After Hope: Artists in Conversation

Join us for a conversation with artists from across the Asian and African diasporas presented in conjunction with the exhibition After Hope: Videos of Resistance at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Two featured artists from the exhibition, Tiffany Chung and Connie Zheng, and two artists previously exhibited through the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Emerging Artists Program, Simone Bailey and Cheryl Derricotte, discuss their practices in relation to themes of hope, resistance, and transnational futurity. The evening’s discussion will be moderated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, assistant curator of American art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

• 
  Tiffany Chung

  Tiffany Chung is internationally noted for her research-based multimedia installations and meticulously detailed cartographic works that examine conflict, migration, urban transformation, and environmental impact in relation to the history of specific places. Chung’s work remaps historical and collective memories of traumatized topographies, creates interventions into the spatial and political narratives, and unveils the connection between imperialist ideologies and visions of modernity. Selected museum exhibitions include Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2019) and Thu Thiem: an archaeological project for future remembrance, Lumar Cité, Lisbon (2019), as well as exhibitions in Kanazawa, Japan; Minneapolis; and Houston.

   

• 
  Connie Zheng

  Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, and filmmaker currently based in Oakland, California. Her work examines diverse articulations of hope amid ongoing ecological catastrophe, possibilities for expanding the language of climate apocalypse, and the racialization of contamination narratives, as told through visual and text-based forms. A 2019–2020 graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, she has also been awarded fellowships and residencies from Ragdale, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and ACRE, and was recently a collection fellow at KADIST. She will be publishing a chapter in the forthcoming “Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change.”

• 
  Simone Bailey

  Simone Bailey uses video, performance, sculpture, and site-specific installations in her artistic practice, which interrogates disembodied poetics and the impulse to grasp the intangible. Her work focuses on perception, process, ephemerality, desire, hybridity, violence, and the impossible, all while maintaining an intimate proximity to Blackness.

   

• 
  Cheryl Derricotte

  Cheryl Derricotte is a visual artist and her favorite mediums are glass and paper. Originally from Washington, D.C., she now lives and makes art in San Francisco. She has an extensive background in the arts and community development and is an active thought leader in the arts. Derricotte serves as secretary (aka the minister of information) for Three Point Nine Art Collective, a group of Black artists who live and make art in San Francisco. She is also the chief mindfulness officer of Crux, a nationwide cooperative of Black artists working at the intersection of art and technology through immersive storytelling (VR).

   

• 
  Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander

  Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is assistant curator of American art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she curated a reinstallation of the permanent collection and served as on-site curator for Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze. With assistant professor of art history Marci Kwon, Alexander is leading the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI). Alexander has presented her research and writing at the the Harvard Art Museums, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her scholarship has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design; and the American Craft Council.