"I AM..."

“I AM...”

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“I AM...”

CURATED BY ADRIANNE RAMSEY “I AM…”, curated by Adrianne Ramsey, featured 15 artists whose work questions and challenges established definitions and historical narratives in regards to personal forms of identification, while levying questions of representation, commodification, and the value of one’s identity.

The show traced a historical through-line starting with the Civil Rights Era imagery conjured by the exhibition’s title, moving into a recognition of the energy and urgency of the identity politics of the 1980 – 90s, and on into our current era—where the language of discrimination and state violence simply shifted—finding viable stakes in the age of social media and Donald Trump.

EXHIBITION DATES July 9 – August 14, 2021

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EXHIBITING ARTISTS Alexandra Bell Storm Bookhard Brittany Rose Bradley Katie Dorame Lisa Jan Fong Camilo Godoy Mark Harris Kacy Jung** Jear Keokham** Nasim Moghadam Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello (aka Rael San Fratello) Reniel Del Rosario Stephanie Syjuco Taravat Talepasand Andrew Wilson ** Root Division Alum

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Nasim Moghadam SelfHood I, 2018 Archival pigment print, staples, wooden board 22 x 22 in.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 10 . . . . . . Foreword by Renée Rhodes & Michelle Mansour 14. . . . . . . Black Box in the White Cube: The Exhibition as Protest by Adrianne Ramsey 20. . . . . . Alexandra Bell 22. . . . . . Storm Bookhard 24. . . . . . Brittany Rose Bradley 26. . . . . . From the Has-Been to Photographic Collaboration by Delpine Sims 30. . . . . . Katie Dorame 32. . . . . . Lisa Jan Fong 34. . . . . . Camilo Godoy 36. . . . . . Curating a Central American Art CARAVANA by Fátima Ramírez 40. . . . . . Mark Harris 42. . . . . . Kacy Jung** 44. . . . . . Jear Keokham** 46. . . . . . Nasim Moghadam 48. . . . . . Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello (aka Rael San Fratello) 50. . . . . . Reniel Del Rosario 52. . . . . . Stephanie Syjuco 54. . . . . . Transparent in Name by Qianjin Montoya 58. . . . . . Taravat Talepasand 60. . . . . . Andrew Wilson

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FOREWORD Renée Rhodes, Art Programs Manager Michelle Mansour, Executive Director Three times each year, Root Division holds an open call for curatorial proposals designed to give space and voice to a new group of emerging curators. Every year we are impressed and emboldened by the development of the work we see emerging from this program. The past 18 months have been full of immense challenges, and seeing continued commitment, adaptability, and powerfully unfettered storytelling ensures us that the arts are alive in the Bay Area.

In a year and a half full of transition, social unrest, pandemic, and the uncertainty of crisis, curator Adrianne Ramsey has brought a thoughtful process of growth, generosity, and dedication in the curation of “I AM…” Throughout all this noise, a powerful and articulate exhibition has emerged.

The curatorial kernel of this show began with an exploration around the layered injustices faced by BIPOC community members everyday, through state violence, as well as through physical and ideological brutalities. With her curatorial process, Adrianne has worked to create an elegant inquiry into identity and identification, which reveals the ways in which individuals offer productive resistance to systematic violence and discrimination.

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Her curatorial vision, bolstered by the artists in the show, brings a cutting sense of clarity through layered stories, clever installations, paintings, textiles, and photographs. Through all of this, the exhibition has grown into an elegant response to the injustices embedded deep within our culture.

Root Division acts as a home for the presentation of visual art and a launching pad for emerging artists and curators. As an organization, we are always seeking ways to connect visual storytelling with social issues that arc well beyond the gallery and into lived experiences. We are inspired to watch this group of artists and Adrianne’s clear curatorial voice as they continue to lead, ask questions, and weave intricate connections between personal experience and the unravelings of our larger social context.

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“I AM…” installation detail

by Graham Holoch

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BLACK BOX IN THE WHITE CUBE: THE EXHIBITION AS PROTEST Adrianne Ramsey, Curator Since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, we as a nation have witnessed BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) protest on and off the Internet in order to fight against the ideological and senseless violence they often face.

