Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Swedish-born artist Nathalie Djurberg’s unsettling avian menagerie takes flight this fall at YBCA. Using actual bird species as inspiration for her sometimes grotesque forms, Djurberg explores physical and psychological transformation as well as pageantry, perversion, and abjection in avian society. In addition to the wild flock of more than eighty freestanding bird sculptures on view, the exhibition also includes five animated films, in which avian psychology is superimposed upon human behavior with extraordinary results. Her clay animations are set to music and sound effects by her partner and collaborator Hans Berg.

Nayland Blake was one of the pioneers of performance art in the Bay Area in the 1980s. His work often explored aspects of the queer urban lifestyle. Though now based in New York, his most recent work is a return to his earlier processes from that period, where materials and spontaneity generate sculptural works that are informal, precarious, nonsensical, and odd or uncanny. For his upcoming solo exhibition at YBCA, Blake will create spontaneous sculptures using his life as the catalyst. Also included in the exhibition are a DJ booth stocked with Blake’s collection of over three thousand LPs, which visitors will be invited to spin; and the recreation of a mural by Chuck Arnett (1962), which decorated the wall of the Tool Box, a leather bar in what is now San Francisco’s SoMa district.

FREE!LOVE!TOOL!BOX! provides visitors an opportunity to explore Nayland Blake’s unique collection of over 3,000 LPs. You are invited to sign up for a DJ set to spin at the turntables within the installation, Ruins of a Sensibility.

Bebe Miller explores the unruly edges of the heart and mind, creating a unique physical language that fully expresses the human condition. The award-winning choreographer’s newest work, A History, centers on the nuanced dancing relationship between veteran company members Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones over a 10-year period. An evening-length duet, the work invites audiences into the experience of dance-making. Part performance, part installation, part interaction, A History shifts the focus from performance to process and can be seen simultaneously as both the result and the act of artistic creation.