Beginning in 2022, 500 Capp Street issues open calls to local high school students each year to apply for summer internship opportunities. Four to five week long internships for 2-3 selected interns will be composed of three 4-hour shifts per week, working at the David Ireland House under the guidance of the art and education staff. Summer internships will culminate in an event open to the public where, in the collaborative, artist-driven spirit of 500 Capp Street, interns are invited to select roles for themselves and help develop the event.
Author: lcollins
Orquídeas Wrap-Up Talk by Marcel Pardo Ariza & “Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects” Book Launch
Friday, January 19, 2024
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: 500 Capp St. San Francisco, California
Join us in celebrating the launch of the book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects from the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) in San Francisco. The book features a series of commissioned photographs by Marcel Pardo Ariza, and the editors are thrilled to present a pop-up book launch event as part of Marcel’s fabulous Orquídeas installation and program series at 500 Capp St. Marcel will discuss Orquídeas as the project nears the end of its residency, and the book’s co-editors, David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas, will talk about the book while everyone enjoys snacks and drinks provided by 500 Capp St. Books will be available for purchase and signing as long as supplies last!
Surveying over three centuries of trans life, this volume brings together a capacious selection of artworks, archival documents, publications, and artifacts. The book is a continuation of artist Chris E. Vargas’s MOTHA, a museum forever “under construction” that exists as a creative and critical exploration of LGBTQ archives, asking audiences to think critically about how a visual history of transgender life could and should look.
About the speakers:
Chris E. Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist, an artist, the founder of the Museum of Trans Hirstory and Art, and co-editor of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. His work deploys humor and performance to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical and institutional memory and popular culture. He is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital award and a 2020 John S. Guggenheim fellowship.
David Evans Frantz is a curator based in Los Angeles, and co-editor of Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. He began his curatorial career at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, where he first worked with Chris E. Vargas and MOTHA. He also co-edited the catalog for Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. He curated the accompanying exhibition as well as the exhibition Teddy Sandoval And The Butch Gardens School Of Art, currently on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, with C. Ondine Chavoya.
Christina Linden met Chris E. Vargas through friends. She met David Evans Frantz while conducting research for the exhibition Queer California: Untold Stories, which she curated at the Oakland Museum of California, and in which MOTHA had an installation. She is the Director of Academic and Public Programs at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
Marcel Pardo Ariza is the featured artist of 500 Capp Street’s recent exhibition, Orquídeas. They are a trans, nonbinary visual artist, curator, and cultural worker whose work explores the relationship of representation, intergenerational kinship, and queerness through constructed photographs and site-specific installations. Through staging and collaboration, Ariza deploys sets as a site of possibility for (re)building a story and materializing alternative and attainable present and future narratives. Ariza enjoys playing with the arbitrary rigidity that is often present in the photographic medium and the work is invested in creating long-term interdisciplinary collaborations and opportunities that are nonhierarchical and equitable. Marcel is the current recipient of the SECA Art Award.
Café Porno
DECEMBER 1
8-11pm
Cafe Porno is a dessert pop up collaboration between Marcel Pardo Ariza and Artist-Chef Salimatu Amabebe. All proceeds from the event will go to the Naughty Nurse Mobile, a van that supports sex workers during late nights in the Mission District.
Innards, Inner and Outer Space & Place: Salon Series #4 with Việt Lê, Nhung Đinh, Corey Pickett, and Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez
Thursday, December 7, 2023,
6-8pm
No One Turned Away For Lack of Funds, for special accommodations, email visit@500cappstreet.org
Straddling artistic mediums and mediumship, these three artists transmute physical and socio-political landscapes, mass media and the mundane. Afrofuturism, Asian indigenous shamanism, and European avant-garde frameworks shift as these artists ask, What does possession mean? There is no death nor dyads: displaced, replaced; ready to wear and readymade. Nhung Đinh is an independent artist, curator, and filmmaker working with queer communities in several countries. Corey Picket’s practice examines the relationships of fear, race, and social systems, which are informed by his upbringing in the Golden Isles of Georgia. Nhật Minh ‘s practice encompasses collaboration and distillation of his connections in Paris, Biên Hoà and in between. Together, their interdisciplinary practice of intimacies intimate between the body and the body politic, the only way out is in. Art talk moderated by Việt Lê as part of 500 Capp Street’s salon series, “Shifting Possessions.”
This “Shifting Possessions” event is a public program of trầnsfiguration, an exhibition curated by Việt Lê at / (Slash).
