Jessica Silverman

Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “Conversational Spirits,” a two-part summer group show, featuring work that explores “animism,” the belief that animals, plants, places and objects are imbued with spirits. Animism is a relevant analogy for the agency, intensity and energy embodied by great art. When the trees whisper and birds sing, when abstraction breathes, when a painted portrait questions your sense of self, spirits are not far away.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Julie Buffalohead’s solo exhibition, “Noble Coyotes,” the artist’s first with the gallery and in San Francisco, on view from November 10 to January 7, 2023. The exhibition includes 7 oil paintings on canvas and 9 ink drawings on handmade watercolor paper that explore memory, childhood and mothering. With metaphor and humor, Buffalohead's visual narratives are enacted by a cast of animals— a coyote, rabbit and muskrat— who are imbued with agency and personhood. The largest work in the exhibition, All Are Welcome (2022), hosts a seemingly festive duality between whimsy and conflict. A group of ermine gated inside a miniature picket fence hold signs stating, “Private community, no trespassing” and “All are welcome here.” An approaching fox cuts off his own tail as an offering to the ermine, while a racoon and a couple of spirit-rabbits appear confounded as to what consequence this sacrifice entails. The work, which was conceived after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, examines notions of inclusiveness, through the reinterpretation of common yard signs in the region. Two paintings in the exhibition consider type-cast cliches of Nativeness through the artist’s wry and ineffable humor. In The Noble Savage (2022), a conjured vision of the archetypal noble savage appears rendered in outline against a background of gestural pink brushwork. The figure is offered trinkets—strings of beads and snakes—by a cadre of otters. Standing opposite is the trickster coyote in a red dress and high heels. With arms crossed the coyote casts doubt upon the proceedings, begging questions of representation and ideas of Native mystique. As a counterpart, Antihero (2022), features a coyote wearing a comedic arrow-through-the-head prop hat and riding a toy rocking horse. Rearing back, arrows splinter beneath the horse and the coyote flagrantly offers a headdress to an unlikely grouping of North American animals. Demonstrating the artist’s command of color and space, painterly figures are suspended in jewel-toned compositions that suggest a kind of intimacy in which no hierarchy exists between background and foreground. In Isle of Dogs (2022), an expanse of teal brushwork holds an elderly mother lying on her side among a family of resting dogs. A m­­­uskrat, who is a hero in Ojibwe stories for gathering earth to formulate the world, brushes the woman’s hair. This gesture of mothering the mother considers kinship within the context of a creation narrative. Notions of nostalgia and childhood are distilled together with contemporary culture in Buffalohead’s pen and ink-wash drawings. In Monopoly (2022), an otter examines the classic boardgame, while a coyote and badger sit in a cardboard Amazon delivery box, setting sail a make-believe ship and drawing reference to another kind of monopoly. In all the works, witty and whimsical scenes explore ideas of duality and contradiction with animals as stand-ins for humans, but also, creatures from whom humans can learn. As Buffalohead says, “I’m always waiting for animals to talk again.” Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972, Minneapolis, MN) received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995 and her MFA from Cornell University in 2001. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Denver Art Museum; Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C. Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Walker Art Center, MN; Denver Art Museum; Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; Field Museum, Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; among others. Buffalohead is a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. She lives and works in St. Paul, MN.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Judy Chicago's "Making Advances,” a solo exhibition featuring a series of new minimalist sculptures alongside historical drawings that explore color as a means of transformation and perceptual awakening, on view from November 10 to January 7, 2023. Chicago began her exploration of color in the 1960s within a reduced formal vocabulary of geometric shapes. In doing so, she recast the concerns of minimalism as perceptual matters of selfhood and feminist subjectivity that still inform her practice today. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a series of five new sculptures titled Moving Parts (1967/2022) made of clear acrylic forms on variously colored mirrors of gold, blush, magenta, purple, and teal. Each of the five sculptures contains 13 moveable acrylic pieces that capture and refract brilliant color through their cylindric forms and rounded tops. Set against a mirrored base, the polymorphic, erotically suggestive pieces appear to extend in multiple directions. They create the illusion of overlapping planes and sharply edged color, reminiscent of the radiating petal formations in the artist’s Though the Flower (1974) imagery. In 1967, Chicago conceived and created this sculpture on a colorless mirror in a work titled 3.5.5 Acrylic Shapes. The freedom of its moveable parts suggests relational interactions, and challenges­­ the rigid, dictatorial norms of much minimalist art. Though colored mirrors were not available in 1967, their introduction dramatically expands the work’s meaning. Seamlessly merging surface, form and color, Moving Parts further extends Chicago’s feminist gesture: rather than imposed upon a surface, color is integrated into the perceptual experience. On the walls are ombre drawings made in the 1960s and 70s that investigate the geometry of feminine flesh. Rectangular fans scatter gradients of color from a center slit onto a horizontal landscape, melting rigid structure into soft sensations. Circular trifecta, sometimes called “whirling donuts,” spin color around a central core with the electricity of female orgasm. For Chicago, who spent her formative years in the blushing light of Los Angeles and has long lived under the prismatic skies of the New Mexico desert, color’s ability to convey emotive states is integral to her practice and deeply intertwined with her female-centered imagery. Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago) has made an irrevocable impact on art history. She is best known for The Dinner Party, which is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. She has work in the collections of the British Museum and Tate, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; National Gallery, Washington D.C.; LACMA, Los Angeles; MOCA Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Getty Trust and Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Art Institute of Chicago, and over 25 university art museums. In 2023, Chicago will have a major retrospective at a New York museum. She has enjoyed recent museum surveys at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and ICA Miami. Chicago’s work has been exhibited in a broad range of major thematic group shows such as “Pacific Standard Time: Made in LA” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; “Ends of the Earth” at Haus der Kunst, Berlin and “The World Goes Pop” at Tate Modern, London. Chicago lives and works in Belen, NM and is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce “Overture,” the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by San Francisco-based artist, Luke Butler, opening September 16 and on view through October 29, 2022. In his newest works, Butler probes his long-held affinity for 20th century film and television through a series of exquisitely detailed acrylic paintings of San Francisco cityscapes and shorelines, all made between 2019 and 2022. With distinctive chromatic tones and cinematic framing, Butler creates moments of suspense and anticipation—a marked departure from earlier works that focused on endings. Indeed, the exhibition title alludes to this shift, borrowing from the text in two paintings wherein, “Overture,” rendered in the artist’s signature bold serif, overlays his realist imagery of condensing clouds and crashing waves. Silvery black-and-white cityscapes cast the artist as the protagonist. The Artist (2019) shows a dead-end street juxtaposed with text reading “Luke Butler in The Artist,” as if taken from the opening of a film noir. Cameo appearances by the artist and his peers come forth in the works, Skylark (2022), riffing on the 1967 Steve McQueen film Bullitt and its famous car chase sequence, as well as Location III (2020), in which the artist crosses a rainy street alongside a dump truck in San Francisco. Location V (2020) and In Color V (2021) take birds-eye-views of San Francisco’s iconic architecture. Framed as if the viewer is looking from a top-floor window to the streets and buildings below, the paintings recall film scenes like those in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo. Depicted in color—the city’s recognizable creamy taupes and cool grays—these works, along with the vibrantly painted A Color Picture III and IV (2021 and 2022) speak to Butler’s fascination with the emergence of color television in the mid-20th century. These new works are the result of an intensive, frequently monthslong process by the artist involving original research, photography, and documentation that he combines and collages with film or television stills. In what Butler refers to as “plastic realism,” the process plays with truth and fiction, exploring the boundary between reality and picture. Like Hockney’s considerations of realism and illusion, Butler’s paintings sample from direct experiences as well as what is imagined, drawn up, or staged. They reflect the self-narratives we create to understand the world and our place within it. "Overture" takes pop culture’s film, television, and media as its center of gravity and brilliantly destabilizes a singular account of what is virtual, actual or neither. Luke Butler (b. 1971, San Francisco) has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from the Cooper Union. His work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AK; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Norton Museum of Art, Miami. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum, The FLAG Foundation Art Foundation, NY; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum; and the ICA Boston, among others. Butler lives and works in San Francisco.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Rae Klein: The Comfort in Calamity, on view September 16 through October 29, 2022 in the gallery’s second-floor space. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery presenting ten new, large-scale oil paintings that are indicative of her practice examining power, opulence and memory through a deft combination of the surreal and the ordinary. In her paintings, Klein often suspends objects in space, recalling the compositional strangeness of Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. Playing with background and foreground, Klein wields both the precision and softness of her brush. Using product imagery sourced from e-Bay or old Sears catalogs, Klein imbues everyday objects with an iconographic quality through her painterly treatment of transparency and opacity. Candles, table settings and seashells take on a ghostly appearance, suggesting the discovery of discarded heirlooms. Indeed the artist situates forgotten markers of time in tension with feelings of permanence, secrecy and the afterlives of objects. Klein’s new paintings notably feature curtains as an added conceptual perimeter, revitalizing the quotidian through the use of dramaturgical elements. In a neat juxtaposition with the crimson velvet curtains of the gallery’s second-floor space, the paintings depict delicate landscapes. Harkening back to 16th century landscape painting in which the pastoral became a subject in itself, Klein’s use of proscenium-style curtains transforms a universal environment into a fantastical scene. Similar to her use of household objects, these paintings disrupt the conventions of the picture plane to harness moments when the familiar turns uncanny. It is here where the artist enacts creation, detaching her subjects from their origins and inviting the viewer to peer into new worlds where reality is not yet fully crystallized. Rae Klein (b. 1995, Holland, MI) graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 2017 with a BFA in Painting. In 2021, she enjoyed her first solo exhibition titled Waiting in the Field at The Valley, Taos, New Mexico followed by Low Voice Out Loud in 2022 at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include End of Eden, Galerie Wolfsen, Aalborg, Denmark; Todos es de Color, The Curator’s Room, Amsterdam; Paper, BEERS, London; I Have My Eye On You, Everyday Gallery, Antwerp; and When Shit Hits The Fan Again, Guts Gallery, London. Klein lives and works in Michigan.