Fall 2023 Lecture Series

Adrian L. Burrell
In CONVERSATION WITH LuKE Williams

Thursday, October 26, 6:30 pm PDT
Block Community Hub, 1955 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612

Directions to Block Community Hub HERE

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Moving into our fall season, we are so excited to be crossing the bay to host Oakland-based artist Adrian L. Burrell in conversation with scholar Luke Williams.

Adrian L. Burrell is a profoundly multi-displinary artist working in photography, film and installation. Born and raised in Oakland, his work explores the idea of history as a living phenomenon in the face of duress and erasure.

Burrell has an exhibition at Minnesota Street opening October 7, and a forthcoming book to be published by Minor Matter. Please join us in warmly welcoming him alongside Luke Williams for a wonderful evening of images and insight into these exciting new projects, followed by a reception.

 
 
 

All photos © Adrian L. Burrell

 

ABOUT ADRIAN L. BURRELL

Adrian L. Burrell is a third-generation Oakland artist utilizing photography, film, installation and experimental media. His work examines issues of race, class, and intergenerational dynamics, inviting moments where collective storytelling can be a site for remembering.

Burrell has lived and worked on four continents. He is a US Marine Corps veteran, and a graduate of San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, film) and Stanford University (MFA, Department of Art & Art History). At Stanford he lectured, served as the Black Graduate Student Community Outreach Chair, and was a visiting artist with Stanford's Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

He is also a resident at SF FILM, was a YBCA Creative Cohort fellow (2021-22), and was selected for the renowned Black Rock Residency in Dakar, Senegal, in 2022.

His first solo exhibition was on view at the ICA San Jose, California, from September 16, 2022 – February 26, 2023. Burrell’s work has been featured through The New Yorker, BlackStar Film Festival, and PopUp Magazine (2022); Photoville, New York and the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China (2020); and at SXSW (2013), among others. In 2021, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet? This collective self-portrait examines normalized violence inflicted on Black lives. He received the SF Camerawork Juror's Choice Award in 2019.

ABOUT LUKE WILLIAMS

Luke Williams is a scholar, artist, organizer, and critic of twentieth and twenty-first century Black performance and visual cultures. His work, which spans embodiment, portraiture, Afrofuturism, racial capitalism, and the aesthetics of the Black radical imagination, focuses on Black Diasporic art in the Americas and broader Atlantic world. Luke is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He most recently held fellowships for the Committee of Black Performing Arts at Stanford and the Jefferson Scholarship at the University of Virginia.

Find more information on Luke’s scholarship, artistic work, and educational organizing at lukewilliamsphd.com.

 

At SFMOMA, Adrian L. Burrell’s Collective Self-Portraits Defy Gravity

By Luke Williams | KQED

“The world ends every day. With an almost mundane regularity someone, somewhere, is facing life-altering changes to the world as they know it: the loss of a job, the impairment of a faculty, the death of a loved one. Over the past year, more and more people have lost the familiarities around which we structure life. With the life-altering effects of the 2020 election, the collapse of the national economy, and the ongoing presence of COVID-19, large-scale losses have become personal. “

 

Photo: Adrian L.Burrell, Regeneration (featuring a mural by Twin Walls Mural Company),
from the series It's After the End of the World, Don't You Know That Yet?, 2020.

EXHIBITION AND BOOK

Venus Blues

Exhibition Dates: October 7 – December 3, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 15, 2022, 6 PM

Minnesota Street Project, 1201 Minnesota St, San Francisco, CA 94107
(DIRECTIONS HERE)

Venus Blues, curated by Dr. Tiffany E. Barber, is a an exhibition of artworks by Oakland-based artist Adrian L. Burrell exploring the idea of history as a living phenomenon in the face of duress and erasure. The exhibition highlights Burrell’s large-scale sculptures and life-sized photographs, as well as the debut of a new iteration of the artist’s ongoing film project, The Saints Step in Kongo Time.

Accompanying the installation will be live performances, community programs, and film projections that oscillate between the found and the fictional, that together spotlight the importance of preserving cultural heritage and family legacies in the afterlife of slavery.

 

Burrell’s forthcoming monograph Sugarcane and Lightning is a mixtape of black life and American history from a familial perspective. This is about messages to the future, reparations, inheritance, and initiation. This is about the blackening of the world, revenge, the fugitive, movement, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and where we come from.” —Adrian L. Burrell

Published by Minor Matters, with an estimated release in February of 2024. The 144-page hardcover book combines his writing, photographs and footage with found letters and personal correspondence, pages from family albums, and stills from home videos, making fluid geographies and collapsing time.

Sugarcane and Lightning by Adrian L. Burrell
Published by Minor Matters, 2023.
Hardcover, 120 images, 144 pages
ISBN 979-89-88975-11-3

ABOUT THE VENUE

We are so grateful to Block Community Hub for making their space available to us as a non-profit for this event. Their newly restored historic building in downtown Oakland is readily accessible by BART and other public transit options, as well as by car… we look forward to seeing you in the East Bay!

Directions to Block Community Hub HERE
(Please use the entrance of the historical building of the Uptown Station on 1955 Broadway, Suite B.)