A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container

A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container features artwork by Erina Alejo, Enrique Chagoya & Kara Maria, Futurefarmers, Marcel Pardo Ariza & Julián Delgado Lopera, Related Tactics, and Pablo Tut. The exhibition takes its name from Ursula K. Le Guin's essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," in which Le Guin offers new metaphors that enable us to reimagine our histories as well as our futures while telling our most important stories. The current political and ecological moment is one in which we are compelled to nurture and mend the narratives that reinforce community connections, to let go of our attachments to the archetypal hero's linear journey through time, and to bring our ancestors and kin along with us on our journey into an undetermined future. As Southern Exposure looks toward the next 50 years of supporting artists and presenting experimental and provocative art, we acknowledge the deep relationships that make up our community, connections woven together to create a container that holds space for multivocal histories and futures. This container, or "bag of stars," as Le Guin names it, carries conversations born out of the possibilities found in learning from and teaching each other. This 50th Anniversary exhibition represents a web of connected artists who have been crucial in shaping, and have in turn been shaped by, Southern Exposure. Each invited artist is actively engaged in pedagogical practice as both liberatory and creative work, having been invited to reach across generational gaps toward artistic and spiritual ancestors, such as those who were engaged in dynamic practices before them, as well as dreaming toward a future space for newly emerging thinkers and makers.

ARTISTS:
Erina Alejo
Enrique Chagoya & Kara Maria
Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini & Michael Swaine) & Shaun O'Dell
Marcel Pardo Ariza & Julián Delgado Lopera
Related Tactics
Pablo Tut


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

ERINA ALEJO (they/them/siya) is a lens-based cultural worker, artist, and third-generation tenant in San Francisco. Their visual ethnographic practice and research interests center micro-communities (families, tenants, service workers) and housing rights. Their practice informs their arts grant-making work at Stanford University. Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Center, SFMOMA, and Montalvo Art Center.

MARCEL PARDO ARIZA (they/them) is a trans visual artist, educator, and curator who explores the relationship between queer and trans kinship through constructed photographs, site-specific installations, and public programming. Their work is rooted in close dialogue and collaboration with trans, non-binary, and queer friends and peers, most of whom are performers, artists, educators, policymakers, and community organizers. Their practice celebrates collective care and intergenerational connection and is invested in creating long-term interdisciplinary collaborations and opportunities that are non-hierarchical and equitable. Their work has recently been exhibited at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Palo Alto Art Center, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Ariza is the recipient of the 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award, the 2021 CAC Established Artists Award, the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award, a 2018-19 Alternative Exposure grant, a 2017 Tosa Studio Award, and a 2015 Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. Ariza is the co-founder of Art Handlxrs*, an organization supporting queer, BIPOC, women, trans, and non-binary folks in professional arts industry support roles. They are currently a lecturer at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, and based in Oakland, CA.

ENRIQUE CHAGOYA (he/him) has been the recipient of numerous honors, including two NEA artist fellowships; National Academy of Arts and Letters, J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, and L. C. Tiffany fellowships; residencies at Giverny and Cité Internationale des Arts in France;a lifetime achievement award from the Southern Graphics Conference International; and induction into the National Academy of Design (2020). His work is in the permanent collections of many national and international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, and the Achenbach Collection at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco; the Museo Nacional de la Estampa and Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City; Instituto de Artes Graficas de Oaxaca in Oaxaca City; and Artium-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; among others. Chagoya's solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper at George Adams Gallery in NYC was on view in 2023. Chagoya was born in Mexico City and lives in San Francisco.

Founded in 1995, FUTUREFARMERS is a group of diverse practitioners aligned by an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding us. Futurefarmers are artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, writers, computer programmers, and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of "not knowing." Futurefarmers have published A Variation on Powers of Ten (Sternberg Press, 2012) and For Want of a Nail (MIT Press, 2018). They have exhibited at the Guggenheim (New York, 2011), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2008), Whitney Museum of American Art (2004), Whitney Biennial (2002), Sharjah Biennal (2017), Taipei Biennal (2018), and Walker Art Center (2010).

JULIÁN DELGADO LOPERA (they/them) is the author of the New York Times-acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical (Feminist Press, 2020); Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017); and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants, which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and Independent Publisher Book Award. Lopera has received the 2021 Ferro Grumley Award and a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. They have received fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, Black Mountain Institute, Creative Work Fund, Hedgebrook, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, Headlands Center for The Arts, Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Their work has appeared in Granta, Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, The White Review, LALT, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, to name a few. Lopera is the former executive director of RADAR Productions and a founder of Drag Story Hour. They have been curating Latinx history projects in San Francisco for over 10 years in partnership with such organizations as the GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco Public Library, El/la Para Translatinas, Galería de la Raza, and Brava Theatre. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Lopera resides in San Francisco.

KARA MARIA (she/her) is a visual artist specializing in painting and mixed media. Her recent creations delve into the earth's biodiversity crisis, exploring the evolving role of animals within our increasingly unstable environment. Maria received her BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation), San Jose Museum of Art, and Cantor Center at Stanford University, among others. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows throughout the United States at venues including the de Saisset Museum (Santa Clara University, CA), the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (Sonoma, CA), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), and the Katonah Museum of Art, (Katonah, NY). A native of Binghamton, NY, Maria now lives and works in San Francisco.

SHAUN O'DELL (he/him) received a BA from the New College of California, San Francisco, in 2002 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2004. His work explores the intertwining realities of the human and natural orders.His work has been exhibited widely in the US and internationally. O'Dell is represented in New York by Susan Inglett Gallery, in Houston by Inman Gallery, in San Francisco by Gallery 16, and on Long Island by Halsey/McKay. He has won numerous awards and honors, including the Tournesol Award (2009, Headlands Center for the Arts), Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship (2006, SF Art Institute), Artadia Award (2005, San Francisco) and The Fleishhacker Foundation Award (2002). His work is included in a number of permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bronx Museum of Arts, the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and the DESTE Foundation of Contemporary Art. O'Dell lives and works in San Francisco.

PABLO TUT (he/him/they/them/she/her/any) was raised by a hard-working single mother in Campeche, part of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. As a person of Mayan descent, Pablo has dedicated their artistic journey to crafting counternarratives and imaginative expressions that challenge the deeply colonized landscape of their hometown. A multidisciplinary artist, they engage in drawing, sculpture, video, installation art, and cultural management, with a central intent of engaging spectators with narratives that question colonial ideologies. Their work has been exhibited at Bienal de Arte Visuales de Yucatan; Museo Carillo Gil, Mexico City; Monterrey National Bienal; and Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla. They were awarded a scholarship by Fundacion Jumex Arte Contemporaneo and received their MFA from Stanford University in May 2024.

RELATED TACTICS is an artist collective that creates projects at the intersection of race and culture, exploring the connections between art, movements for social justice, and the public through trans-disciplinary exchanges, collective making, and dialogue. Related Tactics is also a conceptual space and platform where they employ curatorial strategies as artistic gestures to create opportunities within their communities and construct space for collective voice. They confront systemic and institutional racism or inequities that influence their immediate socio-cultural lived experience--a practice that benefits from collective support and sharing knowledge or resources. Related Tactics has exhibited at the Corning Museum of Glass, Wexner Center for the Arts, University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery, Center for Craft, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. They have been supported through a Rainin Fellowship, Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, Kala Art Institute's Print Public, a CoLAB residency project with the Lucas Artists Program of Montalvo Arts Center, a residency with The Luminary, and grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Alternative Exposure, and Ruth Foundation for the Arts.