Unfortunately, the continued passage and implementation of punitive enforcement policies is a painful reminder of the political and social marginalization of select peoples in the United States.

This sentiment is also reflected in institutions—for example, art spaces aren’t neutral, but instead sites of contest and critique that shape narratives about the objects they display. Recent protests at art spaces raise issues surrounding representation and patronage. But while art spaces call attention to various forms of perception, are they presenting art in a forum that advocates for rational discourse? Are they advocating for the inclusion of artists that are traditionally excluded? Is there sincerity in centering an exhibition’s theme on marginalization? There is a huge lack of diversity across many arenas in art spaces, particularly curatorial staffing and senior leadership. Thus in turn, exhibition programming typically panders to white artists and colonialist themes, thereby turning the art space into the “white cube.” The consistent ostracism of BIPOC artists and curators constrains them into the “black box.”

The results of the tumultuous 2016 U.S. presidential election sparked a concerted effort by some institutions and curators to include marginalized voices and expand exhibition programming to be more reflective of the current times. However, this heightened period of identity politics dominating the U.S. arts sector is not foreign to today. The “Culture Wars” of the final two decades of the twentieth century had a strong influence on a newer generation of emerging and early career artists and curators who made work, or debuted exhibitions, that intersected

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art and politics. A significant case study is the groundbreaking 1993 Whitney Biennial, due to its ambitious, strategic approach of presenting artwork from BIPOC artists that depicted the harsh realities of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which was founded in 1931 and focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century art, found itself smack in the middle of the crossfire between art and identity politics. For years, the Whitney was under pressure from activist groups to exhibit the work of marginalized artists; by 1991, only 10% of their presented artists were non-white. There were many changes in the two years leading up to the 1993 Biennial: the Rodney King beating and subsequent Los Angeles Riots, queer rights and the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, heightened third-wave feminism, and Democrat Bill Clinton winning the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election. Tensions were high and artists responded to the increasing divisions through their creative practices.

The 1993 Biennial was organized under the direction of David Ross, then director of the Whitney. Ross appointed Elizabeth Sussman as chief curator, with John Hanhardt, Lisa Phillips, and Thelma Golden functioning as co-curators. This curatorial committee broke the mold and proved that instead of simply adjusting the contemporary art scene from year to year, radical changes could be made in its presentation. The Biennial presented the work of 82 artists, most of whom were BIPOC, openly gay, and/or women, and half of whom worked in film, video, and conceptual art. Because the show was spread throughout the Whitney’s five-storied building, many of the artists had the luxury of occupying whole galleries. The majority of the artwork presented attempted to de-construct the power of “whiteness” and challenge the notion of what it meant to be an American at that time.

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Each of the essays included in the Biennial catalogue addressed the cultural climate of the 1990’s and the ways in which the selected works responded to specific community and identity politics. Golden, who was hired as the Whitney’s first Black curator in 1988, played an integral role in the racially charged curatorial discourse that defined the 1993 Biennial. In her catalogue essay, “What’s White…?”, Golden discussed the complexity of race relations, racial identity, and the relationship between whiteness and power. She also investigated how artists’ practices were more focused on the politics embedded in their work: “Artists in the nineties have begun to fully deconstruct the marginality-centrality paradigm. Marginality, in effect, becomes the norm while the center is increasingly indefinable and perhaps irrelevant. Although many may call this Biennial the “multicultural” or “politically correct” Biennial, it should be read as a larger project that insists that decentralization and the embracing of the margins have become dominant. This exhibition acknowledges the varied personal and aesthetic strategies that inform this unfolding dialogue, this creation of a narrative which acknowledges the post-national, post-essential identity.”

Golden further suggested that a discussion about identity politics is inherently tied to issues of individual identity, which is informed by one’s relationship to one’s community. She expressed the Whitney’s commitment to providing a critical space for these issues to be interrogated. Her sentiments were directly reflected in the Biennial’s selected works, which represented a watershed moment where issues pertaining to identity were at the core of artists’ practices, and institutions responded to these concerns.

