Kearny Street Workshop presents Trust the Tides, an exhibition by the AVA (APA Visual Artists) Lab inaugural cohort.
On Display at ARC Gallery & Studios 1246 Folsom Street
July 20 - Aug 17, 2024
Gallery hours: Wednesday & Thursday 1-6PM, Saturdays 12-3PM.
Participating artists: Houyee Chow-Jiménez, Michelle Lin, Kim Requesto, Malaya Tuyay, Ngân Vũ, Jes Young
As diasporic artists and settlers on Turtle Island, how do we rebuild bridges to ancestry, lineage, and cultural traditions displaced by war and imperialism? Through altars, weavings, photographs, portals, and paintings, we invite you to “Trust the Tides” with us–whether the waters be the ebb and flow of our many griefs and healing, or the undeniable current of liberation. Join us in uplifting the stories that have been stolen or silenced, and engage with art as a ritual for collective care.
In 2024, Kearny Street Workshop and Kimberley Acebo Arteche piloted the AVA Lab, a program intended to mentor emerging APA visual artists rooted in KSW’s organizational praxis of Solidarity, Renewal, Futurity, and Autonomy. Through a retreat and workshops led by artists and curators including Trisha Lagaso Goldberg and Weston Teruya, we gathered to decolonize our art practices and deepen our relationships to land, community, and justice.
This summer, when we spent time together in an old, wooden farmhouse overlooking the Pacific Ocean, we understood our practices to share values of collective empowerment–through education, cultural work, community organizing, and ancestral healing. Jes Young’s patchwork quilts, hand-dyed from local flora and guided by ritual, seeks to counter imperialist violence through a return to land and herbalism. Ngân Vũ’s photographs tell stories of her community’s intergenerational resilience and vulnerability. Malaya Tuyay’s mixed media textiles stitch mourning and memory to explore identity and possibilities of a radically new world. Kim Requesto’s photography transcends borders by uplifting the narratives of indigenous communities in the Philippines and diasporic Pilipinxs abroad. Michelle Lin’s tapestries weave bridges back to the parts of herself that were stolen while she was being raised within the imperial core. Houyee Chow-Jiménez paints portraits toward self acceptance and love, both for her community and for herself as a first generation, queer, and biracial artist.
During this time of isolation and grief, we found safety within each other, and learned to navigate an ocean of both peril and power, together. We offer you this exhibition with the hopes that you too will find rest and camaraderie through our work as individual artists and as a collective.
Please bring an offering for our community altar, something that celebrates, grieves, or honors ancestors, the land, the collective. Our altar will be an immersive space honoring our rest, reflection, and release–a quiet space where we can dive down deep and reclaim presence and attention. Let the cyclical motion of the tides wash over you.
Acknowledgement of Land and People
This exhibition takes place on the stolen, occupied, and ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who cared for this land throughout generations and are still here. As Asian diasporic folks who are settlers on this land, we acknowledge the ongoing legacies of colonialism, violence, and genocide against indigenous communities both within this country and globally, including the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Displacement and war is a shared story across immigrant and indigenous communities, and we fight for the liberation and safety for all peoples. Land acknowledgement is always just the first step, and we encourage everyone to learn more about this land’s history, about its people, and to reflect on your own relationship and impact to land, history, and to the communities here and globally.
Events
Jughandle Creek Farm and Nature Center, Mendocino Coast 2024. Photos provided by the artists.
Artist Bios
Houyee Chow pronounced HO- YEE (she/her) is a first generation, queer, biracial, multidisciplinary artist, and educator from San José, CA. She earned her bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State University in Studio Art with a minor in Philosophy. During the day, she works at a non-profit managing a free arts and multimedia program for youth. She uses painting, mixed media, and public art to depict themes of culture/ancestry, queer experiences, and the exploration of oneself. Houyee makes art to heal from her life and to grow into a better person. She invites you to reflect, explore, and feel connectivity with her work.
Michelle Lin (they/she) is a textiles and mixed media artist, cultural worker, and author of the poetry collection A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). Their writing and art practices are rituals of grief and healing from the violence of patriarchy, capitalism, assimilation, and living within the imperial core. Passionate about building liberatory spaces for diasporic and queer artists, they work as the Artist Growth Program Director at ARTogether and serve on the Advisory Councils for Vital Arts and Artists’ Adaptability Circles.
Kim Requesto (she/they) is a Philippine born, Mission District raised Cultural Worker and Interdisciplinary Artist based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory (San Francisco, CA). With an artistic foundation in Philippine folk dance, Requesto has dedicated herself to cultural expression and advocacy through movement, photography, and community outreach. Requesto is currently with Parangal Dance as part of their Artistic Team and the founder of Pangalay Circle.
Malaya Tuyay (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and an organizer. She believes art is a tool to connect with the darker parts of ourselves that are not easy to face - in order to heal ourselves and our communities. They also believe art is a practice that can allow us to imagine liberated futures for ourselves and generations to come.
