What: Special Edition: Selected Works by Moholy Ground Photographers

When: May 27– June 24, 2013

Where: The Ramp Gallery, a community curated space at 934 Brannan St. (between 8th and 9th)

This body of work, curated by Editor-In-Chief Rachel Kennedy, showcases three photographers who exemplify the scope of style and mastery of form fostered at Moholy Ground. Margo Moritz is a San Francisco based artist known for her dynamic dance and portrait photography. Kanoa Zimmerman, also out of San Francisco, shoots deep sea divers and surfers across the globe for major publications. Ian Martin’s humanist photography has garnered such honors as a Getty Foundation grant.

These three artists contributed to MOH Online’s debut editorial. Margo Moritz’s gravity-defying dance photography, Kanoa Zimmerman’s black and white images of the deep sea, and Ian Martin’s powerful photographs documenting white poverty in South Africa together illustrate the dynamic and at times challenging works that have come to define Moholy Ground Magazine.

About Moholy Ground
Moholy Ground (MOH) Online presents bodies of work by digital artists, photographers, and visual documentarians. Distinctively, the works they present are always accompanied by the artist’s voice, either through their own original writing or through an interview. The works on display at The Ramp are representative of Moholy Ground’s commitment to promoting a variety of exemplary, contemporary fine art and visual commentary. Moholy Ground is based in San Francisco, California and covers significant exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

About The Ramp Gallery
The Ramp Gallery, a community curated space in the SOMArts lobby, accepts exhibition proposals on a continual basis. To view submission information as well as past exhibitions, please visit The Ramp Gallery page of our website here. To purchase work on display or for more information email gallery@somarts.org. You can visit The Ramp Gallery any time SOMArts Cultural Center is open.

Images above by Margo Moritz, courtesy of Moholy Ground Magazine

In order to make 100 Performances for the Hole possible this January, SOMArts needs to raise $10,000 by June 30th, 2013. Giving levels and rewards are listed below.  Your gift—no matter how large or small—is deeply appreciated. Give now and ensure this underground performance art marathon becomes a reality!

100 Performances For the Hole, a mini-marathon of artistic moments, is back by popular demand. On January 4, 2014, 5:58pm–midnight, 100 Performances is part of the public programming of All Good Things, a group exhibition November 2013–January 2014 that looks at how Bay Area artists (and a select few key works from beyond the Bay) have pioneered time as form in contemporary art.

100 Performances For the Hole features 100 performance artists and groups making two-minute performances back-to-back-to-back all night long as a barometer of the artistic underground. Mayhem and magic fill this evening making it a must-see crowd-pleaser and a veritable hive of creative activity.

Support a thriving art center in showcasing the work of a broad spectrum of performing artists by donating today. A gift of any size is appreciated and helpful. Perks of giving are outlined below.

Donate online

SOMArts accepts online contributions by linking to PayPal, an easy and secure way to donate using your credit card. To make a contribution using PayPal, please click the button below.

Donate by check

Please make the check payable to SOMArts and mail it to:

SOMArts Cultural Center
934 Brannan St
San Francisco, CA 94103

Please enclose your address, phone number, and email address, and your name as you wish it to be listed (or specify “anonymous”). If your company/spouse’s company offers a matching gift program, please enclose the form.

Pictured above: Pete Ippel performing “Llovizna de Cobre – Copper Mist,” photo by Bryan Hewitt

What: Asia On Stage music & dance performance

When: Saturday, May 18, 2013, 7:30pm, doors at 6pm

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: $20 admission, tickets available at the door or online at www.likha.org

Asia on Stage celebrates Asian heritage through music and dance. Performers include GAPA Men’s Chorus, Harsanari and LIKHA-Pilipino Folk Ensemble, Nguyen Dance Company and Parangal Dance Company

About GAPA Men’s Chorus
GAPA Men’s Chorus is an ethnically-based choral group that has become the longest lasting and most enduring organization of its kind. Celebrating over 20 years of accomplishments, the Chorus was formed in 1989 to provide a showcase for the vocal music talents of gay & bisexual Asian & Pacific Islander (API) men. Particularly effective in outreaching to the mainstream Asian Pacific population, as well as the broader LGBT community, the Chorus promotes GAPA’s goals by highlighting diversity and gay Asian Pacific visibility at its every appearance.

About Harsanari
Since 1997, under the leadership of Michael Ogi, Harsanari has specialized in dances from Sunda, West Java, Indonesia. From classical masked dances and dramas that enact the great Hindu epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana to the contemporary folk dance forms that incorporate martial arts movements, Sundanese dance is rich and complex. It shows the influence of the many groups that have traded and settled in the area over the centuries, but remains uniquely distinctive, with its dynamic syncopated drumming patterns, quick wrist flicks, sensual hip movements, and fast shoulder and torso isolations.

