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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

June 27 - June 27, 2014

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• http://www.ybca.org/

• (415) 978-2700

701 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94103

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A Conversation with Dee Hibbert-Jones, Nomi Talisman, and Rhodessa Jones

Please join Art Practical and Daily Serving director Patricia Maloney in conversation with the 2014 YBCA Artists-in-Residence, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, as well as legendary performer-activist Rhodessa Jones. The evening will focus on their respective projects: Hibbert-Jones and Talisman's Living Condition, an animated documentary and interactive project exploring the lives of families with loved ones facing the death penalty and Jones's Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women that has for over 25 years sought to use the transformative power of art to stem the recidivism rate for women prisoners. While each project ostensibly takes the prison as its central location, both projects delve deeply into the economic and social conditions that bring their subjects' lives in close proximity to our own. They explore the power that storytelling—of speaking in the first person—possesses to replace shame with resilience and to bring nuance into extreme circumstances. Through the stories they share with us, threads that weave connection and foster advocacy emerge. Presentations of both projects will be followed by a conversation between the speakers and the audience.

Free with RSVP: http://bit.ly/1nk4QBQ

Artist Bios:
Nomi Talisman and Dee Hibbert-Jones - Working collaboratively since 2004, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman engage in dialogues about power, politics and emotions. Their work investigates the ways individuals manage power systems from the mundane to the extreme, through videos, sculpture, installation, and public work. The projects this creative team has undertaken galvanize voices and elicit opinions from the public that are seldom heard; giving voice to stories that lie below the surface, reaching beyond conventional methods of communication, they draw social, cultural, and political metaphors from everyday life. Their work has been exhibited and screened in Europe, Israel, Japan (Are We There Yet? Dislocate ’08) and the U.S. in galleries, museums, and at international festivals. They have been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Artists’ Project Grant (with the Berkeley Art Center), a European Cultural Council Grant with Social Impact (for Psychological Prosthetics™), a Creative Work Fund Grant (Living Condition), and a San Francisco Artist Grant, among others. From 2009-2011 they produced I-140, a video and photographic work about the process–and agony–of Talismans’ account with the U.S. immigration services, on her way to become a permanent resident.

Rhodessa Jones - Performer, teacher, director, Rhodessa Jones is Co-Artistic Director of San Francisco’s performance company Cultural Odyssey. Jones directs The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, an award-winning performance workshop committed to incarcerated women’s personal and social transformation, now in it’s 23rd year. As recipient of the U.S. Artist Fellowship, Jones expanded her work in jails and educational institutions internationally. She conducts Medea Projects in South African prisons, working with incarcerated women and training local artists and correctional personnel to embed the Medea process inside these institutions. In 2012, she was named Arts Envoy by the U.S. Embassy in South Africa. Recent U.S. residencies include Brown University and Scripps College Humanities Institute. Recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from CA College of the Arts, SF Bay Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Award, SF Foundation’s Community Leadership Award, Non-Profit Arts Excellence Award by the SF Business Arts Council, and an Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater.

Patricia Maloney is the founding editor and director of the San Francisco Bay Area–focused journal Art Practical. In 2013, she also became the publisher of the international online art journal Daily Serving. She is a senior correspondent and producer for the weekly contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports and has written for Artforum, ArtChronika, and Meatpaper, as well as for numerous exhibition catalogues. Between 2000 and 2012, she held curatorial positions at Ampersand International Arts in San Francisco; the MATRIX Program of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum; and the Mori Art Museum (MAM) in Tokyo, Japan. From 1999 to 2002, she was a Program Associate for the International Program at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Maloney has received writing residencies from the Philadelphia Art Hotel, the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Cannonball in Miami, and the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, TX. She holds her MA in Theory and History of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. In Fall 2013, she co-taught the graduate course, “Readership,” at the California College of the Arts, which examined how art publications create, identify, and locate audiences for the visual arts.


Living Condition online video: http://vimeo.com/33185439
Rhodessa Jones website: http://themedeaproject.weebly.com/rhodessa-jones.html



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