Artists Pull Human Stories Out of the Archives in Affecting San José Show

In Allegedly the worst is behind us, a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, the 12 included artists, many of them living and working in the Bay Area, use their art as an archive of family or community history. Rather than gathering text or statistics, their work portrays the individuals and places involved, to affecting and poignant results.

Allegedly includes textiles, paintings, installations and video, all addressing family lineage. In Arleene Correa Valencia’s 25 Estrellas: Sueños Para MiHija / 25 Stars: Dreams For My Daughter, an American flag creates a portrait of a young man holding his daughter. In May and Mik Gaspay’s sculptural quilt, Enrile House, the mother and son collaborators reimagine a former home in the Philippines. And in Razan AlSalah’s short video your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba we hear a woman’s voice as she wanders the streets of Haifa via Google Maps, looking for her former home and her son.

The pieces reek of desire — both to heal the past and to bring about a brighter future. They range in tone from devastating to hopeful; all invite the viewer to join in those emotions. The title of the exhibition, curated by the ICA San José’s Zoë Latzer, comes from the first line of a poem by Amanda Gorman, “Ship’s Manifest,” about trying to move on from trauma by dealing with it, rather than ignoring it.

One line of the poem displayed as wall text in the gallery reads “For what is a record but a reckoning?”

Tricia Rainwater’s a kanomi: my kin/my family is certainly calling for a reckoning. Rainwater’s mobiles, made of cloth strips with metal jingles at the ends, represent missing Indigenous girls and women. Visitors are encouraged to walk through the sculptures, turning the record into an experience rather than just an observation.

Rainwater has also hung posters of 39 missing women on the gallery wall. What’s particularly powerful about this installation is the way the posters pull the women out of a faceless mass of horrible statistics. Personal details on the posters, including what the women were last seen wearing, underscore that these are individuals, and something terrible happened to one woman, then another, and then another.

Like Rainwater’s installation, Trina Robinson’s Liberation Through Redaction also asks for attention to be paid. Reaching back, she has intervened in the archive to restore dignity to her enslaved ancestor. Robinson’s presentation is formal, with a rammed earth pedestal surrounded by dried pampas grass and goldenrod. On top of the pedestal, she has replicated a will that states when her great-great-great grandfather would be freed. Robinson has crossed out all references to her ancestor’s enslavement, so that only “the man … Martin … free” is left.

Paola de la Calle’s work similarly honors a family member — this one known to her, but gone too soon. Her beautiful, dreamy textile, Tio Jaime (Portrait of A Banana Farmer), contains both personal and cultural markers. It’s a portrait of her uncle, who died of cancer possibly caused by pesticides sprayed on banana crops in Colombia. Text on the portrait reads “anoche sone con un mundo donde estabas aqui,” translated as “last night I dreamed of a world where you were here.”

The second line of Gorman’s poem, “Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow,” suggests a pivot from the past toward the future. That’s where Oakland artist Demetri Broxton is looking in his piece A Star is Born, small boxing gloves covered with shells, mirrors and beads that reference his Creole and Filipino heritage. In the accompanying wall text, Broxton writes that his message here is lighthearted: “All of us are stars and living our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

It’s a delicate balance — acknowledging the past, but also our distance from it — that Shirin Towfiq skillfully achieves in her video installation, My Mother Came in the Rain. The work stems from photo albums her family lost when they fled Iran during the 1979 revolution. Through an improbable series of events involving an unrelated Towfiq making an estate sale purchase, the images were reunited with her family 40 years later.

Towfiq had no memories of seeing her mother smile when she was growing up, but in the albums, her mother is a joyful teenager. The video she presents in Allegedly contains those images, along with footage of the family dancing when they arrived in Germany after leaving Iran.

Towfiq has created a comfortable viewing zone at the ICA San José, with a shelf of cardamom tea and Persian sweets mounted above handmade beanbag chairs. The video projects onto a textile collage rather than a plain white wall, interrupting the images and echoing the gaps in family history.

Pieces like this, and the show as a whole, drive home how effective art can be in conveying a broader spectrum of human experience. With the purposeful glitches in her video, Towfiq evokes her family’s fractured history in a way words cannot. Similarly, a news report about missing Indigenous women could never be as personally affecting as walking through Rainwater’s installation. These artworks of Allegedly the worst is behind us are now part of an alternate record, carried within each viewer, even if the reckonings they seek haven’t yet arrived.

‘Allegedly the worst is behind us’ is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José (560 South First St., San José) through Feb. 23, 2025.