



Caleb Duarte: Chuchería
Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College, March 9 – April 9, 2020
Caleb Duarte works in public sculpture, performance, and painting. He uses ordinary construction materials to create temporary structures; these often become sites for performances that Duarte organizes in collaboration with communities, most recently working with unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. In Chuchería (loosely translated as a thing of little value), Duarte uses drywall, lumber, packed earth, cement, and plaster to construct a spatial intervention in the gallery. Chuchería reflects on the powerful symbolism of home, systems of value as they relate to art history and culture, and the expansiveness of decolonial art practices in Zapatista indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
May 18, 1972 – May 24, 1973
Limited edition zine condensing a single journal by feminist artist Nancy Youdelman. Made in collaboration with Nancy Youdelman and printed on riso by Laguna Collective in Downtown Fresno.
Special edition poster by local risograph printer and designer (and Art Space Gallery Student Aide) Vicente Velázquez III.
GOING PUBLIC
Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College, October 10 – November 21, 2019
Recorded at Fresno City College and at CMAC (Community Media Access Collaborative) in downtown Fresno, GOING PUBLIC is a DIY public access TV show, directed by artist and filmmaker Liz Roberts and made with the participation of FCC students and members of the Fresno artist community. Episodic and accumulative, GOING PUBLIC builds over time as content is added, re edited, and looped. Thinking about issues of access, representation, local public conversations, and documentary, through the lens of a community college gallery.
Episode One: PILOT includes music and an interview with local punk band Squid Ink, and student generated content in the form of art tutorials and skits. Episode Two: How To includes a paint color mixing tutorial with Fresno based artist Kezia Harrell and her brother, Chaim Harrell, and more student skits and tutorials.
Episode One: PILOT screened at 6pm on October 10 at the Art Space Gallery, with simultaneous broadcast through Community Media Access Collaborative (Comcast Xfinity Channel 93 and AT&T U-Verse Channel 99 in the Fresno area). Episode Two screened on November 7th.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Fresno City College
March 4 – April 21, 2019
Installation views, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Human For Scale. Fresno City College, 2019.
June 12, 2015 — September 5, 2015
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Mary Ann Aitken, Derf Backderf, Cara Benedetto, Christi Birchfield, dadpranks, Kevin Jerome Everson, Ben Hall, Jae Jarrell , Harris Johnson, Jimmy Kuehnle, d.a. levy, Michelangelo Lovelace Sr., Dylan Spaysky, and Carmen Winant.
How to Remain Human continues MOCA Cleveland’s focused engagement with artists connected to Cleveland and the surrounding region, including neighboring cities in Pennsylvania and Michigan. It features emerging, mid-career, and established artists, working across a wide variety of media, who question and affirm humanness.
The exhibition’s title is a line from the late Ohio writer d.a. levy’s “Suburban Monastery Death Poem” (1968). Ardent, aching, and raw, levy’s poetry captured the struggle for freedom and expression during a tumultuous time in Cleveland’s history. Among the artists in How to Remain Human, there is a shared sense of the need to make, in order to interrogate life and claim space. They explore various ways of acting in and experiencing the world, questioning how we can go on, relate, and be.
Language and narratives are found in many of the works, presenting chronicles of the everyday and the urgent need to communicate. Thick paint, familiar objects, and engagements with the body give the exhibition a heightened sense of touch and physicality. Humor and nonsense become tools to playfully puncture life’s routines, habits, and trials. Together, the works tackle the complexity and intensity of being human: conflict, power, pleasure, folly, doubt, loss, skin, sex, home, money, hair, rage, romance, confusion, darkness, lightness, reaching, pushing, here, now, never, again, more, always.
with Rose Bouthillier, Associate Curator, and Megan Lykins Reich, Deputy Director
Cakes and Daggers: Heartbreak and Emancipation
October 23 — November 15, 2018
Fresno City College
Sylvia Savala’s paintings are fluid and gestural with a strong, Chicanx feminist perspective. Figures and objects sit in swirling, fields of color, symbols, and form. Her works often chronicle dreams, personal narratives, and the ebb and flow of relationships. They express the power of female desire and sensuality, often placing her body, and by extension, her identity as a Mexican-American woman, unapologetically front and center.
