PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with GRAVITY

@ • About • Event Details • About the Artist & Partners • Gallery • Plan Your Visit PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. JESS CURTIS EXPERIMENTS WITH GRAVITY PRESENTED BY FORT MASON ART Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and GRAVITY present PLEASE. STAY. TOUCH. Jess Curtis Experiments with GRAVITY. More than a memorial, this is an invitation: to come closer, to feel more, to let the body lead. A living laboratory of sensation and movement, the exhibition unfolds through immersive, multi-sensory environments that echo Curtis’s 40-year practice of radical, accessible, and unapologetically physical dance. Stay. Touch. Be moved. Photo: Robbie Sweeny EVENT DETAILS The exhibition traces Jess Curtis’s early days as a soloist to becoming a contemporary dance leader on the West Coast and internationally, all the while creating community and inspiring new generations of dancers. Curators Seth Eisen and LisaRuth Elliott explore how Curtis pursued key questions in his work: What happens when we pay attention? When we touch? When we are touched? When we see and allow ourselves to be witnessed? And further, the exhibition asks: How do we hold radical collisions, queer placemaking, and loud bold body culture in a gallery context? Curtis spent his career investigating what it means to be present in a body. We honor Curtis’s experimental practice not by displaying it, but by doing it. Visitors are invited to be participants, observers to be dancers – his archive transforms into an activated experience. Audio description, use of Braille, tactile walking surfaces, and other interpretive haptic tools are integrated from the ground up. Fully Tactile Art SF is integrated in the production team. Accessibility here is not supplemental; it is the exhibition’s aesthetic philosophy made spatial, an expression of Curtis’s lifelong commitment to an accessible future for all. All summer, please, stay, touch. Experience the worlds he created and experiment at the edge of a city loved by Jess. Every body is welcome and provoked into presence. All it needs is you. Jess Curtis is absent. His body, his voice, his daily presence in the studio – gone. Yet he is radically present – in the dancers he trained, the access practices he pioneered, the artistic lineages he nurtured, and in the very concepts he championed throughout his work. Activations An Activation Stage led by artists-in-residence who Curtis mentored, hosts contact improvisation jams, fresh movement works, and community conversations. Serving as curator-facilitator-performers for events, performances, and happenings, three Activation Programmers engage deeply with Jess’s legacy and archive while exhibiting work that extends his commitment to inclusive, innovative performance practice, and embodied presence. Maria Silk brings a sensory gay manifesto and drag performances, Abby Crain explores creative visceral practices of the moving body within simple and spacious structures, and jose e. abad’s performance and dance at the intersection of art, social justice activism, and sustainable urbanism challenge perceptions. DOCENT GUIDED ACCESSIBILITY DAYS: Saturday, July 25, 2026 and August 8, 2026. Contact Seth Eisen at info@EyeZen.org for more information. This exhibition is made possible by the generosity of Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture with additional support from GRAVITY. ABOUT THE ARTIST & PARTNERS ARTIST Jess Curtis (1961–2024) pioneered experimental, body-based performance centering disabled, blind and low vision, queer, and marginalized artists. He emerged from San Francisco’s radical 1980s–90s dance scene including the collectives Contraband and CORE before founding Jess Curtis/GRAVITY in 2000. For more than two decades, he worked with performers between his two homes of San Francisco and Berlin, earning recognition as a contemporary dance leader on the West Coast and internationally while building a community defined by mutual support, mentorship, and sustained collaboration. Jess was part…