This is not to imply that the 1993 Biennial was the first time that these overtly political conversations took place within the context of the museum, or to insinuate that museums became multicultural utopias, but rather, this was an examination of a moment where issues pertaining to identity politics became prevalent within American art institutions. The Biennial’s focus on community and communal identity spoke to the curators’

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interests in providing a forum for perspectives that were seldom represented within a mainstream contemporary art context.

Through their work, the selected artists revised and recontextualized history in an attempt to decenter normative paradigms, while empowering the disempowered. The roster, which included Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Fred Wilson, Daniel J. Martinez, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, and George Holliday—the latter of which didn’t identify as an artist, but had recorded the Rodney King beating from his apartment building—resulted in a chorus of concerns that reflected the political ethos of the times. Despite its initial positive reception, the 1993 Biennial soon received a wealth of contemptuous criticism. The exhibition ignited a pervasive and controversial discourse surrounding identity politics that laid a fertile foundation for subsequent exhibitions, thus resulting in the inclusion of works that conspicuously addressed identity. The harsh criticism was not only directed towards artists, but also the curators and institutions that organized these shows. These critiques brought into question the ways in which politics should, or as some critics argued, should not exist within the museum. By the turn of the century, conversations pertaining to identity politics in the broader art community waned, and discussions that were at one moment prominent became seemingly less vigorous. This is not to imply that artists were no longer addressing issues of race and identity within their individual practices. Instead, the broader conversation evolved from taking on an activist stance to a more nuanced position characterized by an absence of overt interrogation of identity politics within exhibition themes. This transformation was not simply a result of autonomous decisions made by artists, but rather symptomatic of external market and institutional forces, transformations in funding structures, and the backlash directed towards 1990’s era exhibitions.

So the question is: how should politics exist within the space of the art institution? The 1993 Biennial was attacked for the inclusion of narratives outside of the normative art historical

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discourse. It was emblematic of a moment, similar to the one we are in today, where concerns and theorization about identity politics entered into contemporary art and curating. Many of the criticisms rejected the privileging of politics as an exhibition trope. There seems to be a desire to separate politics into a realm outside of the contemporary art discourse. This desire, which perhaps demonstrates nostalgia for a more traditional formalist analysis, is a reflection of the conservative and antiquated paradigm that led to the formation of this overtly political Biennial.

The selected works required a more thorough and complex investigation than a formalist analysis can provide, and the move towards a political thematic provided a context that reflects and is a reflection of the ethos of these groups. In addition, the lens on community politics within the art space brings attention to the invisibility of these marginalized groups within the art historical narrative.

The energy and urgency of identity politics that dominated the end of the twentieth century never really went away, the language just shifted to find viable stakes in the age of social media and Donald Trump. The spirit that the 1993 Biennial embodied is still alive, and questions surrounding identity are as prevalent as ever. However, the strategies to subvert have evolved; cultural producers must now navigate a new cultural climate that privileges curatorial sensibilities. It is entirely possible for society to negotiate our differences in a climate where people are so polarized, angry, and afraid. Art institutions need to host exhibitions that facilitate nuanced and complicated conversations surrounding identity and safety, while juxtaposing and combining artworks that have been fundamentally made out of our present moment of turbulence and amplified emotions, such as anxiety, vulnerability, and rage. Against such a background of uncertainty and strife, exhibitions should seek to set a frame of questions and guided discourse, particularly relating to how we can transform our perceptions of marginalized groups. The challenge will be to absolve the racial paradigm of the “white cube” and resolve the exclusion of the “black box” from what is, in reality, an open space that should have no barriers.

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Acknowledgements This exhibition took an immense amount of effort that involved many interlocutors, but I reserve the highest thanks to the featured artists for their participation and willingness to share their incredible works. I must thank Michelle Mansour, Executive Director of Root Division, and Renée Rhodes, Art Programs Manager at Root Division, for their extraordinary commitment in recognizing this ambitious project. Thank you for green-lighting this exhibition in its beginning stages and nurturing me as an emerging curator. “I AM…” is my first curatorial project and its final product would not be what it is without Michelle and Renée.

