MoAD Emerging Artist Program invites local, emerging and mid-career visual artists and art collectives to submit proposals for solo exhibitions that reflect the cultural and artistic richness of the African Diaspora. Awardees have the opportunity for a solo exhibition in our galleries.

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Since its inception in 2015, the program has provided exhibition space to 20 artists and members of art collectives including Chanell Stone, Angela Hennessey, Indira Allegra, Andrew Wilson, Rodney Ewing, the 5/5 Collective, and many more.

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Museum of the African Diaspora is proud to announce 4 new Emerging Artists program awardees

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MoAD’s Emerging Artists Program starts each cohort with an open call for Bay Area artists to submit solo exhibition proposals of their work. Competitive proposals present innovative artwork to activate the MoAD Salon. This multipurpose space is the heart of the museum where we hold public programs, education workshops, and events.

For the 2022–23 cohort, 4 artists were selected to present solo exhibitions. Each exhibition will be on view in the Salon for 10–11 weeks.

The Emerging Artists Program is designed to amplify and support the practices of local, Bay Area artists both emerging and mid-career. The label “emerging” is not an indicator of age or a marker of educational status but an identifier that speaks to the impact a solo museum exhibition can have on an artist’s career at a pivotal moment, offering artists visibility and a platform that will ensure the longevity of their practice. These emerging artists are establishing themselves as important culture-makers to watch.

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We are thrilled to be presenting the Emerging Artists Program at MoAD once again, after a long two years of COVID-related uncertainties. EAP is one of the crown jewels of MoAD’s programming and has produced some of the most extraordinary and ambitious exhibitions that the museum has seen. And that is just as true of the new 2022-2023 EAP cohort featuring new work from Cynthia Brannvall, Richard-Jonathan Nelson, Trina Robinson, and Ashley Ross.

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— Elena Gross, Director of Exhibitions & Curatorial Affairs

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‍Cynthia Aurora Brannvall: The Threads That Bind March 30, 2022 — June 12, 2022  

‍The Threads that Bind is an allusion to a body of artwork rendered in textiles to evoke memory, presence, labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history in the African diaspora.  The concept and material of thread creates meaning as an ancestral carrier traveling through time across borders through voluntary and involuntary migration from one body to another. The bind refers to shared experiences of trauma, oppression and perseverance that cohere in black identity.

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Richard-Jonathan Nelson:
Interlacing Distributed Intelligence/ Noir Care June 22, 2022 — September 18, 2022

The Black body and craft can be intermeshed to depict our western culture's speculative future no matter how foreign the idea of Black craft is outside of the American Low country. Through the hybridizing of traditional craft practices like embroidery, weaving, and quilting along with digital art, the Black body is reimagined as a place for futuristic progress. Thereby creating images of the Black Diaspora far removed from continued historic depiction as servile and without agency, but instead as visual and culturally complex individuals. The work is balanced visually between the dichotomy of Blackness as an expansive unknowable monolithic void and a chromatically intense generator of culture.

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Trina Michelle Robinson: Excavation: Past, Present and Future  October 5, 2022 – December 11, 2022*

Using early photography and motion picture processes, Excavation looks at the relationship between memory and migration. Robinson’s ancestry is the catalyst for this exploration, but the work also looks at stories of migration and memory outside of her immediate family. In Paul Virilio's The Vision, the author talks about capturing the impression of someone or something rather than producing an exact copy when it comes to creating an image. An ethereal copy is Robinson’s approach when considering the excavation of memories. An exact replica might not be possible, but we can get a glimpse, hold on, and sit with what remains so we can move forward into the future. Hopefully we can move into the future together.  

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Ashley Ross: 10/27/03 December 21, 2022 – March 5, 2023* ‍

10/27/03 is a body of work that surveys the ways in which experiential dualities can exist within the confines of a religious upbringing. Bringing together staged black and white photographs, familial archive layered works, and installation, this body of work uses photography and personal memorabilia to illustrate ideas about indoctrination and legacy within the black familial structure. Whether through visual allegories or the artist’s personal explorations of religion, each photographic work represents the process of rumination and memory when confronting one’s own former spiritual experience allowing the viewer to contemplate the ways in which we internalize belief systems.

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*Exact dates may be subject to change

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A selection panel consisting of MoAD staff and other arts professionals (artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, etc.) reviews and scores all submitted proposals.

The following people formed our esteemed 2022-23 Emerging Artists jury.

• Michelle Branch
  Board Chair of SF Camerawork
• Brock Brake
  Owner, Pt. II Gallery
• Chanell Stone
  2019 Emerging Artists awardee
• Elena Gross
  Director of Exhibitions & Curatorial Affairs at MoAD
• Demetri Broxton
  Senior Director of Education at MoAD
• Nia McAllister
  Public Programs Manager at MoAD
• Charlena Wynn
  Visitor Experience Manager at MoAD

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MoAD Emerging Artists is generously funded by Karen Jenkins-Johnson & Kevin Johnson and Westridge Foundation.

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