MoAD’s Emerging Artists Program (EAP) amplifies the practices of Bay Area artists at a pivotal moment in their career when visibility at a major museum will have a trajectory impact. “Emerging” is not an indicator of age or a marker of educational status, but an identifier that speaks to this moment of impact. MoAD is helping to establish EAP artists as important culture-makers to watch throughout the rest of their career. Offering artists visibility and a museum platform will ensure the longevity of their practice.
We are excited to announce:
- Cynthia Aurora Brannvall
- Richard–Jonathan Nelson
- Trina Michelle Robinson
- Ashley Ross
These artists span a variety of mediums from photography, multi-media works on paper, and sculpture. Admission tickets for this spring will be available soon.
Cynthia Aurora Brannvall – The Threads That Bind
March 30 – June 12, 2022
The Threads that Bind is an allusion to a body of artwork rendered in textiles to evoke memory, presence, labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history in the African diaspora. The concept and material of thread creates meaning as an ancestral carrier traveling through time across borders through voluntary and involuntary migration from one body to another. The bind refers to shared experiences of trauma, oppression and perseverance that cohere in Black identity.
Richard-Jonathan Nelson – Interlacing Distributed Intelligence/Noir Care
June 22 – September 18, 2022
The Black body and craft can be intermeshed to depict our western culture’s speculative future no matter how foreign the idea of Black craft is outside of the American Low country. Through the hybridizing of traditional craft practices like embroidery, weaving, and quilting along with digital art, the Black body is reimagined as a place for futuristic progress. Thereby creating images of the Black Diaspora far removed from continued historic depiction as servile and without agency, but instead as visual and culturally complex individuals. The work is balanced visually between the dichotomy of Blackness as an expansive unknowable monolithic void and a chromatically intense generator of culture.
Trina Robinson – Excavation: Past, Present and Future
October 5 – December 11, 2022
Using early photography and motion picture processes, Excavation looks at the relationship between memory and migration. Robinson’s ancestry is the catalyst for this exploration, but the work also looks at stories of migration and memory outside of her immediate family. In Paul Virilio’s The Vision, the author talks about capturing the impression of someone or something rather than producing an exact copy when it comes to creating an image. An ethereal copy is Robinson’s approach when considering the excavation of memories. An exact replica might not be possible, but we can get a glimpse, hold on, and sit with what remains so we can move forward into the future. Hopefully we can move into the future together.
Ashley Ross – 10/27/03
December 21 – March 5, 2023
10/27/03 is a body of work that surveys the ways in which experiential dualities can exist within the confines of a religious upbringing. Bringing together staged black and white photographs, familial archive layered works, and installation, this body of work uses photography and personal memorabilia to illustrate ideas about indoctrination and legacy within the black familial structure. Whether through visual allegories or the artist’s personal explorations of religion, each photographic work represents the process of rumination and memory when confronting one’s own former spiritual experience allowing the viewer to contemplate the ways in which we internalize belief systems.
*Exact dates may be subject to change
The Emerging Artists Program is generously funded by Karen Jenkins-Johnson and Kevin Johnson and Westridge Foundation
