Pioneer Works and Headlands Center for the Arts are pleased to co-present "Climate Futurism", an exhibition featuring new commissions by Artists Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, and Olalekan Jeyifous presented at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Curated by ecologist and climate policy expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the exhibition represents the culmination of Headlands’s inaugural Threshold Fellowship, a two-year program which highlights the power and efficacy of artists’ methods and processes to imagine a more equitable future. Taking inspiration from Johnson’s forthcoming book, What If We Get It Right?, the Artists have created works that explore topics such as creating new traditions, transforming our food system, reconnecting with nature, strengthening our diasporas, and proceeding with justice and love.

"Climate Futurism" is curated by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and is made possible by generous funding from the Joe & Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund. It is also supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Headlands’ Threshold Fellowship is supported in part by Christine & Curtis Gardner, Gruber Family Foundation, and The Hayabusa Charitable Foundation.

Image: Olalekan Jeyifous, PFC – Seneca SunCraft Orchards, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.

Erica Deeman is included in PODIUM II at Gallery 181, San Francisco, CA beginning 23 March 2021.

Erica Deeman is included in "When Things Go Back to Normal" at Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Berkeley, CA from 27 January - 25 February 2021.

Erica Deeman will direct a lighting and portraiture workshop at Medium Photo, San Diego on 25-26 April 2020.

The two-day workshop will examine the creative possibilities of studio lighting for expressive portraits. San Francisco based artist Erica Deeman will lead participants with live models and studio lighting equipment to create breathtaking, emotionally powerful portraits that express a deeper sense of meaning with our subjects. Workshop participants should have an understanding of camera equipment and digital post-processing software. No previous lighting knowledge required.

Erica Deeman will be included in the "Re-Imagining Equity in the Art World 2020" panel presented by ArtTable at Untitled Art Fair, San Francisco, on 18 January 2020. 

Three noted San Francisco artists working in diverse media will discuss their art practices, concerns and challenges, and where the equity movement might lead in coming years. Featuring artists Indira Allegra, Katherine Vetne and Erica Deeman, as well as Heidi Rabben, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The conversation will be moderated by James Voorhies, Chair, Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice, California College of the Arts, with an audience Q&A to follow. 

Erica Deeman will be included in "Sense of Self" at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art from 9 November 2019 to 15 March 2020. 

Presenting subjects who have been historically excluded and misrepresented reclaims their identities and reinserts them into art discourse. "Sense of Self" celebrates the power of contemporary photographic portraiture to spark empathy, break down barriers, and subvert assumptions.

Deeman’s Brown series will be presented in an immersive installation that questions insidious assumptions about race, and how we read faces based on our own visual expectations and historic portrayals. 

St. Joseph's Art Society is pleased to present an exhibition of Erica Deeman's photography. The exhibition will be on view in San Francisco, CA from 1 October 2019 - 31 January 2020.

Erica Deeman will be included in the new exhibition 'About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging' at the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive' from 17 May - 21 July 2019. 

Black culture and museum institutions have often had a negative relationship. Historically, this has included the theft of cultural objects, the appropriation of styles, and the devaluation of skilled practices, as well as the marginalization and exclusion of Black artists from exhibitions and collections. Museums have been implicated in antiblack practices that present racial difference as biological fact rather than social construction, and exclude, marginalize, and devalue Black art, Black artists, and Black life. Recognizing this, About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging centers a diverse array of Black art in the hope of addressing these questions: To whom does blackness belong? Where does blackness belong? How can blackness belong within the museum?

Erica Deeman has been chosen for the Headlands Center for the Arts' 2019 Artist in Residency Program. 

5 April - 17 May 2019

Shulamit Nazarian is proud to present, Close to Home, a group exhibition of four photographers that mine their personal experiences–past and present–to express moments of intimacy within larger social and political structures on view from 2 March - 6 April 2019. Engaging with the deep and complicated history of photographic portraiture, each artist renders his or her subjects in part as extensions of themselves, coded with personal and cultural references. 

