ARTISTS & EVENTS

Curation is currently underway! Stay tuned for more

CREDITS

CURATORS: Ryanaustin Dennis & Keith Hennessy
INDIGENOUS ADVISOR: Mary Jean Robertson (Cherokee)
PRODUCING DIRECTOR: Alley Wilde

BIOS

RYANAUSTIN DENNIS is an Oakland based curator/artist/writer. As the founding member of The Black Aesthetic, a curatorial collective, whose mission is to curate and assemble both a collective and distinct understanding of Black visual culture. His practice is concerned with how 20th and 21st century experimental performance, film, and writing histories are shaped by the metaphysics of blackness. He has done curatorial work for E.M. Wolfman Bookstore, Kadist, Eastside Arts Alliance, Betti Ono, Soundwave Biennial, and is a Southern Exposure Curatorial Council Fellow. He is the author of How to Bend a Nigger and Strike: Poems Out Loud.

KEITH HENNESSY is a dancer, writer, and choreographer. Born mining town in northern Ontario, he is white, of Irish and French descent. Living in San Francisco/Yelamu since 1982, he tours internationally. He is an award-winning performer, choreographer, teacher, and organizer. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Collaborating across lines of difference, Keith’s performances engage improvisation, ritual, and protest as tools for investigating political realities. Hennessy was a member of Contraband led by Sara Shelton Mann and was a co-founder of CounterPulse.

MARY JEAN ROBERTSON is the radio program producer of Webworks: Voices of the Native Nation on KPOO 89.5 FM, ongoing since 1972! She is a co-founder of both the Ohlone Profiles Project whose mission is to support Ohlone culture within San Francisco and Support for Inter-Tribal Gatherings, who produce cultural events, engage in ceremonies, and organize to restore indigenous culture in San Francisco. Mary Jean is the author of Reflections from Occupied Ohlone Territory (City Lights, 2011) and she is a living archive of Bay Area indigenous histories since the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz.

ALLEY WILDE is an arts and culture worker engaged in a practice fusing art-administration, art-making, and radical activism. They is a white, not-disabled, queer, non-binary person with access to male privilege and USAmerican citizenship whose work confronts questions of power, inequity, and liberation. Their aim is to advance equity and build community through the production and progeneration of queer culture. Wilde was born and raise on the traditional lands of the Tongva (so-called Orange County) and currently lives on the traditional lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone (so-called San Francisco). They have worked for more than ten years managing artists and cultural events for a range of artists and organizations.