About LIKHA-Pilipino Folk Ensemble
LIKHA believes in the power of dance and music to educate the Pilipino American community and diverse audiences about the Philippine culture. Pilipino Americans are the fastest growing Asian American population in the United States, however we are not seen as a unified community.

LIKHA works to showcase the diversity of our culture on the stage to bridge differences within Pilipino American cultures, and to educate Pilipino American youth and adults who do not have the opportunities to learn about their culture. We also seek to educate other cultures who have never seen or heard about the Philippines.

About Nguyen Dance Company 
This multicultural performance troupe features dancers, musicians, and visual artists. Their signature style uses a unique blend of contemporary modern and traditional Vietnamese dance. Committed to bringing interdisciplinary arts to all communities, Nguyen Dance Company is open to all dance genres and considers it a very important mission to bring dance to the public.

About Parangal Dance Company
Parangal Dance Company’s mission is to give tribute to Philippine heritage by preserving and promoting ethnic attire, music, and dance through research, workshops, and performances. We aim to serve as a bridge,inspiring and connecting Filipino Americans to their roots to give them a sense of pride and identity, while educating diverse communities to foster awareness and appreciation of Philippine culture.

This performance is presented at SOMArts through participation in the Affordable Space Program, which provides below-market rental space, production and publicity assistance to nonprofit organizations. For more information visit our rentals page.

Image credit: Gary Cruz / Amaze Studios

What: Electronic Pacific Opening Reception

When:  Opening reception Thursday, July 11, 6–9pm. Exhibition July 12–August 17, 2013. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12–7pm, and Saturday 12–5pm.

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: Free admission.

SOMArts Cultural Center presents Electronic Pacific, a group exhibition that investigates the impact of electronic and digital communication on intercultural exchange. Local and international artists with connections to the Pacific Rim transform shipping containers into installation spaces to showcase time-based media and electronic communications as transitional cultural space. These containers symbolize the mercantile routes that have defined intercultural exchange around the Pacific for many years, as well as the way culture is conveyed, packaged, and disseminated. Exhibited works deal with mixed and transnational geography, the mutability of language, and multiplicity in individual and community identity.

The opening reception features a special screening every half-hour of a 14-minute documentary featuring 9 Chinese painters. Artist Lizabeth Eva Rossof communicates extensively through email and digital images with painters working in the replica production, commission and decorative painting industry in Xiamen, China, who produce her work. On display in the exhibition will be a series of 9, salon-style self-portraits in oil of each of the Xiamen artists commissioned by Rossof. Since many of these artists had never utilized their photo-realistic painting skills to create a self-portraits, the novel request forces the artists to grapple with new forms of representation and stylization, and to question the identity politics of the self.

Artist An Xiao, who draws ties between the movement and storytelling in the Lascaux cave paintings and the .gif, will also facilitate an audience-participatory installation “Grotte de l’Internetz” in which popular memes and internet images are translated into stencils and painted on rocks.

Click here to read more about other works in the exhibition.

Pictured: “Commissioned self-portrait of Jiang Shan Peng” by Lizabeth Eva Rossof

What: underCurrents & the Quest for Space group exhibition

When:  May 2–25,  2013. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12–7pm, and Saturday 12–5pm. Opening reception Thursday, May 2, 5–8pm.

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: Free admission.

underCurrents & the Quest for Space is a multidisciplinary arts exhibition and discussion investigating the space occupied by Asian America, socially, artistically and physically. Asian American artists exhibit work that detonates a discourse on the under-discussed issues impacting Asian Americans, interrogates the myth of “model minority,” and acknowledges the multiple ways contemporary Asian American communities address and subvert stereotypes, discrimination and invisibility. This multi-media, multi-disciplinary arts exhibition aims to identify and contemplate the political implications of what lies below the surface, while exploring possibilities to move beyond, reinventing history and artistically predicting an unrestrained future.

Participating artists:
Salma Arastu
Jung Ran Bae
Michele Benzamin-Miki
Manon Bogerd-Wada
Mitsuko Brooks
Karen Chew
Samantha Chundur
Shari Arai DeBoer
Reiko Fujii
Kate Hers
Zilka Joseph
Kay Kang
Miyang Kim
Alexandra Lee
Mido Lee
Brenda Louie
Li Ma
Choppy Oshiro
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
Yoshie Sakai
Pallavi Sharma
Cindy Shih
Judy Shintani
Shizue Seigel
Valerie Soe
Dao Strom
Cynthia Tom
Truong Tran
Julie Thi Underhill
Laura Wong
Leslie Zeitler
Stella Zheng
Xiaojie Zheng

The exhibition is curated by Inson Choy. Guest jurors included Jay Xu, Ph.D., Director, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and Mary-Ann Milford, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, Mills College.

