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ZAROUHIE ABDALIAN (MFA 2010)  IN 2017 WHITNEY BIENNIAL

The formation of self and the individual’s place in a turbulent society are among the key themes reflected in the work of the artists selected for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition includes sixty-three participants, ranging from emerging to well-established individuals and collectives working in painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film and video, photography, activism, performance, music, and video game design.

The Whitney Biennial is the longest running survey of contemporary art in the United States, with a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking lively debate. The 2017 Biennial is the Museum’s seventy-eighth in a continuous series of Annual and Biennial exhibitions initiated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932. It is the first to be held in the Whitney’s downtown home at 99 Gansevoort Street, and the largest ever in terms of gallery space.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial is co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks.

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2017Biennial

Not Alone: Exploring Bonds Between and With Members of the Armed Forces

SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue (War Memorial Veterans Building), San Francisco,

November 9, 2016 – March 4, 2017

Not Alone: Exploring Bonds Between and With Members of the Armed Forces is an expansive exhibition featuring works by local and national artists and veteran artists that have been engaged with the subject matter of individuals supporting active-duty personnel and/or veterans over long periods of time.

The artists in Not Alone engage in building narratives about and with members of the Armed Forces and their families through media including photography, drawings, prints, sculpture, audio works, installations and 360 video. Their works offer perspectives on a variety of topics including veteran support networks, the experience of spouses and children of US military personnel and how veterans examine their own identity and personal relationships. The artwork in the exhibition highlights the family members, veterans and artists that actively seek out opportunities to connect and support their loved ones, friends and strangers (including everyone who is impacted by seeing this exhibition).

Not Alone is curated by SFAC Galleries Director Meg Shiffler and artist, curator and documentary filmmaker Jason Hanasik (CCA Alumni). Visit SFAC Website for more information.

OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS: MFA NOW 2017

Root Division, 1131 Mission Street (at 7th), San Francisco

Deadline: December 1, 2016

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to nine of the top MFA programs in the country: California College of the Arts, Mills College, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, Stanford University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley. The MFA Now Archive Project and Juried Exhibition provides a platform for looking at Bay Area artists and institutions in order to promote dialogue and to archive current art-making practices and models.

Each artist will submit a single artwork inclusion in the archive publication and for consideration for the MFA Now Exhibition. The juror will select up to twenty-five works from the submitted materials to be shown in Root Division’s gallery for the month of March 2017. An opening reception will be held on March 11th, and will also serve as the archive release party.

For more information and to apply: https://www.rootdivision.org/open-call-exhibition/mfa-now-2017

ERICK MEYENBERG: THE WHEEL BEARS NO RESEMBLANCE TO A LEG

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco

14 October 2016 – 19 February 2017

Working at the interstices of drawing, collage, video, data analysis, and sound, Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg (b. 1980) generates immersive multimedia experiences that merge complex processes of translation—from data to object to image. Premiering in this exhibition, the three-channel video work The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg (2016) borrows its title from Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), a 1903 play written by the Polish-French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the term surrealism. The plot, in which a man gives birth to children, conveys the poet’s essential idea: imagination will preserve art from modern science through the union of surprise and analogical parallels to reality.

Anthony Hernandez: A Retrospective

SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco

September 24, 2016–January 1, 2017

Anthony Hernandez is the first retrospective to honor the more than 45-year career of this major American photographer. Featuring approximately 160 photographs — many never shown before — the exhibition includes a remarkably varied body of work united by its formal beauty and its subtle consideration of contemporary social issues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Anthony Hernandez developed his own individual style of street photography, one attuned to the desolate allure and sprawling expanses of his hometown. Over the course of his career, he has deftly moved from black-and-white to color photography, from 35mm to large-format cameras, and from the human figure to the landscape to abstracted detail. Highlights from the exhibition include black-and-white photographs from the early 1970s taken on the streets of downtown L.A., color pictures made on Rodeo Drive in the mid-1980s, and selections from his critically acclaimed series Landscapes for the Homeless, completed in 1991. Although Hernandez has turned his lens on other cities — including Rome, Italy, and various American locales — Los Angeles, and especially the regions inhabited by the working class, the poor, and the homeless, has been his most enduring subject.

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/anthony-hernandez/

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) FILM SCREENING

BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley

November 5, 8pm

FEATURING: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee,

FROZEN WORLD OF THE FAMILIAR STRANGER

KADIST, 3295 20th Street, San Francisco 

October 12 – November 19, 2016

Artists: Andrea Bowers, Cao Fei, Steffani Jemison, Chris Johanson, Farideh Lashai, Rodney McMillian, Sahej Rahal, Rachel Rose, Tejal Shah, Himali Singh Soin, Kartik Sood, Ho Tzu Nyen, Adrián Villar Rojas, and Maya Watanabe

A common dynamic amongst individuals in large cities is the possibility of anonymity, the luxury and burden engaging with the city’s other inhabitants. If we accept the city to be a site in constant flux, then the construction and destruction of its built environment signals a prevailing circumstance in which the city is subject to a cyclical process of decay and renewal. Elements of this condition are characterized by the stabilizing ambitions of modernization, and the brutal acceleration of global capitalism, which reveal a complex tension between permanence and contingency. Every city contains variants of this tension, while also remaining bound to a particular history, culture, geography, economy, and memory that inform their own urban core.

Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger reflects upon the uncanny sensation of the ultra-modern global megalopolis, and the increasing sense of alienation we encounter in our flattening world. The exhibition builds upon social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1970s theory of “The Familiar Stranger” to consider urban apocalyptic symptoms; physical, environmental, behavioral, psychological, and social. Through works exploring isolation, confinement, collapse, transience, anxieties, and fantasies of inhabiting collective urban space, Frozen World offers an almost satirical point of view on the human condition and what it means to be alive together in the present, and in the constructed future.

http://www.kadist.org/en/programs/all/2592