Co-Presented by Asian Law Caucus

Kearny Street Workshop presents Dreaming People’s History, an exhibition of past and present Asian American arts and activism. Through oral histories, posters, murals, literature, research projects, and contemporary art, the exhibition uplifts Asian American history as the creative product of artists, writers, and organizers reclaiming the struggles of preceding generations. Their work testifies that the promise of the Asian American Movement is more than a cultural identity. To dream people’s history is to challenge the American Dream with the truth of the past, the creative agency of the present, and the radical possibility of the future.

Dreaming People’s History is organized around Asian American Virtual Histories, an intergenerational oral history project led by Kristian Kabuay in collaboration with ClarizeYale Revadavia and Lian Verdeflor. The collected interviews of this ongoing initiative—conducted with recognized trailblazers, like Jessica Hagedorn and Leland Wong, and emerging artists alike—illuminate Kearny Street Workshop’s 50 years of community arts dating back to the height of the Asian American Movement.

Inspired by this multigenerational history, the exhibition puts the work of contemporary artists and organizers MC Amable, Juke Jose, Tina Kashiwagi, Vida Kuang, Andrew Szeto, Lorenzo Tamayo-Lee and Weston Teruya in conversation with Kearny Street Workshop’s archive. Making its way back home from UC Santa Barbara’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archive, the KSW archive includes photographs and silkscreen posters that capture a time when young radicals were uncovering and reclaiming the experiences of their ancestors in the immigration stations, internment camps, and agricultural fields of America. This relationship between artists and the generations before them, continued by today’s Asian American artists, demonstrates how people make history and are also made by it.

The exhibition also highlights Kearny Street Workshop Press, which published numerous books of poetry by local authors. Readers can find titles from KSW Press at the Main Library’s San Francisco History Center on the 6th Floor. The publications are a window into the literary dimension that was vital to the Asian American Movement.

Dreaming People’s History opens on Saturday, April 29, 2023, coinciding with the beginning of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM). The exhibition offers a critical historical perspective on this year’s celebration of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. As violence against Asian people heightens mainstream awareness of Asian American issues, Dreaming People’s History complicates the conventional narrative of the Asian American experience with stories of solidarity, resistance, and radical imagination.