#yerba buena center for the arts

[makingcontact]

The Healing Project: An Abolitionist Story (Encore)

A mural from the Healing Project. (Photo by Anita Johnson) This week on Making Contact we speak with composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes about The Healing Project at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The Healing Project, fundamentally an abolitionist project, explores the structures of systemic racism — particularly the prison industrial complex — in the United…

[dozydawn]

“Principle dancers Joanna Berman and Yuri Possokhov dance the Second Movement of the world premiere of Helgi Tomasson's Criss-Cross at The Center for the Arts Yerba Buena Gardens.”

Photographed Michael Macor, 1997.

[majortomwaits]

Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan and Nicolas Cage

Tom Waits presented the Maria Manetti Shrem Lifetime Achievement Award for Acting to Nicolas Cage at the 2023 SFFILM Awards Night at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on December 4th

[cartermagazine]

Today We Honor Emory Douglas

Born in 1943 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Emory Douglas has been a resident of the Bay Area since 1951. He became the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party in 1967, a role he held until the party disbanded in the early 1980s. During the Party’s active years he served as the art director overseeing the design and layout of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper. Douglas was trained as a commercial artist at City College of San Francisco and has been the subject of several solo exhibitions.

His work has also been in numerous exhibitions about the history of the Black Panther Party, including shows at the Arts & Culture Conference of the Black Panther Party in Atlanta, GA in 2008 and “The Black Panther Rank and File” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in 2006. Most recently his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Urbis, Manchester, UK in 2008-2009.

In 2007, artist Sam Durant curated a solo exhibition of Douglas’ work at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas,” which is the inspiration for the presentation at the New Museum.

The same year, Rizzoli published a book with the same title that included essays and interviews about Douglas’s work and his relationship to the Black Panther Party. Douglas’s work has also been presented at the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Australia; the African American Art & Cultural Complex, San Francisco; Richmond Art Center, CA; and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston. via gclass.org | CARTER™️ Magazine carter-mag.com #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #historyandhiphop365 #carter #cartermagazine #emorydouglas #blackpanther #blackpantherparty #blackhistorymonth #blackhistory #history #staywoke

[fashionbooksmilano]

100 Chairs in 100 Days and its 100 Ways Martino Gamper

Martino Gamper, Emily King, Kate Kilalea, Alex Rich, Deyan Sudjic, Michael Marriott, Ron Arad, Kajsa Stahl

Design: Åbäke

Dent-De-Leone, London 2022, 100 pages, 10,20x17,00cm, softcover, ISBN 9781907908774

euro 50,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Martino Gamper says, 'There is no perfect design and there is no über-design. Objects talk to us personally. Some might be more functional than others, and the emotional attachment is very individual.' Some ten years ago, the London-based, Italian-born furniture designer initiated his project, 100 Chairs in 100 Days. He made a new chair a day for a hundred days by collaging together bits of chairs that he found discarded on the street or in friends’ homes. Blending found stylistic and structural elements, he generated perverse, poetic, and humorous hybrids. The project combined formal and functional questions with sociological and semiological ones. Or, as Gamper put it: ‘What happens to the status and potential of a plastic garden chair when it is upholstered with luxurious yellow suede?’ The project was all about being creative, but within restrictions—being limited to materials at hand and the time available, with the requirement that each new chair be unique. Gamper's ‘three-dimensional sketchbook’ brought him international recognition. The project was exhibited in London in 2007, at the Milan Triennale in 2009, and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 2010.

14/12/23

[webuiltthiscity]

Art on the side of Yerba Buena Center

[dustedmagazine]

Montañera — A Flor de Piel (Western Vinyl)

María Mónica Gutiérrez, who goes by the stage name of Montañera, sings softly, blurrily against a minimalist background of electronic and organic sounds. Obliquely, she considers the immigrant experience and her own journey from Colombia to London in pensive, Spanish-language lyrics and, sometimes fragmentary bits of Afro-Latin sound.

Her opening salvo, “A Flor de Piel,” makes a metaphor out of the Columbian adage, “a flor de piel” which describes the sudden rush to the surface of feelings, so that emotion, like the blush that can come from it, seems to erupt directly from the skin. It starts with just her voice, clear but somehow also remote, as she stretches the title phrase into a blues-y slide. Keyboards burble softly in the background, then some string plucks (she plays the kora). She finds her way through the melody tentatively, seeming, in the chorus, about to rear up into a crescendo, but aside from some doubled harmonies, the tune remains subded. The song feels spare—and it definitely gives her singing room to breathe—but there’s a lot going on in the details, a smattering of sharp and smooth sounds.  

There’s very little of her South American roots in the way that song sounds, nor will you find much in “Vestigios,” which follows. This one starts with an oscillating synth sound, long squiggly notes in alternation. Some keyboard chords land at critical moments for emphasis and skitter of perussion rattles to life. But despite these elements, the track is eerie and disembodied. Gutiérrez’s voice is very quiet but cuts right through to the center, like a whisper in one of those caves that directs the sound.

