Current Events

2020

CANCELLED: Subjected to Removal: Artists Speak Out Virtual Panel

JUNE 24, 2020
6:00 PM

Who is the public in public art? Who represents the public and who is represented? Last year, the American National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) identified four artists in the US who were censored by city, state or national governments for their art. Three of those artists were women of color, working in the Bay Area: Christy Chan, Xandra Ibarra, and Lava Thomas.

Two artists were selected to create public artworks that were censored and/or obstructed by the agencies responsible for their commission, while one artist’s work was censored for violating Texas obscenity laws. In a virtual panel moderated by Sarah Hotchkiss (KQED Art Reporter), Chan, Ibarra, and Thomas will share their experiences and discuss the barriers they confront working in the arts. Each artist was commissioned to create public artworks that were censored, obstructed, or removed by the agencies responsible for their commission. In a virtual panel moderated by Sarah Hotchkiss (KQED Art Reporter), Chan, Ibarra, and Thomas will share their experiences and discuss the barriers to women of color working in this field. Hotchkiss will moderate a discussion on public erasure and where we go together from here.

ARTIST BIOS

Christy Chan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland working primarily in video, installation, performance and oral storytelling. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Kala Art Institute, Southern Exposure, Root Division, SOMarts, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and in storytelling venues such as NPR. She has been awarded residencies and support from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Project 387, Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts and Real Time and Space in Oakland. Chan holds an MA in Communication Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is working on the multimedia storytelling and film project Pen Pals which has been featured on NPR’s Snap Judgement and The New York Times and tells the story of Shelly, an 8-year-old girl who writes idealistic letters to the Ku Klux Klan after the Klan targets her family. Based on real-life events, Pen Pals draws on Chan’s experience growing up in a Southern town with a white nativism movement, an experience that continues to inform her ongoing explorations of race, power, and what it means to be an American. Chan is an A+P+I Artist in Residence at Mills College.

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subject.

Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (LA), ExTeresa Arte Actual (DF, Mexico), The Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC) and Anderson Collection (Stanford) to name a few. Her work is also held in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Recent residencies include Open Space SF MOMA (Columnist in Residence), Marble House Project, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, National Performance Network, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has been awarded the Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship, Queer Art Prize for Recent Work, Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, Eisner Film and Video Prize, Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Paper Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally.

Ibarra’s work has also been featured in several recent and forthcoming books. An excerpt from her presentation at the New Museum, “Exhibitionist Tendencies: The Past and Present of Sexuality, Gender, and Race in Art” is included in the book Saturation: Race, Art & The Circulation of Value edited by C.Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings features her performance “I am your Puppet” (2007) while Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sexual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance includes a chapter about Ibarra’s collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, “Untitled Fucking” (2013). Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production features Ibarra’s performance work “Skins/Less Here” (2015) on the cover and within the book.

As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She is currently a member of Survived and Punished California. As a lecturer, Ibarra has taught Ethnic Studies, Sexuality Studies, and History and Theory of Contemporary Art courses. Adjunct and part-time teaching posts have included: San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State University.

Lava Thomas’s studio practice takes a wide range of thematic and material approaches. She utilizes a variety of techniques suited to the concept and evolution of each project—from drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography to sculpture and site-specific installations. Informed by feminist discourse, alternative approaches to portraiture, secular and religious ideas of the sacred, and African-American devotional and protest traditions, Thomas considers themes of social justice, female subjectivity, current events and the shifting tides of history.

Thomas was born in Los Angeles and is currently based in Berkeley, CA. She studied at UCLA’s School of Art Practice and received a BFA from California College of the Arts. Thomas is a 2019-2021 recipient of the Lucas Artists Fellowship Award at Montalvo Arts Center and has participated in artist residencies at Facebook Los Angeles (2020), Headlands Center for the Arts (2017), and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (2003, 2004, 2008). She was a 2018 Artadia finalist and in 2015 received the Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors.

Her work has been exhibited at various institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, CA; the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, CA; the International Print Center in New York, NY; the Betty Rymer Gallery at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, IL; the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, CO; the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery; the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art; the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, CA; and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive; the United States Consulate in Johannesburg, South Africa; the M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Thomas’s work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, KQED Arts, The Art Newspaper, and LA Weekly. She has served on the boards of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the Alliance of Artists Communities.

MODERATOR

Sarah Hotchkiss is the Senior Associate Editor for KQED Art. She is a San Francisco-based artist and arts writer. She co-runs the project space Premiere Jr., a 6-by-12-foot billboard in the Inner Sunset. In 2019, she received the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation grant for art journalism. She watches a lot of science fiction, which she reviews in a semi-regular publication called Sci-Fi Sundays.