presents

BORN A PROBLEM:

A Multimedia Exhibition


by Paula Te & Edward Gunawan

In 1965, a CIA-aided military coup marked the beginning of a tumultuous period in Indonesia. The new authoritarian government, perceiving a "Chinese Problem," initiated a series of anti-Chinese policies from 1967-2000: Chinese language names barred on official documents, Chinese language media and schools shuttered, while public celebrations of cultural festivals such as Chinese New Year were banned.

These exclusionist and forced assimilation laws, echoing the Indian Treaties & the Removal Act, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States, fostered resentment and discrimination that led to massacres and sexual violence against the Indonesian Chinese community in 1965 and 1998.

This multimedia exhibition by artist Paula Te and writer Edward Gunawan (who are both of Chinese Indonesian descent) takes the form of erasure poems based on actual laws from this dark chapter of history. The large-scale interactive installation contains the context behind the redacted text, revealed through augmented reality (AR) to investigate the invisible historical forces that impact present-day culture, society, politics–and ultimately, our sense of personal flourishing and communal belonging.

Apr 28th to May 12th, 2024

at GRAY AREA / Grand Theater:
2665 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110

Exhibition Hours: May 1-12, Wed to Sun @ 3-8 PM
Sliding scale admission | $15 suggested donation

Apr 28th @ 5:30 PM — Opening Reception

May 1st @ 5:30 PM — Artist Talk

May 3rd @ 5:30 PM — Panel Discussion

May 5th @ 2:30 PM — Craft Workshop

May 5th @ 5:00 PM — Closing Celebration

With festival funders & community partners:

OPENING RECEPTION

Join us for a celebration of National Poetry Month with esteemed Poet Laureates: 

  • AYODELE NZINGA, MFA, Ph.D., is a polymath creating at the intersection of culture and community well-being; Director of Lower Bottom Playaz & BAMBD CDC; Curator of BAM House; a YBCA 10 fellow; Map fellow; YBCA Creative Corps Fellow; California Arts Council Legacy Artist Fellow; and the Poet Laureate of Oakland.

    Ayodele Nzinga is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. She is co-founder of Janga’s House a Black Women Arts collective and a founding member of BlacSpace Collective. She is the Executive Director of the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation, of Oakland, (BAMBD CDC); and founder and producer of BAMBDFEST International Biennial a month-long arts and cultural festival animating the Black Arts Movement Business District in Oakland CA. Nzinga holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness; a Ph.D. in Transformative Education & Change; is a Cal-Shakes Artist Investigator Alumni; a San Francisco Foundation Arts Leadership Fellow; a member of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame; recognized by Theater Bay Area as one of the 40 faces in the Bay that changed the face of theater in the Bay Area; is recognized by the August Wilson House as the only director in the world to direct the complete August Wilson American Century Cycle in chronological order; a YBCA 10 Fellow, a BIPOC Circle Fellow and a VOICES Community Journalism Fellow.

    Nzinga is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland CA. Nzinga's work for the stage has been reviewed internationally. Her blog is read in 81 countries. She is the author of Preforming Literacy a Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent, and her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Nzinga, a cultural anchor, is part theoretician and part partitioner. She describes herself as a cultural architect invested in creating structures for culture making.

    [ ayodelenzinga.com ]
    Photo credit: eesuu orundide

  • A poet and visual artist, KIM SHUCK is solo author of 11 books, and involved in the editing of 11 more. Shuck served as the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco for over 3 years. Kim organizes and hosts from three to five poetry events each month. Her latest book is Pick a Garnet to Sleep In, from Scapegoat Press.

    Born in San Francisco in the 1960s, Shuck taught her first art class in third grade when she organized a lunchtime crochet workshop. She attended the first year of the foundational Noe Valley Nursery School and went on to attend Alvarado Elementary when Ruth Asawa was in the first years of the Alvarado Arts Project. Child of a 60s ceramicist and an electronics engineer, art and science have always been wound together in complicated ways.

