Post No Jangs: Notes from Underground Exhibit (SF)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Post No Jangs: Notes from Underground opens in the basement of Crown Point Press, directly across from SFMOMA, where pristine black and white gelatin silver prints by Michael Jang live in the permanent collection. You won’t find any clean photographs or murals hanging on the walls here though. Installed with the help of longtime friends and collaborators, assistant Brent Willson and curator Adrian Martinez, Jang’s most recent works demand physical engagement: mounted on plywood, some sit in the hallway floor, others are arrayed like an altar in the main room. Ripped and written over, stickered over, these images leap out at the viewer. Such ad hoc layout directly expresses the mode of working on the street and epitomizes the spontaneity and community that have been core tenets of Jang’s career. At his solo exhibition at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (2019–20), it was the backroom with its graffitied pictures tacked to the wall which first hinted at this series developed during the pandemic. In 2021 Jang was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue stretching the limits of photography; with the words “Post No Jangs,” the artist teasingly proclaims his own blacklist, transforming the stenciled tagline into a new calling card.

The art world may be familiar with his more traditional photographs, but what San Francisco knows is that the sharpest street artist out there wheat-pasting and spray-painting is a septuagenarian fluent in pop culture and a visual vocabulary that tackles everything from takeout food to anti-Asian violence.

Come for a street artist’s take-over of the traditional gallery space: today’s Dadaist collage, the West Coast’s Basquiat. Stay for the punch of Jang’s underground.

Dates

Exhibition: December 8–31, 2022 | Wednesday–Saturday, 1–6 pm

Opening: December 8, 2022, 6–9 pm

Location

Crown Point Press, Basement Gallery

20 Hawthorne St, San Francisco, CA 94105

Presented by Lee Gallery

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.