The Artists of SFMOMA’s 2024 SECA Show Stand the Test of Time

In the month since I first visited the 2024 SECA Art Award exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, much has changed. Not to the show itself: The delicate paintings by Rupy C. Tut, Rose D’Amato’s signage-inspired work and Angela Hennessy’s elegant, elegiac sculptures all remain as they did on opening night. But the world around them has shifted. My eyes, especially, are seeing things differently.

I think this is a good thing.

Art is made in a particular time and place, drawing from an artist’s unique experiences, interests and aesthetic sensibilities. But it also needs to exist beyond its maker; once a piece of art has left the studio and entered the public realm, it becomes something else (a different else) to each person who views it.

As of Jan. 7, I can’t help but see Hennessy, D’Amato and Tut’s work in relation to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. How do we describe a place that no longer exists? How do we voice our grief? How do we imagine what happens next?

The first gallery, painted a deep navy blue, is filled with Tut’s paintings on linen and hemp paper. Her process is meticulous. Tut creates her paint with a mortar and pestle, grinding vivid pigments into powder and mixing them with gum arabic and patiently gathered rainwater.

But that’s behind the scenes. What’s visible to SFMOMA visitors are the thousands of tiny brushstrokes on her surfaces. In The Dreamweaver ਸੁਫ਼ਨੇਕਾਰ (sufnekaar), a figure lies atop a mountain range, its peacefully reclining body made up of bushes, grasses and flowers in every shade of yellow and green. Above, a cloudy sky is rendered in concentric white lines on that same deep navy. In Tut’s world, every whole is made of many, many, disparate parts.

To me, these pieces are now a reminder of all the transitory, possibly overlooked elements that make up a familiar landscape or a family home. In a pair of works on paper, Beeji da Ghar (My Grandmother’s Home) ਬੀਜੀ ਦਾ ਘਰ and Beeji de Ghar (My Grandmother’s Home for Me) ਬੀਜੀ ਦੇ ਘਰ, Tut offers two disorienting views of a house’s interior spaces, one closer to reality, the other a dreamscape. Each is teeming with patterns: lush greenery, pink bricks, those watery stars on blue.

Tut talks about being the author of her own story, of fashioning narratives out of traditional materials and methods, but drawing from imagination more than strict representation. It’s this capacity to dream — and self-fashion — that appeals to me now.

In the next gallery, this one painted a chocolatey brown, D’Amato’s paintings, photographs and a video installation in a 1955 Chevrolet panel truck capture a disappearing landscape. In large paintings, words like “Mission Chevrolet,” “emporium” and “high style” repeat and reflect as if glimpsed through a rearview mirror.

There’s a shimming, fleeting quality to D’Amato’s work, despite the precision of her lettering and the sturdy materials she’s referencing: oxidized metal, curving windshields and gleaming chrome. Her relationship to time — and its markers — is strange. D’Amato’s photographs, gelatin silver prints of friends posed in front of Mission shops, are oddly timeless. Similarly, the video projected in the Chevy (transferred from Super 8) captures what could be scenes from over a half century ago.

Yet despite the glossy vintage car in the gallery’s center, the artwork in this room isn’t nostalgic. It’s more about noticing the traces of past activity in one’s everyday, urban surroundings, and honoring that activity with your own. What are paintings if not indoor signs? “Stop here” reads Roadtest and Multicheck (From the Chevrolet Six Construction Site), implying, “look at me and where I came from, while I still exist.”

The show’s final gallery is its most pared down in terms of palette and display, but it hits the hardest. In front of a wide bench, Hennessy has arranged Wake Work, over a dozen sculptures that resemble floral memorial wreaths, all made out of black and white synthetic hair. Set against a black-painted wall and platform, they form an altar of recognition and mourning, each circular form distinguished by its own complicated pattern of rosettes, braids and gauzy drapings.

In the thin catalog accompanying the SECA show, Hennessy, in conversation with California College of the Arts dean and professor Jacqueline Francis, talks about beauty as a means towards an end. “The beauty is what gets people to look,” Hennessy says. “The beauty makes difficult things more accessible. I don’t want to use beauty to minimize the horror or grief or whatever those feelings are. But beauty will bring us in and hold us there a little bit longer.”

As visitors sit and contemplate, held in thrall by the arrangement, Hennessy casts Grief Spell, a three-minute sound piece on loop. A single voice begins, followed by several others, “For the exiled, the profiled, the vaporized before your eyes.” Together, they chant, “We called the bones in the archive, they say genocide.”

The spell is haunting, as intended. It’s a reminder that grief is rarely a passive experience. It comes from somewhere and, if we’re lucky, can be directed back towards something. Hennessy’s spell does not allow audiences to ignore the Palestinian experience in Gaza, just as her sculptures refuse to let any death go unmarked. In their beautiful, intricate opulence, their underlying purpose cannot be ignored.

Existing alongside unfathomable disasters near and far, the grief can knock us horizontal. Before we right ourselves again, perhaps the answer is to emulate Tut’s Dreamweaver, turning our laid-out bodies into fertile seed beds.

‘2024 SECA Art Award: Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy, Rupy C. Tut’ is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through May 26, 2025. The exhibition is free and open to the public on the museum’s second floor.