Record of Succession at
fused space

Curated by Aimee Friberg

January 13 - March 27
M - F, 9 AM - 6 PM | 1401 16th Street, San Francisco

Opening Reception:
Monday, January 13, 6-8 PM

December 19, 2019, San Francisco, Calif. — Aimee Friberg of CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is pleased to announce that she will oversee curatorial programming for fused space, from January 2020, taking the baton from gallerist Jessica Silverman. fused space was founded in 2013 by world-renowned designer Yves Béhar as a place to explore the intersection of art and design. Housed within Behar’s fuseproject design firm, Friberg will bring socially-minded contemporary art into this nexus to examine and forward the interconnectedness of these two creative disciplines.

In 2020, Friberg will mount three thematic exhibitions that bring together artists whose practices explore the complexities of our times. Friberg’s tenure at fused space kicks off with the group show, Record of Succession, with artists, Patricia Fernandez, Masako Miki, Rashaad Newsome, Eamon Ore-Giron and Curtis Talwst Santiago. Record of Succession utilizes traditions in craft and design to explore personal ancestry and cultural mythology. The exhibition asks: What is the impulse behind the desire to reconnect with the past and how does it impact visual culture?

Patricia Fernández applies an archeological approach to traditional vessel design. She seeks to investigate histories and literatures forgotten, misplaced, or buried, and embeds them into the everyday objects. Her boxes, hand-carved with Moorish patterns she learned from her father, signal the intimate rituals of making. Masako Miki draws on the ancient mythological traditions of her Japanese ancestry to fuse these symbols and stories with modernist architectural shapes and forms. The resulting sculptural works use the Shinto concept of yōkai, or “shape-shifters” as a metaphorical departure point to explore blurred boundaries and dichotomies within the human condition. Rashaad Newsome, who will be showing concurrently his work across San Francisco this winter at Fort Mason’s Center for Art and Culture, MoAD, and Untitled Art Fair, revisits history and socio-cultural moments of alleged authorship to re-assign credit where it is due. Traditional design aesthetics from West Africa that are often attributed to Cubism are re-inserted to new narratives correcting the inaccuracies of the art historical record. Eamon Ore-Giron examines art historical legacies of the Global South and those of the Western canon side by side. Traditional shapes from ancient Meso-American painters meet the bold edges of the modern Russian avant-garde. Through this visual excavation he bends time in such a way that the past floats to the present and the historical and contemporary find themselves in direct dialogue. Curtis Talwst Santiago’s work considers the absence of certain narratives in dominant culture and draws on the tradition of storytelling to question the production of historical understanding. Working in miniature, his ring boxes and African Knight masks present a functioning design that can transport precious and functional objects through generations, becoming symbolic of oral historical practices.

On her vision for fused space, Friberg remarks:

I’m honored to collaborate with Béhar, contributing my curatorial vision to fused space by continuing CULT’s direction of giving voice or amplifying artists whose work addresses social context while implementing or responding to traditions and fundamentals of design practice. As a discipline, design has a tremendous influence on our social structures. Our alliance fosters the continued exploration of the power of art and design to shape social change.

On his decision to work with Friberg to continue the exhibition program, Yves Behar states:

Art is one of my passions and fused space is a way to directly engage with and support the art community. We are excited about the contribution we can make to the art and design worlds by working with Aimee Friberg and the artists she brings to fused space.

Friberg will host a concurrent group exhibition responding to Record of Succession at CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions opening January 10. For more information on either exhibition or the artists, visit cultexhibitions.com or contact the gallery.

ABOUT PATRICIA FERNANDEZ
Patricia Fernández (b. 1980, Burgos, Spain; lives and works in Los Angeles) received a BFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2002 and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2010. Fernández has had solo exhibitions at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA (2015); Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Spain (2015); 18th St. Arts Center, Santa Monica (2014); and LA><ART, Los Angeles (2014). Selected group exhibitions were held at Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2017); Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); and Clifton Benevento, New York (2010). Fernández is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2017-18); the Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowship (2015), France-Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2011), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2010).

