Country’s Longest-Standing AAPI Arts Organization Debuts Exhibition Downtown
Colin Choy Kimzey brought the newest Kearny Street Workshop exhibition to life. (Paolo Bicchieri)
There’s a new reason to go downtown to participate in San Francisco’s “hope loop.” Kearny Street Workshop (KSW), the country’s longest-standing organization for AAPI artists, debuted a new exhibition in the San Francisco Public Library’s main branch in Civic Center. The exhibition is called Dreaming People’s History and will be up on the lower level of the library in the Jewett Gallery until August 6. On May 4, the organization kicked off the exhibition’s tenure at the library with a night of poetry, speeches, and refreshments.
The exhibit is meant to showcase Asian American past and present through myriad art forms including posters, oral histories, contemporary art, and more. Former director of KSW Nancy Hom read two poems while photos of mandalas she created rotated across the screen. Colin Choy Kimzey, who curated the exhibition, then took to the stage to introduce the project. He spoke about the public library’s spatial relationship to the Sandlot Riots in 1877, the city’s deadliest race riots. Understanding Asian American’s histories in the city can help disrupt the model minority myth and create a brighter future, Choy Kimzey said. The artist joined KSW in 2016, and current co-director Jason Bayani took to the stage later to praise Choy Kimzey’s vision and hard work on this project.
But the night’s festivities weren’t limited to just the stage. The owner of Eastwind Books, which closed in April 2023 but continues its programming, Harvey Dong recorded a message to share with attendees. Dong is known for opening the country’s first Asian American bookstore Everybody’s Bookstore in 1970, and for taking over the Berkeley location of already-established Eastwind Books in 1996 with his wife Beatrice. The two expanded the selection of Chinese language books to focus on AAPI books broadly. “We touched base with older comrades and a younger generation who may not have connected with that information,” Harvey said in the recording.
The exhibit itself is worth getting lost in. There are photos and plaques detailing the International Hotel, a building slated for demolition with an elderly Chinese and Filipino tenants who fought against the developers through sit-ins and poetry readings. Prints proudly tout Frisco as the city’s nickname, a moniker with a history specific to Black and brown communities. So, there’s no reason to celebrate this year’s AAPI Month alone. Making an afternoon of seeing this new exhibit with a friend in downtown San Francisco is a savvy, historical way to pay homage to those who came before.
KSW has a full list of events at any given time: Its next engagements include a reading of Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History with authors Cathy Linh Che and Kyle Lucia Wu on May 18 and the Interdisciplinary Writer’s Lab debut reading on May 20.
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