The Materiality of Resistance | In spring 2024, The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series included one final "tea time talk on belonging" organized by Julia Grinkrug and featuring guest speaker Dorothy Lazard. It also introduced a new theme, The Materiality of Resistance, which considered historical and contemporary stories where the materiality of making contributes to socio-cultural change.

• 🎥 📖 Belonging is an Act of Resistance | Organized by Julia Grinkrug
• 🎥 📖 New Works: Sofía Córdova | Organized by the Graduate Fine Arts Program
• 📸 Ismail Lumanovski & Inspector Gadje, Live at CCA | Organized by Nilgun Bayraktar

The Materiality of Resistance Symposium | In March, CCA hosted the Materiality of Resistance Symposium, bringing together students, scholars, and artists from across the country to explore material modes of resistance to the status quo in American art and visual culture. Supported by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, and organized by CCA’s History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) Program, the Materiality of Resistance Symposium explored the intersections of aesthetics, pedagogy, and social engagement. The Symposium offered a variety of events, including panels and lectures, workshops, performances, and two exhibitions on view in the Nave and at the nearby Wattis Institute. Creative Citizens in Action partnered with the HAVC Program to present a public lecture, an exhibition of student artwork, and a closing performance by the Nava Dance Theatre.

• 🎥 📖 Lorenzo Balbi: A Possible Model for the “Materiality” of Museums | Organized by the Curatorial Practice Program
• 🎥 📖 📸 How to Cross a Border | Organized by Sholeh Asgary

Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition | The Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition (March 7–8, 2024) featured work by CCA students and faculty that visually complemented the Materiality of Resistance Symposium. Dispersed throughout CCA’s Nave, the exhibition included installations and presentations that were the combined result of an open call and CCA@CCA Faculty Grant-funded course projects.

• 📸 Large-Scale Installations | Organized by Jaime Austin
• 📸 Ink on Paper for Food for Thought: Poster Design as Direct Action | Organized by Michael Wertz
• 📸 Global Girl Cultures Afternoon Tea! | Organized by Melinda Luisa de Jesús
• 📸 Expandable Rainbow Pride Flag | Organized by John de Fazio
• 📸 Tactile Bliss© | Organized by Lucia Fagen-DeLuca

Organized by Julia Grinkrug, Adjunct II, Architecture Program

On February 29th, 2024, Julia Grinkrug, Adjunct II, Architecture Program; Tricia Brand, VP of DEIB; and other members of the CCA community joined Dorothy Lazard in conversation about the urgency of belonging in the time of extreme polarization and radicalism. In recent years, intangible concepts such as belonging, place and community have become tokenized, hollowed of meaning and filled with political agendas. They are becoming buzzwords that draw people apart rather than bring them together. To counter this narrative, Oakland-based cultural leader Dorothy Lazard shared her deeply rooted perspective and critical thinking about these concepts and their urgency today.

Dorothy Lazard is a writer, librarian, and public historian who played a major role in popularizing the Oakland Main Library's Oakland History Center by hosting lectures, mounting exhibits, writing articles about Oakland's history and assisting researchers exploring the city's history. After serving as a librarian for nearly 40 years, Lazard, who retired in 2021, has published a memoir about growing up in San Francisco and Oakland, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World. She is currently working on a book about the library as a public institution.

"In dialogue with Grinkrug and Brand, Lazard affirmed that our institutions should be interrogated and critiqued in order to understand what kind of societal values they prop up or perpetuate– both positive and negative– reminding us that at the end of the day, these spaces are reflective of who holds power within them. Therefore, it is increasingly vital for us as community members, educators, employees, students, public servants, etc., to find equitable and effective ways of getting to know those outside of ourselves, approach our positions of power or influence with understanding, and more actively participate in building the world we want to live in."

📖 Read Vanessa Perez Winder's full review of this event on Rewind Review Respond ➞

Organized by CCA@CCA and the Graduate Fine Arts Program

On Wednesday, February 7, the Graduate Fine Arts Program welcomed video and music artist Sofía Córdova for a lecture in Timken Hall.

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory dimensions, colonial contamination, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution - historical and imagined - within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is also one half of the music duo and experimental sound outfit XUXA SANTAMARIA.

Her work has been exhibited and performed internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, SFMOMA, the Arizona State University Museum, The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, The Vincent Price Museum, the Wattis Institute, and YBCA (USA), as well as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Puerto Rico), Art Hub (China) and MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany). The same is part of The Whitney’s, The Kadist’s, and Pier 24’s permanent collections. She has participated in residencies at Eyebeam, New York, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, Mills College Museum, Oakland, and the ASU Museum in Phoenix and composed and choreographed performances for the SF Arts Commission, Merce Cunningham Trust and Soundwave Biennial. Her work has been featured in Art in America and Aperture magazines. She is a recipient of a Creative Work Fund, a Fundación Ama Amoedo Grant and most recently of both Artadia and Creative Capital Awards.

