Apr 28, 2024: BORN A PROBLEM Opening Reception
Apr 28, 2024 | Sunday | 5:30 - 7:30 PM
at GRAY AREA
2665 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110
*** Open to Public ***
Sliding scale admission | $15 suggested donation
Exhibition Hours: May 1-5, Wed to Sun 3:00 - 8:00 PM
[ RSVP has closed ]
Come join the Opening Reception of BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition as we celebrate National Poetry Month with readings by esteemed Poet Laureates:
Ayodele Nzinga, Oakland Poet Laureate
Kim Shuck, 7th San Francisco Poet Laureate
Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
with co-hosts Michelle Lin & Edward Gunawan
ABOUT FEATURED READERS & CO-HOST
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
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.
Photo credit: Sarah Dawson McClean
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
APICC, Gray Area & HOME MADE @ ARTogether
with Asian American Women Artists Associations , Clarion Alley Mural Project, Eastwind Books, Queerly Complex, San Francisco State University - Department of Creative Writing, and California Arts Council - Creative Corps Initiative Grant
presents
BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition
by Paula Te and Edward Gunawan
Apr 28 - May 5 at GRAY AREA
(San Francisco, CA)
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.
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