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 Visualizing Abolition with Cassils and Rafa Esparza

Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, California

In Plain Sight is a coalition of 80 artists, led by Cassils and esparza, united to create an artwork dedicated to the abolition of immigrant detention and the United States culture of incarceration. On July 4, 2020, skytyping fleets spelled out artist-generated messages in white vapor over detention centers across the U.S. This action made visible what is otherwise purposefully obscured: the immoral and appalling treatment of imprisoned immigrants, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. For this Traction: Art Talk, Cassils and rafa discussed In Plain Sight, from its conception to implementation, and consider the role of art, collaboration, and community in ending the government’s unjust treatment of immigrants while providing material support for those most affected. 

Free

“Just Futures” Opens

Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, California, United States

Against the present’s seemingly endless backdrop of deep political unrest, environmental emergency, and racialized injustice, Just Futures highlights poignant creative experiments in futurity and justice, directed at emancipatory worlds-to-come. With artworks by Black Quantum Futurism, Arthur Jafa, and Martine Syms, Just Futures considers how time itself is a site of struggle and a horizon of liberation. The centerpiece of the exhibition, Arthur Jafa's Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), was screened simultaneously over 48 hours across art museums in 2020 as an international response to racial justice uprisings and civil unrest. Far from homogenous, inherently progressive, or equitable, dominant time expresses the 24/7 chronologies of capital, long synchronized to racialized, gendered violence and oppression. The seemingly endless meter of production encloses people in temporal holds, defuturing communities, and imposing time-traps of debt and deadlines.

Free

Film Screening of “The White Album” by Arthur Jafa

Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, California

Arthur Jafa is an artist, director, editor, and award-winning cinematographer. His renowned work Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) is a compilation of found footage set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired hip-hop track “Ultralight Beam.” The meticulously edited seven-minute montage surveys African American identity and black experience through a vast spectrum of imagery, including well-known pictures from the civil rights era, recent scenes of police brutality, and iconic clips of extraordinary athleticism. For The White Album, Jafa shifts his lens to white experience, combining imagery from a wide array of sources, from music videos to confessionals posted to YouTube, to produce a trenchant examination of race relations in the United States. Jafa received the 2019 Golden Lion award for best artist in the Venice Biennale for The White Album. 

Free

Tina Campt and a Black Gaze in Art

Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History 705 Front St, Santa Cruz, CA, United States

Engaging works by artists including Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Dawoud Bey, Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson, Campt argues that these artist's practices require "viewers to do more than simply look... solicit visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity."  The book has been hailed by Art in America as “a methodological offering a theory of what Blackness brings to making and viewing art, and to perception in general.” 

Free