Radical Presence: Contemporary Black Performance Art Showcase | SoMa

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Come out to the opening celebration 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 featuring a full day of performances throughout YBCA’s galleries.

Performance Schedule

12:30 pm: Benjamin Patterson, Penny for Your Thoughts
In Penny for Your Thoughts, Patterson invites viewers to “try on” the ideas of others and investigate the commodification of the transfer or ideas

1:30 pm: Tameka Norris, Untitled
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.

2:30 pm: Senga Nengudi, RSVP
Maren Hassinger activates Senga Nengudi’s work from the well-known 1955–77 series RSVP. Nengudi creates an installation out of common nylon stockings that are stretched into poetic sculptural form. In activating the work, Hassinger highlights the muscular forces of the body itself.

3:30 pm: Theaster Gates’s See, Sit, Sup, Sip, Sing: Holding Court
Created from salvaged materials from a now-closed public school on Chicago’s south side, this installation is designed for learning. Join Radical Presence curator Valerie Cassel Oliver for a discussion about the exhibition.

4:30 pm: Benjamin Patterson, Pond
Participants release wind-up frog toys to create a cacophony of sound as each frog lands and stops in various places on a grid.

5:30 pm: Maren Hassinger, Women’s Work
Hassinger and four others repetitively rip newspaper, alluding to sewing, knitting, and other activities traditionally labeled women’s work. Their gestures are amplified, transforming the action into a cacophonous sound piece.

6:30 pm: Pope.L’s Costume Made of Nothing
Bay Area artist Brontez Purnell walks through the gallery and stands, arm extended into a void, until exhausted. Purnell will repeat this endurance work throughout the run of the exhibition.

7:15 pm: Jamal Cyrus, Texas Fried Tenor
​As part of the series Learning to Work the Saxophone artist Jamal Cyrus will deep fry a saxophone on YBCA’s 701 Mission Plaza. ​Cyrus, accompanied by Jawaad Taylor on pocket trumpets and electronics, will perform a new iteration of Texas Fried Tenor that references California musicians Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, to​ explore​ the importance of the saxophone in American music​, blues and jazz in particular. ​

8:30 pm: Shaun Leonardo, The Eulogy
This new performance, commissioned for the San Francisco presentation of Radical Presence, takes Ralph Ellison’s 1947 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.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.