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September 8th, 2022
41 Ross Alley, SF Chinatown
September 8th, 2022
Thursday 6-9PM
Join us under the Mid-Autumn moon for Magic Mooncakes, Poetry, and Sounds, as we harvest as a community at Ross Alley!
Presented and curated by 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence Connie Zheng, the Mooncake Harvest Party celebrates the release of Magic Mooncakes, a collection of mooncakes made in collaboration with Chinatown SRO (Single Room Occupancy) Residents from Chinatown Community Development Center and the artist for the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival!
Partnering up with beloved Chinatown bakeries, Yummy Bakery and Garden Bakery, each mooncake design draws inspiration from the Chinatown Residents’ current joys in life, the people they love, and the dreams and hopes they carry for the future. During a two-week workshop, Connie intimately worked with residents to draft out their ideas and drawings to collectively combine them into two designs, expanding their creativity.
During the party, there will be literary performances by poets Maw Shein Win, Shelley Wong, Ploi Pirapokin, Leena Joshi, and Jennifer S. Cheng and a special DJ set by Red Beans, presented in collaboration with Fault Radio.
Guest Artists
Red Beans
@r.e.d.beans
Existing in the fluid space between masc and femme, redbeans is a duo consisting of pupu and angel grinder - that aims to explore and celebrate their queer asian/american identity in sound journeys they weave together.
Maw Shein Win
@mawsheinwin | mawsheinwin.com
Maw Shein Win's recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the CAILIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley.
Shelley Wong
@poetshelley | shelley-wong.com
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
Ploi Pirapokin
Ploi Pirapokin is the Nonfiction Editor at Newfound Journal, and sits on the board for Khōréō magazine, WP Now, and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, and more. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
Leena Joshi
Leena Joshi is an artist, poet, and educator working across sculpture, video, performance, and text. Their work considers experiences of desire, illness, and the labor of appearance for queer, racialized, and trans people, often engaging the digital and speculative as spaces to explore a shifting, illegible, and expansive definition of personhood. Joshi’s work is curious about new forms and practices in an embrace of amateurism and play. Leena’s poetry and written work can be found in SFMoMA’s Open Space, baest: a journal of queer forms and affects, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. They work as the Digital Media Arts Instructor at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California.
Jennifer S. Cheng
@mooncake729 | jenniferscheng.com
Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the feminine monstrous. Her book MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (Tarpaulin Sky) was named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018” alongside Forrest Gander, Ada Limón, Julie Carr, and Raquel Salas Rivera. She is also the author of House A (Omnidawn), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Catapult, Lit Hub, POETRY, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Guernica, and she has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.
About 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence Program
The Artist-in-Residence program nurtures emerging Asian artists to develop and expand on community-based art practices located in SF’s Chinatown while cultivating an exchange platform to critically engage within the Chinatown community. Headquartered at 41 Ross, this program contributes to Chinatown’s vitality and supports the social and economic recovery of the neighborhood.
Follow the journey of Connie Zheng’s residency at 41 Ross, behind-the-scenes, and more: @41.ross. Covid Guidelines
The event will be hybrid outdoor/indoor - masks are required at all times in indoor spaces. We ask that you consume beverages and refreshments outside in the alleyway.
About Connie Zheng
Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and filmmaker based out of xučyun / Oakland, California. Projects such as large-scale maps, speculative seed exchanges, seed-making workshops, and experimental films are strategies for navigating diasporic memory, the continued weight of history and the possibilities for collective imagining amidst ongoing and future ecological transformations. Her work pays particular attention to participatory scenarios and speculative fictions involving interactions between landscapes, humans and more-than-human worlds. Zheng has exhibited work nationally and internationally, through venues such as the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Week, and the IMPAKT Festival in the Netherlands. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, among others, and was the inaugural recipient of the Joint Space Award. She recently published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and her work is held in the collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University, an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California — Berkeley, and is currently a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California — Santa Cruz.
Partners
Chinatown Community Development Center
The mission of the Chinatown Community Development Center is to build community and enhance the quality of life for San Francisco residents. We are a place-based community development organization serving primarily the Chinatown neighborhood, and also serve other areas including North Beach and the Tenderloin. We are a community development organization with many roles - as neighborhood advocates, organizers and planners, and as developers and managers of affordable housing.
We believe in a comprehensive vision of community, a quality environment, a healthy neighborhood economy, and active voluntary associations. We are committed to the empowerment of low-income residents, diversity and coalition building, and social and economic justice.
Fault Radio
Fault Radio is a grassroots non-profit organization dedicated to creating a center for modern electronic/dance music culture in the Bay Area. Originally conceived as a pop-up live video-streaming platform of DJ sets and digital archive in 2018,. Fault Radio functions as both a stationary and mobile community hub; we bridge the electronic music community on- and offline via live-streams and collaborative pop-up events to document and experience the brilliance of our local music scene.
Since its founding, Fault’s unique online archive documents the richness of the SF electronic music scene while elevating DJ culture. Through the production of articles, podcasts, documentaries, annual record fairs, and an ever-expanding variety of educational and live event programming, we strive to compile and showcase the richness of the local electronic music community for future generations to look back on with pride.
Organizers
Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco
Chinese Culture Center (CCC) is a non-profit arts organization established in 1965. CCC elevates underserved communities and gives voice to equality through education and contemporary art. Rooted in San Francisco’s Chinatown, CCC is a loud and creative voice to uplift social and economical transformation. We provide a safe environment for artists who champion activism, resiliency, and healthy communities. In doing so, we shift dominant narratives, empower change, and reimagine our futures.
41 Ross
41 Ross is a unique community art space located in the historic Ross Alley in San Francisco Chinatown. As a partnership between the Chinese Culture Center and the Chinatown Community Development Center, it represents an experimental collaboration between a contemporary art center and a neighborhood development organization.
Since 2014, 41 Ross brings together those who live, work, and play in Chinatown through community-based art and culture programming that promotes dialogue, appreciation, and creative engagement around the cultures practiced by the everyday people of Chinatown. Past projects include; Keyword School (2014), Chinatown Pretty (2015), Chinatown Home Cooking (2016), Liminal Space (2017), and Art, Culture and Belonging in Chinatown and Manilatown (2020-21).
Acknowledgments
41 Ross Community Art Space & the Artist-in-Residence Project are supported by:
San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development
Community Challenge Grant
General Support:
#StartSmall, Fleishhacker Foundation, The San Francisco FoundationSan Francisco Grants for the Arts, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation, California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, CCC Contemporaries
