A STRANGE VIBRATION: LENN KELLER, DARCY PADILLA, ELIZABETH SUNFLOWER
Wed., Jan 22 - Tues., April 22, 2025

A Strange Vibration brings to light work by three photojournalists documenting Bay Area women and queer lives at the margins from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Lenn Keller was a self-taught photographer who documented the Queer Liberation Movement through the eyes of a radical black lesbian, and her work now forms the core of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, housed in Oakland. Darcy Padilla’s work follows life in the Tenderloin’s Ambassador Hotel in the 1990s, where people with AIDS and HIV took care of one another during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States. Elizabeth Sunflower’s archive has recently been rediscovered; with a focus on her Naked Seduction series, tracking the antics and activism of sex workers in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Works from each photographer will contextualize their relationships with the communities they documented from outside and within.

Presented in collaboration with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, Ricki Blakesberg & Retro Photo Archive

Image: Elizabeth Sunflower; Retro Photo Archive

INTERIOR LIFE

Curated by PJ Policarpio and Samantha Hiura
with special projects by Marcel Pardo Ariza
Fall 2025

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” 

― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

In the long shadow of centuries of activism and systemic violence, we find ourselves pushed to turn inwards, towards ourselves and the interior lives of others. This inward step opens up a space of deep connection across boundaries of difference to forge communities of belonging. The artists in Interior Life construct sacred architectures of queer BIPOC interiority through the photographic medium. Their intimate focus on themselves, their subjects, and the space between them resists the inherently violent potential of the camera, and empowers them with agency over their own representation. Ultimately, Interior Life explores a sense of tender reverence and community-rooted gestures of care through a philosophical framework of subjectivity.

Image: Clifford Prince