Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?
An Art and Civic Experience to Drive Awareness and Mobilize the Diverse Communities of the Bay Area around the 2020 US Census
March 28 - September 31, 2020.
Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? is a four-month community engagement initiative part of a larger arts-driven citywide campaign led by Art+Action and headquartered at YBCA.
_________________________________________________
re.riddle is honored to join the coalition of curators convened by Art + Action and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) presenting Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?, an art and civic experience intended to drive awareness and mobilize the diverse communities of the Bay Area around the urgent, long-term impact of the U.S. 2020 Census.
Highlighted above is the large scale installation by Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Between Memory and Landscape, (1105-D), 2017, which is a replica of a single-family barrack using materials from the Japanese internment camp where his father was imprisoned during World War II. For the full list of participating artists, click here.
Image: Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Between Memory and Landscape, (1105-D), Wood, Earth from Tule Lake Segregation Center and Cast Aluminum, 2017.
The results of the Census determine the allocation of federal funding and political representation for the next decade and impact the health of every community throughout the United States—from affordable housing and transportation to education and arts funding. In San Francisco alone, each person who completes the census directs $20,000 to community programs - potentially putting more than $17 billion into the city over the next ten years.
Recognizing what is at stake for the Bay Area and the country, Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? engages in discourse around Census-related issues and inspires each individual to be counted.
The Bay Area artists engage with a range of disciplines to offer art-based explorations of identity, visibility, and citizenship against the backdrop of a city that many historically marginalized and undercounted communities call home. Ranging from site-specific and participatory installations to paintings, films, ceramics, and photographs, the works interrogate the social, political, and cultural implications of being counted.
This participatory experience is part of Come to Your Census, a citywide arts-driven campaign mobilizing around the 2020 census and led by Art+Action, which is headquartered and incubated at YBCA and commissioned by the City of San Francisco’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA). Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? will run for four months, March 28 through September 31, 2020 during the active census period.
ABOUT THE CURATORIAL COALITION
Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? is presented by YBCA and Art+Action, and was developed by a coalition of curators including Martin Strickland, YBCA’s Associate Director of Public Life; Sarah Cathers, YBCA’s Director of Public Life; Amy Kisch, Art+Action Founder + Artistic Director of Social Impact ; Brittany Ficken, Art+Action Executive Producer + Project Director; curator Candace Huey of re.riddle, and curator Ashara Ekundayo—supported by Art+Action’s Curatorial Committee comprised of Micki Meng, Founder of Art & and Friends Indeed Gallery; Dorothy Santos, writer, curator, and artist; Christo Oropeza, Founder of Incline Gallery; Rozz Nash, Founder of The People’s Conservatory; Meklit Hadero, YBCA’s Chief of Program; and Isabel Yrigoyen, YBCA’s Curator of Performing Arts.
The coalition, under the leadership of Amy Kisch, Art+Action’s Founder and Artistic Director of Social Impact, has also commissioned and open-sourced arts-based materials—including posters, postcards, and digital assets—that are available for free at www.ComeToYourCensus.us for communities nationwide to create powerful calls to action to ignite census participation in their region. Many of the materials will be available in the four official languages of San Francisco: traditional Chinese, English, Spanish, and Tagalog.
Art+Action is supported by funding from the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, City and County of San Francisco, and powerful communities dedicated to creativity and transformation. www.ComeToYourCensus.us
ABOUT ART+ACTION
Art+Action—San Francisco’s first coalition for civic participation that spans art, creative, community, business, technology, philanthropy, activist, and government sectors—has launched a citywide arts-driven campaign that positions artists as catalysts to humanize the issues around the 2020 US Census. In partnership with trusted institutions and messengers, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)—their headquarters and a lead partner—and ignited by support from San Francisco’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA), they’re galvanizing communities to participate in the 2020 US Census to receive their fair share of resources and political representation. Although the movement is starting locally, the goal is to set off a national spark. www.ComeToYourCensus.us
Vida Kuang was raised by a Toisan matriarchy and the streets of San Francisco Chinatown. She is an artist and educator. Her education is rooted in her family’s corner store, her work with youth in San Francisco, and community elders who mentor her growth. For Art + Action and YBCA’s Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? Kuang’s artworks capture brief moments she observes around San Francisco’s Muni buses. Children and parents on their way home, teenagers waiting to go to school—all the mundane moments of transportation Kuang sees as moments worth noticing.
Kuang sat down with founder of re.riddle and member of the Come to Your Census curatorial committee Candace Huey on May 12, 2020 to discuss how her work reflects how we navigate our lives and the importance of free and accessible art that resonate with all communities.
Bijun Liang is an interactive media and installation artist from Chinatown San Francisco. Through humor, crowdsourcing, and virtual simulations, Bijun retells the everyday to showcase voices of those often forgotten. For Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? YBCA and Art + Action invited Liang to reimagine her work Chinatown Omens, a participatory wishing shrine that combines Chinese superstition, coin-throwing, and carnival games to explore the strength of women in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Liang sat down with founder of re.riddle and member of the Come to Your Census curatorial committee Candace Huey on May 12, 2020 to discuss the resilience of women in Chinatown and the power of playfulness.
re.riddle sat down with documentarians Harry Chuck, Josh Chuck, and James Q. Chan to discuss their film Chinatown Rising.
Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s, a young San Francisco Chinatown resident armed with a 16mm camera and leftover film scraps from a local TV station, turned his lens onto his community. Totaling more than 20,000 feet of film (10 hours), Harry Chuck’s exquisite unreleased footage has captured a divided community’s struggles for self-determination. Chinatown Rising is a documentary film about the Asian-American Movement from the perspective of the young residents on the front lines of their historic neighborhood in transition. Through publicly challenging the conservative views of their elders, their demonstrations and protests of the 1960s-1980s rattled the once quiet streets during the community’s shift in power. Forty-five years later, in intimate interviews these activists recall their roles and experiences in response to the need for social change.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki is a San Francisco-based artist who combines industrial and natural materials to create fantastical objects and experiences. His work interrogates how we count communities in times of warfare, and how those histories live on within future generations.
Baugh-Sasaki sat down with founder of re.riddle and member of the Come to Your Census curatorial committee Candace Huey on May 15, 2020 to discuss how physical spaces hold history and political power.
Image: Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Between Memory and Landscape 1105-D, 2017. Wood, cast aluminum, and earth from Tulelake Segregation Center. Courtesy of the artist.