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Artist conversation between Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo & David Wilson

Wednesday, June 23, 6 pm PT
In Person & Online

Join us for an intimate artist conversation between David Wilson and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo on Wednesday, June 23 at 6pm. Drop by in person, or tune in on Instagram Live @500cappstreet. David Wilson is the resident artist of The David Ireland House while artist Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is the curator of Southern Exposure’s current exhibition, We use our hands to support. They have previously collaborated with one another and now find themselves in the same neighborhood doing collective exhibition work. Join the artists as they check in on each other, share stories and, exchange experiences of their work processes in an intimate one-on-one dialog.

This program will take place outdoors on The David Ireland House terrace. Free and open to the public.

Doors: 5:30 pm PT
Program: 6:00 pm PT

Links to the shows:
We use our hands to support, Curated by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo at Southern Exposure @southernexposuresf

Sittings, David Wilson exhibition after 4 months of residency at The David Ireland House @500cappstreet

About the artists:

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, activist, educator, storyteller & curator who lives/works between Ohlone Land [Oakland, CA] and Powhatan Land [Richmond,VA]. Their work has been included in exhibitions and performances at Konsthall C [Stockholm, Sweden], SEPTEMBER Gallery [Hudson, NY], EFA Project Space [New York City, NY], Leslie Lohman Museum [New York City, NY], San Francisco State University Gallery, Signal Center for Contemporary Art [Malmo, Sweden], Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [San Francisco, CA] and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [Berkeley, CA], amongst others. For the past 5 years, Lukaza has been the Lead Curator at Nook Gallery [Oakland, CA], collaborating with over 80+ artists, writers, performers & musicians, in a gallery located in their apartment kitchen. They are currently enrolled in an MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.


David Wilson creates observational drawings based on direct experiences with landscape and orchestrates site-based gatherings that draw together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans into collaborative relationships. He organized the experimental exhibition The Possible at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and received the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 2012 SECA Art Award. He has exhibited his work with SFMOMA, was included in the 2010 CA Biennial, and presented a Matrix solo exhibition at BAMPFA. Wilson has received grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Southern Exposure, The Center for Craft and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. He is based in Oakland, CA.


Giving Tuesday

Donate Here!

Our staff of artists contributes to your experiences at 500 Capp Street every time they come to work. On this Giving Tuesday, we are turning to our community for your support.

2022 was a year of growth and development for 500 Capp Street and all working here. We welcomed over 2,200 visitors through free and low-cost admission to our artist-driven exhibitions, programs, and educational workshops, hosted our first-ever Benefit Auction Party, and continued work on dynamic and diversified programming, and growing accessibility to the archive and collection.

Hear from our staff of artists on what inspires them and why their work at 500 Capp Street matters. Join us in building support for 2023 by donating!

My experience at 500 Capp Street has been a beautiful introduction to the art world. It’s my first job relating to galleries or working with artists in any way, so it’s enlightening in that way

– Audrey Herrera, Intern

One of the biggest things I have learned is that it requires a supportive community to make the impossible possible, and that every spoke is vital to make the wheel turn. As an artist, I have shifted my approach to materials and have loosened my grip and have become more playful and experimental within the space of my studio. – Justin Nagle, Archive and Facilities Coordinator

It starts from visual stimulation and the house itself as an inspiration for my works as well as the acoustic of the house as a sound artist. Aside from visual aspects of the house its educational endeavor of the staff and their openness to share the process of the curating, installing, and research has been a tool to expand my vision about art. – Ava Koohbor, Operations Coordinator

It’s free! and open to conversation. At any moment you’ll see established artists coming in through its doors for tea. I think it’s great the org can invite so many people from different walks of life and you can sit there and talk about the exhibition, the house or what the Mission was like 20 years ago.

– Victor Saucedo, Artist Guide

500 Capp Street is different from other organizations in its spirit of collaboration and care for the artists and staff. David Ireland’s legacy and his care for the arts community are palpable inside the house and in the people who keep it alive and that is reflected and honored in the way 500 Capp Street is run.

– Rebecca Kaufman, Artist Guide

One thing about the exhibitions at 500 Capp Street is I constantly feel they challenge me as an artist. They go beyond responses to a social movement, a piece of history, or a transient sensory stimulation but often challenge how I think about art, human society, and all kinds of man-made structures on a deeper level and original approach.

