Take Care of Your Blessings, Fiercely
Memorial Ceremony with André Bloodstone Singleton
Saturday, April 26, 2025 | 2:00 p.m.
SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102
Free and open to the public
Artist André Bloodstone Singleton presents a memorial ceremony, drawing on Black funerary practices and ritual. Around an active altar constructed in memory of Essex Hemphill, Bloodstone will lead community members through a grief ritual that addresses participants’ personal and collective loss. Drawing upon African and Black diasporic spiritual practices, the ceremony seeks to reclaim our right to mourn, to feel joy, to care for ourselves in ways that stretch beyond colonial timelines or expectations.
Participants are encouraged to bring instruments and to contribute to the altar in the form of notes, images, or personal objects.
This program is planned alongside the exhibition Ceremonies: Ritual to Self on view in the SFAC Main Gallery through May 3, 2025.
About the Artist
André Bloodstone Singleton is an Oakland-based sacred healing, multi-disciplinary artist. His art acknowledges and celebrates his enduring survival as a human being and a proud descendant of the African Diaspora. For Ceremonies, Singleton will design an installation and performance inspired both by Hemphill’s writings as well Singleton’s own lived experience, drawing on Black funerary traditions and memorial rituals as an invitation to contemplate death, mourning, and remembrance.
