on protocol and performance at another end of the world: An experiential convening featuring brontë velez, Courtney Desiree Morris, and Mattie Loyce
Wednesday, September 21, 2022 | 6-8pm
Location:/ (slash) (1150 25th st, Building B, San Francisco 94107)
This is a free event please register here
Mask required for entry

On the occasion of SALT to CATCH GHOSTS, curated by Ashara Ekundayo, we invite you to an experiential convening taking place on Wednesday, September 21, 2022 from 6 to 8pm at /. Our time will be guided by brontë velez (Creative Director, Lead to Life), Courtney Desiree Morris (assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley), Ashara Ekundayo (Independent Curator/Steward at Artist As First Responder), and Mattie Loyce (Multidisciplinary Artist/Facilitator).

The exhibition SALT to CATCH GHOSTS features large-scale installation and photography, textile, and video works by JOJO ABOT, April Bey, Kenturah Davis, Shanequa Gay, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Courtney Desiree Morris, Sabrina Nelson, brontë velez, and Sarah Kirnon, who created an accompanying soundtrack engaging themes of salt water. SALT to CATCH GHOSTS is on view at / through December 17, 2022.

Mattie Loyce (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, facilitator and community advocate. Critically engaging socio-political content, and encouraging empowerment through holistic decolonial collaboration, are keys to their community work and socially engaged artist practice. Throughout their career and across continents, they have made a commitment to amplifying and supporting the lives of people with marginalized identities, specifically people and artists of the African diaspora, queer people, people of color, and our ancestors.

Courtney Desiree Morris (b. 1983, Fort Ord, CA) is a Berkeley, CA-based social anthropologist and artist whose work is concerned with ancestral memory, ritual work, ecology, climate change, death, mourning, and Black feminist aesthetics. Her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica), the Frye Museum (Seattle, WA), and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain), among others. She is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her forthcoming book is titled To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press).

brontë velez is a Black-Latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jibarx, and wakeworker, whose eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of Black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, and death doulaship. They are the creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for Weaving Earth. Currently, they are co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in Northern California.

Ashara Ekundayo is a queer Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator, visual maker, cultural theologian, arts organizer, and strategist whose creative practice is rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study and creation of Black archives, site-responsive ceremony, and the specific expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. She is the founder of the philanthropic organization Artist As First Responder and has collaborated with artists and institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora, SFMOMA, and Black [Space] Residency. Ashara currently lives and works between the San Francisco Bay Area and her hometown of Detroit, MI.

brontë velez, CAN I GET A WITNESS, 2022, digital video still