Accompanying events include:

 

Opening Reception
Thursday, May 2, 5–8pm

 

Poetry Reading: Navigating the underCurrents
Wednesday, May 15, 7–8:30pm, free admission, click here for more information

 

Threads in Unbound Kimonos
Saturday, May 18, 4–5pm, $15 admission, click here for more information

 

Panel Discussion
Saturday, May 25, 1–3pm

Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to ensuring the visibility and documentation of Asian American women in the arts. Through exhibitions, publications, and educational programs, we offer thought-provoking perspectives that challenge societal assumptions and promote dialogue. www.aawaa.net

Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC) supports and produces multi-disciplinary art reflective of the unique experiences of Asian Pacific Islanders living in the United States. underCurrents is featured as part of Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s  (APICC) 16th Annual United States of Asian America Festival at SOMArts Cultural Center. www.apiculturalcenter.org

Pictured top to bottom: Judy Shintani Tamano, “Unbound Kimonos”; Michele Benzamin-Miki, “This model stamped and approved’”

What: Electronic Pacific

When: July 12–August 17, 2013. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12–7pm, and Saturday 12–5pm. Opening reception Thursday, July 11, 6–9pm.

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: Free admission.

SOMArts Cultural Center presents Electronic Pacific, a group exhibition that investigates the impact of electronic and digital communication on intercultural exchange. Local and international artists with connections to the Pacific Rim transform shipping containers into installation spaces to showcase time-based media and electronic communications as transitional cultural space. These containers symbolize the mercantile routes that have defined intercultural exchange around the Pacific for many years, as well as the way culture is conveyed, packaged, and disseminated. Exhibited works deal with mixed and transnational geography, the mutability of language, and multiplicity in individual and community identity.

“Many geopolitical and and nationalistic identities evolved from a terrestrial understanding of cultural communities, but today, due to global digital telecommunication, one could redraw cultural maps to conceptualize the West Coast of the United States as the East Coast of the Pacific Ocean. New modes of communication can operate in a supra-national modality to swiftly redefine cultural norms.” — Justin Hoover, SOMArts Curator & Gallery Director

Juan Luna-Alvin depicts the punk movement as a cultural phenomena from the perspective of 60 Pacific Rim countries through a large-scale, conceptual cartography mural. Fragments of information, such as names of bands, characters, phrases, and dates, create a chaotic network of information addressing the reintroduction of punk identities and cultural history.

Jenny Odell, Lizabeth Eva Rossof and An Xiao explore notions of authorship in a digital age. Jenny Odell, a cameraless photographer, uses satellite images from Google Maps as a content source for her image production. Odell’s photo collages depict industrial objects of trade and transport around the Pacific extracted from their original surroundings and regrouped to create intricate, visual archives of similar objects.

Rossof communicates extensively through email and digital images with painters working in the replica production, commission and decorative painting industry in Xiamen, China, who produce her work. On display will be a series of 9, salon-style self-portraits in oil of each of the Xiamen artists commissioned by Rossof. Since many of these artists had never utilized their photo-realistic painting skills to create a self-portraits, the novel request forces the artists to grapple with new forms of representation and stylization, and to question the identity politics of the self.

Rossof also screens a 14 minute documentary featuring these 9 painters during the opening reception on Thursday, July 11, 6–9pm; screenings will begin every half-hour. Artist An Xiao, who draws ties between the movement and storytelling in the Lascaux cave paintings and the .gif, will also facilitate at the opening reception an audience-participatory installation “Grotte de l’Internetz” in which popular memes and internet images are translated into stencils and painted on rocks.

Participating guests can retrieve their rocks and participate in a .gif creation workshop facilitated by Xiao at a closing reception on Thursday, August 15, 6–9pm.

Lynn Marie Kirby, gal*in_dog aka Guillermo Galindo and Huang Xiaopeng focus on the intersections of language and the global economy. Guangzhou artist Xiaopeng employs Google translator tools to continually translate certain key phrases by Chinese politicians on the subject of globalization back and forth between target languages until the translation degrades to a poetic jumble, suggestive simultaneously of cohesion and degradation.

Xiaopeng also contributes a series of videos in which he features hip-hop artists pop culture references and soundbites translated between Chinese and English and vice versa, expressing in a playful way the unmooring of meaning and cultural signification through translation.

Lynn Marie Kirby utilizes salt, a shipping container and video to deal with language and the gaps in understanding created at the limits of technology. For Kirby, salt references the transition from a local to a global economy. The harvesting of this material traces a significant historical trajectory in the Bay Area landscape and California history, and mirrors a national trend of increased outsourcing, largely to Chinese mines.

