Join MoAD and ICA San Jose for a book launch and celebration of Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell, edited by Luke Williams. The program will feature a live conversation with editor Luke Williams, and contributors Elena Gross, Delphine Sims, Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Charles H. Lee, and Selam Bekele, moderated by Dr. Jaqueline Francis. Audience Q&A and book signing to follow. Copies of Blood, Sweat, and Time will be available from the MoAD bookstore.

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About the Book

Blood, Sweat, and Time brings together a collection of creative and scholarly contributions formulated in response to two exhibitions held at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José: Mildred Howard: The Time and Space of Now and Adrian Burrell: Sugarcane and Lightning pt 3. Consolidated around the capacious themes of “blood,” “sweat,” and “time,” this collection intensifies the thematic conversation initiated by these exhibitions and probes several critical questions: How does the long durée of history inform the contemporary moment of Black art? How might gender and sexual identities inform time as an inflection point? How does labor appear or disappear in the art world? What messages should we collectively share with those coming behind us?

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Foreword by Zoë Latzer and introduction by Luke Williams. Contributors include: Selam Bekele, Elena Gross, Shaquille Heath, Benjamin L. Jones, Deborah LeFalle, Charles H. Lee, Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Margarita Lila Rosa, Delphine Sims, and Luke Williams.

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About the Panelists

Luke Williams is a scholar, artist, organizer, and critic of twentieth and twenty-first century Black performance and visual cultures. His work, which spans embodiment, portraiture, racial capitalism, Afrofuturism, and the aesthetics of the Black radical imagination, focuses on Black Diasporic art in the Americas and broader Atlantic world. Luke is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University.  His dissertation, In the Black: Figures of Racial Capitalism examines the practices of four Black emerging artists in the California Bay Area as they navigate the pressures of racial capitalism in the art market. Currently, he is the Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of the African Diaspora and a Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow at Stanford University.

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Elena Gross (she/they) is the Co-Executive Director of the Berkeley Art Center and an independent writer and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists and most recently in queer artistic and literary histories of the late 20^th century. Elena is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Culture (Rutgers University Press), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Anthologies.  

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Delphine Sims is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She recently completed her PhD in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Delphine has held positions at several museums including predoctoral fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curatorial roles within the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In addition to exhibition catalogs, her writing can be found in Aperture, Matte magazine, and the Believer.

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Aaron Samuel Mulenga is an interdisciplinary artist and Visual Studies Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His area of study includes contemporary art of Africa, and the roles that museums play in shaping cultural narratives. Mulenga’s interest in Zambian culture and heritage led to his latest work which focuses on re-membering the significant contribution of the African porters from Southern Africa called Tenga Tenga who carried the First World War on their backs.

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Charles Lee (b. 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist hailing from Honolulu, Hawaii, and Richmond, California. His work, spanning installations, collage, assemblage, photography, film, sound, and text, delves deep into the impacts of external viewpoints and obscured histories and iconography on the individual self. Through the use of archives, narrative, healing rituals, and a confrontation of the internal shadows, Lee seeks to cultivate heightened self-awareness and empathy. Central to his practice is an emphasis on the significance of intrapersonal connections, community, and our shared journey towards healing and mutual comprehension, all in service of forging a more equitable future.

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Lee holds an MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, and a BA in Business with a focus in Marketing from Bowie State University. His work has been shown broadly including Casemore Gallery and SF Camerawork in San Francisco, the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis and 1014 Gallery in London. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College and Recology.

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Selam Bekele is a writer, artist, and curator whose recent work experiments with the poetics of architecture and spatial design. She was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts, and recently served as Curator & Guest Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Bekele believes that the best ideas come from a regulated nervous system, so her practice prioritizes peace, balance, and a deep connection with Earth. Her ongoing light and sound installation Approaching_____ premiered at the Oakland Museum’s Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism exhibition, and she has given guest lectures at The New School, CCA, and USC School of Cinema. Bekele holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from CCA, and a BA in Film Studies from UC Davis.

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Jacqueline Francis 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.

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This program is co-presented by ICA San Jose