care/stamina
Directed by Hope Mohr and hosted by BOXBLUR at Catharine Clark Gallery
with dancers Karla Quintero and Melissa Lewis Wong. Sound artist Zachary James Watkins. Followed by an artist talk with Arleene Correa Valencia in conversation with Favianna Rodriguez
Thursday, July 17
Doors open: 5:45
Event begins: 6:00
Artist talk: 7:45
The event is free
care/stamina is a performance installation and a slow-moving sculpture in which two dancers share weight, touch, vulnerability, and stillness. Directed by Hope Mohr in collaboration with dancers Karla Quintero and Melissa Lewis Wong and sound artist Zachary James Watkins, care/stamina is performed within the exhibition of work by Arleene Correa Valencia titledCodice del Perdedor/The Losing Man’s Codexat the Catharine Clark Gallery.
In the words of artist Arleene Correa Valencia:
"I love the idea of having to work together to hold each other. My work is very much about the balance between visibility and invisibility. I think a lot about ways in which we carry each other even when the other isn’t visible or present. The bodies fight to exist together and apart. "
In the words of choreographer Hope Mohr:
"This work offers an embodied expression of care as a stamina practice. This can look like a sustained difficult hold, a walk holding hands, or humming into someone's ear. There are so many different ways to touch another person. Touch can be a form of sanctuary. Inside this sanctuary, so much is possible."
Hope Mohr (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, visual art, and language. Her work in dance, drawing, and fabric explores embodiment, feminism, gender, and queerness. For over thirty years, she has made multidisciplinary performance that “conveys emotional and socio-political contents that ride just underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). She makes performance not only in theatrical contexts, but also extensively in museums and galleries, including at 18th Street Arts Center (LA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Sonoma), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), and in the Bay Area at SFMOMA, ICA San Francisco, 836M Gallery, Mills Art Museum, Gallery Wendi Norris, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Her work has been presented at performance venues throughout the U.S. including: Movement Research at Judson Church (NYC), Highways Performance Space (LA), Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), and in the Bay Area at ODC Theater, Counterpulse, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco International Arts Festival, West Wave Festival, Montalvo Arts Center, and S.F. VA Hospital’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation.
As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, and Margaret Jenkins and freelanced with Liz Gerring, Douglas Dunn, Trajal Herrell, Della Davidson, and Pat Catterson.
Hope teaches contemporary dance technique, creative movement, movement for actors, and cross-disciplinary practice. She teaches “Bodies in Practice & Performance” at California College of the Arts. She has taught dance and movement at PARTS (Brussels), The Place (London), Trisha Brown Dance Studio, ODC, Stanford University, Lines Ballet BFA Program, American Conservatory Theater MFA program, Peabody Conservatory, UCLA, and Shawl-Anderson, among others.
In 2007, she founded Hope Mohr Dance (HMD). In 2010, she founded HMD's presenting program, The Bridge Project, which she ran for ten years, curating cutting-edge programs that brought artists together across difference. In 2020, she co-stewarded the organization’s transition to a model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. In 2023, Hope transitioned out of Co-Directorship; she now works as an independent artist.
FAVIANNA RODRIGUEZ is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and entrepreneur based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, reproductive justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her work centers joy and healing, while challenging entrenched myths and dominant cultural practices. Favianna’s creative partnerships include institutions like Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, Ben & Jerry's, Spotify, Old Navy, and Playboy Magazine. Through her poignant speeches, she has inspired audiences around the world including at the United Nations Climate Summit, Sundance Film Festival, Smithsonian, and Google. A strategy advisor to artists of all genres, Favianna is regarded as one of the leading thinkers and personalities uniting art, culture and social impact. Through her thought leadership as Founder and former President of The Center for Cultural Power, an organization igniting change at the intersection of art and social justice, she has been instrumental in building a cultural strategy ecosystem that supports BIPOC artists in the U.S. She helped launch the Constellations Culture Change Fund, a philanthropic initiative that moved $8 million to artists activists and grassroots art organizations in the United States. She is a recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity, and the Soros Equality Fellowship.
ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA (b. 1993, Michoacán, Mexico) is an inaugural recipient of the Bay Area Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts and received a regional Emmy award for her feature REPRESENT: Portraits of Napa Workers: Arleene Correa Valencia by KQED Arts. In 2023, Correa Valencia was named a Eureka Fellow by the Fleishhacker Foundation and a Finalist for the SECA Award through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In Fall 2023, Correa Valencia’s work was featured in a two-person booth presentation (alongside work by Stephanie Syjuco) for Focus at The Armory Show, curated by Candice Hopkins, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Forge Project. In 2021-2022, Correa Valencia was the subject of a solo exhibition, Llévame Contigo, Yo Quiero Estar Contigo, at the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 2022, Correa Valencia had her first international solo exhibition, (in)visibles En La Oscuridad (De Regreso A Casa) at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico, curated by Guadalupe García and generously sponsored by The ANT Project. Also in 2022, Correa Valencia also opened Por favor, no me olvides / Please, don’t forget me at MCA Gallery in Ontario, Canada, her first major international solo presentation at a gallery. Catharine Clark Gallery presented her solo exhibition, Aveces Quiero Llorar Porque Te Extraño, Pero Mi Mami Dice Que Estás Bien Y Pronto Estaremos Juntos Otra Vez / Sometimes I Want To Cry Because I Miss You, But My Mom Says That You’re Fine & That We’ll Soon Be Together Again, in 2022. In 2023, Correa Valencia’s work was featured in exhibitions at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon, San Francisco Arts Commission, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York City, and Alfred University, New York. Her work is currently featured in BAN9: Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In Summer and Fall 2024, she will be the subject of solo exhibitions at the Bolinas Museum and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Correa Valencia received her MFA from California College of the Arts. One of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico, Correa Valencia is a beneficiary of DACA (Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals) and is on a path to becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States. The Correa Valencia family fled to the United States in 1997 and found home in California’s Napa Valley. Correa Valencia’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Crocker Art Museum; Utah Museum of Fine Arts; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Valley State University Museum of Art, Ulrich Museum of Art; and 21c Museum Hotels. Based in Napa Valley, California, Correa Valencia has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2022
