The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced the 2019 recipients of its biannual SECA Art Award. Conferred this year on three Bay Area artists, the award has been the region’s most visible recognition program for contemporary artists since its inception in 1967.
The winners were chosen from among 16 finalists announced in December. They are Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Sahar Khoury, and Marlon Mullen. Each artist will have a dedicated gallery in a three-person exhibition to be held at SFMOMA, Nov. 16-April 12.
Hinkle, 32, lives and works in both Berkeley and Los Angeles. She is known for a wide-ranging practice that encompasses painting, writing and performance. In exhibitions and performances at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora and elsewhere, she draws upon historical archives, she says, to “make work that allows the dead to talk.”
Oakland artist Khoury, 46, often works with materials discarded by others, employing basic sculptural techniques like papier-mache, cast concrete and ceramics. Her installation in “Bay Area Now 8,” which closed last month after a six-month run at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, was a standout in the group exhibition. Her work will be featured as the first exhibition at the new gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents on Sutter Street in San Francisco.
At 55, Mullen, who lives in the East Bay town of Rodeo, is no novice. A dozen years ago, The Chronicle’s Kenneth Baker praised the “inherently persuasive visual force” of Mullen’s brilliantly colorful paintings, which are often based on pages from art and lifestyle magazines. It was just announced that Mullen has been selected for 2019 presentation of the highly influential Whitney Biennial exhibition, which opens in May.
Charles Desmarais