This project has also benefited from Wayee Chu, who provided much appreciated support, mentorship, and friendship over the past year, as well as facilitating the loan of Alexandra Bell’s piece alongside Ethan Beard. I must also thank Dr. Janet MohleBoetani and the team at Catharine Clark Gallery, Catharine Clark, Aileen Mangan, and Anton Stuebner, for organizing the loan of Stephanie Syjuco’s work. I offer my sincere gratitude to Qianjin Montoya, Fátima Ramírez, and Delphine Sims for their excellent contributions to this catalogue and the research and care they undertook in developing their essays. I would also like to thank Jourdan Papadopoulos for her helpful feedback on my curatorial essay. Huge thanks to Michael and Phi for designing this incredible catalogue and to the whole team at Root Division for being super supportive of this exhibition. Finally, it is with deep gratitude that I thank my mother, Donna Ramsey, my sister, Monica Ramsey, and my dear friend, Maliko Pearson, for their valuable support and guidance in helping me realize this project.

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ALEXANDRA BELL

A Teenager With Promise (Annotated), 2018 Screenprints and archival pigment print on paper (triptych) 44 x 105 in.

Artwork courtesy of Wayee Chu & Ethan Beard

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STORM BOOKHARD

Nick and Niko, 2019 Inkjet print 14 x 11 in.

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Left to right: Niko, 2019 Inkjet print 14 x 7 in.

Laith, 2019 Inkjet print 11 x 14 in.

Nick and Niko, 2019 Inkjet print 14 x 11 in.

Bek, 2019 Inkjet print 14 x 11 in.

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BRITTANY ROSE BRADLEY

Left to right: Cultural Workers, 2019 Archival inkjet of tintype 14 x 11 in.

Vega Family, 2019 Archival inkjet of tintype 14 x 11 in.

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Left to right: Charlotte Nimjeh, 2019 Archival inkjet of tintype 14 x 11 in.

Andrew Jolivette, 2019 Archival inkjet of tintype 14 x 11 in.

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FROM THE HAS-BEEN TO PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLABORATION Delphine Sims, Ph.D. candidate, UC Berkeley History of Art Department We are not looking at the original tintype photograph taken during the two days of community gathering and protest at “Pioneer Monument,” a series of statues and reliefs celebrating early white settler colonialism in San Francisco during April 2019.

We are looking at a print of a print (see Brittany Rose Bradley images on previous page.) Of course, the relationship between an original and a reproduction, a negative and a positive image, is intrinsic to the photograph and theories of photography, but I note this because the transition from the tintype to the prints of this exhibition is a means to discuss the varying levels of mediation that constitute the promising and necessary process of photographic collaboration. We do not encounter the tintype, because the tintype is not for us. It is also not for the photographer. The tintype is for Lindsie Bear, Tere Almaguer, Carolyn Kuali’i, Kebo Drew, and Janeen Antoine. When we have the honor of experiencing this photograph, we have the honor of witnessing and engaging in a presentation of the sitters on their terms and a version of themselves in a moment of reclamation, which they then chose to offer to this world.

I want to play with the dual possibilities in the photographic phrase “that has been” to offer different ways of understanding the practice of photography and strategic actions to counter white supremacist histories. As theorized by Roland Barthes in the text “Camera Lucida” (1980), “that has been” speaks to the essence of a photograph—that the medium is a record of the past and the camera is a tool that freezes a fleeting moment.

Barthes offers us a theory that what we see in the photograph means that what or who is depicted did indeed exist, that they were there during a time that once occurred. I also play with the colloquial “has-been”, or the idea that something is old and outdated. Documented in this tintype is the empty plinth that

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once supported Early Days, a statue that depicted a Spanish Missionary leaning over a kneeling Indigenous man but which is now removed from the “Pioneer Monument” site. In this record, we witness such statuary as “has-been” objects, monuments which the public has worked to remove in acts against the legacies and celebration of racist, imperialist, and genocidal white supremacist figures. As a promising consequence of their deinstallation, we are only left with photographic documentation of their prior installation, an image archive now in existence to disrupt the celebration of a colonial past and to honor Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures. Let us now focus on the event that occurred that spring day, and why the invitation to collaborate reimagines photographic and artistic relationships and provides distinctive counternarratives against singular notions of what constitutes the has-been Early Days.

