About the exhibition
Taking the essay “Technology & Ethos, Vol. 2 Book of Life” by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) as a framework, Rodney Ewing and Nyame Brown created paintings, drawings, works on paper, and objects reflecting on and conceptualizing new technologies, ranging from mass communication to space travel, as they pertain to the specific needs of a Black diasporic community. This exhibition originated at the Art and Art History Gallery at Santa Clara University and was curated by Pancho Jiménez.
Nyame Brown is an Afrofuturist installation artist who works in painting, drawing, cut paper, blackboards, augmented reality, gaming, and fashion. His work addresses the Black imagination as a space for new ways to perceive the Diaspora as trans-Atlantic, psychic, and imagined—not just through unity and similarity, but also by looking at the dynamics of difference.
Brown received his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA from Yale School of Art and Architecture. He is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and the Richard Dreihaus Foundation Individual Artist Award. He has held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; and the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans, LA. He has held solo exhibitions across the U.S., notably at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Hearst Museum at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA; and the West Virginia University Art Museum, Morgantown.
Rodney Ewing is a visual artist whose drawings, installations, and mixed media focus on the intersection of body and place, memory and fact, re-examining human histories, cultural conditions, and trauma. Rodney received his BFA at Louisiana State University and his MFA from West Virginia University.
Ewing’s work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY. Ewing is a grantee of the San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grant (2016-2020) and a 2022-2023 Pollack-Krasner Award recipient. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, CA; Djerassi, Woodside, CA; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska; NARS, Brooklyn, NY; and Fountainhead, Miami, FL. His work is included in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, CA; Fairfield University Art Museum, CT; and Tisch Library at Tufts University, Medford, MA, among others.
Pancho Jiménez is a Senior Lecturer & the Department of Art and Art History Art Gallery Director at Santa Clara University.
Pancho Jiménes holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Sculptural Ceramics from San Francisco State University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Santa Clara University. He has taught courses at San Francisco State University, West Valley College and is currently a Senior Lecturer at Santa Clara University where he has been teaching since 1999. He teaches studio art courses in Ceramic Sculpture and Three-Dimensional Design and serves as Gallery Director for the Art and Art History Department Gallery. He is also an Academic Adviser in the Drahmann Advising and Learning Resource Center.
Pancho has exhibited at the Sonny Art Center in London, England, extensively in the Bay Area and nationally at museums, universities, commercial galleries and civic spaces. His work is in permanent collections at the Crocker Museum of Art, the Triton Museum of Art, the Autry Museum of American West, the University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University . He has been featured in Ceramics Monthly and numerous publications including, “The Ceramic Design Book”, “Extruded Ceramics” and “500 Ceramic Sculptures.” In 2018 he was selected as an Artist Laureate by Silicon Valley Creates. More recently his work was exhibited at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco.
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