Artist Phoebe Beasley Reflects on Life and MIGRATIONS – SF Weekly

What Phoebe Beasley does with other peoples discards can be called collage, but thats like describing the Taj Mahal as a building or KafkasThe Metamorphosisas a book. Yes, its accurate, but those words are just the reductive start of a much bigger conversation about history and complexity and characters whose lives veer off in unpredictable and unintended directions.

Beasleys exhibit at Rena Bransten Gallery, MIGRATIONS in Our Minds Eye, isa visualnarrative of the African-American exodus that, from 1916 to 1970, prompted six million Black people to leave the American South for the Northeast, Midwest and West. In Beasleys art aresnapshots of people who are dreaming of their escape or are on their way as inAnother Fireside Chat, where a gray-haired woman practically embracesan old-fashioned radio for the news of the day.

The radio is an actual wooden device from the 1930s that found its way into Beasleys possession, while the woman is composed of different materials including colorful fabric for a dress that resembles a field of new flowers; lined, yellowing paper that is her wrinkled skin; and a brownish stocking that crawls halfway up her left knee but is bunched in a way that would be unbecoming in public. This is a view both flattering and unflattering of a woman alone in the early 20th century with a then-new media device, which brought the world directly into her home. For the woman depicted in that scene, there was no need to migrate anywhere else but the green chair on which shes seated. Beasley says hercollages are almost like stop-action stories.

Radio was the media our grandparents or our great-grandparents,Beasley tellsSF Weeklyby phone from her Los Angeles home. It must have been so fascinating and exciting to have radio in your home especially for seniors, to have someone suddenly give you the news.You had fireside chats with [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt.Your radio was your new best friend.

MIGRATIONS in Our Minds Eye also navigates issues related to migrations in general, as in Beasleys work calledClimates Climax, which hints at the environmental damage that has uprooted people from previously fertile land. But its the Great Migration from the American South, which Beasleys grandparents participated in, thats at the root of her new exhibit.

Beasley, whois now celebrated for her decades-long career in art and arts education (shes a former member of the Los Angeles Arts Commission and the California Arts Council),has gone through her own challenging migrations and obstacles, many of them rooted in racism.In high school, when she aspired to study art in college, her counselor laughed dismissively and told her that African-Americans couldnt become artists. You have to understand:Theres no such thing as a Black artist, Beasley remembers her saying.And after Beasley moved from Ohio to Los Angeles in 1969,she frequently encountered gallerists who told her, Oh, we have one Black person already and our clients dont buy Black art.

In the late 1970s Beasley was at an artistic crossroads: She worked a day job doing sales for two Los Angeles radio stations while doing art at night and weekends, when the poet Maya Angelou by then a good friendhelped convince Beasley to be even more creative to get her art noticed. A car trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco became a tipping point for Beasley. Maya said, Were going to take a car trip, and I want you to meet everyone whos still alive who Ive written about in my books, Beasley says. By the time we went to San Francisco, she asked me what I was working on. And I started to hem and haw. I was doing shows in hospital lobbies or community centers. And she said, You must do this! You must do this! Ive bought your work. I care about your work. Ive told other people about your work. You must do it. If you dont, youll lose it.'

Fast forward to the present: Two American presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, acknowledged Beasleys art with official presidential seals, and Oprah Winfrey, Samuel L. Jackson, and other celebrities regularly collect Beasleys work. (As part of her new exhibit, Beasley is participating in an online talk with artist Nashormeh Lindo, moderated by UC Irvine associate professor Bridget Cooks, on April 9 at 5 pm. Free with registration on theRena Bransten website.)

Beasley will never want for material to work with, especially for collage, which Beasley was first inspired to do by the work of the great African-American collage artist Romare Bearden, and by her days as a high-school art teacher, when she had limited paint supplies and turned to material that was available. My friends, she jokes now, all have a freebie box at their front door, because everyone I know is old enough to be deaccessioning. The only houseaccessioning is mine. So I have everyones discards or their junk.

Phoebe Beasley: MIGRATIONS in Our Minds Eye. Through April 24 atRena Bransten Gallery, 1275 Minnesota, S.F. Free with appointment.

Future Faithful: Islamic Experiments in Space Exploration and Posthumanism. Through April 10 atBass & Reiner, 1275 Minnesota, S.F. Free.

The bulls that appear in the collaged, fabric sculptures of Zulfikar Ali Bhuttos latest exhibit are, lets put this matter of factly, weird looking. Two of them have milky eyes that are ghostly. And one of them is really a half-bull, half-human thats dressed in shiny jewelry and a red, flowing skirt that falls halfway to the floor. It helps to know that Bhutto is referencing the bulls that are in Islams holy book. And that hes also celebrating real and imagined queer Muslim fighters. Based in both San Francisco and Karachi, Pakistan, where he was raised, Bhutto has made a name for himself withvisually provocative art thataddresses queerness and Islam. Bhuttos video animation,Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, is a tour-de-force work that takes Islams oldest extant building of significance, Jerusalems Dome of the Rock, and flies it into a kind of outer space, where it meets a Hindu deity, and the earth circles aroundas sacred Islamic chanting erupts in the background, along with voices and other sounds. When the YBCA exhibited Bhuttos video earlier this year as a window display, you could watch it at night amid the stars and outside elements. That was a perfect spot. At Bass & Reiner,Tomorrow We Inherit the Earthis on a relatively small screen, but taking it in amid the fabric sculptures adds a dynamic that was missing at YBCA.

Solange Roberdeau: Beyond Latitude. Through April 10 atMunicipal Bonds,1275 Minnesota, S.F. Free with appointment.

In her work calledContinuity: Movement To Moments (Diptych),Solange Roberdeau does something both quite simple and complex: She bleeds ink across the two white pages, creating patterns of black density that morph into waves of semi-opaqueness (the complex part); and she adds two stripes of black and gold (the simple part) that cut through the density and giveContinuity: Movement To Moments (Diptych)a small visual anchor that balance the density and give it a visceral yin-and-yang feeling. And so it goes throughout Beyond Latitude, where almost every piece is a world of anchored abstraction, where darkness and lightness connect through permutations that are frozen for a moment in time.

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Artist Phoebe Beasley Reflects on Life and MIGRATIONS - SF Weekly