Join the ICA San José at the Battery SF on December 19th 6:30pm-8:00pm for an artist talk with Bay Area artist Adia Millett in dialogue with Elaine Yau, Associate Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Millett and Yau will discuss their artistic and curatorial practice through a Q&A with Zoë Latzer, the Curator and Director of Public Programs at the ICA San José. This talk is being presented in conjunction with Millett’s solo exhibition Wisdom Keepers at the ICA San José (through February 18, 2024), with four quilts on loan from BAMPFA. The conversation will center around themes of preserving African American culture, survival and community during precarious times, curatorial and museological roles, and will address questions of collaboration and legacy.
About the speakers:
Adia Millett, originally from Los Angeles, received her BFA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the California Institute of Arts. She has exhibited at prominent institutions including the New Museum, New York; P.S. 1, New York; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Oakland Museum, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta; The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Barbican Gallery, London, San Jose Quilt and Textile Museum; California African American Museum, Los Angeles and di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa. Millett has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, Cooper Union in NY, and California College of the Arts. She is currently based in Oakland, California.
Elaine Y. Yau is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition that deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2019). Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received her doctorate in History of Art and Folklore from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015.