Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa’ (the water is rising) solo exhibition at Blaffer Museum of Art at the University of Houston, Houston, TX.

All This Soft Wild Buzzing considers the relationship between artists and the natural landscape through a lens of collaboration, of listening, and of reciprocity. Nature is often viewed as a neutral space, but landscape—with its connotations of ownership and control—is fraught. The sweeping vistas of early American landscape painting and photography promoted and perpetuated Manifest Destiny, and artists replicated a prevailing desire to conquer the land. In direct contrast to this earlier narrative, the contemporary artists in this exhibition hone in on details, incorporate organic materials into their process, and allow nature to exist. Artists included: Saif Azzuz, Teresa Baker, Christopher Robin Duncan, Nicki Green, Bessma Khalaf, Dionne Lee, Young Suh, Stephanie Syjuco.

All eight of the artists in the exhibition live, or have lived, in northern California, and their work resonates with the specificity of the Bay Area terrain and the people who inhabit it. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the final line of a poem by Camille Dungy that draws parallels between the soft, protected soul of her partner and the untouched, pre-colonial coastline of California. The artists in the show engage with the effects of forest fires, the Land Back movement, the carceral system, belonging, climate change, and the resiliency of Indigenous life, among other topics. Landscape is exposed as a historical construct that is interrogated by a new generation of artists grappling with the relationship between humans and nature. In these works, the artists invite viewers to also consider site, place, and the land beneath and around them. All This Soft Wild Buzzing inaugurates the Wattis galleries on the newly expanded CCA campus.

All This Soft Wild Buzzing is curated by Jeanne Gerrity and organized by Diego Villalobos.

Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is an exhibition in two parts with programming examining the shifts in dilated time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020-2024. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions traces the cyclical nature of improvised, responsive yet sustained systems of mutual aid, information sharing, and embodied knowledge and their intersectional, intimate, and enduring effects, as magnified by the COVID-19 global pandemic. 

The exhibition considers artists as prognosticators and traces their evolving practices and approaches, informed by activism and the creation of mutual aid networks spurred from lived experiences such as the still ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and Black and Brown grief. The artists assume the role of narrators for memetic memory, muffled silences, and informal archiving against power structures sanctioning conditions of personal isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction. 

Amplifying the concurrent exhibitions presented in Houston and San Francisco, public programs are activations and timely engagements of the current moment, during the final months of the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a diary of experiences, encompassing not only what happened but also the possibility of what never happened in the ongoing process of remembering and recollection, as a form of ‘protest against forgetting.’ 

The years 2020-2024 began with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which continues to expose systemic inequities disproportionately affecting historically marginalized communities. In the 2022 book What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler advocates for intertwinement as a ‘“collective effort to find or forge the best form of ‘interdependency’ as one that most clearly embodies the ideals of radical equality.”’ The concurrent exhibitions in Houston and San Francisco and their related public programs are guided by entangled ethics in order to untangle forms of sustained solidarities inching toward liberation.

The exhibition, How to Carry Water, brings together contemporary visual artists and humanities scholars in shared observations and questions about watersheds. In this expanded conversation, the term “watershed” refers not only to ecological structures, but also to the spatial, temporal and cultural entities that catalyze collectivity and life alongside bodies of water. The exhibition considers how the lenses of history, philosophy and creative practice allow for alternative methods of witnessing the human relationship to water.

Curators: Ashley Stull Meyers, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Chief Curator of Art, Science, and Technology and Kelly Bosworth, Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Assistant Professor of Public History and Ethnomusicology.

Artists: Indira Allegra, Saif Azuz, Michael Boonstra, Carolina Caycedo, Dan Coe, Rasheena Fountain, Sky Hopinka, Garrick Imatani, Colin Ives, Sean McFarland, Susan Murrell, Jefferson Pinder and Margo Woloweic.

This exhibition is the second in a series highlighting contemporary Bay Area artists in our collection. The installation explores how artists relate to their environments through place: place as the physical land, place as heritage, place as the imaginary, and place as belonging.

Several artists examine climate change and its local impact. In Saif Azzuz’s Lo’op’ (It burns) (2021), he draws the color palette from maps of the 2021 droughts and fires in California. Other artists use found materials not only to address ecological issues but also to add layers of meaning, such as in Guillermo Galindo’s Ready to Go (2015), made from a broken bicycle and chair he found along the US-Mexico border. And others play with figure and ground: Clare Rojas’s Walking in Rainbow Rain (2021) is a meditation on disappearing into one’s environment. The drab cityscape is brightened by the rain’s rainbow palette, which also alludes to the history of the LGBTQ+ movement in San Francisco. The works on display, exploring themes of belonging, ecological stewardship, and social justice, are drawn from the 2022 Svane Family Foundation gift of 42 works by more than 30 local artists.

