Brett Cook and Liz Lerman: Reflection and Action

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) San Francisco, CA October 20, 2022 – June 11, 2023

Video courtesy of YBCA

In an expansive multidisciplinary exhibition, visual artist Brett Cook and choreographer Liz Lerman transform YBCA’s galleries into a space for collective creation and inspiration, guided by their leadership in collaborative art-making based in community relationships. Weaving together video, dance, installation, painting, and other interactive works, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in the complexity and wide-reaching social impact of Cook and Lerman as catalysts for enacting change in the world.

Comprising more than 150 individual works, the exhibition functions not only as a survey of the two artists’ decades-long careers, but a window into their current practices and the future directions of their work. The dialogue and interplay between their overlapping interests carries viewers through five distinct thematic sections, with opportunities for visitors to interact and contribute to the exhibition.

YBCA Reflection and Action

Photos by Charlie Villyard

YBCA Reflection and Action

YBCA Reflection and Action

YBCA Reflection and Action

YBCA Reflection and Action

YBCA Reflection and Action

Cook’s portion of the exhibition includes Gardeners of Belonging (2022), a new series of portraits created of and by local Bay Area community leaders—around whom various public programming elements will be created—co-commissioned with Oakland’s Life is Living Festival; paintings from the artist’s Black (W)hole (2020) series in partnership with Destiny Arts Youth Performance Center, which are a healing, celebratory experience mourning and honoring the lives of six young people who died in and around Oakland; and The Congregation (1993–2014), more than 50 monumental scale portraits Cook painted in the Bay Area, New York, and New Jersey brought together for the first time. His paintings are accompanied by documentation and ephemera from community-led projects throughout Cook’s career, telling the stories of relationships and connection across geographies and time.

Gardeners of Belonging

Life is Living 2022 featured Cook's "Gardeners of Belonging," now on view at YBCA. Life is Living is an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, eco-equity performance event at DeFremery Park in West Oakland hosted together with Youth Speaks Inc./the Living Word Project, the Friends of DeFremery Park, Hood Games, the Estria Foundation, the Oakland Public Library, and others.

Gardeners of Belonging

Gardeners of Belonging

Lerman’s portion of the exhibition includes an immersive video installation that brings together more than three decades of groundbreaking choreographic works—from the incorporation of speaking roles for dancers, to unorthodox subject matter such as nuclear waste and genetics. Visitors are invited to locate themselves inside the works, including newly-recorded choreographic instructions from Lerman where participants are encouraged to respond through dance and movement in YBCA’s courtyard using wireless headphones and their imagination; and a recreation of Lerman’s office space that takes visitors inside her creative process. Also on view is Back Stage (2022), a multimedia installation of artifacts and ephemera charting her family’s history, fragmented elements of a theater backstage, and original video composed by Lerman and her daughter Anna Spelman exploring her psyche and approach to her work. Lerman’s Critical Response Process holds space in the galleries as an interactive installation, inviting viewers to become participants in her globally-renowned collaborative methodology. A reflection of Lerman’s approach, the exhibition explicitly addresses the back of the mind, the swirling space of imagination and contemporary stories that form the basis for subsequent work.

This dynamic presentation is the culmination of Cook and Lerman’s three years in residence as Senior Fellows at YBCA, centering artists as leaders inside the organization and in the communities they serve. Central to both artists’ practices is advancing the essential role of art in social and cultural progress. Beginning as Senior Fellows in the fall of 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic altered the course of their time and trajectory with the organization, bringing them into deep collaboration with YBCA’s leadership.