Oakland Photo Workshop’s 5th Anniversary Celebration The DeYoung Museum’s triennial “Open” is a target for thousands of Bay Area artists, and because of its process, the 2023 edition featured 137 photographers, as of this writing still shown on the exhibit’s website. We’re of course interested in how many were included in the 2020 Open – during the COVID Era: the exhibition overall received 11,514 submissions from 6,200 applicants in a two-week period in June 2020, eventually selecting 877 works by 762 artists. From various records such as gallery layouts and installation overviews, photography represented an estimated 15% to 20% of the exhibition, translating to roughly 130 to 175 works hung among the total selections. That show became a direct visual chronicle of 2020. Works prominently explored themes of quarantine, domestic confinement, remote work via Zoom, grief, frontline workers, and the concurrent racial justice uprisings following the murder of George Floyd. By 2023, practitioners in the Open emerged along broadened lines. Rather than grouping pieces by medium, the Open’s chief curator and jury organized the 883 works into emergent thematic galleries that reflected Bay Area life and current global dialogues. Climate Crisis & Altered Landscapes: Photographers frequently engaged with environmental shifts and ecology, ranging from wildfire and drought imagery to arboreal documentation of aging regional flora. Global Conflicts & Sociopolitical Realities: photographic works addressed ongoing international and domestic events, including responses to global conflicts (Ukraine, the Middle East), post-pandemic recovery, and political polarization. Cultural Identity, Community & Portraiture: Numerous photographers focused on intimate human connection, cross-cultural heritage, and local communities Urban Environment & Ephemera: Bay Area street life, architectural textures, transit, and typographic interventions explored the changing character of regional cities. Formal Abstraction & Perceptual Studies: A significant cohort of photographers moved away from documentary realism toward non-representational minimalism, high-contrast black-and-white studies, geometric spatial divisions, and experimental light refractions. Even more interesting, therefore, is that three years later in 2026, and before the next DeYoung Open, Bay Area photographers were already able to submit and show works to a similar regional show: “In Focus: A Survey of Bay Area Photography", now showing at Oakland Photo Workshop. While In Focus is EBPCO’s first regional survey, its gallery has mounted several other more specific juried and group open calls since opening in 2021: Thematic Juried Open Calls: The Night Is Young (2022), a 22-artist juried exhibition focusing on nighttime photography. Medium & Process Surveys: the Film Swap Show & Tell retrospective (2023), and Refractions: A Lenticular Exhibition (2024) Annual Member Surveys: All-member juried showcases, including Where Would I Be Without You? (2022) and Food with a Twist (2021/2022). Through September 13th, the current OPW show “In Focus” brings together 50 artists in the gallery and an additional 30 artists in an expanded online exhibition – a total of 80 -- highlighting what it advertises as the many ways photography can document, question, connect, and inspire. MAKING OPEN WIDE Despite the example of earlier show themes, those four modes are, frankly, more interesting than the usual emphasis on subject matter categories. Like themes, they pull the mentality of the photographer into the foreground, making the motivation for the works a stronger shared concern with the viewer. But without prescribing themes beforehand, the exhibition is literally more “open” to how the discipline itself is practiced. Being a juried show naturally makes the included works somewhat special; but even more value is offered by the opportunity to display the pictures at OPW without their being swamped by the 500 or so works in other mediums that at the DeYoung corner photography in less direct lines of sight and traffic. And at the same time, EBPCO’s infamous dedication to film photography (which of course means prints) did not suppress alternative techniques -- ranging from antiques to digital to collage -- holding wall space on par with the more conventional methods. Finally, a special ingredient of the show is its two-staged orchestration featuring a virtual conversation between juror Ann Jastrab, , who made the selections; and OPW curator Jyoti Liggin of Oakland’s EBPCO, who arranged and hung the show. Jastrab featured at RayKo for ten years prior to joining the Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel (CPA) in 2019 as its Director. It’s fair to assume she has perused for decades many of the things that Liggin's decisions help bring forward. SEEING IT HAPPEN As a juror for a survey, one has at least two strong motivations: both the chance to confirm hunches, and the chance of discovering something unexpected. Then, as a curator, Liggin took both. While Jastrab’s selections were not given over to Liggin in categories, we get to join with Liggin searching for correspondences among them that presume they will highlight how photographers are seeing life today. But instead, what happens at the gallery exhibit is a tour of what makes imaging “photographic” – and that is the real signature concern of this survey. One such finding is the ever-present interest in formalism and even drawing, making the most explicit use of the boundary of the frame. These interests do the