The Bay Area's Hub for Asian Pacific American Community Arts Since 1972
Rebel Legacy: Activist Art from South Asian California
The San Francisco Bay Area has long been distinguished as a center of important radical organizing and art by communities of color. Kearny Street Workshop itself is the product of Asian Pacific American activists and artists coming together during the infamous San Francisco I-Hotel evictions of the 1970s.
South Asian Americans have been organizing across California for over a century, from the Ghadar Party, the West Coast Indian American anticolonial movement founded in 1913, and continuing through the post-9/11 period. Each wave of organizers has created art reflecting their movements, using a variety of media, including paintings, woodcuts, music, theater, and performance art.
In August 2013, the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour curated Our Name is Rebel: Images of Berkeley’s South Asian Legacy, featuring art inspired by the stories told on the walking tour. Kearny Street Workshop is delighted to partner with the curators to bring the show to Oakland, expanding the scope to encompass contemporary work that builds on historical themes.
Rebel Legacy: Activist Art from South Asian California connects the century-long history of South Asian American activism with contemporary social movements, linking local and global struggles for equity and social justice. In their work, the seven featured California artists address themes of historical memory, cross-racial solidarities, feminist and LGBTQ organizing, anti-caste struggles, colorism, Islamophobia, and the U.S. war machine. Many of the pieces build on South Asian art styles, reflecting our communities’ hybrid and immigrant identities. Living in an age of unrestrained neoliberalism, post-racial delusions, climate change misinformation, and incessant surveillance and fear-mongering, it is of paramount importance to be clear — a century on, the struggle continues.
Talk to us at #RebelLegacy
The views & opinions of the exhibitions at the Asian Resource Center Gallery do not necessarily reflect those of its sponsoring organization, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC).
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ARTIST BIOS
Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is an activist, artist, storyteller, and politico based in Los Angeles. She was recently published in the anthology Love, Inshallah and currently writes a monthly column called Radical Love. Her personal projects include curating images for Mutinous Mind State, writing about Brown music at Mishthi Music where she co-produced the benefit album Beats for Bangladesh. She paints an ongoing series of #MuslimVDay Cards and had her first solo show, Maghrib Memories, in Oakland in 2012. You can find her ranting at @tazzystar and at tazzystar.blogspot.com.
Amman Desai is a South Asian artist/non-profiteer living in Oakland. His interests include basmati rice, Baduizm, animality, curry leaves, elephants, and lions. You can contact him at: ammandesai@gmail.com.
Khushboo Gulati is a South Asian queer artist, storyteller, organizer, and student, born and raised in Los Angeles. She draws the visions of her art from her South Asian roots, social justice, street art, and her experiences. Her art began through the practice of and experimentation with mehndi, Indian dance, and an exploration with color which has evolved through new understandings, her journey to reclaim her roots, and utilizing other mediums to convey her messages. Through her pieces she wishes to tell stories, challenge taboos, and use creative justice for healing and learning. By layering her work with different materials, diasporic and colonial histories, personal experiences, and different visual cultures, she challenges structures of oppression to provide decolonial narratives that unearth alternative stories.
Through his artistic practice, Nick Singh Randhawa aims to be disruptive of the viewer’s standard experiences. To achieve this, Randhawa employs a variety of methods and media in order to continually ‘confuse’ the viewer. His artistic practice departs from the work of psychologist and philosopher John Dewey, who promotes an understanding of pedagogical practices as requiring a moment of disruption in order to open up spaces for (re)education. The subject of his work spans a multitude of topics, but can always be understood as occupying the field of the political and social.
Nisha Kaur Sembi was born and raised in Berkeley, California. With any art that she produces, whether it be her digital, fine art, or street art work, Nisha’s main objective is to use her art as a platform to bridge self expression with social change. By combining Indian culture with hip-hop culture, Nisha has channeled a new style called Kalakari (“Artistry”) through which she has been crafting art work, digital design projects, and apparel design that break through traditional boundaries and bring forth a fresh and eclectic urban/cultural aesthetic. her most recent mixed-media solo exhibit called Word to Your Motherland (2012) that took place in Oakland, California and again in Sacramento California (2013); which has evolved into a dynamic new international exhibition series with educational workshop components that is the first of its kind. Currently, Nisha works as a freelance graphic designer and is working on upcoming art exhibitions and collaborative projects that will take place around the globe.
Poonam Whabi is a long-time co-owner at Design Action Collective, a worker-owned cooperative that provides visual communication tools to the social justice movement. She plays drums in the Brass Liberation Orchestra, a leftist band that supports local organizing for justice, and also DJs under the name of DJ Baagi in Oakland, CA.
Design Action Collective began in 2002 as an independent design and communications spin-off of Inkworks Press. This has allowed us to better serve the movement for social justice by expanding our design capabilities to provide web and other interactive and “new media” services, and continue to expand to include strategic communications and messaging. We are a majority women and people of color owned cooperative based in Oakland, CA.