Boom: The Art of Resistance. Outdoor installation: painted tent by Leslie Dreyer and Zeph Fishlyn for Coalition on Homelessness’ Tackle Homelessness/Superbowl action, 2016; banner by Leslie Dreyer for Oakland’s Fight for $15 march to address the issues of low wages, real-estate speculation, and displacement.

Such a gathering would occur in view of a 2001 documentary film—Boom: The Sound of Eviction, from which the show adopts the leading, econ-onomonopoetic part of its name—playing on a loop on a side table. The older Boom is a detailed account of the socioeconomic effects of the first major dot-com explosion of 1998–2001. The footage is grainier than today’s HD video, and the cars are a bit less streamlined, but the story remains uncannily the same. The influx of a global network of tech industry workers has incentivized evictions on a mass scale—around 1,000 a month, recently, by some accounts—under many different guises and justifications.

Random Parts is located in the East Lake neighborhood, east of Interstate 880 and just north of Fruitvale. It’s a neighborhood poised for the sort of “transformation” that tends to divide people into “dread” and “desire” camps according to their respective historically conditioned levels of access to capital. The waterfront is just beginning to witness the construction of Brooklyn Basin, the largest real-estate development project in the history of the East Bay. What sorts of kitchen conversations will this development, with its high-rise condos and boutique retail, make possible, and what others will it make impossible?

Gay Shame poster, 2016. Seen on the streets of the Mission District of San Francisco. Photo: Leslie Dreyer.

How might I do justice to a show as crucial as Boom: The Art of Resistance? I mean as a spectator, as a reviewer, as one who shares space with its conditions. Because this is what the exhibition asks, firmly and directly, with no waste of breath, time, space, or energy, all the while knowing that it takes new idioms, and surprise scenographies, to get the question across. What does directness require in this moment poised on the edge of “augmented reality,” when large institutions claim cynically to be the centers of “doing something about it,” and “wonder” is the domain of a rentier class (or, in the words of the Gay Shame collective, “brogrammers and Beckys-who-techie”) that performs extractions on a widening repertoire of cognitive and relational functions.

Amara T. Smith, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and collaborators. House/Full of Black Women, 2016-ongoing; performance, multiple sites in Oakland, CA. “Now You See Me” video documentation by Ginika Oruche.

Yes, Boom does ask that we do justice, but it asks with a particular inflection. It is precisely tuned to the scale of lives, while it refuses the ambivalence of strategic individualism. Take, for instance, Amara T. Smith and Ellen Sebastian Chang’s ongoing performance ritual House/Full of Black Women (2016–ongoing). The work, which manifests in multiple “episodes” across a span of two years, addresses “the displacement, well-being, and sex-trafficking of Black women and girls in Oakland.” It does so by sending an enigmatic troupe of veiled, white-lace-clad figures into the pricey new nightlife sites of uptown Oakland, searching, with old-fashioned lanterns and framed mirrors (worn like masks and necklaces) for some idea of home that can be carried in the collective, to be moved through the long, historical night of trauma. Maybe they’re reflecting back the funereality of white-privileging cultures of housing, and housing-finance. They are like figments of various domesticities syncretized in bodies—lampshade hats, doily shawls, and curtain skirts—haunting out a space for living in the easily startled spaces of capital.

Or take the twenty-plus year legacy of POOR magazine (the rare first issue is on display in the exhibition), a poor-people-led publication and arts organization founded by Lisa “Tiny” Gray Garcia and Dee Gray. Flipping through the magazine, one is reminded of how long and intensely the landless movement has been fighting against police violence; and how, before there were hashtags and statuses, there was the strange and economical poetry of the street, the sort of symbolism that can only be whittled down to brevity by necessity, experience, and the expertise of IRL networks.

Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes. Poster for Sogorea Te’ Land Trust/Shuumi Land Tax, 2016-ongoing. Bay Area Indigenous Community (Founders: Corrina Gould & Johnella LaRose). Ohlone Land (Bay Area), CA.

This review would have to be much longer to account for the depth and complexity of all the works/movements/actions represented in Boom, all of which are fierce, smart, and dense, but I must mention one more, a poster for the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust designed by Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes of the graphic arts collaborative Dignidad Rebelde. It describes the background and stipulations of the Shuumi Land Tax. This is a voluntary annual financial contribution that East Bay residents can pay (online or off) to the indigenous Ohlone stewards of the land, who have no tribal recognition by the federal government, and whose ancestors’ remains are stored in archives at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. The tax goes toward the acquisition of land for the purposes of reestablishing Ohlone cultural practices and to return the ancestors to the land. In the group’s words:

If you live on Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone land, you are inadvertently benefitting from the genocide waged against the Ohlone people and the theft of their land. Whether you know it or not, however you feel about it, this is an inescapable fact.

We could pay it right now. We, the readers of these words. It’s not very expensive: between .00375 and .0075 percent of annual Bay Area rent. I mean, why not? It is, quite literally, the least one could do, without doing nothing; one might say that nothing good can happen here until this injustice is recognized. It’s difficult to ask, on behalf of others, especially on behalf of oneself. Go see the show, and pay your taxes.

Boom: The Art of Resistance is on view through September 10, 2016.

Juan Carlos Quintana. Reflections on Exile Part I (Entering the Forest), 201415; oil and acrylic on canvas; 84 x 192 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco.

The elegant, perfectly paced installation of Retrospectives—just the right number of paintings and objects—evokes the hushed adoration that the title invokes. Yet many things about Juan Carlos Quintana’s beautiful yet unsettling paintings make one reconsider just what the artist might really intend. The clusters of cartoony, faintly alarming figures that people Quintana’s canvases suggest a combination of Belgian painter James Ensor’s crowd scenes, Philip Guston’s goofy hooded Klansmen, and the denizens of ’70s “Bad Painting.” Looking closely at these crowds of “barflies, wanna-be-revolutionaries, lackeys, clowns, hobos, hillbillies, zealots, opportunists, and zombies” (the artist’s description), it is clear that we, the art-world audience, are also part of this mob.

Quintana, who has described his work as a “pre-post-anti-pro revolutionary gumbo/ajiaco potpourri of image-making that navigates between narratives and abstractions,” is a veritable poster boy for cultural hybridity, having been raised by Cuban exile parents in New Orleans’ mix of African, European, and Native American cultures. The dense, palimpsest-littered surfaces of his paintings suggest the presence of these multiple voices; images added and subtracted, improvised and erased seem to be part of an affectionate, labor-intensive relationship with each canvas, renewed on a daily basis for months before final completion. Titles are sharply humorous references to political (in)correctness of all kinds. Some are about the Cold War; others—Revolutions Are Made to Liberate the Painter from the Humdrum Circumstances of the Canvas (2015), for instance—evoke Communist rhetoric, or, like Soiree for the Nouveau Riche to Show Off Their New Art Collection (2015), or Art Collectors Descending on Unsuspecting Emerging Economies (2015), make fun of the burgeoning Late Capitalism of the present-day art world.

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