USAAF 2026: Opening Ceremony

Opening Ceremony of "Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30”

Join us for the exhibition opening of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated by Colin Choy Kimzy. This event marks the celebration of three decades of cultural resilience and community organizing by APICC, showcasing the rich heritage and contributions of the Asian Pacific Islander community. Look forward to engaging performances, insightful discussions, and a first look at the powerful artworks that reflect the struggles and triumphs of our dynamic community.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

In 1996, facing dwindling resources, five San Francisco Asian American arts organizations (Asian American Dance Performances, First Voice, Asian Improv aRts, the Asian American Theater Company, and Kearny Street Workshop) banded together to form the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC). In the words of this year’s United States of Asian America Festival theme, APICC was a Common Ground for our community to advance our art and activism.

Thirty years later, APICC endures, but the forces that threatened its founding organizations are back with a vengeance. Our government is slashing arts funding, whitewashing history, and censoring people of color even as it detains, deports, and wages war.

APICC’s existence proves that our culture thrives because our people organize, creating spaces of community care, solidarity, and liberation. Against the all-out assault on imagination, memory, and freedom, this exhibition turns to APICC’s archives to show how we have always fought for and with our art. In these times, the archive is a refuge for collective memory and a weapon for concerted action FEATURED ARTISTS

Curator: Colin Choy Kimzy

Colin Choy Kimzey is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and researcher born and raised in Yelamu (San Francisco), Occupied Ramaytush Ohlone Territory. Working across printmaking, installation, and curatorial and pedagogical projects, he creates site-specific inquiries into histories of migration, labor, urban development, and radical politics through silkscreen and through long term relationships with historic and present-day activist organizations.

ABOUT THE USAAF FESTIVAL This year’s theme, Common Ground, invites us to reflect on our relationships with each other and with the spaces we move through together as AAPIs in the diaspora by exploring what it means to take up space and practice placemaking for others. The festival will celebrate modes of thinking about solidarity through shared experiences and histories by underscoring how visibility in public spaces can cultivate belonging. 

• How do API communities continue to create spaces for gathering and community care through arts and culture? How do we use these spaces to act in solidarity with other BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ communities and work towards collective liberation?

• What does it mean to create and hold space for healing, and how does API cultural expression inform the ways that we are able to expand reflective spaces within ourselves? 

• How do we continue to create spaces to amplify API narratives in the face of injustice and erasure in the United States? How can the arts help us imagine new ways to tell our stories and steward our histories for future generations?

> View the full lineup