We’re open today from 11 AM—7 PM
On view at MCASD
October 17, 2024 to February 2, 2025
Located on floor 1, For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability surveys themes of illness and disability in American art from the 1960s up to the COVID-19 era. The rotating series of films and videos on view in the film and video gallery on –3 is part of For Dear Life and extends many of its themes.
Moyra Davey
Canada, born 1958
Les Goddesses, 2011
Color video with sound, 61 min.
Courtesy of the artist, greengrassi, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
© Moyra Davey
Moyra Davey’s films and photographic works are filled with references to literature, poetry, and history, which she often reads aloud and records as she moves through her home, the street, or the subway. The film Les Goddesses takes its title from the American statesman Aaron Burr’s description of Mary Wollstonecraft’s two daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and their stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Imlay, Shelley, and Clairmont were inheritors of their mother’s remarkable legacy in their resistance to norms, in lives marked by the structural misogyny that limited their freedom, and by mental and physical illnesses, suicide, and substance abuse. Davey’s film interweaves their stories with events from her own life and the lives of her siblings and her own child, together with meditations on photography. The narrative bridges time through coincidences and parallels: the siblings’ adolescence and adulthood included their own experiences of addiction, eating disorders, mental illness, and Davey’s diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Les Goddesses asks what history can tell us about our own lives as it braids together past, present, and future with moments of poetry, loss, and liberation.
Content note: This video contains mature content, including images or language related to suicide, substance use, and sexuality. Please use discretion.
November 7 - November 24, 2024
Anna Halprin
United States, 1920–2021
Circle the Earth, 1986
Film by Coni Beeson
16 mm film, digitized, sound, color, 24 min.
The Elyse Eng Dance Collection / Museum of Performance + Design
Anna Halprin was a choreographer and dancer whose contributions to postmodern dance challenged many aspects of conventional dance training, focusing on movement’s capacity to develop and sustain community among people. Halprin was especially invested in collective dance as a container for communal healing. After moving to San Francisco with her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, in the mid-1940s, she went on to found the experimental San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in 1955. Halprin’s numerous students in the following decades included Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and the duo Eiko and Koma.
In 1972 Halprin faced a diagnosis of colorectal cancer that reoriented her relationship to her body and her choreography. In 1978, with her daughter, Daria Halprin, she founded the Tamalpa Institute in Marin County, north of San Francisco. The institute offered movement as a therapy for those experiencing illness; by encouraging physical expression, practitioners believed they could ameliorate discomfort or disease within the body. In dialogue with her ongoing work at the Tamalpa Institute, Halprin choreographed Circle the Earth (1981), a community ritual intended to be performed by those living with cancer, HIV, or other illnesses. Staged in several iterations during the 1980s, Circle the Earth consists of an open-ended score that can be enacted in numerous contexts, with community-based catharsis and relational movement as its goal.
November 7 - November 24, 2024
Angela Ellsworth, United States, born 1964
TT Takemoto, United States, born 1967
Imag(in)ed Malady, 1997
Dir. TT Takemoto
digital video, 6:30 min.
Courtesy of the artists
Angela Ellsworth and TT Takemoto began performing collaboratively under the collective name Her/She Senses after meeting as graduate students at Rutgers University in 1991. Informed by the campus politics of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), Ellsworth and Takemoto honed a queer and feminist performance practice that examined issues of health, grief, friendship, and intimacy. The video and photographic series Imag(in)ed Malady began in 1993, when Ellsworth was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. At the time, Ellsworth was based in Phoenix, while Takemoto was pursuing a doctorate across the country in Rochester. The long-distance collaboration evolved organically: Ellsworth started photographing herself as she underwent cancer treatments to visualize and process her illness and its impact on her body. She would then send these photographs to Takemoto, who began restaging the images. Using homemade props and divergent settings, Takemoto’s “visual rhymes” imitate but intentionally do not replicate Ellsworth’s documentary photographs. The resulting images demonstrate the care of friendship while also acknowledging the divergent experiences of the two artists as they navigated the effects of cancer on Ellsworth and on their shared relationship.
Milford Graves
United States, 1941–2021
Heartbeat Drummer, 2004
Reuters, color video, 4:19 min.
LabVIEW animation, c. 2014-2020
LabView software screen captures, 4:21, 2:53, 4:32 mins.
Courtesy of the Estate of Milford Graves and Fridman Gallery
Fascinated by the material aspects of sound and its effects on the human body and mind, Milford Graves devoted himself to the study of rhythm and vibration. Graves was a leading percussionist in the Free Jazz movement and a polymath innovator in the fields of music, sound studies, martial arts, herbology, and acupuncture. His focus on the relation between the drumbeat and the heartbeat led him to challenge metronomic timing and, notably, to liberate the drummer from the role of timekeeper in jazz. Alongside his successful career in music, Graves trained as a medical laboratory technician to learn more about heart function. He subsequently joined the faculty of the Black Music Division of Bennington College and founded the Institute for Bio Creative Intuitive Music, where he connected students to EKG machines to monitor their heartbeats and study their responses to improvised music. In the early aughts, Graves developed idiosyncratic techniques at his home lab to extract melodies from heartbeats and turn them into visual patterns and digital animations.
Gregg Bordowitz
United States, born 1964
Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993.
video, color, stereo, 54:04 min.
Courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
© Gregg Bordowitz
P. Staff
United Kingdom, born 1987
Weed Killer, 2017
video, color, sound, 16:49 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth & Council
© P. Staff, 2017
Barbara Hammer
b. 1939, Hollywood, CA; d. 2019, New York City
Sanctus, 1990
16 mm film on HD video, color, sound, 18:16 min.
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix
Identifying the vulnerable body as a throughline for art in the United States in recent decades, the exhibition focuses on the ways health issues intervene in life and in art, transforming artists’ processes, subject matter, and politics. Informed by intersecting social movements that include civil rights, antiwar, women’s and gay liberation, and disability rights, artists have approached the body—in all its variance—as a field of inquiry.
Featuring an intergenerational group of eighty artists, the exhibition includes work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Yvonne Rainer, Howardena Pindell, and David Hockney, among others, to more recent contributions by artists such as Christine Sun Kim, Simone Leigh, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Park McArthur. Considering disability through a broad lens, For Dear Life suggests affinities between those living with a range of maladies and conditions, recognizing that all of us experience illness and disability throughout our lives.
Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024 with more than 60 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, with exhibitions on subjects ranging from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from environmental justice to artificial intelligence. Art & Science Collide will share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability is organized by MCASD Senior Curator Jill Dawsey, PhD, and former Associate Curator Isabel Casso.
For Dear Life is a part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative of Getty. The landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.
For Dear Life and its publication have been made possible with lead support from Getty. The project has also received major support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Generous individual exhibition underwriting provided by Rebecca Moores with additional funding from Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese. Funding for the catalog comes from the support of Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McKneely and The KHR McNeely Family Fund. Additional support is provided by the City of San Diego through the Commission for Arts and Culture.
Top: Moyra Davey, Still from "Les Goddesses," 2011. Courtesy the artist, greengrassi, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.© Moyra Davey.