Spirit of Unity: Leland Wong and the Nihonmachi Street Fair
Poster art on exhibit
UCSB Library, Third Floor Gallery
August 5 - October 9, 2013
Leland Wong is a San Francisco-based graphic artist and photographer best known for his screen-print posters announcing the San Francisco Nihonmachi Street Fair. This is the 40th anniversary of the street fair, which takes place in Japantown each summer. The spirit of unity is an enduring value that brings the Bay Area’s diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander communities together in a celebration of both cultural affirmation and a commitment to community service.
Leland Wong’s artwork has been widely exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe. His artistic affinities and iconography are deeply rooted in San Francisco’s Chinatown where he was born and raised. His posters, designed for community events such as the Nihonmachi, draw on both Japanese and Chinese traditions and are noted for their stylistic symmetry of pan-Asian aesthetics.
A good example in the exhibit is his announcement poster for the 25th Annual Nihonmachi Street Fair where a pair of dragon-headed turtles--powerful Chinese symbols of longevity and prosperity—appear impervious to the crests of waves washing over Japantown. The ubiquitous thundering waves, appearing in many of his Nihonmachi posters, are reminiscent of Katsushika Hokusai’s Edo period wood cut prints.
In Africa and the Americas:
The Legacy of the Diasporas
At the UCSB Multicultural Center Lounge
Summer 2013
This exhibit represents the legacy of the movements of a people from their origins in Africa, their struggles for social justice in that continent, and their dispersal to North and South America, as represented in the graphic art collections in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives in the Department of Special Collections. The viewer is advised that owing to the limitations in scope of this exhibit, it cannot constitute a historical narrative of the Diasporas, but it can capture some important moments in the timeline.
The operative term is "Diasporas." There were many strands to these Diasporas, including involuntary and voluntary transnational movements of peoples from the African continent throughout the globe. Between the years of 1500 and 1900 an estimated 9,600,000 slaves were taken by force to the Caribbean and Central and South America, approximately 500,000 were taken to the U.S., and 4.3 million were taken to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
The visual narrative includes their indigenous origins in Africa, the oppression of these noble peoples through the slave trade and colonialism, and ultimately their indispensable role in the economic, political, intellectual, and moral life of the nation, including ascendancy to the American presidency. The 2008 poster “Yes We Did” accentuates yet another Diasporic strand: in September 1959, Barack Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama was part of a group of 81 talented young Kenyans airlifted to the U.S. He became the University of Hawaii’s first African foreign student, eventually returning to Kenya in August 1964.
The exhibit reflects the dichotomy of both exclusion and inclusion of Americans of African origins and their emergence as an important political presence and force in American and global societies. Also represented are the contributions of African Americans to the American Westward Movement and to social justice for all through the civil rights movement, including the protest movements for social justice, for human rights, and the Black Power Movement. As part of the legacy of these Diasporas, their contributions to American culture in music, art, and literature also are celebrated.
Come Together: Interethnic Collaborations for Equity and Social Change in the 1970s - Online Exhibit
This online exhibition features selected 1970s vintage posters by San Francisco Bay Area activist artists who represent a spirit of cultural diversity, social equity/social change, and international human rights from various perspectives. Revealed in the imagery are significant interethnic collaborations in which shared interests of African American, Asian American, Chicano/Latino, and Native American communities are united within individual posters. The posters are drawn from major graphic art collections housed in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) in the UCSB Library.
