SFMOMA, The Historical Present, and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle.

Every year, SFMOMA awards the prestigious SECA prize to three exceptional artists. It so happens that all three winners, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Professor of Painting, UC Berkeley), Sahar Khoury (MFA, UC Berkeley, 2013), and Marlon Mullen (supported by NIAD, run by Amanda Eicher, MFA, UC Berkeley, 2010), have strong ties to the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice. We already featured Sahar Khoury's work, and this story focuses on Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle. Professor A.C. Hinkle joined Art Practice in 2018.

She is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer born in Louisville, KY who has often split her time between multiple geographies simultaneously. Hinkle utilizes drawing, painting, photography, dance, sculpture, and socially engaged projects in order to navigate 'The Historical Present,' a term that has become a mantra for her practice, in which she strives to examine the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective in relationship to gender, race, and politics of being.

For the SECA show, Hinkle presented works in various media ranging from paintings, photography, fibers, and ceramics. THEY is a series based on enlargements of historical colonial photographic postcards from West Africa. With layers of collage and painting, she interrupts colonial narratives of empire and occupation in order to remix, reimagine and retrieve the subjectivity of the individuals captured in the postcards.

The exhibition premiered collages in Professor Hinkle's practice that engage with colonial architecture, in which the land is taking over and disrupting visible and invisible structures of power. These works challenge the boundaries of time: While the impacts of colonialism continue to affect the present, the works show how it is also possible to implicate oneself within the residue of colonialism and its ongoing impact.

As critic Charles Desmarais writes in the SF Chronicle, Hinkle foregrounds "a past that was once imposed, but is now surreally shared."

The show is open to the public at SFMOMA until April 12, 2020. People under the age of 18 always have free entry.

The Rubber Tree, 2019
Watercolor paper, magazine clippings, and acrylic paint on inkjet print
Courtesy the artist

Ensconced Pt. I and THEY: Jardinière [vessel] #1, #2 #3, 2019
Rattan fibers, synthetic fibers, and beads, ceramic
Courtesy the artist

THEY: Jardinière [vessel] , 2019, detail
Ceramic, synthetic fibers, and beads
Courtesy the artist

Pangea: Sanguine & Sun, 2019
Acrylic paint on canvas
Courtesy the artist