Ceremonies: Rituals to Self
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present Ceremonies: Rituals to Self, a group exhibition curated by PJ Gubatina Policarpio, featuring work by Demian DinéYazhi', Gericault De La Rose, Khari Johnson-Ricks, J Rivera Pansa, and André Bloodstone Singleton. The exhibition will draw upon the life and writings of celebrated writer, editor, and activist Essex Hemphill (1957 – 1995).
“to love myself as fiercely
as I have in better days”
– Essex Hemphill, Better Days
Essex Hemphill is best known for his urgent and uncompromising writing on the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, informed by his lived experience as an openly gay Black man in America. Ceremonies reflects on the vital themes present in Hemphill’s life and writing: desire, defiance, kinship, and ritual.
Through multimedia works and new commissions, the artists in Ceremonies explore the intimate and collective acts of ritual—the sensual, the spiritual, and self-initiated—that call to mind Hemphill’s fierce commitment to self-acceptance and possibility.
Gericault De La Rose is a queer trans Filipinx, multidisciplinary artist, and educator based in the Bay Area. De La Rose’s work explores how the Philippines’ colonial trauma is consumed, digested, and regurgitated. Her work plays with histories of spectacles and practices of intimacy in order to regain bodily autonomy. For Ceremonies, De La Rose will present a structure surrounded by their textile works informed by Hemphill’s writings on realness and authenticity. Viewers are invited inside this intimate space to reflect and center themselves.
Demian DinéYazhi' is an Indigenous Non-Binary Diné transdisciplinary artist. DinéYazhi'’s work is influenced by their ancestral ties to traditional Diné culture, ceremony, matrilineal upbringing, the sacredness of land, and the importance of intergenerational knowledge. In the exhibition, DinéYazhi' will be contributing An Infected Sunset (2018), a video work featuring the artist’s poem reflecting on queer desires, environmental injustice, Indigenous knowledge-making, and collective resistance.
Working across media including paper, zines, and Black vernacular dance, New Jersey based artist Khari Johnson-Ricks creates work that is deeply concerned with acts of maintenance, training, and care that reference their background as an athlete. Featured in the exhibition will be two large-scale works made with intricate layers of cut and painted paper that touch on queer fellowship and communion.
Through the use of grids as a form, Oakland-based artist J Rivera Pansa creates work that subverts the capitalist structures and systems as avenues for self-determined networks of kinship. Their work incorporated the hard structures and forms to underscore the connectivity between QTPOC chosen family and diasporic communities.
André Bloodstone Singleton is an Oakland-based sacred healing, multi-disciplinary artist. His art acknowledges and celebrates his enduring survival as a human being and a proud descendant of the African Diaspora. For Ceremonies, Singleton will design an installation and performance inspired both by Hemphill’s writings as well Singleton’s own lived experience, drawing on Black funerary traditions and memorial rituals as an invitation to contemplate death, mourning, and remembrance.
“As many of us are feeling heightened challenges during this time, we know that queer and trans lives have always been under siege,” states exhibition curator PJ Gubatina Policarpio. “But we must also remember that we've always had fierce advocates, including Essex. This exhibition is dedicated to Hemphill and many others whose commitment to liberation and queer possibility continue to inspire us all. I’m thrilled to collaborate with and spotlight a new generation of artists who carry this critical legacy forward.”
About the curator
PJ Gubatina Policarpio is a curator, educator, and community organizer with over 10 years of experience in arts and culture, leading innovative and rigorous initiatives that engage artists and diverse communities. He has organized exhibitions and programming in San Francsico, New York, and internationally, including Notes for Tomorrow (Independent Curators International, 2021-present), Letter from the Network (Berkeley Art Center, 2024), Under the Same Sun (Edge on the Square, 2023), Notes on Cultural Evidence (slash art, 2023), Conversations on Carlos Villa: World-Making and Cross-Cultural Solidarity (Asian Art Museum, 2022), Tarsal by Metatarsal (Headlands Center for the Arts, 2021), Solidarity Struggle Victory (Southern Exposure, 2019), and Rally: Queer Art and Activism (Dixon Place, 2017). Policarpio is co-founder of Pilipinx American Library, an itinerant library and programming platform dedicated to diasporic Filipinx perspectives. His publications are in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in the Philippines, Policarpio immigrated to the United States in his early teens. He lives and works in San Francisco.
Image credit: Gericault De La Rose, Wall of Gericault, 2023. Installation. Courtesy of the Artist.