Words and Places: Etel Adnan April 17, 2013

Exhibit April 17-June 29, 2013 - Opening Reception April 17, 2013, 6-8pm

The graduating class of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts will present its thesis exhibition, Words and Places: Etel Adnan, April 17 through June 29, 2013, in the new galleries of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, located at 360 Kansas Street in San Francisco. The exhibition is free and open to the public, with an opening reception on Wednesday, April 17, from 6-8 p.m.

Words and Places: Etel Adnan will be the first large-scale institutional exhibition of work by the Lebanese writer, poet, and painter Etel Adnan, spanning six decades of her artistic practice. Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, Adnan has spent her life between places-Beirut, Paris, and the Bay Area-negotiating their different cultures and languages, as well as her distinctive position among them. This experience of displacement deeply informs her work, which similarly ranges between mediums and formats. Her work has recently been included in dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, Germany, 2012) and the Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon (London, 2010).

The exhibition explores Adnan's complex negotiation between verbal and visual forms of expression. Some of the featured paintings include elements of geographical specificity-for instance a series of paintings of Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco, a place that she says "orients" her-whereas others are ambiguous paintings of envisioned "non-places." Adnan's leporellos, or folding books, offer a compelling fusion of written texts and painted or drawn images. Their unique design is intended to accommodate narrative, and they connect the immediacy of her gestural paintings with the extended durations of her writings.

Official Website: http://cca.edu/curatorialpractice