Introductions 2024 was presented at Root Division, San Francisco in August/September 2024 as part of the 2nd Saturday Exhibition Series.
EXHIBITION DATES:
August 14–September 21, 2024
JURORS:
Matthew Villar Miranda
Curatorial Associate
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Callie Jones
Co-Founder
COL Gallery, San Francisco
Ebti Artist
Introductions 2020 Artist
EXHIBITION ARTISTS:
Kristiana Chan
Grace Jin*
Clementine Keenan
Timna Naim
jamil nasim**
Kevin Lopez Pardillo
tamara suarez porras
Deena Qabazard
Sophia Ramirez
Jacob Li Rosenberg
Jessy Slim
luka vergoz
*RD Studio Artist
**RD Alum
FOREWARD
MICHELLE MANSOUR Executive Director, Root Division
Introductions has been a core part of Root Division’s annual Exhibitions programming since 2007. Conceived as an opportunity to bridge a gap left when the San Francisco Arts Dealer Association (SFADA) discontinued their 30-year summer programming of the same name, Introductions has become a mainstay of our roster. This show highlights talent in the Bay Area and creates connections for artists with commercial galleries and beyond.
Root Division acts as a nexus for the production and presentation of visual art. Our goal is to serve as a connector between artists, the larger art community, and the general public. We offer an entry point for artists as they develop and hone their professional practice. Especially as the art community has faced an exodus of artists moving outside San Francisco and to other cities in search of a more sustainable life AND with the reverberation of the hit to the city’s most financially unstable populations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Root Division is holding course in its position as an anchor for artists to remain in the Bay Area. Celebrating 22 years of supporting artists and our ninth year in our 13,000 square foot facility, Root Division continues to be a beacon for the visual arts in our city, especially amidst so much challenge and uncertainty.
Introductions begins each year as an open call to any Bay Area artist whose work is not currently represented by a local gallery. Reviewed by a committee of three arts professionals representing a diversity of commercial, non-profit, and educational venues, the exposure for any submitting artist is invaluable. Each year we are encouraged and impressed by the quality of submissions, and we are surprised by the number of outstanding artists still operating under the radar of commercial representation. Our intent is to capture both the aesthetic and conceptual magic that comes from cultivating this new crop of budding talent.
Our jurors this year—Ebti, Callie Jones, and Matthew Villar Miranda—selected 12 artists through intensive review. Root Division is happy to provide an opportunity for these artists to add to the conversation of contemporary Bay Area art, especially in asserting that the San Francisco art community has a unique voice. We are proud to debut this group of artists and to support their continued artistic and professional development.
Having started Introductions 17 years ago, this exhibition is also close to my heart. As I plan my departure from Root Division, I look forward to watching the legacy of this project—and the impact it has on artists— live on for years to come.
FROM THE JURORS
MATTHEW VILLAR MIRANDA
Curatorial Associate, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Root Division’s Introductions 2024 now in its remarkable 18th iteration, embodies the distinctly communitydriven spirit of San Francisco’s art scene, as championed by the late Filipino American artist and native San Franciscan Carlos Villa (1963-2013). Reflecting on his return after a six-year sojourn in New York, Villa praised the Bay Area’s eclectic art scene: “Art has no horizon…It could come out in documentary form, it could come out in abstract forms, it could come out in poetic terms…artists as conduits to their communities.”1 Root Division’s communitarian origins share a lineage with Villa, who taught at the legendary but now shuttered school. In 2002, three MFA graduates from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) founded the organization after receiving a prompt from a seminar assignment called “Artist as Endangered Species.”2 The word “endangered” eerily recalls the precarity of even a historic and nearly “universally beloved” art institution two years after SFAI’s shocking and sudden closure in 2022.3 With the loss of SFAI, it is evermore urgent that organizations like Root Division persist, which has, for over two decades, nurtured and debuted emerging artists, maintaining a vital link with the city’s abundant heritage; as stated in their mission, “Giving back to the community is singular to our unique mode.”