"For Córdova, revolution is as much about undoing and unlearning as it is about building and educating. Córdova’s work does both. Her work references historical revolutions, with a particular focus on Latin America, while also combating the popular (and historically imagined) conception that revolutions are fought and won under singular male leadership. Through her work, Córdova seeks to remind us that revolution is a collective process, often enacted by marginalized groups, whose labor is then decentered or erased. Central to GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry is the idea that revolution is messy, non-linear, and marked by both failure and resilience."

📖 Read Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle's full review of this event on Rewind Review Respond ➞

2024 CCA@CCA Faculty Coordinator Nilgun Bayraktar (Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture)

On Friday, February 2, the extraordinary clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski and Inspector Gadje Balkan Brass Band performed a live concert in Timken Hall.

Ismail Lumanovski is a musical force of passion and dynamic virtuosity. Already of international distinction, Lumanovski has launched a major career as a soloist, chamber musician in both classical and Balkan styles. Blending the fiery spirit of folk music with the discipline of classical music, his performances throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Korea and China have received uproarious critical acclaim. Lumanovski performs internationally, leads the New York Gypsy Allstars, and is perhaps the first Roma clarinet player to graduate from the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Time Out New York remarked that he’s "A showboat of a performer . . . an adventurous, modern-minded front man," while the New York Times has waxed poetic about his musical prowess. 

With up to 14 musicians (12 horns and 2 percussionists), Bay Area-San Francisco-based Inspector Gadje brings a big sound to the beautiful and bumpin’ brass band music of the Balkans of south-eastern Europe. Hearing Inspector Gadje is love at first listen. The driving, tight groove of low brass and drums with soaring melodies from trumpets, saxophones, and clarinet incite joy and dance from the very first downbeat. Inspector Gadje ignites the dance floor and makes the party wherever they play, be it clubs (including notable venues such as the MGM Arena, Fox Theater, Palace Of Fine Arts, The Independent, Ashkenaz, Café du Nord, The New Parish, Rickshaw Stop, and Yoshi’s to name a few) weddings, parties, and street festivals. Original inspiration for the group came from many years of collaboration between the Brass Liberation Orchestra (BLO), a progressive social activist street band, and the Voice of Roma, a non-profit organization that supports Romani community and cultural causes world-wide. 

This event was presented in conjunction with The Materiality of Resistance, a two-day symposium exploring the artistic deployment of materials as tools to imagine, promote, and enact resistance to the status quo in American art and visual culture. The performance was funded by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism.

🎥 Watch collaborations between Ismail Lumanovski and Inspector Gadje on Inspector Gadje's YouTube channel →

Organized by CCA@CCA and the CCA Curatorial Practice Program

On March 7, 2024, curator Lorenzo Balbi presented a lecture as a featured part of the Materiality of Resistance Symposium.

Lorenzo Balbi is the artistic director of MAMbO – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, and head of the Modern and Contemporary Art department of the Bologna Musei Institution. After a degree in Cultural Heritage Conservation at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, he specialized in Contemporary Art at the City University of Turin. From 2006 to 2017 Lorenzo taught "Methodology of Curatorship" at Campo Corso di Studi E Pratiche Curatoriali, which focused on training young curators, and he coordinated the Residency for Young Foreign Curators at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, among other exhibiting projects.

"Balbi firmly stated that a museum should be part of the process of enabling and supporting artists, not just the final destination to display and acquire the end product. The purpose of a museum is to support, help, and uplift artists. Museums must be invested in creating systems to lend money, time, space, communication, and other resources to artists in order to sustain creativity. Balbi’s goal is to support specific upcoming and young artists from Bologna as a part of the revolutionary and resistance-based mind- set and values of MAMbO. Transitioning the museum space from an inactive exhibition space into a supportive productive space could be the new wave of involvement that museums can have within artists’ lives and the production of art."

📖 Read Evelynn Harra's full review of this event on Rewind Review Respond ➞

Organized by Sholeh Asgary, Adjunct II, First Year Core Studio Program

The exhibition, How to Cross A Border, was on view March 7–8, 2024 at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, as part of The Materiality of Resistance Symposium. How to Cross A Border showcased work by Sholeh Asgary’s current and former 4D students, centered on the themes of borders, loops, and imprints. It sought to explore and redefine border spaces through various mediums, comprising a catalog of graphic scores for visitor interaction, video, and sound loops. The exhibition was structured into three main components: print, image, and sound. Underneath the graphics scores were zines for visitors to take and interact with the scores; on a separate wall was a kinetic graphic score, two video installations (accompanied by headphones), and a separate device emitting continuous audio loops throughout the space (indicated by a graphite ear symbol on a blank wall).

