Click here on the date of the event to see the live performance streaming Live on Facebook.

During these challenging times, it is our goal to continue providing excellent and uplifting programs to you and we are pleased to announce our fourth online FREE  MAPP program.  This program which includes a visual art workshop and music + dance performances will be streamed from artists homes to your homes on Saturday, December 5, 2020

Now, more than ever, we need your support to continue facilitating relationships between the artists and our community and building a sonic bridge between today’s challenging time and a brighter future. Please consider investing in the future of the artists and the important role of the live performing arts in our community. 

Make a gift to Red Poppy Art House today! 

Red Poppy Art House Needs You

Launched in 2003, the Mission Arts & Performance Project (MAPP) is a homegrown bi-monthly, multidisciplinary, intercultural happening that takes place in the Mission District of San Francisco. On the first Saturday of every even month of the year, the MAPP transforms ordinary spaces, such as private garages, gardens, living rooms, studios, street corners, and small businesses into pop-up performance and exhibition sites for a day/night of intimate-scale artistic and cultural exchange among a kaleidoscope of individuals and communities.  Due to COVID-19, we have temporarily changed this dynamic program from an onsite to an online series. Thanks to the mastery and innovation of the presenting artists and curatorial vision we are pleased that the kaleidoscope of cultural exchange continues to be an incredibly enriching experience for the presenter and the viewer. We look forward to the days that we can safely present at our neighborhood venue and we are grateful for everyone’s ingenuity in making the online presentations meaningful and unique experiences.  

This program is funded by the California Arts Council Local Impact Grant. 

We are also excited and grateful to announce that we have received three amazing grants, the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Relief Fund and the Zellerbach family “Community Arts COVID Response Grant” and  Grants for the Arts and will continue our work in presenting unique artistry to the communities that we serve.

RED POPPY MAPP TEAM:

Curator: Dina Zarif / Artistic Director 

Tech support: Leeav Sofer

PR and Digital Marketing: Jennie D. Legary

RPAH PROGRAM (ONLINE) DECEMBER  5TH

Collage in Times of Pandemic and Social Changes / Workshop by Adrian Arias

Adrian will be accompanied by guest artist Kristi Williamson. A poet, dancer, singer, healer

Adrian Arian is a poet, visual artist, performer, art teacher, and South American cultural activist based in the Bay Area for two decades. His poetry and visual art have won awards and local and international recognition. His work has been presented at the Young Museum, San Marcos Museum, Poetic Nights of Struga, Macedonia, Benamil Residence in Spain, Venice Biennale, Latin American Biennial of Lima, etc. Creator of the multidisciplinary event Illusion Show, and the Poem of the Day.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Adrián believes that poetry is in constant motion, and that feeds on each discipline to continue among us. Sometimes it is a photograph of a feather lying on the shore, sometimes a book-object that seems to tell us the future, sometimes the body moving slowly between blue lights to go dancing with paper and umbrellas, without rain.

The absurd, the light, the sensual, the shadow, the dreams, are often elements in the daily life of Adrian, who in addition to declaring himself a Poet in motion, is an art teacher and a cultural organizer of events. 

WORKSHOP:

Adrian’s Collage workshop is open to a personal exploration of what we are experiencing in times of pandemic and social change. We will explore forms of composition, cut, a combination of images, colors, and texture. We will use magazines, solid-colored papers, acrylic paints or those that we have at home, sharpies, glue, scissors, and a hard surface that can be the cardboard of a box or thick cardboard.

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Kristi Williamson

Trumpet and Bass Duos with Darren Johnston and Justin Dawson

Original Songs and Compositions, Classic Jazz Standards, and Beyond

Featuring:

Darren Johnston – trumpet, voice

Justin Dawson – upright bass

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Darren has led groups such as Nice Guy Trio, Broken Shadows Family Band, Darren Johnston Quintet, and many others. He’s played with local treasures such as Marcus Shelby, Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Meklit, ROVA Sax Quartet, Fred Frith, Brass Menazeri, Lisa Mezzacappa, and many more. After 22 years in San Francisco, the winds of Covid have blown trumpeter, composer, and long-time Red Poppy/MAPP veteran Darren Johnston to Cincinnati Ohio for the next few months.  During his time in the Bay Area 

He’ll be teaming up in Dave’s garage, just outside of Cincinnati, with one of the Natti’s most in-demand young bassists, Justin Dawson.  Among many others, Justin is a current member of the JD Allen Trio.

