Colonial Desires on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art Eltonhead Manor Period Room →
The Collection of the EoS 10^15 on view at Saint Joseph's Arts Foundation, San Francisco →
Guided tours of The Collection of the EoS 10^15 by The Auctioneer, The Specialist and The Artist
Dates: January 5, 9, 19, 21, 26 and 30, 2023
Venue: Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation (1401 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94103)
RSVP here
Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation, a non-profit that celebrates the arts in all its forms, presents Beatrice Glow: The Collection of the EoS10^15. Multimedia artist Beatrice Glow kicks off Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation inaugural “Apothecary of Ideas” with a site-responsive installation, reimagining the Apothecary and the Vestry spaces as historic period rooms based on a fictional family, Empire of Smoke quadrillionaires (EoS 10^15), rescuing their prized possessions from an uninhabitable Earth, circa 2068. Composed of hauntingly luxurious artifacts, including a range of hand-embroidered textiles, scent experiences, videos, as well as VR-sculpted and 3D-printed objects, the collection blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction and explores the language of luxury and power.
The installation is on view through January 30, 2023 and will be part of the FOG Design + Art Fair (January 19-22, 2023). A portion of the proceeds will go towards paying Shuumi Land Tax.
A series of guided tours and performances of The Auctioneer, The Specialist and The Artist will take place throughout January 2023. If interested, please schedule an appointment here.
October Newsletter
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I hope you are healthy and thriving!
Lately, I have been reconnecting with the Bay Area / Ohlone Land, where I was born and raised. I am thrilled to share that I am currently the Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco’s Saint Joseph’s Arts Foundation where I am developing a site-responsive installation with selected objects from The Collection of the EoS10^15 series.
This fall, I am also realizing collections-based research in New York, Washington D.C and The Hague while enjoying teaching at the School of Visual Arts. I led a walk-through of Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears at Baltimore Museum of Art with a group visit hosted by the Center for Visual Arts, John Hopkins University one last time before the exhibition drew to a close earlier this month. It’s been gratifying to read messages from visitors and thoughtful reviews (see below) that altogether expand my understanding of the powerful impact of multi-sensory public history storytelling.
Here are some of memorable quotes from visitors:
“History should always be taught this way!”
“The goal of art is often transportation and you did that for me.”
“My biology students would benefit from learning about the social history of plants.”
Hope you will join me for a guided tour of The Collection of the EoS10^15 at Saint Joseph’s Art Foundation in the coming months (more info below). Thank you for supporting my practice!
Warmly,
Beatrice
Maryland’s Tobacco-scented past emerges in Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears
SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Excited to participate in booth 1117, an ecological refuge co-curated by Rachel Frank and Sarah Grass!
‘𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒗𝒆, 𝑺𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒓𝒚, 𝑺𝒆𝒆𝒓’ is an immersive exhibition presenting new remedies, rituals, and responses to our collective ills by Vanessa Albury, Rachel Frank, Beatrice Glow, Sarah Grass, Heidi Norton, Kylin O’brien and Zulu Padilla.
Get your tickets now through here and come see us in September✨9/7-9/12, 11am-8pm, 625 Madison Ave.✨
#springbreakartshow #springbreakartshow2022 #nakedlunch #salvesanctuaryseer #armoryweek #contemporaryart #ecological #refuge
In response to a plague and a climate in crisis, Salve, Sanctuary, Seer is an ecological refuge. The artists included in this immersive exhibition will present new remedies, rituals, and responses to our increasingly tumultuous time.
In the 1630’s the French town of Loudun was emerging from the plague during a time of increasing social unrest between the Catholics and the Huguenots. During this time of anxiety and division, multiple nuns from the local convent each claimed to be possessed by the devil. Staged exorcisms, accusations, and an obsession across Europe with the events at Loudun marked this time as medieval Europe moved into the age of Enlightenment and the public faced collective conflicts between the roles of mysticism, religion, the body, and scientific thought.
Currently we are amidst an emergence (mostly) from our own pandemic era. The climate crisis is reaching a potentially non-returnable tipping point just as our own country has become increasingly fractured and politically polarized. During tumultuous times of upheaval, division, and chaos, where events seem largely out of personal control, historically the individual has searched for new rituals, myths, defenses, and strategies to grapple with difficult situations, which can manifest physically or spiritually.
Amidst an over-abundance of plants to purify the air, Salve, Sanctuary, Seer, will present the works of Vanessa Albury, Rachel Frank, Beatrice Glow, Sarah Grass, Heidi, Norton, Kylin O’Brien, and Zulu Padilla. From the creation of an ecological current(cy), to the covering (or uncovering) of ceramic bones, to gathering offering vessels made for indicator species living in the liminal areas between land and sea, virtual world building based on past colonial injustices, the medicine of metaphor, non-human animals steeped in the symbolic, the cementing of objects (and memories) in resin and wax, and responsive crystal channeling, the artists included in this immersive exhibition will present new remedies, rituals, and responses to our increasingly tumultuous time.
