Allegedly the worst is behind us features artists who examine the toll of intergenerational trauma and the laborious process of recovering fragments of disrupted pasts. Exploring “mending” and “amending” as action, metaphor, and foundation for resistance, the exhibition considers the relationship between the need to tend to ourselves and the people around us and the need to critique and change narratives—and how both can work hand-in-hand as expressions of self-determination.
Razan AlSalah
Razan AlSalah is a Lebanese-Palestinian media artist and cinematographer living and working between Beirut, Philadelphia and New York. She approaches cinematography with a media artist’s critical eye and media art with the technical deconstruction of image, time and movement. Her site-specific installations overlay images on found objects and places often using projection mapping. She formally aligns body, image, object/place particularly using visual perspective to create a sensorial connection between different times, places and scales. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Sursock Museum in Beirut and has been exhibited in Beirut, Dubai, Philadelphia and New York. She is currently the cinematographer on one narrative feature film and another feature documentary. She is a Fulbright scholar and MFA candidate at Temple University http://razanalsalah.com
Demetri Broxton is a mixed media artist of Louisiana Creole and Filipino heritage who was born and raised in Oakland, CA. His textile sculptures reflect his connection to the sacred art of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the beading traditions of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians, and his love of hip-hop and graffiti. Broxton holds a BFA with an emphasis in oil painting from UC Berkeley (2002) and an MA in Museum Studies from San Francisco State University (2010). His work has been exhibited internationally and most recently at SFMOMA Artists Gallery (2019), UNTITLED Art Fair (2020 & 2021), and Kala Art Institute (2021). His work is held in several private collections and the permanent collection of the Monterey Art Museum. He is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA.
Arleene Correa Valencia is a multidisciplinary and community-oriented native Mexican artist living and working in Napa, CA. Correa Valencia investigates various ethical, political, and aesthetic strategies in her practice to address the effects of our current socio-political and ecological climate on undocumented communities in the U.S.
In 2020 Correa Valencia completed her MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She was featured in the Emmy award winning “Portraits of Napa Workers: Arleene Correa Valencia,” part of KQED Arts’ Represent series of artist profiles. She is a recipient of Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals and is one of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family migrated to the United States in 1997 and made a home in California’s wine country, Napa Valley.
Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. In her practice, De la Calle combines photographs sourced from family albums and found images which she prints on textiles, as well as poetic texts, paintings made with coffee instead of paint, and found objects, to mine the aesthetics of nostalgia and examine the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia.
She is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza in 2020. She’s a 2022-2023 KALA Fellowship Award recipient and previously an Artist-in-Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY.
She’s been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, NPR, Refinery29, The Boston Art Review, Latina Magazine, and VOGUE among others.
Mik and May Gaspay are a Filipino-American mother and son artist team who collaborate on
sculptural quilts. Working together, they combine their individual strengths and perspectives to create pieces that are at once familiar and fresh. May brings a deep knowledge of traditional quilting techniques, while Mik brings a conceptual and experimental approach to the medium.
Through their collaboration, they hope to create pieces that not only celebrate their familial history and Filipino culture, but also speak to the broader human experiences of family, heritage, and connection.
Pantea Karimi is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in Northern California. She grew up in post-revolutionary Iran and her education in science and art at school was convoluted with religious indoctrination. Karimi’s art collectively explores historic, religious, scientific, and political themes using performative video, animation, sound, print, drawing, and installation. Taking the cue from her research on Iran’s religious, and scientific manuscripts and objects, Karimi’s work highlights archival materials and personal narratives reflecting upon her gender and upbringing in Iran, intertwined with conflicting political, religious, and societal issues.
Suchitra Mattai is a multi-disciplinary American artist of Indo-Caribbean descent who creates mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations that shed light on untold histories. She often combines processes and materials once associated with the domestic sphere, such as embroidery, sewing, “weaving,” and found clothing, in order to honor the labor of women. Past projects include group exhibitions at the MCA Chicago, the ICA Boston, Crystal Bridges Museum (Bentonville, AR), the Sharjah Biennial 14 (Sharjah, UAE), the MCA San Diego, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada), the MCA Denver, and solo exhibitions at the ICA San Francisco, the Tampa Museum of Art, and Socrates Sculpture Park. This Fall she will also open a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. Her works are represented in public and private collections which include the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the MCA San Diego, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Joslyn Museum of Art, the Crocker Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Suchitra received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and is a recent recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2023).
Tricia Rainwater is a Choctaw multimedia artist based in the Bay Area, with roots in the Central Valley and New Mexico. Her artistic portfolio, which includes self-portraiture, sculpture, large-scale murals, and installations, has been featured at the Berkeley Center for the Arts, ICA San Francisco, MOCA Toronto, and with Muz Collective, among others. In 2022, she received a grant from the SF Arts Commission to trace the Choctaw Trail of Tears. Rooted in themes of identity and grief, her work offers a perspective through the lens of a Choctaw survivor. Through her art, Tricia confronts and resists loss by revisiting sites of pain, creating spaces for personal and collective healing.
Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco based interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery, Minnesota Street Project , and New York’s Wassaic Project and is currently included in the prestigious triennial Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work is also included in Paper is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures at San Francisco Center for the Book, a traveling exhibition co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer. She had a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), a Smithsonian Affiliate, as part of their Emerging Artist Program 2022-23. Robinson is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? published earlier this year by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. She previously worked in print and digital media in production at companies such as The New York Times T Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slack before receiving her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2022.
As a storyteller, she traveled the country and telling the story of exploring her ancestry with The Moth Mainstage at Lincoln Center in New York, in addition to touring with them on stages in San Francisco, Portland, OR, Omaha, NE and Westport, CT. Her story aired on NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour in October 2019. She received her MFA from California College of Arts in Spring 2022.
Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, video, and textiles. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. She focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.
“paper” identities amid the limitations of the time. In the absence of preserved records, Yin works from these gaps to visualize scenes where desire, refusal and moments of possibility set the tone.ICA San José will resume our normal business hours after September 14th.
ICA San José is located at 560 S First St, San Jose, CA 95113. We are open 12-5 pm from Thursday-Sunday. Stay up to date on all upcoming programming by signing up for our email list.