The day was gray and rainy, not an ideal day for an outdoor gathering, and yet scores of Indigenous folk descended onto “Pioneer Monument” and Early Days. There, participants began to position themselves within this local cartography of colonial and western supremacy. As invited by the San Francisco Art Commission for their 2019 exhibition The Continuous Thread, photographer Brittany Rose Bradley joined the swell of people to mark the removal of racist monuments. There, she set up her weighty large format camera, a developing tent, and began to enact her keen passion for collaborating with potential photographic subjects. Bradley, a bisexual woman and artist of Indegenous descent, inserts herself into a long history of photographers who are dedicated to the wet collodion method of capturing and developing photographs on glass plates, but with a thoughtful understanding of the inequalities inherent to the medium and the harmful histories of white artists’ relation to

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subjects. She extends great, nonauthoritative care to those that stand before her lens. If folks elect to pose for Bradley, she invites them to position themselves how they feel most comfortable.

Children and the elderly are often given the option to stand, not only because of the long exposure times required of precarious 19th-century processes (sometimes upwards of 5 minutes) like wet-collodion, but also because historically it was the most respected person within the photographed event that was given a chair (typically not the Indigenous subjects but rather the resident white man). Further, there are those iconic photographers whose names are emblazoned in the history of photography (names I won’t rehearse here) who crafted utter fictions of the traditions and look of Indigenous peoples as part of their photographic business. They sold stereotypes of Indigeneity while staking claim to a masterful artist practice. This is another “has-been”—both the photographers who continue such practices and the history which celebrates them without critique. While Bradley certainly is very skilled in the way she frames her images and processes the temperamental wet-collodion tintypes, her interaction and the afterlife of the final images are all in support of those that she photographed.

Despite and because of the ubiquity of the digital image, there is a resurgence of interest in wet-collodion and other 19th-century processes amongst the photography community. But for much of the broader public, our familiarity with high resolution images often makes the aesthetic of the wet-collodion seem foreign.

Understanding this, Bradley offers context for the history she intervenes into and cautions sitters about the way their image appears in the developed print. Because wet-collodion is hypersensitive to light and temperature changes, there are limits to the control one has over the final image. Rather, one must embrace the oddities and failures that come with the medium, as well as the likelihood that representation of oneself is typically not that of a detailed, color, digital image. Bradley notes for her sitter/ collaborators that the wet-collodion produces deep blacks and muddled grays; that skin tones will appear darker than perhaps

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expected; that sharp focus is compromised in the murky, swirled emulsifier of the process. The resulting images are mediations of Lindsie Bear, Tere Almaguer, Carolyn Kuali’i, Kebo Drew, and Janeen Antoine; a version of themselves that places them into not a long and complex image history, but a version which they approve and now own.

In the United States, claims of ownership or copyright to an image belong to the photographer. Such a system allows photographers to build comfortable careers from their craft, but it also allows for some exploitative practices, wherein those that are photographed typically have no right to their own image. Bradley beautifully interrupts this precedent through a practice that undermines her ownership of the material she develops. Again, we see the secondary, paper print of this photograph because the original tintype belongs to those that are featured in the photograph.

Bradley does not and cannot profit from these images. In the spirit of collaboration and in a direct rejection of “has-been” traditional photography, this tintype is in the care of the true and rightful owner. Indeed, there is a familial element that is a part of this series—the photographs live with the sitter and amongst their personal archive of family photographs. Images are housed in circumstances of deep love and care amongst their kin.

