Artist Talk with Rodney Ewing

In Conversation with Meg Shiffler

Tuesday, June 1, 2021
6:00 - 7:30 PM PDT

On Tuesday, June 1st at 6:00 PM PDT, SF Camerawork hosted a conversation with artist Rodney Ewing and curator Meg Shiffler. Rodney and Meg have worked together on multiple occasions. Most significantly, Rodney contributed a newly commissioned work to the 2016 -17 exhibition Not Alone: Exploring the Bonds Between and With Members of the Armed Forces at the SFAC Main Gallery, co curated by Jason Hanasik and Meg Shiffler. 

For this conversation, Rodney and Meg spoke about Rodney’s past and present projects, including Broken Shadows, an ongoing series begun during San Francisco’s 2020 mandatory shelter-in-place order and broadly referencing the positive and negatives of the silk screens Rodney uses to create much of his work:

“The impetus of the project was to keep busy—I told myself that I would create a new work every one and a half days to stabilize my art practice during quarantine. Eventually, Broken Shadows evolved into a project that allowed me to reuse my large archive of silkscreens to continue the conversations about diaspora, place, and identity--ideas that are central in my practice. The central challenge in this project is using my older work to create images that speak to the immediacy of 2020s racially fraught atmosphere.  The re-use of material mirrors the cyclical nature of history; the resulting works are one-of-a-kind images that layer the past with the present to remind us of their inextricable link.”  - Rodney Ewing

ABOUT RODNEY EWING

Rodney Ewing is a San Francisco, CA.Visual Artist. Ewing’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, CA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Root Division, Jack Fischer Gallery, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Alter Space Gallery, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Ictus Projects, and Euqinom Gallery. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Space Program SF, Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts both in San Francisco, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, California, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, and Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking West Virginia University.

ABOUT MEG SHIFFLER

Meg Shiffler is the Galleries Director and Chief Curator for the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC). Every year, the SFAC Galleries features works in diverse media by over 150 local, national and international artists in curated exhibitions that center civic and social issues of our time. The SFAC Galleries also manages an artist in residence program placing artists in City departments and an international Sister City traveling exhibitions program. She is a guest lecturer at regional universities, was a faculty member in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and is a member of the Creative Cities Working Group at Stanford University. She has been a columnist for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, is the author of Jeremy Fish: O Glorious City (Chronicle Books) and most recently was a contributing writer for Jim Marshall: Show Me the Picture (Chronicle Books). The exhibition Jim Marshall's 1967, co curated with Ameilia Davis and originally produced at SF City Hall, will travel through Europe in 2021-22. Prior to her tenure at the SFAC, Meg worked in New York and in Seattle as a curator, writer, researcher and consultant. She attended the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York.

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