San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cultural changemakers answer big questions at YBCA summit
Questions — the big sort, the kind that rarely have pat answers — were at the heart of the annual daylong summit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Saturday. For the fourth year in a row, the San Francisco arts organization created a list of 100 cultural changemakers and then worked to gather a few of those honorees to discuss topics as pressing as the #MeToo movement and representation in media.
Known as the YBCA 100 Summit, the event focused on topics shaped by both the list and the issues of the day. To kick off the event, Bay Area youth activists led “Calling Youth to Power,” encouraging everyone — young and old — to get politically engaged, just in time for Tuesday’s midterm elections.
But the star power hit during the summit’s two evening sessions. Poet and filmmaker Rafael Casal joined advertising activist Kat Gordon and Afrofuturism author Nnedi Okorafor to discuss “the future of visual culture.” Each, in their own way, has been pushing to expand the sorts of voices and stories portrayed in broader mass media. Casal, for instance, shined light on his hometown of Oakland and gentrification throughout the region in “Blindspotting,” the film he co-wrote and starred in with childhood friend and “Hamilton” star Daveed Diggs.
Diversity in media, from movies to television, is essential, they said, because what people see or don’t see onscreen is critical to how they see themselves.
Making sure marginalized stories are heard was also a focus of the next panel, “Reimagining Political Power,” with Tarana Burke, founder of the “me too” movement (before it became a hashtag); transgender activist, writer and producer Janet Mock; and New York Times opinion columnist Charles Blow.
Burke talked about how this year’s #MeToo movement focused so much on the perpetrators, while her work pays attention to making sure survivors, particularly black and brown girls of color, can heal through her organization, Girls for Gender Equity.
The reason #MeToo exploded after stories came out of Hollywood, she said, is that “we are trained to respond to the vulnerability of white women.”
Each of the participants Saturday night were selected by YBCA staff for the coveted YBCA 100 list because they saw them as people pushing society forward. The list is unique in its scope, in part because it’s unique in the way it comes together. Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the person who oversees the center’s programming, sends out a broad prompt (one of those big questions) to everybody on staff, from the executives to the custodians: “Who is asking the questions that are shaping culture?”
Up to 300 nominations come in, and the list is refined to 100 names. This year, singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe shares space with astrologer Chani Nichols, Bay Area poet Tongo Eisen-Martin, and the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Fla., site of February’s shooting.
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