An exploration of the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, as well as its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, addiction, and the outgrowths of resistance and resilience to Manifest Differently
Manifest Differently is a multifaceted project featuring 38 multigenerational artists and poets. Using literary, visual, and media arts storytelling in conjunction with public programming, the collaboration will interrogate the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, and addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience – giving fire to movements for social change. As recognized in Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in 1983, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and others that have followed, we must acknowledge and witness the impacts of our history before we can move forward, otherwise the same injustices will be repeated, as we have seen most recently in the case of Israel’s genocidal treatment of Palestinians.
Storytelling is a powerful tool to help provide deep witness, compassion, and inspiration.
Manifest Differently was conceived and developed by poet/artist Kim Shuck and CAMP co-director/ artist / writer Megan Wilson and is co-curated by Shuck, Wilson, Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Amy Berk, and Katayoun Bahrami with support from California historian Barbara Berglund Sokolov, CAMP communications director Veronica Torres, and humanities advisors Mary Jean Robertson, Kyoko Sato, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Anita Chang, and David A.M Goldberg. Audiences were introduced to the history of Manifest Destiny and the forward vision to Manifest Differently through the lens of a diverse multigenerational team of artists and poets, whose histories and experiences include those of American Indian/Indigenous, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Southwest Asian, and North African (SWANA), and white/European American descent.
The project was exhibited in 2023/24 in collaboration with the following presenting partners – Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP,) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Artists’ Television Access (ATA), Minnesota Street Project (MSP), San Francisco Public Library, Book Castle, the Beat Museum, Book Castle, San Francisco State University, and Stanford University.
Participating poets, artists, and humanities scholars include:
Poets: Aileen Cassinetto, Avotcja, Clara Hsu, Dena Rod, E.K. Keith, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Genny Lim, Josiah Luis Alderete, Kim Shuck, Lauren Ito, Linda Noel, Lourdes Figueroa, Mahnaz Badihian, Maw Shein Win, MK Chavez, Stephen Meadows, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tureeda Mikell, Voulette Hattar
Visual and Media Artists: Adrian Arias, Afatasi, Amy Berk, Anita Chang, Barbara Mumby-Huerta, Biko Eisen-Martin, Carolyn Castaño, Chris Gazaleh, Katayoun Bahrami, Kim Shuck, l. frank manriquez, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Megan Wilson, Rene Yung, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Shonna Alexander, Vaimoana Niumeitolu, Victoria Canby
Humanities Scholars: Dr. Anita Chang, Dr. David A.M. Goldberg, Dr. Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Dr. Kyoko Sato, Mary Jean Robertson
Photo Credits: Robert Herrick Divers, 2024
Megan Wilson
Broken (18 California Treaties) reflects on the formalized promises members of the Indigenous Tribes who were the original inhabitants and stewards of the land we now call California were forced to sign by the United States Government. Between 1851 and 1852, the United States Army under the direction of President Fillmore forced California’s Tribal communities to sign 18 treaties that relinquished Indigenous rights to their ancestral lands in exchange for designated land reservations, stallions, cows, bulls, mules, horses, seeds, tools, thread, fabric, scissors, thimbles, needles, blankets, clothes, iron, and steel. The treaties Native Peoples of “California” signed in 1851−52 were treaties of “peace and friendship” that would forever guarantee their protection while providing eighteen reservations (about 11,700 square miles, one-seventh of California) as homelands for Indigenous Peoples.
When the 18 treaties were introduced in the U.S. Senate, it was determined white Californians strongly objected to the treaties. Due to pressure from California representatives, Congress failed to ratify the 18 California Treaties, instead ordering them to remain secret. The Tribal communities were never informed of this decision; instead, Tribal families walked, some across the entire state, to the areas they had been promised. There, they waited, starved and impoverished for the peace, friendship, protection, and provisions they had been promised, and forever guaranteed.
The United States never delivered.
However, it’s never too late to apologize, to make reparations, to give land back, and to make peace.
-Megan Wilson
Rene Yung
This two-part socially-engaged artwork takes places as a site-specific installation created for Manifest Differently in the Minnesota Street Project atrium, and online as an Instagram project.
The expression “at this moment” is increasingly used to tenuously finger the uncertain place where we try to find ourselves amidst global chaos that assaults our senses in unrelenting streams of news, fake news, post-truths, and counter-truths on a massive scale. #WeThePeople_IAmDifferentIBelong hones in on the individual in the moment by asking visitors to respond to two simple prompts, “I am different because…” and “I belong because…,” and write them on post-its that they stick onto each banner writ large with the respective prompts.
Statements in response to the prompts are two sides of the same coin that reveal our interlinked relationships in a polarized society. Perceived differences of those we don’t agree with or don’t understand can be used to other, marginalize, and oppress, while our own perceived sense of difference, often as a consequence of social acts of othering, can come to shape our lives. Conversely, declarations of difference can be a powerful articulation of personal truths, just as declarations of belonging are acts of self-acceptance and manifestation. These declarations can be simple, and the granular can be the most powerful.
