For Immediate Release:

Blazing and Blasted: Post-Punk Pre-Tech in 1990s explores a highly-charged period in the city’s cultural history

September 27, 2019 – January 18, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (August 6, 2019) – The era situated after the influx of punk rock but before the apex of socioeconomic stratification resulting from the dot com boom, the 1990s fostered a period of extraordinary artistic activity in San Francisco. Opening on September 27, 2019 at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (MFA), Blazing and Blasted: Post-Punk Pre-Tech Underground Film in 1990s San Francisco presents experimental short films of the decade from key figures of San Francisco’s underground film community: Craig Baldwin, Chris Johanson, Anne McGuire, Jenni Olson, and Thad Povey, among others. The program is curated by Joel Shepard.

Blazing and Blasted is presented in conjunction with MFA’s exhibition Michael Jang’s California. Featuring more than 15 low-budget artists’ films, Shepard identifies a spirit of rebellion and youthful energy in the program akin to Jang’s prolific photographic documentation of all strata of Californian life. An opening reception takes place on Saturday, September 28, 5–8pm in tandem with the reception for Michael Jang’s California.

“This may have been the last time San Francisco had what could be termed an actual ‘underground’ art scene,” Shepard says. “And yet most of these artists continue to work and live here. Organizations like Artists’ Television Access and San Francisco Cinematheque, continue to operate. Let us celebrate that unique moment, when the city burned like ice.”

The program centers on artists drawing inspiration from a vibrant street energy to produce and share work rooted in the physical culture of their surroundings. The city’s independent filmmakers shot, cut, cast, and edited films with whatever was available, experimenting with narrative, poetic, and collagist approaches to create something beautiful that transcended its original context. Jenni Olson’s elegiac narrative Blue Diary (1997) roams San Francisco’s urban 2 McEvoy Foundation for the Arts Blazing and Blasted: Post-Punk Pre-Tech Underground Film in 1990s San Francisco landscape from the perspective of a lesbian pining over a chance encounter with a heterosexual girl while Craig Baldwin’s landmark science fiction collage film Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991) presents an arresting critique of U.S. involvement in post-WWII Latin America. Later, a slowly melting strawberry sundae takes on an aura of postmodernist menace in George Kuchar’s Uncle Evil (1996) that playfully bristles next to the examination of media-defined stereotypes in Cauleen Smith’s Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1998).

Blazing and Blasted celebrates this singular period in the city’s cultural history when irreverent mixtures of subject matter and style collapsed distinctions between high- and low- brow. Yet the program is no nostalgic time-capsule of a bygone San Francisco and its subcultural artifacts. These films are at times grotesque, poignant, disturbing, and ultimately unforgettable. Reencountering them today unleashes vital questions of identity, belonging, home, landscape, and privilege in the context of the city’s current cultural moment.

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Joel Shepard is a San Francisco-based film curator who has been practicing his adventurous form of programming in the Bay Area for more than two decades. As curator of film and video at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts until 2018, Shepard programmed many influential film series such as New Filipino Cinema, A Crack in the World: Cinema of Chaos and Transcendence, Fearless: Chinese Independent, Go to Hell for the Holidays, and Freaks, Punks, Skanks, and Cranks. Shepard has also organized film programs for San Francisco Cinematheque, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Roxie Theater, and others. He received his BA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Blazing and Blasted is presented in four programs, each beginning near the top of the hour.

Program 1: Creepy Crawl

Dean Snider Without You Babe, 1989, 5 min.

Thad Povey Thine Inward-Looking Eyes, 1993, 2 min.

Anne McGuire The Waltons, 1996, 7 min.

Sarah Jacobson I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, 1993, 25 min.

Survival Research Laboratories Crime Wave (excerpt), 1995, 10 min.

3 McEvoy Foundation for the Arts Blazing and Blasted: Post-Punk Pre-Tech Underground Film in 1990s San Francisco

Martha Colburn Spiders in Love: An Arachnorgasmic Musical, 2000, 5 min.

Program 2: Subterranean

George Kuchar Uncle Evil, 1996, 7 min.

Craig Baldwin Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, 1991, 48 min.

Program 3: Inside Out

Jenni Olson Blue Diary, 1997, 6 min.

Chris Johanson Encinitas Realization, 1999, 3 min.

Cauleen Smith Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), 1992, 6 min.

Valerie Soe Picturing Oriental Girls: A [RE] Educational Videotape, 1992, 15 min.

Lourdes Portillo Sometimes My Feet Go Numb, 1996, 2 min.

Veronica Majano Calle Chula, 1998, 12 min.

Greta Snider Flight, 1997, 7 min.

Program 4: Sludge

Jon Moritsugu Terminal USA, 1993, 54 min.

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Michael Jang’s California September 27, 2019 – January 18, 2020

Michael Jang’s California explores the artist’s career as a portrait and street photographer in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, assembling dozens of vintage and contemporary prints as well as ephemera from his photographic process over the years. This survey is the artist’s first retrospective exhibition. It presents a rare journey through Jang’s career, from

4 McEvoy Foundation for the Arts Blazing and Blasted: Post-Punk Pre-Tech Underground Film in 1990s San Francisco early student work in the 1970s to commercial headshots of aspiring television weather reporters in the 1980s, to his series on teenage garage bands in the early 2000s. Photographs from the McEvoy Family Collection situate Jang’s work among his major influences: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. Michael Jang’s California is curated by SFMOMA curator emerita of photography, Sandra S. Phillips.

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McEvoy Foundation for the Arts The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (MFA) presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes present in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, MFA creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, MFA embodies a far-reaching vision of the McEvoy Family Collection’s potential to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. MFA invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. Each year, these collaborations produce exhibitions in MFA’s gallery, new media programs in the Screening Room, as well as many film, music, literary, and performing arts events each year.

The McEvoy Family Collection features works in a wide array of media such as painting, photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and installation. Artists include Mamma Andersson, Diane Arbus, Carol Bove, Brassaï, Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Friedlander, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Goshka Macuga, Christian Marclay, Robert Motherwell, Nathan Oliveira, Dario Robleto, Larry Sultan, Mark di Suvero, Wayne Thiebaud, , James Welling, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Libby Black, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others. A shared theme of books, newspapers, and other media reflects the family’s long career in publishing.

Media Contacts Wendy Norris, [email protected], (415) 307-3853 Nate Gellman, [email protected], (415) 580-7605

McEvoy Foundation for the Arts 1150 25th Street, Building B San Francisco, CA 94107 Visit mcevoyarts.org or call 415.580.7605 for more information. @mcevoyarts

Tuesday–Friday: 10am–6pm Saturday: 11am–5pm Sunday–Monday: Closed

Exhibitions are free and open to the public.

IMAGE CREDITS: Jenni Olson, Still from Blue Diary, 1997, 6 min. © Jenni Olson. Courtesy the artist; Craig Baldwin, Still from Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, 1991, 48 min. © Craig Baldwin. Courtesy the artist.

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