A night of reading and dance with old friends and new
Old Friends/New Friends logotype
Old Friends/New Friends takes inspiration from Creativity Explored’s generous four-decade history in the Mission district in San Francisco. Over the course of the summer 2023, Creativity Explored artists, in workshops along with guest artists, including several original participants of the fabled Mission School, have created work about their community, friends and neighborhood.
On Thursday, November 9, join us for an evening of art, featuring introductions with curator Natasha Boas, live readings by artist Amanda Eicher, and a work in progress showing of Chain Mail, a new performance project with Reniel Del Rosario, Emma Lanier, and Cauveri Suresh.
Activations
Thursday, November 9
5:00 to 7:00 PM
Reading of Adobe Books Genealogy by Amanda Eicher & Andrew McKinley
Chain Mail work in progress showing by Reniel Del Rosario, Emma Lanier, and Cauveri Suresh.
About the live reading
Surprise reading with Old Friends/New Friends artist Amanda Eicher and Mission neighborhood Adobe Books founder Andrew McKinley.
Known affectionately as The Living Room of the Mission, Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative, Inc. ("Adobe Books" or "Adobe") was founded in 1989 by Andrew McKinley at 3166 16th Street. The store became a bohemian nexus for a large and rotating cast of artists, musicians, writers, readers, thinkers, and whoever was looking for an old comfortable couch and a place to feel welcome. With an open heart and open door, Adobe Books has played host over the years to an innumerable number of memorable afternoons and evenings.
About Amanda Eicher
Amanda Eicher is an artist, educator, and arts administrator who has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 1999. Currently the Executive Director at NIAD Art Center, Amanda has also worked at Creativity Explored as a teaching artist. In 2001, she collaborated with Andrew McKinley and the Adobe Books community (which includes many CE artists) to open The Back Room Gallery, a one-room project space dedicated to installation work by emerging artists, where Amanda was a curator through 2003 before passing curatorial duties to a series of collaborative and cooperative groups, one of which continues to maintain The Back Room presently.
Rehearsal picture of dancers, Emma Lanier and Cauveri Suresh
About Chain Mail
Chain Mail studies the paradox of ceramic chains fabricated by Del Rosario. Their physical properties—what sounds ceramic links make, how they move, what tasks they can be used for, and their innate fragility—are points of inquiry. They are source material for movement generation as well as objects to partner with through the course of the dance. Though chains may represent literal confinement, imposition, or violence, through our study of the ceramic chains we seek new possibilities for how we can use objects, our physical environments, and one another to access the many freedoms housed in our bodies.
Ceramicist Reniel del Rosario and dance artists Emma Lanier and Cauveri Suresh create interdisciplinary site-specific performances that consider relationships between bodies, between body and object, body and space, and object and space. Our trio’s alternatively sardonic and earnest point of view confronts the strictures of the mediums in which we work. We began working together in 2021, during which time our collaborative has explored alternative modes for creating and presenting our artworks that attune closely to the site, make use of unusual spaces and vantage points, and consider how to communicate across mediums.
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.