The de Young presents the third iteration in their series of exhibitions drawn from a major acquisition of 42 artworks by 30 emerging and midcareer Bay Area artists. Supported by the Svane Family Foundation’s $1 million gift, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco follows the inaugural Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift in 2023 and About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift in 2024 with a third show, Superficial Matters: Artists from the Svane Gift and Beyond. This exhibition explores issues of identity via eight Bay Area artists who mine the material potential of their art forms, expanding the possibilities of their chosen medium.
Reshaping identity
The show focuses on the values that Western visual culture places on appearance and the surface aspect of identity. Meaning and depth exist below this surface in a complex relationship with authentic selfhood, and this push and pull is the creative impetus for many of the pieces in Superficial Matters. The exhibition takes on the split between substance and appearance, examining how it has shaped — and constrained — representations of womanhood.
The artists
Maria A. Guzmán Capron creates soft, tactile sculptures from secondhand garments. Me Contuve (I held back) (2022), featured above, reflects on her experiences as a migrant and mother through a colorful assemblage of hybrid figures with multiple limbs and heads.
Christiane Lyons reconfigures womanhood by depicting multiple identities in a single image. In her oil painting Leonora: Arrangement in Radiant Magenta and Cadmium Red Light, 2021 (featured image above), we see a figure emerging from what appears to be a second figure in a traditional kimono like a snake shedding its skin.
Wesaam Al-Badry’s photographic series AI-Koture (2018), merges his ideas about cultural authenticity and consumer choices in the refashioning of luxury silk scarves into niqabs. The eye-catching photos exist as both an ideological critique and a colorful symbol of female empowerment.
Stephanie Syjuco’s photographic series Cargo Cults plays with the formal quality of images and historic portraiture by questioning the reduction of Indigenous people to surfaces without depth. Cargo Cults: Java Bunny (2016) depicts a woman in traditional dress with a price tag hanging from her clothing.
Lorna Simpson’s conceptual work echoes issues of gender, race, and identity in works like Wigs (Portfolio) (1994). A collection of wigs is presented in a series of lithographs arranged to look almost like a department store advertisement while addressing the fetishization of Black hair. Wigs are an instrument of social transformation as well as existing as a consumer product.
Sunny A. Smith brings attention to the ornamental role bestowed on women in Western domestic spaces. In Tilt-top Table (Scattergood), 2013–22 Smith uses archival pigments printed on silk in a patchwork motif on a cherry wood table, tilted in a stance more like an easel, thereby turning a symbol of the American home on its head.
Ruby Neri’s ceramics present vibrant, colorful representations of women that defy gender roles and expectations. Breaking Out (2021) depicts a monumental, lively female figure with two miniature figures emerging from her breast. The surreal idea of cell division and self-reproduction depicts the female body in a constant state of becoming.
Storytelling as social critique
Superficial Matters: Artists from the Svane Gift and Beyond doesn’t attempt to transcend the surface to reach authenticity; rather, it blurs accepted distinctions between the superficial and the meaningful, the ornamental and the authentic. “In many of these works, material becomes a form of storytelling and social critique,” said Axelle Toussaint, associate curator of contemporary art and programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “The artists draw from personal histories, popular culture, and craft traditions to examine the tension between what society asks us to project outwardly and what remains layered beneath the surface.”
