Datebook Yerba Buena Center summit a reminder of how hope feels.
YBCA summit honors artists shaping future
Anyone who thinks they already know just how cool the Bay Area is gets a welcome jolt of surprise each year when Yerba Buena Center for the Arts publishes its YBCA 100 list.
Sure, you’ll see some heroes you already revere among the honorees — 68 of whom are local this year — but you’ll also find out about scores of new artists, activists and other leaders who are working on projects that make you want to get your own hands dirty. It’s a group of people who expand your conception of what’s possible, who remind you that our region is endlessly rich and varied and fascinating.
To encounter the work of a handful of these honorees at the YBCA 100 Summit, aired as a compilation of online videos Saturday, April 3, was to remember what hope feels like after a year of disease and fire, hate and violence and racial injustice.
Among those celebrated at the summit was West Oakland scholar, organizer and “artrepreneur” Tahirah Rasheed, who spoke poetically about her work in the medium of neon.
“When bending neon, I love how the glass takes comfort in the heat of the flames,” Rasheed said.
The accompanying video segment showed one of her pieces, with red block capital letters spelling “Breonna Taylor,” the name of the 26yearold Black woman fatally shot in her Louisville, Ky., apartment on March 13, 2020, by white plainclothes officers.
“Joy to me is a form of activism,” she continued. “Joy is a conscious form of resistance to terrible things.”
Then there was Margo Hall, actor, playwright, director and educator; the new artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre; and a recent recipient of an unrestricted $100,000 fellowship from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.
“I realized early on in my career that just walking onstage as a Black female artist is an act of protest,” she said in her segment, part of which was filmed at Lake Merritt.
Then there’s RyanNicole, an actor, writer, musician and activist, who invited audiences to imagine what a “democratized” heroism would look like, one where everyone finds the hero within through “radical acceptance of oneself.” Or Corrina Gould, cofounder of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, which works to return Indigenous land to Indigenous people. She gave a land acknowledgment near the top of the event: “I’d like to start off by welcoming you to our land,” she said, a powerful reframing away from colonialist notions.
This year, YBCA opened the nomination process to the public for the first time since the list began in 2014, and it was gratifying to see so many women and people of color recognized among the results. Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho, interdisciplinary artist Leticia Hernandez, and artist and curator Karen Seneferu were just a few more who represented the locals. Others from outside the Bay Area included Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini; “So You Want to Talk About Race” author Ijeoma Oluo; musician Rhiannon Giddens; and documentary filmmaker Loira Limbal.
To scroll through the gallery of honorees is to see the global majority reflected.
YBCA Chief of Program Meklit Hadero was the event’s host and also among its most powerful performers. She opened the festivities with one of her own compositions, “Here to Imagine,” whose instrumentals managed to dig deep in the earth and fly high in outer space at the same time, a feat mirrored by her vocals: Her conversational lower register flips into a celestial higher one.
Thao Nguyen, another honoree, gave the other musical highlight, excerpting from her rich catalog of shardlike lyrics: “I’ve been so politely at the bottom”; “Careful, I’m an animal/Trap, trap, trap.”
Her vibe is like dancing on an electric fence, mischief hovering over danger. Even Nguyen’s calmer, more oceanic soundscapes are laced with threat.
You might have imagined “Hamilton” and “Blindspotting” star Daveed Diggs, who closed the event in a brief conversation with YBCA CEO Deborah Cullinan, would be the headliner, but he seemed to recognize that wasn’t the case.
“I love perusing this 100 list every year,” he told Cullinan. “I always get to cheer for people who I know and have worked with for a very long time, and also meet young artists who I don’t know yet.”