Arts + Design Fridays
September 2–December 2, 2022
Join us for a lively series of talks by artists, performers, scholars, and activists exploring themes of global and US migration, exclusion, and belonging. We use the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as jumping-off point for this exploration.
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- Upcoming
Films - Past
Films - Past
Events
Past Events
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Friday, December 2, 11:30 AMOnline Only—Angel Island Oratorio: Chinese Exclusion, Music, and Storytelling
The composer and performers of Angel Island–Oratorio for Voices and Strings will discuss the work, which will be performed at UC Berkeley on December 3. The Del Sol Quartet commissioned the oratorio in order to illuminate the poetry of immigrant detainees carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station and to examine the white supremacist ideology that fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist government policies.
This event will be presented as a Zoom webinar.
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Friday, November 18, 11:30 AMCancelled—Poetry in Place: Interpreting the Angel Island Immigration Station
PhD Student Elizabeth Fair will discuss the material and spatial qualities of the Chinese poetry carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station by detainees. Her experiences as a park interpretive specialist at Angel Island inspired her to pursue a PhD in Art history in order to study the ways calligraphy, architecture, and landscape work together to shape history and memory.
This event has been cancelled.
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Friday, November 4, 11:30 AMJulio Morales—Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration
Curator Julio Morales will talk about his current BAMPFA exhibition, Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration, which considers the cultures and institutions of confinement that have been centuries in the making.
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Friday, October 28, 11:30 AMPlague at the Golden Gate: Pandemics Then and Now in Film and in Life
Director Li-Shin Yu and producer James Q. Chan will discuss their American Experience PBS documentary about an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
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Friday, October 21, 11:30 AMIllegal: the Theater of the Angel Island Immigration Station’s Paper Sons
One island, two plays: Skyler Chin and Sita Sunil will discuss their new musical Illegal with Filipino-American playwright Jeffrey Lo, who recently directed The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin, which like Illegal dramatizes the family traumas created by racially exclusionary policies carried out at Angel Island.
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Friday, October 14, 11:30 AMRethinking Place in Asian American Histories of the United States
Catherine Ceniza Choy will discuss her new book, Asian American Histories of the United States, in which she argues that Asian American experiences are essential to any understanding of US history and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.
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Friday, October 7, 11:30 AMRooted in Place: Radical South Asian Storytelling Blooms in Berkeley
Barnali Ghosh will talk about creating the award-winning Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, part of a growing movement of activist-led, place-based storytelling.
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Friday, September 30, 11:30 AMOnline Only—Border-thinking Through Wartime Incarcerations Environments
Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi will talk about their new book, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps and the Pacific War.
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Friday, September 23, 11:30 AMSee Us: Portraits of Community in the Exclusion Era by Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo
ShiPu Wang will discuss the paintings of three trailblazers of Japanese descent who leveraged portraiture to build communities and make their presence visible in the Exclusion-era California.
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Friday, September 16, 11:30 AMPreventing Erasure: How the Angel Island Immigration Station Was Saved
Angel Island in San Francisco Bay is a crucial spot marking the history of exclusionary, race-based immigration policy. Its immigration station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.” In this lecture, Ed Tepporn will discuss how activists saved this site, current day efforts, and its meaning for the future.
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Friday, September 9, 11:30 AMAngel Island and Alcatraz: Site-inspired Dance, Theater, and Landscapes of Incarceration
Choreographer Lenora Lee and theater director Ava Roy will discuss San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island and Alcatraz Island as creative catalysts and settings for their site-inspired performances addressing migration, incarceration, and resistance.
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Friday, September 2, 11:30 AMIndigenous Memory and Nature Interact: Native Californian Stories
Indigenous leader and author Greg Sarris will join Assoc. Prof. of Comparative Literature and English Beth Piatote to discuss how literature and nature intersect with stories of Bay Area Native American history.
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