Big Ideas Room
Free and open to the public during gallery hours, YBCA's Room for Big Ideas is an interactive space where visitors can access preview and background material on the artists presented at YBCA. In addition, The Room contains videos of past artists' work, documentaries on organizations or issues explored in YBCA programming, catalogs, artist-books, educational displays, listening stations, and interactive websites about exhibitions and performances. The materials in the The Room, combined with our Discovering YBCA programs as described above, enable visitors to learn about artistic offerings in a way that is casual yet informative, making the work we present both inviting and intellectually stimulating.
The Room also house artist commissioned interactive installations that are designed to complement YBCA's Big Ideas and artistic programs. For 06/07, we've commissioned Steve Jones, an Oakland based graphic designer to work with our Young Artists at Work students to develop a wall mural that combines text with imagery to describe our Big Ideas or curatorial themes (add image of installation). Our other featured installation, designed by artist Joaquin Newman in collaboration with our YAAW students, is the "Tree of Secrets" (add image of the Tree of Secrets) where visiting guests can anonymously submit secrets. These secrets will then be added to our "Tree" throughout the year, allowing our audiences to watch the installation "grow" over time.
The Room will also act as an extension of our galleries for our two Oakland art shows by being the site for Jon Brumit's "Vendetta Clinic" (one-on-one artist consultation to redirect negative feelings toward creative endeavors) and Reading Oakland, reading stations and "free bins" of selected independent publications and zines from Oakland's vibrant underground publishing community.
Fil AM Conference
As part of our civic engagement efforts, YBCA convened a leadership team from local and national Filipino American arts and cultural organizations to address the groundswell of Filipino American activities in the Bay Area with a focus o the development of four local major Filipino cultural and arts spaces and particularly the trends in artistic production and its relationship to community development projects and academia.
Leadership from Bindlestiff Studio, Bayanihan Community Center, Kularts Inc., Manilatown Heritage Foundation, Filipino Cultural Center, professors from UCLA, NYU, UC Santa Cruz, and the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development collaborated with YBCA Community Engagement to host a one day conference entitled, PURO ARTE: Filipino American Arts, Academia, and Community Development. This one day conference held in April of 06, brought together 75 key leaders in the field of arts, academia, and community development to identify the respective roles and the institutional ties of each field and the ways it impacts artistic expression and cultural production. PURO ARTE resulted in the development of a formal network that includes participants of the conference and beyond as well as initiating collaborations that have yielded in national grant awards of significant amounts for neighboring organizations.