Bring it Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy through the Body
Co-curated with Kevin B. Chen. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. January – April 2016
Artists: Zeina Barakeh, Jeremiah Barber, Vic De La Rosa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Dana Harel, Carolyn Janssen, Summer Mei Ling Lee, Ranu Mukherjee, Ramekon O’Arwisters, and Tsherin Sherpa.
Bring it Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy through the Body is one of three exhibitions opening the new San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery after two years of relocating and renovating a greatly expanded gallery and public program space in the heart of SF’s Civic Center. The exhibition presents work from artists representing diverse Bay Area communities, and centers thematically on how these artists grapple with cultural identity and its relationship to the human condition.
Working in media ranging from painting to digital photography, video to textiles, performance to sculpture, the artists address personal relationships to cultural history and heritage by using and framing the body as the primary form and site of conceptual and artistic exploration. In an attempt to reconcile and bridge differences—such as past and present, historical and contemporary, Eastern and Western, traditional customs and modern conventions, religious and secular—and the ongoing search for grounding and a sense of home, these artists make culture and history highly personal by presenting the body (and often their own body) as a site of inscription and fractured performances. As writer, performer, and participating artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena states, “In fact, our main artwork is our own body, ridden with semiotic, political, ethnographic, cartographic and mythical implications.”
Bring it Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy through the Body showcases how the body can act as a crucial site for the construction and presentation of our social identities and can offer a window to the relationship between people and places as well as history. The artists in the exhibition involve the use, appreciation and knowledge of their own bodies, linking the body and physical movements with the organization of society, customs and the individual psyche. The resulting works represent both intimate viewpoints as well as draw focus to aspects of the human condition.
Bring it Home is generously supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Selected Press
Hyperallergic, Melissa Stern (February 12, 2016)
"This very public display of support should be applauded in a time when cities are strapped for funds and the arts often slip down the list of perceived importance. While the SFAC can’t rescue artists from high rent and shrinking real estate, and while it can’t claim to represent all of the Bay Area’s art community, it is a uniquely local institution, one that has nurtured artists for half a century."
KQED Arts, Sarah Hotchkiss (January 21, 2016)
SF Weekly, Anita Katz (January 28, 2016)
Art Practical, Brian Karl (March 17, 2016)