The Past Is Present

Rupy C. Tut explores ecological and feminist issues through imaginative paintings that use fine brushwork and earthy handmade pigments. Rose D’Amato commemorates fading art forms and lost histories in meticulously hand-lettered paintings. Angela Hennessy braids and crochets synthetic hair into textile sculptures that question our assumptions and rituals around death. Through their distinctive practices, these recipients of SFMOMA’s 2024 SECA Art Award bring the past to the present, using tradition as a vehicle for innovation and drawing on personal stories to elevate the universal experiences that connect us.

Every two years, SECA (the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) honors exceptional Bay Area artists who have not yet received significant recognition from major institutions. The two SFMOMA curators who oversaw this year’s competition — Maria Castro, associate curator of painting and sculpture, and Shana Lopes, assistant curator of photography — selected D’Amato, Hennessy, and Tut from more than 160 nominees. The three artists join an impressive circle of more than ninety past recipients, including Hung Liu, Barry McGee, Tauba Auerbach, and Rigo 23.

As part of their award, D’Amato, Hennessy, and Tut have been given the space and resources to mount an exhibition of new work and are featured in an accompanying publication.

ANGELA HENNESSY

An Oakland-based artist and survivor of gun violence, Hennessy creates sculptures and textiles using synthetic hair and actions associated with everyday domestic labor — washing, wrapping, stitching, knotting, brushing, and braiding — to question our relationship to death and mourning.

In an interview with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she was a 2021 fellowship recipient, Hennessy says: “Hair is a material that is exchanged between the living and the dead. There are rituals and traditions where hair is offered as a sign of respect or as a gesture of grief when someone has died . . . I’m really interested in how materials can make visible or tactile these relationships between the living and the dead. That’s certainly one of my big motivations in the work — to think about how I am in relationship with my dead people, how I’m in relationship with my ancestors. And what materials might be the form or the structure or the language that I’m trying to communicate with.”

The artist sometimes works at a braiding table, in a process reminiscent of Victorian-era artisans who used human hair to create elaborate jewelry and accessories, such as for lockets and chains for watches. She draws on these techniques and materials, but uses hair bought from local beauty supply stores in brown and black colors that she describes as her “black rainbow palette.”

Castro and Lopes say that hair, for Hennessy, serves as “a generative material to address a range of conceptual questions. In death, it has been used to preserve a physical connection to the bodies of those no longer with us. In life, it is a medium for self- and political expressions that, particularly in Black and African American experiences, carry complex histories of racialization and reclamation.”

ROSE D’AMATO

D’Amato’s lineage as a second-generation sign painter informs and inspires her art. She learned hand-lettering from her father and uncle, who owned sign-painting businesses. After refining her skills with formal training in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, D’Amato apprenticed at renowned New Bohemian Signs. She then expanded into pinstriping, another form of fine line painting traditionally associated with car culture, such as the stylized designs and embellishments on customized hot rods, lowriders, and motorcycles.

Hand-lettering and pinstriping connect D’Amato to her family history and to an earlier time when these painting techniques associated with blue-collar labor were ubiquitous on storefronts, doorways, and walls of commercial corridors. Scrolls and floral elements are common in her pinstriping, as seen in works such as Mission St (For Our Collective Ride) (2024), which was inspired by signage from a shuttered Mission District shop.

In her artist statement for the Headlands Center of the Arts, where she was recipient of the 2023–24 Tournesol Award, D’Amato wrote, “[M]y current artistic motivation stems from my desire to learn more about the painters, businesses, and histories of the signs around me . . . Painting is a chance for me to create new memories that relate these histories to my present moment, and to see that these traditions of handmade modes of production . . . move forward.”

D’Amato researches the history of each sign she paints, photographing the original sign in situ as part of the process. She uses the documentation as source material, studying the original artist’s technique and contextualizing the sign’s life. She brings new life to these works while highlighting the poignancy of change and the loss that comes with every new layer of history.

RUPY C. TUT

When Tut migrated from India to the U.S. at age 12, she was following in the footsteps of her Sikh ancestors, who were repeatedly uprooted and transplanted. She is grateful to have a home in Oakland, but, as an environmentalist and Indian American woman, she never takes place for granted. Her paintings depict lush natural territories, often graced by feminine figures. The works variously suggest eco-feminist paradises, the confinements of gender, and fears of climate disaster, using Tut’s mastery of traditional Indian painting to tell stories the all-male practice never told. She explains, “I question traditional roles and labels while preserving traditional practices and making.”

Her colorful paintings of introspecting protagonists are rich with natural imagery expressed as codes of emotional narrative. Water and hands are two recurring motifs. The hands in A River of Dreams (2024) are gestures of both nourishment and care, so the dreams don’t feel alone and uncared for, as well as strength and stability.

Integrated into all of Tut’s art is an intention to engage and connect with viewers through “something that might feel culturally specific but very much alive and relatable to their own [daily] experience,” she says. Tut’s paintings reveal a world where dreams, daily strife, and memories inform each intricate leaf, each wavy waterline, and a carefully brushed indigo world dripping with yearnings and nostalgia.

“Dreams are deeply connected to meaningful living for many,” she says. “Dreams have power, presence, and purpose. But what happens when dreams become distant? Is dreaming for everyone and chasing dreams for a privileged few?”

2024 SECA Art Award: Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy, Rupy C. Tut is on view through May 26, 2025, on Floor 2.