Bay Area Now 9

BAN9 ARTISTS

INDIRA ALLEGRA

MICHAEL ARCEGA

SHOLEH ASGARY

ASHWINI BHAT

NYAME O. BROWN

CRAIG CALDERWOOD

CHAMPOY

JEFFREY CHEUNG

LENORE CHINN

ARLEENE CORREA VALENCIA

JILLIAN CROCHET

JANET DELANEY

JOSÉ FIGUEROA

HEESOO KWON

MASAKO MIKI

GOLBANOU MOGHADDAS

COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS

PAZ G

TRACY REN

TRINA MICHELLE ROBINSON

MUZAE SESAY

NICOLE SHAFFER

PETER SIMENSKY

CHARLENE TAN

SHIRIN TOWFIQ

CHRISTINE TIEN WANG

LEILA WEEFUR

CHELSEA RYOKO WONG

DORIS YEN

CONNIE ZHENG

FOREWORD

AMY KISCH

YBCA Head of Art + Public Programs

At a time when revitalization of and investment in our region and its people are critical to preserving our past and ensuring our future, YBCA—as one of the only interdisciplinary arts centers in the Bay Area—remains committed to offering itself as a public resource. As we celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, we continue to bring together artists, cultures, and communities through the transformative power of broad, boundarybreaking participation in art.

YBCA’s signature triennial, Bay Area Now, has long invested in and amplified the vibrant creative ecosystems that define this region. This ninth iteration of BAN widens the aperture to include a multitude of voices and genres reflecting our hope for a more inclusive and collaborative future.

The exhibition and its accompanying programming feature artists working across painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, textiles, film, sound, new media, performance, dance, music, poetry, social practice, fashion, and more. Through historical work, projects in development, new commissions, and public art, BAN9 transforms YBCA’s campus, inside and out, from fall 2023 through spring 2024.

This year, we were grateful to collaborate with our first Curatorial Counsel as key advisors: Erina Alejo, Gina Basso, Jason Bayani, Mina Girgis,

Candace Huey, José Ome Mazatl, Aay PrestonMyint, and Lehua Taitano. Their knowledge and care for our communities is long-standing and deep, and aligns with our belief in the act of curating as directly stemming from its Latin root, curare, “to take care.”

We welcome you to this version of the Bay Area— now—one in which we connect to, care for, and are changed by one another, in collective pursuit of better ways forward.

01 Connie Zheng, Land of Opportunity, 2022, installation view, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Courtesy the artist and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Photo by Impart Photography.

WHAT, WHERE, OR WHO INSPIRES YOU IN THE BAY AREA?

“I am inspired by the uniqueness of the Bay Area, its landscape and surroundings. From the rocky shorelines of the Northern California coast to the oldest Chinatown in the United States, the Bay Area has always been an inspiring, distinct, and evolving place to live in.”

—Chelsea Ryoko Wong

“The same old things. The same picture and same design and same fabric. The simple things. People shopping. Receiving checks in my mailbox. Food. Banana and apple. Avocado and kiwi.”

—Doris Yen

“The DIY / underground / independent orgs and venues dedicated to art, books, and music are really what I’m about. They embody the supportive and nurturing energy that I feel like defines the creative communities here, and that has shaped me into the person I have become.”

—Tracy Ren

02 Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Gone, a Busy Day Where the River meets the Ocean, 2023. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.

Photo by Shaun Roberts.

FINDING FOOTING, MAPPING NETWORKS

FIONA BALL

Bay Area Now 9 Curator

Independent Curator

MARTIN STRICKLAND

Bay Area Now 9 Curator

YBCA Director of Curatorial Initiatives

Five years have passed since the last Bay Area Now. The massive undertaking that this exhibition entails was impossible during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that also witnessed global urgencies around climate and racial justice, reckonings in the world of contemporary art, and seismic organizational changes for YBCA. As we collectively gathered up the pieces of the last few years—still repairing, still processing—conversations with colleagues, peers, and artists showed a clear need for BAN as a space to make sense of all we have endured, created, and survived. As curators, we were elated for the opportunity to answer this call.