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce the group exhibition Beyond Identity on view from July 23 to September 1, 2022, featuring the work of Julie Buffalohead, Nick Cave, Theresa Chromati, Duggie Fields, Loie Hollowell, Lila de Magalhaes, and GaHee Park. Comprising sumptuous painting and bold sculpture, the show explores the body, physical affection, and the fluidity of corporeal connection. Together, the works find joy in our mammalian roots and unexpected intimacies. They share diverse jouissances that skirt around the confining social rules of sex and gender, seeking nothing less than bodily autonomy and romantic freedom. A new performance by Sebastian Hernández will take place on Saturday, August 20, 5–6PM at the gallery. Large-scale assemblage sculptures in Nick Cave’s Rescues (2013–14) series display found ceramic dogs enveloped amongst dream-like backdrops of metal flowers and ceramic birds. Seated like royalty on ornate thrones, Cave’s rescued animals act as the keepers and guardians of their own worlds; forgotten and discarded objects are majestically transformed into symbols of actualization and liberation from servitude. Commanding both pattern and texture, paintings by GaHee Park place her subjects in tension with their flattened environments. Couple in a Field (2022) is a clever inversion of traditional portraiture, showing a voyeuristic scene of a naked heterosexual couple merging with each other to become one. Dream with Still Life (2022) probes the labor involved in feminized self-imaging; the subject’s head rests on a table, tired and smiling, repelling any concrete or finalized interpretation from the viewer’s gaze. Julie Buffalohead’s oil paintings explore love, death, and motherhood through a variety of interdependent creatures: humans, coyotes, bobcats, rabbits, skunks, and birds, among others. In these works, lone indigenous women share nest-like homes with Native American animals, creating resilient communities, which integrate European mirrors and colonial teacups in ways that amplify their social and spiritual powers. Punctuating the scenes are Plains Indian tribal motifs such as ribbon patterns and clan animal symbols that are emblematic of both resistance and peaceful coexistence. Theresa Chromati’s works are painterly renderings of her own inner world. Through vibrant abstraction, she explores the multiplicity of race and gender, where swirling compositions go beyond a singular being towards different modes of existence. Integral to the compositions are various phallic flourishes and sculptural embellishments by which Chromati embraces and celebrates a hard but gentle masculine principle. The late British artist Duggie Fields was flamboyantly queer in a way that excluded him from being taken seriously during his lifetime. The art world has finally caught up to his gender-fluid experiments in colorful surrealist Pop and the painter is having his moment. In Ball of Confusion (1993) and Circular Circulation (1994), Fields plays mischievously with the human body, subverting binaries, suggesting amusing polymorphous perversities, entering trans debates at their inception. Radiant bas relief paintings by Loie Hollowell explore breasts as sources of love and otherworldly nourishment. Sensuous and stellar, works like Around the Clock and 12, 4, 7 and 10 (both 2022) consist of orbs cast from the breasts of the artist and her friends. Their circular formation is reminiscent of clocks, stars on flags, planetary orbits, and lunar cycles. Evoking a matriarchal nation with its own time markers, these Hollowell pieces go deep on a body part essential to human survival and evolution. Lila de Magalhaes’s delicately dyed and embroidered stretched textiles depict tender cosmologies. Psychedelic and celestial, her compositions are part Hieronymus Bosch, part Fantasia, where writhing insects, mammals and plants mischievously intertwine in cosmic menageries. De Magalhaes’s pale palette and gauzy lines veil any obscenity and heighten the works’ spirited fairytale quality. On Saturday, August 20, Sebastian Hernández will present a new performance at the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition. Wielding a multidisciplinary approach ranging from movement, to sculpture, to photography, their work investigates the social hegemonies of the visible through queer Mexican and Chicano narratives.

For her first Los Angeles pop-up show, Jessica Silverman is thrilled to present Clare Rojas’s “The Magic of It All,” on view for only four weeks from July 9 to August 6. This new body of work fuses the artist’s magic realist figuration with her precise abstraction to create compositions that are at once witty and sublime. Combining the surreal whimsy of Dorothea Tanning with the geometric vigor of Kazimir Malevich, Rojas explores the curious and precarious beauty of the California coast and its sentient wildlife. In a large, richly textured oil painting titled She Believed in the Magic of It All (2022), a solitary woman in a red dress stands at the edge of a road amid an enchanted landscape. This recurring femme figure is at once a self-portrait, a sorceress, the goddess of the void, and an archetypal Earth Mother/Mother Earth. In this painting, she looks up and waves to a flock of black birds and witches as they fly by. Rojas’s interest in animism—drawn from the folklore of her Peruvian heritage—enlivens the paintings with otherworldliness. Invisible Door (2022), for example, depicts a bird flying towards a threshold delineated by a rectangular black line. On the other side of the threshold, a geometric pattern suggests the spirit or the evolutionary energy of a feathered animal with the capacity for flight. While every painting affords delightful surprises, one or two offer a tiny shock. I’ll Always Have this Little Movie in My Head (2022), for instance, features an omniscient face rising from the ocean while a ghostly deer leaps from a cliff and the leash of a sprinting dog severs a woman in such a way that she loses her head. In this work and nine other paintings, the viewer is invited to bear witness to the tragicomedy of human survival, the absurdity of patriarchy, and the woe of environmental disaster. Fearlessly existential but ultimately hopeful, Rojas’s pictorial philosophy looks to nature as an enlightening force that heals, guides, invigorates, and inspires wonder. Clare Rojas (b. 1976, Columbus, OH) is in the permanent collections of MoMA New York; SFMOMA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dakis Joannou Collection, Greece; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; and the Smart Museum, University of Chicago. