Art
Rituals
Performances
Parade
Art Rituals Performances Parade
August 23, 2025
4:00PM - 9:00PM
SF Chinatown
八月 23, 2025
4:00PM - 9:00PM
舊金山華埠
Art Activations
Aambr Newsome
Aambr Newsome is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, public art, installation, and printmaking, with a central focus on materiality as a gateway to ancestral memory. They investigate the histories embedded in materials tied to the transatlantic slave trade—sugar, cotton, and other crops cultivated through forced labor—exploring their cultural, spiritual, and historical resonance. Their process unfolds in connecting with their higher self, becoming a vessel for the messages embedded within these substances. Through sculpture, performance, and site-specific installations, they interrogate labor, exploitation, and the body’s relationship to material goods that once defined entire economies and continue to shape our collective memory. This material exploration is a spiritual practice as much as it is a creative one. They blend African and Indigenous traditions with Afrofuturist narratives, forging connections between the past and the future. These works seek to reclaim the legacies stolen through oppression, offering new ways to understand identity, spirituality, and ritual. By working with the very materials that sustained oppressive systems, they aim to shift narratives of race, gender, and value toward liberation and transformation.
Reyna Brown
Reyna Brown is a Queer, Black, Chicana mother, artist, and alchemist who uses mixed media and installation to transform emotional trauma and honor ancestral memory. A practitioner of Lucumí, an Indigenous African spiritual tradition, Reyna approaches art as a sacred practice—channeling spirit to confront systemic racism, addiction, and mass incarceration while creating space for healing. Her multidisciplinary work spans painting, ceramics, glass blowing, beading, embroidery, and immersive altar installations. Raised among the strawberry fields of Oxnard, California, she draws strength from her cultural lineage and deep commitment to community. Reyna earned a B.A. in Performing Arts and Social Justice from the University of San Francisco, with a concentration in Theater and a minor in Peace and Justice Studies. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She serves as lead facilitator of the Artistic Ensemble, a performance collective inside San Quentin State Prison, and teaches at USF as an Adjunct Professor. Her course, Performing Arts and Community Exchange, connects students with incarcerated artists to explore art as a tool for justice and transformation. Through altar work and spirit-led creation, Reyna reclaims grief as a portal—inviting personal and collective liberation.
Alexander Hernandez
Based in San Francisco, artist Alexander Hernandez was born in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in Grand Junction, Colorado. His mixed-media practice, concentrating in textiles, explores the intersectional identities of immigrant experience, queer sensibilities, gender expectations, and HIV+ survival. He earned his BFA from Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design (2007) and his MFA from California College of the Arts (2012). He has participated in significant residencies, including Mass MoCA, Mark Rothko Art Center, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently, Alexander also works at Creativity Explored in San Francisco, assisting neurodiverse artists and those with disabilities in their art creation.
John Aragon
John Aragon is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reflects decades of experience as a craftsman, welder, designer, and visual merchandiser. His practice spans an eclectic mix of mediums—ranging from faux finishes and fabric work to the refined stains and finishes of high-end cabinetry, as well as intricate treatments in steel. A defining feature of Aragon’s art is the integration of simple kinetic elements. Using small motors to animate select components, his work invites viewers into an engaging and often unexpected visual dialogue. Many of his pieces are infused with thematic or political commentary and thoughtfully combine found objects with precision-crafted elements. The result is a body of work that is both conceptually layered and viscerally captivating.
Indira Allegra
Indira Allegra is a conceptual artist and founder of Cazimi Studio. Allegra's work has been featured in Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, e-flux, and ARTFORUM and in exhibitions and performances at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Blaffer Museum (Houston, TX), KADIST (San Francisco, CA), Center for Craft Creativity and Design (Ashville, NC), Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA) and SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA) among others. Allegra is the author of Tension Studies (2024), Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness (2024) and Blackout (2017) (Sming Sming Books). They have been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Burke Prize, United States Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital, Gerbode Choreographer Award, CripTech Metaverse Fellowship and Art Matters.
Kimberely Acebo Arteche
Kimberley Acebo Arteche is a multidisciplinary artist, healing justice practitioner, and cultural worker committed to reindigenizing cultural practices and fostering community-based art. Their work explores diasporic remembering and belonging through installation, photography, and community ceremonies. Arteche’s practice is deeply rooted in ritual, research, and ancestral knowledge, engaging communities in collective acts of remembrance and cultural reclamation.
Tracy Williams
Tracy Williams is a Tongan American muralist, cultural educator, and community art healer based in Oakland, Ca. She is the founding art teacher at The Freedom School and co-director of “Dreams Arts & Activism,” an award-winning afterschool program centering youth power, ancestral creativity, and collective healing. She leads trauma-informed art sessions with One East Palo Alto organization and youth in custody in Utah, with partnerships including the Utah Division of Multicultural Affairs, Utah Division of Arts and Museums and Juvenile Justice Youth Service. Her work weaves Pasifika spirituality, cultural grief work, and public storytelling into transformative community spaces. Her visual practice merges public installations, murals, and rituals that honor the sacred labor of Indigenous and diasporic women. She uses restorative art to amplify invisible histories, empower youth, foster intergenerational healing, and create visual altars that merge culture, protest, and prayer.