Ngân Vũ (she/her) is a Vietnamese-American visual artist, photographer and storyteller, exploring the depths of identity, culture, and vulnerability in her work. As a first-generation immigrant and daughter of the Vietnamese diaspora, she draws inspiration from her vibrant community and ancestral lineage. Ngân's creative practice harnesses the transformative power of personal storytelling to cultivate collective intergenerational healing within our shared narratives. Her work aims to evoke empathy and foster a heart-centered tenderness in human connection.
Jes Young (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, maker, story-teller, educator, curator, and student of herbalism from the Bay Area. Their practice connects process and material storytelling to deepen and honor ancestral and collective relationships. They primarily use craft based processes that include patchwork quilting, natural dyeing, photography, and herbalism. They draw visual and energetic inspiration from objects / imagery used in Chinese ancestral worship, funeral rituals, divination, lore and both traditional Chinese medicine and Celtic herbalism.
Faculty Bios
Weston Teruya is an artist and cultural producer who moves between individual and collective modes of practice. In his individual work, he has created projects for the Mills College Art Museum, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kearny Street Workshop, Longhouse Projects & the NYC Fire Museum, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and public art commissions for the San Francisco and Alameda County Arts Commissions. Weston is also one-third of Related Tactics, a collective of artists of color who create projects at the intersection of race and culture. The collective’s projects have been presented through the Center for Craft, University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery, Southern Exposure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Museum of Capitalism at the Kellen Gallery of Parsons, Berkeley Art Center, and Kala Art Institute’s Print Public Fellowship. Their artist publication, Shelf Life, was designed and distributed by Sming Sming Books and can be found in numerous University library collections. They have been awarded a Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, grants from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission, and were commissioned to produce a CoLAB residency project with Montalvo Arts Center.
Trisha Lagaso Goldberg is an independent curator and artist. Born and raised on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu, she spent 15 years in the Bay Area (1991-2005). As executive director of Southern Exposure, the acclaimed San Francisco Mission District artist-centered organization and gallery, Lagaso Goldberg launched the Youth Advisory Board and worked with hundreds of artists to organize transdisciplinary contemporary art programs. She is the only woman of color to lead the organization to date. In 2005, Lagaso Goldberg returned to Hawai‘i where she piloted the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts’ commissioned works branch of its public art program. She was the founding gallery director and curator of the Honolulu Chinatown art space thirtyninehotel and developed an artist residency program that invited artists from outside of the archipelago to create site-specific installations. Through this initiative, she commissioned works by artists such as Carolyn Castaño, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Stephanie Syjuco. Her curatorial projects include Hawai'i for Real, new work by Kanaka ‘Ōiwi artist Dana Paresa, at Arts & Letters in Honolulu (2021); Lands End (2021-2022), which featured the work of 27 international artists addressing climate crisis at the historic Cliff House in San Francisco; the 2022 Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision touring retrospective, presented at the Newark Museum of Art, San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; and Manifest Differently (2023-2024), a multi-sited project featuring the work of 19 visual artists and 19 poets - all connected to California - whose works underscore issues of place and history and embody resistance. She is currently researching and developing an exhibition titled, Remittance, for the San Francisco State University’s Fine Art Gallery and the Noguchi + Hawai‘i exhibition for the Honolulu Museum of Art. She is a member of the Ninth Planet, with DB Amorin and Whit Forrester, the collective curating the Lagrange Point exhibition for Slash Art in San Francisco. Lagaso Goldberg lives and works in San Francisco and on the island of O‘ahu.
Kim Acebo Arteche an interdisciplinary community artist, educator, cultural worker, and healer. Born in Anacostan territory (DC-MD-VA), Arteche currently lives in Chochenyo Ramaytush Ohlone land, and hails from Tagalog-Batangueña and Bicol lineages. Arteche received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and MFA from San Francisco State University, where she received the School of Art’s Distinguished Graduate award. She is the co-founder of Balay Kreative, a future Filipinx American Cultural Center providing artist sustainability and professional development programs in SOMA Pilipinas, and has served on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council, SOMA Pilipinas’ Arts & Culture Committee, and was the Visual Arts curator for UNDISCOVERED SF. She has developed community-responsive programs with Bay Area arts organizations like Kearny Street Workshop, Southern Exposure, SFSU’s School of Art, ARTogether, YBCA, Artists at Work and more. She is Community Arts Panelist for the Zellerbach Family Foundation, is a Healing Justice Practitioner with the Anti-Police Terror Project, and is a 2023 Leaderspring LeadStrong fellow. Arteche is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, while creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists. As a healer, Arteche supports BI&POC community and cultural workers in standing from a place of wholeness and connectedness so they can live with balance, ancestral abundance, and empowerment.