Gallery 212 is one of the Community Center’s two dedicated exhibition spaces. Housed in a bright, airy former classroom with hardwood floors and whitewashed walls, this space houses rotating exhibitions by artists from the Bay Area and beyond.
All gallery shows are free to attend, and open to the public during the Community Center’s business hours.
Read on below to learn more about the gallery’s current exhibit, as well as future and past shows.
PAST EXHIBITS:
Urban Legends; A solo Exhibition by Resident Artist Reniel Del Rosario
The Museum of Found objects welcomes you to a month of acquisitions, appropriation, art, and antiquity. In Urban Legends, Reniel wants to play with the notion that objects are simply objects. But in a world motivated primarily by markets, they are categorized by value (historical, cultural, and monetary) and some fall through the cracks and are never put on the same pedestals (if at all) as others.
Within these categorizations, objects can be cast off as second-rate or idolized through an exotified anthropological lens. Certainly, some objects will garner cult followings that understand the real merits in time, but until then they exist through those who choose to hold the knowledge of their existence and those who choose to tell the world of them—something short of a myth.
Along with sculptures, a collaboration with San Francisco Bay Area-based dancers Emma Lanier and Cauveri Suresh will be held on November 12th, 2022 throughout the evening. The dancing duo will be performing a movement piece involving works made by Reniel.
Through his body of work made through the Sonoma Ceramics residency, Reniel is not critiquing the artists themselves (for the most part), but how legacies are chosen and erased through almost arbitrary connotations of value through consumer markets, Eurocentricity, and privileges of race, gender, etc. The concept of institutions such as museums and public and/or private collections guiding the public’s tastes and exposure to artwork leads to many blind spots along the way. Many artworks will never be in the limelight to any degree due to a multitude of reasons—lack of immediate popularity, absence of understanding, or no funders being interested.
Whatever the reason, the riff created follows the individual works indefinitely. In the gallery, the artist uses this as an opportunity to combine and clash works from both ends into layered, comical, and albeit confusing combinations that critique the divide amongst objects that institutions build on rather than face and level out.
More on the Performers:
Cauveri Suresh is an artist whose work orients around geometry, color, and relation to physical environment. They are deeply influenced by their study with Jodi Melnick, Christina Robson, Joanna Kotze, and Doug Varone, among others. As a performer, they have danced in works by Lauren Simpson, Kickbal, Risa Jaroslow & Dancers, KT Nelson, Kim Epifano, and GERALDCASELDANCE, and Jodi Melnick. Cauveri collaborates frequently with San Francisco-based choreographer Emma Lanier, and with Ky Frances as part of Apt A dances. Cauveri’s choreographic work has been supported most recently by Nava Dance Theater’s Unrehearsed Artist Residency and to be like the river in Dos Rios, CA. Cauveri graduated cum laude from Barnard College in 2018 with a B.A. in dance.
Emma Lanier is an artist who works with movement, objects, and sound. She was born and raised in San Francisco and studied at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza in Madrid, and at Skidmore College in New York, where she was the recipient of the 2016 Margaret Paulding Award for outstanding performance, choreography, and research in critical dance studies. She has presented her work nationally at Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO,) David Zwirner Gallery (New York, NY,) and locally at San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, Fresh Festival, James Graham Dance Theatre’s Dance Lovers, SAFEhouse for the Performing Arts, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Catharine Clark Gallery, and ODC Pilot71. In addition to creating, she has performed with Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works, Rachael Cleveland, and Kickbal.
Lama Tashi Norbu sandmandala, and other great works. Interactive over the weekend, viewing through October 7th, 2022
