Ant Lorenzo |
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Biography Ant(onia) Lore(nzo) is an artist and organizer from Los Angeles, California (unceded Tongva Land) and currently based in Oakland, California (Ohlone Land). As a mixed-raced Greek & Filipino American, they are the product of a lot of love, a lot of labor, and the manipulations of the American empire. As such, they make their life praxis within contemporary grassroots movements and internationalist struggles built amongst the inexorably interconnected spaces of our globalized contemporary. |
Artist Statement I often ask myself how I got here. Do you do the same? Talking to Annie DeOcampo, herself a living archive and informally trained archivist, I think I understand a little more. The Pilipino community of Watsonville is one of the obscured progenitors of the state of California, a recent construction built upon a jagged coast and a slowly shifting fault line. They are part of local stories that lead us to global questions and histories. I invite you to sit, visit this past, and listen to a tale, then, pass these stories on. |
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Binh Danh |
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Biography Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. Danh is noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape. His work has been collected by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. “Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging” was the inaugural recipient of the Minami Book Grant for Asian American Visual Artists at Radius Books in 2023. He is an associate professor of art at San José State University. |
Artist Statement My early work investigates my Vietnamese-Cambodian heritage and our collective memory of wars in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. The themes of mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality encompass the work. My technique incorporates my invention of the chlorophyll process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through photosynthesis. My newer work focuses on nineteenth-century photographic processes, applying them to investigate battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year. Recently, I have been focusing on California history from Salinas, CA to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. My photographs ask us to reflect on the land literally in the polished mirror surface of the silver plate, provoking questions of politics, landscape, history, and the self. The daguerreotype process (copper, silver, mercury, and gold) probes notions of alchemy, exploration, and geological and cultural land transformation. |
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Connie Zheng |
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Biography Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker based out of Oakland. She uses maps, field recordings, hand-drawn animation, participatory scenarios, and other methods to investigate relationships between human and more-than-human worlds, as well as the interplay between memory, culture and place. Her projects have been shown internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA); the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, CA); and Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), and her work is held in the collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, among other organizations, and was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee. Her writing has appeared in Small Press Traffic, SFMOMA’s Open Space, Errant Journal, and the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. She is a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. |
Artist Statement Maps are fascinating to me because they are one of the oldest interfaces for human interaction with land and water. Without a map, many of us would not know how to begin to orient ourselves to an unfamiliar place. Maps have literally shaped landscapes, rooted in their colonial history as tools for surveying and charting the ample resources of the “New World.” Maps beget landscapes, which are then re-mapped, and over, and over, again. Despite their settler-colonial and extractive histories, however, I believe maps also have immense possibility as tools for humans to re-orient ourselves to our environments in productively alien ways. They can teach us how to locate ourselves in a place — both literally and psychically — and to relate to it differently, depending on which stories are made visible. Each of my cartographic drawings begins with a question, and I see each map as an index of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas, narratives and data points that coalesce around a particular problem-space. For me, the ‘problem-space’ of each map project relates to how human and more-than-human worlds relate to one another — and how memory, culture and place intersect in often surprising ways. Strawberry Fields Forever is a roughly 6’ x 6’ mixed media map comprised of block linoleum prints, image transfers, and loose ink, gouache and watercolor drawings collaged on top of a patchwork of cotton, rice, bamboo and mulberry paper. The map builds up a dreamlike terrain constructed from memory: it is a multi-layered, contingent and somewhat precariously assembled diagram of the Pajaro Valley, drawn by a visitor whose primary knowledge of this rich place is informed by oral history interviews with select members of the manong community in Watsonville. These elders and their descendants shaped the land, communities and spirit of Watsonville. Strawberry Fields Forever was made in piecemeal and joined together, one piece at a time, to form a densely textured and highly imperfect “memory map” of the crops that the manong grew in the Pajaro Valley — both for commercial farms and for their personal enjoyment. The work oscillates back and forth between different layers of imagery, figuration and abstraction, figure and ground. Many of the interviewees for the Watsonville Is In the Heart archive shared generously, telling the team stories about throwing rotten strawberries at their siblings, sledding down wheat fields on cardboard boxes after the harvest, buying bicycles with earnings from their strawberry-picking work. It is my honor to be able to access these shared memories; what meaning does a place have, after all, without the stories of its inhabitants? By drawing upon personal anecdotes and oral histories to build up a topography of trees, beaches, waterways, farmland and personal gardens, the landscape shown in Strawberry Fields Forever exists somewhere between the present and the past. This map aims to celebrate the deep and powerful relationships between the manong communities and the land of the Pajaro Valley, as well as the ways in which family gardens could be an expression of personal and communal agency and creativity, even amidst the difficult conditions of specialized, grueling agricultural labor. |
