There is a powerful connection between the physical and emotional journeys focusing on Black family lineages in Adrian L. Burrell’s multimedia exhibition “Venus Blues” at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation.
Adrian L. Burrell poses with his exhibition “Venus Blues” at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation in the Dogpatch district in San Francisco.
In the dark of the vast San Francisco arts venue, visitors take a path between two mammoth burnt-red exhibition walls meant to evoke colonial architecture in Senegal, Burrell’s matrilineal homeland. Entering the round structure dubbed the “Radius Room,” viewers walk around an installation that looks like a large pile of sugar, a crop once frequently farmed by enslaved labor. In the center of that heap is a metal tub where water from a bucket above drips into it, providing an unsteady beat.