Inside the exhibition, viewers will find pathways forward—ruminations on hope, collectivity, sustainability, and community—guided by local artists. Their devotion to the Bay Area as a place to carry out their personal and professional lives emphatically rebuts a narrative that this place’s best days are in the rearview mirror.

Following the success of the first iteration in 1997, YBCA established BAN as a triennial festival with a commitment to local artists working across creative fields, grounded by an exhibition of visual art specifically. This history sets the stage for our current multidisciplinary

initiative, forefronting collaboration as a medium in its own right. During our research and studio visits over the last year, again and again we saw artists using their practices to build rhizomatic networks joining not only disciplines, practitioners, and communities, but also histories and realities. What we’ve pulled out as the themes of the exhibition speak to this intuitive desire to find one another:

• Building portals to new and imagined worlds

• Looking to the land to learn how to regenerate

• Reconciling the contemporary immigrant experience

• Cherishing the people and places that form us

• Collapsing time and history to connect to a personal and collective ancestry

• Interrogating our relationship with the built world

We offer these as entryways to the exhibition, but encourage you to form your own networks as you explore it. What stories do the artworks tell you? Where do aspects of one artist’s practice show up in another’s? Ultimately, we sincerely hope you locate something of yourself in these artists and their work.

BAN9 CURATORS IN CONVERSATION

Fiona Ball: When we started visiting artists’ studios to make selections for BAN9, we had no predetermined themes in mind, but I think we can agree that some commonalities surfaced pretty quickly.

Martin Strickland: Definitely. For instance strong lines emerged around notions of who artists celebrate and honor through their practices, whether chosen or bloodline family ancestry.

FB: So many artists are using their work to hold dear the people who are integral to their own growth. Or the landscapes they hold dear. Many are making work related to elements of the natural and built worlds around them.

MS: Quite a few connect the built world to the contemporary immigrant experience. Michael Arcega, for example, has worked with family members to clean out a number of different spaces—storage units, garages—which led him to think about how objects are associated with memory and lived experience through the eyes of an immigrant family, specifically in his case a Filipino American family. Arleene Correa Valencia built her installation with doors taken from an ICE detention center in Portland, Oregon. There are words and drawings carved into those doors that marked time for the people who made them. By bringing the doors into a more public space, we’re inviting the public to acknowledge their existence. Charlene Tan embraced traditional Filipino textile designs to guide her weaving work, but blew up the scale to take over an entire wall of windows. She will invite community members in

during the exhibition’s run to learn her techniques and add to the work.

Some artists are thinking about site specificity in a somewhat different way. The first time Sholeh Asgary visited YBCA, she was drawn to the Third Street Courtyard as an interstitial space, between inside and outside. Her sound piece combines an original composition with her interactions with the city environment at various times of day. Peter Simensky investigates the California dream through these beautifully constructed objects and radios that are on the wall and involve pyrite, California fool’s gold. With these, AM stations are transmitted through the objects so that visitors can hear different kinds of dialogue and sound, which will change depending on the day and frequency.

FB: Christine Tien Wang and Muzae Sesay are questioning the more pragmatic systems of our constructed world. With Christine’s work, at first, you are looking at these humorous memes, but she’s leveraging humor to insightfully comment on commerce, capitalism, and mental health. Muzae’s work shows us

"MANY OF THESE INSTALLATIONS INVESTIGATE THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ART AND MEMORY, OR URBAN PLANNING IN THE BAY AREA, OR SPACES FOR COMMUNAL ENGAGEMENT."

the results of those systems playing out through urban planning choices specifically in the Bay Area.

MS: Muzae is reflecting on different kinds of structures by which commerce, industry, and capital pass through neighborhoods, cities, counties. His critique isn’t obvious; he’s leaving it up to viewers to make informed interpretations.