Songs,Tales and dance from Danistan

Original music inspired and informed by the confluence of cultures and diasporic sounds of the Balkans. Dance performance by Elizabeth Strong.  

Featuring:

Dan Cantrell – accordion and voice

Elizabeth Strong – dance

ABOUT THE PROJECT:

Dan Cantrell’s music is influenced by deep study and respectful appreciation of traditions found in the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East.   His original music is rooted in classical compositional forms and modern songwriting, but through respectful application of the scales, rhythms and musical gestalts from folk and urban Balkan music he creates a unique fusion.   He aspires to find the meeting point where music is moving, engaging, and profoundly beautiful, across geopolitical boundaries and cultural borders.   What happens when you create a goth-industrial Turkish Roman musical Fusion?  What about Delta Blues in Greek Miroloi vocal dirges?   You can find out when you listen to Danistani traditional folk music presented and performed by Dan Cantrell.   

Dan is joined for a song or two by his delightful wife Elizabeth Strong. Elizabeth’s vast range of study and breadth of international performances lead her to be aptly fit for presenting the folk dance traditions of Danistan with grace and accuracy.   She is, in fact, a royal ambassador to the nation of Danistan, earning the accurate acronym of RAD, which she embodies so well with her scintillating dancing. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Accordionist/pianist/saw player Dan Cantrell is an Emmy winning composer known for his innovative and energetic approach to documentary film and television scoring. He can be heard on albums from Tom Waits, Joanna Newsom, the Toids, Beats Antique, as well as numerous self-produced albums. He was recently a featured soloist with the San Francisco Symphony and has performed with the Oakland Symphony, Mike Marshall, members of the Klezmatics, Brave Old World, and Fishbone. 

Dan composed music for three seasons of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack on Cartoon Network and received an Emmy Award for his scoring work on the PBS documentary Home Front.  

Influenced by the music of Eastern Europe, Early American Jazz and modern alternative rock, His extensive scoring catalogue for film and television is described as “hauntingly beautiful…quirky and energetic” (SF Bay Guardian). Dan’s music spans a wide range of emotion and style, rich with virtuosic performance, lush acoustic orchestrations, sonic textures resonant with sound design, and strikingly innovative melodic themes.  

Elizabeth Strong is a San Francisco Bay Area dancer, choreographer, and teacher whose work focuses on the integrity and spirit of traditional dance forms inside of a contemporary framework. Elizabeth was a touring member of Bellydance Superstars, and was a founding member of Bellydance Evolution and of Beats Antique’s dance company with Zoe Jakes. A former principal member of Katarina Burda’s Aywah! Ethnic Dance Company, Elizabeth has traveled to Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Greece and Bulgaria to study closely at the source and is now considered one of the leading experts in the form. She performs with live music groups including Kugelplex, Inspector Gadje, and Fishtank Ensemble, and renowned world musicians including Faisal Zeidan and Rumen Sali Shopov.

Elizabeth has had original choreographies commissioned by Jill Parker and Jillina Carlano, and has received grants from Zellerbach Foundation and from Bill Graham Presents Foundation. Her Turkish Roman instructional DVD was released in 2011. Elizabeth currently teaches and performs internationally and she teaches weekly online from Berkeley, CA. 

“Musical Musings”

Middle eastern and Celtic inspired compositions for violin

Featuring:

Briana Di Mara – violin

Faisal Zedan – percussion, vocals

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Eclectic Bay Area violinist Briana Di Mara brings her love of the instrument and its soulful expression to every performance. She was trained in western classical music as a child and has since gone on to study and perform a wide variety of traditional styles including Celtic, Balkan, Turkish, and Arabic. She harmoniously weaves these influences into her own unique sound and compositions. She is known for her evocative improvisations and skillful ability to play a broad range of genres from many different cultures.

She has performed and recorded with numerous artists, some of whom include Stellamara, the Ali Paris Project, Beats Antique, Darioush Sami, Dan Cantrell, Moh Alileche, Sweet Moments of Confusion, Lounès Kheloui, La Ruya, and many more! She has also collaborated with well-known dancers such as Zoe Jakes, Rachel Brice, Miriam Peretz, and Jill Parker. These projects have led her to perform in a wide variety of venues, theaters, and festivals around the globe, inspiring audiences with her expansive interpretation of world music and exciting interaction with dancers.

