Virtual Gallery Experiences

Produced by SOMArts Cultural Center, we’ve created these virtual gallery experiences that can be viewed from the safety and comfort of your home!

Sounds Like Home: Longing and Comfort through Lullabies

Curated by Duygu and Bengü Gün
2020–2021 Curatorial Residency

Based in San Francisco and Istanbul respectively, curators Duygu and Bengü Gün were inspired by their family history with migration and interest in music as a connecting force. Sounds Like Home: Longing and Comfort through Lullabies not only questions how cultural memory is preserved and transmitted through simple melodic messages from childhood, but also challenges the way lullabies, family stories and fairy tales transmit gender roles and cultural norms while affirming that culture is dynamic.

Sowing Agency: Seeding the Future
for Environmental Justice

Curated by Lisa Pradhan
Presented by Asian American Women Artist Association (AAWAA)
and Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC)

Sowing Agency is inspired by the fight for environmental justice, activating our Asian Pacific Islander communities to engage in the issues of today’s climate crisis. With a number of artistic disciplines represented, the pieces featured in the show work to realign our relationships with the Earth through introspection and collective leadership. The exhibition’s broad coalition of community partners amplifies calls for increased action to challenge extractive industries, monocultures, corporate greed and colonization. Weaving local and global climate resistance into our cultural consciousness, Sowing Agency is a visual and poetic address to the grief and resiliency rooted in “seeding the future.”

CARAVANA: Mobilizing Central
American Art (1984–Present)

Curated by Fátima Ramírez, Mauricio Ramírez, and Josué Rojas
2020–2021 SOMArts Curatorial Resident

CARAVANA: Mobilizing Central American Art (1984–Present) is a multidisciplinary traveling exhibition that centers U.S. Central American artists living in California as well as across the United States to examine their lived experiences in relation to the impact of mass migration, family separation, and the legacy of political action and solidarity with the people of Central America.

Bay Area Deaf Arts

Curated by Antoine Hunter
2020–2021 SOMArts Curatorial Resident

Bay Area Deaf Arts celebrate and center the art forms and cultural expression historically rooted in the Deaf community, raising Deaf awareness in non-Deaf populations, and inviting collaboration between Hearing and Deaf artists. Curated by renowned performer and activist Antoine Hunter for SOMArts’ Curatorial Residency program, this exhibition asks us: Where are the voices of Deaf and Deaf people of color? What truths are we willing to listen to? Do you know they have more to show than just talk about Deaf culture itself?

The Black Woman is God: Reclaim, Reconfigure, Re–Remember

Curated by Karen Seneferu
and Melorra Green

Now in its fourth iteration at SOMArts, The Black Woman is God reveals a community of Black women artists that pay homage to their complex creative practices that have influenced the world, but are often overlooked because of the intersections class, race, and gender discrimination. The Black Woman is God: Reclaim, Reconfigure, and Re-Remember gives Black women their flowers, affirming that they are essential to building a more just society and a sustainable future.

Living Legacies:
Día de Los Muertos 2020

Curated by Rio Yañez
and Carolina Quintanilla

Living Legacies: Día de Los Muertos 2020 is a call to action for our responsibility to future generations. It is a call to invoke the strengths and lessons of our ancestors to survive the historic moment in which we’re currently living. This exhibition recognizes that the status quo has continued to fail communities of color while holding space for collective grief, mourning, and resilience in the face of systemic oppression.