What Are You Listening For 
2017 

We ask the question: What are you listening for? The double-headed axe of the god Changó invokes ideas concerning the potential focus and purpose of listening. Black Spirituals feel compelled to explore these assumptions through a creative inquiry into redesigning and recontextualizing a genre shaped by the historical conditions of the movement of people’s bodies over time, space, and land, while preserving critically innovative technologies. 

Acknowledgements: Exploratorium Resonance Residency, Marshall Trammell, Victoria Ruiz, Amber McZeal, Jon Leidecker

A Watkins Retrospective, Ep.8

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to contemporary art. It was founded in 1998, at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

The Wattis Institute is a place for showing art and for thinking about art. We spend time with artists and pay close attention to their ideas.

We like to work with one artist at a time—one artist presents an exhibition in the gallery, one artist stays in the apartment on a residency, and one artist is the subject of a year-long research initiative. 

The Wattis Institute is a headquarters for contemporary art for everyone in the Bay Area, and runs an active event space (featuring an artist-designed bar) for discussions, performances, screenings, artworks, and drinks.