Bloodchild: Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco

5 November 2022 - 28 January 2023

Bloodchild, Installation View, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, 2022

Bloodchild
Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to present Bloodchild, featuring work by Nyame Brown, Xandra Ibarra, Shara Mays, Gregory Rick, Stuart Robertson, and Leila Weefur. Taking its title from Octavia E. Butler’s story titled “Bloodchild,” first published in 1984, this exhibition invites the viewer to investigate the power of speculative fiction to imagine alternative world-buildings and narrative-making strategies.

Perceived as the mother of Afrofuturism, the genre blending science fiction, fantasy, and history to speculate on liberated future scenarios through a Black lens, Butler wrote cautionary tales. In her stories and novels, she projects into the future to investigate possible solutions. Using Butler’s “Bloodchild” story as a lens to look at the art-making today, the exhibition meditates on symbiosis, love, power, and tough choices. Set on a foreign planet inhabited by insect-like beings,
“Bloodchild” is a coming of age story, raising provocative questions about sex roles, self-sacrifice, colonization, and species-interdepence. Similarly, the artists featured in this exhibition ask complex questions via speculative artistic practices and challenge their own mediums to imagine alternate futures.
Stuart Robertson, A moral or legal obligation; a responsibility, 2022 acrylic, aluminum, paper, textiles on canvas 54 x 72 in ( 137.2 x 182.9 cm ), signed verso

Stuart Robertson

Stuart Robertson is a mixed media artist who paints, collages, and assembles images of Black life inspired by the nostalgia for his birthplace, confrontations with the American dream, and fantasies of the African Diaspora’s future. His creative and educational practices prioritize interdisciplinary discourse and aesthetic innovation that better serve the representation of the Black diaspora in contemporary art.
Stuart Robertson
Nyame Brown, Legendary, 2019, oil on blackboard, 24 x 48 in (61 x 121.9 cm)

Nyame Brown

Nyame Brown is an Afrofuturist installation artist working in the media of painting, drawing, cut paper, blackboards, augmented reality, gaming, and fashion. His work addresses the Black imagination as a space for new ways to perceive the Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined—not just through unity and similarity, but by looking at the dynamics of difference. Brown received his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA from Yale School of Art and Architecture.
Nyame Brown
- Nyame Brown
  Legendary, 2019
  oil on blackboard
  24 x 48 in (61 x 121.9 cm)
- Nyame Brown
  Cakewalk 3000, 2021
  oil on linen
  48 x 72 in (121.9 x 182.9 cm)
Shara Mays, Emiline, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 108 x 60 in (294.6 x 152.4 cm), signed verso

Shara Mays

Shara Mays is a visual artist who creates paintings which take the shape and form of both landscape and intuitive figuration. Her works are performances of both subconscious motions and are in constant conversation with the natural world seen throughout Northern California. Originally from Princeville, North Carolina, her art practice represents an evolution of narrative, from a focus on literal, southern landscapes, and family struggles, to chasing freedom through the act of painting. She received her BFA degree from The Corcoran College of Art and Design at George Washington University, and her MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Shara Mays
Blackberry Lexicon, 2017 letterpress and blackberry ink on paper, 6 1/4 x 9 in (15.9 x 22.9 cm) Each

Leila Weefur

Leila Weefur is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Their interdisciplinary practice examines the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging. The work brings together concepts of sensorial memory, abject Blackness, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including The Kitchen NYC, Locust Projects Miami, The Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and Smack Mellon. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of The Black Aesthetic. Through film and architectural installation, Leila Weefur examines the performative elements connected to systems of belonging, present in Black, queer, gender-variant life. They combine still-life imagery, gesture, and sound to communicate feeling and evoke sensorial responses. They construct environments that invite viewers into the possibility of understanding a narrative through the way bodies experience it. Through an entanglement of beauty and horror, the work combines concepts of sensorial memory, architectural psychology, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. They implement ways language can be used as a system for determining access and aid in disidentification.
Leila Weefur
- Leila Weefur
  Yusef Yomunyakaa's Blackberries, 2017
  inkless intaglio print on paper
  18 x 30 in (45.7 x 76.2 cm)
- Leila Weefur
  Blackberry Lexicon, 2017
  letterpress and blackberry ink on paper
  6 1/4 x 9 in (15.9 x 22.9 cm) each
  Edition of 3
Strobelite Honeys (Flor and Jewel), Detail Shot, 2019, gypsum cast dog food bag, resin, fur coats, steel hardware, anti-theft device, stolen stool, knife, bottle, studs, rubber, chain, jewelry, and used cigarettes, dimensions variable

Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based visual and performance artist from the US/Mexico border of El Paso/Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.
Xandra Ibarra
- Xandra Ibarra
  Strobelite Honeys (Flor and Jewel), 2019
  gypsum cast dog food bag, resin, fur coats, steel hardware, anti-theft device, stolen stool, knife, bottle, studs, rubber, chain, jewelry, and used cigarettes
  dimensions variable

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Bloodchild: Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco

Bloodchild

Stuart Robertson

Stuart Robertson

Nyame Brown

Nyame Brown

Shara Mays

Shara Mays

Leila Weefur

Leila Weefur

Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra

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