Join us on Sunday, April 7th for the opening reception of Value Test: Brown Paper featuring spoken-word activations by devorah major, Tonya Foster, Tureeda Mikell, and Rhodessa Jones, followed by a discussion of the work with Emerging Artist Program awardee Mary Graham, in conversation with art historian and professor Dr. Jacqueline Francis. Light refreshments will be served.

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About the Exhibition

Value Test: Brown Paper is an exhibition of portraits depicting fictional Black women rendered in oil on brown paper bags. The eponymous “paper bag tests” were historically conducted amongst the Black upper classes to gauge entry into elite spaces, granting access only to those lighter than the brown paper. Through this work Graham reflects on colorism, classism, and power, and their roots in white supremacy.

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With colorism’s continued prevalence in the contemporary as both an internalized and systemic phenomenon, she attempts in this work to foster conversation, reconciliation, and a level of inter-communal healing. Rooted in an African-American spiritual tradition, Graham's work begins with the veneration of her own lineage, expanding to encompass themes of generational love, collective human origin, and our relationship to the unknown. Graham works primarily in figuration and portraiture, and is also a classically trained vocalist.

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About the Artists

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Mary Graham (@mary.graham.art) is a Philadelphia born interdisciplinary artist studying the notion of “the ancestors” as a conceptual and spiritual medium through which historical, interpersonal, and introspective insight might be gained. Her work in painting, vocal performance, film and installation encompass themes of generational love and reconciliation, collective human origin, and our relationship to the unknown.

Graham received her BFA from California College of the Arts, and has exhibited and performed nationally.  

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Born and raised in California, granddaughter of immigrants, documented and undocumented, devorah major (@devmajor) served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate (2002-2006).A baker of pies and lover of jazz In her poetry has carried her to many countries where she has performed with and without musicians. In 2022 she received the Regina Coppola International Literary Award in Italy where her sixth book of poetry, "with open arms," was released in a bilingual edition in 2020.  A Willow Press Editor’s Choice her seventh book of poetry, "Califia’s Daughter," was published by Willow Press in 2020. he is always looking to build a better world and uses her science fiction stories as one voice in Afro-Futurism.  She will put down her pen to march and call for justice.  

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In terms of other publications, she has four poetry chapbooks, two novels, two biographies for young adults, and a host of short stories, essays, and individual poems published in anthologies and periodicals.  Ms. Major is featured on a number of CDs including Fierce//Love and The Tongue is a Drum as a part of Daughters of Yam, a poetry and jazz performance duo. She has performed as poet and actress with First Voice productions of “Song of the City in 2022 and “Soul of the City” in 2023. Trade Routes, a commissioned symphony with spoken word and chorus, premiered under Maestro Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony in 2006. In June 2015 major premiered her poetry play Classic Black: Voices of 19th Century African Americans in San Francisco at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.  devorah major flourishes with cross-genre interactions and has  had productive creative collaborations with musicians, composers, painters,  storytellers and  writers.

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‍Tonya M. Foster (@fosterpoet) is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os, and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers) and of The Umbra Galaxy, a two-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Her next poetry collection thingifications is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Additionally, she is co-editing an anthology of drafts. A recipient of a research fellowship from the Radcliffe institute, the 2023 C.D. Wright award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, awards from Creative Capital Foundation, NYFA, San Francisco MoAD, and residencies from the Emily Harvey foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Macdowell, and Djerassi, among others, Tonya is a transplanted southerner (with the varied ramifications). Raised in New Orleans, she is a Louisianian from generations back on the maternal and paternal lines, and joins a community of Bay Area Louisiana transplants. Dr. Foster holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at SFSU where she has established Undisciplining the Fields: Study, Performance, and (Re:)Creation, a conversation (and sometimes performance) series that invites writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars into conversation. She is the newest member of a 50-year old Emeryville Artists Co-op, and the newest member of the SFSU Poetry Center.

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Tureeda Mikell (@storymedicinewoman), author of Synchronicity: Oracle of Sun Medicine, (Nomadic Press 2020) was nominated for the California Book Award. Tureeda is regarded a Story Medicine Woman, hell bent on asserting life. She has published over 72 student classroom anthologies from five bay area county school districts. Tureeda was featured storyteller for the 50^th and 55th Black Panther Party Anniversary, DeYoung Museum Soul of a Nation, featured poet storyteller celebrating Octavia Butler’s 70^th birthday, and Eth-Noh-Tec Nu Wa Delegate storyteller in Beijing, China in collaboration with the University of Beijing and MoAD’s 2022 poet in residence. She recently closed as one of the featured poets/artists for the Clarion Alley's Manifest Differently/ Minnesota Project. She is author of 5 chapbooks and recently acclaimed, full length collection, The Body: Oracle of Memory, released by (Black Lawrence Press 2/2024), that speaks to the wonder, protection, and teaching of the body’s senses. Many of her works have been translated in multiple languages.

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Rhodessa Jones (@rhodessajones) is a recent Pew Fellow, and Frank H.T. Rhodes Chair at Cornell University. She has conducted visiting professorships at Dartmouth University, Hamilton College, and the University of Wisconsin. Rhodessa received an Honorary Doctorate from California College of the Arts, San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Award, and an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater. Her acclaimed solo theatre plays: The Legend of Lily Overstreet; Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women; and Hot Flashes, Power Surges & Private Summers spanned decades and stand out as seminal tour de force performances in the canon of American theatre. Rhodessa Jones has been central, fundamental and inspirational to the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women since its inception--now celebrating its 36th year. During this time generations of young women have been taught and experienced epiphanies under Rhodessa's tutelage. Some have gone on to become theatre professionals in their own right. Many more have been saved. All have benefited from their exposure to Ms. Jones sage counsel and worldly wisdom. She is a 2023-24recipient of a Legacy Artist Award from Youth Speaks through the California Arts Council and recognized as a pioneer and leader in utilizing art as a vehicle for social change.

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Jacqueline Francis (@jackiefrancissf) is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012). She is the co-editor of two anthologies: Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011)—scholarly essays devoted to the twentieth-century artist, author and curator—and Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023): writings and art placed in conversation with the work of contemporary conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Francis’s curatorial projects include Adia Millett: You Will Be Remembered (Galerie duMonde—Hong Kong; 2022), Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life (Museum of Craft & Design—San Francisco; 2023), and Sargent Claude Johnson (Huntington Art Museum—San Marino, California; 2024). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective of San Francisco, Francis also is a fiction writer who was awarded an Individual Artist Commission grant (2017) by the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2023 she was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100—recognition of her cultural activism in the Bay Area. Francis is Dean of the Humanities and Sciences Division at California College of the Arts in San Francisco—the alma mater of artist Mary Graham.

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This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Value Test: Brown Paper on view at MoAD March 27, 2024-May 19, 2024.