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Artadia, Eureka Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at MCA Chicago; IKON Gallery, England; Museum Het Domein, Netherlands; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA; Savannah College of Art and Design, GA; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Belkin Satellite, Vancouver; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco. She has a BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in painting from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rojas lives and works in the SF Bay Area, CA and is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “House Spirits,” a two-person exhibition featuring paintings by Hernan Bas and multimedia works by Zadie Xa. Both Bas and Xa are avid colorists interested in animism, alternative social histories, and the afterlives of cultural paradigms. For this show, Bas has made three ambitious history paintings and two smaller pieces. While 18th and 19th century history paintings commemorated war victories and treaty signings, Bas’s bygones are techno- and psycho-social. In December 31, 1999, 11:58pm, for example, a boyish figure sits on his hands, waiting for the new millennium when, according to “Y2K” hysteria, computer systems would wreak havoc on the Western world. Besieged by ominous shadows, iMac G3s, and CD-ROMs, the young man wears comic New Year’s Eve party glasses, emblematic of the influence of mood-altering myths. Similarly, in Disco Demolition Night, a lost soul stands in the outfield of a baseball stadium, surrounded by broken vinyl records, wondering where, and perhaps when, he is. This minimal color-field painting with Seurat-inspired strokes of grass is Bas’s reply to a Warhol race riot painting. A critical reflection on the 1979 “Disco Sucks” protest and riot, the painting depicts a straight white boy, who has lost not only his shirt, but the prospect of guaranteed dominance. Indeed, the liminal experience of marginalization is so disorienting that the scene feels paranormal. An artist of Korean descent, Zadie Xa understands the double displacement of growing up in Vancouver, then migrating to London, England. Through a range of mediums, Xa strives for ancestral empowerment through exploring the pagan spirituality of the Korean peninsula, before the colonial incursions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. In a pair of sculptural hanging garments, Xa explores the power of ritual and robes to transform the wearer from outcast to shapeshifting shaman. The floral motif on Princess Bari refers to the famous shaman who guides souls safely into the afterlife, while the knives stitched into Kimchi Rites, Kitchen Rituals, evoke the matriarchal creation of a superfood and source of national pride. Similarly, Xa’s textile paintings combine an improvisational, high modernist love of abstraction with the embodied remnants of Korean folk art. Respectively titled Seven Full Moons and Vancouver Sunset, the works betray Xa’s love of the West Coast, a land of sunsets, and her desire to mark time in ancient ways, where the temporal was measured by spatial movement and skyscapes were cosmological dreamscapes. Hernan Bas (b. 1978 Miami, FL) has shown in many important group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale, as well as shows at the Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh) and Pérez Art Museum (Miami). His works are in the collections of MoMA (New York), Brooklyn Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), MOCA Los Angeles, MOCA North Miami, the MFA Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). He has enjoyed solo shows at the Yuz Museum (Shanghai), Space K (Seoul), Rubell Museum (Miami), Centro De Arte Contemporáneo Málaga (Spain), Colby College Art Museum (Waterville, ME), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA), The Bass Museum of Art (Miami) and Kunstverein Hannover (Germany). Bas lives and works in Miami, FL. Zadie Xa (b. 1983 Vancouver, BC) has a solo show opening at Whitechapel Gallery (London) on September 20, 2022. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at Castillo di Rivoli (Turin, Italy), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), the Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), Arnolfini Arts (Bristol, UK), and MoMA PS1 (Queens). She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at The Box (Plymouth, UK), Leeds Art Gallery (UK), Tramway (Glasgow), Yarat Contemporary Art Space (Baku), Galería Agustina Ferreyra (Puerto Rico), Union Pacific (London) and Pump House Gallery (London). Xa has presented performances at the National Gallery (London), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Hayward Gallery (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and Serpentine Gallery (London). Her work is in the permanent collections of the UK’s Arts Council Collection and British Council Collection. She has an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Xa lives and works in London, England.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Margo Wolowiec’s “Whole Earth,” the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from June 10 to July 16, 2022. This new body of work centers around ecology: selected images of flora, fauna, and landscapes from around the world merge into a single collage, effectively creating a new field of vision. By doing so, Wolowiec aims to highlight vulnerable and endangered habitats in order to emphasize the interconnection between all of our disparate ecosystems. While still utilizing her standard technique of creating handwoven tapestries of dye-sublimated polymer threads, Wolowiec has shifted by creating shaped canvases and tondos for the first time, bringing the content of the work into a cohesive physical form. The eponymous work, Whole Earth (2022), is a 74 inch tondo that features source images of an Icelandic river, bioluminescent coral, a New Zealand landscape and a sunrise in Australia. This tension or interconnectivity runs within the infinite form of the circle. According to Wolowiec, “There is such power to a circle, they represent equality and unity, and stand as a symbol of the infinite because it is without a beginning or ending. Circles are spiritual; they represent the sun, the moon, the seasons, and the cycle of life to death, and rebirth.” Additionally, Whole Earth references the magazine Whole Earth Catalog produced between 1968 and 1972, which published how-to guides and product reviews that invigorated human autonomy and environmental empathy. Throughout the exhibition, Wolowiec communicates this empathy—the entanglement of all matter—alongside a proposal for new worlds. Other works in the show are a more playful combination of semi-circles filled with images of vast landscapes and rectangular counterparts filled with information-packed content and text snippets. Natural State juxtaposes urgency with pastoral calm. A satellite image of the Lena Delta Wildlife Reserve in Russia, the country’s largest protected wildlife area, is situated next to an ominous news headline: “Just 10% of global land in natural state by 2050 without action.” Lithium, made