Convergence Line: A Mixed Reality Concert accompanies the exhibition on Thursday, August 1, 2013, 7–9pm, free admission. A performance by Mexican-American punk band Desmadre en Krisis will be live-streamed as a projection on the gallery wall. A mixed reality performance featuring a layered, experimental, electro-acoustic composition by collaborators Laetitia Sonami and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon simultaneously spans cities: Sonami performs in the gallery at SOMArts and Kiyomi’s performance streams live from Los Angeles. The entire event will be simulcast on SF Commons, San Francisco’s public access television station and online.

Exhibiting artists include:
JD Beltran
gal*in_dog aka Guillermo Galindo
Lynn Marie Kirby
Allison Leigh Holt
Laura Hyunjhee Kim
Marya Krogstad
Juan Luna-Avin
Scott Minneman
Jenny Odell
Lizabeth Eva Rossof
Vaimaila Urale
Ai Weiwei
An Xiao
Li Xiaofei
Huang Xiaopeng

Performing artists include:
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon
Desmadre en Krisis
Laetitia Sonami

The following accompanying events are free to attend:

 

Opening reception with Film Screening
Thursday, July 11, 6–9pm

 

Convergence Line: A Mixed Reality Concert
Thursday, August 1, 2013, 7–9pm

 

Closing Reception with .GIF-making Workshop
Thursday, August 15, 2013, 7–9pm

Pictured above: Jenny Odell, 195 Yachts, Barges, Cargo Lines, Tankers and Other Ships (2010)

What: Imaginarium Group Exhibition

When: Exhibition May 11–17, 2013. Gallery hours: 12–5pm. Opening reception Thursday, May 16, 6–9pm

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: Free admission

The Department of Art + Architecture at The University of San Francisco presents IMAGINARIUM, an exhibition of BA thesis projects from Design + Fine Arts.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:
Frankie Barton
Nicole Carroll
Morgan Cassell
Krystina Considine
Parina Daraphet
Alyssa Fioravanti
Julia Garcia
Leonard Gray III
Ryan Hagosian
Rebecca Huerter
Kristoff B. Hunter
Alex Hartong
Chelsea V. Javier
Mia Johnson
Michelle Kaewthongkam
Charmian Liang
Mackenzie Lisenby
Stephanie J. Louie
Katherine Manlapaz
Brandon L. Mendiola
Dana Merrill
Devin Moses
Kelsy Natividad
Adriana Parada
Meredith Pentzien
Jessy Pietraszkiewicz
Kimberly Pirring
Wendy Rangel Limas
Victoria A. Roberts
Marin Shepardson
Jami Smith
Lauren Soares
Melissa Thomas
Nicholas Vizzutti

The exhibition is presented at SOMArts through participation in the Affordable Space Program, which provides below-market rental space, production and publicity assistance to nonprofit organizations. For more information visit our rentals page.

Image: photo by Shahrukh Fauquih

What: Poetry Reading: Navigating the underCurrents

When: Wednesday, May 15, 7–8:30pm

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: Free admission.

What: Threads in Unbound Kimonos, a Butoh Performance by Hiroko Tamano and Troupe, installation by Judy Shintani

When: Saturday, May 18, 4–5pm

Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)

How Much: $15 admission at the door

What: Prime group exhibition
When: Saturday, June 1, 2013, 6–9pm
Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)
How Much: Free admission

Join the artists of Prime for the opening reception of their first group exhibition! Their work ranges from abstract to classical figurative, landscape to contemporary, and everything in between. There will be free food and libations, live music by The Elefant Family, a silent art auction with bids starting at only $3, and a raffle drawing where 11 lucky people will walk away with an original piece of art created by a member of Prime.

Prime is a group of starving artists who share a studio space together. They all begin with a primed potential surface upon which they develop their vision of opening their creative process to the public.

Prime wants to create an event showcasing a collaboration of different genres of painting and make them accessible for everyone. They are looking for innovative ways to turn everybody in the room into an active participant and a potential collector. In an effort to destroy the disconnect most viewers have when going to a gallery event, this group makes their creations affordable for everyone. Their emphasis is on making  people excited about being able to own artwork and to be able to become a collector.

Why Prime? They have the intention of taking something that is usually for an elite group of people and making it available for everyone. Sharing art is their prime focus.

Exhibiting artists include:
Benjamen Craig
Madeline Glaspey
Golda King
Jackson Lain
Hak Lee
Kristina Leporati
Shailaz Mody
Jacqueline Moore
Gabriella Moilina
Dayna Palazzolo
Cathleen Van Bergen
Kevin Moore

This exhibition is presented at SOMArts through participation in the Affordable Space Program, which provides below-market rental space, production and publicity assistance to nonprofit organizations. For more information visit our rentals page. Exhibition sponsorship provided by System Pavers.
Pictured above: “Prime” by Madeline Glaspey, “Pathways” by Gabriella Moilina