4
In this spirit, Introductions 2024 features artists exploring identity, memory, place, and their intertransformations. Deena Qabazard integrates textile, breath, and light, which oscillates between bicultural identities. luka vergoz reflects this fluidity of self, with works that remake scraps into new forms. Grace Jin combines medical and artistic knowledge to redress diasporic grief and healing. Kristiana Chan transforms the corpus of environmental and industrial pasts. Clementine Keenan’s “ghost” monoprints reanimate the personal archive. Through photography, printmaking, and installation, Jacob Li Dai Rosenberg processes generational trauma and familial lore. tamara suarez porras uses photo-optic interventions to envision parallel existences. Timna Naim playfully builds clay into tactile and fantastical accretions. Jessy Slim questions power through architectural constructions with unexpected and symbolic materials like chickpeas. jamil nasim renders intimate depictions of daily life, enlivening what they call the “Black mundane” in densely layered paintings. Sophia Ramirez explores the history of disappearing lesbian bars with intricately composed lightboxes. Kevin Lopez repurposes beer cans, and industrial rubber, into transborder critiques of commodity and labor. Together, they embody narratives, (de/re)construct pasts, alchemize the every day, and compellingly shift gravity towards our Bay Area.
Carlos Villa once described being part of the San Francisco art scene as a unique world of its own, “like being part of modernism, a new world with its own temporality and landscape.”5 Drawing from the fertile ground of decades of aesthetic experimentation, the artists in Introductions 2024 continue to articulate the particular shades of this temporality. One that is fractured and radically interrelated. They continue to texture and tone a Bay with no horizon.
1 Carlos Villa, interview by Paul Karlstrom, June 20, 1995, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
2 Root Division, “Our History,” Root Division, accessed July 24, 2024, https://rootdivision.org/about/history/.
3 Sam Lefebvre, “The San Francisco Art Institute Will Never Be What it Once Was,” KQED, March 30, 2020, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13878509/the-san-francisco-art-institutewill-never-be-what-it-once-was.
4 Ibid. Root Division, “Our History.”
5 Ibid. Carlos Villa, Oral History, Smithsonian Institution.
CALLIE JONES
Co-Founder, COL Gallery, San Francisco
As a somewhat new resident of the Bay Area, it has been an honor to serve as a juror for the 2024 edition of Introductions and, in so doing, to be introduced to the rich creative output of local artists. The Bay has long been known as a place that attracts people from all over the world with its promise of individual and aesthetic freedom. It is a unique artistic landscape, one, I believe, that people too often overlook. In recent memory, in the 50s and 60s, artists built cooperative communities pursuing daring, ephemeral, personal, and often uncommercial work. This spirit of experimentalism, boldness and collaboration clearly persists to this day.
Freed from commercial constraints, by choice and geography, Bay Area artists have historically found conditions conducive to a wide range of creative expressions. But here, perhaps more than anywhere, they have also attacked social injustices such as homophobia, censorship, and racism. The Bay has always proudly acknowledged its outsider status. It represents the radical resistance to the mainstream and artists continue to redefine what art has the capacity to be and mean. Like their forebears, today’s local artists continue to push the boundaries of artmaking, but this new generation also engages in poignant contemporary conversations with far reaching implications.
Joan Brown once wrote, “I feel that public art is becoming more and more exempt in our time. What I mean by that is art that is accessible to the public. Subjectively I am most interested in public art because I don’t like the elitism which is happening in the art world these days. I am really for bringing art back to the people.” As Joan predicted, in an age when the elitism of the art world continues to run rampant, it is incredibly special to have spaces like Root Division for artists to present deeply personal and poignant work for the public to access and experience. Such spaces support artists and demonstrate that the Bay, with its diversity and forward thinking, is a dynamic and influential arts community, an important force in a larger ecosystem where artists do and are contributing to the broader landscape of contemporary art. Artists here are making work at the highest possible level and I am confident their unique visions will ripple beyond the idyllic confines of the Bay as they continue to urge necessary conversations, pushing the dialogue forward in order to promote positive change. To our Bay Area artists, we hear you, and we are here for you.