most to make the photograph into a standalone object, actually presenting itself as a design at least as much as, if not more than, representing something else. Photo: Wilfred Galila, But only god can make a tree On a quite different tack, one adjacent pair of image groups emphasizes how we inhabit spaces while being alone, segueing into how we move through them. These together are far more like theater than most of the other works. Photo: Dante Calcagno, Roller Rink Photo: Chris Fiorentini, Paletero Another grouping appears to be images in memoriam, ranging across recalling specific people or places now from points past or far away. Photo: Carl Weingarten, The Memory Shade One more grouping includes a combination, if not juxtaposition, of people as portraits or as icons, bringing a sense of role-playing being as meaningful as any other presentation of identity. Photo: Rikki Ward, Cuervo with his mules, Slab City, 2017 And finally for now, there is a generous supply of collage, montage and mixed media, poetic inventions of the scene Photomontage/handmade paper: Becky Jaffe, California Dreaming Tableau/Photography Collage: Stephen Albair, Self-Portrait Thanks to OPW’s production team, the gallery show of 50 works easily facilitates doing one’s own curating as well, an exercise made even more inviting by all 80 selections being together online: https://www.ebpco.org/exhibitions/online/in-focus. Numerous entries there include notes by the artist, bringing more clarity to the motivations and meanings behind the work. Prompted by those, and by the demonstration of Liggin's installation at OPW, we are further inspired to browse the works in many different ways, exploring how photography can document, question, connect, and inspire. [All images above: copyright of their respective artists.]

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2026 Spoiler Alert. In another fine mix of painting, photography and a splash of 3D work, curator Jan Watten at Gray Loft Gallery wraps a summer show about water with a deceptively simple title, Surface Tension. Naturally this throws us back to a few things: insects that magically skate on a lake; the mystery of what holds bubbles together, and our faces breaking into the air from our strokes under the deep end of a pool. These appreciations all dramatize, although not excitedly, our encounters with water. But here in the meditative space of the Gallery, the tension is not really between the differing ways that the art works show water or make us think about it. After all, there is little in life that, across so many reasons and occasions, is already so familiar to us as is water. Nor is the tension due to whether we find one style or scene more engaging than another; one style of portrayal is not better than another. Practically all of the works are both evocative and provocative in some way; each work has a meaning both as memory and as the immediate moment, and intentionally, they do not conflict. Rather, I think that the tension comes from two other things. One, nearly all of the 2D works are scenic. We can say about them that - shaped, tangible, and portable - they are containers… they each have carried water from someplace else, numerous slices of reality brought to us here. There is intensity in the selectivity that each artist exerted in deciding what to put into their respective containers. And so there is by definition great specificity on display; yet it is all no less universal. It is the standard modus operandi of variations-on-a-theme, and the arrangement of the works performs a balancing act throughout the exhibit space. And two, as we continue viewing, it becomes clear that the artists have not simply used light to show the water or its known materiality or its ubiquity. Instead, in these works, when light is seen, the water is the light. “Water as liquid light…” It’s a thought that subordinates water’s metaphor and memories to its immediate role in creating the image. There is plenty of description going on in the pictures. But as things made and offered by the artist, what is visible in the works is there because the water put it there. Then, in that same moment, the light that is there “reads as” water. We pick this up directly in Jan Watten’s own piece, as if she had given us all the cheat code to the rest of the show… Photo: Jan Watten, Reflections - Lake Tahoe In other pieces, following suit, there is the elegant “brushwork” of Michael Scandling’s ethereal white-on-black photo. Photo: Michael Scandling. Latourell Now, far differently, John Wood's colorful hyper-graphic abstraction deftly argues another way that light reads as water in his work. We get it from his title and have an "Aha!" moment. Looking nothing alike, Wood and Scandling both understand the same thing: once again, water gives light behavior. Consistently, the artist’s rendition has not frozen that behavior; rather, in the art work, water is the light that plays across the surface of the work. Mixed Media: John Wood, Midafternoon Reflections In the end, while being indisputably generous with us emotionally, this show is a show about art. The tension is between the stillness of the light in the “container” that is the work, and the dynamism of the artist’s actions that used the water to put the light where it is. Ultimately, these objects celebrate the aesthetic materiality of the subject more than the psychological; and down the road from now that is what I think we will remember distinguishes this show. [All images above: copyright of their respective artists.]