Artist Bios
Corey Pickett is an interdisciplinary artist living in New Mexico. His practice examines the relationships of fear, race, and social systems, which are informed by his upbringing in the Golden Isles of Georgia. In addition to being a working artist, Pickett is the founder and Director of The Jaye Rock Cultural Center in Clovis, NM. He received his Master of Education in 2008 and his MFA in 2017 from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has exhibited his work in cities throughout the US and is a recipient of the International Sculpture Center’s 2017 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
Nhung Đinh is an independent artist, curator, and filmmaker working with queer communities in several countries. Most of her projects are collective works that are rooted in her approach to participatory and relational aesthetics in which her roles as facilitator, artist, curator, and organizer are overlapping. She is the founder of Bàn Lộn-Vagina Talks- a public art and education project in Hà Nội, Việt Nam, that consists of performances, workshops, and exhibitions.
Nhật Minh (neé Frédéric Dialynas Sanchez) is a French artist born in 1983. His first solo show took place in Hanoi (2006), where he often travels to develop his researches. Grounded in abstraction field, his work has been shown in the exhibitions «Portrait de l’artiste en motocycliste» and «The artist as a collector» which took place at CNAC of Grenoble (“Le magasin”, 2009), at the museum of fine arts of La Chaux de Fond (2010) at Museum of Contemporary arts of Tucson (MOCA) in Arizona (2010/2011). He took part in exhibitions about globalization and tourism like “Cosmotopia” at “Le Commun” in Geneva (2012) which was for him an opportunity to show other aspects of his work as sculptures related to vietnamese culture or a collection of popular objects found in Vietnamese streets. Curation is also a part of his art process and he created the nomad gallery called “L’Éclair” to propose collective projects (www.l-eclair.fr). His recent solo exhibit was held at VinFast in Paris, as well a two-person exhibit with Joe Fyfe.
Việt Lê is a queer, disabled artist, writer, and curator whose work centers global south sexualities and spiritualities. Lê is the author of Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, Candor Arts 2019). Lê has presented their work at Civitella Ranieri, the Shanghai Biennale, among other venues. They co-curated transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (with Yong Soon Min: ARKO, Galerie Quynh, UC Irvine Gallery; YBCA, 2008-09) and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei). A 2022-24 Headlands Bay Area Arts Fellow, Lê is an Associate Professor and Chair of Visual & Critical Studies(VCS) at California College of the Arts.
“Shifting Possessions” is an ongoing Salon Series of 500 Capp Street with artist and academic Việt Lê having dialogues and programming on queer(y)ing object collections, geopolitical connections and remediation strategies. Supported by California Humanities and Tieger Foundation.
Mother | Goddess Or, Việt Namaste: Queer Vietnamese Indigenous Shamanism
Sunday, December 3, 5PM
Headlands Center for the Arts
$50 | $40 Headlands Members
A free shuttle to Headlands, departing from 500 Capp Street in San Francisco, will be available by reservation. This shuttle is intended to serve those without access to individual transportation.
In collaboration with 500 Capp Street’s Shifting Possessions, join us for a spiritual drag show (of sorts): an elegantly bombastic remix of the traditional high-energy, high-stakes, centuries-old hầu bóng Mother Goddess ceremony, followed by a panel discussion with Headlands Bay Area Fellow Việt Lê; traditional lên đồng musicians musicians Anh-Tấn and Hồ Nga Cao (Hà Nội); dancers Jay Carlon (LA), Megan Lowe (East Bay), Johnny Huy Nguyễn (SF); and Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion at University of Southern California. They are our special-secret-surprise world-renowned guests, dance, and music collaborators—our secret sauce. Putting the “trans” in “transcendence,” and making it rain (like in da club), this evening’s event will center queer ritual in Southeast Asia, its diasporas, and worlds beyond.
As part of this special evening—and speaking of secret sauciness—audiences will convene for a dinner in the Mess Hall featuring a menu conceived by Lê and Headlands Chef Damon Little.
A free shuttle from San Francisco to Headlands will be available by reservation. The shuttle will depart from 500 Capp Street at 4pm, and will return to 500 Capp Street following the conclusion of the event at 8pm. This shuttle is intended to serve those without access to individual transportation.
*For accessibility questions or requests please contact info@headlands.org.
This evening is co-presented by Headlands Center for the Arts as a part of 500 Capp Street’s Shifting Possessions salon series and trầnsfiguration, an exhibition curated by Việt Lê at Slash.
Shifting Possessions is a salon series that feature dialogs and programming on queer(y)ing object collections, remediation strategies, geopolitical connections, historical trauma and healing. 500 Capp Street’s Shifting Possessions is made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional support from Teiger Foundation.
Memoria Trans SF
Memoria Trans SF hosted by Julián Delgado Lopera & Marcel Pardo Ariza
Drop by and share your trans archives. Let’s write our story together.
For questions or more info please contact visit@500cappstreet.org
Upcoming Dates
Thursday, November 9th, 5:00-7:00 PM
Thursday, November 30th, 5:00-7:00 PM