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A selection of works by poet David Meltzer curated by Lisa Conrad to coincide with a reading of his work, Friday, September 4, 2015, Writers’ Studio, San Francisco Campus. David Meltzer began his literary career during the Beat heyday and is considered a major figure in the San Francisco / Beat Renaissance. Meltzer's reading at CCA centered on the recent reissue of a special edition of Two-Way Mirror (Oyez 1977). It returned with a new introduction and an ample addendum written almost 40 years later.
The Materials Library is proud to highlight a selection of sustainable materials that are predominantly manufactured from recycled content. With the increasing awareness and urgency of climate change, sustainable materials and processes are now more necessary than ever. Each material sample is displayed with things that are recycled in order to create the new material.
The exhibition showcases the use of computational and digital technologies in literary production in the networked world and its material connections with 20th-century technologized approaches to literature like futurism, concretism, creationism, stridentism, magical realism, and others. By bringing purposefully together a collection of print and electronic works in the single space of a gallery, NL||LE takes on a media archaeological perspective to create a “space of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated,” in Siegfried Zielinski’s words. NL||LE asks questions that highlight unconventional literary relationships like the look or the handling of the works as objects. The exhibit intervenes in the temporality of the works it brings together. NL||LE brings forth the historical dimension of its collection by incorporating vintage computers in the exhibit, next to mobile devices, and print materials from CCA Libraries’ collections. While undeniably each one of the print and electronic piece…
Shaghayegh Cyrous, a visual artist from Tehran, Iran initiated the Lost Art Project upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2012. Feeling lost after moving halfway across the globe, she began the project as a way to build connections and allow others to reflect on their own identity by engaging with the persian rug, a symbol of her own identity. Cyrous grew up knowing the importance of the persian rug to her community- a symbol of beauty and art, a useful object in the home, and an heirloom passed down for generations, she felt her connection to the rug grow more important to her practice. After 3 years, the Lost Art Project has now generated over 5,000 images and travelled to over 20 countries and territories including Tunisia, Palestine, Norway, and Indonesia. For this exhibition Shaghayegh Cyrous painted a phone booth located just outside the California College of the Arts Meyer Library, encasing it in patterns and symbols she has often painted on her rugs. In the storefront display case, a rug fra…
The CCA Libraries Exhibition Program presents Lessons of Darkness by CCA faculty member Emily McVarish. Lessons of Darkness is inspired by the French baroque musical genre leçons de ténèbres. These settings of the Lamentations were performed during Holy Week on the days separating the commemoration of Christ’s death from the celebration of his resurrection. During tenebrae services, candles were progressively extinguished, leaving the church and its attendants in darkness. The exhibit includes McVarish’s book Lessons of Darkness, one 22-minute film, a binder of source materials, and Music With Words: A Composer’s View, by Virgil Thomson, an inspiration to the artist.
What do plants know? How they know it? Why do people like forests? Who owns plants? Who owns plant knowledge? In order to answer these questions, students from Carol Manahan’s Fall 2017 class Eco: Plant Matters unfolded their projects. They learned about the study of plants for artists and design while investigating topics such as the origin and evolution of plants; form, development, reproduction, and identification; ecological roles and interactions with other species; food, medicine, and materials; preindustrial and contemporary agriculture, including genetic engineering. At the same time, they experimented with plants: from ecological observation, to gardening; to uses such as wood, textiles, and paper; to elements of art and design. They looked at plants, smelled them, tasted them, touched them, in the lab, on campus, and out in the field. Finally they applied both scientific and studio interests and skills to create posters that identify and give information about plants on CCAs Oakland campus. Th…
Recognizing the archive as resource, Jacqueline Francis, Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies (VCS), taught the graduate seminar “Digging Deep: Research in the Archive” in the Spring 2018 semester. Students met with San Francisco-based historians E.G. Crichton and Chris Carlsson, and with visiting speakers Sara Ahmed and Gabriel Menotti as well. The class toured prominent public collections: Letterform Archives, the Prelinger Library, the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Maritime National Park, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Short writing assignments described these experiences. Students also read and responded to influential theoretical writings that discuss the ways that archives construct and preserve the concept of knowledge. Final projects were generated from close study of archival documents and curious objects.
What does it look like when you apply the craft of Interaction Design to thelibrary experience? MFA IXD students from Year 0 have created public projects that engage us in new ways to approach inquiry. Developed by Professor Maria Mortati, this exhibition asks what happens if you invert how we search, browse, select? Where do you begin, or better yet, how? What can the role of play ... play? What are the histories and futures as we merge campuses? As they have explored ways to for you to more richly engage with this incredible resource, their work suggests new design protocols for the library experience.
Tamara Suarez Porras has constructed a site-specific installation in Meyer Library that considers three total solar eclipses: 1979, 2017, and 2024. eclipsis is the outcome of a long process of digging, accumulating and collecting photographs and ephemera, and re-contextualizing them. In doing so, new meanings are constructed and spaces are altered. Eclipsis, a word puzzle: eclipse, ellipsis, eclipsis...It reveals porras’ “habit” of distilling material to evoke multiple readings of an object. Starting with an installation of two videos and floor-to-ceiling wallpaper in the storefront, the audience is invited to two parallel yet fragmented spaces. The show unfolds as you walk into the library listening to a sound piece created by Sei Harris. To listen, scan the QR code or stream it through the URL.
The CCA Libraries Exhibition Program presents the solo exhibition Out the Mud by Troy Lamarr Chew II, CCA MFA ‘18. His series Out the Mud references mud cloth from Mali, a handmade cotton fabric traditionally dyed with fermented mud and a sign of cultural identity. For Chew, it speaks to the rip in the cultural fabric of African Americans, from the the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as both negative and positive paths taken to repair and continue the fabric. This series also questions the definitions of “Fine Art” and “Folk Art.”