Economic support of the Arts continues to be under-prioritized, inadequate, and aspirational in an environment of fierce competition with political trends and sufficient provision of human services. The issue is not, however, that the Arts are deemed weak or unimportant to decision-making in those areas. The real issue is that, without a track record of impacts that clearly enhance those two areas in a predictably consistent way, the Arts are seen as optional except for those who will make art regardless. The most important response to this is to explicitly account for how the presumptive "ecosystem" of the arts environmental) is actually a System (architectural). In that way, the Arts are not seen as something that is improving some other system; rather, a system is designed such that it continually generates the productivity of art-making beyond a critical threshold of Return-On-Investment (ROI). The ROI perspective entirely displaces the Subsidy perspective as the orientation of strategic planning. This point of view immediately calls up a recognition of what sources of money are active investors. Systemic economic inputs. (c) 2026 Malcolm Ryder With that economic input, effects of the system dynamics build sustainability by being inherently regenerative: The measurable outcomes constitute the environment, and the environment fosters confidence in benefits arising from collaboration and synergies. Additionally, the system is open to more and various contributors who essentially add energy into the system without imbalancing it. The full specification of this approach is a solution architecture, described in the following document: Archestra Research continues to scan arts regions such as the East Bay in California for past and present examples of efforts and impacts that now logically map to the system model as dynamically effective candidate contributors.

It’s mid-2026, and the industrialized world is absorbing almost daily shocks from the hyper-speed of AI development. It’s the latest epochal change in work since the internet got real for everyone. This is perhaps why the exhibition of photographs about work, unveiled April 3rd at Oakland Photo Workshop, seems to reach backwards almost farther than nostalgia. It features industry still literally beyond the reach of automation, highlighting what must be done by hand. But for many viewers it shows that being done in places they rarely if ever have been or will go. That distance toys with how we see the work: raising the question of whether the portrayed task, soon enough, is antiquated or instead timeless. Also because of the distance, sometimes the work we see in the pictures is almost like a display of an alien culture. – tasks that accomplish an effect far exceeding the scale of the personal labor, but the effect is not very obvious to anyone other than who is doing the task. This intrigues because the task itself seems exotic; implying no narrative of cause and effect. Other times, however, this group of photographers frames views in a way that the work needs no labeling; the task in scene is a moment that leads to something entirely familiar to us, and the labor is something that is not specialized but simply necessary. It is a kind of task, however, almost never celebrated. In other words, as advertised, the show is built on noticing things that often lie beyond either our awareness or care. But this includes both the exotic and the mundane. A few of the group's photos stand as exceptions to those two strains. For example, in one, the photo is the sole image of a worker being managed by another one - doing something somewhat inscrutable that makes the mystery task seem really critical. A second image is the only picture of a busy team, highlighting the immediate burden of the task. These two pictures add a layer of the energy that is felt in cooperation. Their views stress the workers attending to each other's work as much as they do to their own. All of the other pictures have an unfiltered focus on the worker watching what they're doing themselves. In each case, the connection of the mind, eye, and hand sets the moment up as being nearly dramatic; no one is on “autopilot” in their effort, so not only do we feel they derive great satisfaction from dignifying the work with quality – but their attentiveness means that they are valuable to whoever comes along as the customer or user. Overall, the sense of the show is that we’re watching people with scalpels, not axes; we keep coming back to their hands. That steeps the views in a kind of intimacy that, being a familiar feeling, helps us imagine ourselves, however briefly, in their roles.

