Radical Presence

A day full of performances and lectures by exhibition artists.

Noon — 10 PM

Benjamin Patterson, Penny for Your Thoughts

12:30 PM, Grand Lobby

In Penny for Your Thoughts, Patterson invites participants to care for their minds by “investing in the best,” imbuing the performance with a type of humor common to many Fluxus projects. By having viewers “try on” the ideas of others, Patterson encourages them to reframe how they think while investigating the commodification of the transfer of ideas.

Tameka Norris, Untitled

1:30 PM, Downstairs Galleries

Norris’s untitled performance tests not only the artist’s ability to tolerate pain, but also the audience’s ability to bear witness to pain. The artist literally bleeds for art as she first cuts herself and then marks the walls in an action that gives new meaning to the term gestural painting.

Senga Nengudi, R.S.V.P.

2:30 PM, Downstairs Galleries

Maren Hassinger activates Senga Nengudi’s work from the well-known 1955–77 series R.S.V.P. Nengudi creates an installation out of common nylon stockings that are stretched into poetic sculptural form. In activating the work, Hassinger moves through it, pulling, stretching, and knotting the nylon and, in doing so, highlighting the muscular forces of the body itself.

Theaster Gates’s See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court

3:30 PM, Downstairs Galleries

This installation evokes a classroom that has been relocated into YBCA’s galleries. Created from tables, chairs and desks salvaged from a now-closed public school on Chicago’s south side, this installation — much like a classroom — is designed as an experience for learning created by the people assembled in and around it. Kicking off the series is Radical Presence curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, who will discuss the development of the exhibition.

Benjamin Patterson, Pond

4:30 PM, Downstairs Galleries

Following a score composed by the artist, participants in Pond stand around a grid divided by intervals of time and phrasing of sound, equipped with wind-up frog toys. The frogs are released and move across the grid according to chance-based system; the performance evolves as a cacophony of sound as each participant’s frog lands and stops in various quadrants.

Maren Hassinger, Women’s Work

5:30 PM, Grand Lobby

This meditative performance, in which Hassinger and four others repetitively manipulate newspaper, alludes to sewing, knitting, and other activities traditionally labeled women’s work. Their communal gestures are amplified using microphones and speakers, transforming the simple actions into a cacophonous sound piece.

Pope.L’s Costume Made of Nothing

6:30 PM, Downstairs Galleries

This is a durational work in which a local performer, Brontez Purnell, interacts with a unique sculpture in the gallery. Purnell will repeat the performance at periodic intervals throughout the run of the exhibition.

Jamal Cyrus, Texas Fried Tenor

7:15 PM, 701 Mission Plaza

Part of the series Learning to Work the Saxophone, Texas Fried Tenor explores the importance of the saxophone in American music, particularly blues and jazz, which are celebrated as America’s original musical forms. Accompanied by Jawaad Taylor on pocket trumpets and electronics, this duo performance is a new iteration of Texas Fried Tenor that references musicians Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, who were working in California in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Shaun Leonardo, The Eulogy

8:30 PM, Sculpture Court

This new performance, commissioned for the San Francisco presentation of Radical Presence, takes Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man as its starting point. As Leonardo performs the speech given by the novel’s narrator at Brother Clifton’s funeral, a local brass marching band performs a routine that mimics the impact of the speech, interweaving the artist’s words with choreographed moments of confusion and disorder. These words serve as a memorial, a rejection, a challenge, and call to action, all at once. Appropriate funeral attire is encouraged.

YBCA is thrilled to be the only West Coast venue for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, the first comprehensive survey of performance art by black visual artists from the United States and the Caribbean. The artists included in this exhibition have been using performance in their work for more than five decades, generating an incredible wealth of performance art that has been largely unrecognized until now. Radical Presence explores the history of black performance traditions within visual arts, beginning with Fluxus and Conceptual art in the 1960s all the way through present practices. This groundbreaking exhibition features video and photo documentation of performances, performance scores and installations, audience interactive works, as well as works created as a result of performances. Live performances will be scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition, including a special opening day celebration packed with nine performances.

The exhibition features work by three generations of artists including Derrick Adams, Terry Adkins, Papo Colo, Jamal Cyrus, Jean‐Ulrick Désert, Zachary Fabri, Sherman Fleming, Coco Fusco, Theaster Gates, Girl [Chitra Ganesh + Simone Leigh], David Hammons, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Wayne Hodge, Satch Hoyt, Ulysses S. Jenkins, Shaun Leonardo, Kalup Linzy, Dave McKenzie, Jayson Musson aka Hennessy Youngman, Senga Nengudi, Tameka Norris, Lorraine O’Grady, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, Rammellzee, Jacolby Satterwhite, Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons, Sur Rodney (Sur), Danny Tisdale, and Carrie Mae Weems.