    Shuck’s education was almost entirely public, apart from High School in a private preparatory, she’s the product of San Francisco Unified Schools and later San Francisco State University for both a BA and an MFA in Art. In the 1990s Kim started working with Dr. Maurice Bazin of the Exploratorium teaching other people to see the inherent connections between art, math, and science. She continued to pursue these interests and reunited with Ruth Asawa to teach origami in Elementary schools which she continued to do for over 20 years.

    Shuck’s first book Smuggling Cherokee, won a first book award for the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers in 2005. Her fifth book, Deer Trails, won a Golden Poppy Award in 2019. Her chapbook Murdered Missing won a PEN Oakland censorship award in 2019. In 2019 Kim was chosen to be a National Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets. She received a Costo Medal from UC Riverside in 2022.

    Shuck has been a major poet and poetry organizer in the Bay Area since the early 2000s. She has organized honorings, memorials, monthly, bimonthly and intergenerational readings. She has curated/edited small books and full collections of poetry, including the first in her forthcoming series from all over the state of California.

    [ kimshuck.com ]
    Photo credit: Douglas A. Salin

  • LEE HERRICK is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire.

    He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020). His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Herrick serves on the advisory board of Terrain.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He has taught in Qingdao, China, and for Kundiman.

    He was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant. He lives with his family in Fresno, California and served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role.

    [ leeherrick.com ]
    Photo credit: Curtis Messer

with co-hosts Michelle Lin & Edward Gunawan

  • MICHELLE LIN (they/she) is a poet, artist, & cultural worker. The firstborn daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, their poetry and art practice are rituals of grief and healing from the violence of patriarchy, capitalism, and American assimilation.

    Their creative work explores themes of dissociation, estrangement, generational trauma and rupture, mental health, and surviving sexual and gender trauma. They are the author of A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), a lyrical examination about the inheritance of stories and cyclical nature of trauma. Her poetry has been published in over 30 literary journals, and was anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, a book series seeking to dismantle the gatekeeping, tokenization, and marginalization of poets of color.

    Passionate about building loving, liberating spaces for diasporic artists of color, they co-host KSW's podcast "We Won't Move: A Living Archive" and direct the Artist Growth Program at ARTogether in Oakland.

    [ michellelinmakes.com ]
    Photo credit: Sarah Dawson McClean

[ Click on red button above to RSVP ]

ARTIST TALK

Join us for an evening with the lead artists behind the hybrid installation to learn more of the inspiration, creative process, and the intended impact of the project:

  • PAULA TE designs and builds interfaces at the intersection of learning, crafting, and culture. She specializes in hybrid digital-physical artifacts and environments that explore alternative visions of the future. Her practice centers community and people from diverse backgrounds, welcoming folks to co-create and contribute their vision of the future, allowing for multiplicities of experiences to unfold.

    Paula built a platform named Collaboratura as an Instigator Fellow for the San Francisco Opera (2022-2023) to explore tools for creative collaboration across disciplines in the creative arts. She was previously a design researcher at Dynamicland (2015-2019), investigating a new computational medium woven into physical space. Her work on digital fabrication and interfaces has been featured in Ars Electronica, SIGCHI Interaction Design & Children and Eyeo Festival.

    A believer of bridging cross-cultural connection through sustainable community craft, she was a Dinacon Node Leader in Sri Lanka (2022) and facilitated the creation of a recycling machine that turns plastic waste into raw material for new products (2022). Her mini-zine on decolonization has been published in the Interwoven: Black/Asian Solidarities Zine (2022).

    Born to Indonesian-Chinese immigrants in the US, Paula currently resides in Duwamish, Seattle, Washington state.

    [ paulate.com ]

  • EDWARD GUNAWAN (he/they) is a Bay Area-based writer, translator, and curator whose multimedia projects and community work meditates upon themes of displacement and (be)longing, healing and intimacy, kinship and citizenship within the contexts of post-colonial queer transnationality.

