Friday, February 26, 2021 7pm
Hosted by Booksmith and The Bindery
This virtual event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) is proud to present the second event of our Wall + Response project, featuring sixteen Bay Area poets responding to the social/ political/ racial/ justice narratives of four murals on Clarion Alley, hosted by Booksmith and The Bindery on Friday, January 29, 2021 at 6pm.
Curated by CAMP artist and organizer Megan Wilson (wall) and poet Maw Shein Win (response), the second event in the series features Karla Brundage, Jennifer Hasegawa, Tureeda Mikell and Kim Shuck responding to the mural What We Want! by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / Remix by CUBA, Unity, MACE.
What We Want! (2011) by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / remix by CUBA, Unity, MACE reflects the legacy of the Black Panthers and their core work towards social, political, racial, economic, and food justice. The mural, based on a design by Emory Douglas with elements from the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program is a remix painted by graffiti artists CUBA (Clarence Robbs), D8 (David Petrelli), and MACE (Alex Douhovnikoff). The artists ensure the work is maintained and periodically add messaging based on critical needs of the moment. These gestures of care and thoughtfulness reflect the intent of the original work and support the ongoing movement to secure the demands stated in What We Want Now!.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. She believes that in order to restore balance and to reclaim our humanity as Black people, this issue of racism and the racist structures that uphold this belief, must be dismantled. Her writing is primarily for Black women and people disenfranchised by poverty, abuse, neglect or violence. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange and her work can be found at http://westoaklandtowestafrica.com/ as well as on https://www.karlabrundage.com/ .
Jennifer Hasegawa is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet who has sold funeral insurance door-to-door. She was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi and lives in San Francisco. The manuscript for her first book of poetry, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Tule Review, and Vallum and is forthcoming in Bennington Review and jubilat.
Tureeda Mikell, Ture Ade, Story Medicine Woman, an ‘activist for holism, called a ‘word magician,’ an award winning poet, published nationally and internationally. Qigong Healer, workshop leader, storyteller, lyricist, performance artist, BMI and ASCAP member. Published 72 student anthologies with CA Poets in the Schools since 1989. Performed in schools, libraries and universities, Google, Genentech, Aspire, Lawrence Hall, Golden Gate Academy of Sciences, Randall, Oakland, and De Young Museums. 2020, was featured spoken word artist at SOAN [Soul of a Nation] Exhibit, the American Academy of Poets, Fire Thieves, at the De Young, and MoAD’s Lit-Quake Afrofuturism. Featured storyteller for the 50 Year Anniversary of the Black Panther Party, National Association of Black Storytellers, featured poet storyteller celebrating Octavia Butler’s 70th birthday, and Eth-Noh-Tec Nu Wa Delegate storyteller in Beijing, China in collaboration with the University of Beijing, 2018. Latest publication, Synchronicity, The Oracle of Sun Medicine, released 2/2020, by Nomadic Press.
Kim Shuck is the solo author of seven collections of poetry. Fog gazer, collector of odd ends and dreamer, Shuck was born in the 60s in San Francisco. Kim is the seventh poet laureate of that city. In 2019 Shuck was awarded a National Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets and a Censorship Award from PEN Oakland. In 2020 Kim was awarded a Golden Poppy Award from the California Independent Booksellers Association and a Groundbreaker Award from the Northern California Book Awards. Kim’s latest published work is a single poem chapbook Whose Water from Mammoth Publications. Shuck is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Emory Douglas (born May 24, 1943) worked as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the Party disbanded in the 1980s. His graphic art was featured in most issues of the newspaper The Black Panther. As the art director, designer, and main illustrator for The Black Panther newspaper, Douglas created images that became icons, representing black American struggles during the 1960s and 1970s. Douglas’ work has been featured in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Aus- tralia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the African American Art & Cultural Complex in San Francisco, Richmond Art Center, Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston Texas. He has been a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area since 1951 and attended City College of San Francisco where he majored in commercial art. He continues his work as a world-renowned artist and educator in the Bay Area.