ABOUT RASHAAD NEWSOME
Rashaad Newsome lives and works in New York City. He was born in 1979 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he received a BFA in Art History at Tulane University in 2001. He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC); The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC); The Whitney Museum (NYC); Brooklyn Museum (NYC); MoMAPS1 (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); New Orleans Museum of Art (LA); Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow); and MUSA (Vienna). Newsome’s work is in numerous public collections including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC); Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); The Brooklyn Museum (NYC); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); McNay Art Museum (TX); The Chazen Museum of Art (WI); The New Britain Museum of American Art (CT); and The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC). In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial (NYC), and in 2011 the Greater New York exhibition at MoMAPS1 (NYC).

ABOUT EAMON ORE-GIRON
Eamon Ore-Giron (b. 1973, Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in Los Angeles. Ore-Giron received his BFA at San Francisco Art Institute in 1996, and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. He was a member of the collective OJO, which was active from 2004 to 2013, with artists Brenna Youngblood, Joshua Aster, Justin Cole, and several others. He has exhibited and performed at the Hammer’s Made in L.A. Biennial (2018); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2017); LAXART, Los Angeles (2015); Prospect 3, New Orleans (2014); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2013); Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008); and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008), among others.

ABOUT MASAKO MIKI
Originally from Osaka, Japan, Masako Miki resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has exhibited throughout the region at venues including the Headlands Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Kala Art Institute, and The Lab. She was a resident artist at The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Project 387 (Gualala, CA), Kamiyama Artists in Residency (Tokushima, Japan), Facebook Artist in Residence (Menlo Park, CA) and the de Young Museum with an accompanying solo exhibition in 2016. She received the 2018 Inga Maren Otto Fellowship from the Watermill Center in New York and 2017 Artist Fellow Award from Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Miki received her MFA from San Jose State University and has been on the adjunct faculty at the University of California Berkeley, Davis, and Mills College. She will have be a part of the SF Art+Action Census Project in Spring 2020 and will have solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in spring 202. Miki is represented by CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions in San Francisco.

ABOUT CURTIS TALWST SANTIAGO
Curtis Talwst Santiago (b. 1979, Edmonton, Alberta) studied as an apprentice of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Santiago has exhibited internationally at venues such as The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; The New Museum, New York, NY; The Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan, Canada; The Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; and the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; among others. The artist was included in the SITE Santa Fe SITELines.2018 Biennial, Casa Tomada, in Santa Fe, NM and was featured in the 2018 Biennale de Dakar in Dakar, Senegal. The artist is currently included in the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, Canada and his solo exhibition Can't I Alter, opens in February 2020 at The Drawing Center, New York, NY. His work is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Santiago lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

ABOUT CULT AIMEE FRIBERG EXHIBITIONS
CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is a contemporary art gallery for cutting edge work by emerging and established artists, founded in November 2013 by curator and performance artist Aimee Friberg. CULT bridges formal, conceptual and process- based investigations, across all media. Since its inception, CULT has quickly become the leading gallery in San Francisco for rigorous work that is both experimental and forward-thinking. CULT engages a broad Bay Area and international audience with programming that encourages artists, especially from underrepresented groups, to take risks with their work. Conceived as a commercial gallery that would engage its audience beyond the white cube, CULT has quickly become renowned for its provocative exhibition programming, as well as unorthodox performances, critical dialogues between artists, curators, and critics, and intimate dinners. The gallery is located at 1217 B Fell Street in the NOPA neighborhood of San Francisco.

ABOUT FUSED SPACE
fused is an exhibition space where the art and design worlds merge. Adjacent to the world-renowned design studio fuseproject in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, fused space is hosted by its founder Yves Béhar and curated by San Francisco-based curator and gallerist, Aimee Friberg of CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions. Friberg’s team join’s Béhar to continue fostering provocative dialogue between the interwoven disciplines of art and design through several exhibitions a year. The space will be open to the public on weekdays from 10AM to 6PM.