Join us for a talk with multidisciplinary textile artist Richard-Jonathan Nelson in conversation with Tosha Stimage about Nelson's current exhibition on view in the MoAD Salon. Interlacing distributed intelligence/noir care interrogates how the Black body and craft can be intermeshed to depict our western culture's speculative future no matter how foreign the idea of Black craft is outside of the American Low country. Through the hybridizing of traditional craft practices like embroidery, weaving, and quilting along with digital art, Interlacing distributed intelligence/noir care reimagines the Black body as a place for futuristic progress. Nelson’s work is balanced visually between the dichotomy of Blackness as an expansive unknowable monolithic void and a chromatically intense generator of culture. Thereby creating images of the Black Diaspora far removed from continued historic depiction as servile and without agency, but instead as visual and culturally complex individuals.

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Richard-Jonathan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. His work is multi-layered, chromatically intense and mixes images of the natural world with reference to hoodoo, queer culture, and Afro-Futurism. Born in Savannah, Georgia (1987) and working in Oakland, CA, Nelson received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. His work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Embark Gallery, Root Division in San Francisco, and Aggregate Space in Oakland.

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Tosha Stimage is an artist living and working in Berkeley, CA. Stimage’s interests focus on disrupting the notion that language is isolated from historical or modern connotations. By consistently re-contextualizing material forms and histories, she is able to challenge visual language and its relationship to the construct of death, the self, and, “race”.

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This is an in-person program at MoAD. Proof of Covid-19 vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test within 72 hours of entry is required.

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This program is presented in conjuction with the exhibition Emerging Artists Program presents Interlacing distributed intelligence/noir care on view now through September 18, 2022.

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MoAD Emerging Artists is generously funded by Karen Jenkins-Johnson & Kevin Johnson and Westridge Foundation.

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