with sterling-silver leafed thread, similarly wields found text from a news headline that reads: “The Lithium Mine Versus the Wildflower.” The artist’s sharp manipulation of images of proposed sites for lithium mining in Nevada ushers in a totalized image of an ecological past, present and future. Wolowiec's has long been interested in climate change, and has often used images of nature throughout her career, this new body of work injects a different ideological breath into her conceptual exploration of image re-production, circulation, and information economies. Weaving together examples of existing ecological preservation with endangered species, "Whole Earth" deftly signals the urgency of what is possible with what is necessary. Margo Wolowiec (b. 1985, Detroit, MI) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and an MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2013. Most recently her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2018); Library Street Collective, Detroit (2018); Harper’s, New York and East Hampton (2017 and 2015); and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2016). Her work is in the public collections of the Detroit Center for Photography; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MacLean Collection, Libertyville, IL; and the San José Museum of Art, CA. In September 2022, she will have a solo exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Wolowiec currently lives and works in Detroit.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Martha Friedman: Brain in Hand, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from April 29 to May 28. Continuing her highly technical investigation of embodiment, neurology and the multiplicity of form, the artist will debut a new series of ten cast rubber lightboxes inspired by drawings of the human brain by the late 19th century neuroanatomist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. The exhibition includes a performance of Tenterhooks with the artist’s longtime collaborator, choreographer and dancer Silas Riener, to be staged at the gallery on Friday, May 6 at 6:30PM and Saturday, May 7 at 12PM and 3PM. In her series "A Natural Thickening of Thought," Friedman creates evocative rubber works—a material central to the artist’s practice–that mimic empirical representations of the brain and explore the materiality of the body from the inside out. While Cajal’s drawings sought to achieve scientific accuracy, Friedman abstracts cerebral circuitry into loose figurations of dendrites and somas imbuing them with vibrant pigments. The artist’s sculptural process is precise yet experimental; her cast rubber objects are three-dimensional wall works that suggest suspension. This gestural form of mark-making uses the microscopic to enact new material associations where the body is both subject and object at once, bearing witness to itself. A key component of the exhibition will be an iteration of an ongoing collaboration between Friedman and Silas Riener. As part of their performance, one of the gallery’s walls will be transformed into a row of large, floor-to-ceiling rubber band sculptures that reference invisible organs, such as the cable-like axon that carries electrical impulses through the brain. In his performances, Riener will suspend himself and move through the rubber bands, converting his own body into material—temporarily interweaving the flesh of the performer and the rubber created by the artist into an animated sculptural fabric. Martha Friedman (b. 1977, Detroit, MI) earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale University School of Art. She is a senior lecturer in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2018); The Institute of Fine Arts Great Hall, New York (2016-2017); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY (2017); Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2015-2016), among others. She was the recipient of a 2017 Visiting Artist Fellowship at Urban Glass, Brooklyn, and the recipient of a 2016 and 2020 National Endowment for the Arts grant in collaboration with Susan Marshall & Company. In May 2022, Body Matters / Martha Friedman will open at Art@Bainbridge, Princeton University Art Museum. She lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce the exhibition Rupy C. Tut: Search and Rescue, on view from April 29 to May 28 in the gallery’s second floor space. In the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery, new works demonstrate the virtuosic linework of Tut’s practice that melds Indian miniature painting and calligraphy. Drawing on traditional forms and methodologies, and inspired by her own lived experience, the artist’s radiant and meticulously detailed compositions explore self-reclamation and the resilience of womanhood as they meditate on the nuances of diasporic identity. The natural world figures strongly in the artist’s works on handmade hemp paper. Using natural pigments, paintings such as "Forest of Joy" and "False Hope" (both 2022) attend to the beauty of verdant plant-life and the resilience of perennial bloom. Three works "Leaving Home," "Finding Roots" and "Claiming Land" (all 2022) deploy shell gold on a backdrop of swirling blue water. Hands reach out to embrace one another, exploring kinship and care; they hold precious objects like vases, a sprouting seedling, and a marigold flower—items that symbolize survival and hope. Rooted in experiences both universal and deeply personal, Tut’s works contemplate the past and investigate everyday social and political landscapes, illustrating the myriad ways we uplift, liberate and show compassion for one another. The characters throughout the exhibition mirror these modes of both individual and collective power, closely examining historical memories while fashioning new futures. Rupy C. Tut is an Oakland-based visual artist. Tut’s work is particularly remarkable for her use of traditional materials and methods associated with calligraphy and Indian miniature painting. Her work has been presented through exhibitions and talks at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; London City Hall, Stanford University, the Peel Art Gallery and Museum Archives, Toronto; and a solo exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara. Coinciding with the exhibition at Jessica Silverman is the artist’s solo exhibition, Rupy C. Tut: A Recipe for Brown Skin, at Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California on view until May 1, 2022.