FB: We see something similar with Janet Delaney’s diptychs, which span decades.

MS: We’re presenting photographs from a project Janet made between 1978 and 1986, and then picked up again in the early 2010s. The set of photographs document the South of Market neighborhood, which was then on the precipice of massive change—YBCA being one of many outcomes of that change. When she revisited this place approximately thirty years later, some of the buildings were the same, but the people who were occupying the buildings, the industry that they’d created, the capital they’d created, and the way in which the neighborhood works, had changed completely.

Connie Zheng is investigating California agriculture, specifically how Chinese immigrants were the ones irrigating and growing the food, cultivating the industry that, in great part, made California the commercial power it is today. A two-sided installation, divided by day and night, depicts California’s geography and agricultural and waterway systems. Water flows into the Bay Area, industry flows into the Bay Area, and she’s asking us to consider external versus internal approaches to place.

FB: Going back to the idea of works that are homages, intended to honor, to celebrate—that already comes across powerfully in the main entryway to the galleries, with Craig Calderwood, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, and Jeffrey Cheung’s work.

MS: Craig is reflecting on their time growing up in Fresno—all the people, places, and events that formed their work and their ability to leave that place, move somewhere else, and then create work. With Chelsea, there’s two beautiful scenes, one of nature and one of a more urban environment, and I read it as being about immersing yourself in a place, so as to be able to record and express the meaning inherent in being in the present moment. Jeff’s works are incredible, beautiful, colorful expressions of queer life and queer joy, which take form both on canvas and on YBCA’s interior architectural features.

FB: We see a more documentary-style practice with Lenore Chinn and José Figueroa, who archive the people and places in the Bay Area that form them.

MS: To me, they epitomize devotion to a practice. A major part of the work is about the commitment and the rigor that they put in every day. Lenore has been working for many decades on documenting and supporting communities, and what we see in the galleries is a tiny fraction of their archives. The digital photographs will change throughout the run of the exhibition, as Lenore will continue to document achievements and celebrations in the arts. Similarly, with José, we have an archive of his drawings going back

to 2018. It’s about repetition and accumulation and memory of being in the outside world.

FB: Another theme is about building spaces for people to gather. We see that with Masako Miki, Jillian Crochet, and Indira Allegra, who all provide opportunities to be communal.

MS: Jillian’s Lumpy Bed is usable and accessible and comfortable for different kinds of bodies and acknowledge that rest, even within a formal space like a gallery, is for everyone. Masako has collaborated with us to build an engawa, a traditional Japanese architectural feature that mediates between the interior of a house and its garden space. It’s a place of casual invitation and gathering. And Indira’s TEXERE builds community through an interactive digital tapestry, where visitors can put their own stories of grief and loss alongside everyone else’s.

Courtney Desiree Morris has given us a visual and sonic representation of bodily autonomy and joy. It’s about looking at queer people, trans people, Black people, on large screens. Her installation is a space of liberation, created by the feeling of being with one another.

FB: What makes this iteration of Bay Area Now, now your third, unique for you?

MS: Definitely the size, scale, and excitement with which the artists have been working. Conceptually, a major thing that surprised me is this deep investigation

around time—trying to understand what time means to them and how it inflects their personal experiences, their ancestors, what they’re looking for in the future. For example, Paz G’s You Have a Broken Heart asks how song and sculpture are revolutionary. How do you reopen wounds from the past, fast-forwarding in time, through song and sculpture?

FB: Trina Michelle Robinson’s work is likewise about fast-forwarding and simultaneity. Her installation addresses the naming ceremony she went through in Cameroon. It asks: Who am I leaving behind? Who am I becoming? And how do the two beings become one? Basically, how we exist as both our present self, our past self, and our future self, all at the same time.

