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Movable, Long Commutes Between Loved Ones, Music For Motors and Resonant Strings 

Movable is scored for pianoforte in a unique just intonation/equal temperament hybrid tuning and employs a new mechanical extension we like to call the Piano Monster built by NYC artist Ranjit Bhatnagar that uses 16 voltage controlled motors with attached objects that resonate piano strings.

–Zachary James Watkins

A Watkins Retrospective, Ep.7

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

This final episode of Broken Boxes for Radio Coyote opens with a message/memory shared by my Godmother Rebeccah Silva, whom I lived with in Santa Barbara California after leaving Maui, HI as a young adult. We then dive into a conversation between myself and DJ INTI, who is my oldest and most informative friend sonically (who was featured in the beginning of this series). We reminisce on the music scene in SB back in the day and up into the Bay Area from past to present and I share some music memories and rebroadcasts from the past that coincide with our conversation. DJ Inti lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Music // Soundbites featured:

Frogs Belly by Luke Vibert
Invisible Skratch Pickles LIVE Set
Suck My Left One by Bikini Kill
Me and Giuliani Down By the School Yard- A True Story by !!!
Steve Aoki speaking on the History Of Dim Mak
Beep Street by SquarePusher
Funk Fu 1999 with Miss GInger on 91.9 KCSB
Azz Everywhere by Big Frida
Foxy Girls In Oakland by Roger Collins
You Get Mad at Napster by Princess Superstar
Rock Creek Park by The BlackByrds
The Book Of Right On by Joanna Newsom LIVE Jools Holland 2004

Broken Boxes, Ep.16

Faith Wilding, Waiting With (2007)

Music for Maraming by Loren Kiyoshi Dempster

Created by Angela Hennessy, this audio guide gives visitors to SFMOMA an alternative means of navigating the institution. Intervening into the traditional museum space, it directs visitors to works of Black Abstraction, landscape, and portraiture in the permanent collection of SFMOMA, offering insights and new perspectives.

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and co-founder of See Black Womxn. Hennessy’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, The New Yorker, and Surface Design Journal. She has had recent exhibitions at SOMARTs, MoAD, Pt. 2 Gallery, and SoEx.

This is the ninth program in our year-long season dedicated to thinking about our contemporary moment through the lens of Lorraine O’Grady's work. Special thanks to Wattis curatorial fellow Meghan Smith for her work on this project.

Image credit: Zanele Muholi, "Phaphama, at Cassilhaus, North Carolina," from the series "Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness)," 2016; collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; ©Zanele Muholi; photo: Katherine Du Tiel

...An Audio Guide to Black Abstraction, Landscape, and Portraiture at SFMOMA by Angela Hennessy

This audio guide to Drum Listens to Heart Part 1 surveys the exhibitions, providing physical descriptions of a selection of works and curatorial insight into each gallery space.

Drum Listens to Heart Part 1 Audio Tour

This audio guide to Drum Listens to Heart Part II surveys the exhibitions, providing physical descriptions of a selection of works and curatorial insight into each gallery space.

Drum Listens to Heart Part II Audio Tour

This audio guide to Drum Listens to Heart Part III surveys the exhibitions, providing physical descriptions of a selection of works and curatorial insight into each gallery space.

Drum Listens to Heart Part III Audio Tour

Francesco Pedraglio (1981) uses storytelling as a tool for decoding intimate encounters with both mundane and historically complex situations. He explores how the
acts of narrating and staging shape the relationship between teller and listener,
revealing the fantasies and fictions that make up our reality. As part of his ongoing
Autobiography of a Museum series, Pedraglio composes a narrative from the perspective of the Wattis. Told through a set of staff keys—from office and storage keys
to the curator’s house key—Pedraglio scratches their silhouettes into the museum’s
walls, exposing layers of sheetrock and paint from previous exhibitions. A graffiti of
sorts, this quiet intervention leaves a speculative trace of those who move through the
institution: staff, artists, and the public. Here, buried memories, invisible routines,
and idle fictions accumulate in the museum’s unconscious.

Francesco Pedraglio: "Autobiography of a Museum" Performance

Some of you, especially those of you who don't live in San Francisco, might not be familiar with the work of Dodie Bellamy.

She's a novelist, poet, and essayist who has been living and working here since the late 1970s, and has become a central member of the Bay Area’s avant-garde literary scene. She's interested in sex, death, and literature. Her material is language and narrative, which she twists and bends around different truths and untruths.

In her mind, a good essay always embarrasses its author, a bit.

Andrew Durbin, himself a poet and novelist, is an avid reader of Bellamy's work, along with the work of other writers from the New Narrative movement of the 1970s and 80s. Like them, he sees autobiography as something to use, but also to subvert, pervert, and perform. 

Durbin launches our 5th year-long research season with a new lecture on the writer Dodie Bellamy, giving an overview and sharing his perspective on her work and her words.

Andrew Durbin is an American poet and novelist, and currently serves as Senior Editor for the Americas at Frieze Magazine. With Ben Fama and Trisha Low, he co-founded Wonder and published books, pamphlets, and limited edition art prints from writers and artists such as Juliana Huxtable, Ariana Reines, and Jacolby Satterwhite. Nighboat Books published Mature Themes (2014), his collection of poems, and MacArthur Park (2017), his first full-length novel. 


This is the first event in our year-long season dedicated to the questions posed by the work of Dodie Bellamy and how they address art, culture, and society today.

Andrew Durbin on Dodie Bellamy

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.

Andrew Durbin on Dodie Bellamy

CCA Wattis Institute

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