    They authored chapbooks: Start a Riot! Prize-winning The Way Back (Foglifter Press, 2022) and Press Play (Sweet Lit, 2020), and their poems/cine-poems, short stories, essays/video-essays, and translations have been published in TriQuarterly, Aquifer, The Town anthology (Nomadic Press, 2023), and elsewhere.

    As writer, producer, actor, and/or director, they have completed over 25 feature and short films. Their last two producing projects—How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) and By the Time It Gets Dark—premiered in Berlin and Locarno respectively, and were both honored as Thailand's Best Foreign Language Film entries for the Academy Awards.

    An Indonesian-born Chinese queer immigrant, Edward serves as the founder and lead organizer of HOME MADE @ ARTogether that hosts free literary arts gatherings in Oakland, CA.

    [ addword.com ]
    Photo credit: Sarah Deragon

  • COLIN SULLIVAN (he/him) is an Oakland based software developer & artist specializing in interactive musical systems, web technologies, and generative music. Colin has built interactive installations and performed improvisational electronic music using bespoke generative music software.

    [ colin-sullivan.net ]

[ Click on red button above to RSVP ]

PANEL DISCUSSION

Join us for an evening of conversation with scholars specializing in Indonesian/South East Asian history and cultural studies that will explore the profound impact of global geo-political events in the 1960s, and their relevance to our present and future:

  • DR. JESSICA ELKIND (Ph.D. UCLA, 2005) is an Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where she teaches on the United States in the world, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Southeast Asian history.

    Her publications include Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) and The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895, 5th edition (Taylor & Francis, 2024). She is currently working on a study of U.S. non-military involvement in Cambodia during the 1970s.

    [ history.sfsu.edu/people/jessica-elkind ]

  • REUVEN PINNATA is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. His project reads colonial and postcolonial Indonesian literature as a critique of global capitalism. His research interests include Indonesian and Southeast Asian literatures, decolonial theory, and Marxist aesthetics.

    [ english.washington.edu/people/reuven-pinnata ]

  • VINCENT BEVINS is a journalist and author of The Jakarta Method (2020) and If We Burn (2023). He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, after serving as Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and previously reported for the Financial Times in London. His work focuses on global development, the imperialist interventions that hold it back, and revolutionary attempts to re-shape the world system.

    [ vincentbevins.com ]
    Photo credit: Cassia Tabatini

  • DR. VIOLA LASMANA (she/her) is an Indonesian-born educator, scholar, mentor, and writer. She has lived in Indonesia, Singapore, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City. Viola is currently an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Fellow, a South & Southeast Asian Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Institute at New York University.

    Viola teaches and writes about Asian American and Transpacific Studies, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, transnational feminisms, digital humanities, film, literature, and global media arts. Her work has appeared in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, Film Quarterly, make/shift: feminisms in motion, The Cine-Files, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Visual Anthropology, Computers and Composition, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is currently working on her book project, Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Indonesian Feminist Archives in the Wake of Political Violence.

    Before her current appointment at Rutgers University, Viola has previously taught in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and Media Arts and Culture Department at Occidental College. She received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California, with a certificate in Digital Media and Culture from the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Media Arts + Practice Division, and she was also an Andrew W. Mellon PhD Fellow in Digital Humanities. In August 2024, Viola will start her new position as Assistant Professor in the Comparative World Literature Program at California State University, Long Beach.

    [ violalasmana.net ]

[ Click on red button above to register ]

CRAFT WORKSHOP

Join us for an “erasing oppression :: re/claiming power, a blackout poetry workshop” led by Jason Wyman of Queerly Complex that will engage participants in erasing oppression and re/claiming power through a series of exercises and examinations rooted in liberating our beings from past and current laws and policies that criminalize along the axes of race, national identity, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, and disability.

Participants are encouraged to bring texts (e.g. State Senate bills, political speeches, immigration policies, ballot propositions, etc.) with them that directly address their own identities and oppression. Facilitators will also provide a selection of texts for reference/inspiration. 