BMA Curators Celebrate the Art of Collaboration
As curator of American art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Virginia Anderson is particularly focused on the last few words of its mission statement—to create “a museum welcoming to all,” with a goal of assembling exhibitions that center on the voices and experiences of historically marginalized groups.
One of the keys to that success? Her BMA colleagues.
“There are so many things you have to balance as a curator working with different departments to make the art and the narrative shine,” says Anderson, 51, formerly assistant curator at the Harvard Art Museums. “I’ve experienced collegiality at every museum I’ve worked in, but I think intellectual resourcing is having a moment.”
Comparing notes and research with colleagues across multiple departments allows Anderson to present exhibitions of American art that showcase a more inclusive art history, both in the selection of objects and in the display itself. Since arriving at the BMA, she has curated four exhibitions—two solo shows, with works by female contemporary artists, and two group shows, showcasing art movements, such as women modernists. And each has been created with the help of her first hire—curatorial assistant Sarah Cho, an art history major hired straight out of Princeton University.
The duo’s most recent collaboration is the first time that Cho has fully stepped into the role of co-curator. Three years in the making and up through October 2, Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears occupies three galleries in the museum’s Contemporary Wing, showcasing cross-disciplinary works by the bicoastal artist-researcher, including the first-ever virtual reality-sculpted and 3D-printed objects exhibited at the BMA. Glow examines histories of Indigenous, Chinese, and Black communities as they relate to the Chesapeake Bay tobacco trade, recasting the white depiction of the region’s history.
Anderson and Cho hope that people will attend the exhibit, read the accompanying wall text, and be inspired to continue learning more about the substance of Glow’s work.
“What Virginia and I wanted to do is spotlight aspects of Beatrice’s research,” says Cho, 26. “One of the major goals of Beatrice’s work is highlighting solidarities between Asia and the Americas.”
Both women are the exhibit’s co-curators—or “thought partners,” as Cho describes them—but they’re quick to point out that Glow’s exhibition would not have been possible without the entire museum staff.
“The museum can function as a kind of lab,” says Anderson. “Just as within the sciences, you have collaboration and research from a team of people that supports a particular project or angle of inquiry…This collaborative approach to research can only benefit our audiences.”
Rhunhattan Tearoom on view in the Dining Room of Lyndhurst Mansion for the "Women's Work" Exhibition
On August 4 and September 20, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is hosting two events inspired by "Women's Work." Learn more and register.
From May 26 to September 26, 2022, National Trust Historic Site Lyndhurst is presenting “Women’s Work,” an exhibition that marks the evolution of women artists—from the domestic handcraft tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries to the practice of many contemporary artists. Curated by Lyndhurst’s Executive Director Howard Zar, Nancy Carlisle of Historic New England, and Rebecca R. Hart, an independent contemporary art curator, “Women’s Work” is—in Zar’s words—“ultimately about ownership of identity.”
A 19th-century home whose history is shaped by three different families and their staff, Lyndhurst has, in recent years, focused more on sharing women’s history—a key part of the National Trust program Where Women Made History, which identifies, honors, and elevates places across the country where women have changed their communities and the world. Within both the mansion and the Lyndhurst gallery space, visitors to “Women’s Work” encounter more than 125 objects and art pieces all produced by an inclusive group of women artists.
The intent behind this exhibition was one of celebration, providing an opportunity for visitors to engage with hundreds of years of artwork by women artists. It’s not every day that needlepoints by First Ladies Martha Washington and Dolley Madison sit next to a fan by Miriam Schapiro, steps away from a performance piece by Yoko Ono, or a remarkable art piece by Faith Ringgold—each a revolutionary artist in the field of contemporary art. As Zar wrote in the catalog, “I wanted to tell the story of triumph and remind contemporary audiences that the things we now take for granted are often the result of hundreds of years of gestation, much less struggle.”
See more: https://savingplaces.org/stories/womens-work-lyndhurst#.YtbXTuzMJ3k
Séance Fiction at the Pfizer Building, curated by Kevin Wu
Solo Exhibition at Baltimore Museum of Art | Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears
May 15, 2022 — October 2, 2022
Beatrice Glow is a New York- and Bay Area-based multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the social history of plants. For her first exhibition in a major U.S. museum, Glow delves into the unseen and unsavory sociohistorical and ecological realities underlying the tobacco industry’s veneer of luxury through her digitally printed and embroidered silk textiles, VR-sculpted and 3D-printed objects, watercolors, and scent experiences.
In exploring the global uses of tobacco, Glow questions the embedded histories of visual culture by critiquing unresolved injustices wrought by colonial desires to profit from the lucrative tobacco trade. The artist weaves together tantalizingly decadent surfaces with imagery derived from historical sources, and examines the networks through which tobacco spread across the world.
