Yves B. Golden’s The Burden
A solo show curated by Seta Morton
Opening Saturday, September 28, 2024, 5–7PM @ The Pit: 3015 Dolores St. LA, CA 90065
“Yves B Golden is an artist whose work gleams at multiple intersections of media, including sculpture and embodiment, activism and curation, written word and sound, installation and performance.” — Seta Morton
Feminist Center for Creative Work is thrilled to announce the opening of our latest Artist In Residence exhibit — a collection of sculptural works and programs by Yves B. Golden, curated by Seta Morton. The exhibit, Golden’s first solo exhibition of sculptures, addresses the imperative to fight for humanity and dignity, amidst the violence of Western imperialism in our everyday lives.
The works in the exhibit, which also include a printed publication entitled The Burden, comprise a delicate armory of sculptural and textual provocations. The show’s title is rooted in the old negro spiritual “Down by the Riverside” — and references the laying down of the burden to fight and engage in our world’s violent systems. Through programs, Golden and Morton are bringing together artists in their communities to be in conversation with Golden and to be in ritual with the sculptures.
They invite audiences to engage with the questions of this show: How do we understand and reclaim our human rights (or the human rights of others) in the wake of war? Is global disarmament achievable without a universal understanding of dignity?
This project, associated programs, and publication were made possible with grants from the California Arts Council and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Schedule of Programming
Exhibit Open Hours @ The Pit:
Tuesdays–Saturdays, September 24 through October 31, 11AM–5PM
Exhibit Open Hours @ the new FCCW:
Wednesdays–Saturdays, November 2 through November 16, 11AM–5PM
Exhibition Opening: Yves B. Golden’s The Burden
Saturday, September 28, 2024
5–7PM
The Pit: 3015 Dolores St. Los Angeles, CA 90065
Free
Celebrate the opening of Artist in Residence Yves B. Golden’s project The Burden, curated by Seta Morton. Come see the exhibit, and see other work on view at The Pit.
Artist Talk with Yves B. Golden, Cedric Mitchell & Gogo Graham
Saturday, October 5, 2024
6-8 PM
The Pit: 3015 Dolores St. Los Angeles, CA 90065
Free
Join us at The Pit for a conversation with our artist in residence and collaborators about the relationships and processes behind the works in the exhibit.
FCCW Exhibition Opening + The Burden Book Celebration
Saturday, November 2, 2024
10AM-6PM
FCCW’s new home: 3053 Rosslyn St. Los Angeles, CA 90065
Free
See the second iteration of The Burden exhibit at the new Feminist Center for Creative Work and celebrate the show’s publication, The Burden, the book. Join us for a DJ set by St. Mozelle & friends on our patio from 3–6PM — all in conjunction with LARB’s LitLit @ The Pit and across our campus.
Artist Statement by Yves B. Golden
People like to believe every human being is born with the right to prosper, to self-identify, to live without shame amongst others without the threat of annihilation. However, Western imperialism and its rippling effect on the globe produces a reality where these rights, in any instant, can be confiscated and refused in the name of profit, expansion, bigotry, racism, etc. The world continues to shift further away from the universal and divinely granted dignity embedded in every soul. How do we understand or, when necessary, reclaim our human rights (or the human rights of others) in the wake of war? How is global disarmament achievable without a universal understanding of dignity?
Dignity materializes when it’s evoked and rooted in a visual language people can identify with. People understand and perform transactions at an exponential rate — those transactions are all embedded with a visual language based on magic and alchemy. Poetry, the hijacking and rearranging of language, may disrupt the cycle of ceaseless transactions, which turn people into commodities, digits, and instead, help us arrive at a universal understanding of human worth. Growing up under the leadership of critically engaged elders grounded us in storytelling/public speaking, grassroots organizing and cooperative economics which taught me that words and how you share them with others can shake people to their cores, in everlasting ways. Throughout my practice, I’ve collaged symbols and language through mixed media sculpture, performance, screenprinting and community activism.
Making an impact means moving intentionally as we straddle the line between “craft” and the hard truth. Fargo Nissim Tbakhi says that “craft…is a counter revolutionary machine” which reproduces ethical failures. I plan to cultivate a conversation with this work and subsequent programming, which address disarmament, dismantling the counter revolutionary machine, and being unflinchingly radical, armed with the truth, in the wake of converging humanitarian catastrophes. As artists and writers, we must not let the imperial core reduce our offerings to “craft” – defanged and apolitical.
Curatorial Statement by Seta Morton
Gonna lay down my burden
Down by the riverside
Study war no more
Yves B. Golden’s The Burden, “as in the burden you lay down” she explains, draws it’s title from a negro spiritual “Down by the Riverside.” An apt title for Golden, whose body of work both attends and surrenders to the fluidity of water and, with this exhibition, demands demilitarization. Within the traditions of Black feminist pedagogy as transformative praxis, The Burden aims to soften our senses while sharpening our teeth and tongues around the shape of disarmament.
For her first solo sculpture exhibition, Golden is building an armory of all things glass, granular, and fragile. Rendering swords and weapons out of glass, within this collection of new sculptures and poetics, Golden invokes the Book of Isaiah—“and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” As the precarity of our human rights becomes more and more weaponized, The Burden tends to the inherent dignity of all humans, the symbolism of images, the materiality of objects and the human rituals that imbue them with meaning. Within this exhibition and its activations, both the objects and their makers will find a protective space for all that they are — delicate, sacred, precious, and otherwise shatter-able.
Bios
Yves B. Golden is a poet and artist based in Los Angeles. She uses mixed media sculpture, performance, sound, and olfaction to unpack questions of human worth, dignity, and transmutation. Golden pulls from natural processes to articulate the flow and obstruction of converging histories — curing objects in reactive fluids to physically break down language and to transmute the temporal into symbolic sculptures. Her poethical practice is rooted in media literacy, critical pedagogy, and global disarmament. Her work has been shown in Jupiter Artland, Scotland, Yaby, Madrid, and The New Museum, NYC. Photo Credit: George Nebieridze.
Seta Morton is an interdisciplinary curator, writer, and artist based in Lenapehoking (New York, NY). She is the Program Director/Associate Curator at Danspace Project and the managing editor of Danspace’s print and digital publications. Alongside Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Danspace, Seta has curated numerous artist commissions, programs, and projects. Seta’s curatorial practice is grounded in somatics, collaborative practice, and Black feminist thought. Seta’s written and embodied works live in the tremble between iteration, fermentation, and intergenerational memory. Photo Credit: Everett Ravens.