Registration required — limited to 20 participants. We will confirm your participation by April 30th, 2024. 

  • JASON MICHAEL WYMAN (E / he / they), also known as Queerly Complex, was born upon the Land of 10,000 Lakes on what E is coming to know as Turtle Island, who has settled on Yelamu, which is also called San Francisco.

    Jason's name means healer, or so he's been told since a young child, and they did not believe it until Eir father, Michael (Mike) James Wyman, and him mended their selves and one another as Mike died of mantle cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma across a screen and a country over all of 2020. What E has come to understand as the significance of his name is that healer does not mean healed or (even) healing. Rather, it is a positionality within the cosmos that allows one's self to change and be changed by all that unfolds. It is to be curious and listen, and then create.

    Jason is proud to be a Co-Founder of the Immigrant Artist Network with Rupy C. Tut and a collective of 23 immigrant artists, a Co-Founder of Tree of Change with Crystal Mason, an Arts Consultant with AllThrive Education, and a Creator of Chaos Poetry.

    [ queerlycomplex.com ]
    Photo credit: Queering Beauty

[ Click on red button above to RSVP ]

CLOSING CELEBRATION

Join us in celebrating the closing of our week-long festivities that features a special musical performance by Gamelan Sekar Jaya and readings by an all-Indonesian diaspora writer line-up:

  • Gamelan Sekar Jaya's 2023-2024 Guest Music Director NI NYOMAN SRAYAMURTIKANTI is the daughter of I Nyoman Suryadi, a natural artist, composer, and singer from Celuk Village in Sukawati, Gianyar, Bali.

    Srayamurtikanti has studied Balinese gamelan since elementary school from various master teachers, including her father, I Ketut Cater, I Made Subandi, and others. Her education has focused on the arts from her studies at SMKN 3 Sukawati, an arts specialty high school, and Denpasar’s Institute for Indonesian Arts (Institut Seni Indonesia or ISI Denpasar). Srayamurtikanti finished her master’s degree in music composition at the Surakarta branch of the Institute for Indonesian Arts in 2022.

    Srayamurtikanti is also the head of Sanggar S’mara Murti, originally founded by her father. Srayamurtikanti began composing in 2017, and her works are based on the intersection of tradition and innovation in Balinese arts. Srayamurtikanti has represented Indonesia at events across Southeast Asia, and her music has been featured in regional, national, and international events. In 2020, she was a featured guest in Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s Bali’s Living Arts speaker series.

    [ gsj.org ]

  • Originally from Bali, Indonesia, CYNTHIA DEWI OKA (she/her) is the author of four books of poems, most recently A Tinderbox in Three Acts, a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions, 2022) and Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021).

    A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Oprah Daily, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.

    An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), Anaphora Literary Arts, and The Writers' Program at UCLA Extension.

    For fifteen years, Cynthia served social movements for racial, gender, climate, and migrant justice as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser. Based in Los Angeles, she currently works as a strategic consultant and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Adi Magazine.

    [ cynthiadewioka.com ]
    Photo credit: Bill Prokopow

  • EDWARD GUNAWAN (he/they) is a Bay Area-based writer, translator, and curator whose multimedia projects and community work meditates upon themes of displacement and (be)longing, healing and intimacy, kinship and citizenship within the contexts of post-colonial queer transnationality.

    They authored chapbooks: Start a Riot! Prize-winning The Way Back (Foglifter Press, 2022) and Press Play (Sweet Lit, 2020), and their poems/cine-poems, short stories, essays/video-essays, and translations have been published in TriQuarterly, Aquifer, The Town anthology (Nomadic Press, 2023), and elsewhere.

    As writer, producer, actor, and/or director, they have completed over 25 feature and short films. Their last two producing projects—How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) and By the Time It Gets Dark—premiered in Berlin and Locarno respectively, and were both honored as Thailand's Best Foreign Language Film entries for the Academy Awards.

