7:00 - 8:00
United States
Members of Collective Genus, a group of three Bay Area art collectives, will be in conversation with Jeff Gunderson local art historian, librarian and archivist on the subjects of collaboration, mutual support networks and the history of art collectives in the Bay Area.
Collective Genus is a group of Bay Area artists working across media and subject matter but united by common goals and a commitment to the greater arts community. The group is comprised of three distinct smaller collectives: Three Point Nine Art Collective, ONE + ONE + TWO and Borderline Art Collective. “Genus” references the taxonomic category above species, and denotes the entity’s status as both an aggregation of smaller groups and a subset of a larger category: the greater Bay Area arts community.
The three collectives of Collective Genus were first brought together through a 2019 Kadist Institute program, in which Mercer Union and Native Art Department International (NADI) generously shared the platform of their artist residency with local artist groups. That project sparked the desire for continued collaboration, and Collective Genus was formed.
Jeff Gunderson has been the Librarian and Archivist at SFAI since 1981. He has written on the history of California photography, the San Francisco art scene of the 1940s, and done presentations on artists Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, Ed Ruscha, Charles Howard, the history of LGBTQ art in San Francisco, the history of Bay Area conceptual art, and the influence of art libraries on artists. He also did the introductory essay to Black Power/Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch. He is currently working on a collection of essays about open water swimming.
Rodney Ewing drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate. His work has been exhibited at Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, CA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Root Division, Jack Fischer Gallery, Museum of the African Diaspora, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Alter Space Gallery, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Ictus Projects. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts both in San Francisco, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, California, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, and Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking West Virginia University.
Jacqueline Francis is a writer, educator, and arts consultant who lives in San Francisco. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and a co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). She curated the exhibition “A Matter of Time: New Work by Adia Millett” at Hong Kong’s Galerie du Monde (November 19, 2020—January 10, 2021). Francis is the Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. She serves on the Luggage Store Gallery’s Advisory Board, and she is the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center, a multidisciplinary resource and advocacy site for LGBT artistic expression in San Francisco. A member of the 3.9 Art Collective and Collective Genus, Francis creates the occasional visual art object. She received an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2017.
Amy Lange is an artist based in San Francisco, California. She is a native of the west coast, having grown up half her life in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other half in rural Central Oregon. She received her BFA in Fibers from the University of Oregon in 2009, and received her MFA from California College of the Arts in spring 2017. She is a founding member of Borderline Art Collective in San Francisco and works in arts education.
Kathryn Ian is a multimedia artist, musician and performer. She is inspired by themes relating to ecology, both scientifically and philosophically, and uses imaging and audio technologies to explore the relationships between the intimate and the environmental. She is a founding member of New Wilderness Society multidisciplinary collective, ONE + ONE + TWO art collective, and The CCC Project, an arts and humanities education platform created to empower youth.
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