MS: Shows like BAN are such necessary outlets for artists in part because they are opportunities to recognize synchronicities we might not otherwise. Many of the artists in this exhibition have overlapping stories and sources of inspiration. The installations range in size and scale, but so many investigate the connection between art and memory, or urban planning in the Bay Area, or spaces for communal engagement. And, as we touched on, so many are about stretching time—time as a dynamic force that shapes their personal experiences, heritage, and visions for the future. The creative work that’s happening in the Bay Area right now is testimony to this place as a creative wellspring that persists. And being witness to it, bringing it to as wide a public as we are capable of, is a real honor.

José Figueroa, 05/30/2023

Dolores, 2023. Mixed media on watercolor paper. Courtesy the artist.

Peter Simensky, Pyrite Radio (Cabinet - Peacock Sunburst), 2023. Courtesy the artist.

Craig Calderwood, Fashion Fair Death Shroud, 2022. Courtesy the artist.

WHY IS THE BAY AREA HOME FOR YOU?

“I spent 20 years trying to get to the Bay Area. I always feel like the Bay is on the cutting edge of wherever the culture is moving and it's really exciting to be in a place that feels so full of possibility. ”

—Courtney Desiree Morris

“The Bay Area is a place where a collaborative spirit is fostered and inclusivity is celebrated. I love the topography, the weather, the social/ cultural/ecological/political awareness, my dear friends and family—they all intersect in just the right way.”

—Michael Arcega

“I first came to San Francisco from Los Angeles when I was fourteen. I’ve lived in and nearby for more than fifty years and still feel the magical pull of a place that is constantly changing and always challenging. ”

—Janet Delaney

“Wild but tranquil like the ocean, high but grounded like the redwoods, my thoughts are softly wrapped in the embrace of fog, weightlessly carrying my imagination to corners of the mind that I had not visited before.”

—Golbanou Moghaddas

"The Bay Area has influenced my practice by making work that is rooted in Black pride, community transformation, and Black Futurity.”

—Nyame O. Brown

“I was born and raised in San Francisco’s Richmond District, in an era when it was rare to see families of color living in the neighborhood. The circumstances, events, and cultures I was exposed to shaped my worldview and sociopolitical consciousness from childhood through college.”

—Lenore

Chinn

“I think there have always been experimental spirits in the Bay Area art scenes and I feel it’s quite full of idiosyncratic characters here. I think my art making process also resonates with synthesis of many influences in diverse contexts.”

—Masako Miki

“My definition of home is expanding to be defined by the place where one uncovers previous versions of their past self.”

—Sholeh

Asgary

“I wasn’t born in the Bay Area, but it’s my chosen home. And its dramatic landscapes, with which I’ve become intimate in these last seven years, have changed my life and studio practice, becoming central to my vision in every way.”

—Ashwini

Bhat

“The Bay Area influenced my practice because it feels like the center of the end of the world. It’s the best place and the worst place all in one.”

—Christine Tien Wang

“Having been born and raised in Oakland, I’ve been witness to cultural and spiritual shifts in the Bay Area. I’m inspired by the capacity of this place to be the initiator of political movement. I am consistently surrounded by people who are dedicated to making social, political, and economic impact here through arts, education, and public policy.”

—Leila

Weefur

“The Bay Area is home for me because this is where I was born and lived pretty much my whole life. It is where my family, friends, and community are. The Bay Area and the people around me have helped shape my work and the person I am.”

—Jeffrey Cheung

“The Bay is where I began to mature as an artist, develop a political consciousness, learn how to organize, and cultivate a spiritual practice; it was the first place in the U.S. where I felt proud to be Asian. I can't imagine what my work would look like if I had gotten my start as an artist anywhere else.”

—Connie Zheng

“Things that inspire me in the Bay Area are its landscape and bodies of water: the view over the Pacific Ocean; the lakes and rivers and trees; BART and Dolores Park; its open-mindedness and cultural vibrancy. The Bay is healing; the Bay is home.”

