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Join us for a conversation about our current exhibition EN MAS': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean with Curator Claire Tancons and Professor Shannon Jackson (Rhetoric and Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley). EN MAS’ introduces performance art with a focus on the influence that Carnival and related masquerading traditions in and of the Caribbean and its diasporas have had on contemporary performance discourse and practice, in both the artistic and curatorial realms. Tancons and Jackson (a contributor to the EN MAS' catalogue) will discuss this innovative performance-based exhibition and reveal the many layers of social critique and protest embedded in the Carnival tradition. The program will include a wine reception.

Trained as a curator and art historian, Claire Tancons practices curating as an expanded creative field and experiments with the political aesthetics of walking, marching, second lining, masquerading and parading in participatory processional performances. She has curated for established and emerging international biennials including Prospect New Orleans (2008); the Gwangju Biennale (2008); the Cape Town Biennial (2009); Biennale Bénin (2012); and the Göteborg Biennial (2013), and was a guest curator for the BMW Tate Live Series at Tate Modern (2014.) Since 2012, she has initiated a series of collaborations tackling different aspects of public ceremonial culture, civic rituals, carnival and processional performance.

‍Shannon Jackson is Director of the Arts Research Center and Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of "Counter-Carnival in a Performance-Friendly World," in the En Mas' catalogue. Her most recent book is The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (2015).

‍This program is presented in conjunction with Third Thursdays in Yerba Buena

‍Image: Ebony G. Patterson, Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, performance, April 27, 2014, Kingston, Jamaica. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photograph: Monique Gilpin and Philip Rhoden