A sense of emancipation, fun, and self-love characterize Sylvia Savala’s paintings, with the artist’s irrepressible sense of humor evident in works such as Let them Eat Cake (2001)—a lewd play on the mythical words of Marie Antoinette at the time of the French Revolution—and Fast Car (2015) in which furious but measured brushstrokes capture a car as it speeds away from the frame. Lately, Savala’s paintings have become increasingly abstract, with towering, geometric, compositions of cakes and other objects filling the frame.
Savala has spent most of her life in the Fresno area. Her home, like the homes of many artists, is an important part of her creative life and practice: it is filled with furniture, art, and color collected over time. Acknowledging this, we recreate a small part of her home studio within the Art Space Gallery.
January 18—February 15, 2018
Art Space Gallery, Fresno City College
Clase abstracta de brujería is a multi channel installation by Fresno based-artist and City College instructor Ricardo Rivera. Rivera’s expansive practice includes performance, drawing, and immersive installations that blend projections, video, sound, and sculpture.
Rivera’s practice involves digitally mapping the gallery to create a three dimensional model of the interior. Small idiosyncrasies of the space, such as an oddly placed clock or alcove, are incorporated into the work. The title of the show could be translated as abstract sort of witchcraft. It refers to multiple alchemical processes: that of transforming the gallery; of labor into art; of extracting images from computer languages; making the invisible visible. A more literal translation might be abstract witchcraft class, suggesting a kinship between teaching and witchcraft.
Ricardo Rivera (1970, Sacramento, CA) earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001, and his BFA also from SFAI in 1997. Selected solo exhibitions include Oscillations, Maxxx Project Space, Valais, Switzerland (2016) and Fantasy is A Place Where it Rains: Part II, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco, CA (2011). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including Words Imagined: Co-relations Between Art and Poetry, Sacred Heart University Art and Design Gallery, Fairfield, Connecticut (2017); Paix, Amitié, Limites et Réglements – Tout Ceci Se Trouvait, D’Habitude Á L’Extérieur, Installations in situ, Creative Villages, Leytron, VS, Switzerland (2016); and DRAWINGS | FRIDGES, Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA (2015). In 2014, he was awarded a research fellowship as a part of Ars Contemporaneous Alpinus, a theoretical and applied research project about the issue of site- specific practices taking the natural environment as a context in Sierre, Switzerland.Before his role at Fresno City College, Rivera taught at several Bay Area institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, City College of San Francisco, Stanford University, and the California College of the Arts.
August 21 – October 11, 2018
Bending towards the Light of the Sun begins in two local archives – the National Land for People archive at California State University, Fresno, home to an extensive collection of the group’s land activist printed matter and ephemera, and artist Nancy Youdelman’s personal archive, consisting of early performance documentation, collaborations with other artists in Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at Fresno State, and Youdelman’s cathartic experiments with casting and using her body as material in her work.
From there, it expands. Like the city itself, it sprawls outward, with installations by an intergenerational group of artists connected to the history of land, activism, and art in the region; film screenings, artist publications, public workshops and talks.
Maia Ballis, Caleb Duarte, Carissa Garcia, Laguna Collective, R.L. Muas, Sylvia Savala, Christian Vargas, Nancy Youdelman.
Bending towards the Light of the Sun is anchored by archival materials relating to Fresno’s history of activism and art making, in the form of printed matter by Fresno-based radical land activist group National Land for People (NLP).
