In the center of the triptych a family poses alongside a Polaroid and a huge, dark bust of a man’s head. A little boy stands proudly between his sitting relatives, two handprints floating above his head—his father’s larger hand encircling the boy’s own.

For his second family portrait—a facade spanning eleven feet of wall on South First Street––Ghana-born, Detroit-based artist Conrad Egyir asked a family he’d known for years to sit. The poses are a combination of formal and relaxed: next to the boy, his sister sits with a grin, cross-legged and slouching, while to the left a mother raises her hand as if taking an oath. The parallel open hands are a perfect introduction to Egyir’s work, where the intimate and the official stand side-by-side, often sharing identical symbols.

Egyir’s newest exhibition, Chapters of Light, opened at San Jose’s Institute of Contemporary Art earlier this month. The facade, A Chapter of Love, was commissioned by ICA as part of an ongoing project to establish the museum as a visual landmark. A postage stamp affixed to the left panel of the facade sticks out above the top of ICA’s roof, as well as the top of the painting itself—a common three-dimensional element of the artist’s work. 

Egyir’s world is punctuated with ephemera: stamps, binder tabs, notebook paper. These archival materials serve as “visual metaphors for migration,” he says, invoking the spectrum of paperwork and documentation required by both institutions of the state and the university (Egyir grew up in Accra, Ghana’s capital, and moved to the U.S. as a student).

Text is another recurring element in Egyir’s work, frequently appearing in English, Swahili and Twi, a West African dialect the artist names as his “local, native tongue.”

“I often use it to add an extra layer of a narrative,” he says. “In my MFA program, I was heavy on symbols and iconography from West Africa, but my colleagues had trouble understanding them visually so I had to find a way to use language to break that divide.”

Books also show up in many of the show’s paintings, some real, some invented. For “Mitchell’s Class,” the piece which graces the top of ICA’s webpage for the exhibition, Egyir asked his model (in this case, his studio assistant Mitchell) about his favorite books. The titles––Fred Moten’s Black & Blur and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man––are clearly displayed, balancing atop the subject’s head.

Egyir says the placement is a nod to American photographer Paul Strand, whose early 1960s portrait of a young Ghanian woman, Anna Attinga Frafra, in the same pose came to represent the country’s early days of independence. 

“We [Ghana] had just gained our independence, just got out of colonialism, and were inheriting, or trying to establish our own, literature and curriculum,” he says, of the iconic photo. 

For Mitchell’s Class, Egyir elevates Strand’s personalization of history not just by naming his subject in the title (as Strand did), but by displaying Mitchell’s own literary canon. The sense of collaboration and agency is unique in an artist/model dynamic––particularly considering the treatment of Black subjects throughout Western art history. 

In Mediums, the newest series in the exhibition, the books carry titles of concepts instead: “THE CREATOR / THE CREATURE / AND THE LAND,” reads one. These phrases, Egyir explains, entered his mind when he returned to Ghana after COVID-19 hit. 

“Whenever I go back home, I go straight to the village. People ask me, ‘Why don’t you go to Accra?’ But there’s something very humbling about being in the village, going straight to the people, that a lot of people in cities have no experience with.”

Before emigrating, he’d spent a year in his family’s village, assisting the school his grandfather had founded there. (The archival motif represents a legacy of education, as well: Egyir comes from a family of teachers on both sides.)

“I had this longing to go back home and help him develop it into something larger, to set up a new curriculum…which played a part in the iconographies, textures, formal aspects of my paintings.”

It makes sense, then, that Egyir’s visual “curriculum” transcends boundaries of all kinds: the frames of his paintings, the divide between text and image, and the roof of the museum itself.

Conrad Egyir: Chapters of Light
Now showing, 12pm-5pm, Free
ICA, San Jose

This Friday, after a brief closure, a memorial gallery dedicated to the late photographer David Pace will reopen at San Jose’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Truly a man who contained artistic multitudes, Pace worked across decades, beginning from the moment he was gifted a Brownie Hawkeye camera for his eighth birthday in February, 1959.

The gallery at the back of the ICA is humble, white-walled and concrete-floored. As guests enter, they are welcomed by a dedication from Nicki Moffat, ICA board member and longtime friend of Pace, along with whimsical music videos created with Victor Bellomo. Friends with Pace since they attended Catholic school together in Sunnyvale in the 1950s, Bellomo is one of Pace’s first subjects, and appears in his earliest photos, taken with the Hawkeye camera he so loved.

Pace died of leukemia in October of 2020. The current exhibit reads not only as a collection of his works over the years, but as a loving eulogy to a man who carried wonderment and gratitude through his art.

“You see so many elements of him,” says Nicki Moffat. “Because he wasn’t just one thing, his photographs weren’t always the same.”

“David Pace: Speaking Through Images” unfolds gradually. The silence and negative space draw the viewer in, inviting viewers to linger on photos presented on the wall to the right.

