BODIES ON THE LINE

About the Exhibition

Curated by RHIANNON EVANS MACFADYEN, founder of Black & White Projects, this show features three artists who place the body at the center of their practice, bringing to light the urgency, endurance, violence, and magic associated with being Black women. Through live performance and broad documentation of past performances — including video recordings, photographs, and objects — the exhibition explores radically different approaches to understanding issues of performativity related to gender, race, and queerness.

During the opening reception, SIMONE BAILEY presented a live version of Sway, Clench, Release (Requiem No. 415) featuring MIA PIXLEY. This performance was created to reflect upon the impulses of past black in-migration to the Bay Area and the current displacement-fueled out-migration, which is part of a larger movement back to the South called the New Great Migration.

About the Artists

SIMONE BAILEY works with video, performance, sculpture, and photography to examine themes of violence, agency, and the impulse to grasp the intangible. Her work has been exhibited at Krowswork (Oakland), Galeria Luis Adelantado (Valencia, Spain), Amory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, the Studio Museum (Harlem), and CDA Projects (Istanbul), among other venues.

CHRIS EVANS is an interdisciplinary artist trained in music and dance. Her music training began in Oakland public schools and, after a very long break, resumed at San Francisco State University while Chris was working on a master’s degree in comparative literature. The Bay Area enabled her to deepen and expand her interdisciplinary exploration through studies with Roscoe Mitchell, Alex Kelly, Shelly Senter, Abigail Hosein, and Randee Paufve, as well as collaborations with choreographers Byb Chanel Bibene, Sheena Johnson, Lizz Roman, and musicians from WaterSaw and Ark of Bones. Her practice explores where the lines between dance, music, space, artist, and audience blur. Through her work, she aims to create moments of community that revere, challenge, and lovingly hold our imaginations, bodies, stories, and expression.

MX. BEATRICE THOMAS is a queer Bay Area–based multidisciplinary artist/performer and film & theater director who comes from a family lineage of pastors, performers, doctors, and healers. She has been pondering the meaning of things and making art from the moment she came into consciousness. From absurdist cabarets to vampire/witch love triangles, Thomas weaves the experiences of queer people and people of color into magical realities with strong critical commentary, comedic satire, and media-rich production. A maker of objects, installations, and theater, Beatrice reveals, reconstructs, and constructs alternate realities. She uses the artifice of drag to inhabit her alter ego, Black Benatar, an exaggerated black femme creature that challenges blackness, whiteness, oppression, and convention. She performs as soulful death-metal diva Black Benatar at Drag Queen Story Time at the San Francisco Public Library and all over the Bay Area.

About the Curator

RHIANNON EVANS MACFADYEN is a curator, consultant, and project-based artist from San Francisco. With a long background in the performing and visual arts, Rhiannon is deeply influenced by her own — and her communities’ — intersectional identities. She is driven by her pursuit of “productive discomfort”: her curatorial focus on projects that push boundaries of scale, scope, medium, venue, and dialogue; and her cross-discipline personal work engages symbols, identity, communication, and the unseen.

In 2013 she founded A Simple Collective: an organization dedicated to fostering creative independence for professionals, and professional independence for creatives, and Black & White Projects: an experimental project space in San Francisco’s Mission District. Deeply involved with community-building through the arts, she is on the Curatorial Committees for Root Division and Sites Unseen, launched the RE[FRAME] Arts Industry Conference at the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2015, is Co-Director of Emerging Arts Professionals, is founding member of Pacific Felt Factory arts complex, and is a member of 3.9 Art Collective.