Yerba Buena Center loses its program chief
Marc Bamuthi Joseph, an established performance artist and chief programmer for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, will leave that position for a newly created role at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., officials announced Thursday, Nov. 15.
Joseph, 42, will assume the title of vice president and artistic director of social impact on Jan. 1. He’ll arrive in time to open the Reach, the first expansion of the Kennedy Center since it opened on the banks of the Potomac River in 1971.
“The Kennedy Center is one of the most prominent cultural institutions in the world,” Joseph said. “And because it is in Washington, it will be impossible to avoid the political potential.”
Joseph writes poetry, plays
and opera, and performs spoken word and dance.
“Fundamentally,” he says, “I make culture.”
It has been this way since he was a child. Joseph made his Broadway debut at age 10 as the tap dancing understudy to Savion Glover in “The Tap Dance Kid.” He went on the national tour and was on TV by age 12.
After graduating from Morehouse College, a historically black university in Atlanta, Joseph was hired by Marin County’s Branson School in Ross to teach English and dance, in 1997. He’s been in the Bay Area ever since, living in Oakland since 2001.
In 2011, YBCA premiered his dance theater piece “Red, Black & Green,” and three days later he was interviewing for an administrative job there. In that capacity, he came up with the idea for the YBCA 100, to honor 100 people, movements and organizations from around the world that are shifting culture. He also developed a YBCA Fellows Program, which brings Bay Area creators together for an annual project called “The Public Square.”
“The Kennedy Center’s hiring of Bamuthi into this position underscores his catalytic and widely regarded work both at YBCA and as an artist,” says Deborah Cullinan CEO of YBCA, a nonprofit contemporary art center in San Francisco. “This is exciting for YBCA because the Kennedy Center is acknowledging the role we play in moving the arts and culture field forward.”
Though he was selected for the job after a national search, Joseph has a history with the Kennedy Center. He made his performance debut there in 2013 during the “One Mic Hip Hop Culture Worldwide” festival.
In 2017, the center commissioned him to write the play “peh/LO/tah,” which uses the universal game of soccer to examine migration.
Earlier this year, he appeared in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a co-commission of the Kennedy Center and the Apollo Theater.
He will be one of 12 artistic partners at the Kennedy Center and the first to serve in both administrative and artistic roles.
“Even in my job title, it is clear that both my creative practice and my administrative capacity are simultaneous assets,” he says.
The Kennedy Center is a nonprofit created by Congress in 1958. It has a $200 million annual budget, placing it among the largest arts organizations in the country. Already a vast theater complex, the center plans to expand in 2019 by adding nine new spaces for immersive arts in a $175 million facility scheduled to open in September.
“The Reach is 102,000 square feet of studios, amphitheater, rehearsal space and outdoor pavilions,” Joseph says. “It is basically a new city park that is driven by the performing arts.”
Joseph is looking for an apartment on the East Coast but is keeping the 510 area code on his cell phone, he says. He’s also keeping the home in the Laurel neighborhood of Oakland, where his wife, Kanoelani Connor, will remain to raise their teenage son and daughter.
Along with his new role, Joseph plans to continue with his own projects. His latest is “The Just and the Blind,” a spoken word duet with a violinist that addresses what he calls “the prison industrial complex.” It opens in New York in March with three nights in Carnegie Hall.
And Joseph has a piece in the works for 2020, called “The Black Whole,” which will receive its world premiere in the Bay Area at Laney College.
“I’m leaving YBCA,” he says, “but Oakland is home.”
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com. Instagram: sfchronicle_art