On the black-and-white back wall, the eye is drawn past a series of “anonymous” photos from World War II, then through images of an abandoned Route 66. When viewers turn around, they are confronted with a larger-than-life, full-color vinyl print of Pace’s personal bookshelf. Diane Jonte-Pace, David’s wife of nearly 50 years, describes the feeling as one of “color shock.”

Clear throughlines in Pace’s work are honesty and intimacy. While in Burkina Faso, Pace took many spontaneous portraits of dancing couples that lack any feeling of voyeurism so typical of white photographers in Africa.

As Jonte-Pace explains, this is because David wasn’t standing on the periphery taking photos: he was on the dance floor.

“In Burkina Faso, on Friday, it was market day,” Jonte-Pace says. “Friday night, there was always a dance because people come from neighboring villages. So we were dancing in the dark, but David had his flash. He was dancing with the community, and photographing while he danced.”

It was only later that Pace would discover whether or not he had taken a good photo. At the time, the point was simply to engage: to be present with people.

While the startling, nearly technicolor brilliance of Pace’s bookshelf—complete with his own toys and childhood baseball glove—presents a picture of who he was through a collection of his favorite items, the best peek into the mind of David Pace is his “Velocity” series.

Taken from the window of a moving bullet train, the “Velocity” series is named for a poem by Billy Collins—a favorite of Pace’s. After battling Lymphoma, Pace had once again become strong enough to travel, and he and Diane traveled together from Tokyo to Kyoto.

“I was giving a talk in Japan, and so we traveled to Tokyo and then took the bullet train to Kyoto. We got tickets on both sides of the train so that he could move from one side to the other, depending on where the light was best,” Diane explains.

As she does, she laughs and mimics David, jumping back and forth across the aisle of the train to put his camera up to the window. Like his and Diane’s book of photographs, Where the Time Goes, “Velocity” is a meditation on the preciousness of life.

“[‘Velocity’] came out of a sense of realization of the brevity of his own life, the fragility of his own life,” says Jonte-Pace.

The series captures the rushing movement of a body on a train, and the stillness of objects outside: buildings, trees, powerlines. Some snap beautifully into focus, while the rest becomes a blur of motion. “Velocity” forms a commentary on the delicate transience of life: as we rush through it, certain things may come into focus. The movement turns each photograph into the shortest possible timeline: the beginning on the left side of the frame, the ending on the right, and the colorful, fluid blur in the middle.

David Pace: Speaking Through Images
Reopens Fri
Free
Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose

Though it is only roughly the size of Connecticut, Jamaica’s influence on world culture is impossible to overstate. This week, Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s stunning mixed-media exhibit wraps up at San Jose’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and to celebrate the run, San Jose Jazz hosts “Reggae Warrior” Winstrong out front in their roving Boombox Truck. The mighty singer takes influence from genre-melding artists like KRS-One, and mixes dancehall, hip hop, roots and reggae into an inspired whole. He’s got a conscious message, too, as heard on his evergreen dub single “Save the Environment.”

Winstrong
Friday, 8pm, Free
Parque de los Pobladores, San Jose

Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s stunning solo mixed-media exhibition has been on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art since March, but its run ends soon. This Saturday, as the exhibit enters its final weeks, ICA holds a curator-led tour of the exhibit, inviting people to indulge their imagination in Patterson’s florid mixed-media worlds. Using intricate fabrics, tapestries and jewelry, Patterson dazzles the eye with interwoven images of faces, expressions, nature and life. ICA’s Christine Koppes and Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, lead the tour.

Editor’s note: Due to the resurgence of Covid in Santa Clara County, this event has been moved online. Click link below to RSVP.

Curator-Led Tour
Sat, 11am, Free
ICA, San Jose

This week, South First Fridays art walk and street market are back with artists showing their paintings, ceramics, photographs, music and more all along the SoFA District. Exhibitions include young musicians slangin’ tunes for San Jose Jazz on the corner of First and San Carlos, and a film/art show with live musical accompaniment at KALEID Gallery. At MACLA, a new exhibition memorializes loved ones lost to COVID, and invites the community to contribute photos of their own loved ones. There’s plenty more, plus onsite food trucks from 3 Brothers Kitchen and Road Doggs to satisfy your cravings.

SoFA First Friday
Fri, 5pm, Free
South First Street, San Jose

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘portrait?’ Someone’s face? A head-and-shoulders shot, like the Mona Lisa? Or is it something more personal: a depiction of someone’s skin and body? LA-based artist Amir H. Fallah thinks it is exactly none of these things. In his portraits, Fallah depicts obscured bodies of hooded faces, defined by their environments rather than their skin tone or facial features. In a free online event hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Fallah discusses his work in the context of personal experience, veganism, allegory, film, and hip hop.

Amir H. Fallah
Wed, 6pm, Free (registration required)