Opening Reception: Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle

Join the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries (SFAC Galleries) for the opening reception of The Retrieval, a solo exhibition of works by Bay Area artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle.

The Retrieval features over 100 works that respond to the disappearance of Black women and female-identifying women due to various abuses and the current human trafficking trade in the Bay Area and beyond. The exhibition responds to how we perceive, comprehend, and react to these erasures as removed spectators or actively involved witnesses with new work from two distinct bodies of work. Drawings from the artist’s ongoing The Evanesced series focus on the erasure of Black women from the African Diaspora, will take over the gallery’s walls. Holding court in the center of the space is a new large-scale, textile-based, healer-figure inspired by Nigerian Egungun festival costumes. The work is a new addition to the artist’s research and educational platform for a contested geography and culture named Kentrifica.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco and the Made in LA 2012 Biennial. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times.