Coordinated Exhibitions
Installation view, Unruly Bodies, California Museum of Photography, 2016-17 (photo by Nikolay Maslov)
Coordinating Curator and Advisor, Unruly Bodies: Dismantling Larry Clark's Tulsa
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, June 10, 2016-January 28, 2017
This exhibition is a historically informed reassessment of the artist Larry Clark’s controversial first book, Tulsa (1971), a set of 50 images depicting a tight circle of friends and drug addicts in Tulsa, Oklahoma, photographed over a span of nine years (1963-71) by one of their number, Clark himself. On first appearing, the exposé was hailed as “a devastating portrait of an American tragedy” and embraced as an artistic watershed of participant observer-oriented personal documentary. Yet in spite of its anthropological connotations, the story Tulsa tells is the product of a tightly constructed, nearly cinematic narrative of descent from teenage experimentation to a drug-fueled haze of chaos, violence, exploitation, and death—a “slippery slope” sequence that tells us what we already want to believe about the self-destructive countercultures of the 1960s. This exhibition seeks to recover some of the untold counter-stories that live in the interstices between these affectively charged images, by loosening them from Clark’s sequence and opening them to multiple interpretations that address Tulsa’s historical conditions of production and reception.
Unruly Bodies is organized by California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, and is guest curated by graduate students from the Departments of Art, History of Art, and Public History: Pamona Alexander, Marissa Friedman, Robin Hextrum, Rocio Medina, Daisy Ocampo, Karlyn Olvido, Meranda Roberts, and Sara Rowe, as advised by Susan Laxton, UCR Assistant Professor of the History of Art.
Rachelle Bussieres, Maison de pierres, 2015 (detail)
Curator, I'll tell you later
2016 Graduate Fellows Exhibitions, featuring works by Rachelle Bussières, Tanja Geis, Kaveh Irani, Sara Kerr, Christopher Nickel, Brittany M. Powell, and Jonathan Sprague
Headlands Center for the Arts, May 15-June 5, 2016
James Welling, LA-C 120, 1977 (detail)
Curator, James Welling
2016 Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award exhibition
Woodbury University Hollywood Outpost (WUHO) gallery, March 3-27, 2016
Co-curator, Interrogating Manzanar: Photography, Justice, and the Japanese American Internment (with Jason Weems)
Photographs by Ansel Adams, Clem Albers, Dorothea Lange, and Tōyō Miyatake
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, March 14-July 18, 2015
Exhibition page . Exhibition announcement . Press release . Gallery guide . Video podcast
Coordinating Curator, The Provoke Era: Japanese Photography from the Collection of SFMOMA
Photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki, Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Ikko Narahara, Issei Suda, Yutaka Takanashi, Shomei Tomatsu, Hiromi Tsuchida, and Katsumi Watanabe
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, February 28-May 16, 2015
Named for the magazine Provoke, which sought to break the rules of traditional photography, The Provoke Era presents the avant-garde tradition that emerged in Tokyo in the 1960s and continued in the 70s and 80s. The exhibition traces Japanese photographers' responses to their country’s shifting social and political atmosphere. The influence of Provoke photography in Japan continues today.
The Provoke Era is organized by SFMOMA, and is curated by Sandra S. Phillips, SFMOMA senior curator of photography.
Exhibition page . Exhibition announcement . Gallery guide . Video podcast
Curator, Alinka Echeverría: Faith and Vision
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, November 1, 2014-January 24, 2015
Curator, Flaws in the Diamond: Exploitation and Empire in South Africa, c. 1900
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, February 22-July 19, 2014
Photographs from the CMP's Keystone-Mast Collection selected by Thomas Cogswell, UCR Professor of History, and Santos Z. Roman, UCR graduate student in History
Curator, Blockaded: A photographic itinerary through Iran, North Korea, and Cuba
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, November 9, 2013-February 2, 2014
Photographs by photojournalist Roberto Fumagalli
Coordinating Curator, More American Photographs
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, September 28, 2013-January 11, 2014
Exhibition curated by Jens Hoffmann, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco,
including new works by Walead Beshty, Larry Clark, Roe Ethridge, Katy Grannan, William E. Jones, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Hank Willis Thomas;
as well as historic images by the Farm Security Administration photographers Esther Bubley, John Collier, Marjory Collins, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Edwin Locke, Pare Lorentz, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott
Coordinating Curator and Advisor, Confessions* of a male chauvinist pig: Rethinking Winogrand’s Women
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, August 10-October 26, 2013
This exhibition reconsiders Garry Winogrand's "Women Are Beautiful" (1975), a set of 85 photographs culled from the hundreds Winogrand shot of women in public places between 1964 and 1973. Initially bearing the controversial subtitle "Observations of a Male Chauvinist Pig," Winogrand's book struggled to find a publisher and then withered in the light of feminist critique once it appeared. Confessions* of a male chauvinist pig aims to reorganize the photographs into a critical exhibition that places the project in the context of the turbulent 1960s, at the nexus of gender relations buffeted by the conflicting terms of the sexual revolution and the women's movement.
