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Tag: Armory Center for the Arts
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how we are in time and space
Armory Center for the ArtsIt’s all I can think about. It’s all I can think about. It’s all I…
Since the news broke revealing the Supreme Court’s green light to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it’s all I can think about. It is tremendously difficult to avoid feeling the progress forged by decades of activism is now lost. I found reprieve from this permeating sadness upon visiting the Armory Center for the Arts to see the exhibition “how we are in time and space” featuring artists Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif and Barbara T. Smith. This was my second time seeing the show — returning to the work with eyes tinged with rage and disappointment. This widely praised exhibition is worth seeing and revisiting; curated by Michael Ned Holte, the show features a range of artwork, documentation, and ephemera by the three artist-activist friends and long-term collaborators. This trove of material emphasizes the deep sense of friendship and support that guided their interrelated practices, united in their deep desire for social change. Their stars first crossed as MFA students at UC Irvine (the program’s first 1971 cohort). Two years later marked the 1973 Roe V. Wade ruling, and as Holte and other art historians have posited, Roe had an overarching impact on feminist ideas and activist strategies of the early 1970s, a period that also marks the emergence of what Amelia Jones calls “body art.” While this history of second-wave feminism is not without its privileged fractures, the art-activist networks that emerged during this period in Los Angeles were integral to the advancement of Women’s rights in America. As we move forward in protest and action, it’s crucial to listen to these histories of resistance and their collective screams.
Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Ave
Pasadena, California 91103
On view through June 12, 2022 -
Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that we simply weren’t able to imagine it. It takes a special kind of imagination to create a vision, whether idealized or dystopian, of an evolving (and/or disintegrating) reality out of personal observation and the materials at hand. The American (and Pasadena native) writer, Octavia E. Butler, called hers a “radio imagination” and, from her prolific output of science fiction, we can understand this description. It takes a kind of multi-frequency mode of looking and listening, and an acutely prehensile capacity for speculative exploration to conjure these variously forward and backward-looking visions of worlds that might be our own – in slightly altered molecular or astrophysical configurations. Given a different scope, Radio Imagination would have to be considered one of the most visionary exhibitions of the past year. The artists who have entered the ‘mothership’ of The Huntington Library’s Butler Archive, have each engaged and returned with their individual interpretations of aspects of Butler’s imagination: the acute alienation of an African-American woman marginalized by social and racial barriers; her simultaneous sense of inter-connectedness and eco-symbiosis (and necrosis); her will to manifest this larger, encompassing view, to radically project the implications of her observations, extrapolate and boldly fictionalize and fantasize upon them; her ability to parallel and project the African-American experience into futuristic, even extra-terrestrial, constructions. The show includes work by Connie Samaras, Cauleen Smith, Lauren Halsey, Laylah Ali, Malik Gaines and Alex Segade, and Mendi and Keith Obadike. But, true to Butler’s visionary spirit, the show takes us still further – returning us finally to the incomparable domain of Butler’s novels.
Armory Center for the Arts
145 N. Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103
Show runs thru January 8, 2017
