Southern Exposure is excited to announce the recipients of grants in Round II of its Alternative Exposure grant program. Alternative Exposure offers direct support to individuals and groups working in the visual arts to create frameworks of support for other artists working and presenting work in our communities.

The 2008 Alternative Exposure grant recipients are; Black Boots Ink, Hamburger Eyes, Hot and Cold, Invisible Venue, News of Common Possibility, Plastic Antinomy Magazine, Practice + Practice, Project Bunch, Receiver Gallery, Right Window, Rowan Morrison Gallery, The Garage Biennale, The Present Group, The Spare Room Project, Triple Base Gallery, and Underground Art Crew.

An outside panel of three local arts experts including; Kerri Johnson, artist, co-owner of Blankspace Gallery in Oakland, and co-director of the Oakland Art Gallery; Bruce Tomb, artist, architect and teacher; and Elizabeth Thomas, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at Berkeley Art Museum, selected the 2008 Alternative Exposure grantees. 

Through this program, Southern Exposure is committed to continuing to serve as a resource for the burgeoning independent visual arts community. Southern Exposure inaugurated the Alternative Exposure grant program in 2007 and to date has awarded $95,000 in direct funds to 33 Bay Area artists and projects.

 

Generous support for Alternative Exposure is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

 

In 2008, Southern Exposure will award over $50,000 to 18 projects. The 2008 Alternative Exposure grant recipients are:

Black Boots Ink presents, the International Artist Collaborative 2008, which is a collaboration between arts organizations and artists from California and Jalisco, Mexico. Through a series of bilingual photography workshops, a final publication will be produced which will increase understanding of recent local events and immigration issues between these two communities through the creations of new works and cross-cultural dialogue between participating artists and the public.

Hamburger Eyes raises awareness of local underground and emerging documentary photographers using traditional photography forms. Hamburger Eyes provides the public with an opportunity to publish photographs of the their own through means of their internationally distributed magazine. Through showcasing this published work, Hamburger Eyes are able to promote the work of emerging photographers from the San Francisco bay area.

Home is Something I Carry With Me is an alternative art exhibition that features emerging, Bay Area artists whose work takes into consideration the elusive and high contested notion of home and the politics of belonging within both a local and global context. For one night, three homes in the Mission District will be transformed into galleries displaying the artwork. An outdoor film screening will be held the following week and a catalog will be produced in conjunction with these events. 

The Hot and Cold zine project started in 2002 with the first issue being numbered ten. Since then, the issues have been released in reverse order and the last installment of the project, number 1 will be published soon. Each issue is limited to 150 copies and multiple artists are invited to contribute images, stickers, screen prints CD’s, photos or various other forms of publication all to be included in one Hot and Cold limited edition group collaborative zine. 

Invisible Venue is host to a series of projects and artist interventions presented in unexpected settings both in the Invisible Venue project space and in public spaces. Projects range from guerilla interventions, ephemeral projects, installation and performance and are motivated by a desire to function as a forum for exchange between artists, curators, and a wide reaching public. Online since 2005, Invisible Venue originated as a web-based project to host new media art work online--since 2007, projects have been presented in a dedicated project space and the surrounding area.

News of Common Possibility is a quarterly ‘art’ newspaper that aims to collect perspectives on broad subjects of common interest through a specific theoretical construct that provides a unique framework for each edition. The resulting publication will be a collection of articles, strategies and visual contributions. Three editions of the newspaper will be published between fall 2008 and fall 2009. Each issue will be distributed at no cost through art spaces and bookstores throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

Plastic Antinomy is a free visual arts quarterly magazine dedicated to bringing focus, coherence and long overdue attention to the vibrant visual arts scene in the Bay Area with an emphasis on San Francisco and Oakland. Plastic Antimony Magazine provides a forum for critique and discussion through a print publication wand a website. 

Practice & Practice publishes and distributes digital and physical books featuring art projects that engage in systems or economies that extend beyond or outside of a gallery context. These curated publications are constructed as a vehicle for the discussion and dissemination of projects that, because of their chosen form, may have previously been excluded from a larger dialog.

Project Bunch will be a permanent art space built by West Oakland based artists, Alicia McCarthy and Sahar Khoury and the participating students, staff and faculty of Ralph E. Bunche High School This art space will maintain a functioning silkscreen studio and a series of workshops on the premises of the school that will promote creative activities in a high school in grave need of art resources. 

Receiver Gallery is our on-site exhibition space for local and national emerging artists. The exhibitions allow artists to present their work in the space and create a site-specific installation for the exhibition. Each artist will have an opening reception and an opportunity to share their work with the public.

 

Right Window is a collective of artists, writers and curators who stage exhibitions, installations, performances, readings, and screenings of local, national, and international artists’ work. Right Window takes its name from the storefront space where it is located at Artists’ Television Access (ATA) in San Francisco’s Mission District. 

Rowan Morrison Gallery and Artist’s Bookstore is an artist-run exhibition space that features rotating solo exhibitions by emerging artists as well as a selection of affordable artists books, zines, paper goods and prints to make art accessible to the entire community. Rowan Morrison also publishes art books and print editions for several local artists. 

Teaching from Old Textbooks is a series of workshops and an accompanying exhibition using technical school textbooks from the 1950’s and 1960’s as the curriculum led by artist Kamau Patton. Patton while he was an artist-in-residence at Helms Middle School, discovered multiple practical experiments and technical textbooks ranging from woodworking to electronics from the 1950’s and 1960s in a long forgotten classroom closet. Using these found materials as his curriculum, Patton will teach a series of workshops in which participants will complete one project from these textbooks. The contents of the closet as well as the finished projects will also be displayed in a final exhibition.

The Garage is an experimental exhibition series presented at The Garage, an alternative space in San Francisco. The Garage Biennale will publish and distribute a retrospective of the first five years of The Garage’s programming. The book will concentrate on how The Garage exists within this current historic moment, enabling greater public access to its artists, projects and philosophies.

The Present Group is a quarterly art subscription project. It enables a community of subscribers to support emerging contemporary artists and receive limited edition artwork in return. The goals of The Present Group are to create a new avenue of support for emerging artists, create consistently thought-provoking work in a variety of media and provide a free online resource for anyone interested in contemporary art.

The Spare Room Project is a gallery and project space in one room of a Bernal Heights apartment that is host to monthly art exhibits, bi-monthly group critiques, and skills shares/workshops. Members of the local arts community will curate the exhibitions. The group critiques will be an open forum for any interested and the skill shares workshops will allow an artist to teach a workshop on a specific technique. 

Triple Base Gallery strives to facilitate new and innovative ways to promote and assist emerging Bay Area artists, to initiate dialogue with artists from various regions and to encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations. Triple Base’s curators invite artists working in areas of visual art, film/video, social practice, music and literature to create new work while considering the parameters of site, scale and location. 

The Underground Art Crew is a collaborative of young artists who will work together to produce a multi-paneled mural with its foundations in painting combined with plaster sculpture, tile mosaic to be installed inside Mama’s Art Café in the Excelsior District of San Francisco. The mural will serve as a backdrop for public events and performances organized in conjunction with other youth organizations.