Carolyn Janssen and Tsherin Sherpa pointing toward and complicating spirituality for individuals, the more evanescent projections of layered family figures by Summer Mei Ling Lee, and the shifting layers of postcolonial place by Ranu Mukherjee occupy different niches in other reaches of the space.

Read the full article here.

Senga Nengudi. R.S.V.P., 1975–78; nylon, sand, and mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York.

Radical Presence, a survey of African American performance art curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, has come to San Francisco. The featured works are all distillations and/or documents of performances that have ended up in, or have been adapted for, a gallery setting; an exceptionally robust program of related live performances runs concurrently. The earliest work is Pond (1962) by Fluxus cofounder Benjamin Patterson. The most recent pieces date from 2015, several of them created or re-created for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ iteration of the show.

The exhibition presents a substantial and striking set of takes on race in both the art world and society more generally. These are serious matters. That said, many of the artists adopt playful, even lighthearted approaches, often forcing visitor engagement through destabilizing strategies. “Playfulness” thus becomes a tactic akin to that of the tricksters and shamans who perform criticality in so many cultures—either in intense moments of crisis or in a more ongoing fashion. It is also similar to how masters of Zen and jujitsu trip up potentially worthy students as wake-up calls or as lessons to combat placid acceptance of the status quo.

Read the full article here.

Richard Misrach. Kodak, Donna, Debra, Jake, Oregon Coast, 1984; pigment print; 61 1/2 x 76 1/2 in. © Richard Misrach. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

This Fraenkel Gallery survey of more than thirty years of Richard Misrach’s photography primarily features small, isolated human figures in larger land- or seascapes. In much of the artist’s most famous work (not included here), for example Cancer Alley (1998) and Desert Cantos (1981–2001), human presence is indicated through occasional signs of intervention: tire tracks, contrails, an abandoned-looking building. By contrast, in Being(s) 1975–2015, the presence of humanity is marked by actual human bodies. Ultimately, however, the vastness of the natural expanses (large bodies of water, parklands, deserts) and the conditions of weather (wind, tide, clouds) relentlessly prevail, overwhelming the tiny, tenuously balanced figures.

The prints are mostly large-scale, and some, such as the nearly twelve-foot-long Playas de Tijuana #1 (Crowded Beach), San Diego, California (2013), are vast. A couple, including IPS #0134 (2011) and Untitled (Silver Reverse) (2002), are more modest in dimension, barely more than twelve inches high or wide. Many of the works were shot years ago and only recently printed for this show. Misrach has left visible frame-number marks from the decades-old film in some prints to highlight the shift in photographic tools and techniques from analog to (increasingly) digital.

Read the full article here.