David Petrelli, also known as D8 and Unity is a political street artist, muralist, deejay, and writer living in “The Mission District” of San Francisco, California. My first stencil cut in 2002 was “WAR IS CHILD ABUSE”. Since then I have cut hundreds of stencils, most notably stencils of freedom fighters Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Clarence Robbs, better known as CUBA, is the primary founder of the lettering ‘Wild-style’ graffiti movement that rose in popularity in the 1980’s and 90’s. Primarily tagging and painting murals with the name CUBA (or, KUBA), he has also tagged and painted under the aliases Imagine, Salsa, Work, and Utopia. In the early 1980’s, CUBA left Baltimore and brought his high-color, high-density, layered writing style to the Bay Area, where he has painted over 600 murals.
Alex MACE Douhovnikoff was born and raised in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood. He started painting tags in the early 90’s and became a prolific street artist going by the signature MACE. He’s been a teacher at Lincoln High School since 2010. Douhovnikoff curates Cypress Alley in conjunction with the organization Mission Art 415.
ABOUT WALL + RESPONSE
Wall + Response features 16 poets responding to the social/ political/ racial/ justice narratives of four murals on Clarion Alley, curated by CAMP artist and organizer Megan Wilson and poet Maw Shein Win.
Participants include:
- Poets Heather Bourbeau, Aileen Cassinetto, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Chris Stroffolino responding to the mural Justice for Luís D. Góngora Pat by Marina Perez-Wong and Elaine Chu, working with Justice4Luis;
- Poets Karla Brundage, Jennifer Hasegawa, Tureeda Mikell, and Kim Shuck responding to the work What We Want! by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / remix by CUBA D8, Mace;
- Poets Celeste Chan, MK Chavez, Paul Corman-Roberts and Tim Xonnelly responding to the mural Affordable Housing/Vivienda Asequible by the SF Print Collective working with the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP).
- Poets Youssef Alaoui, Jason Bayani, Genny Lim, and Michael Warr responding to the mural The Arab Liberation Mural by Art Forces, Arab Resource Organizing Center (AROC), and Arab Youth Organizing (AYO).
The project was originally conceived to culminate in four quarterly public events to be presented on Clarion Alley. However, due to the pandemic the poets will instead be filmed by videographer Mahima Kotian reading their work in front of the murals on Clarion Alley. Kotian will be creating videos for each series that will be presented as part of live online events (of which this is the first). All the events are free and open to the public.
The poets are creating new poems in response to the murals, and will be reading those and other selected works at the events. The specific dates for each of the following events will be announced in the month prior to the event – December, February, May.
Wall + Response is made possible by the generous support of the San Francisco Art Commission and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
You can read more about CAMP and Wall + Response here.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Megan Wilson is a visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Wilson has been an artist and core organizer with Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) since 2001. In 2018 she co-directed and co-organized (with Christopher Statton and Nano Warsono) CAMP’s second international exchange and residency project, Bangkit /Arise between artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia and San Francisco/Bay Area in collaboration with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The second phase of the project will take place 2021-22.
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018), and her poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House will be published by Omnidawn in October 2020.
ABOUT THE VIDEOGRAPHER
Mahima Kotian is a freelance photographer and videographer. Originally from Mumbai (India), she moved to San Francisco to pursue a Master’s degree in Communications. She loves all things art, from painting to reading to filming. Mahima aspires to be a videographer and video editor, and narrate great stories through her content.
ABOUT THE SOUND PERSON, PUBLICIST, EVENT PRODUCER
Evan Karp is the creator and executive director of Quiet Lightning, recognized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of the 100 “people, organizations, and movements who are shaping the future of culture”, and the founding editor of Litseen, recognized by the New York Times as a go-to, near-comprehensive source for Bay Area literary events. He’s written columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, SF Weekly, SF/Arts and The Rumpus, and his nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Guardian UK, BOMBlog, Eleven Eleven, Omniverse, Vertebrae, and a fading constellation of other places. With his brother Miles, he combines music, words, and other sounds as Turk & Divis; with Maw Shein Win, as Vata & the Vine. Evan is the events manager for Booksmith, The Bindery, and Berkeley Arts & Letters.
THANK YOU!