Vincent Valdez's Historical Truth When Vincent Valdez was  app r oached in 2023 by Arion Press to  imagine h i s next project, the publisher and the artist were actual l y  continu i ng  an ongoing conversation ,  one  that led to his selection as Arian's first King  Residency a r t i st i n residence .  The project they picked for the residency? Kurt Vonnegut ' s meditation on the catastrophic impact of war, Slaughterhouse-Five. The core  of  Va l dez ' s oe u v r e  i s  hi s m i ssion to dispel what he  calls  " social amnesia " - moments when we as t h e p u bl i c beco m e d i sta n ced from ve ri fiable realit i es by a n unprecedented prevalence of dis i nfor m at i on and cu l tural  polarization. (Sound familia r ?) We must, Valdez believes , recognize and reject that distance . In  contrast to much photography and  high-fidelity representational  painting, Valdez's meticulous creations in hand-drawn  ink have  the  special quality of  amplifying  our awareness of his effort.  His  drawing  registers  as a speech act, a testimony that, when complete, has the force of a single clear  idea .  As we dwell on it  and take in  the details, we increasingly  try to retrace his steps in getting it done. As a result, our extended attention becomes focused concentration, and we can feel ourselves working with him on the  creation of the image - said differently, of having a realization. The feeling is both  like recalling  a memory and making a discovery. It tells us what we might already know, but immediately compares what he sees to what we see in our minds. The Brooklyn Rail  notes that Valdez  "creates images as instruments to probe the past in order to reveal an  immediacy to what is occurring today, and to remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras." Valdez's probing highlights the way we experience the world from multiple perspectives, sometimes reconciling the differences but not always .  And when we act on life from some given perspective, we are not always ready, willing, or able to include the others. Meanwhile, the consequences of our actions are in their own way convincing. The result: truth can be illusory, b u t al so t hat truth ca n s i mply be w ha t  w e  have n o t lo o k ed fo r h a r d enou gh  o r l ooked a t hard en ough . W it ne s ses m ake t he diffe re nc e, a n d Va ld e z is a n enl i ghten i ng w i tness . Va l dez creat e d images for Arian's edition of  Slaughterhouse - Five  that link Vonnegut ' s shifting "realities " of Billy Pilgrim's experience to Valdez ' s own sensibility about the challenge to the i nd i vidual ' s sense - making effort in life .  The suite of images , collectively , both review the life in Vonnegut's text and compare it to Valdez's awareness , an awareness is drawn from his own experience . The drawings explore Billy Pilgrim's fictional life from various perspectives; Valdez's draw i ngs reiterate selected things for more of our at t ention, and they also comment on how we pay attention . The observation ranges var i ously across the imagined versus the real; the mundane versus the trag i c; the i ntimate versus the public; the rational versus the absurd. Published in 1969 as  Slaughterhouse - Five, or , The Ch i ldren's Crusade: A Duty - Dance with Death, Vonnegut's novel has enjoyed notoriety and great influence in v i sual media before, especially with the 1972 film version directed by George Roy Hill. Vincent Valdez's fresh achievement is in bringing its interpretation and original format fully into the present. His interpretation is enormously enhanced by Arion’s handmade artistry. From the type to the paper to the slipcases (including an aluminum casing in Army green for the Deluxe edition), the edition gives us a new way to experience the novel and hints at its moral clarity and enduring relevance.

