Bay Area Now 9

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) announces Bay Area Now 9 (BAN9), the ninth iteration of its signature triennial exhibition, opening on October 6, 2023. On view through May 5, 2024, BAN9 will feature a broad range of creative practices including visual art, dance, performance, music, film, sound, new media, technology, fashion, poetry, and social practice—underscoring YBCA’s role as one of the only interdisciplinary arts centers in the Bay Area. This edition holds particular significance, taking center stage in YBCA’s 30th anniversary celebration and marking three decades of groundbreaking art and community connection. Spanning YBCA’s entire campus, including outdoor spaces, BAN9 will include site-specific commissions as well as new and historic work. 

Curators: Martin Strickland, Fiona Ball, Amy Kisch, alongside a Curatorial Counsel of eight individuals across disciplines and communities throughout the Bay Area.

The 30 artists included in the 2023 edition are: Indira Allegra, Michael Arcega, Sholeh Asgary, Ashwini Bhat, Nyame O. Brown, Craig Calderwood, champoy, Jeffrey Cheung, Lenore Chinn, Arleene Correa Valencia, Jillian Crochet, Janet Delaney, José Figueroa, Heesoo Kwon, Masako Miki, Golbanou Moghaddas, Courtney Desiree Morris, Paz G, Tracy Ren, Trina Michelle Robinson, Muzae Sesay, Nicole Shaffer, Peter Simensky, Charlene Tan, Shirin Towfiq, Christine Tien Wang, Leila Weefur, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Doris Yen, and Connie Zheng.

This year’s triennial includes a wider array of artistic mediums than previous years, including dance, spoken-word, film, sound art, textile art, and fashion. In addition, several of the works on view will evolve over the course of the exhibition through community participation in collaboration with the artists.

A new interactive installation of Indira Allegra’s Texere will greet visitors at YBCA’s Mission Street plaza, where contributed text and images are turned into a “thread” and woven into an ever-growing digital tapestry. This will be accompanied by ongoing community loom workshops focusing on the theme of repair—spiritual, physical, and communal. Masako Miki’s fantastical creatures will dance across YBCA’s Grand Forum Building in a large-scale public installation based on her watercolor works, which will be accompanied by programming celebrating the multitudes of identities. Revolution, a series of Persian rugs printed on gauze fabric by Shirin Towfiq, will provide a potent space for reflection and inspiration in YBCA’s East Garden and Grand Lobby. Featured in For Freedoms’ Eyes on Iran activation in New York, the carpets faced the United Nations during the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence,” campaign, successfully calling for the removal of the Islamic Republic of Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women in a historic vote. Leila Weefur will turn YBCA’s Glass Passageway into The Chapel, a celebration of the transgender community through the subversion of religious iconography, viewable from both inside and outside of the building. A series of ceremonies and performances, titled Seven Songs & Sermons, will celebrate Trans leaders and allies.

Additional works on view in the exhibition include a fully functioning “Leymusoom” gift shop by Heesoo Kwon in collaboration with Sming Sming Books; an interactive sculpture by Jillian Crochet that meditates on providing space, inclusivity, and comfort for disabled bodies; a video installation by Courtney Desiree Morris exploring the healing powers of pleasure and desire; a selection of new watercolors by Chelsea Ryoko Wong; new photography diptychs by Janet Delaney; and a large-scale iterative textile by Charlene Tan which will be worked on by Tan and community members throughout the exhibition’s run; among many other works. 

The exhibition will be supported by an ongoing slate of seasonal artist activations, participatory public programs, and educational initiatives that feature both BAN9 artists and additional Bay Area artists, cultural producers, and organizations, developed in collaboration with an inaugural Curatorial Counsel of curators, artists, activists, and cultural workers working across the Bay Area’s creative disciplines and communities: Erina C. Alejo, Gina Basso, Jason Bayani, Mina Girgis, Candace Huey, Aay Preston Myint, José Ome Navarrete Mazatl, and Lehua M. Taitano. The programming will include film screenings, workshops, communal meals, artist talks, dance and music performances, poetry, and literary presentations. Exploring the notion of convening as a creative discipline, the programming will invite Bay Area communities to connect to and be changed by one another through evocative creative experiences—in collective pursuit of better ways forward. 

For more information about BAN9, including participating artists, events, programs, and workshops, visit ybca.org.

About YBCA
Opened to the public in 1993, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) was founded as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. YBCA’s work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the communities it serves. For more information, visit ybca.org.