It is only with “Santa Mar” that we begin to feel centered, geographically. The cut is criss-crossed with the chants and cries of Las Cantadoras de Yerba Buena, an all-female vocal group from Colombia and punctuated by the gently syncopated melodies of marimba player Cankita. Even Gutiérrez’s own voice sounds rougher, warmer and more grounded in this cut, less the disembodied spirit more a member of a specific world that has shaped her musically and otherwise. “Como Una Rama,” later on, has the same kind of visceral impact, though its yearning vocals fray at intervals into electronic bleeps and squiggles. It’s also the most uplifting and buoyant of these songs, with lush, multi-voiced intervals that sweep you up in emotion. Which emotion? It’s hard to say. All these tracks have a tinge of melancholy, but also a wide-eyed ecstatic wonder, hurt and spiritual epiphany in uneasy balance.

Gutiérrez’s music traces the remarkable journey she’s made from a traditional, African-influenced, Latin culture to the digital age melting pot that is contemporary London. You might like the warmer, groovier, world-tinged cuts the best (I do) as they filter memory through a space-age skrim, but the electronics are just as real as the call-and-response and just as much a part of Gutiérrez’s art.

Jennifer Kelly

[california-slow-take]

What most people in the Bay Area already know is that the city moved the vast majority of its dead to Colma in the 1930s. That, at least, is the common narrative. What Winegarner uncovers here is a far more shocking tale — one in which San Francisco remains awash with dead bodies that are simply lacking grave markers. And we’re not just talking about the handful that have popped up over the years during construction work.

The bodies that were moved to Colma came from San Francisco’s four main cemeteries — Laurel Hill, Masonic, Odd Fellows and Calvary — all of which were positioned on the north side of the city. However, San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries thoroughly charts all of the other places that city dwellers once used as graveyards — and many are in unexpected, and under-discussed, locations. Dolores Park, for example, was a Jewish cemetery. Russian Hill is named for the fact that Russian sailors were buried there in 1848. Bodies were buried at First and Minna downtown. Most shockingly of all, Civic Center was once home to an enormous cemetery named Yerba Buena. (And a smaller one known as Green Oak.)

The Yerba Buena graveyard started at Market and Larkin and stretched all the way up to where City Hall stands today. It was opened in 1850, contained an unmarked mass grave of 800 bodies moved from North Beach, and was filled with between 7,000 and 9,000 bodies within the first eight years of its existence. In 1868, the dead were disinterred and moved again — at least, they were supposed to be. In truth, hundreds of bodies were left behind, under what is now Civic Center Plaza, City Hall, the Asian Art Museum and the Library.

According to Winegarner, few corners of the city are actually free of former residents’ bodies. Keep in mind that the Mission Dolores graveyard once contained between 10,000 and 11,000 bodies. And while only 200 or so are marked by gravestones today, thousands of dead remain under 16th Street and the surrounding buildings, many of them the Indigenous people who built the mission in the first place.

[videoddd]

Apple Announced the iPad 15 Years Ago Today

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the original iPad 15 years ago, marking a decade and a half of the company’s tablet revolution. Jobs unveiled the “first generation iPad” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27, 2010. Designed to bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops, the original iPad featured a 9.7-inch MultyTouch LED display, Apple’s First Custom chip, a…

[sfacgalleries]

Part 2 - Go West: African American Lives and Westward Migration Performance from San Francisco Arts Commission on Vimeo.

Monday, August 12, 2024 | 8:00 p.m. Southeast Community Center, Alex Pitcher Pavilion and Amphitheater, 1550 Evans Ave, San Francisco

Join artist Trina Michelle Robinson for an artist talk (pt 1) followed by a special performance (pt 2) featuring her new video work Go West!

Projected onto the exterior of the Southeast Community Center’s amphitheater and accompanied by musician Christopher Lowell Clarke and dancer Audrey Johnson, Go West looks at the migration of Black people to California from not only the South, but also the East coast and Midwest. Using the large-scale projection as a metaphor for taking up space, this piece celebrates the drive felt by so many to travel far from home in search of new opportunities, adventure, and also to simply rest.

A conversation between Robinson and author, curator, and educator Jacqueline Francis will take place inside the Alex Pitcher Pavilion prior to the performance. Refreshments provided.

This program is organized in conjunction with Praxis of Local Knowledge, a group exhibition featuring four artists, including Robinson, creating work that explores their ancestral stories and grappling with these memories today. The exhibition is on view through Saturday, August 17, 2024 at the San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery.

Artist Bios Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco based visual artist. Her work has been shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery, Minnesota Street Project, and New York’s Wassaic Project and is currently included in the prestigious triennial Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She had a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), a Smithsonian Affiliate, as part of their Emerging Artist Program 2022-23. Robinson is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? published in 2023 by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. She previously worked in print and digital media in production at companies such as The New York Times T Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slack before receiving her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2022.