March 2026 The storefront entrance to The Grand Gallery in Oakland’s Jack London Square features a display space having a character somewhat like an amphitheater. And in the current exhibit held by it, the effect is especially apropos as its featured works restage the early 1960’s East Bay of the critical protest period of the Free Speech Movement and more. At The Grand Gallery These are classic black-and-white photographs laid out in three sections. The left section powerfully iterates “home” in West Oakland. Its numerous scenes, with framing that isolates as well as crystalizes, sit right on the line between each resident possessing perhaps the only space they have or being possessed by it. We see conditions that poignantly say “Doing Without” in a timeless way, but in the context of the whole show they ask “Why?” We easily reflect on a no-win scenario in which today there are forces that create these conditions and there are forces that simply bulldoze it all away. In the center section the shots move us from the first group’s private individual spaces into the public space of Berkeley, and they time-stamp all of the other pictures. In classic witness  posture, the photographer has selectively recorded the high-energy mixed society of non-violent protesters, its diversity spanning gender, ethnicity, occupation, and class. In these shots, the business of being a protester – from the artifacts to occupying space to the body language – is vivid in no small part due to it being archetypal, showing us much of what we see now 60 years later in the wave of federal pursuit of non-legal immigrants spilling over into civilian grounds. Harawitz portfolio online at http://harawitz.com . The third section, at the right, contrasts with the first while also suggesting that the three sections together have, from left to right, a narrative arc. Arguably illustrating no one town or site, they are made up mainly of photos of friendships, perhaps lovers, and perhaps families, showing human bonding and dignity in a milieu far more comfortable –  as if depicting the victorious outcome of the prior strife shown and related efforts to overcome it. Being outside of most of Harawitz’s work that made him historically important in the journalistic genre, this third group attests to his individual personal sensibility. But as viewers standing virtually in his shoes, we get a vibe from these pictures that is part optimism, and part echo of what our own experiences have done to underline our personally shared humanity. In effect, they show us what is at stake in each of the first two groupings. Curated from thousands of photographs in Harawitz’s library, this is the first time that these particular pictures have been formed into a singular exhibit – selectivity accomplished  as a partnership between husband and wife, painter Cheryl Gillett. Broader collections of his work appeared at a 2025 solo show in Albany where they now live. Meanwhile, a comprehensive survey of his pictures is readily available on his website http://harawitz.com . We leave this show not only looking for more of his work but also with a plan to study two of his most notable contemporaries of the period: Nacio Jan Brown, who documented the anti-war movement and counterculture in the Bay Area for the  San Francisco Express Times , and Dennis Stock, known for documenting the California counterculture during the 1960s in his work, California Trip .

Richmond Art Center’s 2026 Art of the African Diaspora exhibit. By definition, a diaspora involves movement across space and time. Also, by definition, an event about the art of a diaspora involves people bringing culture across space and time. And in the Richmond Arts Center’s annual event – titled Art of the African Diaspora  – the criteria for participating makes identity a prerequisite consideration of what will appear in the diasporic pathways. But none of the above predefines the actual artwork or confines it to only one prescribed socialization of culture. In the diaspora, time and place make definite impacts on what moves through them. Environments and conditions are inhibitors on impulses and intentions, just as much as they are inspirations. And to the extent that personality is cultivated in those influences, individuals will differ from each other because of where they are and have been. This generates a broad perspective on the collection of art works created within the diaspora. In the historical context of the diaspora, the Richmond Art Center’s event hosts a vitally important congregation. Fostered now for 30 years, it regularly uncovers the rising, resilient, ambitious community of artists in one of the most far-flung destinations of the African diaspora, the California Bay Area.** That group  of works – all sharing an ancestry –  can “evolve” over time, driven by the intent of each of the makers at their respective times. For any individual artist, is the intent of the work to celebrate, philosophize, or critique? Is it to preserve, adapt, or innovate? And what becomes the compelling attraction in the work for other people within the diaspora? What kind of embrace does the culture offer through the artist’s effort: is it tradition, or soul, or consciousness? Considering all the possible combinations of resources, motives, and attractions, the big message about the true nature of the diaspora is that it cultivates diversity  as the way culture stays relevant. That diversity is not just about the impressive range of mediums a visitor encounters when attending the Art of the African Diaspora exhibit. It's all visual art, but it broadly spans 2D and 3D works, well represented on the event’s online gallery of artists. Below is a look at how, within the Richmond on-land show, even just one medium and subject – painted faces , or identities – contains the breadth of variations that an artist can incorporate resulting in the “flavor” of the work: a wide variety of