While the works initially appear as a celebration of opulence, closer inspection reveals the cascading impacts of colonialism, capitalism, and inequitable trade networks.
Curated by Sarah Cho, Curatorial Assistant of American Painting & Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Virginia Anderson, Curator of American Art.
See the full issue of BMA Today
Imagining Climate Futures
Of the exhibition’s artworks, Beatrice Glow’s mock-luxe multimedia installation Smoke Trails (2021) creates the most developed world. Set in the year 2068, the project imagines the fictional estate sale of a quadrillionaire family, nicknamed the “Empire of Smoke,” that made its fortune in the tobacco and arms industries. The ornate, faux-porcelain and -gold objects — from pipes to rifles, to vape pens — have been 3D printed and displayed on a gallery wall, and are also displayed in a VR-generated video tour of the dynastic family’s mansion. But Smoke Trails achieves its most complete expression in the published “mocktion” catalogue, “The Collection of the EoS10^15” (2021), produced by Glow and Jeong-A Kim.
The 100-page-long auction catalogue stands out not only because the form lends itself well to satire (for example, a vape pen prototype is extolled for its rarity in the year 2068) but also because books provide ample room for what fiction writers and game designers call worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is particularly important for genres such as sci-fi and fantasy, in which the fictional universe differs substantially from the actual one, but, whatever the genre, elements such as character, folklore, and setting provide the story with coherence and depth. Broadly speaking, there are two types of worldbuilding design: top-down, which begins with a thorough, big picture schema and fills in details from there; and bottom-up, which begins with relevant details and only sketches out the big picture as needed.
Nicot & Tang — Official Launch
Part online viewing room, exhibition and art and design multiples and editions gallery, Nicot & Tang, “the premier auction house for taste-makers seeking the most eclectic art and luxury objects” is presenting the 2068 mocktion of the collection of the EoS10^15.
Collaborative Survival Group Show at 601Artspace curated by Danni Shen
Collaborative Survival
Curated by Danni Shen
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge St
18 June - 14 August 2021
Jenny Brockmann
Beatrice Glow
Tahir Karmali
Goldie Poblador
Michael Wang
Please join us for the opening on Friday, June 18th, 2021, 6-8pm.
Curator’s Statement:
Collaborative Survival explores the environmental narratives and ecological relationships that often get overlooked in mainstream consciousness. From dystopian sci-fi films to green technocapitalism, what often trickles down from scientific research on climate change into popular culture are dire visions of Earth’s future. The proposed scientific designation of our present geological epoch as the Anthropocene, in which humans are capable of driving the planet on a universal death track toward extinction, fuels these cultural narratives. However scientifically valid the concept of the Anthropocene may be, such an unfathomable, monolithic framework offers little room for the nuances of human and non-human relationships. While human activities are indisputably over-extracting from the earth, there are other stories to be told amid the ruins.
The artists in this exhibition mine the complex connections between humans and the lifeworlds of plants, revealing social, historical, political, personal, and material histories in the process. By joining feminist, decolonial, and indigenous scholars in taking to task the Western framework that positions “human” and “nature” as distinct and oppositional categories, these artists critique the erasure of other ways of living in the world that are inherently environmentally conscious or sustainable. In Collaborative Survival, plants and humans are bound together through specific, complex, and reciprocal relationships defined by interconnected processes of survival and displays of resilience that complicate the Anthropocene narrative.
”Beatrice Glow interrogates the visual languages of luxury and power as they are derived through the exploitation of natural resources. Smoke Trails (2021) features the catalogue, objects, and virtual smoking room of a fictional private family collection in the near future. Named Empire of Smoke (EoS10^15), this mysterious quadrillionaire legacy has self-enriched through centuries investing in businesses related to airborne substances, from tobacco and gunpowder to vape culture and bioweapons. “
See more here: https://601artspace.org/Collaborative-Survival
PALA Exhibition at the Westfries Museum, Hoorn, Netherlands →
I am thrilled to be participating in this online exhibition PALA, meaning “nutmeg”, at the Westfries Museum in the Netherlands that takes a multi-vocal approach to telling the impactful story of the Banda Islands.
See the online exhibition here: https://pala.wfm.nl/echo/
OPEN STUDIOS | May 1-2, 2-6pm | Gillman Barracks
See the full press release here: https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/newsroom/yale-nus-college-artist-in-residences-open-studio-and-podcast-series/
Download the pdf version here.
National Arts Coalition Against Censorship - Benefit Auction
I am proud to be part of this auction to benefit the National Coalition Against Censorship. Bidding has begun and culminates on Nov. 13! The artist list is stellar with 130 generously donated works. Many of the artists are my art heroes and cherished art comrades ;-) Thank you to Kathy Brew for curating this project!
