I should have posted this first, but I had to throw the blog and accessories together in such a hurry that I didn't get around to it before the festival started, and once the festival started ... well, I've been running around, ya know.
Let's get some background on APAture:
KSW is actually, at this point, a 36-year-old organization that arose during the heyday of the Asian American Movement. (Here's a brief history of the org.) The short version: founded in the ground floor of an itinerant worker hotel on the border of Chinatown and Manilatown, KSW originated as a collective of Filipino and Chinese American Baby Boomer artists who were coming back to their communities to teach kids and elders drawing, painting, printmaking, poetry, martial arts, and other things.
The hotel location became politicized in the seventies when the I-Hotel became the last piece of Manilatown real estate to hold on in the face of financial district take-over. The building was cleared and torn down in 1977, and KSW became a nomadic organization, with spaces in Chinatown and North Beach, and eventually in SOMA. In 1981 KSW started the Asian American Jazz Festival, as well as a poetry book publishing program. The Jazz Festival was a success, but by the time KSW reached SOMA in the early nineties, it was hemorraghing organizers, volunteers, and other programs.
In the mid-nineties, KSW's only major program was Jazz Festival. Nancy Hom (who moved to SF from New York in 1974 and has been with KSW ever since) came on as E.D. in 1995 and started trying to establish other projects, including a series of writing and printmaking classes, and continuing book publications. This was problematic because most of KSW's longtime artist/organizers had stepped back from active involvement in the org, and there was no programming that attracted younger folks.
Nancy's previous two assistants--Amy Yuen in 1997 and Jean Chen in 1998--had thought up and established (respectively) a next generation group to try to give the Gen X volunteers pulled in through the Jazz Festival something to do at KSW, besides work for free. Jean especially had set up a series of salons/jam sessions where young folks came together and showed their stuff and hung out. When I took over as Nancy's assistant in early 1999, Nancy handed the next generation program to me and I started programming monthly meetings/salons.
After the 1998 Jazz Festival, the Festival entity (defunct after 2006) and KSW parted ways for good, and KSW suddenly found itself with a $30k surplus and a huge hole in its schedule. Jean, a zinester herself, had been to a Youth Expo at the downtown jail (I think) which featured tables with zines and comix. She had noticed that significant numbers of comix artists and zinesters were APA, and suggested to Nancy that KSW produce an APA-specific zine and comix expo. Nancy expressed this to me as an APA "Youth Expo," without limiting the genres, and naturally that got turned immediately into a Youth Arts Festival (not just in my head). Nancy's thought was that this could be a major event that could replace the Jazz Festival in 1999.
After a little back and forth, Nancy said, "Well, should we do it?" and I said, "Yes." It was pretty much just like that. So, in March or April, we brought it to the next-generation salon group (which was quickly dubbed "KSW-Next"), which included Robynn Takayama, Jean Chen, Sabina Chen, Dan Wu, Doug Hirai, and a few others, and said, "What do you think?" Within half an hour we had a festival, set for October 2. Most of the meeting was scheduling the day around a committee member's wedding.
Over the course of that spring and summer we met twice a month at venues all over the city. We collected further committee members: Jimi Choi, Ernest Mark, Manami Kano, Annie Koh, Ritsu Yoneyama, Matt Abaya, Russell Gonzaga, Dennis Somera, Jeff Chan, Leon Lee, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Val Chow. (Was Annie Cheng with us that first year, too?) We designed a logo (Matt Abaya designed the first logo), and t-shirts (three of them) which we hand-screened ourselves under Leland Wong's guidance. We voted in "APAture: A Window on the Art of Young Asian Pacific Americans" over any number of "-asian/-ation" puns. "APAture" was my idea, born out of desperation, after Nancy suggested "Art Attack."
That first year we decided that this festival was about us but our definition of "us" was expansive: everyone on the committee, their friends and colleagues, and anybody else in the community that wanted in. We all agreed that we wanted all the organizers to show their work and that APAture was that kind of event. We all knew at least a handful of APA artists in our own genres, and when we collected them together, we were surprised at how many they made up. But in addition to that, we got around 50 submissions as well. (We were active in grabbing anybody who looked Asian and young and handing them a submission form. Wei Ming and I would go prowling for Asian-y looking people. All. Summer. Long.)
We ended up with 72 acts or artists, and 100 individual people presenting their work at the first APAture. We were surprised, and unprepared. We figured we'd be happy with an audience of 300, ecstatic with an audience of 500. We got 700, with no formal press or media attention: all word of mouth. We packed out CELLspace. We were surprised and unprepared. It was like that scene in Pitch Black where the drunk guy fires up his lighter in the middle of the completely dark plain, and it lights up monsters' faces all around him that he didn't know were there. Only in this case, it wasn't aliens' faces, but our folks' faces that suddenly appeared. And it wasn't just that people showed up. The atmosphere of the event was electric. Everyone was looking around with this look on their faces that said I didn't know we had this. It was awesome.
We were dazed afterwards -- not just with exhaustion (there was a film night, a panel, and then a 14-hour day, that was the whole festival/expo), but also with having done something we never suspected we'd do. We thought we were putting on an event, but we'd accidentally grounded two wires and had the energy of the entire city pass through our bodies for a second. Remember, this was 1999, high-dot-com-boom-time, and the city was absolutely crawling with GenX APAs, all arts and creative writing minors working 12-hour days with nothing to do on weekends. It wasn't just APAture that exploded right around then. Ask Chi-hui what happened; ask LocusArts or AECA; ask OACC. (On second thought, don't ask OACC.)