Her award-winning debut album, “Haven”, has earned rave reviews and reflects the dynamic collaborations that she has built around her original compositions. 

PREVIEW THE MUSIC

Darren Johnston 

Dan Cantrell & Elizabeth Strong 

Elizabeth Strong 

Briana Di Mara

Faisal Zedan

Works by Jennifer Bloomer, Megan Wilson & Ronni Goodman at the “Window Exhibition at RPAH”.

 Building Community Resilience Through the Arts | “Red Poppy’s Window Exhibition” October – December

“The Stains and Misdirections of Manifest Destiny”

Megan Wilson

Growing up as a fifth-generation Montanan, Megan Wilson was surrounded by the mythology and iconography of the American West, and specifically that of the cowboy. Images of rugged men with their code of stoic endurance, self-reliance, loyalty, courage, and camaraderie, on horseback riding across the plains, wrangling cattle and spitting chew were everywhere – from the paintings of Charles M. Russell, Frederick Remington, and Will James to the landscape itself. However, the reality is the painful and violent history of manifest destiny that annihilated much of the indigenous peoples and wildlife of the West. The 19th century doctrine gave American settlers the rationale of a ‘God-given destiny’ to expand westward across North America and beyond. Framed in the context of morality, divinity, freedom, and the presumed greatness of a white America, the ideology was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans from their land, the subsequent genocide of their people, and later, claims to Pacific islands. The mass migration also served industrialists who benefited from the labor force that established in the west to build the railroads, work the land, build the cities, and mine the natural resources. 

Wilson’s latest body of work, The Stains and Misdirections of Manifest Destiny explores and calls attention to the painful history of manifest destiny and its lasting racist, imperialist influence on American social and political ideology today. 

The Stains series uses the traditional craft of quilling (paper filigree) to create intricate drawings that evoke 19th century quilt patterns set against a stained foundation. The handicrafts of quilling and quilting spread from England to the American colonies and then to the American West. Wilson began quilling as a child when her grandmother passed on the fashionable craft of her childhood to her granddaughter. 

The Misdirections series counters the glorification of the west using revisions of existing historical texts branded into leather hides and stretched over wood placards to create new narratives and new directions for moving forward from a past rooted in the arrogance of manifest destiny. 

Kemp-Greene-Wilson-Metzner is a series of suede works with narratives and ornamentation from Wilson’s ancestral history of pioneer families who migrated from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa to Utah, Idaho, and Montana in the 19th century as a protestant, Mormon, and Jewish settlers, homesteaders, miners, and railway workers.

Megan Wilson’s quilling drawings at Red Poppy Art House are part of the Stains series.

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Ronnie Goodman was a self-taught homeless artist and former distance runner living in San Francisco. He was inspired by the beauty of this city and its diversity, balanced with the struggles of human despair. With his brush, Ronnie tried to capture these raw emotions in painted images. Rest in Power Ronnie.

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Posters for Change

Jennifer Bloomer

Jen is an artist, facilitator and the founder of Radici Studios in San Francisco. For the past two decades, she has painted and taught art in Guatemala, India, Italy, Colorado, Eritrea, Thailand, Kenya and California. Jen has a BA in Latin American Studies, a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting, and a Masters Degree in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has created art with people aged 1 to 81 giving space for them to find their unique creative voice in the world through the arts. Jen’s own activist art can be seen in local murals, at marches for social justice across the country, and across social media. Her work has been shown internationally by Amplifier Art, and is included in the Library of Congress archive. Jen believes that the intersection of creativity, connection and community holds the answer to our personal and collective healing.

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Time: Dec 5th, 7:00 pm – 8:05 pm  (Visual Art),  8:10 pm- 10 pm (Performances) 

Admission: Free (donations are encouraged)

Tune in 10 minutes before each event starts to test your devices for connection.

The event will be streamed live through Red Poppy Art House Facebook page

Tune in 10 minutes before each event starts to test your devices for connection.
The event will be streamed live through the Red Poppy Art House Facebook page

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