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s “Gravitational Pull,” on view from March 11 to April 23, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and presents a series of new paintings: vibrant figurative compositions that reflect the diversity and style of her home in San Francisco. Her scenic vignettes demonstrate sociality and joy as forms of resistance and empowerment. Wong’s brightly colored and heavily stylized paintings beam with the beauty and vitality of interpersonal connections. Like a sequence of dreams, they depict figures swimming among fish in turquoise water, napping on hot rocks, watching the sunset, and feasting on dungeness crab. Like in Musseling on a Foggy Day (2022), the natural landscape figures heavily in her works. She draws inspiration from California landscapes like the Yuba River, Sea Ranch and the Joshua Tree National Park. As a backdrop, delighting in nature works to fortify the central theme of the exhibition—the gravitational pull, or invisible force, that grounds us on Earth. While contemplative and serene, the works in “Gravitational Pull” portray energetic crowds, often praising sisterhood and community spirit. In works such as A Modern Feast (2022), the subjects are playful, strong and self-possessed, representing a collective of identities that defy political turbulence. Moving through the artist’s own memory, heritage and a grand social and political vision for the world, Wong’s layered compositions use a commanding sense of color and form to celebrate the most tranquil ideals of communal existence. Chelsea Ryoko Wong is a painter and muralist. Her work is known for celebrating racial and cultural diversity, promoting working class communities and evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder. Wong began her studies at Parsons School of Design (New York, NY), and finished at California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA) with a BFA in Printmaking in 2010. She is the first recipient of the Hamaguchi Emerging Artists Fellowship award at Kala (Berkeley, CA, 2010) and has recently completed murals for Asana (San Francisco, 2021), La Cocina (San Francisco, 2021) and the FB AIR Program (San Francisco, 2019). She has exhibited across the United States, Europe and Asia. In February 2022 she was announced as a finalist for the SFMOMA 2022 SECA Art Award.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to present a solo show of new works by Andrea Bowers, on view from March 11 to April 23, 2022. Titled “Can the world mend in this body?,” the exhibition embraces a broad range of media: richly textured paintings on recycled cardboard, intricate colored pencil drawings, elaborate neon pieces, and a documentary video. All the works reflect the artist’s investigative and activist relationship to the environment and social justice. An ardent ecofeminist, Bowers explores loss and stalwart hope for a healthier planet that values the rights of women and nature. Debuting the artist’s “Eco Grief Extinction” series, the show starts with three pictorial elegies on collaged cardboard bases. Each depicts a bird species that has vanished: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Bachman Warbler, and Molokai Creeper. Among twenty-three species that the U.S. government declared extinct in 2021, the birds are depicted alongside women in states of suspension and remembrance. The bold juxtaposition appeals for the dignity, safety and rights of both. All the words in the cardboard paintings come from Deena Metzger. As the healer-poet writes, “How you treat us is how you treat the Earth.” Celebrated for her neon signs, Bowers has created a 3D hanging sculpture-neon. The work takes the form of two entangled branches, made of hand-welded recycled steel, with leaves outlined in both steel and yellow and green neon. The words “Everything is Part of Everything Else” wind their way down one of the branches, suggesting the ecofeminist notion of interconnectedness wherein moral decisions are based on community, responsibility and care. Another neon, a wall-work announces “RIGHTS OF NATURE” next to a speech bubble that adds “to exist, flourish and naturally evolve.” A quote from the Lake Erie bill of rights, which was passed by the City of Toledo but then overturned by a federal judge, the phrase emerged from activists that aim to give natural resources, like corporations, the power of personhood. No wonder it appears that NATURE herself is speaking. By these means, Bowers personifies nature and pays homage to the grassroots activists affiliated with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). Around the world, a Rights of Nature movement is gaining traction locally and sometimes even nationally. Bolivia has awarded legal prerogatives to the environment with its “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth,” which Bowers commemorates in the first three panels of a four-part work of detailed two-tone colored pencil drawing. Filling the fourth panel is the manifesto of Warsaw’s Federation for Women and Family Planning, which asserts that the banning of abortion “means forced births, discrimination, state violence against us all.” By pairing these declarations of the rights of women and nature, Bowers conjoins feminist and environmentalist energies into a unified front of resistance to the global forces of their shared subordination. Finally, the show features Landscapes We Call Home (2022), a video shot in Humboldt County, featuring Redwood Forest Defense activists, perched high in the canopy with the aim of stopping “clear cutting” by Green Diamond, an industrial logging firm, which uses “greenwashing” marketing tactics to make their business appear sustainable. Filmed in the summer of 2020, Bowers interviews the tree-sitters to reveal how political movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter have shifted perspectives on social justice to the degree that these environmental activists are not only keen to save the forest and the planet’s oxygen supply, but reinstate the ancestral lands of the Tsurai people. Andrea Bowers (b. 1965) is currently enjoying a retrospective show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago which travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She has had solo shows at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Bronx Museum, New York; Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; Pomona and Pitzer College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; Vienna Secession, Austria, and the Power Plant, Toronto. Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum (2021); MCA Denver (2020); the Walker Art Center (2020); and Migros Museum, Zurich (2019). Bowers’ work is held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; MOCA Los Angeles and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Bowers has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Julian Hoeber's "Relief From Pictures." This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery presenting eight new wall-works along with a new sculpture. These works echo a persistent motif in Hoeber’s practice—stepped gradients that complicate spatial perception and bridge conceptual and expressive modes of painting and sculpture. The new wall-works, part of the artist’s Constructions series, were created in direct response to XCJS Door, 2021, which operates as a permanent installation and functioning door to Jessica Silverman’s second-floor gallery. This door was itself inspired by an earlier door Hoeber constructed for his first solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman in 2011, the most recent iteration being an approximate replica of the original. Hoeber traces these associations back and forth over the history of his relationship with the gallery and the different modes of his practice to produce a new body of work both experimental and responsive to its context. The relationship between the doors and the new, painted wood pieces in the Constructions series are exemplary of Hoeber’s practice, where a multitude of sources and references exist in excess of the contours of their appearance. While the artist has created works in the Constructions series before, only three previous iterations have been painted in a gradient. This series explores space by using color and fluid brushwork with architectural relief and depth, rejiggering numerous strategies from the artist’s twenty-year practice. Also on view will be a new sculpture, Curves From Straight Lines, which is inspired by a found, oval-shaped picture frame in the Tramp art style. Resembling a supple wooden chain, Curves From Straight Lines signals the possibility of making irrational forms from a series of minute rational parts, pointing to an essential aspect of Hoeber’s practice—the production of the ineffable through repetition of the mundane, structured and systematic.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Hayal Pozanti's "Lingering." Working at scales in direct relation to the body, these new paintings are visual poetry, a human response to the artist’s concerns around digital media and artificial intelligence. The works reverberate with a sense of the haptic, the subconscious, and the rhythms of the natural world. This is Pozanti’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and follows the recent unveiling of her permanent installation at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library in New York. Using her own hand as a vessel for intuitive gestures, Pozanti’s works do not mirror existing worlds, but rather, offer up new ones. Works in the show continue to embrace her invented visual language Instant Paradise, 31 glyphs developed by the artist that correspond to numbers and letters from the English alphabet. Using these shapes, Pozanti translates her inner experience through painterly acts as modes of play and a celebration of embodied cognition. This self-imposed symbolic structure and visual system unfold a plane of psychological and spiritual exploration across the canvas. As a whole, the exhibition constructs a kind of planetary system—a universe where the abstract forms become mystic inhabitants or undiscovered species. Earth tones and natural pigments throughout the paintings similarly reference a sensorial interaction with the organic world. The show’s interrelated gestures freely speculate upon a serene ecology, where lush hues suggest pops of mushrooms, flowers, sea foam, corals or animals that have not yet existed. Rather than seek an essential image as its desired outcome, this generative approach to painting, much like engaging with ecological surroundings, is transcendental and imaginative. "Lingering" situates reverie and contemplation as artforms, delving into the immeasurable possibilities of when space-time is viscerally felt and activates the unconscious; “lingering” is both a method of viewership as well as a radical form of presence. Collectively, Pozanti motions towards a lyrical abstraction, where pure, harmonious feeling flows outward without the impositions of conceptual limits or restraints. This forms a series of proposals for reflection and deceleration, embracing the beauty of the artwork without finality or neat resolution. By doing away with absolute representations and slowing the pace of production, Pozanti demonstrates that meditative processes and improvisational experiences can inhabit forms in worlds all of their own.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce "Sadie Barnette: Inheritance," the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from November 20, 2021 to January 8, 2022. This new body of work uses installation, sculpture, photography, wallpaper and large-scale drawing to examine the artist’s familial legacy. Employing archival material–such as the 500-page dossier compiled by the FBI surveilling her father, Rodney Barnette, during his time in the Black Panther Party–the artist wields the personal nature of generational inheritance to inflect international political struggle with urgency, collapsing temporal distinctions of past and present. The solo presentation at the gallery runs simultaneously with the two-venue exhibition, Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend, at Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries, on view until December 18, 2021. It also coincides with the announcement of Barnette's commission by Los Angeles International Airport and the L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs to design a permanent site-specific artwork for a new plaza to be completed in 2024, which will display the message "Sister You Are Welcome Here" in brightly colored terrazzo lettering. Upon entering the exhibition, the initial site-line wall of the gallery is a sculptural depiction of The New Eagle Creek Saloon, founded by Barnette’s father in the early 1990s as the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. The work is adorned with neon lights, and a photograph of Sammy, a beloved patron and guest bartender, floats in a field of pink glitter. High-femme aesthetics permeate the works throughout the show; signifiers such as the color pink and glitter are used to re-invigorate archival material, escaping a binary vision of gender and sexuality while celebrating the extant legacy and ongoing resistance of the Black radical tradition. The exhibition also continues Barnette’s FBI Drawings series, examining the FBI’s targeting of her father’s involvement in the Black Panther Party when he founded the Compton chapter in California in 1968. This series takes scans of her father’s FBI file and re-engineers individual pages, enlarging them to five by four feet and overlaying them with exuberant, playful symbols such as flowers and the character Hello Kitty to denigrate modes of empire, surveillance and power. Here, Barnette’s practice throws the