—José Figueroa

“The Bay Area is the only home I’ve ever known and it seeps into all aspects of my self and my work. Questions about it are hard for me because it’s everything. I could talk about everything. I don’t have a sound bite for what the Bay Area means to me, but if you take me out for an iced tea, I’ll tell you something about everything.”

—Nicole Shaffer

06 Courtney Desiree Morris, Oshun’s Bowl, Oñí Ocan, 2023. Digital video. Courtesy the artist.

NOW IS AN ACT OF ABUNDANCE

FIONA BALL

Bay Area Now 9 Curator

Independent Curator

Bay Area Now inherently asks us to define “now.” And so, with each iteration, we reconsider the notion of “now” to reflect the Bay Area’s artists and art worlds at that particular moment in time. In this moment, artists seem to be perceiving the concept of “now” as infinite, pliable, and sometimes collapsing—a stretchy, malleable thing to manipulate as desired, in any direction. Speculative futures become entangled with ancestries and lineages, and artists become conduits from which knowledge can be attained, worlds can be built, and repair can begin.

Golbanou Moghaddas’s Seven and One Tales

Under the Desert Stars (2023) in YBCA’s secondfloor gallery epitomizes this, collapsing as it does distant geographies and memories, refusing a linear understanding of time. Weaving together her personal experience and Persian poetry, the installation ushers visitors into a space reminiscent of old Iranian desert towns. Miniature paintings, situated within a wallpaper framing that echoes Iranian architecture, tell stories of family strength across time and distance imposed by the 1979 Revolution.

Nearby, Nyame O. Brown expands his ongoing work New Black Myths (2018–2023), an Afrofuturist suite of paintings, chalk drawings, vinyl, and digital images populating an all-Black universe. Using language from graphic novels and science fiction, Brown builds a familytree circuitry based on Africa-based technologies of the future. The work asks us to look backward and forward simultaneously, setting our bodies into a disorientation that frees us from the confines of the present.

In the space between Moghaddas and Brown, Shirin Towfiq’s Thinking about Migration (2020) breezily floats

off the wall, a magic carpet printed on semitransparent gauze. Such textiles are modes of transportation both mystical and sociopolitical, simultaneously providing visitors a way to travel to imagined worlds while recognizing and reflecting on the precarious and delicate, and very real, subject of migration.

Amalgamation may come to mind while proceeding through the galleries—a mining of histories, myths, people, and places to find new narratives or revive old ones. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), “In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, present, and future exist.” ¹ This conception of time is abundantly evident across the exhibition, especially among artists seeking understanding and repair while looking to the natural world. Doris Yen’s work, in YBCA’s Anteroom on the ground floor, depicts animals—both real and imaginary—alongside a repeated beating heart based on anatomical diagrams. Paired together, the details of her figures reveal personal connections for both Yen and viewers to Earth’s non-human inhabitants. Nearby in Gallery 1, artist champoy employs this notion of repair as a woodshop where their intergenerational community can tend to a bangka (canoe) in a dreamlike, underwater space where paddles float above. The installation was developed with deep guidance from elders to understand the functionality and purpose of a bangka across centuries and contexts. In the same gallery, Ashwini Bhat presents two works from her ongoing Assembling California series, specifically looking at the San Andreas Fault lines for guidance to find belonging amongst climate change and forest fires.

For Leila Weefur and Heesoo Kwon, repair comes from a subversion of religious iconography. Weefur’s The

Ashwini Bhat, Lovers on the Earthquake Trail (Assembling California), 2023. Glazed ceramic sculpture on a wooden base, high-fired stoneware clay, underglaze, glaze, quartz cracked from a wildfire, thread, dried turmeric root, and brass bells used in classical Indian dance. Image courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

Chapel of Becoming (2023) in YBCA’s Glass Passageway is a divine celebration of the trans community, emphasizing the power of hybridity, while Kwon’s Leymusoom Gift Shop (2023), a church gift shop in the lobby, made in collaboration with the publishing studio Sming Sming Books, sells ephemera for Leymusoom—a feminist religion Kwon founded in 2017 as a means of connecting with her female ancestors. Both works speak to the power of world building through a manipulation of histories. As Legacy Russell states in the book Glitch Feminism (2020): “We . . . will not wait for the world to love us, to understand us, to make space for us. We will take up space, and break this world, making new ones.”

