Institute of Contemporary Art San José
560 South First Street, San José, CA 95113
SoFA District
Saturday, January 18 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Sunday, January 19 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Monday, January 20 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Tuesday, January 21 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Wednesday, January 22 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Thursday, January 23 | 12:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Friday, January 24 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Saturday, January 25 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Sunday, January 26 | 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Saturday, January 18th | 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Join ICA San Jose for our second Curator and Artist Tour of the current exhibition, Allegedly the Worst is Behind Us. Curator and Director of Public Programming, Zoë Latzer, will lead the tour, accompanied by artists Livien Yin, Demetri Broxton, Arleene Correa Valencia. This event is free and open to the public. Find more here.
Thursday, January 23rd | 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Join us for a conversation with artists Trina Michelle Robinson and Tricia Rainwater, alongside political scientist Hakeem Jefferson and curator Matthew Villar Miranda. This panel dives into the profound ways art can reclaim silenced histories and offer pathways toward resilience and healing, as exemplified in Allegedly the Worst is Behind Us, curated by Zoë Latzer and on view at the ICA San José from September 14, 2024, to February 23, 2025.
Trina Michelle Robinson and Tricia Rainwater, featured in the exhibition, bring deeply personal and community-centered approaches to their work. Robinson’s Liberation Through Redaction (2022) and Rammed Earth Pedestal (2024) trace family migration and survival through handmade materials and sound that honor ancestral resilience. Rainwater’s Falamvt ishla chike (2024) is a powerful multimedia installation confronting the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People, weaving memory, language, and activism into a call for justice.
Through a conversation grounded in their artistic practices, the panel will explore critical themes of colonial trauma, migration, and self-determination. What does it mean to carry and rebuild from fractured histories? How can art foster spaces for collective healing and radical change?
This event is free and open to the public.
Find more here.
Allegedly the worst is behind us
On view: September 14, 2024 – Feb 23, 2025
Allegedly the worst is behind us highlights the practice of twelve contemporary artists who pursue personal and collective acts of rebuilding fractured memories and stolen histories. Positing the body as an archive with generations stored achingly inside, the exhibition prompts examination on the toll of historical trauma and how to recover fragments of disrupted pasts.
Curators, philosophers, historians, and artists have long problematized normative notions of the archive, interrogating the role of institutions in including or excluding information and asking who has the power to build historical narratives and repositories. Emerging from performance and dance theory, the idea of the body as an archive centers corporeal forms of knowledge that challenge these dominant modes of keeping history. The artists in Allegedly the worst is behind us work to mend and amend the past in reckonings with memories, records, and archives, acting as both revisionists and storytellers. Drawing from their own family lineages and cultural backgrounds, in many cases lost or ruptured through forced relocation or removal, each artist explores what it means to be a living archive, carrying previous generations’ experience into the present. Through investigations in installation, painting, and video, they affirm the importance of art in keeping and questioning history—creating not mythic pasts but active practices for considering what stories need to be told, and, even rewritten.
In Allegedly the worst is behind us, past knowledge and future imagination meld in the hands of living artists who show us how re-examinations of history can offer insight towards the radical changes needed for today. The exhibition prompts the questions: What does it mean to inhabit a fraught or silenced history? How do we critically analyze and reconstruct historical narratives while caring and tending to our communities? How can reflecting on the past create spaces of liberation for the future?
Featuring Artists:
Razan AlSalah
Demetri Broxton
Arleene Correa Valencia
Paola de la Calle
Mik and May Gaspay
Pantea Karimi
Suchitra Mattai
Tricia Rainwater
Trina Michelle Robinson
Shirin Towfiq
Livien Yin