– Kacy Jung, Artist Guide (Photo by Ebti)

Ann Hamilton at 500 Capp Street

Process + Place: Ann Hamilton

here • there • then • now

February 11 – April 29, 2023

Opening Reception: February 11, 2023, Saturday 12-5pm

RESERVE TICKETS

On the occasion of Headlands Center for the Arts’ 40th anniversary in 2022, Headlands joins 500 Capp Street for a project created by Ann Hamilton sited in both locations that highlights the deep connection between the two spaces and their shared stories of material and discovery.

At Headlands, artists David Ireland, Mark Thompson, and a team of collaborators transformed and opened the cluster of former military buildings to artists in 1986, creating an architectural condition that amplified and extended the vocabularies Ireland developed in his ongoing living project on Capp Street. Within this framework, Hamilton responded to these conditions in her 1989-1991 renovation of Headlands’ Mess Hall, transforming the space into a comfortable and inviting gathering place where meals are shared, collaborations are inspired, and creative revelations arise. Also in 1989, Hamilton was in residence at Capp Street Project with an installation entitled Privations and Excesses.

Now, Hamilton returns to both sites for here •  there • then • now, reaching across time and place to form an engagement, reflection, and response. During a research residency at 500 Capp Street in November 2022, Hamilton selected objects  from Ireland’s practice, exploring the typology of their forms and materiality, and scanned each to create luminous images that will be on display along with a newspaper print that will be available as a free, take home memento.

Further connecting the domestic scale of 500 Capp Street with the institutional scale of Headlands’ studio buildings, Hamilton is developing a sculptural audio element that will call across the distance to connect the near at hand with the far away—a pulse, connection, collaboration reaching across time, then and now.  

Process + Place : Ann Hamilton, here •  there • then • now, will have satellite installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts on view from February 12 to March 19, 2023, at Building 944, 944 Simmonds Road, Sausalito, CA 94965.

More information on Headlands Center for the Arts Anniversary, Process + Place: Headlands at 40 here.

About Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton’s art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.

In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances far greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world? These concerns have animated the site responsive installations that have formed the bulk of Hamilton’s practice over the last 20 years. But where the relations of cloth, sound, touch, motion and human gesture once gave way to dense materiality, Hamilton’s work now focuses on the less material acts of reading, speaking and listening. The influence of collaborative processes in ever more complex architectures has shifted her forms of making, wherein the movement of the viewer in time and in space now becomes a central figure of the work.

A Remarkable Year

Dear Artists and Supporters,

2022 has been an impressive year for 500 Capp Street. 

Throughout this year of growth in programming and community-building, 500 Capp Street prioritized remaining free of charge. In this season of giving, we hope you will consider contributing to 500 Capp Street to ensure free admission with artist-guided tours for 2023 and beyond.

In 2022 500 Capp Street welcomed over 2,200 visitors to our artist-driven exhibitions, including The Way Things Also Are by Libby Black, A Tree is A Tree by Michael Zheng, and As Above So Below by Sherwin Rio. We created our first juried residency call-out focused on performing arts, awarded to Megan Lowe and Johnny Huy Nguyen, resulting in HOME(in)STEAD, an awe-inspiring thirteen-run sold-out performance. Programs included Domestic Affairs: Protocols for Living Together, organized by architects Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmuller, Shifting Possessions with artist and academic Việt Lê, and a week-long educational workshop in partnership with Mission Art Center. 

We succeeded with our first-ever Benefit Auction Party honoring Mildred Howard when you, our community, came together to show your support and help fundraise for the organization. We also formed an archive team focused on preserving and curating Bay Area conceptual art. And all of this would not have happened without your support. 

In 2023 we look forward to presenting the work of SECA awardee Marcel Pardo Ariza, thanks to a prestigious grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. And we could not be more thrilled to start the year with a project with Ann Hamilton in partnership with Headlands Center for the Arts, helping to celebrate their 40th anniversary, amongst other exciting artist-driven exhibitions and programs to come. 

As you may know, the heart of 500 Capp Street relies on the unique experience brought to you through intimate tours with an artist guide. Oftentimes, these guides are active students–– emerging or mid-career artists too. They are employed at 500 Capp Street to support the core of what they do; to live, thrive, and further engage with the artistic community as active artists. With in-depth knowledge of 500 Capp Street’s collection, archives, and exhibitions presented, these talented artists provide unique access to the house every time you visit.

To quote artist and Board Chair David Wilson, “I see 500 Capp Street as a gift. We are all gifted a place of the richest inspiration to visit again and again.” 

