Where Is Here presents the work of contemporary artists who have developed engaging
language to claim, make, and describe place. As a concept, place is about location as we
experience it through and over time: here and there are tied to the past, present, and future.
The exhibition title, Where Is Here, is a statement with a lurking question. The art on display
references locations—the sites where the work was made, and inevitably, the places and
spaces that inform and shape creative strategies and vision. Still, these art objects seem to hold
back. Their stories are partial and open-ended, allowing audiences to complete them.
Working in photography, painting, sculpture, installation art, experimental music, printmaking,
video, and collage, the artists of Where Is Here start conversations with audiences by making
everyday things strange, and in some cases, surreal. Cards march across the gallery floor like a
determined army. Shoes are overgrown with live moss and decorated with shells and lace.
Metallic-looking fish and tarred berries spoil the appetite. Memories of journeys taken are
narrated in discontinuous, free verse. Light flickers on watery surfaces and filters through wind
blown trees, reconfiguring nature into abstract compositions of black and white. Hybrid
structures and futuristic landscapes are simultaneously inviting and foreboding. Looped and
layered sounds of jazz and spoken word poetry are transports for time-travel. Basketball net
patterns, explosive ink bursts, and china plate designs are appropriated motifs. Taxidermied
birds are frozen in flight. Forms are material, visible, concrete, but they remain mysterious.
The exhibited works announce their makers’ interests in current events, archaeology,
architecture, the environment, politics, the domestic sphere, and colonial and postcolonial
history. The effect of place plays an important role in each of these projects. In them, place is
quiet and intimate, imagined and fantastical, contested and nearly exhausted. It is vital territory
that these artists interpret/consider as dynamic and full of potential. If Where Is Here situates
locations in time and across geographies, it also prompts the audience to similarly situate itself.
How does looking, listening to, and considering art change one’s sense of self in a place? It is
certain that as place and time shifts, so do we.
Conspicuously, the represented body stands off-stage in Where Is Here in order to focus
attention on real and conceptual movement. The scattering of people is at the center of all
discussions of diaspora, a phenomenon that defines groups and their origins, ideas about
home, the process of adaptation, and complex desires about return. In a different way, the
condition of the contemporary artist is tied to movement--travel to short and long-term residency
programs, participation in international exhibitions and commercial markets, and socio-
economic displacement and relocation because of neighborhood gentrification. Hailing from the
San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, these artists declare Where Is Here and ask us to find
it for ourselves.
Artists: Asya Abdrahman, La Vaughn Belle, Allan deSouza, Broun Fellinis, Christopher Cozier
Thierry Fontaine, David Huffman, Olalekan Jeyifous, Adia Millett, Ingrid Pollard
Curated by Kathy Zarur and Jacqueline Francis
Museum of the African Diaspora, October 2016 - April 2017
language to claim, make, and describe place. As a concept, place is about location as we
experience it through and over time: here and there are tied to the past, present, and future.
The exhibition title, Where Is Here, is a statement with a lurking question. The art on display
references locations—the sites where the work was made, and inevitably, the places and
spaces that inform and shape creative strategies and vision. Still, these art objects seem to hold
back. Their stories are partial and open-ended, allowing audiences to complete them.
Working in photography, painting, sculpture, installation art, experimental music, printmaking,
video, and collage, the artists of Where Is Here start conversations with audiences by making
everyday things strange, and in some cases, surreal. Cards march across the gallery floor like a
determined army. Shoes are overgrown with live moss and decorated with shells and lace.
Metallic-looking fish and tarred berries spoil the appetite. Memories of journeys taken are
narrated in discontinuous, free verse. Light flickers on watery surfaces and filters through wind
blown trees, reconfiguring nature into abstract compositions of black and white. Hybrid
structures and futuristic landscapes are simultaneously inviting and foreboding. Looped and
layered sounds of jazz and spoken word poetry are transports for time-travel. Basketball net
patterns, explosive ink bursts, and china plate designs are appropriated motifs. Taxidermied
birds are frozen in flight. Forms are material, visible, concrete, but they remain mysterious.
The exhibited works announce their makers’ interests in current events, archaeology,
architecture, the environment, politics, the domestic sphere, and colonial and postcolonial
history. The effect of place plays an important role in each of these projects. In them, place is
quiet and intimate, imagined and fantastical, contested and nearly exhausted. It is vital territory
that these artists interpret/consider as dynamic and full of potential. If Where Is Here situates
locations in time and across geographies, it also prompts the audience to similarly situate itself.
How does looking, listening to, and considering art change one’s sense of self in a place? It is
certain that as place and time shifts, so do we.
Conspicuously, the represented body stands off-stage in Where Is Here in order to focus
attention on real and conceptual movement. The scattering of people is at the center of all
discussions of diaspora, a phenomenon that defines groups and their origins, ideas about
home, the process of adaptation, and complex desires about return. In a different way, the
condition of the contemporary artist is tied to movement--travel to short and long-term residency
programs, participation in international exhibitions and commercial markets, and socio-
economic displacement and relocation because of neighborhood gentrification. Hailing from the
San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, these artists declare Where Is Here and ask us to find
it for ourselves.
Artists: Asya Abdrahman, La Vaughn Belle, Allan deSouza, Broun Fellinis, Christopher Cozier
Thierry Fontaine, David Huffman, Olalekan Jeyifous, Adia Millett, Ingrid Pollard
Curated by Kathy Zarur and Jacqueline Francis
Museum of the African Diaspora, October 2016 - April 2017