Tina Williams Brewer
Judy Chicago
Teresa Flores
Ronda Kelley
Adrianna Alejo Sorondo
Carmen Winant
Deeper Structures
SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio, 2015
Earcatcher (collective), Yvonne Carmichael, Dani Leventhal, Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Exhibition text: He’s Coming to Bring me the Sperm
I’m watching Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s film trailer The Pterodactyls (2015), and trying to figure out the connection between the diver striding confidently towards the end of the diving board, and Tatum O’Neal, proto child star, in a scene from 1978 coming-of-age sequel (already a copy), International Velvet, as one scene dissolves into another. O’Neal is immaculate and smiling, the diver is diving. Is this the connection? A smile on the point of breaking, at the moment when it goes from a reaching smile to a grimace, when the expectation of success suddenly falters (at its apex, the dive is going suddenly, splashily wrong). Losing it. This being now, we watch endless replays of the pain of defeat at 400 fps.
Tatum O’Neal dissolves into an extended montage of film trailer clips — Forrest Gump, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, Con Air, The Pelican Brief, and many others. The characters seem to nod knowingly to each other, across genre, and across story. These films form the invisible pop-culture scaffold of a reality we have all agreed upon; they represent a language, a currency, share a pre 9/11 sense of nostalgia. In this film trailer, the narrative (like the smile) breaks down, degrades, becoming illegible, hysterical. These fragments alternate with basic screen saver style graphics (tumbling stars a la 1999), and then there is a clip from an ABC special program in which Patti Labelle is acknowledged but invisible. In which her image is not visible, not represented; erased. The Pterodactyls is a trailer for a film that doesn’t exist.
There is another kind of nostalgia at play in Yvonne Carmichael’s The Ballad of the Rawson Sisters in which performers silently re enact the repeated gestures of shop workers in Bradford, in the North of England, where many shops at the center of town stand empty. Carmichael imagines the ghosts of spanx-clad, manicured female shop workers, abstracting the gestures and repetitive acts of folding, restocking, hanging, in a choreographed folk tale that memorializes the once busy past of these spaces. We never see a face – just feet, legs, hands. Feet which stand all day in heels; hands that elegantly perform; mild fetishization.
Artist collective Earcatcher work within strict narrative parameters, using sound as a generative seed around which mysterious, playful, and disjointed stories are developed; all restricted to a One is made each month; as they accumulate, narrative threads appear. The camera takes us on a trip to the mall, watches a game of rounders, the spinning of a penny; a woman waits outside a convenience store. They are often acted, but sometimes, as with Out (2015), document everyday events. They are infused with place – all are filmed in around Columbus, Ohio, but despite their brevity and simplicity, their framing, composition and coloring in post production results in a filmic treatment of the everyday, with a Midwestern-gothic sensibility. They have the high soft sheen of “the movies”; tiny films in which the everyday is elevated to hollywood status.
Dani Leventhal’s Hearts are Trumps Again (2012) begins with a montage of scenes. Hair, (shining, black) tumbles over shoulders; pigeons (scruffy, scrappy), pile into a hole in a roof, a scuffle breaks out, the pecking order is challenged/asserted; the camera cuts to a bedroom crowded with two twin beds. Gas station coffee in a styrofoam cup upon a red carpet; basic comforts. A halfway house; last port of call in a storm. Then we are outside and Leventhal is interviewing a young woman, “Nina”, wearing yellow plastic earrings. It looks to be about 45 degrees Fahrenheit in a Northern European city; this shot has the feel of a BBC2 documentary or exposé. She says: “I’m just sitting here waiting for my donor. He’s coming to bring me the sperm”. Nina breaks character and makes eye contact, cracking up at one of Leventhal’s questions – what looks like documentary is staged, our narrator unreliable.
In Leventhal’s work, what appears at first to be a formal exercise in free-‐association gradually reveals itself as something else-‐not playing straight, less story, and more discourse. Less film, and more sculpture, made up of narrative fragments. Cut to a brief excerpt of Ana Mendieta’s 1972 performance Untitled (Chicken Piece Shot #2), in which the artist stands naked, holding a decapitated chicken as it bleeds all over her. Ana Mendieta, most definitely not faking it.