Marlon Mullen, Untitled, 2017; courtesy the artist; JTT, New York; and Adams and Ollman; © Marlon Mullen; photo: Glen Cheriton, JKA Photography
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (September 24, 2019) — In addition to its major contemporary survey show SOFT POWER, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will showcase the work of local and international contemporary artists with SECA and New Work exhibitions this winter. The 2019 SECA Art Award exhibition will feature this year’s award recipients, Bay Area artists Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Sahar Khoury and Marlon Mullen in the museum’s second-floor California galleries. In New Work: Nevin Aladağ in the museum’s fourth-floor New Work gallery, Aladağ will explore culture, transformation and belonging with a series of sculptures that unite musical instruments.
2019 SECA Art Award
November 16, 2019–April 26, 2020
Floor 2
The SECA Art Award engages directly with the local Bay Area community and serves as a unique platform for emerging or under-recognized artists. Established in 1967 by SFMOMA’s Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA), the SECA Art Award has honored more than 70 Bay Area artists with an exhibition and accompanying publication. This year, the 2019 SECA Art Award exhibition will feature three Bay Area artists, each with a dedicated gallery: Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Sahar Khoury and Marlon Mullen.
Berkeley-based artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s interdisciplinary practice explores the “Historical Present,” her term for the persistent residue of history in contemporary life. Rooted in extensive research on race, gender and sexuality, her projects investigate how Black bodies and images have been distorted and exploited by various mechanisms of power. Sahar Khoury transforms various materials into sculptures animated by fierce devotion to the efforts of salvage and creative repair. In her Oakland studio, she constructs pieces combining textile, papier-mâché, concrete, ceramic and silk-screened materials. Marlon Mullen takes art magazine covers as his primary source imagery, translating them into vividly painted abstractions. Working out of NIAD (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) Art Center’s studios in Richmond, he reconfigures images into puzzle pieces of interlocking color.
illy is the Presenting Sponsor of the 2019 SECA Art Award: Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Sahar Khoury, Marlon Mullen. Generous support is provided by Concepción S. and Irwin Federman and SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), an SFMOMA art experience group.
New Work: Nevin Aladağ
December 7, 2019–June 7, 2020
Floor 4
This exhibition will present a new series of sculptures by Berlin-based artist Nevin Aladağ. For her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Aladağ will explore culture, transformation and belonging by uniting distinct elements of disparate heritage into single works. In the series Resonator, musical instruments from around the world — a harp, mandolin, chimes, bass guitar, drums and didgeridoos — will be joined as geometrically abstract forms that create new sounds. Aladağ’s sculptures invite participation and experimentation, and the exhibition will include a program of sound improvisations by Bay Area musicians. Complementing this body of work will be a selection of collages from the Social Fabric series—abstract compositions pieced together from carpets of unique material, method and origin.
Since 1987, SFMOMA’s New Work series has provided a platform for experimentation: a space for artists to develop or premiere a body of work or present existing work in a new context.
Generous support for New Work: Nevin Aladağ is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, SFMOMA’s Contemporaries, Adriane Iann and Christian Stolz, and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.