For his first institutional solo exhibition, Bay Area artist Saif Azzuz will construct a mixed-media installation of readymade sculptures, large-scale wood assemblage, found objects, and paintings. Titled "Cost of Living", the exhibition establishes current realities of gentrification and histories of settler colonialism as tandem forces to be examined and unsettled. The cost of living is both an indicator and a complaint, a framework and unequal reality that deals out unrelenting change.

In "Cost of Living", Azzuz utilizes the materials of gentrification, such as construction fencing, semi-private mesh, and barbed wire to mirror the physical reality that corporate development has on humans and nonhumans. Movement, sight, and memory are restricted as land is taken and soiled. With this installation, the artist creates a space in which viewers navigate through objects and artworks. With sightlines and physical pathways obscured, the viewer’s experience mirrors the shifting reality of the Bay Area.

Azzuz roots his practice in looking to the land and its histories as a prism for understanding the dread and beauty of contemporary life, guided by the signs and teachings of Indigenous resilience, learned from both plants and people.

Including works by: Saif Azzuz, Matthew Kirk, and G. Peter Jemison.

Jack Barrett presents "Plant a Weed", a group exhibition that brings together new and existing works by sixteen artists, from New York City, Los Angeles, Pacifica and Mexico City. On view from June 17 to July 22, 2023, the exhibition is curated by Francesca Altamura, an independent curator and organizer based in New York, NY. The exhibition will mark the debut of new works by over sixteen participating artists.

The artists in "Plant a Weed" offer a counterpoint to what is understood as natural, offering an expansion of systems, of publics, and a glimpse into the lives lived and loved within the urban ecosystem. Street detritus, both natural and human-made, maps out a cosmos of the non-desirable. Paper towels, Windex, egg shells, cigarettes, mummified rats, scorpions, lollipops, hard-shell tacos, fabric, paper, plastic, leather, and other mixed debris coagulate to form a new ecology.

The scurrying of critters acts as a score for the de facto co-habitual relationship New Yorkers, human and non-human, share. While pizza rats embark on a quest for a slice and a subway seat, the Adams administration appoints a ‘Rat Czar,’ a Sisyphean display of control over the non-human taking place during a generation-defining housing and medical crisis.

Amidst meticulously manicured astroturf and glistening corporate lawns, a weed resolutely disrupts the imposed order of the grid, of who belongs here, and of authority. In this whimsical interplay of urban encounters, resilience emerges, dismantling the hedgerows between the imaginary borders that demarcate the natural and human worlds.

Several artists in the exhibition including Michael Assiff and Salome Asega have undergone extensive fieldwork to shed light on their artworks. In Assiff’s new paintings from 2023, he trucked cross country with a childhood friend, observing the infrastructure and plant life that grows alongside truck stops, highways and spaces frequented by long-haul truckers. The 3D-printed monster truck model, Asega’s RATs, literally printed in the shape of a rat, which first debuted in the 2022 iterations of Nuit Blanche and Munchmuseet’s Munch Triennale, delves into Risk Assessment Tools, or AI technological systems, that are used by city agencies to make biased decisions about bail, prison sentencing, welfare, medical benefits and housing services. Saif Azzuz excavates the colonial history of Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan. In We don’t want your kind here (No’-oh) from 2022, the steel fence acts as a physical symbol of relentless colonial campaigns to privatize and monetize land and natural resources once stewarded by the Lenape.

Both Antonia Kuo and Ragini Bhow are inspired by the mercurial and moody rhythms of New York City. Kuo combines the photography taken around her home and studio, with industrial processes she learned growing up in her family’s casting foundry to create two new photographs, Aftermath and Phosphor, both from 2023. The densely layered compositions are so far abstracted from their original meaning, yet portray an emotive story about the urban landscape. Bhow enters into a transcendental state to create Wood Entity from 2023. As a means of digesting the sights and sounds of the city, she articulates amoebic forms by pressing on the blank aluminum sheets bought from an industrial metal supply store. Similar to Kuo, Justin Cloud grew up in a family of farmers, mechanics, and engineers. He uses an ancient technique called “repoussé and chasing” to create Mood Graft and Knight Kitchen from 2023, an art form used around the world to ornate metal from chalices to armor. The artist uses a hammer and chisel to shape the metal into realistic depictions of flowers.