Confessions* of a male chauvinist pig is organized by California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, and is guest curated by graduate students from the Departments of Art, History of Art, and Public History: Andrea Brown, Leann Do, Chelsea Herr, Leslie Paprocki, Ana Ramey, Kaelyn Rodriguez, Nicolette Rohr, Carolyn Schutten, Megan Suster, and Margaret Wallace, as advised by Susan Laxton, UCR Assistant Professor of the History of Art.
Coordinating Curator, Geographies of Detention: From Guantánamo to the Golden Gulag
California Museum of Photography at UCR ARTSblock, June 1-September 7, 2013
Group show organized in collaboration with Catherine Gudis, UCR Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Program, and Molly McGarry, UCR Associate Professor of History,
including work by Sandow Birk, Alyse Emdur, and Richard Ross; films by Ashley Hunt, Setsu Shigematsu, and the Los Angeles Poverty Department; and the traveling didactic exhibit “Guantánamo Public Memory Project”
Exhibition page . Gallery guide
Advisor, Words and Places: Etel Adnan (with Julian Myers and Ana Paula Cohen)
Kent and Vicki Logan Gallery, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, April 17-June 29, 2013
Words and Places: Etel Adnan is an exhibition produced by the graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts with the support of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Words and Places features works by Etel Adnan, Chris Marker, Rabih Mroué, and the Otolith Group, as well as selected articles from the Al-Safa newspaper archive.
Words and Places: Etel Adnan is the first large-scale institutional exhibition of work by the Lebanese writer, poet, and painter Etel Adnan, spanning six decades of her artistic practice. Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, Adnan has spent her life between places—Beirut, Paris, and the Bay Area—negotiating their different cultures and languages, as well as her distinctive position among them. This experience of displacement deeply informs her work, which similarly ranges between mediums and formats. Her work has recently been included in dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, Germany, 2012) and the Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon (London, 2010).
The exhibition explores Adnanʼs complex negotiation between verbal and visual forms of expression. Some of the featured paintings include elements of geographical specificity—for instance a series of paintings of Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco, a place that she says “orients” her—whereas others are ambiguous paintings of envisioned “non-places.” Adnanʼs leporellos, or folding books, offer a compelling fusion of written texts and painted or drawn images. Their unique design is intended to accommodate narrative, and they connect the immediacy of her gestural paintings with the extended durations of her writings.
The exhibition also includes selected articles written by Adnan for the francophone daily newspaper Al-Safa (these appear courtesy of Adnan and the Bibliothèque nationale de France) as well as film and video works by Chris Marker, Rabih Mroué, and the Otolith Group that relate directly or obliquely to Adnanʼs practice. Markerʼs eerie footage of sculptures at the fringe of the San Francisco Bay; Mrouéʼs conflations of destruction and construction, future and past in an unspecified city; and the Otolith Groupʼs portrait of Adnan reading her own poetry in her Paris home: all present a melancholic counterpoint to Adnanʼs work, deepening the exhibitionʼs logic of place and displacement.
Curator and Advisor, MFA 2012: Group-Work (with Julian Myers)
Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, April 28-May 18, 2012
At the invitation of Mary Jane Jacob, Group-Work was one of four parts of the graduate exhibition alongside sections curated by Pablo Helguera, Tumelo Mosaka, and Steven Bridges. Group-Work was curated by four Graduate Curatorial Fellows: Ionit Behar (MA, Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism, 2013), Natalie Clark (MA, Arts Administration and Policy, 2012), Michaela Hansen (MDes, Fashion, Body and Garment, 2012), and Laura-Caroline Johnson (Dual MA, Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism, and Arts Administration and Policy, 2012).
Curatorial Assistant, On the Road
Exhibition curated by Jens Hoffmann, Artpace, San Antonio, May 13-September 5, 2010
On the Road takes its title from the legendary book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, who recounts his eventful road trips across the United States in the late 1940s. The exhibition investigates the mythology of the American motoring adventure as it began to develop in the early 20s with the advent of immense expansions of the highway system, particularly in the West of the country. Featuring two interrelated components, the first part of the exhibition presents the practices of artists whose images and works have long been associated with the exploration of the West by way of the automobile. The second part is the result of a recent two-week excursion through Texas by the curator, during which a number of artifacts and documents were collected for display. Beyond looking at the road trip from a nostalgic point of view, On the Road explores the idea of such a drive as a rite of passage, a journey toward emancipation on the way to a destination that may be largely unknown but which holds the promise of liberating self-discovery.
The exhibition includes works by Robert Adams, Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Walker Evans, Robbert Flick, Mary Heilmann, Roger Kuntz, Danny Lyon, Catherine Opie, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, Alexis Smith, Kon Trubkovich, and Andy Warhol.
Coordinator, Numerous exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
including presentations of new work by Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Wynne Greenwood, Rodney McMillian, Martin McMurray, Ruben Ochoa, Joel Tauber, and Mickalene Thomas, among others, 2006-2008