intents, motives, attractions, and more. Message: within commonality, differences refine meaning. For example, clockwise from the top left , these seven works* show a progression beginning in a more naturalistic representation but gradually increasing in abstraction on the way to the bottom left. Within that kind of difference, an artist’s piece has perhaps “captured” an identity, while another instead “constructed” one. And in doing that, the works use figures in various ways to indicate culture, sometimes simply depicting, and otherwise more symbolically. Meanwhile, the visually simpler images like the first two eliminate most of anything non-essential, leaving a face that is potentially more universally representative. In comparison, the more complex ones like the fifth and sixth suggest that the sense of “self” is always a work in progress, or even a performance. Along the way, we don’t know if any of these are specifically “portraits”; but we don’t need to know: despite their specific differences, the faces all have in common an iconic  presence. Within that commonality, we might take each particular picture’s apparent mood as a reflection of our inner selves  – a reflection as seen either by ourselves or by others. Or instead, the work might appear to be a snapshot of an outward personality , an example of how some people want to be seen. Further, in that duality of inner and outer selves, each face on display can be taken as either a celebration of who we already are, or an exploration of what we might like to be. In short, these variations of faces not only have differing meanings, they also end up emphasizing artists’ wide-ranging approaches to forming meanings. Recognizing the nature of creativity that way, it is easy to understand that there is plenty of room for tradition, adaptation and innovation in this exhibit of the community. Overall, we get to reflect on the famous phrase attributed to Henry Louis Gates: “ There never was one way to be Black. There are 42 million African Americans. There are 42 million ways to be Black .” - Malcolm Ryder   Notes: © 2026 Malcolm Ryder “Flava in Ya Eye” title  inspired by " Flava in Ya Ear ", a song by American rapper Craig Mack released on July 2, 1994 Map illustrations  newly generated by the author via AI from multiple knowledge bases. * Artist credits/copyrights  clockwise from the top left: Hellen; Desola; Zoe Boston; Karla Lawson; K. Dollar-Dickerson; Malik Seneforu; Shawn Sanders ** Scheduling and location details  of the Richmond Art of the African Diaspora events through April are found and updated at Aotad.org

With generative digital imaging, the panic is on about photography. That doesn't need to happen.

The point of creating forms is to make an idea communicable or to make that idea persistent enough to use, continuously or repeatedly, over time. The use of the form is what gives it meaning. "Usage" includes intentionally experiencing the form whenever that is relevant to a need or desire. Naturally, issues such as which form is "the right one" for the usage are basic here. But what makes a form "right", due to its availability and effectiveness, is the distinctive way that availability and effect are preferred in the specific occasion. While that is equally true for builders, designers, and composers, the following pertains to making text or images. See six varieties of preference here: Aside from pure accident or coincidence, the use of the chosen form exploits the form's exposed characteristics to generate an intended conceptual and emotional reaction to their presentation. That reaction may, at one extreme, be "first-and-only-time" (original and unique); at the other extreme it may be entirely "tried-and-true" (learned and conventional). Either way, it is the immediate exposure and experience of the form that originates "meaning" (the distinctive importance) compared to all other occasions of experience -- whether in comparison the meaning is different or similar. Typically, we then associate the meaning with the form. That association can happen at least because the experience has a pattern that matches a pattern of the form -- but entirely differently from that, it may happen simply because we decide to agree and rehearse making a certain association as a rule. Individuals can choose how it happens, but groups can also decide how it happens. This accounts for how a given form could have a uniquely private meaning decided by a person, or a largely public meaning decided socially or culturally. But underlying both is the same range of ways that meaning is recognized.

A Critique of the Art of Identity Today, 2026 in California, African American visual artists are no longer strangers to galleries or large audiences. But this is true partly because it is 2026, and we have the internet and smartphones as distribution channels for self-publishing. It means that images can "premiere" everywhere all at once without gatekeepers. So as part of normal visual culture, the level of familiarity with whatever styles from whatever sources is exponentially higher than when getting exposure meant earning real estate -- whether literally or virtually -- belonging to editors and curators. In this environment of visual proliferation, another important effect is the fast, widespread discovery of like-minded and like-sighted people. With that facility, it is never surprising when one kind of "identity" emerges as being very common, but no more than do very unexpected exceptional identities surface in plain view too without warning. Art exhibits that intentionally survey works done by any subset of the BIPOC/LGBTQ+/GENDER orientations are also now commonplace, and have powerfully confronted the historical habits of othering or marginalizing that still had strength in many of the conventional channels of production or presentation in art. But we can't ignore that audiences earlier latched on to entertainment and marketing as a huge source of