Erica Deeman’s Brown series is a collection of medium format photographs that depict isolated men from the African diaspora, rendered shirtless in front of a brown backdrop that matches the color of the artist’s own skin. Injecting her own presence in the portrait of others,these deceptively straightforward imagesprovide a foil for the deleterious tropes of black male portraiture—particularly images affiliated with the practice of physiognomy and mug shots. Her subject’s gazes are quiet, vulnerable, and self-aware, carrying the power and weight of the photographic history and lineage that she is acutely referencing.

Aperture is pleased to present the group exhibition At Home: In the American West with a new work by Erica Deeman, on view from 6 December 2018 - 4 January 2019. In a year when thousands of migrant children have been sent to live in tent cities, rents for a San Francisco apartment average $3,750, and wildfires have destroyed entire communities, the question of how people define "home" has never felt more urgent. Some feel nostalgic about where they came from, some never left the towns they grew up in, and others couldn't wait to leave. At Home features a variety of emerging and established photographers who traveled through ten states in the American West and spoke to people about what, and where, home is. The series includes a formerly homeless woman who finally feels settled in her tiny house in Seattle, a single mother who found her sanctuary living off the grid in the New Mexico desert, a couple who built their dream mansion in the mountains, a DACA recipient who has proudly purchased his first home in Utah, and a Los Angeles native who feels at peace by the ocean.

This exhibtion coincides with the publication of The California Sunday Magazine's December special issue in which all stories will be told through photography, focusing on a single theme: Home.

The Phoenix Art Museum is pleased to present In the Company of Women: Women Artists from the Collection, a group exhibition with works by Erica Deeman, 7 July - 12 August 2018. The group exhibition showcases nearly 50 twentieth- and 21st-century artworks from Phoenix Art Museum's collection created exclusively by women. In an era of contemporary phenomena such as the #MeToo movement, and in light of growing awareness of gender inequality in many contexts, including art museums, this exhibition is an engagement with feminist scholarship that, for decades, has aimed to provide a more complete history of artistic production.

MOPA San Diego is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Erica Deeman, 27 April - 16 September 2018.

Two series by contemporary artist Erica Deeman, Brown and Silhouettes will be on display. The work investigates the history of race, ethnography, and portraiture through large-scale photographs. This exhibition is part of the museum’s The Artist Speaks series that includes a large video installation of the artist explaining the work in her own words.

Erica Deeman will be included in Way Bay at BAMPFA, 17 January - 20 May 2018.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY is pleased to present, ERICA DEEMAN: Silhouettes, the inaugural exhibition at their new Chelsea location, 521 West 26^th Street, Fifth Floor. Opening reception: September 14, 6 to 8 pm.

In her first solo exhibition at the gallery, entitled Silhouettes, Deeman employs the complex legacy of the silhouette to subvert established biases founded on face value, gender and race.

Silhouettes is comprised of a series of 45 x 45 inch color portraits of women from the African diaspora, most of whom were unknown to the artist. Deeman found her subjects by placing ads, approaching strangers on the street, and asking friends and family to pose.

Deeman’s elevated depiction of black femininity and identity underlines the series and provides a renewed narrative.  The larger than life-size portraits appear to be featureless black and white silhouettes upon first glance, but as the viewer becomes more intimate with the image, each woman’s individuality unfolds in the rich textures and skin tones barely visible. Deeman states: “It has been for me to reflect how I see myself, how I see and how I am seen…through these women.”

The Berkeley Museum of Art & Pacific Film Archive is pleased to present Silhouettes by Erica Deeman.

Erica Deeman is included in Get Face (To Gain Respect; To Increase One’s Status) at the Phoenix Art Museum.

Portraits prompt curiosity. Details such as the gesture of the sitter and the apparel they wear can communicate notions of status and power. We are left contemplating self-representation and the assumptions made about contemporary society through this artistic genre.

Drawn entirely from the permanent collection and spanning the nine collecting areas of Phoenix Art Museum - American, Asian, Contemporary, European, Fashion, Latin American, Modern, Photography, and Western American - these works reveal the loosely defined typology of portraiture, and provide a broad dialogue of art history, perception, and popular culture.