Anna Wexler

I am an interdisciplinary, project-centered artist. My research-based works often engage inventive legacies of resistance to colonialism and racial capitalism. I am inspired by collaborative projects that fuse archival sources, radical aesthetics, and insurgent social practices across histories and communities.

In Balmy Alley in the Mission District of San Francisco, generations of collective murals painted on its walls incarnate those lost in the genocides of Indigenous peoples, the wars in Central America, and gentrification and police brutality in the neighborhood now. Remembrance and resistance intertwine on the layered surfaces, as in a mural triptych with family members holding up photos of their disappeared flanked by protective female freedom fighters. “The culture contains the seed of resistance that blossoms into the flower of liberation” is written at their feet. I recently returned to live in the Bay Area after several decades in Boston. Walking through the Balmy Alley “mural sanctuary” anchors me in a cherished passageway between the past, present and future as these temporal dimensions of my own life are infused by the cycles of struggle and their resurgent visions of liberation so brilliantly depicted there.

I have been a member of the Mobius Artist Group since 2009. With the aesthetic insights and practical support of the group, I have been able to carry out projects that aspire to the artistic values mentioned above. Among them are Vessel for Haiti with Catherine Tutter, an ongoing sequence of participatory actions honoring those who perished in the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and organizers engaged in the struggle for environmental justice in its aftermath, most recently at the invitation of Vassar College. Le Fruit Mordoré, created with Irène Itkine in Marseille, France, was a performative homage to a legendary cooperative that functioned as a haven from fascism and a Resistance nexus during the Nazi Occupation of France. This project contributed to the historical-artistic programming of Marseille/Provence 2013, the year of that city’s designation as a European Capital of Culture.

Currently, I am working on archival and performance-based projects exploring abolition as a pivot of the struggle for racial justice and the radical social transformation needed to achieve it. In a durational performance in Northern Ireland (Mobius/Bbeyond Exchange), I linked contemporary and historical expressions of abolitionism based on 19th-century women’s anti-slavery organizing in Belfast. With the initial support of the Harvard History Design Studio and presently in collaboration with the Community Archival Resource Project of the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland, CA, I am now completing an accessible archive documenting the radical activism of the mothers of three militant Black prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers because of their alleged involvement in the murder of a guard in the California prison of that name in 1970 (https://historydesignstudio.com/features/insurgent-maternity-the-soledad-mothers-in-the-radical-black-prison-movement).

For a more extensive overview of my work and sources, please see a video interview filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland: https://www.nvtv.co.uk/shows/collapse-the-box-anna-wexler/