exposure to artistic creativity, independent of institutions like magazines, galleries, or museums. Meanwhile commerce tirelessly uses consumer profiling to scientifically optimize "identity" as "personalization" -- the lead attractor to real life experiences. Those various influences are both pervasive and concurrent, which makes the pursuit and promotion of identity in art as well a no-brainer expectation. But then, as identity generally becomes more and more commonplace as a subject, making that subject special requires an additional effort that in some way is exceptional . One line of thought is that "fine" art is the exceptional way. Invented in the 1700's, the idea of fine art primarily intended to elevate attention to the creative labor beyond the goal of manufacturing or utility, and to the level of aesthetic contemplation on par with that held for Nature. With that, refinement in effort aimed for the aesthetics. (Borrowing ideas from philosopher Charles Batteux.) A different line of thought is about the idea of Identity being the subject of contemplation, beyond just of recognition. This makes for the occasion of making art being itself a way of doing that contemplating. Expression as thinking. Identity, but identity as Self. And finally, the physical venue of art presentation, like any theater or church, intentionally promotes a set of conventions that shapes the audience's appreciation as a kind of positive cognitive bias. BY THE PEOPLE, OF THE PEOPLE From there, what is most notable is why this subject might predominate in the efforts of a group or medium or time period. A cult of personality. What do "I", the product of some nurture, manifest of my culture, the people side of nature? Does my culture legitimize who I am? While identity has emerged as a dominant subject in social, political, and artistic discourse certainly in the most recent 25 years, the "identifying as" phenomenon does not and cannot impose a "standard" for any given group beyond stereotyping. Art audiences are no more immune to cultural politics than they are to love stories or rock&roll rhythms. These things are virtual gateways into the fuller experience of the art work that comes with them. We reach back to obvious periods such as the 1960s "counterculture", the 1970s Black is Beautiful movement, the first three waves of feminism, and the Gay Pride movement - each yielding archetypes meant to be enlightening, models meant to be aspirational. But those examples are also overtly oppositional to caricatures and biases that came before them. They emerged in environments that fueled specific experiences and ideas relevant to identity being a handicap or an attraction, a risk or a benefit. It is the diversity of those experiences that also accounts for what is now idiomatically called "a thousand ways to be Black" (attributed to Henry Louis Gates). Summarizing the roots of that diversity, we have unique life experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds, shaped by generational history, personal circumstances, and cultural expression . They form individual stories involving economic status, location, family dynamics, and personal triumphs and challenges. Then those are each displayed by diverse forms of art, music, literature, and community practices across various regions. But it is just as important to not reduce all expression to the type "story". This is because aesthetic reiteration and knowledge through art refers to conditions not just to narratives - to interpretation not just to progression. To image, not just to course. And because there is no experience without an environment of conditions, the representation of environments is no less profound than the surveying of identity. That is how a show by a self-selecting group fuses the unifying distinction of the group's difference with the diversity of its presence. And by doing so in physical locations, convening the participants amplifies that the group, in all of its heterogeneity, is a community. ART IN MOTION Annually, in the East Bay region of California opposite San Francisco, an area-wide set of curated exhibitions takes place as The Art of the African Diaspora. Works are accepted from artists in the East Bay whose family tree branches within the African community's migration across the US continent, such as in the paths here: [Gemini Pro rendering based on the title of the illustration] or here: Source: https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/culture/migration-map based on: William H. Frey, Brookings Institution, analysis of US Census Bureau’s Decennial Censuses, 1920-2000, and 2008-2012 American Community Survey, drawn from IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota,  www.ipums.org  and American Community Survey Public Use Microfiles. My perspective on the overall exhibit encompasses the movement of culture from the Past to the Future. It relies on seeing the features and impacts of displayed works as the effects of environment and purposeful expression shaping each other. It is an analysis of the simple and universal artist's question, "why am I going to express something, and how am I going to express it?" (c) Malcolm Ryder / Artdotdot In examining the works in The Art of the African Diaspora , I use what I propose are the three most characteristic representations of diasporic "culture" -- tradition, soul, and consciousness. As shown here, this is a reflection of the overarching theme of Belonging -- with special attention to how it is cultivated, transmitted, and preserved. (c) Malcolm Ryder / Artdotdot With those ways of accounting for the description of any work in the exhibit, we can grasp the relations of the artist's choices in what to make, why, and how. (c) Malcolm Ryder / Artdotdot ART EN SITU Organized by and at the Richmond Art Center, the 2026 edition of Art of the African Diaspora takes place in dozens of art venues across the East Bay region from January through May.