For me, as an immigrant from colonial Hong Kong, a city whose civic freedoms have been decimated by a newly-installed authoritarian regime, to say that “I am different because I am an immigrant” is not only a statement about a legal situation, but to say that “I belong because I am an immigrant” is also an assertion of my place in this adopted country, and now I also belong because I am a citizen of the United States of America, even as I wrestle with the pain of loss of my childhood hometown.
#WeThePeople is an iteration of interactive post-it Lennon Walls inspired by the prolific walls that sprang up in Hong Kong during the city’s pro-democracy protests of 2019 and 2020. The first iteration, #AskThePandemic, launched in 2020 as an Instagram project since everything was in lockdown, and as a parallel installation at Headlands Center for the Arts. #WeThePeople continues this dual-space deployment for Manifest Differently. The site-specific Lennon Walls create a space for collective voicing, where individual voices retain their privacy and intimacy, but come together to amplify each other.
I invite you, dear visitor, to bring these walls to life with your written post-its. Please also invite those who are not local to participate on Instagram at #WeThePeople_IAmDifferentIBelong @reneyungstudio.
#WeThePeople_IAmDifferentIBelong by Rene Yung
Participate in this Lennon Wall project and help grow community voices of belonging!
1. Take a post-it from the trays and write a response to each of the prompts on a different post-it
(post-it color doesn’t matter). Include the prompt in your response:
a. I AM DIFFERENT because…
b. I BELONG because…
2. Your response can refer to any context that feels relevant: family, community, work, country, planet… No hate speech please.
3. Put your Post-it on the banner for the prompt. Post-it should stick easily to the banner. Please do not push hard or pull on the banner, or step on it.
4. Feel free to write more than one response. The more the merrier!
5. Please do not remove others’ Post-its.
6. Please also take a picture of your Post-it(s) and post on your Instagram feed with
#WeThePeople_IAmDifferentIBelong tag @reneyungstudio
-Rene Yung
Chris Gazaleh
Paintings:
(L-R, top row)
Rise up, 2023, Acrylic on canvas
The Soul Resists, 2022, Acrylic on canvas
(L-R, bottom row)
Intifada, 2023, Acrylic on canvas
Roots, 2022, Acrylic on canvas
Reflections, 2023, Acrylic on canvas
Barbara Mumby-Huerta
As a Narrative Shifter, I use the arts to challenge inaccurate and outdated perceptions of Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized groups. I believe that the arts are a powerful and effective tool for survival and an instrument to unite communities and move public policy. As a mixed-race Indigenous women born and raised in the impoverished Central Valley of California, my art is born from the seeds of resistance and resilience.
Through my figurative oil painting, I approach each piece of work as an opportunity to tell a visual story; where the subject’s history is embedded, either overtly or subversively, into the fabric of the work. Each artwork embodies an interwoven record of my interaction and inter-connectedness with my subject, pays homage to stories that are ignored, and captures the beauty in those that are often denied admiration by mainstream society.
The series of paintings entitled Las Mariposas, La Tejedora de las Palabras, and Maestra de Verdad, are of sisters, Suzy and Mari Huerta, a poet and educator respectively. Whereas, Jacqueline is a portrait of Luiseño tribal member Jacqueline Lomeli. These women represent resilience, strength, and the power of the feminine.
-Barbara Mumby-Huerta
Carolyn Castaño
In Tropical Geometries, landscape and geometric abstraction are used to re-imagine ideas of modernity, progress, and identity in the Americas. Landscape, mapping, cartography, and botanical illustration co-exist simultaneously with pattern and free-flowing shapes inspired by textile patterns from the Americas, such as the ruana, a poncho-like garment worn in the Andes, Neo-Concrete painting, and modernist design, carving out a space beyond ideas of the sublime and Manifest Destiny in the Americas to interrupt, fracture, or bifurcate traditional conventions of “landscape”. The patterns in the drawings exist on a parallel plane as the landscape and propose a simultaneity of cultures, concepts of modernity, and imaging of the future.
Victoria Canby
The layers of sky, clouds, mountains and the history held within the earth’s strata remind me of Dine’ rugs on the loom. The cyclical forces of time and nature keep the story ongoing, and our history is both fading and being formed. This terrain is Farmington, New Mexico, where my mother grew up and went to school. The land will take itself back and continue on, but the trauma and pain of assimilation and separation will hopefully splinter and crumble like the walls of the boarding schools.
I was inspired to create this image after hearing stories about my mom’s childhood growing up in Farmington & Shiprock, New Mexico at our recent family reunion, from looking at the work of Diego Romero, L Frank, TC Cannon and Frank La Pena and after watching Season 3 the Deer Lady episode from Reservation Dogs.
-Victoria Canby
Vaimoana Niumeitolu