bracketing of a collective political past into crisis, shining a light on continued racial injustice. The slow, labor-intensive act of making these drawings gives Barnette the time to meditate on the bravery, politics, and the real lives of people who dared to change the world. Barnette’s activation of everyday objects such as speakers, couches and domestic interiors reveals their socio-political essence. In Home Good the artist references the showy paint jobs of Bay Area car culture from her upbringing. Barnette uses these cars as source material to conceptually address the generative act of creating something grand and monolithic out of something ordinary. Similarly, the exhibition depicts a couch covered in holographic vinyl against a wallpaper that repeats the word “sister” in a patterned, geometric form. This repetition simultaneously creates a domestic space of care while multiplying revolutionary acts and familial protection beyond any spatial limitations. Though the artist’s personal history and experiences are directly referenced, the political concepts of the works shimmer and leap beyond geography, time and space. Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, CA; The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Guggenheim Museum, NY; JP Morgan Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Orlando, FL; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; and the Berkeley Art Museum, CA. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Jessica Silverman is delighted to present Woody De Othello's "Looking In," an exhibition of new works comprised of paintings on canvas and paper, ceramic sculptures, and a large-scale outdoor bronze. On view from October 2 to November 13, the exhibition is the artist's second at the gallery. It explores still life as social commentary and psychological inquiry. A bright orange, ten-foot-high bronze sculpture stands in the center of the show. Titled Fountain, it consists of two column-like pipes punctuated by three knobs and three faucet heads. The graceful arc of the tallest tap culminates in a single drop of water. “Moving from the rising tides of the Florida tropics to drought-ridden California, the environment is always on my mind,” said Othello. “Among other concepts, Fountain is about abundance, scarcity, access and denial.” An inversion of Duchamp's 1917 Fountain, Othello's 2021 Fountain symbolically offers clean, life-sustaining drinking water. The large bronze is in a sea of ceramic sculptures depicting mirrors, clocks and watches on stools and chairs, hanging lights, light switches, and oversized coffee-mug planters. Bearing witness to the way Othello uses clay as a spontaneous and improvisational material, these forms could be the lyrics to the instrumental jazz music that is in heavy rotation in his studio. Six oil-on-canvas and four acrylic-on-paper paintings portray domestic spaces full of time pieces, plant life and windows to the outside world. Vibrantly rendered in primary and tertiary colors, the paintings play with natural and artificial light sources that speak to intellectual perspectives and emotional states. "Looking In" marks a new level of mastery in the artist's command of his forms and themes. Animistic, anthropomorphic, and deeply human, Othello's work evokes both pathos and humor, sensory pleasure and intellectual vigor.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “Human Geometries,” an exhibition of works created by Judy Chicago between 1965 and the present. The show features both monumental pieces and potent gems that explore gendered aesthetics, human rights and social justice. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Sunset Squares, a landmark in Feminist Minimalist sculpture, which consists of four structures in different sizes and subtle shades – pale pink, baby blue, lavender and mint. Framing and commenting on its surroundings, this quad of quads can be arranged and rearranged for maximum impact and interaction. Its freedom of movement, combined with its poly-chroma, challenges the rigid, dictatorial norms of much minimalist art. Conceived and created in 1965, but destroyed in the seventies, this outdoor rendition of Sunset Squares is made to original specifications in painted stainless steel. Rendered in clear and colored acrylics, Chicago’s “Dome” sculptures suggest bodily landscapes, bellies and chests, perhaps even an expectant mother in the bath. While the sculptures evoke sensual slumber, the artist’s drawings and paintings of spinning orbs, sometimes called “whirling donuts,” are infused with the electricity of female orgasm. Although Chicago is best-known for elevating and recognizing the lives of others (e.g. The Dinner Party, 1979), she has created a series of 140 raw, extempore drawings in watercolor and pencil on paper, laying out her innermost aspirations and insecurities. The unexpected intimacy of Autobiography of a Year (1993-94) invites empathy as the artist’s struggle for self-worth and self-soothing is familiar to us all. Cartoon for the Fall (1987) is an ambitious history painting, exploring power and powerlessness, gender and Jewish identity in civilizations past and present. Chicago and her husband Donald Woodman worked for eight years, pondering the horrific depths of the Holocaust. In 2021, a time of resurgent white supremacism, fascism, and anti-democratic dictatorships, their project is ever more relevant. The 18-foot-long canvas is meant to remind us of the necessity to work towards a more humane, peaceful and equitable world. Triangles loom large in Chicago’s oeuvre, taking on different meanings in different decades. Logo (1994) takes the form of concentric triangles of stained glass not only to honor Holocaust victims, but to create an icon of community survival. Here color represents the demographics targeted by the Nazis: yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, black for “anti-socials,” blue for immigrants, red for political prisoners, brown for gypsies, and green for criminals.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of its new space and location at 621 Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Titled “We Are Here,” the group show features paintings, sculptures and photographs by 31 gallery artists and friends.

Jessica Silverman Gallery is pleased to present “Isaac Julien’s America,” a solo show of new and historic works about the struggle for freedom and equality in a globalized world. The show is inspired by three pioneers: Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, orator and the most photographed man of the nineteenth century; Matthew Henson, the African-American explorer who discovered the North Pole; and Angela Davis, the radical feminist and former Black Panther turned social justice activist.