When we empower ourselves to dismantle notions of linear time and find our existence among our collective pasts, presents, and futures, we gain freedoms. A refusal of the status quo becomes not a negation, but an act of abundance. We are able to make whatever worlds we can dream, led by the wisdom of the land, our lineage, and our communities, as in Nicole Shaffer’s and Tracy Ren’s installations in Gallery 2. Shaffer builds an alternative time for queer, trans, disabled, and immigrant people who were committed to Sonoma State Hospital, an institution that implemented forced sterilization in the early twentieth century. Their installation connects to their person and a collective queer and mad ancestry by offering an alternative narrative. Their sculptures, which Shaffer often calls “speculative furniture,” build a new history for those ancestors who suffered at Sonoma State to enjoy and embrace. Ren’s installation uses astrological archetypes to unearth familial histories otherwise left undiscussed. Threaded knots mark the archetypes of Mars and Venus, speaking to Ren’s astrological makeup, but also recognizing that personal history does not exist outside of a universal framework. Viewers are encouraged to lie beneath the work and gaze up at the woven constellation.

If Bay Area Now is a geographical and social reaction to our present, this ninth iteration is clearly in great part a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, which taught many of us just how dramatically time can stretch and shorten. But it is indisputably also, I propose, a radical act of imagination. “Now” is simultaneous; it is all that has come before, and none of it. “Now” is not a pinpoint, but a map across time, space, and communities.

"TIME IS NOT A RIVER, BUT A LAKE IN WHICH THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE EXIST.”¹

1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015), 343.

2 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London. Verso, 2020), 11.

Photo by John Janca.

HOW HAS THE BAY AREA INFLUENCED YOUR PRACTICE?

“This is where I became an artist. Hard to imagine who I’d be had I not moved here 13 years ago but this place and its (mostly) inclusive politics has made me who I am.”

—Paz G

“My Bay Area arts community has always been a hub for social justice, social engagement, and speaking up for what is right. This culture has influenced the way I think about what art can be and do.”

—Shirin Towfiq

“When I was an undergrad at California College of the Arts, I more often than not used public transportation to move around San Francisco and get back home to Napa. It was on the crowded Muni buses and the BART trains that I would find the most inspiring people, who always made me feel like I wasn’t alone.”

—Arleene

Correa Valencia

“Filipino American camaraderie in SoMA inspires me all the time to be more generous and to anticipate the needs of others. Through SOMCAN’s ROSe scholar program, I’ve built a crew of spunky young BIPOC women who help me in my studio and now with my project at YBCA.”

—Charlene Tan

“I was able to initiate and develop the Leymusoom, my autobiographical feminist religion, thanks to the supportive community I met in the Bay Area.”

—Heesoo Kwon

“For me, inspiration truly comes from all aspects of life, and the Bay Area is rich in a type of life that bonds. Everything I do, everything I’ve seen, everyone I’ve known—all become inspirations to create and tell stories about connections.”

—Muzae Sesay

“The unceasing work of self-advocacy for the inaccessibility of our built environment led me to performance and interventional installation.”

—Jillian Crochet

“From the queer club scene to direct-action groups and various art communities, in the Bay Area my art has been able to develop beyond what it once was through these relations and the support I’ve received from so many.”

—Craig Calderwood

“It’s all about the Presidio for me. I came to San Francisco primarily to learn more about one particular ancestor, but I was deeply interested as well in the migration waves of other family members who came to the Bay Area and Southern California by way of Chicago and, before that, Kentucky.”