How a commercial release of a documentary about a historical investigation ruptured the photojournalism community. https://malcolm-ryder.medium.com/shoot-the-messenger-475f18818cee Given the unholy combination of Social Media and AI as top corrosives of truth, it's important to remember that people are more of a threat than either of those. My analysis of the controversy over the documentary The Stringer is a long-form piece in my growing collection of articles about visual culture on the Medium.com publishing site.

Pre-Screening Photography There are many ways in which history and philosophy mythologize each other. But one overt pattern is that a philosophy acts as a filter of historical pursuit, while history makes arguments about what value a given philosophy has. In art this dynamic most often appears as a pairing of an artist’s motivation to change how to work, with a subsequent discovery of how a change influences what we recognize as being art. Artists are credited with innovation, but the value of the innovation may not be attributed until long after the work has been completed or even stopped. Visiting a show of authentic Rauschenbergs comes with the ambition to have his ultimate innovation feel like it bursts into your consciousness the way it is said it burst onto the art scene. But in this case what is on display is more about watching the work gradually emerge from humble beginnings, while the artist simply progressed in a way that didn't show any dependency on anyone else. We're already used to the innovation. For artists viewing the show, the value is in its demonstration of being tenaciously original. From the outside, Rauschenberg’s very long career can be seen as a continuous exploration of what qualifies as art. But that then features several different phases distinguished by working methods. Rauschenberg did not begin his art career as a photographer. But the current show, Robert Rauschenberg's New York: Pictures From The Real World , at the Museum of the City of New York, appropriately begins by featuring his attention to what makes New York typically recognizable -- showing that recognition primarily through his camerawork, then ending with examples of silkscreened photocollages. The exhibit first highlights, more than anything else, his creation of photographs that collect urban iconology by framing and reframing the items figuratively rendered. The items in the earlier pictures usually appear to have been selected because of the “meanings” that they already had. But overall, the exhibited pictures show him as an observer with a pronounced sensitivity to the found, arbitrary or indifferent coincidences of them – coincidences that occurred at any given location as a matter of the densely diverse active interests there. Accentuating his characterization of “city-ness”, Rauschenberg frames both found and organized items with the same apparent interest that he possibly had with staging in the theater , one of his very strongly preferred experiences and working environments. It is not hard to indulge the practical connection between intentional theatrical staging and the arbitrary nature of creating a scene from found objects. In both cases the goal is to discover how their arrangement generates a meaning. Copyright Robert Rauschenberg: from Museum of the City of New York shop https://shop.mcny.org/collections/home-and-office But Rauschenberg also appears to have an early preoccupation with removing the ordinary context from visible items, enough to re-contextualize them himself for a variety of reasons including irony, humor, subversion, surrealism, poetics... or other alternatives to the reasons people perceive images the way they typically do. Copyright Robert Rauschenberg: from Museum of the City of New York shop https://shop.mcny.org/collections/home-and-office As seen in the show, Rauschenberg utilizes three different approaches to the items he displays in his views, with the effect of making them visual material for his idiosyncratic arrangements, in particular, appropriation. The most interesting challenge of appropriating found images is the effort to neutralize how they are recognized in their conventional contexts, which pushes them to a less specific and more abstract  state leaning towards formalism. Copyright Robert Rauschenberg: from Museum of the City of New York shop https://shop.mcny.org/collections/home-and-office But when treating visual items as if they were arbitrary , they could also get used precisely because their existing typical meanings collide, or converse, or together catalyze new ideas not already held in the respective separate items. The photographs don't predict what Rauschenberg would do in collage, but much of the collage work winds up reiterating his way of treating form within the boundaries of the photograph's framing. Artwork (c) Robert Rauschenberg. Photograph (c) Malcolm Ryder Finally, his compositions can operate as catalogs (evidence), as scrapbooks (memory), or as expressionism (metaphor). The consequences are what he is pursuing, whether by improvising or by planning, Over the timespan of the show, Rauschenberg’s photographs explore the conversion of Figures into Icons into Motifs. And with regard to the title of the show,   this is arguably a transformation of what was a notion of real being “objective” discovery into real being “idiosyncratic” truth. Generally, now, we watch him experimenting with his own personal language.