Kearny Street Workshop moves … again
By Yi Hai Lai
On Dec. 7, friends, supporters and members of the Kearny Street Workshop (KSW) gathered for a house-warming party in its new space. In the wake of eviction madness in the South of Market, KSW, the oldest existing Asian Pacific American multidisciplinary arts organization, has recently moved in with SomArts, a city-funded cultural center, on Brannan Street.
Nancy Hom, the executive director and a driving force at KSW since 1974, inaugurated their new home with a characteristically gentle passion. Several founding members of KSW lent their presence, one of whom was Charlie Chin of the “first-ever Chinese American folk band” Grains of Sand. He grabbed the stage and had the crowd rolling by doing an impression of his uncle who went to church for free English lessons and fell in love with a white woman. Also present was Japanese American writer and poet Roy Kamada, who read from his personal collection.
Having moved six times since its Manilatown beginnings in 1972, KSW has seen several cycles of artist displacement in San Francisco.
“If you look at the history of gentrification, there are definite patterns where by a space is revitalized by an arts community moving into the neighborhood,” says Claire Light, KSW’s program and office manager. “A neighborhood might be built as a middle income area, deteriorate over a period of several decades and becomes a working class neighborhood. And because the rent is cheap, an artist community will move in; and because they are there making it happening, some young, hip, venturesome professionals will move in and gentrify the neighborhood. Pretty soon you’ll have an upscale neighborhood again.”
Only this time, the tech-industry-specific growth rate is highly unprecedented. According to an S.F. Bay Guardian report, more than $20 million of venture capital was pouring into the city everyday in the fall of 1999, and jobs doubled from 500,000 to 1 million in the span of a year. With the city’s limited square-footage and poor transportation system through the boroughs, these rapid growing pains have proven fatal for nonprofits and artists’ communities.
Most visibly, thousands of musicians that regularly practiced at Downtown Rehearsal in Hunters Point have been evicted. The landlord aims to find more lucrative use for the space. In the Asian American arts community, Teatro ng Tanan lost its rehearsal and performance space in August this year. Its former stomping ground was part of the Mint Mall, a predominantly Filipino American community center. Other API community organizations like Bindlestiff Studio, also a Filipino American performance group, and National Asian American Telecommunication Association, which supports Asian American artists working in film, video and other electronic media, are anticipating unaffordable raises in rent in the coming year.
“If the city protected arts interests, and social service interests, then the neighborhood would be much stronger,” says Light. “You have a situation in San Francisco recently where people haven’t been chased from neighborhood to neighborhood — they’ve simply been chased out because of the expansion in a particular industry. That is a problem.”
Kearny Street Workshop is unique in its resilience as a continued force in API community arts promotion. More than any other group of its nature, it has validated the nomadic model of organization. Over the years, its mission statement has evolved to incorporate movement as a strength.
Earlier last year, KSW had the chance to move back temporarily to the Chinatown area, where it first gathered strength. It made a conscious decision not to do so, partly in effort to be non-denominational in its space. With a certain degree of mobility, it can better serve the entire community. KSW continues to do location-based projects with different artists within the API arts community, such as the 1999 collaboration with artist Flo Oy Wong in made in usa: Angel Island Shhh…, a mix-media exhibit about Asian immigrants detained on Angel Island during1910.
“I know some arts organizations dream of a cultural center. A big building somewhere in J-town [for example],” says Hom. “It works to our advantage not to be too closely related to one ethnic group. It keeps us fluid and that fluidity is what keeps us going in hard times.”
A measure of success for this unique model is the large community donor base that KSW enjoys. Over the years, by virtue of its instability, it has deservedly collected a lot of fans from different neighborhoods in the Bay Area, rather than relying heavily on one or two.
Across the bay, the city of Oakland has its own rich loci of artistic development, originally aided by the cheaper rents and larger spaces. Now more than ever, it has made room for artists and some arts organizations that have been squeezed out of San Francisco. Given this phenomenon, some wonder if the cultural centers in Oakland will eventually supercede those in San Francisco.
Mayor Jerry Brown has been floating the buzzwords “Oakland Renaissance” in hopes of establishing the city as a cultural force rivaling San Francisco. Within its large Asian American community, pockets of artistic energy have been emerging. “The activist, collective art-making is what’s more energetic [in Oakland],” says Dennis Somara, a Filipino American artist involved in projects on both sides of the Bay Bridge. Somara is part of Godzilla West, an API arts organization that hosts Ohana, an open mike event in Oakland. He also performs with Teatro ng Tanan, which recently lost its rehearsal space South of Market. He helps out at KSW when he has time.
It is fair to say that Oakland has an independent scene that is up and coming. It remains to be seen if it will draw out the San Francisco art lovers.
“For cultural centers to move out to Oakland it would take a lot more than what’s already been done,” says KSW’s Light. “The psychological barrier is still there, it exists eastward and it exists southward. I know that a lot of people have had to move to Oakland. They are willing to travel back into the city for events, as well as attend those in Oakland, but the reverse is not true.”
For now, API arts organizations born of San Francisco continue the fight to channel the city’s prosperity into the creative endeavors of its artists.
“It’s not just that the community is booming. It’s that you have to educate the people to contributing to the arts,” says Hom. “Art really is food for the soul. You need it like you would need food or water.”