500 Capp Street needs your help to raise $60,000 by the year-end. In this season of giving, can you make a generous donation and ensure 500 Capp Street remains free of charge with artist-guided tours for 2023 and beyond? You can donate online here or mail a check payable to 500 Capp Street for $5,000, $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, or any other denomination.  

No amount is too large or small for you to make an impact. Contribute to 500 Capp Street–– a portal to what’s possible and imaginable and ensure free admission for 2023 and beyond.  

We look forward to your continued support. 

Sincerely,

Lian Ladia
Curator, Exhibitions & Programs
500 Capp Street

Cait Molloy
Director
500 Capp Street

Donate Online Here

Shifting Possessions Salon Series #1 with Việt Lê featuring curator-scholar Patrick Flores

On Camp, Agit Prop and Imelda Marcos

Monday, October 31, 2022, 4:00-5:30pm. Doors open at 3:30pm

Online (zoom link): Register here

SOLD OUT On-site (limited seating, RSVP required, email lian@500cappstreet.org)

On All Hallow’s Eve (Oct 31) and on the cusp of Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, please join us for a Zoom presentation, conversation and post-talk celebration/ costume party at The David Ireland House Dining Room with curator-scholar Patrick Flores (University of the Philippines), in dialog with artist-academic Việt Lê (California College of the Arts; ‘22 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow). As an opening case study, Flores will present on an exhibition he curated, Objects of Study (2022) –a critical reconsideration of Imelda Marcos’ art collections at the Vargas Museum (University of the Philippines Diliman). Of this artistic trove, Flores writes, “Inscribed in looking at and seeing through and around the images are the history of their shifting possessions and the political, ethical, and moral trouble they pose.”

Flores puts this Vargas Museum show in relation to the late artist David Medalla’s 1969 protest at the opening night of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), a huge complex initiated by the Marcos regime, with a banner which read “Down with Mystification.”  These moments may link us to the notion of object or property, mediated by camp and agit prop. 

Conjuring the Mission, Manila, and the Davids (David Medella and David Ireland) as nodal points, we will reflect on space, place and displacement, ownership, and (queer) strategies.  As we continue to shift notions of possession, in its various valances–as  objects, as subjects, as well as territories and hauntologies– we trouble past and future archives.

Shifting Posessions is a Three-Part Salon Series in The Dining Room with artist and academic Việt Lê having dialogs and programming over tea, on queer(y)ing object collections, remediation strategies, geopolitical connections, historical trauma and healing.

Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003. Flores is also Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019, Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila, and Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art (2000), the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008, and was the curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Flores was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. 

Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010); a member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011), organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe; and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He co-edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011). On behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines, Flores organized the conference “Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia” in Manila.

Việt Lê is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê, Associate professor at California College of the Arts, is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, 2019) is in the collections of the Guggenheim, Victoria and Albert Museum, SF MOMA, among others.  

A 2022 Stanford Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) Mellon Arts Fellow, Lê has presented his work at The Banff Centre, Bangkok Art & Cultural Center, Shanghai Biennale, Rio Gay Film Festival, the Smithsonian, among other venues. Lê curated  Charlie Don’t Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver, BC, 2005); and co-curated humor us (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, CA, 2008), transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix (with Yong Soon Min: ARKO, Seoul; Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn; UC Irvine Gallery; YBCA, San Francisco, 2008-09) and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei) and the 2022 Viet Film Fest, “the world’s largest Vietnamese international film festival,” with a special screening and Q&A with Trinh T. Minh-ha. Lê is a board member of the Queer Cultural Center and Art Matters. vietle.net

Sherwin Rio

As Above So Below

As Above So Below by Sherwin Rio is generously sponsored by Mary Valledor and the Carlos Villa Estate, Dudley and Michael Del Balso, with additional support by Colin Fernandes.

December 3, 2022 – February 25, 2023

RESERVE TICKETS

Sherwin Rio is an interdisciplinary artist working in San Francisco who makes site-specific and research-based work in sculpture, installation, video, performance, and audio. For his exhibition at 500 Capp Street, Rio is inspired by Ireland’s affinity for enclosure, particularly his deep interest in the House’s basement, a space Ireland called “The Grotto” where he sourced dirt for his work and spent many hours in solitude.

Framed by Ireland’s dual relationship to architecture above and below, Rio is creating works that provide alternative, inverse ways of experiencing a house—indebted to the past, the unseen, and the underground.

