This program is in-person at MoAD. Proof of vaccination is required at the door.

MoAD Members Champagne Reception with artist, followed by public reception and artist talk with MoAD Emerging Artist Sydney Cain.  Reserve Members-Only Tickets here

Event Schedule

5:30 pm – 6:00 pm

MoAD Members Champagne Reception with artist

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Public Reception – Artist Talk

Join us for a reception and conversation with MoAD Emerging Artist Sydney Cain and artist and professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, Courtney Desiree Morris.

Sydney Cain: Refutations is an ongoing body of work exploring ancestral memory and the power of Black myth. The project includes various multimedia series of artwork, publications and exhibitions emerging from personal genealogy research alongside process documentation through photography and drawing. Through play between ephemerality and figurative representation, Cain teases resistance against erasure while also celebrating metamorphoses that occur in the voids of invisibility.

The work is an exploration in the perimeters of both existing and not existing through imaginative landscapes.

Sydney “Sage” Cain is a visual artist born and raised in San Francisco, CA. As an act of empowered remembering, Cain’s work invites viewers to challenge the continuum of colonialism that privileges scientific language and understanding of mystical experiences over indigenous epistemologies. Utilizing graphite, powdered metals, printmaking, and chalk as transcendent emblems for myth-making, her work offers reverent narratives that reveal the power of remembrance and spiritual evolution within “unseen” Black afterlives.

Their work has been exhibited at Betti Ono, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery and the Oakland Museum of California. They have received the Emerging Artist Award at the Museum of the African Diaspora and the Honorary AIR Award at Kala Art Institute. Cain is currently represented by Rena Bransten Gallery with a solo exhibition scheduled to open there late 2021.

Sydney Cain is an awardee of MoAD’s 2019-20 Emerging Artists program.

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the forthcoming book, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua (under contract with Rutgers University Press). She is a social anthropologist whose research and art focus specifically on social movements and cultural politics in the African Diaspora.

As an artist, her work is concerned with understanding the ways that we inhabit place – through migration, ancestry, and shared social memory — and how places inhabit us. Her work focuses primarily on examining these ancestral narratives and everyday ritual aesthetics among communities throughout the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and West Africa. She works primarily in the fields of large-format photography, experimental video, installation, and performance art.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, the Photographic Center Northwest, and the San Francisco LGBT Center.

‍www.courtneydesireemorris.com