YBCA 100 Honorees from Art Practice
We are proud to share that a number of Art Practice faculty and alumni are included in the prestigious list of awardees for the YBCA 100. Launched in 2014, the YBCA 100 list publicly celebrates artists, activists, and leaders who are committed to building regenerative and equitable communities. These fierce innovators work steadfastly through art and activism to provoke, inspire, ground, heal, and bring us together when we need it most.
The 2023 YBCA 100 Honorees will be celebrated with a dynamic program of live performances, interactive art, food activations, and meaningful connections on Saturday, March 18, 2023 from 6-9pm, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Join us as we shine a light on those moving us towards empathy, hope, and action. Free and open to the public.
Black [Space] Residency (co-founded by Erica Deeman, MFA’22) leverages the transformational act of providing free studio space and creative resources to empower Black creatives to thrive, explore, and enhance their artistic practices. A San Francisco-based, creative residency, they strive to make a significant long-term difference in the lives of artists, writers, and curators who identify as Black, African American, of African ancestry, from Africa, and Black Diaspora.
Chhoti Maa (Vreni Michelini Castillo, MFA’14) was born in Guanajuato, México. She is the executive producer and creative engine of Chhoti Maa’s genre bending music, rooted in community organizing, hip hop, neufolk, R&B, cumbia, migrant soul, and oral tradition.
Connie Zheng (MFA’19) is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of xučyun (Oakland, California). She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings, and participatory scenarios to diagram dynamic relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.
Fred Marque Dewitt (lecturer and MFA’21) is an African American interdisciplinary artist with a disability who is researching and exploring ways to deconstruct notions of white supremacy as it is promoted in early American art. His research places materials as a cornerstone of cultural liberation.
Heesoo Kwon (MFA’19) is a multidisciplinary artist from South Korea currently based in the Bay Area, California. In 2017, Kwon initiated an autobiographical feminist religion Leymusoom as an ever-evolving framework to explore her family histories and communal feminist liberation.
Jenifer K. Wofford (lecturer and MFA alum) is a San Francisco-based artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity, and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is one third of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B.
Xandra Ibarra (lecturer and MFA’20) who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based artist from the US-Mexico border of El Paso, TX and Juarez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.