In one work, Rio opens up the floorboards to reveal a hidden stairwell and extends it, with copper pipes. Rio also finds inspiration in Ireland’s basement, in the network of pipes and electrical conduit, and merges this with an artwork that Ireland made by recording the sound of the pipes and walls. Rio’s sculptural sound installation transmits and amplifies vibrational sound within the House– “I see these items–webs of ABS, PVC, unistrut, wood, soil and conduit–as the veins that bring lifeblood to the house, preserving its ability to function–a need that preceded Ireland and continues into the future,” writes Rio.

Rio also creates an installation changing the objects and airing out the Dining Room—filled with problematic objects, photographs, and animal trophies from safari travels—Rio clears the Dining Room and opens all the drawers, clearing and re-circulating air as a gestural symbol. Rio writes, “The work is a critical look at the commodification of nature and culture, dominance and violence as leisure, and a business that profited from and upheld ideas born of settler-colonialism, manifest destiny, and global capitalism.”

Additional installation works will be presented throughout the House as well. Rio will live at 500 Capp Street for 10 days in order to develop work for the exhibition.

Sherwin Rio is an interdisciplinary artist who makes visual metaphors addressing colonization, historical public amnesia, and intergenerational storytelling through a Filipinx-American lens. He has exhibited and performed as a solo and collaborative artist throughout the US in venues such as: de Young Museum, Asian Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Carlsbad Museum of Art, San Jose State University, Portland State University, Dominican University, University of Northern Colorado, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Human Resources, and Torpedo Factory. Awards include a 2019 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, the 2019 International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, the 2018 Ella King Torrey Award for Innovation & Excellence in the Arts, and the 2017 Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Fellowship Award. 

As Above So Below by Sherwin Rio is generously sponsored by Mary Valledor and the Carlos Villa Estate, Dudley and Michael Del Balso, with additional support by Colin Fernandes and in kind contribution by John Yoyogi Fortes.

A Tree is A Tree

Michael Zheng

A Tree is a Tree

October 22 – November 19, 2022

Opening Day: Saturday, October 22, 12-5pm

Reserve Tickets!

San Francisco-based conceptual artist Michael Zheng’s work is influenced strongly by his Buddhist upbringing. Born in China, Zheng’s mother found him a Buddhist master when he was little, and his artwork is an extension of his ongoing exploration of the intrinsic nature of all things. He often uses the spatial, historical, and other contextual characteristics of a site or situation as the formal materials to create his work. 

The exhibition title, A Tree Is A Tree, is a Buddhist aphorism that informs the works on view, all of which place emphasis on ‘seeing’ and ‘noticing.’ Zheng observes details within the architecture, history, and personal stories embedded in Ireland’s House as a means of pointing to the transcendent moments inherent in daily life.

Planned works include the conversion of the living room into an enormous camera obscura. The immersive installation, entitled As Is, references the upstairs window Ireland blocked with copper and his accompanying audio recording that describes what can be seen outside. Similarly, As Is brings the outside in, but in such a way as to subtly critique how framing affects perception. “Life as it is, when framed in a particular way, can intrigue, can be art,” writes Zheng.

Zheng also contributes Wu Wei Drawing, a large-scale work on paper created by tracing nail holes, smudges, and cracks on the House’s wall and then repeating these over and over. For Zheng, this time intensive process is informed by meditation practice—a process of paying attention to the task at hand and accepting accidents as they occur. “By relinquishing the subjective expectation of the resulting image and instead letting the process dictate the act of drawing, this paradoxically often produces mesmerizing images in the end,” he writes.

A Root is No Branch is a large installation of photographic panels that present fragmented views of roots and branches, hung in such a way as to allow the viewer, through their own experience, to question their perceptive process. “Our acquired knowledge makes us ‘presume’ many things, including perhaps that the roots are lower in the soil than the branches in the air,” writes Zheng. “In reality, it’s not necessarily so. A tree is a tree, regardless of how we perceive it.”

Several other works in various media are planned and will be installed throughout the House. An accompanying full-colored catalog will be published for the exhibition.

Michael Zheng’s work has been exhibited internationally including in the Vancouver Biennale, the Baltic Triennial at ICA/London, OSTEN Biennial of Drawing Skopje/National Gallery of N. Macedonia, and Macao Museum of Art/China, and nationally at the Berkeley Art Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Marina Abramovic Institute West, and in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial.