APAture Focus Awardees: Barbara Jane Reyes & Taraneh Hemami
Join us on Friday, October 19, 2018 as we present the 2018 APAture Focus Award at Arc Gallery & Studios, 6-10pm.
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers, 2017). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of four previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, and To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015). She is also the author of the chapbooks Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2008) Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlán Libre Press, 2012). Her sixth book, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2020.
Taraneh Hemami works with materials of history, organizing archives of images, data and information, weaving complimentary and contradictory narratives in objects, installations as well as experimental collective and collaborative curatorial projects. Hemami’s architectural sculptures become platforms for interaction and engagement, personal reflections, and public action. She explores themes of displacement, preservation, and representation in installations that intermingle with the architecture of the spaces they occupy, complicating their identity and altering their function. She has received awards from the Creative Capital, Creative Work Fund, Center for Cultural Innovation, and the California Council for the Humanities. Her works have been exhibited widely including at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, Victoria and Albert Museum, Boghossian Foundation, and at the Sharjah International Biennial. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and living and working in San Francisco, Hemami engages in diverse strategies including installation, object and media productions, collective and participatory projects to explore themes of displacement, preservation, and representation.