THE 29th ANNUAL UNITED STATES OF ASIAN AMERICA FESTIVAL: COMMON GROUND
CALL FOR ARTISTS
Submit your work to be part of “Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30,” an exhibit for the United States of Asian America Festival 2026: Common Ground.
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.
We seek visual art in any medium that:
- Draws connections between past and present cultural organizing
- Celebrates and activates community
- Engages with the history of APICC and its founding organizations.
Accepted mediums: digital art, drawing, film, illustration, installation, mixed media, multimedia, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, textile, and video.
Anyone of any cultural/ethnic background may submit.
📅 Due Saturday, January 31, 2026 at 11:59PM
💫 Submit at https://shorturl.at/GcdLg
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
Each year, the United States of Asian American Festival (USAAF) presents up to 20 different programs reflecting the artistic accomplishments and cultural diversity of San Francisco’s Pacific Islander and Asian American communities. USAAF showcases artists representing a diverse range of ethnic and cultural groups and aims to heighten the visibility of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) artists working in all disciplines - theater, music, dance, film, literature, visual arts, and more! Our goal is to nurture and empower these groups to be self-sufficient while providing the support they need to grow.
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?
Thank you to our many partners and funders including the San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, California Arts Council, Zellerbach Family Foundation and startsmall.
THANK YOU TO OUR DONORS AND SPONSORS
San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, SF Grants for the Arts, SF Office of Economic & Workforce Development, Zellerbach Family Foundation, and SOMArts Cultural Center.