An Artist Residency with Jason Wyman
In collaboration with Mission District artist Jason Wyman, the Red Poppy Art House is excited to announce a bold, new artist residency, A Feast of Communities. The program focuses on integrating personal artistic and healing practices into the overall cultivation and development of the art house through the production of small feasts that engage specific communities of which Wyman and Poppy staff Zena Carlota and Shree Shyam Das want to be in deeper, more intentional conversation.
A Feast of Communities is rooted in the Red Poppy Art House’s core practices of facilitating socially-engaged professional development, producing vigorous and multidisciplinary programming, playing matchmaker among friends and strangers, and honoring that which is slow. Another root comes from Wyman’s approach of cultivating circle-based models of creation and exchange that foster understanding, empathy, and complexity across age, identity, culture, and expression. Together, this unique residency will weave a tapestry of talents, traditions, and tales representing a community of communities.
To realize the vision of a rich tapestry of talents, traditions, and tales, Carlota, Das, and Wyman will:
- Curate five small feasts centered on communities of which we want to be in more intentional, slow, and creative conversation. Those communities include:
- Long-standing residents of the Mission District who have seen their neighborhood change in all of its complexity
- Those who have moved from across the globe and found opportunity in San Francisco’s technology industry
- Gender rebels and queers
- Carefully curate each feast accounting for the specific needs and tastes of each audience and doing so in collaboration with other artists who are a part of the communities we have identified
- Activate our room on a corner in the Mission District as a home, a place of nourishment physical, familial, and spiritual
- Break bread as art spills off of tables, as dance erupts from moments of quiet, and as music fills every corner
- Document our feasts and share songs, movements, images, poems, and/or stories of our discoveries, shadows, practices, and desires
A Feast of Communities Artist-in-Residency was conceived in October 2016 with a mini-retreat for Carlota and Das facilitated by Wyman at the Red Poppy Art House. It has blossomed into this broader vision through cooperative development and exchange between people (not institutions). As it grows, A Feast of Communities will continue to center on people through activating the physical location of the Poppy. This unique and innovative approach to an Artist-in-Residency boldly makes a case for relationships over organizations in the production of social practice artwork.
The Red Poppy Art House commits to providing the gallery space to artist team Wyman, Midori, and Davey Faye Jones for the production of a site-specific installation and performance tentatively titled Cultural Chemistry. Inspired by the simplicity of design of a chemistry chart and the symbolic significance contained within each element, Midori, Wyman, and Jones will transform the art house into a science classroom that examines the policies of cultural exclusion and inclusion of the United States. Set for the first weekend of December to coincide with the Mission Arts & Performance Project, the installation will be activated by a series of curated performances that call into light the legacies of these policies through music, poetry, performance art, dance, and more.
Jason Wyman is many things. He is an artist that uses all the tools available—photography, video, interviews, social media, sound, design—to create visual works that reveal layers, connections, and perspectives. She is a writer examining truths and myths through fables, poetry, and parallel observations. They are a performer crafting multi-media experiences that dance between light and dark, despair and hope, reality and possibility. He is a curator filling white walls and empty spaces with the voices and visions of community, emerging, and established artists. She is an educator cultivating environments of peer exchange rooted in creative inquiry and multi-sensory pedagogies. They are a catholic (notice it is not capitalized) mystic conjuring ephemeral landscapes of astral and temporal origins. Jason Wyman is queerly complex.Wyman’s work has graced walls, stages, screens, cafes, classrooms, and cultural complexes including the Asian Art Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the deYoung Museum, the Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, the Museum of the African Diaspora, SOMArts Cultural Center, Ninth Street Independent Film Center, Black and White Projects, Red Poppy Art House, Adobe Books, Qulture Collective, Amnesia Lounge, The Stud, the San Francisco Public Library (Main Branch), San Francisco City Hall, the New Parkway Theater, The Roxie, Denman Middle School, International Studies Academy, Stanford University, In Our Words: A Salon for Queers and Company, Mission Local, COUP Journal, and many other alleys, street corners, parking lots, social media platforms, bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and closets.
The space, though, ultimately is unimportant. What matters most is that the work exists in memories and dreams.