Contemporary works by local artists exploring climate change and shifting ideas about heritage and home make up “About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift” on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
The artists investigating environments and their histories, and issues of individuality and identity include Guillermo Galindo, the collective Postcommodity, Chris Johanson, Clare Rojas, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Miguel Arzabe, Saif Azzuz, Katy Grannan, Wesaam Al-Badry and Rupy C. Tut.
The exhibition, supported by the Svane Family Foundation’s $1 million donation to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to acquire contemporary work, runs through Nov. 30, 2025 and follows “Crafting Radically,” an installation drawn from 44 pieces in the Svane gift by 12 artists reflecting on personal experiences, history, pop culture and craft.
Both exhibitions tell stories of resistance and question traditional tracks in art, history, and concepts related to identity.
“Each of the themes of the Svane exhibits reflect what contemporary Bay Area artists and all Californians are thinking about, which reflects the cultural zeitgeist,” says Janna Keegan, FAMSF associate curator of contemporary art and programming. “In ‘About Place,’ you can approach the idea of landscape purely. The idea of home is not fixed. These artists open up the idea to allow for different interpretations of home, relationship to the environment, notions of ecological stewardship. They’re not being prescriptive; (they’re) suggesting that multiple perceptions are equally valid. It’s unifying.”
Indigenous artist collective Postcommodity’s “Going To Water,” a multi-channel video and sound installation in the museum’s central atrium fronts the show of paintings, photographs and a sonic sculpture.
An added element to “About Place” includes a residency from Oct. 24-27, 2024 with the seven-member SFJAZZ Collective, which is marking its 20th anniversary season by composing new works based on visual art.
Keegan says, “Every year their collective creates an entirely new album, which they record, perform, and tour nationally and internationally. Last fall, they approached us and each musician selected work they were interested in. …. To have music written based on art created in the Bay Area expands the audience’s access to artists’ perspectives. It has the potential for new creative energy and enables an expanded form of dialogue.”
Tut’s “New Normal,” a painted work on hemp, is among the “About Place” works that inspired a new composition. Keegan took a hands-off approach to facilitating artists’ creative process and did not attend a conversation held between Tut and the musician. Anticipation is part of the pleasure of new work, she suggests.
Keegan calls Tut, who was born in India and lives in Oakland, an exciting, emerging artist: “She thinks about three audiences for this work ‘New Normal’: what her grandparents would say, how it relates to her in the present, and how it will relate to young viewers. It has two figures in a triptych that has a central image of a tree on a yellow field that’s on fire. The headscarves the women are wearing in her culture is a very personal item; a way to express yourself, a deep connection to identity. One scarf has the ocean on it, one has forest and fields.”
Tut comes from a family with many immigrants and her grandparents were forced to migrate. For such people, home can be an ethereal concept: something heard about, ancestral, imagined, but never seen. Tut’s “New Normal” underscores that connections to home can be strong, even if not physical.
Clare Rojas’ oil painting “Walking in Rainbow Rain” expresses concepts of self in relationship to an urban space. “It’s one of the few grounded in an urban environment,” says Keegan. “You have the (flattened) figure walking against a wall. The (stylistic) approach means there’s less distance between figure and background. The figure also melds into the background, with the gray of the wall and the same gray of the jacket.” “Rainbow Rain,” Keegan says, refers to San Francisco being on the vanguard of LGBTQ+ rights.
Portrait photographer Grannan’s three-part series “The Westerners” considers California from a dreamer’s perspective. Keegan says, “It speaks to that very weird contrast between (the state’s) history of Western settlers’ colonialism. Their effort to bend nature to settler’s will. Is this a place of dreams? A place we’re sculpted by, or we can sculpt? That negotiation goes through the entire exhibit….”
Galindo, an experimental composer as well as fine artist, collaborated with photographer Richard Misrach on “Border Cantos,” a project that includes “Listo (Ready to Go),” a sonic sculpture created from a bicycle and chair abandoned along the United States-Mexico border. “Ready to Go” was developed in response to underground footfall detectors used by border patrol to detect if someone is crossing. The disjointed bicycle sculpted out of found objects shows migrants’ innovative solution: Ride a bike to gain entry, which confuses the detector.
“When the border patrols find the bikes, they run them over with their cars,” says Keegan. “What stuck out to me when researching this work was the ineffectiveness of ‘The Wall.’ There are some places where there are no walls, and even in places where there is a wall, it’s something you can scale quickly. It’s just made migration more dangerous and funneled it away from urban areas to these desert routes. Which create greater loss of life.”
The objects Galindo uses are totemic profiles of people’s lives, Keegan suggests, with authentic sound elements. Like living memorials, the sculptures speak to hope, diversity and potentiality.
“What’s exciting about the Svane gift is that it enabled us to open up our holdings and expand them to include these emerging and mid-career artists, giving them exposure at a level they may not have had,” Keegan says, adding that one “About Place” artist said it was realization of a 30-year dream to be in the de Young.
In continued efforts to serve the community, Keegan mentions Free Saturdays, which grants free access to the de Young’s permanent collection galleries to residents of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties. Plans to add more public outreach programs to “About Place” are underway, including more performances with SF JAZZ at the de Young.
“About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift” continues through Nov. 30, 2025 at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco. Admission is $11 for students; $17 for seniors; $20 general; free for ages 17 and under. Visit famsf.org.
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