We are witnesses to Bradley’s mediations, as they are swept into this generous process of collaboration. Encountering this image gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the past and note the “has-been,” but only so we can thoughtfully embrace more critical histories and more just futures. Through a photograph, we too become promisingly entangled in extended collaboration with Lindsie Bear, Tere Almaguer, Carolyn Kuali’i, Kebo Drew, Janeen Antoine, and Brittany Rose Bradley.

Delphine Sims is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art department at UC Berkeley, where she studies the history of photography in the Americas.

Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, geography, and urbanity inform and redefine landscape photography.

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KATIE DORAME

I am not Rebecca: in the Garden with Percy, 2021 Oil and acrylic on canvas 48.5 x 37 in.

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LISA JAN FONG

One Strand at a Time, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 in.

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CAMILO GODOY

GLOBAL RANKING, 2011 Lenticular postcards 4 x 6 in. each

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CURATING A CENTRAL AMERICAN ART CARAVANA Fátima Ramírez, Executive Director, Acción Latina & Co-curator of CARAVANA: Mobilizing Central American Art I co-curated the multidisciplinary traveling exhibition CARAVANA: Mobilizing Central American Art (1984 – Present) to center U.S. Central American artists living in California, as well as across the United States. I wanted to examine our experiences in relation to the impact of mass migration, family separation, and the legacy of political action and solidarity with the people of Central America.

There were two key defining moments, both of which happened while I was a college student, that inspired me to pursue this art curation. First, I attended a lecture by Carlos “Santiago” Consalvi at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA) in 2012. As Director of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in El Salvador, he spoke about a rare photo collection of the martyr and saint Monseñor Oscar Romero. During the Q&A, members of the audience asked Consalvi how they could share their objects with him to bring back to the museum in El Salvador. A lightbulb went off in my head that made me question why we didn’t have a place that featured Central American art locally. That moment helped me realize there was a void of Central American artistic and historic representation. Second, as the daughter of Salvadoran refugees, I was incredibly moved when I witnessed my first allSalvadoran artist exhibition at SOMARTS Cultural Center in 2013.

The show “Mourning & Scars: 20 Years After the War”, curated by Roxana Leiva, commemorated the 20th anniversary of the end of the civil war in El Salvador. This multimedia group show featured 12 artists who drew from personal experiences and family stories to explore reconstruction and healing during El Salvador’s postwar period.

Fast forward to 2016, when the rise of 45 awakened a dangerous level of xenophobia that attacked Central American immigrants, as well as many other historically marginalized groups across

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the world. Nonsensical comments in conservative media that wrongfully identified El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as “three Mexican countries” demonstrated national ignorance about the geographic location from which migrant caravans were fleeing. Additional racist remarks were made by the former president in 2018, dubbing El Salvador, Haiti, and parts of Africa as “shithole countries.” 45 refused to restore temporary protected status to people from those places, reinforcing a hegemonic worldview that dismisses territories that the United States can no longer manipulate.

The anger I felt inside transformed into a deep sadness as more reports depicted violent loss of life at the border. The tragic story that went viral about the drowning of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, while they attempted to cross the Rio Grande in 2019 hit too close to home, as I had become a mother the year prior. A new metaphor formed in my brain as I thought about the poor mother, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, who had to watch as her baby and partner were swept away. As a Central American diaspora, we continuously witness the disintegration of our families, first because of civil wars, then because of natural disasters, and now because of ongoing migrant caravans where children either risk their lives and travel unaccompanied—or they are separated from their families at the border. Migrant youth, who traveled unaccompanied, made headlines in 2014, as 68,541 children were apprehended at the U.S. Mexico border; approximately 75% of those children arrived from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. More recently, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that more than 5,400 children were separated from their parents at the border from 2017- 2019, hundreds of which have been held in ICE detention in California, Southern Texas, and Pennsylvania.

