Join us for an Artist Talk & Reception with EAP awardee Jessica Monette for her exhibition Unveiling Histories: A Fabricated Archive. Jessica Monette will be in conversation with inter-disciplinary independent curator and artist Ashara Ekundayo, with a poetic offering by the Director at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts A-Lan Holt. Light refreshments will be served.

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In this talk, Jessica Monette and Ashara Ekundayo will explore the motivations and inspirations behind Monette's work, focusing on her New Orleans roots and the lasting impact of Hurricane Katrina. They will examine how this event connects to ongoing systems of oppression, as well as Monette's artistic process of creating archives, preserving memories, and building cultural legacies. Through these themes, they will discuss how art can serve as a tool for both personal reflection and collective resistance against erasure.

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About the Exhibition

Unveiling Histories: A Fabricated Archive is a deeply personal exploration, tracing fragmented pieces of Monette's lineage disrupted not only by the Middle Passage but by ongoing events that challenge her ability to sustain a familial archive. The turbulent terrain of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 further underscored the difficulty of this preservation. From ancient to recent pasts, this collection amalgamates items and information, forming a fabricated archive that documents a colonial and ancestral past reshaped by historical turbulence. Originally from New Orleans, Jessica Monette's work delves into her heritage, weaving tangible yet elusive threads of ancestral legacies. The work then becomes a gumbo of artifacts that are inherited, found and fabricated. Monette's artistic expression spans the realms of painting, sculpture, installation, and more seamlessly connecting these themes.

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On view at MoAD October 2, 2024-December 15, 2024.

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About the Artists

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Jessica Monette (@jessicafalonmonette, b. 1986, New Orleans, Louisiana) is a Bay Area-based interdisciplinary artist and mother whose work spans painting, sculpture, installation, and collage. Her practice delves into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005), using the event as a metaphor for modern colonial conditions and systemic inequities. Jessica's art is rooted in an exploration of heritage, diasporic connections, and cultural preservation, framing the retention and production of culture as acts of resistance against erasure.

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For Jessica, art is more than just a creative process—it is a means of survival, legacy building, and a repository of knowledge and lived experiences. Her work reflects her ongoing journey to understand herself and her familial histories, placing these narratives in dialogue with broader historical conversations. Through her practice, she engages with the intersections of personal and collective memory, using art as a tool for resilience, reclamation, and cultural continuity.

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Ashara Ekundayo (@blublakwomyn) is a queer, Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator, visual maker, cultural theologian, arts organizer, and consultant whose creative practice is rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study and creation of Black archives, site-responsive ceremony, and artist-based strategies such as screenprinting, zine-making, installations, and altar-making that illuminate the specific expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. Her work explores healing, memory, and place, and she is the founder of the collective Artist As First Responder and also the principal at AECreative Consulting Partners, LLC.

Prior, Ekundayo stewarded Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland (2012-2017) and Ashara Ekundayo Gallery (2017-2019) both in Oakland, CA and has held national and international fellowships and residencies with entities such as the U.S. Dept. of State Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs, Institute For The Future, Schools Without Borders, Villa Albertine, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Ashara currently sits on the Board of Directors at Black Art Library and on the Advisory Boards of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, SECA at San Francisco MoMA, and the Curatorial Advisory Committee at Minnesota Street Project Foundation. She is co-founder at Black [Space] Residency and director of The Black Curator’s Lab while also touring the exhibition “Frontline Prophet: James Baldwin” featuring the work of Detroit based artist Sabrina Nelson who offers more than 60 iterations of the Black American author and activist in commemoration of his Centennial. Additionally, she is hosting a series of experimental creative pop-ups connecting artists and educators via immersive technology at the AfroPortals Project Space & Archive.

Ashara lives and works between the San Francisco Bay Area and her hometown of Detroit, MI.

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A-lan Holt (@a_lanmoon) is the Director at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts, where she mentors students on diversity, culture, and arts leadership with a social justice focus. A practicing artist, mother, and poet, she has been recognized as a Sundance and SF Film Screenwriting Fellow. Holt's work spans theater, film, and poetry, and her 2016 artist book Moonwork was widely acclaimed. She holds a degree in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford, with over a decade of expertise in identity and culture.