Surface, Service, Restraint: A Conversation with Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Thursday, June 5, 2025 | 6:00 p.m. (Doors at 5:30 p.m.)
Join Service Tension curators Elena Gross and Leila Weefur in conversation with exhibition artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden as they explore the immense surface tension in McClodden's leather and rope compositions, examining how abstraction functions as a tool for interrogating queer dynamics, power exchange, and the messy complexities of desire within the exhibition.
Service Tension is a group exhibition exploring the complexity of queer sexuality and power dynamics. It is on view in the SFAC Main Gallery through August 23, 2025.
About the panelists
Tiona Nekkia McClodden (she/her) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Most recently, her work has explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography. Her works have been shown at Kunsthalle Basel, Guggenheim Museum in NY, the Institute of Contemporary Art-Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum (New York), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), Museum of ContemporaryArt (Chicago), and MoMA PS1. She was the recipient of the 2021-2023 Princeton Arts Fellowship, the Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2019), among others. She curated A Recollection. + Predicated. as a part of the multi-artist retrospective Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental at both the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and The Kitchen in New York. McClodden's writing has been featured in Artforum's Triple Canopy platform, Cultured Magazine, ART 21 Magazine, and many other publications. She lives and works in North Philadelphia and is the founder and director of Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black thought and artistic production.
Elena Gross (she/they) is an independent writer and curator living in Oakland, CA who specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Gross was formerly the creator and co-host of the arts & visual culture podcast "what are you looking at?" published by Art Practical. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists. She has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Nook Gallery, Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum. Her most recent writing can be found in the publication Blood Sweat & Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell (Sming Sming Books). Gross is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (Rutgers University Press), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Anthologies.
Leila Weefur is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion, and queer worldmaking. Weefur has worked internationally with institutions including Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. They are a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of curatorial film collective The Black Aesthetic.