The piece that I am offering is "Banda Island Archipelago (Nutmegs and Cloves)" (2016) from my Spice Routes/Roots Series. It is a 24 x 24 in. digital print on silk and is part of my multiyear research-creation where, through the social history of plants, I bring forth histories of dispossession and enslavement that continue to impact our present environmental injustices.
See more here: http://vugalleries.com/product/beatrice-glow/
#WaveHillBranchingOut Digital Catalogue for Returning to the Source Group Show at Wave Hill
Access the full catalogue here: https://spark.adobe.com/page/iQENtxcIDSsin/
Flowers and Forts Opening Event Oct. 19 at Taipei Contemporary Art Center
"Peace " Treaty (VOC and Mattau)
I want to highlight the centerpiece of my exhibition Flowers and Forts at Taipei Contemporary Art Center. In addition to showing a series of prints on silk referencing extractive economies, at the center of the space was “Peace” Treaty (VOC and Mattau) that consists of a betel nut plant in a faceted vase echoing the forms of pentagon-shaped forts and architecture in the exhibition. This betel nut plant is nestled in soil from my mother's homeland in Taitung and the plant boxes near Taipei Contemporary Art Center. The plants were procured by my maternal uncle and 高秀妹, our Amis neighbor during my recent visit. It is called i-zhi in the Amis language. I am unsure of the transliteration but when pronouncing the second syllable, the tone goes upward. I chose to center the plant in this show to reference the 1635 Treaty between the Dutch East India Company and the Mattau peoples during which the Dutch stipulated that the Mattau signal their surrender by submitting a small tree (often betel nut or coconut) planted in earth from their village as a symbolic ceding of sovereignty to the Dutch East India Company. By centering the plant in the show and placing it on top of an image of Fort Belgica — a star fort in the Banda Islands, Indonesia, where Austronesian people also were subjugated to great brutality—, I am calling attention to our relationship to land, sovereignty and regeneration. As the betel nut plant adjusts to Taipei, some of the leaves turned yellow. After consulting with my Bunun(布農) friend Qucung Qalavangan. I painted the yellowed leaves gold to memorialize the leaves and reference the weight of the territory carried by this plant given earthy golden tones symbolizes territory in the Sakizaya culture (撒奇萊雅族).
我想特別強調在台北當代藝術中心《花語碉堡》這檔展覽中的重點,除了展出一系列印上採掘經濟作物圖像的絲織品之外,放置展覽空間中心的作品是〈“和平”條約(荷屬東印度公司與麻豆)〉,其中包括一株檳榔。該植物被裝在五角形多面體的花瓶中,與展覽中五角碉堡及其建築形態相呼應。這個植物原生在我母親的家鄉台東,被移入台北當代藝術中心。它是由我的舅舅與我們的阿美族鄰居高秀妹,在我這次佈展期間拜訪時尋得的。在阿美族語中稱為“ i-zhi ”。我不確定發音是否準確,但當第二個音節發音時,音調會升高。在這檔展覽中,我選擇以這株檳榔為中心,源於荷蘭東印度公司與麻豆社人民之間的1635年條約。在此條約中,荷蘭人規定麻豆社人要呈上來自他們的土地所種植的小樹(通常是檳榔或是椰子)來表示將主權渡讓予荷蘭東印度公司。我希望通過將檳榔擺在空間正中央的位置,將其放置在Belgica 堡壘(印尼班達群島的星堡,象徵著南島族群曾遭受的殘酷暴力)的圖像之上,來呼籲人們關注我們與土地之間的關係,主權與重生的意義。這株檳榔為了適應台北,一些葉子變黃了。經過與我的布農族朋友Qucung Qalavangan(谷縱‧喀勒芳安)討論後。我將黃色的葉子漆上金色,以紀念逐漸變黃葉子,以及在撒奇萊雅族文化中以金色色調象徵這株植物所承載著的土地重量。
Flowers and Forts in Taipei Times
Beatrice Glow is an interdisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums, including performance, painting, experiential technology, olfactory art and video. For Flowers and Forts, currently on view at Taipei Contemporary Art Center (台北當代藝術中心), Glow presents a series of video works, prints on silk and parts of her ongoing research project between Mannahatta (today’s Manhattan) and Rhun of the Banda Islands in Indonesia. Both islands share traces of traumatic pasts under European colonization and were exchanged by the Dutch and English in 1667. Glow’s research revolves around the wild flowers growing around historical forts, which suggests a narrative of exploitation, regeneration and resilience.
■ Taipei Contemporary Art Center (台北當代藝術中心), 11, Ln 49, Baoan St, Taipei City (保安街49巷11號), tel: (02) 2550-1231. Open Tuesday to Sunday from 1pm to 7pm
■ Until Nov. 10
Source: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2019/10/18/2003724150