—Trina

Michelle Robinson

“My projects engage what is both volatile and compelling about the so-called California dream. As a speculative romance, it’s shaded in smoke and mirrors, obscuring violent histories and present inequities with glossy promises. I hope my objects call attention to some of the seductive impulses while amplifying a broader wellspring of sounds, voices, and frequencies of the past and present.”

—Peter Simensky

“It has been a privilege to have my creative consciousness shaped by a long memory of redwoods, the soft, permeating mist lifting off the Pacific, and the reality-shifting collisions in the fault lines below ground. Beyond human history and accomplishment, there are many forms of power here to learn from.”

—Indira Allegra

“I am grateful for everyone I get to meet in the Bay Area, and how it opened me up to so much about myself: to be queer, to be a parent, to be poly, to be pansexual, to be an educator, to be Filipinx, to be an artist, to be in community, to be a lover of many people and things.”

—champoy

BAY AREA NOW 9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Reflecting YBCA’s aspiration to be a welcoming, living art space, Bay Area Now 9 will offer ongoing, multigenerational programming codeveloped with the BAN9 artists, BAN9 curators from YBCA, the Curatorial Counsel, and other interdisciplinary individuals across our nine counties.

Committed to the notion of convening as a creative discipline, presentations and gatherings around film, dance, music, spoken word, ceremonies, communal meals, workshops, forums, artist activations, and more will highlight our region’s artistic and cultural communities.

As part of BAN9 Outdoors, public art commissions will be unveiled across YBCA’s campus with open-to-all celebrations and programs that invite us to reimagine and rebuild our region through creativity and connection.

Stay connected to BAN9 activities by scanning the QR code:

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ABOUT YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

Opened to the public in 1993, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) was founded as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. Our work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the communities it serves. For more information, visit ybca.org.

Bay Area Now 9 is curated by Martin Strickland, Director of Curatorial Initiatives and Fiona Ball, independent curator, under the artistic direction of Amy Kisch, Head of Art + Public Programs; and developed with the inaugural YBCA Curatorial Counsel of curators, artists, activists, and cultural workers working across the Bay Area’s creative disciplines and communities: Erina Alejo, Gina Basso, Jason Bayani, Mina Girgis, Candace Huey, José Ome Mazatl, Aay Preston-Myint, and Lehua Taitano.

The BAN9 YBCA project team also includes Yoni Asega, Manager of Exhibition Design; David Tim, Head Preparator, Project Design; Bella Manfredi, Senior Preparator, Multimedia + Graphics; O Soo Vegh, Exhibition Project Manager + Registrar; Rea Lynn de Guzman, Manager of Public + Educational Programs; Flavia Mora, Public + Educational Programs Coordinator; and Cori Lucas, Community + Program Event Manager.

YBCA is grateful to the preparator team who made this exhibition possible: Isaiah Acosta, Amy Bergstein, Micha Dudgeonwood, Owen Goodwin, German Hoyle, Calvin Jones, Linden Julien-Lehr, Lauren Kenwood, Benjamin Leon, Maren Mouhanna, Éamon McGivern, Christian Neill, David Prigge, and Kelsey Westphal.

Design by MacFadden & Thorpe.

YBCA programs are made possible in part by the City and County of San Francisco, MacKenzie Scott, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), #StartSmall, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Marilyn Conrad Trust, New England Foundation for the Arts, California Arts Council, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, William G. Irwin Charity Foundation, The Bernard Osher Foundation, The Sato Foundation, Gaia Fund, Office of Mayor London N. Breed, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Headlands Center for the Arts, ICA San Francisco, Bay Area Mind and Music Society, GitHub, Harvey and Leslie Wagner Foundation, McNabb Foundation, Raymond James Charitable, Savant Group Charitable Foundation, The Building Works, Fremont Group Foundation, and YBCA Members.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS YBCA.ORG

AN EXHIBITION OF THIRTY NORTHERN CALIFORNIAN ARTISTS