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Through our exhibition, which was featured at SOMARTS Cultural Center from March 12 – April 15, 2021 and still offers a virtual presentation on their website at the time of this writing, it was my goal—along with both of my co-curators, Mauricio Ramírez and Josué Rojas—to humanize the experiences of recently arrived migrants. The show featured 33 artists, the majority of whom were U.S. Central American artists or artists in solidarity with Central America. One of the programs that we developed as part of the exhibition was called “RAICES MIGRANT(ES)”, through which we hosted two art and storytelling workshops in partnership with the organizations CARECEN and Good Samaritan to publish testimonies from migrant youth who defined migration in their own words in the legacy bilingual newspaper El Tecolote.

One of our sources of inspiration for this project was the national 1984 Artists’ Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, which began in New York but spread to dozens of cities across the country, including San Francisco. This cultural movement served as a precedent and historical reference point for how art production can mobilize communities on a national scale to empathize with Central American families. To close the exhibition, we hosted a screening featuring two films by filmmakers Michelle Angela Ortiz and Kenia Guillen that address the impacts of family separation and the awkward tension of family reunification. My curatorial practice through the CARAVANA art exhibition is deeply personal, and I hope it serves as both a call to civic action and as a catalyst to inspire more Central American curated art shows.

Fátima Ramírez is the Executive Director of the San Francisco based nonprofit Acción Latina and a co-curator of the traveling multimedia exhibition CARAVANA: Mobilizing Central American Art (1984 – Present).

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MARK HARRIS

Untitled, 2021 Mixed media on panel 20 x 16 in.

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The Neo-Coons, 2021 Mixed media on panel 20 x 16 in.

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KACY JUNG

Above: Free Will is an Illusion #8, #6, #2, 2019 Archival inkjet prints 24 x 16 in. each Right: Free Will is an Illusion (Performance), 2020 Single channel HD video 1:13 min.

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JEAR KEOKHAM

Knowledge is Power #2, 2017/2021 Mass produced diploma frames Variable dimensions

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NASIM MOGHADAM

SelfHood I, 2018 Archival pigment print, staples, wooden board 22 x 22 in.

SelfHood II, 2018 Archival pigment print, staples, wooden board 30 x 22 in.

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RAEL SAN FRATELLO

Reunite, 2018 Plywood, latex, and acrylic paint 48 x 72 in.

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RENIEL DEL ROSARIO

The Ballot, 2021 13 papier-mâché piñatas Dimensions variable

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STEPHANIE SYJUCO

Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N), 2017 Pigmented inkjet print Edition of 8 + 2AP; edition 8/8 41 x 31 in.

Collection of Dr. Janet Mohle-Boetani. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

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TRANSPARENT IN NAME Qianjin Montoya, Assistant Curator, The Contemporary Jewish Museum Visual and tactile artist Stephanie Syjuco engages component details within social systems and global structures of labor, models of consumerism, and information sharing networks. She makes work from various social contexts that have been created, expanded, reacted to, and sometimes destroyed by individuals, as well as the masses. Syjuco often incorporates political symbols and images to present the inequitable and dangerous realities of marginalized people within these systems and by, “crafting analog manifestations of digital content, flow, and process, Syjuco navigates the distortion of images in the internet era and effects of political upheaval as perceived by young citizens on the verge of adulthood.” One work, Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N), made in 2017 and exhibited in her solo show CITIZENS from the same year, is included in the 2021 group exhibition “I AM...” at Root Division in San Francisco. The image is a striking example of the ways contemporary artists might decontextualize certain visual components of identity, and in this case, what contemporary “American” identity can look like today.

Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N) depicts a portrait-style photograph with a human form in the center. Seated, with a semi-sheer, checkered cloth draped over their head, the sitter’s body is enveloped by the soft folds of fabric that continue over their legs and feet and out of frame. The image appears black and white, but it is a color photograph; a hint of warm skin tone is visible through the material. The background transitions from gray to black behind the sitter, and the veil-like fabric is patterned in gray and white—it is a color photograph made up of black and white. The perceivable features of the individual are obscured by the near-opacity of the fabric, making the material experience and relational understanding of the image uneasy. The design on the fabric is recognizable as the background of unmarked sections

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of Photoshop image files. Named for its function in digital design software, the “transparent background” in Photoshop is a gray and white checkerboard pattern—transparent in name only, as it is very much visible.

