If, like me, you’re scratching your head wondering where the heck July went, you probably haven’t planned much for August, our final foggy month of “summer” in the Bay Area.
And usually that would be okay; August is traditionally a vacation month for the visual arts scene. But for some reason, nobody’s slowing down this year. Blame it on our “art boom” or the lack of beach weather, and reap the benefits.
Boom: The Art of Resistance, A Diversity of Bay Area Anti-Displacement Tactics
Random Parts, Oakland
Through Aug. 20
The gallery that hosted half of last summer’s The Dissidents, the Displaced, and the Outliers opens its doors once again for an artist-centered exploration of the changing Bay Area. Artist Leslie Dreyer organizes twelve projects and “countless unnamed movement collaborators” in an exhibition of current anti-displacement tactics, including Zeph Fishlyn with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Heart of the City Collective with The Last 3%, and Poor Magazine’s Homefulness Project and GentriFukation Tour. Itching for a way to join the fight against displacement with no idea of where to start? Boom is part action documentation and part recruitment tool, providing a primer on the many groups and individuals utilizing radical tactics in a struggle as long as it is necessary.
Yolanda Ramirez and Evelyn Reyes, Shapeshifting
Creativity Explored, San Francisco
Through Sept. 7
Works by two 20-year-plus veterans of the Creativity Explored studio are paired for the first time in this exhibition of drawings by Yolanda Ramirez and Evelyn Reyes. Reyes, who focuses on one subject for long periods, currently renders abstracted carrots in multiples of three (past subjects have included cakes, garbage cans, fences and fences with sandwiches). Instructor and curator Geri Montano matched the two artists after noticing Ramirez’s own energetic drawings filling with repeated abstract forms, inspired by Reyes’ work. In works like Ramirez’s Piles of Colored Pencils, what could be an entire field of Reyes’ carrots sprout from the ground. Enjoy large and small meditations on form and repetition in this colorful two-person show.
Amy Ho, Spaces From Yesterday: The Garage
Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland
Aug. 5 – Sept. 29
What spaces do those confined to prison cells dream of? San Francisco-based Amy M. Ho works with incarcerated artists from San Quentin State Prison to bring inmates’ memories of real spaces to life. Instead of exact replicas, Ho’s reconstructions, large-scale video and architectural installations, center on memory, imagination and lived experience. The Garage, based on the childhood workshop of Bobby Dean Evans, Jr., is the first of five spaces Ho plans to construct in locations across the Bay Area. Using paper models, projected light and built structures, Ho creates an environment that captures Evans’ memory of his garage as a place of refuge, hope and peace. Learn more about the project and Ho’s longtime engagement with artists in San Quentin at a talk with Tanya Zimbardo on Thurs., Aug. 25, 6-7:30pm.
Xandra Ibarra, Inventory of Exhaustion
Black & White Projects, San Francisco
Aug. 5 – Sept. 10
Oakland-based performance artist Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom) presents large-scale photographic works drawn from her own parody-based performances at the Mission district’s Black & White Projects. Her vacuum-sealed costumes become artifacts of bodily exhaustion and shells of activity. A roach costume, desiccated and shriveled under plastic, is both a reminder of the absence of Ibarra’s body and the lingering residue of the racial stereotypes she manipulates into spectacular performances.
Takeshi Moro, 365 nm
100%, San Francisco
Aug. 14 – Sept. 18
The always enigmatic 100% gallery (the space, a second-floor bedroom within a Mission district apartment, is actually symbolized by the “Hundred Points” emoji, but we can’t render that here) hosts Santa Clara-based photographer Takeshi Moro for an exhibition of new cyanotypes that feature images of a mother and child in the California landscape. Moro, who also runs an exhibition space out of his home (check out the opening there on Aug. 20), breaks the show down as such: one percent painting, two percent photo, just three percent 365 nm UVA (the wavelength of ultraviolet light), four percent luck and 90 percent “pain in the neck.” This fruitful combination opens with a reception on Sun. Aug. 14 2-6pm. Email the gallery at 100percentgallery@gmail.com for the exact address.