here and now

May 15-July 31, 2005

Here and Now features the work of six African American photographic artists living and working in the Bay Area: April Banks, Keba Konte, Emmanuel Pratt, Bayeté Ross Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carla Williams. The photographic and photo-based works in this exhibition address themes of community, loosely defined through explorations of constructed communities, self, friends, family, and place.

Conceived as the natural outgrowth a century later of the anonymous work of Recovered Views, an exhibition of history and reclamation, Here and Now could be defined as an exhibition of presence and declaration. The exhibition positions both its subjects and makers firmly in the present moment as they examine the complexity of identities—self-identity, gender, class, race—that define each of us in the multiple communities of which we are a part. Using a variety of media from traditional color and black and white prints to digital to projection, the artists in Here and Now individually and collectively expand our world view by focusing on distinct communities that are both personal and political.

Here and Now is guest curated by photographer and writer Carla Williams