    An Indonesian-born Chinese queer immigrant, Edward serves as the founder and lead organizer of HOME MADE @ ARTogether that hosts free literary arts gatherings in Oakland, CA.

    [ addword.com ]
    Photo credit: Sarah Deragon

  • GIOVANNA LOMANTO (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and photographer who has published 2 poetry collections, 2 chapbooks, and a limited edition art book.

    Her next collection, driver’s seat echo, is available for preorder and is set to release in April. A recent graduate of the MFA program at New York University, her work has been supported by the SFMOMA, LitQuake, the Ecology Center of Berkeley, and various reading series around the Bay Area.

    [ giovannalomanto.com ]

  • JEDDIE SOPHRONIUS (he/they) is the author of the poetry collections Interrogation Records (Gaudy Boy, 2024), Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023), a runner-up for Quarterly West’s 2022 Chapbook Contest.

    A Chinese-Indonesian writer, educator, and translator originally from Jakarta, he received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he served as the editor of Meridian. Their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, while their prose is forthcoming in The Arkansas International, MAYDAY Magazine, and The Third Coast. They divide their time between Indonesia and the United States.

    [ nakedcentaur.com ]

  • MAY-LI KHOE (she/her) is an artist, designer, and writer, born in the Netherlands to Chinese-Indonesian immigrant parents and raised in Vancouver, Canada. May-Li is currently earning her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where she plays in the blur between genres and formats, across time and space, generations and geographies, worlds and afterlives. Her work unravels the profound hidden in the mundane, casts light on the imperialism in our spice cabinets, and unearths humor in the tragic fallibility of human belief systems.

    In her past, she’s served, among other things, as a VP of Design, a co-founder of companies, a DJ, and a co-creator of a music and dance toy called Boogie Loops for the Playdate game platform. She’s helped invent new ways for people and computers to interact, such as the now-ubiquitous face filters and haptic feedback. Her music is in the soundtrack of award-winning documentary, Powerlands. Her writing and art has been published in The Ana, Transfer Magazine, Umber Magazine, 14 Hills, the inaugural issue of The HTML Review; and recommended by The New Yorker Recommends weekly newsletter.

    When May-Li’s not writing, you might find her halfway up a pole, performing in the Mission District of San Francisco with her band Neblinas del Pacífico, or designing something new.

    [ maylikhoe.com ]
    Photo credit: Mcklin Photography

PRESENTED BY

  • APICC was founded in 1996 by representatives of five nonprofit arts groups: Asian American Dance Performances, First Voice, Asian Improv aRts, the Asian American Theater Company, and Kearny Street Workshop. Since 1998, the center has promoted the artistic and organizational growth of San Francisco’s API arts community by organizing and presenting the annual United States of Asian America Festival as well as commissioning contemporary art for and by the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.

    APICC’s mission is to support and present multidisciplinary art reflective of the unique experiences of Asian Pacific Islanders living in the United States. APICC proudly presents the annual United States of Asian America Festival (USAAF), showcasing diverse artistic works in music, dance, film, visual art and more from API artists throughout San Francisco.

    [ apiculturalcenter.org ]

  • GRAY AREA is a San Francisco-based nonprofit cultural incubator. Our mission is to cultivate, sustain, and apply antidisciplinary collaboration — integrating art, technology, science, and the humanities — towards a more equitable and regenerative future.

    Since our inception in 2008, Gray Area has established itself as a singular hub for critically engaging with technology and culture in the Bay Area, while also reaching a global audience. Through our platform of public events, education, and research programs we empower a diverse community of creative practitioners with the agency to create meaningful social impact through category-defying work.

    [ grayarea.org ]

  • Recipient of California Arts Council and YBCA’s Creative Corps Initiative grant, HOME MADE @ ARTogether is a non-profit collective that hosts free intimate in-person literary arts gatherings to connect, cultivate & celebrate the stories and storytellers from immigrant/refugee backgrounds in the Bay Area.

