All This Soft Wild Buzzing

All This Soft Wild Buzzing inaugurates the Wattis galleries on the newly expanded CCA campus. Exhibiting artists include: Saif Azzuz, Teresa Baker, Christopher Robin Duncan, Nicki Green, Bessma Khalaf, Dionne Lee, Young Suh, Stephanie Syjuco, and Zekarias Musele Thompson.

The exhibition considers the relationship between artists and the natural landscape through a lens of collaboration, of listening, and of reciprocity. Nature is often viewed as a neutral space, but landscape—with its connotations of ownership and control—is fraught. The sweeping vistas of early American landscape painting and photography promoted and perpetuated Manifest Destiny, and artists replicated a prevailing desire to conquer the land. In direct contrast to this earlier narrative, the contemporary artists in this exhibition hone in on details, incorporate organic materials into their process, and allow nature to exist.

All nine of the artists in the exhibition live, or have lived, in northern California, and their work resonates with the specificity of the Bay Area terrain and the people who inhabit it. The title of the exhibition is drawn from the final line of a poem by Camille Dungy that draws parallels between the soft, protected soul of her partner and the untouched, pre-colonial coastline of California. The artists in the show engage with the effects of forest fires, the Land Back movement, the carceral system, belonging, climate change, and the resiliency of Indigenous life, among other topics. Landscape is exposed as a historical construct that is interrogated by a new generation of artists grappling with the relationship between humans and nature. 

All This Soft Wild Buzzing is curated by Jeanne Gerrity and organized by Diego Villalobos. It is made possible thanks to generous support from Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Robin Wright & Ian Reeves, and Anthony & Celeste Meier, and special thanks to the Wattis Leadership Circle: Mary and Harold Zlot, Jonathan Gans and Abigail Turin, and Katie and Matt Paige.

Public programs
October 18, 2pm
Conversation: Teresa Baker and Linda Geary
Co-presented with CCA’s Graduate Fine Arts Department

October 19, 6pm
Music performance: spatial facilitation by Zekarias Musele Thompson
As part of the opening reception

November 20, 7pm
Screening with live performance: A Consequence of the Unintended by Richard T. Walker

About the CCA Wattis Institute
The Wattis is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to contemporary art at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. It supports the creation of new work by artists from around the world, proposes new models of attention, and hopes to complicate the meanings of art and culture today. 

In fall 2024, the Wattis opens its doors to the new Penny and Jim Coulter and Stanlee Gatti Galleries and Gardens on CCA’s expanded campus.

As always, Wattis Institute is free and open to all.