View the graphic score zine →

Watch one of the video installations, ciudad de estrellas by Angie Vargas, below and on YouTube →

Organized by Jaime Austin, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs

The Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition featured site-specific installations by the following CCA students:

• Sara Cruz (BFA Sculpture)
• Sean Cullen (BFA Fashion Design)
• Benjamin Eckert (BFA Sculpture)
• Zedekiah Gonsalves Schild (MFA Fine Arts)

plus paintings by Cindy Zhang (BFA Painting and Drawing).

📸 View more images of the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition →

“My work is an exploration of the Latin American identity within my own lens, but also within the context of syncretism. Syncretism as the merging of culture, merging of iconographies, of history, of current contexts, where the Indigenous aspects of Latin America and decolonial aspects merge into what we see as the 'melting pot' of the Latine experience... The materiality of resistance is a medium or a conduit for change. I think that resisting, or expressing issues or concerns about the world using art and sculpture, has given me the opportunity to explore different ways in which I can critique or resist aspects of our world, and create something to send a broader message.”

📖 Read Renata Blanco Gorbea's full interview with Sara Cruz on Rewind Review Respond ➞

Organized by Michael Wertz, Chair, Illustration

Michael Wertz’s Illustrated Poster course contributed a series of posters to the exhibition, inspired by the Bay Area’s rich history of pre-internet political discourse and direct action. Students were asked to create works responding to the prompt: “What do you stand for instead of against? Can you harness your power as Designers, Illustrators and Printers to advocate for marginalized communities and individuals?” Final projects advocated for peace, climate change mitigation, and LGBTQIA+ and migrant worker rights.

Participating students: Adora Ozieblo, Asa Kittner, Dartagnan Parsons, Dominique Du, Hiromi Lee, Kaelie Taylor, Kelly Young, Maya Makino, Mo Diedrich, Ruichen Yang, Sayuri Bronstein, Thalia Martinez Bobadilla, William Choi

📸 View more images of the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition →

Organized by Dr. Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Associate Professor, Critical Ethnic Studies

In two back-to-back Afternoon Tea sessions on Thursday, March 7, students from GIRL CULTURE invited symposium attendees and the CCA community to discuss girl power and the specific challenges facing girls around the world. Reclaiming the idea of the little girls’ tea party, our Afternoon Tea showcased student art and research about global girl cultures. Student organizers offered tea, snacks, and stimulating conversation to foster learning about girls’ studies and girls’ resistance.

Participating students: Ying Chen, Nitya Cheruku, Julie Du, Nariah Gillett, Jerry Huang, Amy Jiang, Robin Larisch, Primrose Lu, Luna Mae Lupine, Lauren McGee, Kaeli Mcleod, Claudia Nunez, MC Payen, Kainoa Rocamora, Brenda Sanchez, Maya Vaughan, Rex Wallia, Xinhao Zhou

📸 View more images of the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition →

"I went into the event expecting to have the opportunity to learn about issues faced by girls globally, the specific issues selected by the students themselves. While all of that did happen, I did not anticipate just how fun the event would be. Interwoven with “girl culture” related literature and resources, there were tons of tea, cakes, cookies, fruit, and even shirley temples available to sip and snack on while the students engaged those of us who attended. Located in the Nave – a well-frequented corridor on CCA’s campus – many folks walking by were drawn in by the friendly faces stationed at each table. The students in the class successfully created a space for community to gather, learn, and celebrate girlhood."

📖 Read Chloe Vuillermoz's full review of this event on Rewind Review Respond ➞

Organized by John de Fazio, Senior Adjunct Professor, Ceramics Program

Students in John de Fazio’s Queer Super Objects UDIST course collaborated to create an “Expandable Rainbow Pride Flag” in tribute to Laura Ann Carleton who was killed over hanging a Rainbow Pride Flag at her store in Cedar Glen, California, in August 2023. Each of the 15 students in the class created a single-color flag with its own symbolism. Hung side-by-side, the 15 flags comprised a unified homage to Gilbert Baker’s original Rainbow Pride Flag from 1978.

Participating students: Annalise Cole, Aris Ruff, Robin Larish, Qianyi Lin, Coli Drechsel, Iso Donoso, Nya Serano, Malcolm Christie, Sara Cruz, Kya Higgins, Maiya Brown, Briana Gordon, Anna Qian, August Smith, Alena Urban

📸 View more images of the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition →

Organized by Lucia Fagen-DeLuca, Adjunct II Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program

Lucia Fagan-DeLuca’s Tactile Bliss© UDIST course teaches students to decenter vision and center the haptic in their artwork; each student in her course contributed a texturally rich artwork for visitors to the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition “to pet, to touch, to interact with, to enjoy, to lean on, to tell secrets to, to pray on, to love, to feel.” Combined, the students’ artworks showcased neuro-non-normative ways of analogue making and alternative sensory ways of knowing.

Participating Students: VII Void, Jessy, Jade, Eloise, Leona, Nicole, Vivian, Cell, Xinyu, Max, Mars, Sebatian, Zoe, PJ, Miguel

📸 View more images of the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition →