A

BERKELEY

ART CENTER

THE AGILITY

PROJECTS

LAVA THOMAS:

LOOKING BACK AND SEEING NOW

JULY 11–

AUGUST 23

2015

B

BERKELEY

ART CENTER

THE AGILITYPROJECTS

Berkeley Art Center1275 Walnut StreetBerkeley, CA 94709berkeleyartcenter.org

LOOKING BACK AND SEEING NOW

NEW WORK BY LAVA THOMAS

JULY 11–AUGUST 232015

2 3

4 5INTRODUCTION

AIMEE LEDUC

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOROn behalf of the staff and board of Berkeley Art Center,

I would like to congratulate Lava Thomas on a stunning

exhibition, Looking Back and Seeing Now (July 11 – August

23, 2015). This exhibition represents a big step in the history

of Berkeley Art Center. In the past year, Berkeley Art Center

has entered a new chapter of programming. Our community

has broadened to include the greater Bay Area, and our

mission has been strengthened by our new program, The

Agility Projects which supports emerging and mid-career

artists as they create new bodies of work and experiment

with new approaches to their practice. Berkeley Art Center

is proud to be able to engage in these open-ended dialogs

with participating artists.

Looking Back and Seeing Now is the second exhibition

in the inaugural year of Agility Projects. This new work by

Lava Thomas is a culmination of multiple studio visits,

emails and phone conversations between Ms. Thomas

and myself. I am inspired by Lava Thomas’ overall practice.

She is a thoughtful, insightful, and methodical artist. She

approached this show as a conceptual investigation of

how history infuses objects and images. In addition to her

extremely large, masterfully rendered graphite portraits on

paper, Ms. Thomas pushed the boundaries of sculpture and

installation to transform the entire gallery space into a site

of refl ection and mediation.

I would like to sincerely thank Lava Thomas for creating

such a special exhibition. Berkeley Art Center is honored

to have been a part of this experience. I would also like to

thank Trish Bransten and Rena Bransten and the entire staff

at Rena Bransten Projects. Thank you for offering so much

support to Lava Thomas as she completed this exhibition;

and thank you for your generous and longstanding support

of Berkeley Art Center. Your dedication to community-based

arts organizations and to experimental work helps make

what we do at Berkeley Art Center possible. Lastly, I want

to extend my gratitude to the board, staff, members, and

Berkeley community. Your contributions and participation

make all of this possible.

6 7ARTIST BIO

Lava Thomas is a native of Los Angeles, California.

She was educated at UCLA’s School of Art Practice and

California College of the Arts, where she received her

BFA. Her diverse artistic practice includes drawing,

painting, sculpture, printmaking and installations.

Her work has been exhibited at various institutions

including: Museum of the African Diaspora, Print Center in

NY, the Betty Rymer Gallery at the School of the Art Institute

in Chicago, the California African American Museum in Los

Angeles, the Riverside Art Museum, Paulson Bott Press,

the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado,

Wight Gallery at UCLA, the San Francisco Art Commission

Gallery, the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, and

in the collection of the United States Consulate General in

Johannesburg, South Africa.

Thomas is a Djerassi Resident Artists Program Fellow. She

is a former board member of the Djerassi Residents Artists

Program and the Alliance of Artists Communities. 

8 9

A few years ago at my grandmother’s house in Los

Angeles, I unearthed something previously unseen in

all my time there as a child. Buried underneath a pile of

sheet music in her piano bench was an album containing

photographs from the late 1880s. The women in the

photographs are most likely related to me, but I can’t be

certain; there’s no one left to ask. As I looked at them from

across four generations, I had the unnerving sense that

they were looking back at me.  

Drawing the women in my studio over the past year and a

half, the intensity and defi ance in their eyes was palpable

and real. I wondered what their lives must have been like—

these black women living in the south more than a hundred

years ago—and mused sadly at how some things hadn’t

changed. With reports of brutality against black people

streaming from my computer while I worked, at times the

women’s gazes seemed like an indictment of the present;

despite the gains of the civil rights movement and a black

president in offi ce, the black body remains a target for

hatred and violence.  

Meanwhile, the tambourine installation that I was working

on began to assert its strength and take on a life of its

own. What I had fi rst conceived as an elegy was instead

evolving into a boundless eruption of forms, a manifestation

of something irrepressible. As the tambourines’ mirrored

faces refl ected the observer’s gaze, I glimpsed the

possibility of transcendence—and hoped, as we strive to

realize the potential of our humanity, that this sense of

infi nite possibility could be closer than we know.

My sincere gratitude goes to executive director Aimee Le

Duc for her invitation to embark on this project, and to the

board of directors of Berkeley Art Center for supporting her

vision. Thank you as well to the Berkeley Art Center staff

and to the city of Berkeley.

I would like to thank Jacqueline Francis for the thoughtful

insights and observations in her essay.

I am grateful to my team—studio manager Jennifer

Noland, studio assistants Melissa Bolger, Tyler Noland, and

fabricator David Andersson.

To my editor Nicholas Stone, I thank you for making my

words sing.

A special thank you goes to Rena and Trish Bransten of

Rena Bransten Projects for their generous support of the

exhibition. Finally, a debt of gratitude goes to my husband,

Peter Danzig.

ARTIST STATEMENT

10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17ESSAY

Many years after the death of her maternal grandmother,

Lava Thomas found a photo album belonging to this

beloved woman. This rich visual record was not something

Thomas had seen before, and yet the circumstances under

which she came upon them were entirely apropos. On a

visit to Los Angeles to attend the funeral of her best friend’s

mother, Thomas, who lives and works in the San Francisco

Bay area, stopped by her late grandmother’s home. There,

she opened the piano bench upon which her grandmother,

an accomplished musician who was her Pentecostal

church’s choir director, would sit when she played the

instrument at home. As an active churchwoman, she was a

respected community leader. Still, Thomas’s grandmother

had a private side, for she had created this photo album and

had not shared it with anyone during her lifetime. It existed

for her alone, as a curated archive of meaningfully arranged

imagery. Most poignantly, the album’s fi rst two photos were

portraits of women whom were unknown to Thomas; she did

not recognize them nor could she identify them by name.

Nonetheless, it’s likely that these women, whose photos

held places of prominence in the album, were related to

Thomas’s grandmother, and by extension, to Thomas.

In Looking Back and Seeing Now, Lava Thomas not only

engages an aspect of her family’s history, but also seeks to

understand a past era and connect it to her own. Riveted

by the photos of the two women, Thomas spent countless

hours studying the sitters’ expressions, postures, and

clothing of the women in an attempt to know them and to

respond to their serious and unblinking gazes. The haunting

cameo images that Thomas has produced, Looking

Back 1 and Looking Back 2, resemble the photos in her

grandmother’s photo album, but they are not replicas of

them. Much larger in scale than the album photos, Thomas’s

drawings establish their own authority that is grounded

in their unerring realism: they offer details and precision

far beyond what the human eye could discern in a single

glance. Thomas depicts fi nely combed strands of hair and

fl yaway wisps, shows the light refl ecting off buttons’ facets,

JACQUELINE FRANCIS

LOOKS: LAVA THOMAS’S

LOOKING BACK AND

SEEING NOW AT

BERKELEY ART CENTER

LIST OF WORKS

Looking Back 2, 2015

(left side of installation)

graphite, conte crayon and

watercolor on paper

72"” x 72"”

$22,500

Seeing Now, 2015

tambourines, lambskin,

monofi lament, ribbon, acrylic

mirrors, digital prints on

paper, s-hooks, wood, steel

12'’ x 15'’ x 20'’

$75,000

Looking Back 1, 2014–15

(left side of installation)

graphite, conte crayon and

watercolor on paper

72" x 72"

$22,500

18 19

and delineated the wrinkled creases in the fi gures’ lips.

Features are rendered with great refi nement by Thomas’s

skillfully assured hand, for her acknowledged perfectionist

nature would not allow otherwise. Without access to

her subjects’ autobiographies and biographies—their

own accounts of their lives, the written facts about them

recorded in legal annals, their descendants’ memories of

them—Thomas sensitively represents them. Looking Back

1 and Looking Back 2 portray the strong moral character,

knowing sensibility, and successful mien that the women,

doubtlessly, wanted the commissioned studio photos to

capture and communicate. But Thomas’s tour-de-force

drawings also must be recognized as thoughtful and

deeply invested artistic interpretations, ones that enhance

and supplement the photographs the artist found in her

grandmother’s album. As a result, Looking Back 1 and

Looking Back 2 doubly assert self-revelatory power—the

artist’s and the depicted women’s—and fi ll Berkeley Art

Center’s exhibition space with a palpable vitality.

The project Looking Back and Seeing Now is multimedia

and multisensory. As a site-specifi c installation, it reveals

itself as a transformative experience in many senses of

this phrase. Consider the exhibition’s locale. Berkeley Art

Center is in the city’s Live Oak Park, the Codornices Creek-

bounded space that was once home to native peoples.

Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, the white settler

Napoleon Bonarparte Byrd claimed ownership of the land,

having traveled by covered wagon from Missouri with his

family and the African-American couple Hannah and Pete

Byrd he once had enslaved. Since 1914, Live Oak Park has

been a public recreational space, and BAC, a city-enterprise

turned private non-profi t gallery, was built there in 1967. A

meditative, outdoor area, Live Oak Park is a calming respite

from city din; its resolute quiet is occasionally broken by

a dog’s bark or the muffl ed thwacking of tennis balls from

nearby courts. Visitors enter BAC from Walnut Street via a

wooden bridge, a pathway which makes it hard not be aware

of the sound of one’s footfall. Inside BAC’s Arts and Crafts-

style building, the tinkling of Seeing Now’s tambourine bells

is simultaneously a welcoming and mysterious sound: one

hears this work before actually seeing it. A room divider

mediates between the BAC atrium and gallery; once

around it, the viewer needs a moment to make sense of

the environment. Hanging between the portraits Looking

Back 1 and Looking Back 2 is Seeing Now, a curtain of

mixed elements. More than a hundred tambourines are

wire -tied to a stable lattice frame, installed high above the

gallery fl oor. Some of the small, framed drums have warmly

colored surfaces; some are decorated with mirrors that

capture parts of the visitor’s body and of Looking Back 1

and Looking Back 2; others proffer a Surrealist effect with

print details of eyes from the Looking Back portraiture.

Attempting to track the origins of the audible jingling, the

viewer’s looks upward to discover that small fans are key

components of the installation. Thrumming air currents

gently turn the instruments and activate, ever so slightly,

their small metal cymbals. However much the visitor’s

movements contribute to the animation of Seeing Now,

the work, even in the absence of a human presence, would

generate an improvisatory composition of treble clef notes.

Of course, nothing about Looking Back and Seeing Now

is happenstance. The tambourine is a signifi cant object

for Thomas: she recalls playing it in her grandmother’s

church as a child and the expressed ecstasy of Pentecostal

worship is a vivid memory. The tambourine’s visual and

cultural history also resonates with the artist, who has

studied its appearance on ancient Greek pottery and its

role in African-American musical traditions, including

the protest songs of the Civil Rights Movement. Overall,

the form and content of Looking Back and Seeing Now

evoke the past and engender refl ection about its relation

to the present. Thomas presents myriad fragments and

perspectives, and invites her audience to sit with them.

In this way, the installation’s open structure mimics the

narration of history, which is never a completed project.

20 C

Berkeley Art Center serves the diverse and creative

citizens of the greater Bay Area through the presentation

of visual art exhibitions and related programs that are

relevant, engaging, and inspiring. 

The Agility Projects is a series of exhibitions and public

programs that seeks to engage diverse audiences with

new and commissioned art by outstanding emerging

artists from the Bay Area. The program provides artists

with time, a stipend and support to create new bodies

of work that will push their own artistic practices

in new directions. For more information, please visit 

berkeleyartcenter.org.

Looking Back and Seeing Now: New work by Lava Thomas

would not have been possible without the generous

support of Rena Bransten and Trish Bransten of Rena

Bransten Projects, San Francisco. Thank you for your

thoughtful insights and passionate support of Berkeley Art

Center and the Bay Area arts community. This exhibition

was also supported by: the City of Berkeley, Lava Thomas,

and the members of Berkeley Art Center.

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

Published by Berkeley Art

Center, 2015

Design by Studio 1500

Lava Thomas images

courtesy of John Wilson

White and Rena Bransten

Projects, San Francisco

All rights reserved. No part

of this book may be repro-

duced in any form without

written permission from

the publisher.

Printed and bound by

Solstice Press, Oakland,

California

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Marianna Stark,

President

Dennis Markham,

Vice-President

Lucille Freeman,

Treasurer

Ernest Jolly,

Secretary

Shiree Dyson

Susan Roth

Anna Schooley

Elizabeth Sher

Larry Stefl

BAC STAFF

Aimee Le Duc,

Executive Director

Ann Trinca,

Programs Manager

2015 Interns

Kayleigh Locastro

Jaymie Orogo

Kate Rose

Natasha Shompole

Smith Koy Smith

Stephanie Wu

HOSPITALITY SPONSORS

MEDIA SPONSOR

BUSINESS SPONSORS

ERWIN YEH, DDS

PAUL TEMPLETON,

REALTOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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