Clik here to view.
Visitors to Oakland artist Zekarias Musele Thompson’s multidisciplinary exhibition “The Meeting Place” at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco will be rewarded by deep observation, listening and paying dedicated attention. On view through Sept. 1, Thompson’s artwork and soundscapes are the third exhibition in the museum’s 2024-25 Emerging Artists Program highlighting art and culture of the African Diaspora.
Curated by Key Jo Lee, “The Meeting Place” consists of seven diptychs and one triptych accompanied by original compositions by Thompson that play continuously in the gallery.
Photographs of fragmented landscapes and structures are altered with clear paint or overlayed with semi-transparent, abstract forms. Along with a few oil paintings, the images “speak” to each other through simple proximity. Soundscapes, most featuring alto saxophone, electric guitar, electronics, synthesizers and field recordings, introduce Thompson’s ideas about art as a series of objects and how people experience separate sensory elements when they are brought together in one time and place.
“When I sit and just pay attention to sound frequencies coming in and out or moving about, or put on things meant to be listened to and (ambient) sounds, I can always find they fit together and make sense in the present moment. My idea of composed sound specifically built and the sounds existing around us is that they’re always in communication with each other,” says Thompson, a master’s degree candidate in the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.
Thompson, who uses they/them pronouns, finds people’s interpretation of and response to that dialogue intriguing. What’s most potent are the different ways people organize their attention when viewing or hearing things that are separate but experienced simultaneously.
“For me, experiencing them together allows more possibility for things to be seen as unified. Right now, I’m outside in my backyard and occasionally flies stream by. I hear the frequency of their wings, then my neighbor’s wind chime, then our gazebo-greenhouse door creaking. Air and wind move them all, but they serve different functions. Hearing them at the same time flattens them together for me.”
Clik here to view.
Applying the flattening concept to “guideposts through the winds of a cove II,” a diptych that pairs “White Sands” and “Portrait of the Artist in a State (of Siobhan),” Thompson says the art arose from life’s heightened moments—moments when it was difficult to be seen or to exist within actual or internal places of vast spaciousness.
“’Portrait’ is a double mix-exposure of the top of my head. The hair I’d shorn after growing it for 20 years is that shadow in the center. The thing that felt so present was the central (shadow) image I immediately felt was an aspect of myself. I was thinking about it and about ‘White Sands’ while listening to the soundscape; seeing where the resonances might live. These three pieces are aspects of trying to understand the self that contains me. They are me, observing how I feel, but it’s also you, observing that person I’m observing.”
The soundscape for the diptych includes field recordings they made by holding a cell phone outside the window of the downtown Oakland studio where they used to work. The voices of people hanging around outside the skate shop below, construction and road sounds, and incidental chatter of passersby fuses with Thompson playing saxophone and investigating breath as it moves in, through and out of the instrument.
Combined, the visual and auditory input stimulate awareness of life’s constant motion. Instead of creating hierarchies or separations of form, material or concepts, and viewing them as still, those elements become like air waves undergoing continual translation: “Acknowledging them all as important means your attention can be drawn at any time to one sonic space or a moment on the wall that is just a corner of the artwork, but you’re still experiencing them all at once. Of course, there might be so many things going on that you don’t catch it all. That moment of tension is what feels important to me. That we can be in that together is the value,” says Thompson, who works in Reykjavík, Iceland as well as the Bay Area.
Clik here to view.
Another diptych, “a new bootymix,” groups “Valley of Fire 2” and “Protection.” The first piece centers a tiny white cross located in Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park. “I stumbled on this monument in 2018 on a road trip through the park. I’ve been fascinated with the ways colonization moved what we know as the American West to be a narrative of taking over (indigenous) land,” Thompson says.
Randomly erecting this white structure in the middle of a beautiful, natural zone caused Thompson to think about racism and how a fabricated, false Black identity was built in the U.S. and lives on in the nation.
Asked to consider the infrastructure of the art world and practical or imagined movement that might best support artists in the future, Thompson says the Bay Area is well-positioned to play a pivotal role: “We are in whole-hearted, healthy dialogue. What ways can we build our world that supports humans continuing to exist through being in harmony? We’re in a stage where there are opportunities for more dialogue and resources for people to have time and space to focus on such things. We’re in a critical time where that has to be the focus and not an afterthought because we’re on the verge of conditions not conducive to humans. In museums, galleries, workshops, and other avenues that bring people together, we need accountability, healthy collaborations. We need to do the work and commit to it. Here, we have people doing excellent work in varied communities and the financial resources to really support humans striving.”
“Zekarias Musele Thompson: The Meeting Place” continues Wednesdays-Sundays through Sept. 1 at the Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St., San Francisco. Admission is $7 to $15 and free every second Saturday. For more information, visit moadsf.org. Thompson and collaborators will speak about the exhibition in a free event at 2 p.m. Aug. 10 at the museum; register here.
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