Continuing through June 13, 2026

Jonathan Calm’s archival pigment print “Sun Down” (2026) could be a view of hundreds of American commercial strips along highways. Shot from a low angle, this one is lined with telephone poles and neon signs switched on for the night; it records the road and sky bathed in amber light. Higher up, purple-gray clouds announce that night will soon blanket the scene. Cars and a pickup truck tick past, heading home after work or to a motel after a day on the road. 

But not so fast. “Sun Down” sets up seven other pieces from the artist’s “Sundown Towns” series (2026). Each image bears the name of a town. Edina, Minnesota, Cedar Key, Florida, and Darien, Connecticut are among thousands of places where Black Americans once had to be off of the street by nightfall or risk arrest, a beating, tarring and feathering, or worse. Starting with the photographs he takes on site, Calm uses custom-built software to transpose his images into embroidered outline drawings on linen. The gold thread glints as if touched by the sun’s final rays. What’s left are ghost towns. 

The “Sundown Towns” works represent only one of six ongoing series here. The exhibition was initially paired with “To Wherever, Forever: Sites of Passage” at Santa Clara University’s Art & Art History Department Gallery. That exhibition introduced Calm’s central themes: the diminution of Black Americans’ automobility and, more broadly, the structures and practices that impede their fair access to decent land, a safe home, and a sense of belonging. The American Dream may hinge on home ownership but is inseparable from the freedom to hop in a car and hit the road.

Keying off the earlier exhibition, de Saisset’s “Archives of Absence” also includes three black-and-white archival pigment prints from the artist’s signature series “Green Book” (2016 to present). A visual archive in progress, it comprises Calm’s photographs of places listed in “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” published from 1936 to 1966. It served as the standard guide to places where Black travelers could feel welcome and safe in Jim Crow America. Where the businesses no longer exist, Calm photographs what has replaced them or the vacant sites where they once operated.  

While the “Green Book” images take a documentary approach, other series affirm the artist’s own agency, shifting the focus from historical memory to the recent past. Organized in a grid, the nine prints from “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice” (2017–18) result from a multi-step process involving double exposure and solarization. Targets overlay aerial views of the neighborhoods where Black residents were killed by police following a traffic stop or similar incident. Each names a victim: Malissa Williams, James Brissette, Trayvon Martin, and so on.

Facing and echoing the target images are twenty-seven cyanotypes from “Hurricane” (2026), presented in three grids of nine. Each reproduces a meteorological map of the eye of a storm that was disproportionately catastrophic for Black Americans. Calm again supplies names, ranging from Alma to Zeta. Stare for a while and the eyes of the storms become eerily human.

Nearby hangs the first of the “Ghost Ships” series (2026), a group of dramatic archival pigment prints interspersed throughout the exhibition. Most blur or abstract Phantom Island, a jagged rock formation in Oregon’s Crater Lake, which mutates into the looming silhouette of a schooner like those used in the slave trade. Nightmare and dream, past and present, the “Ghost Ships” open to a rush of associations that reward contemplation.

Yet the installation and interpretive materials don’t always lend themselves to such. Calm’s art is not polemic. Its power lies in his skillful and concise mapping of aspects of the American experience that most will find disturbing and unfamiliar. We need time and effort to take the full measure of what the work conveys. Making such engagement a greater challenge, we are likely to be distracted by the effort of keeping track of what’s what. There are no labels for the individual works, only a confusing blue handout. This lack makes the exhibition feel like a puzzle.   

That’s especially true in Gallery I, intended as a bridge to the earlier show. That gallery includes the triptych “Body Language” (2018), which shifts the focus from place to person. The silhouetted body that the artist depicts is his own, in positions typical of those ordered by police during an arrest. “Body Language” directs attention to Calm’s personal stake in the situations he addresses. 

The “Sites of Passage” show featured a video (also aired on KQED Arts in 2020 and viewable on the artist’s website) that extended Calm’s work into a performative context. Using footage from the artist’s dash cam, plus that shot by the KQED crew, the video homes in on his experiences as a Black man taking road trips in a late model pickup and photographing disparate sites. We accompany him as he gathers raw material for much of the work featured in “Archives of Absence,” attending to a past that’s forever pressing into the present. Driving while Black remains risky, and photographing while Black is often viewed with suspicion. “I want to be free,” Calm explains, “and this drive” — indeed, this exhibition — “is investigating that level of freedom.”