Even as the soft folds in the semi-sheer fabric nod to a certain marble-chiseled veil around the delicate face of a mourning mother sitting in a church near Rome; Syjuco’s Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N) challenges our ability in the current moment to situate or classify what we are seeing. A published description of the image gives us more information about the sitter, an undocumented college graduate who received her education through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in the United States. She, along with other DACA students, has had to employ a “protective anonymity” and “claim a presence where their individual identities must be absent.” This intersection of policy and personhood further complicates the role of visibility in American society.

In colonial archives, namely European and American, historical accounts of Black, Indigenous, and Asian experiences are rendered in/visible—they may have been present, but the way they lived was othered, ridiculed, or destroyed. In my research for this essay, I came upon Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s definition of a “bare life” where one’s “entire existence is ... stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land.” This failed political and national determinacy, insofar as a person can be stripped of protection and safety on certain “land,” crystalizes another outcome of a white, male, Western philosopher’s understanding of the inequitable and dangerous immigrant experience in the United States. It illustrates that an immigrant in the United States is

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fated to fall on either side of visibility—of being seen or rendered invisible—whether or not they are perceived as “American.”

Syjuco often correlates her visual art practice with historical moments underpinning the contemporary ideas and connections made in her work. In an interview, Syjuco discusses the functional divide between art and activism: “These are objects that were created to function in the world, and they have entered a visual archive as artifacts. But they also function as contemporary touchstones to help us realize that we have been in this situation before.” Syjuco’s works become impactful cultural objects by providing a visual representation of the ways certain people’s lived realities do and do not align with social, political, or perceived status in the United States. It is precisely this kind of uncertainty and precarity that is woven through the history and identity of every American today, whether or not they have experienced the threats that can come from it.

Total Transparency Filter (Portrait of N) offers us, the viewers, a moment of psychological and interpersonal reflection to reconcile the idea of a nation “indivisible” in the face of constant marginalization, division, and extraction. Considering the complexities of visibility in the U.S. includes recognizing it as a path toward participation and inclusion in American society, as well as a tool used by systems of power to place marginalized communities in danger of being singled out, ostracized, and worse. In Syjuco’s work the question is not about when the point of transition from Agamben’s “bare life” to fellow American happens, but when or if it does—how are you implicated in the ways it can then be otherwise withheld, manipulated, or reverted?

Qianjin Montoya is assistant curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA. Her practice includes curating, writing, and research, with a focus on institutional histories and the narratives of women and people of color.

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TARAVAT TALEPASAND

SUMUS Collection, 2021 Silkscreen t-shirts and army jackets Sizes small, medium, and large

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ANDREW WILSON

Above: Brookes Hats, 2018 Dye sublimation print Variable Right: What they Yell in the Streets, 2015-2021 Cyanotype on cotton, muslin, hand quilted 114 x 60 in.

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ABOUT ROOT DIVISION STAFF Michelle Mansour Renée Rhodes Michael Gabrielle Phi Tran Ronaldo Reyes ChiChai Mateo Rachel Welles

Executive Director Art Programs Manager Education Programs Manager Marketing & Design Manager Facilities & Installation Manager Development & Programs Assistant Operations Assistant

CATALOGUE PRODUCTION Phi Tran & Michael Nguyen Graham Holoch

Graphic Design Exhibition Documentation

1131 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 415.863.7668 | rootdivision.org

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MISSION Root Division is a visual arts non-profit in San Francisco that connects creativity and community through a dynamic ecosystem of arts education, exhibitions, and studios. Root Division’s mission is to empower artists, foster community service, inspire youth, and enrich the Bay Area through engagement in the visual arts.

The organization is a launching pad for artists, a stepping-stone for educators and students, and a bridge for the general public to become involved in the arts.

SUPPORTERS Root Division is supported in part by a plethora of individual donors and by grants from National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission: Community Investments, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, Fleishhacker Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Violet World Foundation, and Bill Graham Memorial Fund.

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DONATE Root Division is a visual arts non-profit, and we are grateful for your charitable support of our programming: rootdivision.org/giving

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