Room for Big Ideas
FREE and open to the public during gallery hours, YBCA's Room for Big Ideas (RBI) is an interactive space that complements YBCA's Big Ideas and artistic programs. In recent seasons, YBCA has invited artists, curators and collectives to use the RBI as a showcase for innovative art practices that supports emerging Bay Area artists and promotes exciting intersections between community, civic engagement and arts education. In addition, the RBI contains video clips of past and upcoming programming at YBCA, exhibition catalogs, artist books, educational displays, listening stations and computers with interactive websites. The RBI is a space where visitors can learn about YBCA’s artistic offerings in an atmosphere that is casual yet informative, inviting and intellectually stimulating.
The RBI Annex Project — BAN 5
For BAN 5, YBCA’s Community Engagement commissioned three curatorial-artists' collectives from three Bay Area cities—Richmond, San Francisco, and Oakland—to explore the Inside/Outside theme of BAN 5 as a site of investigation. The three curatorial collectives—InSitu: Richmond, The Red Poppy Art House, and The Black New World—activate the RBI to elaborate and expand upon their respective performance/exhibition/art spaces and/or geographical locations by creating three distinct environments (or annexes) and an accompanying series of public programs that will be showcased and on view in the RBI during the run of BAN 5.
InSitu: Richmond, a process-driven project created by former graduate students of California College of the Art's curatorial practice program Julia Hamilton, Erin Elder, and Grace Kook-Anderson was conceived as a way to examine Richmond’s specific cultural context, as well as its relationship to Bay Area’s larger urban network. By using the map as a point of departure and by investigating a spectrum of particular sites, landmarks, and geographical phenomenon, InSitu aims to expose some of the contradictions and eccentricities of these places as a means of exploring the region’s cultural, environmental, and economic terrain. The InSitu: Richmond Annex is on view Jul 19–Aug 17.
As part of their
BAN 5 residency,
the Red Poppy Art House, co-directed by Todd T. Brown and Meklit Hadero, explores the concept of
The Living Presence of Space as a means of demonstrating the power that small spaces hold as vibrant centers where artists gather, create, and make their home, and the fact that such spaces are in deep need of support. The Red Poppy Art House Annex is on view Sep 1–Sep 28.
The Black New World, founded by West Oakland-based artist, activist and cultural historian Marcel Diallo, transforms the RBI into a sanctified outpost of cutting-edge and traditional Black New World art, music, and dance using assemblage altars, multimedia and spiritual merchandise. Specializing in presenting exhibitions, concerts, workshops, symposiums, lectures, parades, festivals and other social and educational events, they are progressively advancing the continuum of Africa-rooted Diaspora culture into the new millennium.
The Black New World Annex is on view Oct 9–Nov 16.