Aryana Minai presents View and Embodied & Embedded IV from 2022, as emblems of architectural design elements. Minai creates a liquid pulp from recycled paper, then presses objects like bricks and stones, salvaged from the street, textile woodblocks and other urban artifacts, to create fossil-like imprints of the cities which she calls home, Tehran and Los Angeles. Tamara Santibañez creates new work from 2023 that exposes and interweaves meaning assigned to industrial materials, architecture and objects used for mass socio-political and symbolic actions. The artist renders two flowers, commonly used symbols of peace and resistance, in glazed porcelain that delicately hold a chain of keys and a heart-shaped lock at the center. For Santibañez, these objects represent the ‘lock bridge,’ where couples inscribe their names on padlocks, lock it on the bridge and throw the keys into the river. These gestures of eternal love are cut short due to ongoing maintenance costs and the structural integrity of the bridge being endangered by the added weight. Rodrigo Red Sandoval’s handmade manholes, constructed in Amsterdam and clogged with urban detritus from New York City, activate the gallery floor. In Sandoval’s new molds from 2023, cigarette butts and various debris clog the mouth-like openings, truncating the possibility of waste disposal. Sandoval lays bear the entanglements of global environmental degradation, breaking down the boundaries between the here vs. there of waste offsets. Within a series of three new small-scale works from 2023, Emma Safir fabricates portals between the inside and outside worlds. She first takes iPhone images from the streets, which are obscured through digital manipulation. These abstract backgrounds are printed on silk, then further distorted through traditional methods of fiber manipulation.

On view at Jack Barrett for only two weeks before the pandemic, Molly Soda presents for the second time, two vinyl windows, which incorporate “invasive” weeds that were grown in her apartment. These sculptures act as windows into the artist’s private space, as reminders that no matter how disorganized and chaotic her life becomes, the surrounding environs will always continue to flourish. Sydney Shen revives a sculpture from 2015, Please Don’t Eat Me, that consists of a dustpan and scorpions sourced from Etsy, a reminder of the life that exists between floorboards, in the walls, in the alleyways between apartments and on online marketplaces. Christine Egaña Navin questions utility and value, especially of objects, structures and processes made by humans and organically. In Botiquín 1.22 from 2018, she encases a mummified two-toed adult female Ring Tailed Cat, 22 two-dollar bills, a Blow Pop, two dehydrated Taco Bell hard-shelled tacos, and a mummified adolescent male Brown Rat, among many other objects, in epoxy taxidermy putty.

In Hamlet from 2022, Justin Chance uses a number of techniques to create his quilts, with wet and felt needle that is arranged, collaged, and sewn together with fibers and wool that are then encased in silk organza. His title refers to human settlements that are not legal entities and have no local government or official boundaries. Chance’s work represents an idealized version of rural life, where manicured lawns are within close commuting distance of a city. Em Rooney is also inspired by nature and creates botanical forms with large-scale industrial processes and materials. In trouble every day from 2022, a blue cocoon is made from steel, indigo-dyed rice paper, rhinestones, and synthetic whale boning, among other materials. In stark contrast, Monsieur Zohore’s material of choice is paper towels, an artistic practice that has been honed in for over ten years. In a new work from 2023, he presents a relic of old New York City, a plastic takeaway bag emblazoned with the former two-dimensional I ❤ NY logo. In another new work from 2023, Zohore depicts an iconic image of Mierle Laderman Ukeles performing Touch Sanitation Performance: “Handshake and Thanking Ritual” with Sanitation Workers of the New York City Department of Sanitation from 1979–80. Over the course of 11 months, Ukeles shook the hands of all 8,500 sanitation workers, thanking them for their service. Zohore re-writes this iconic image from performance history by adding the world's most expensive handbag ($450,000), designed by former Louis Vuitton Creative Director Marc Jacobs.

In this whimsical interplay of encounters, the resilience of artists thriving in the city is evident, as they subvert the borders between the haves and the have-nots, the locals and the interlopers, the perfect specimens and the riff-raff. The weed will always prevail.

This exhibition of eight artists: Saif Azzuz, Chelsea Culprit, Brian DeGraw, Brittni Ann Harvey, Erin O'Keefe, Eddie Martinez, Sarah Peters and Derek Weisberg showcases work that in some way engages with the triumphs and fallacies of the modern project. As the lines in the verse above state, "Doin' things I used to do/ They think are new," artists are filled with enthusiasm and excitement that belong to those who feel they are in the process of original invention, like children at play. Yet, as time goes by, we realize that this feeling of newness will be discovered and reclaimed by the next generation.
Examining this framework, images and motifs from the past become replete with additional meaning, celebrating the movement and repetition in many of the works which speak to this cyclical framework and create a vibrancy and mode of activity that is in communication between the various artworks.

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