    [ homemadelit.org ]

FESTIVAL FUNDERS & COMMUNITY PARTNERS

  • ARTogether is a Bay Area 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to strengthen refugee and immigrant communities through the creative arts. Our mission is to provide art programs that foster compassionate communities where refugees and immigrants can flourish. ARTogether works with artists to produce programming, professional development workshops and exhibitions that highlight topics relevant to the refugee and immigrant communities.

    [ artogether.org ]

  • AAWAA’s mission is to advance the visibility and recognition of Asian American women in the arts. Through exhibitions, publications, public programs and an informative website, AAWAA is an accessible resource and portal for educators, academics, researchers, arts and social justice communities and the general public.

    [ aawaa.net ]

  • Established by the State of California in 1976, CAC is a state agency with a mission of strengthening arts, culture, and creative expression as the tools to cultivate a better California for all.

    [ arts.ca.gov ]

  • Since 1992, CAMP has supported and produced socially engaged and aesthetically innovative public art, locally and globally as a grassroots artist-run organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District. CAMP is a community, a public space, and an organizing force that uses public art as a means for supporting social, racial, economic, and environmental justice messaging and storytelling.

    Over 30 years, CAMP has produced 900+ murals and worked with 1,000+ artists, organizers, and community-based organizations. In addition to works directly on Clarion Alley, CAMP has produced offsite projects in collaboration with community partners, and completed two international exchange and residency projects with artist collectives and community organizations in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and San Francisco in 2003 and 2018-2022. CAMP receives over 200,000 visitors annually to visit our work on Clarion Alley.

    [ clarionalleymuralproject.org ]

  • Since 1982, EASTWIND BOOKS OF BERKELEY has been a major source for Asian American literature, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies, Language Learning, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Martial Arts books. Although our physical store has closed in 2023, we continue to promote Asian American and ethnic studies literature through community events, celebrations, and publishing.

    [ asiabookcenter.com ]

  • GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA (GSJ) fosters artistic exchange between Bali and the United States through residencies, workshops, performances, and the creation of innovative new works for music and dance. Founded in 1979, the company is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and specializes in the performing arts of Bali. GSJ has been called “the finest Balinese gamelan outside of Indonesia” by Indonesia’s Tempo Magazine, and the group has performed in venues ranging from New York’s Symphony Space to LA’s Hollywood Bowl to remote village squares in Bali.

    [ gsj.org ]

  • GRANTS FOR THE ARTS provide general operating support for arts and culture organizations, and fund re-granting to individual artists and groups.

    [ sf.gov/departments/city-administrator/grants-arts ]

  • QUEERLY COMPLEX, aka Jason Wyman, explores the art of relating to one's self, each other, and the Cosmic Mysteries, through Creative Coaching (personalized services for artists and creatives), Tree of Change (arts-based change management and culture tending consulting), My Queer Cosmos (personal art, ideas, and inquiries archive), and The QC (a monthly journal on arts, culture, change, cosmologies, and movements).

    [ queerlycomplex.com ]

  • SF OEWD strives to create a thriving and resilient economy, where barriers to economic and workforce opportunities are removed, and ​prosperity is shared equitably by all.​

    [ sf.gov/departments/office-economic-and-workforce-development ]

  • THE DEPARTMENT OF CREATIVE WRITING OF SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY was established in 1955 as part of the English Department and founded in 1968 as The Creative Writing Department with the mission of making our writers attentive readers of the literatures of the world and socially aware members of society, who can use writing of self-expression, explorations of the possibilities of the medium, as well as in service of social causes and concerns.

    Our students and alums go on to publish imaginative work of distinction; many others are in positions of leadership in publishing firms, foundations and art organizations. We are also honored to be associated with the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives. Internationally known, the center augments our programs, sponsoring approximately fifty visiting writers per year, on campus and at various locations around San Francisco.

    [ creativewriting.sfsu.edu ]

  • The Mission of the ZFF is to be a catalyst for constructive social change by initiating and investing in efforts that strengthen families and communities.

    [ zff.org ]