a lament
Monday, December 9, 2024
Doors open at 5:30pm, event at 6pm
$20 general, NOTAFLOF (limited tickets)
In collaboration with San Francisco Arts Commission and their Shaping Legacy: Monuments and Memorials project, ọlágbajú along with artists who contributed to the audio installation, will be facilitating a performance and group activation entitled “a lament.” The December 9th performance will make connections between memorial and monument work to collective grief work; that is over invisibilized or made silent through ongoing genocides, plutocracy, facism, and state violence.
Visitors and performers will gather to answer: what is a monument for our current moment? Keeping in pace with the socio-political landscape a lament will hold space as we tend to the fires growing within us. Ones that are directionalized towards blazing trails for sustainable change, shifts in power, care, mutual aid, accountability, and resistance. Together the collaborative group will talk about monumentalizing the everyday: the evergreen commitment and prayer to collective struggle, for liberation, and all the moments in between.
yétúndé ọlágbajú (b. 1990) is a research-based artist, creative producer, and residency director living on Ohlone and Tataviam lands (Bay Area & Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together?
With no set answers or expectations, ọlágbajú unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are affected by what we confront in the reckoning.
Through their social practice they have co-founded and are a member of numerous artist and worker-led collectives, each with liberatory missions and values. An advocate for non-hierarchical working structures, they embrace shared leadership models that challenge white supremacy, by actively rejecting disposability and urgency — two of its guiding tenets.
They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of multiple awards including a YBCA 100 award and a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship. They were a recent awardee of The Lightening Fund by LACE, Los Angeles, CA, resident at Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Iowa City, IA, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, ME. They are a co-director and creative producer at Level Ground.
This project is a public program of yétúndé ọlágbajú’s exhibition, a spiral fuels and fills, developed over the yearlong residency as the 2023-2024 International Artist Residency recipient of 500 Capp Street. Collaborating artists include Tyler Holmes, eli meza, Avé-Ameenah, Hazel Katz, Lois Bielefeld, Titania Kumeh, mata flores, Slant Rhyme, Rian Crane, and tiffany m. johnson.
a spiral fuels and fills is generously funded by the Sanger Family Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and San Francisco Arts Commission.