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Jenifer Wofford |
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Biography Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B. Her work has been exhibited in the Bay Area at the Asian Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, YBCA, San Jose Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, and Kearny Street Workshop. Further afield, she has shown at New Image Art (Los Angeles), Wing Luke Museum (Seattle), DePaul Museum (Chicago), Silverlens Galleries (Philippines), VWFA (Malaysia), and Osage Gallery (Hong Kong). Wofford is a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree and a recent recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her other awards include the Eureka Fellowship, the Murphy Fellowship, and grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has also been artist-in-residence at The Living Room (Philippines), Liguria Study Center (Italy) and KinoKino (Norway). Wofford teaches in the Fine Arts and Philippine Studies programs of the University of San Francisco. She has also taught at UC Berkeley, Mills College, SFAI, California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University. She holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and UC Berkeley (MFA). Born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and the Bay Area, Wofford has also lived in Oakland and Prague in addition to San Francisco. A committed and active member of the Bay Area art community, Wofford currently serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of Southern Exposure. |
Artist Statement Clothing can tell stories over time, not just in the moment of an outfit. Having spent some wonderful time with Watsonville native Eva Monroe as she shared family stories and photos, I found myself drawn to images and tales about Eva’s mother, Rosario “Nena” Nieva Alminiana. Nena was a community leader and fostered many relationships between women within local Filipino groups as well as across other cultural lines. I noted that Nena was always perfectly dressed for whatever the occasion was: a formal event, a work obligation, a family function, a community picnic, a parade. Fabric can be cloth, and it can be a structure. When I look at photos of how the women of Watsonville presented themselves in earlier eras, I think about how they were the fabric of their communities, families, friends. I admire the power in their presentations of self and community, and in their reinventions of self and community: of rolled up work-sleeves, of relationships built, and solidarity woven with other women. Of the strength it took to emigrate and to build a new life, a family, a community. I’ve made a small series of images inspired by Nena Alminiana and her various coteries of women that look at their connections through their garments. Fabric is work. Fabric is community. Fabric is power. |
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Johanna Poethig |
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Biography Johanna Poethig is a visual, public and performance artist who has exhibited internationally and has been actively creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations for over 40 years. Her practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day politics, futurist musings, humour and satire, a feminist point of view, collaborative processes and cultural critique. In her current work, in the midst of climate crisis, the mathematical patterns in nature’s terrestrial and extraterrestrial life systems are expressed by creating experiential landscapes, surrealistic portraits and texts that come together in a speculative storytelling. Poethig’s public art works intervene in the urban landscape, on freeways, transit corridors, in parks, hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, cultural centers and civic buildings. She has worked in collaboration with other artists, architects, urban planners, design teams, arts commissions, specific communities and cultural groups. She has received numerous commissions and awards for this work ; in 2021 the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award. She has curated, produced and participated in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, cabaret, experimental music and video. Poethig is Professor Emerita of the Visual and Public Art (VPA) department at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). As an arts educator and socially engaged artist she deconstructs boundaries in a collaborative artistic process grounded in research, production, critique, improvisation and reciprocal learning. She was raised in the Philippines and has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland since coming to the United States. She received her BFA at University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her interest in the dialogue between the public and personal, politics and aesthetics, the mathematical and the mystical, the ridiculous and the sublime and an inclusive cultural life inform her process and inspire her work. |
Artist Statement Placesetting combines the utilitarian objects of a table setting with the art, necessity, emotion and politics of creating home and community. Finding housing and creating a place to call home is particularly relevant in our current economic crisis but it is also a common thread through all human experience. This project is specific to this site and the Chinatown and Manilatown communities. San Francisco’s culture is rooted in the many different peoples who have made their homes here, and the history and struggle associated with the International Hotel (I-Hotel) is just one example of the many individual and collective struggles behind that effort to find a “setting” place – a home. The Placesetting exhibit offers “souvenirs” to display or to use, as works of art, as remembrances or as objects of curiosity. Images from the Manilatown Heritage Foundation’s Archival Project, poems of Al Robles, Serafin Syquia, Nancy Hom, Genny Lim and Oscar Penaranda, saved newspaper articles lent by Mrs, Lee, objects from the Filipino and Chinese community and imagery responding to the metaphors, myths and memories that resonate with the artist’s own experience growing up in the Philippines are fired onto bought and hand cast dinnerware. Digitally printed tablecloths, placemats and coasters are canvases for the installation. As art or as utility ceramics has built civilizations. They are the precious remains of archeological sites from which we piece together the past. They are the kitsch objects that line the shelves of the avid collector. They are the “revolutionary ceramics” of the Constructivists, feminist classics like Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” and astounding public art of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona. California has its own rich history in the development of ceramic arts and experiments in individual, public, community art and practices. “Placesetting” sets a table for this occasion, this place, this aesthetic of the home and the museum, for the everyday and for history. |
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Minerva Amistoso |
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Biography Through documentary photography and historic images, Minerva Amistoso integrates Filipino American narratives of visionary leadership and unconditional generosity in the community and its connection to RE:covered history. She interned at the Watsonville-Register Pajaronian and at Her photographs document the landscape of community memories and cultural practices that amplify a passion in sharing knowledge and creating well-being within and among communities. |
Artist Statement I weave talk stories with my photographs and historic images. The first body of work marks the beginning of “Manong Brotherhood,” my lifelong documentary project, (late 1980s) with the reopening of Rosita Tabasa’s Philippine Gardens, a much older manong labor crew, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and writer Stanley Garibay who knew writer and union organizer, Carlos Bulosan. Using old news photographs and my photograph, I made the second series, “Manong Work Shirts,” for this exhibit to illuminate that the pioneer Manong Brotherhood carried history on their backs. This series intertwined with the tragic shooting death of Fermin Tobera in his bunkhouse at the Murphy Ranch in Watsonville by vigilantes on January 22, 1930. My photograph of Manong Freddy Alnas, a labor rights participant, highlighted the enduring strength, healing and resiliency of the Manong Brotherhood in My Manong Brotherhood Project draws upon the fierce determination of the Manong Brotherhood to forge ahead, to take care of one another and survive, in the spirit of social justice and solidarity during California’s early labor history in the Great Depression, despite lost dreams, anti-miscegenation laws, racial and economic barriers. |
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Ruth Tabancay |
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Biography Ruth Tabancay’s passion for science led her to study microbiology in college. Following a stint as a hospital laboratory technologist, she went on to medical school. After 11 years in private practice, she left medicine to study art. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley; University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco; and California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally, including The Textile Museum, Washington, D. C.; Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; World Financial Center, New York City, and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. She lives in Berkeley, California. |
Artist Statement The content of my work derives from concepts and constructs from my past: childhood experiences, formal education, and an innate fascination with math and science. With techniques such as hand stitching, embroidery, knitting, rotary knitting machine, arm knitting, crochet, wet felting, cast and burnt sugar, as well as technological tools like the scanning electron microscope and computerized Jacquard loom, I express these ideas visually. My materials are as varied as thread, yarn, wool, sugar, tea bags, metallized Tyvek, silk, beeswax, plastic waste, and vintage linens. My largest body of work is based on microscopy and magnification. Years spent looking through a microscope for my education and early career have inspired me to create the microscopic world into a tangible, non-magnified one. Embroidered bacteria, the use of the scanning electron microscope on commercial fabrics for Jacquard weaving and photographic images, and felted bacteria and blood cells have been subjects of my work. Since 2020, my work has focused more on environmental issues. Micro-organisms digesting plastic, bleaching of the coral reefs, mycorrhizal networks in the forest underground, and natural pests of bees have been themes in my newer work. |
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Sandra Lucille |
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Biography Sandra is a Filipina Mauritian filmmaker who grew up using film as a way to ask questions and collect answers. She began her career as a freelance editor and story producer. Her personal work discusses mixed heritage, displacement, Asian diasporic experiences, and how globalization impacts identity. Sandra had two films premiere at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival: Finding Mauritius (2018) and Back To The Source (2021). She continues to hone her post-production skills with Adobe’s in-house production team. |
Artist Statement I see Dear Watsonville as a powerful response to histories that have excluded Filipino perspectives and stories of resilience. Each narration in the film is pulled from raw, 1–2-hour oral history interviews with manong descendants that are publicly available in the Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) archive; I encourage curious viewers to listen to the full interviews there. The photos in the film are also from the archive, sharing in the archive’s commitment to community-based image-making. Dear Watsonville is meant to look and feel like a moving graphic novel. As viewers listen to edited excerpts from the oral history interviews, they see three main visual assets: archival images from the WIITH archive, archival 8mm footage of the Philippines from my grandfather, and illustrations by the artist Lauren Song. This mixed media approach aims to convey the complex emotions and memories inherent in the archival images and narration. The film is less about the manong’s hardship and more about the manong themselves from the perspective of their children. By emphasizing the manong’s everyday lives and joyful moments, the film strives to lovingly humanize and displace colonial representations of migrant labor. |
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