Jim Denomie and Pao Houa Her at KADIST, San Francisco

11.11.2024

Works from Pao Hoa Her’s *After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw* (center right) in Installation view of *Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions*, KADIST San Francisco, 2024–2025. Courtesy of the artists, KADIST collection; Patron Gallery. Photo: Phillip Maisel.

Jim Denomie and Pao Houa Her are among over 40 artists to exhibit in Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at KADIST, San Francisco, through February 15, 2025.

Drawn from works in the KADIST collection, Makeshift Memorials’ co-curators Lindsay Albert, Joseph del Pesco, and Jo-ey Tang were guided by “an ethics of entanglement” towards sustained solidarity economies and liberation. The exhibition and its public programs center the enduring legacy of the COVID-19 global pandemic, considering exhibiting artists’ activist-informed methodologies and roles within a larger “diary of experiences encompassing not only what has occurred in culture following COVID-19, but what never came to light in the ongoing process of remembering and recollecting as a form of ‘protest against forgetting.’”

Jim Denomie’s acrylic on canvas painting, Standing Rock – 28 Degrees (2021), remembers the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) resistance at the Standing Rock Reservation (2016-2017) as it documents when police turned a water cannon on Water Protectors in 28F/-2C degree temperatures. Pao Houa Her’s black and white photographic series, After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw (2017), speaks to the complexities of desire and longing for homeland (teb chaw) by staging living and plastic flora as backdrops with Hmong diasporic elders who suffered devastating financial loss in a scam promising a new Hmong nation in Laos.