Clare Rojas “Here We Go” acrylic on panel. Image courtesy of Jessica Silverman Gallery.

May 4 to 22 – Clare Rojas: Here We Go at Jessica Silverman Gallery:  Here We Go, a solo show by Bay Area artist Clare Rojas, is the gallery’s first in-real-life exhibition in over a year; it marks the soft opening of an almost completely renovated, new gallery space at 621 Grant Avenue (between Sacramento and California Street).  Rojas is best known for her magic realist and otherworldly abstract paintings.  This exhibition, is a virtuoso display of Rojas’s formal and spiritual evolution in oil on linen and acrylic on panel. Her distinct style of high-folk, figurative-abstract art enlivens art history and elevates popular culture.  Jessica Silverman Gallery is open by appointment, please schedule your visit here.

Joy O. Ude.  Image courtesy of Southern Exposure.

Ongoing to May 22 – Once Removed at Southern Exposure:  Southern Exposure is reopening for in-person viewing by appointment with the group exhibition Once Removed, curated by Kija Lucas.  The  exhibition includes works by artists who are incorporating traditional textile and movement techniques alongside new material strategies. Artists in this exhibition draw from their ancestral traditions as well as personal experiences to create works that explore tradition and belonging while living in an in-between space, weaving together quotidian materials and contemporary art practice with traditional craft techniques. Artists in the exhibition:  Miguel Arzabe, May Gaspay, Mik Gaspay, Melissa Joseph, Charlene Tan, Joy O. Ude, and Sriba Kwadjovie Quintana.  The gallery is open by appointment only, please schedule your visit here.

Teresita Fernandez and Sir David Adjaye.  Image courtesy of Stanford University.

Monday, May 10, at 5:00pm – Teresita Fernández & Sir David Adjaye in conversation on Stanford YouTube:  Teresita Fernández’s work is characterized by interactive self-reflection and conceptual wayfinding. Her immersive, monumental works are inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references.  Sir David Adjaye OBE is a Ghanaian-British architect who has received international acclaim for his impact on the field.  Adjaye’s largest project to date, The National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC opened on the National Mall in Washington DC in 2016 and was named Cultural Event of the Year by The New York Times.  RSVP for the conversation here.

Wangetchi Mutu “I am Speaking, Can you hear me?” Paper pulp, wood glue, soil, charcoal, bone, feathers, shells, wood, metal stands.  Image courtesy of The Legion of Honor Museum.

May 7 to November 7 – Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? at The Legion of Honor Museum:  Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies, Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine.  Mutu’s exhibition at the Legion of Honor, a museum built for the showcase of European art from antiquity through Impressionism presided over by Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, aims to spur “a purposeful examination of art histories, mythologies, and the techniques of archiving and remembering.” the Legion of Honor museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday with advanced tickets required.  To purchase tickets, please visit here.

Raymond Saunders “Untitled” mixed media on board.  Image courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby.

May 1 to June 12 – Raymond Saunders 40 Years: Paris/Oakland at Casemore Kirkeby and Andrew Kreps Gallery: Casemore Kirkeby and Andrew Kreps Gallery are co-presenting the exhibition 40 Years: Paris/Oakland, a retrospective of works by Raymond Saunders.   A cult-like figure in the Bay Area art scene, Saunders’ paintings and installation-based works are loaded with rich swaths of paint, interwoven with found materials and his own notational marks, and white-pencil drawings. ​ Blackboard surfaces, left visible through a heavy accumulation of marks and material, tie Saunders’ works inextricably to his role as an educator, as he handwrites simple equations, lettering, and childlike notes onto the work’ s surface.  The exhibition is held in 2 locations:  Andrew Kreps Temporary Gallery at 657 Howard Street and Casemore Kirkeby at 1275 Minnesota Street.

Lezley Saar “Chelove is steeped in the mist of longing for fragments of her past” acrylic on fabric over panel in found antique frame.   Image courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery.

May 1 to June 12 – The Ambiguities of Blackness at Minnesota Street Project:  The Ambiguities of Blackness is the first of five exhibitions by the inaugural grantees of the California Black Voices Project. Curated by Dr. Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, the exhibition examines who and what defines “Black art.” The answer’s complexity is central to the exhibition, and considered by the seven participating artists: April Banks, Lavialle Campbell, Karen Hampton, Raymond Holbert, David Huffman, Lauren McIntosh, and Lezley Saar.  The exhibition will be installed in the atrium space of Minnesota Street Project, located at 1275 Minnesota Street and will also be presented on Adjacent, the Project’s virtual space for art, here.

Stuart Robertson “Big Man Ting II” (detail) acrylic, interior paint, aluminum, paper, cardboard, glitter foam, textile and foam core insulation on wood.  Image courtesy of Headlands Center for the Arts.

May 2 to 23 – Tarsal by Metatarsal Graduate Fellows exhibition at Headlands Center for the Arts:  This exhibition explores the seven Graduate Fellows’ varied engagements with the body in its expansive and multivalent manifestations: as archive and ecosystem, instrument and metaphor, specter and source. Tasked with creating work under the extraordinary weight of the current moment alongside the bone-crushing persistence of ableism, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, the participating fellows utilize a spectrum of strategies and tactics to assemble a body of work that is simultaneously an encounter of the present and an index of what the body remembers, endures, and survives.  Artists in the exhibition: Calum Craik, Jillian Crochet, Xandra Ibarra, Yétundé Olagbaju, Jessica Eve Rattner, Stuart Robertson, and Lena Tseabbe Wright.  Headlands Center for the Arts is open Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.  To visit, schedule your appointment here.

Miguel Arzabe “Isla del Sol” woven acrylic on canvas.  Image courtesy of Johansson Projects.

May 8 to July 24 – Miguel Arzabe: Condor de cuatro cabezas/Four-Headed Condor at Johansson Projects:  Cóndor de Cuatro Cabezas is a solo exhibition of recent works by Oakland-based artist Miguel Arzabe.  The works included feature intricate canvas and paper weavings that are crafted from strips of painted reinterpretations of artworks by pre-war American abstractionists, which Arzabe weaves into new visual interpretations using improvised patterns inspired by Andean textiles. The four heads of the condor referenced in the exhibition title represent the various ‘authors’ of each work: the two artists whose works Arzabe deconstructs; Arzabe himself as the third artist who then reconstructs their work into a new, mixed form; and the viewer, who then engages with and creates new meanings from the resulting woven piece.  The gallery is located at 2300 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland.  To schedule an appointment, please email info@johanssonprojects.com.