Curated by Essence Harden

March 16th - May 11th , 2019

Mappings is an exhibition on spatial matters. Invested in what Kellie Jones calls “assertations of space...that create place” this exhibition explores the aesthetic conditions of geographical knowledge. The maps here range from portraiture and textile to draftsmanship and abstraction advancing a topography of/on legacies, ephemera, cosmology, and memory.

In noting geography as a spatial practice which highlights ways of seeing and unseeing, this exhibition asks how these artists works become a type of absorptive cartography offering realms of inimitable sight and place. These are maps of imaginings wherein the elements of here are strategies of placemaking. Curated by Essence Harden, Mappings will feature work from Diedrick Brackens, Kris Chau, Jeffrey Cheung, Adee Roberson, Grace Rosario Perkins, Gabriella Sanchez, Ashley Teamer, and Sam Vernon.

Installation Images

About the Curator

Essence Harden

Essence Harden is a visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum and an independent arts writer. Essence has curated exhibitions at California African American Museum (CAAM), Antenna Gallery (New Orleans), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Oakland Museum of California, UTA Artist Space, El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA), Subliminal Projects, Eduardo Secci Contemporary, and the Orange County Museum of Art (2022), amongst others. Essence is a contributor to The Los Angeles Times Magazine: Image, SSENSE, Art21, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), Artsy, LALA, Cultured Magazine, Performa Magazine, and SFAQ: International Arts and Culture and has written catalog entries for Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow;  Brave New Worlds: Exploration of Space: Palm Springs Art Museum; and  What Needs to Be Said: Hallie Ford Fellows Exhibition. Essence has also served as an art consultant for film and television. Essence is a 2018 recipient of The Creative Capital, Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a 2020 Annenberg Innovation Lab Civic Media Fellow.

Essence graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History and received their Master of Arts from the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Essence is a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley.

About the Artists

Diedrick Brackens

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dying of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens utilizes both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview.

Kris Chau

Kris Chau was born and raised in Honolulu Hawaii to Ann and AIan Chau who were refugees from the Vietnam/American War. Chau’s work is inspired by the visual symbolism used in various Indigenous Folk arts as well as being classically trained as a painter and drawer. She considers her body of work as one continuous language that celebrates the human spirit. She is an independent artist that lives and work in Los Angeles.

Her work is always trying to tell the story of how we are all interconnected. Chau uses influences and symbols from different cosmologies and folk art to communicate all of this in her work.

Jeffrey Cheung

Cheung is a Oakland based, Chinese-American artist, who is the co-founder of Unity Press and Unity Skateboarding. Cheung’s bright figurative work celebrates queerness within his personal life and within skate culture. He is a prolific maker, whose vivacious art examines freedom, identity, and intersectionality, through bold color and intertwined characters. Cheung’s figures stem from his homoerotic zine making practice and have grown into larger than life paintings. On canvas his playful androgynous characters fearlessly take up space, blend together and playfully unite in non- binary identities. His genderless body positive world questions the boundaries of sexuality, body, gender, and race. Cheung’s simplistic line-work of gender nonspecific bodies offers a clever yet loving response to the heteronormative male gaze creating a more inclusive and accessible entry point.

Adee Roberson

Adee Roberson (b.1981, West Palm Beach, Florida) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is a meditation on symbolism and texture. Synthesizing performance and installation, her work melds vibration and technicolor visions through paintings, video, and melodic compositions. These works offer a refracted timeline of black diasporic movement, weaving sonic and familial archives, with landscape, rhythm, and spirit. Color, shape, and rhythm become constellations, locating a call and response with ancestral memory. This visual language is a way to process the viscerality of grief, celebration, trauma, and healing

Grace Rosario Perkins

Based in Oakland and New Mexico but having spent most of her life moving between city centers, the Navajo Nation, and the Gila River Indian Community, Grace Rosario Perkins is interested in disassembling her personal narrative and reassembling it as one that layers words, objects, faces, and signifiers built from cultural dissonance, language, punk ethos, and history. Primarily a painter, Grace also works extensively in printed matter, textiles, writing, and sculpture.

Gabriella Sanchez

Gabriella Sanchez (b.1988) is a self-directed learner, a fan of sci-fi, and a multidisciplinary artist. As a painter she employs a range of artistic expression from abstraction to portraiture, with a particular focus on both form and language within the perspectives of art, design, and psychology. This is done to reexamine, re-image, and reimagine themes from her own life and the life of her loved ones which address issues of class in relation to: labor, race, addiction, gender, education, imprisonment and system-induced death. She does this through a lens which incorporates public archives alongside personal imagery and narrative. Her art practice focuses on art-making as a tool for survival and a tool for coping with survival.

Ashley Teamer

Ashley Teamer’s collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. She uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture revealing the malleability of our built environment. She has been an Artist-in- Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center (2018) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Teamer received a BFA from Boston University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2022.Her work has been most recently exhibited as a series of billboards called Lady Bleu Devils in New Orleans, Louisiana

Sam Vernon

Sam Vernon is a visual artist who earned her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. Her installations combine Xeroxed drawings, photographs, paintings, and sculptural components in an exploration of personal narrative and identity. Recent solo exhibitions at venues including San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora; UT Downtown Gallery, Knoxville, Tennessee; G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto; and Seattle Art Museum, Olympic Sculpture Park. Her work has been part of groups exhibitions at, among other institutions, California African American Museum; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Barney Savage Gallery and The Cooper Union, New York; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco; We Buy Gold, Brooklyn; Brooklyn Museum; Queens Museum; and the Drawing Room, London. Honors received include San Francisco Artadia Awards finalist; Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program (LAP) Visual Arts Fellowship; Artistes en Résidence, Clermont-Ferrand, France; Fountainhead Residency, Miami; Helen Watson Winternitz Award, Yale University; Emma Bee Bernstein Fellowship, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, and A.I.R. Gallery Emerging Arts Fellowship. Collaborative projects include visual art contributor to The Arsonist, a play by Mai Sennaar, at Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Broadside Press, with poets Danez Smith and Nathan McClain; and Black Women Arts for Black Lives Matter, New Museum, New York; and performer, Ganggang: Creative Misunderstandings Series, organized by Alejandro Guzman, Brooklyn Museum. Vernon has been a panelist, moderator, or guest lecturer at, among others, San Francisco State University; University of California, Berkeley; Watkins College of Art, Nashville; Utah State University; Barnard College; Union College; and Voelker Orth Museum, Queens, New York.