Performance in Progress weekend

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces a performance weekend featuring new commissions by its inaugural Performance in Progress artists from March 16 through 19, 2017. After preview weekends at the museum in fall 2016, Desirée Holman, Naomi Rincón Gallardo and Jacolby Satterwhite will return to debut performances developed over the course of a year-long engagement with SFMOMA.

Continuing its dedication to emerging contemporary artists, and building on a legacy of engagement with performance initiated in the 1960s, SFMOMA commissions local, national and international artists to develop groundbreaking live work through its Performance in Progress series. Launched in fall 2016, Performance in Progress invites artists and audiences alike to explore the artistic process and participate in the creation of new work with unique behind-the-scenes access.

“Performance in Progress presents artists developing live work via key issues in contemporary and Bay Area culture: queer identities, communities in the diaspora and popular forms (from commerce and entertainment to memoir and religion) reworked as engines for social and aesthetic experiment,” said Frank Smigiel, associate curator of performance and film at SFMOMA.

Each of the artists included in the inaugural year—Holman, Rincón Gallardo and Satterwhite—draw on the look and story arcs of science fiction and fantasy to create alternative futures. Rather than employ blockbuster superheroes and starships, the artists populate their imagined spaces with personal stories, heroes and locales. Through their fictional worlds, the artists offer epic possibilities for the real world.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Performance in Progress will present the debut of The Formaldehyde Trip, a performance and video work by Mexico City-based artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo. Co-curated with Galería de la Raza, The Formaldehyde Trip will weave together Mesoamerican cosmologies, feminist activism and theory and indigenous women’s struggles for their territories. This new commission will imagine the murdered Mixtec activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño in her journey through the underworld where she encounters warriors, witches and the dual-gendered goddess of death. Rincón Gallardo will perform the work on Thursday and Friday, March 16 and 17 at 8pm in the Phyllis Wattis Theater at SFMOMA.

Jacolby Satterwhite
During this long weekend of performance, New York–based artist Satterwhite will premiere the visual album En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance. In this newly commissioned piece, he will build an immersive virtual reality dreamscape from his mother Patricia’s archive of 12 a cappella albums, featuring tracks selected by the artist and his musical collaborator Nick Weiss (Teengirl Fantasy). Satterwhite will perform En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance on Friday and Saturday, March 17 and 18 at 10pm in the Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box at SFMOMA.

Desirée Holman
Oakland-based artist Desirée Holman will unveil a new iteration of Sophont in Action, a processional performance and video piece exploring theosophy, E.T. sightings, New Age mysticism and California utopias. Originally developed in 2013, Sophont in Action was performed at SFMOMA marking its temporary closure for its expansion project. As part of the Performance in Progress series, Holman will return to SFMOMA with her cast of Time Travelers, Ecstatic Dancers and Indigo Children for this special debut performance throughout the museum on Saturday, March 18 at 6pm and Sunday, March 19 at 6pm and 8pm.

About the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMOMA is dedicated to making the art for our time a vital and meaningful part of public life. Founded in 1935 as the first West Coast museum devoted to modern and contemporary art, a thoroughly transformed SFMOMA, with triple the gallery space, an enhanced education center and new free public galleries, opened to the public on May 14, 2016.

Media contact
Jill Lynch: jilynch [​at​] sfmoma.org / T 415 357 4172