Creative Conversations: FotoFest x CatchLight with Adrian L. Burrell, Rafael Vilela, Erica Garber, and Steven Evans
Adrian L. Burrell, Modernity Blues, Loreauville, LA, 2022. Archival inkjet print. From the series Sugarcane and Lighting, 2012–. Courtesy of the artist.
Creative Conversations: FotoFest x CatchLight with Adrian L. Burrell, Rafael Vilela, Erica Garber, and Steven Evans
Sunday, March 10 | 5 PM
The Hangar at Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards Street
Free and open to the public.
FotoFest executive director Steven Evans and CatchLight vice president of development and public programs Erica Garber join artists Adrian L. Burrell and Rafael Vilela for a conversation about their extensive film and photography practices as well as the artists' works featured in the FotoFest Biennial 2024 exhibition, Critical Geography. Burrell’s deeply personal, reflective works utilize narrative storytelling to unpack histories of Black revolutionary action against ongoing systemic oppression in the U.S. Burrell often draws from his personal experiences, familial legacies, and archival text and images to create works that challenge histories of Black erasure. For Burrell, radical potentiality—the potential for profound and fundamental change—is rooted in networked forms of kinship and community. Vilela’s ongoing project Forest Ruins addresses the role of cities in the climate crisis from the perspective of the Guarani Mbyá Indigenous people in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, and how their philosophy, culture and traditions offer alternative paths of existence and resistance to colonial development.
About the Speakers
Adrian L. Burrell is an artist based in Oakland, CA who uses photography, film, and site-specific installation to invite moments where collective storytelling can be a site for rememory – used as much for healing as for stretching towards the not-yet-imagined. He won the 2019 S.F. Camerawork Juror’s Choice Award and is a 2021-22 YBCA Creative Cohort fellow. He has lived and worked on four continents and has exhibited in spaces as varied as the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, Photoville in New York City, Pop-Up Magazine, The New Yorker, and SFMOMA, where his work was acquired for the permanent collection. Adrian is a visiting artist with Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the arts and SFFILM Resident. A United States Marine Corps veteran, Adrian earned a BFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Stanford’s Department of Art & ArtHistory, where he currently lectures.
Erica Garber has worked in the arts for more than a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Working at organizations such as the Museum of the African Diaspora, International Arts & Artists, and Art Resource, she has worked in a range of roles including curator, gallery manager, exhibitions manager, and development director. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana and taught art in secondary schools both overseas and in the US. Garber is a graduate of the University of Arizona and Columbia University.
Rafael Vilela is an independent Brazilian photographer currently reporting on social injustice and the environmental crisis in his country. He was one of the founders of Midia NINJA, an initiative that today has more than 8 million followers. His photographs are part of São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM-SP) permanent collection. In 2014 he was invited by Magnum Photos to be one of the Brazilian photographers in the OffSide Brazil project to report on the World Cup. Rafael was also nominated for World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in 2013, 2014 and 2015. In 2020 he was selected by National Geographic's Emergency Fund for Journalists covering Covid-19 and his work with Covid Latam won the POYLatam and the FotoEvidence Book Award with World Press Photo. In 2022 Vilela was shortlisted on Leica Oskar Barnack Award and awarded the Catchlight Fellowship and the National Geographic Explorer grant. In 2023 he was the lead photographer for the Washington Post's "The Amazon, Undone" reporting series that won the Overseas Press Club Winner, the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
About Catchlight
CatchLight is a visual-first media organization that leverages the power of visual storytelling to inform, connect, and transform communities. CatchLight acts as a catalyst, connecting visual storytellers, communities and media organizations to represent and bring about solutions to urgent social issues. The organization supports emerging talents and leaders in the field of visual storytelling to meaningfully engage audiences and push innovation in the field.
Learn more about the FotoFest Biennial 2024, its exhibitions, and programming at fotofest.org/fotofest-biennial-2024.
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