Erik Kessels

Artist lecture Friday, February 25, 2011 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco
24 HRS in Photos, installation image

Erik Kessels is a founding partner and creative director of communications agency KesselsKramer. The company supports finding new ways for brands to tell stories using whatever media is most relevant to their message. He also helped set up KK Outlet, a combined exhibition space, gallery, and communications agency in London.

Kessels is a photography collector and has designed, edited, and published several books of vernacular photography through KesselsKramer Publishing, including the in almost every picture series, The Instant Men, and Wonder. Since 2000 he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography. Kessels has curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Arles. He was one of four curators (with Lou Reed, Fred Ritchin, and Vince Aletti) of the New York Photo Festival 2010, where he presented the exhibition Use me Abuse me.


Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.


Larry Sultan Photography Award


Jonathan Calm, Double Vision (Recording I), 2018

Jonathan Calm

Fall 2019 Residency
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA

Click HERE for more information on the Larry Sultan Photography Award

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In his most recent work, Calm explores the complex representation of African-American automobility from a historical and contemporary perspective, focusing and drawing on the importance and resonance of the Negro Motorist Green Book. Of this project, he explains, “the image of the infinite highway and the unbridled freedom to roam the land has always been considered a quintessential expression of the modern American spirit, but the black American experience of travel, which involves heightened subjectivity and exposure, has to this day proven a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.”

Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Calm currently lives in Palo Alto, CA where he is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.