As a storyteller, she traveled the country telling the story of exploring her ancestry with The Moth Mainstage at Lincoln Center in New York, in addition to touring with them on stages in San Francisco, Portland, OR, Omaha, NE and Westport, CT. Her first story aired on NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour in 2019 and her second in earlier this year. trinamrobinson.com

Christopher Lowell Clarke is a trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. Christopher's professional performance experience includes playing with the East Coast Jazz Festival Fish Middleton Rising Star Band in Baltimore, Carnival Cruise Lines Main Orchestra and Jazz Chair, the Johnny Nocturne Band at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Orvieto, Italy, his own quintet at the Fillmore Jazz Festival in San Francisco, and the Contemporary Music Orchestra at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He has also performed with Eddie Marshall and Holy Mischief, the Marcus Shelby Big Band, the Howard Wiley Quintet, and the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra. Christopher currently serves as a teaching artist for SF Jazz/Oakland Public Conservatory After School Jazz Program, Oakland Public Conservatory, SF Jazz’s Jazz In Session Program, Oaktown Jazz Workshop, and the Lafayette Summer Jazz Camp. Christopher has released several albums, including The Swooper (Lifeforce Records 1018) and multiple albums with bassist Dewayne Oakley on Naki-Do Records. christopherlowellclarke.com

Audrey Johnson is a queer, Black, mixed-race dance artist and plant worker with roots from Detroit, Michigan/Anishinaabe land, currently based in Oakland, CA/Ohlone land. Audrey’s performance, choreographic, and teaching work experiments with improvisation and embodied time travel, in refusal of colonized time and space. She has shown performance work in the San Francisco Bay Area and Detroit, and has performed in the companies of artists Gerald Casel, Jennifer Harge, Biba Bell, Detour Dance, Stephanie Hewett, among others. As an educator, she has taught dance as embodied practice at community spaces, dance centers, and youth programs, and is a current faculty member with the LINES BFA Program through Dominican University. She holds a BFA in Dance from Wayne State University and was a co-founder of Collective Sweat Detroit. audreyjohnson.space

[makingcontact]

This week on Making Contact we speak with composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes about The Healing Project at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The Healing Project, fundamentally an abolitionist project, explores the structures of systemic racism — particularly the prison industrial complex — in the United States. Pinderhughes uses music, visual arts, film, and language as…

[eunoiareview]

How Green

ripples rise under the water bug, skipping the sun is stuck between the fern leaves i am well fed on little beauty John Carpentier is a graduate of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Creative Poetry Writing Program at New York University. His poetry has been featured in a number of community arts forums including those presented by KQED, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, GLIDE,…

[earcandle]

ECP0832 SF Theater Festival Camera 3 Tape 2 072609

Ear Candle Productions captures two duos performing brief sketches at the San Francisco Theater Festival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 26, 2009, Camera 3, Tape 2.

The performers and playwrights are not identified on the tape, but the first piece shows two men commiserating on their love lives, with The Game Of Love by Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders blasting in the interim. The second piece is a conversation between a woman and a man on a blind date that takes some unexpected twists and turns. The third is a faux medieval comedy in the courtyard.

Ear Candle Productions is a small music label, video production, and eLearning website designed to be a place for the arts to stay and to be a venue for the creative products of the owners, John Bassham (AKA J Neo Marvin) and Debra Nicholson Bassham (AKA Davis Jones). We live in San Francisco. Come visit our website, check out our YT, Bandcamp, Ear Candle Radio, and other pages at https://earcandleproductions.com

[businesspr]

Protests Over Gaza Intensify at American Art Museums

A protest at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco led to the resignation of its leader and to a monthlong closure of its galleries. source https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/arts/design/israel-gaza-protests-museums.html

[abwwia]

Portrait of Essence Harden, photography by Julia Johnson.

Essence Harden (Oakland, CA) works at the intersections of blackness, art, and cultural history.

Essence is a Ph.D. candidate, independent curator, writer, and artist. Her visual work has appeared at Good Children Gallery, Black Portraitures III, SOMarts, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA). Her writing has appeared in Performa Magazine, SFAQ: International Arts and Culture, Everyday Feminism, Palmss Magazine, and Acres. She currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.

Essence graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History from UC Berkeley in 2011. She received her Master of Arts from the department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley in 2013 and is currently a Ph.D Candidate in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores post Black Power constructions of black masculinity, queerness, and fashion. Via Their's Website

Read: Essence Harden is Everything and Everywhere, All at Once: https://elephant.art/essence-harden-is-everything-and-everywhere-all-at-once/

#EssenceHarden #JuliaJohnson #artherstory #womensart #palianshow #artbywomen #contemporaryart #contemporary #art #femaleartist

[cavenewstimes]

Israel-Hamas war causes conflict at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Israel-Hamas war causes conflict at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Protests over the war have roiled art museums. The latest is Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which saw its CEO resign after allegations that she censored pro-Palestinian artists. Read More