A confrontation greets us at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ current exhibition, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar. Immediately upon entering the space, a perceptual split between the virtual and the real is presented by Hershman Leeson’s The Infinity Engine (2014–2017), a row of distorted mirrors that subsumes and reflects our own appearance, as well as a video installation projected on adjacent walls behind us. Through[…..]

Alien She’s assemblage of Riot Grrrl output continues to inspire collective feminist organizing.

Today from our sister publication Art Practical we bring you editor Emily Holmes’ review of Take This Hammer at YBCA in San Francisco. Holmes notes, “Although there is crossover between works, particularly in regard to the social issues they address, violence is perhaps the single thread running through all of Take This Hammer. […] It takes many forms, but the exhibition particularly exposes systemic inequities and state-sanctioned[…..]

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you In the Dressing Room with Coco Fusco by Patricia Maloney and Moira Roth. In it, Coco Fusco takes us behind the scenes of her performance as Dr. Zira, the animal psychologist from Planet of the Apes, at Yerba Buena’s Radical Presence exhibition. As she removes her monkey costume backstage, Fusco opens up about performance and uniforms, economic violence, and[…..]

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Anna Martine Whitehead’s latest installation of “Endurance Tests,” a column “on current explorations of representation, the ethereal, and compulsiveness by black artists working in the field of performance.” The author notes, “[…] there is no accounting for blackness. It is too vast—it is everything—and can look any way it wants to. Or it can not look at all.” This article[…..]

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of Alien She, an exhibition that regards the impact of Riot Grrrl culture on contemporary art. Author Melissa Miller writes, “[The exhibition] presents Riot Grrrls with one voice, with a ‘we’re all in this together’ attitude. In reality, the movement was troubled by the same internal debates that other generations of feminists have[…..]

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Larissa Archer‘s review of Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, currently on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The review highlights the work of photographers Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, whose portraits, video projects, and zines reveal the lives of the residents living in a famous Brutalist building in Johannesburg. This article[…..]