Mia Eve Rollow & Caleb Duarte: EDELO and Levester Williams: Our Bedrock

Exhibition Dates January 31 – April 6, 2025
Opening Reception Friday February 7, 6-8 p.m.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (January 6, 2025) The Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS), UC Santa Cruz’s contemporary art space on the westside of Santa Cruz, is opening two new winter exhibitions: EDELO, the first survey exhibition of Fresno-based collaborators Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte and Our Bedrock, the West Coast premier of Philadelphia-based artist Levester Williams. Together, the exhibitions will offer visitors immersive experiences of large-scale sculptural works, installation art, video, and performance reflecting the diverse practices and regional concerns of these award-winning U.S. contemporary artists. A First Friday party to celebrate the openings will take place from 6-8 p.m., February 7, 2025, with the artists in attendance. 

For EDELO, artists Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte have transformed fragments of the murals and other public artworks from the past 15 years of their shared community-based art practice into towering assemblages, installations, and interactive sculptures, many of which have never been seen in a gallery context. The survey takes its name from an action taken by the artists in 2009, when they repurposed the United Nations building in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico, which had been abandoned after displaced indigenous community members occupied its offices. Rollow and Duarte renamed the space EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be), and partnered with members of the Zapatista community to reimagine and recreate the building as an intercultural artist residency, experimental art laboratory, and safe house. 

For this survey, the name has been repurposed as the framework for the artists’ larger practice. With large-scale sculpture and installation works composed from shards of murals and other artworks altering the built environment of the gallery, the exhibition pieces together Rollow and Duarte’s collaborative artworks, produced with communities in a wide-range of locations, including Chiapas, Tijuana, and Santiago, to explore how this shared practice materially, conceptually, and aesthetically seek to dismantle failed institutions– and rebuild community.

Philadelphia-based artist Levester Williams, Our Bedrock, will expose local audiences to videos, installation, sculpture, collage, and photographic works never before shown in California. The artworks in Our Bedrock delve into the history and current uses of Cockeysville marble, which is mined in Baltimore County, Maryland. The marble has been used for the columns of the U.S. Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, and other important national sites, and in 2020, was nominated for official recognition as a “Global Heritage Stone.” The marble was also used to make the stoops of many of the homes in Baltimore. In the Black-majority city, some of these stoops were used as spaces of everyday neighborhood gatherings. Others act as boundaries and sites of social division, including those stoops in which jazz singer Billie Holiday scrubbed for fifteen cents in Baltimore’s wealthier– and historically White– areas, as described in The Lady Sings the Blues, her autobiography. 

For Our Bedrock, Williams enacts a careful masonry, bringing together photographs of Billie Holiday taken by legendary jazz-bassist Milt Hinton, performative enactments of the labor of cleaning, and other works to build on the different resonances and values of this marble.  Excavating histories of domestic labor and mining as well as a continuum of Black resistance made manifest through art, music, and community, Our Bedrock unearths the shaky national foundations of the United States.  

The IAS Galleries are located at 100 Panetta Avenue, on the westside of Santa Cruz and are open Tuesday-Sunday, 12 pm-5 pm. Admission is free to the public. More information at https://ias.ucsc.edu/.

IAS Winter exhibitions are organized with support from the Mellon Foundation as part of the Visualizing Abolition initiative. 

Images: (Left) Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, Collaborative performance, Walking the Beast, Alberque La 72, Tenosique Tabasco Chiapas. Video still E.D.E.L.O 2014. (Right) Levester Williams, a centerpiece (Lady Sings the Blues), 2021.

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