ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN
Demagoguery, White Supremacy, and Resistance
Featuring works by
Nic[o] Brierre Aziz, Christy Chan, Nicólas González-Medina, Doug Hall, and Kal Spelletich
April 19th – June 7th, 2025
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 19th 6:00 – 9:00pm
Closing Reception, Saturday, June 7th, 2:00 – 4:00pm
An exhibition of political art, registering the re-election of Donald Trump as an authoritarian take-over of the country. The show adopts an historical lens on our current crisis, foregrounding the authoritarian tendency in American politics, tying this tendency to the white supremacy integral to our country’s past, and highlighting these artists’ voices as protests against the ever-present threat of authoritarianism – now taking hold of our society.
Nic[o] Brierre Aziz, Doug Hall, Nicólas González-Medina, Christy Chan, and Kal Spelletich
EVENTS
Nic[o] Brierre Aziz: In Conversation
Tuesday, April 22nd, 6:00 –8:00 pm
Free and open to the public
Art and Politics:
A Panel Discussion with Nicólas González-Medina and Kal Spelletich
Wednesday, April 30th, 6:00 –8:00 pm
Free and open to the public
This is Doug Hall:
A conversation with artist Doug Hall about his recently published memoir
Saturday, May 17th, 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Free and open to the public
More Information available: HERE!
STATEMENT
Since beginning his second term as President, Donald Trump has undertaken a frontal assault on our political institutions, aimed solely at consolidating his power. He has actively undermined the rule of law and exploited his position for the enrichment of himself and his cronies. He has implemented loyalty tests, based on acceptance of the “Big Lie” that the last election was stolen, and he has initiated a radical racist, sexist, and homophobic ideological agenda, targeting the most vulnerable, marginalized people in our society and subjecting them to extra-legal forms of discrimination and persecution.
As an exhibition of political art, this show registers the re-election of Donald Trump, as an attempted authoritarian take-over of the country that we are watching unfold in real time. At the same time, the show adopts an historical lens on our current crisis,foregrounding the longstanding authoritarian tendency in American politics,from Huey Long to George Wallace and beyond; and it ties this tendency to the authoritarianism of white supremacy integral to our country’s past. That is, not only have authoritarian movements in America’s past been marked by their xenophobia and racism, but white supremacy itself has functioned as a pervasive form of authoritarianism, plaguing the lives of people of color and compromising our self-proclaimed principles of liberty and justice.
Finally, the show marks a site of resistance, highlighting these artists’ voices as political protests – integral to their work as artists – and championing public activist opposition to the ever-present threat of authoritarianism, now taking hold of our society.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES
image credit: Kal Spelletich, American Aria
image credit: Christy Chan, Dear America
Image Credit: Nicólas González-Medina, Migrantes Sin Nada Que Perder
image credit: Nic[o] Brierre Aziz, Gazing
image credit: Doug Hall, A Brief History of American Demagoguery
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nic[o] Brierre Aziz is a Haitian-New Orleanian interdisciplinary artist and curator born and raised in New Orleans, LA. His current practice is deeply community focused and rooted around the utilization of underdiscussed personal and collective histories to reimagine the future. His work is also very centered around the Caribbean Diaspora and he is very interested in Blackness as an experience, construct and capitalist tool. He has worked extensively leading community engaged projects throughout New Orleans with entities such as the Office of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Antenna, The Joan Mitchell Center, the Arts Council of New Orleans, Prospect and most recently the New Orleans Museum of Art. He is also the manager of the Haitian Cultural Legacy Collection, a collection of over 400 artworks started by his maternal grandfather in 1944. He has contributed to publications such as HuffPost, Terremoto and Hyperallergic and his work has been featured by The Oxford American, The Associated Press and The Alternative UK. He is also the recipient of several artist residencies and fellowships and most recently was selected as a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow and a 2021 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College, a Master of Science degree from The University of Manchester (UK) and will be pursuing a Master of Fine Arts Degree with a concentration in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art starting in Fall 2023.
Christy Chan is a Virginia-born, San Francisco Bay Area-based artist who uses video, installation, performance, and social practice to question the everyday power structures that uphold white supremacy in the United States. She was a 2022 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Fine Art and the founder of Dear America, a guerrilla public art project that projects the art works of Asian-American artists on to high-rise buildings in urban areas in response to an epidemic of anti-Asian violence. Chan’s work has been exhibited at YBCA and Mills College Art Museum in California; Wassaic Project x NY State Council of the Arts in New York; Film Independent in Los Angeles; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha; and on NPR, among others. She has been awarded residencies and support from Montalvo Arts Center, California Arts Council, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley Film Foundation, SFFILM and other institutions. Her public art project, Fainting Couch, will be traveling the United States in 2023.
Nicólas González-Medina is an Oakland-based artist and activist whose political art practice reflects his experience of growing up undocumented. His energy and passion to make art accessible is reflected in the large scale prints that have been wheat pasted around the country. González-Medina believes his art belongs in the streets, amplifying the often unheard voices of people like him: queer, undocumented immigrants. He has printed over 1,500 Defend DACA prints.
Doug Hall is an internationally known artist who has worked for over 40 years in a wide range of media, including performance, installation, video, and large format photography. In the 1970s he became prominent for his collaborative work with the media art collective, T. R. Uthco, which, among many other works, created the video and installation, The Eternal Frame, 1976 (in collaboration with Ant Farm), a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination, filmed in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Following the dissolution of the group in 1979, Hall continued to work in video, performance, and installation. In the late 1980’s his interests expanded to include large format photography. His work in diverse media has been exhibited in museums in the United States and Europe and is included in numerous private and public collections. A selection of public collections includes the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Contemporary Art Museum, Chicago; The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, California; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna; Tate Modern, London; The San Jose Museum of Art, California; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Among the grants and fellowships he has received are those from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The Fulbright Foundation, and The Guggenheim Foundation. In 1995 he received The Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy in Rome. With Sally Jo Fifer, he edited and wrote the introduction to Illuminating Video (1991, Aperture Books, New York), a collection of writings on video by artists, critics, and scholars. He is Professor Emeritus at The San Francisco Art Institute where he taught from 1980 until 2008. From 2008 through 2015 he was Visiting Artist in Graduate Fine Arts atthe California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He lives and works in San Francisco.
During his 30-year-career in the Bay Area, Kal Spelletich has been a pivotal figure in the machine art and robotics community. He frequently collaborates with scientists, engineers, musicians and audiences to realize projects. His machines address the poetic nature of technology, scientific discovery and metaphorically illustrate how, just as movement, light and sound waves can be sent into the world, so also can ideas and emotions radiate out, with the potential for activating positive change. Spelletich builds interactive sculptures from the same elements of technology, hardware and software, used in everyday consumer, industrial, and military devices. However, he subverts the original intended use and breaks the barrier of exclusive access. Viewed from our contemporary vantage point that is immersed in functional technologies, his sculptures seem nonsensical. They are poetic and not meant for a proscribed use or to achieve commercial, monetized goals. Spelletich raises open ended questions about the dominant economic producers of technology, the interplay of technology and spirituality, the role of the collective in capitalism, and economic and educational privilege. His work is generated from the belief that ultimately humanity prevails over technology. Spelletich has exhibited at the deYoung Museum, SFMOMA, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco; Deitch Projects and the Knitting Factory in New York; and in venues in Germany, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Holland, France, Spain, India and Africa. He has been the subject of press in the New York Times and on PBS, holds an undergraduate art degree from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery.
323 10th St. @ Folsom (SoMa), San Francisco, CA 94103
415-336-2349 | @tttelematiccc
Info@tttelematiccc.com | www.tttelematiccc.com