The next APAture we took to SomArts--we had avoided SomArts the first time around because we'd thought it would be too big and we didn't want to rattle around in there like peas. We knew we needed the size the second year, which grew by 50% in audience, submissions, festival size, and committee size. After APAture 2, which was as poorly organized and amateurish as APAture 1, but bigger, I was so burnt out I decided not to coordinate the festival myself anymore. Nancy concurred; all the people the first two APAtures had attracted to KSW (we had an artist database of 500 and an active volunteer database of 300) had helped us to expand our programming by about 500% or more, and the program manager (me) was really needed to, well, manage the programs.
Also, all over SF--all over California, really--Baby Boomer established orgs were suffering from loss of founders and longtime activists. Generational transfer was a huge issue; youth programming was a huge issue. Inspired, I was given to understand, in part by APAture and similar programs in other organizations, the California Arts Council (the pre-Schwarzenegger, properly funded CAC, that is, the one that had Cali as the second best arts funded state in the Union) created a grant especially for youth arts programs. APAture got one from the first round, and we used the money to hire a festival coordinator.
APAture 3 was coordinated by Andrew Amorao (Dru, where are you?). Sam Chanse also appeared on the committee for the first time that year, having just moved (back) to the Bay Area and joined the Locus organizers. Sam coordinated APAture 4, and joined the KSW staff permanently afterwards. When I left the staff early 2003, Sam took over as program manager, then program director, and eventually artistic director of KSW. The next five years of APAture (and KSW) were led and guided by Sam. (I was not involved, so I can't tell you any details. Ask Sam.)
Every year since the first, APAture grew length-wise. It started out as a one-day expo (with a separate film/video night), and added a "quiet" performance night, then a gallery opening night, then additional, separate genre nights until the festival lasted two weeks and was segregated by genre, except for the performance disciplines.
Also, as I think I've mentioned before, APAture started out as a specifically young-adult-oriented event, so the participants were restricted to age 18-35. But within three years of the first APAture, the entire KSW board was under 40. Within five years of the first APAture, the entire staff was under 40. Within two years of APAture, we had to (try to) institute a specifically intergenerational program, to try to keep the founding generation of KSW from wandering away. We didn't exactly have much success with that. I imagine that's part of the reason that the APAture committee did away with the age limitation a couple of years ago.
Let me just say something about that at this point: the age limitation was something along the lines of an attempt at perpetual revolution. It was supposed to encourage artists and organizers to move on after a few years, preventing anyone or group from trying to take over the festival and make it their personal thing. But it was also supposed to keep fresh young folks coming into KSW and feeling empowered by having the opportunity to organize their own event. It was supposed to turn out new, trained API organizers into the community every few years.
But it's occurred to me during this APAture that APAture itself--the idea, the structure, the type of event it is--is very much a product of my generation, in the same way that the original KSW--including the Jazz Festival--was a product of its generation. Maybe we don't need to perpetuate APAture, because when the next distinct generation comes to adulthood, they'll want to do something completely different.
Or maybe they won't. Maybe they'll just change APAture into something else. Whatever. We have a few years before intergenerational transfer becomes a problem again, but since we have APAture here, and have to do something with it, thinking about these issues, at least, will always be on the table.
That's part of the point of this liveblog, by the way. I don't intend to do this again next year (although I'd be happy to help out anyone who wants to do an APAture Liveblog next year!) but using the proliferation of cheap, easy web communications technologies to update APAture and make it impactful on the web might go a ways towards renewing APAture and perpetuating the revolution.
Maybe APAture just needs to be a word that hovers over the perpetual change of youth-oriented programming at KSW. At the moment, I'm still part of the generation that is active in this shared endeavor, but soon I won't be. And maybe this contribution will fall by the wayside, as many of the APAture practices we established ten years ago did. That would be cool, actually.
Awesome. Very nice, Claire, to hear you break it down in terms of generations (each with its specific sets of needs), zeitgeists, and timeliness. I remember being in a completely different head space the first APAture I participated in with my chapbook (1999? 2000?), and another different head space as literary feature (2003?) and certainly at different stages in my development as a professional writer at each point of my participation.
OK, my point here: I sensed some of the perhaps tension with other commenters here do have to do with generational needs, what are the expectations of someone just entering this art scene, or at the very beginning of his/her possible career as an artist, and perhaps also different levels of discourse.
I have to be reminded that what I have identified as "tropes" (and hence stuff I get sometimes tired of seeing over and over again) over the past decade+ of my involvement in API artist communities is totally fresh and new and awesome to somebody who hasn't been in this community for as long as I have.
I like what you've said about Bindlestiff, for example, when blogging about Irene Duller's piece and its potential/promise; as well, you ask what is the next step for Bindlestiff artists, given that they have identfiable aesthetics, tendencies in performance, etc. and that they are emerging/young artists, some of whom do want to move on to the next level. I dig that and would very much love to see APAture participants, including Bindlestiff folks, find a next level.
I guess for myself, I also have to respect that some if not many of these emerging artists may not want the next level, or may not continue on as artists.
OK, this is overlong. You know what I'm thinking for the most part anyway.
Posted by: bjr | September 25, 2008 at 04:23 PM
that's a good point, barb, and one that i haven't been thinking too much about during this process.
in the past, apature HAS definitely been a place for those early, raw, and often silly identity pieces, and perhaps should always remain open to them.
on the other hand, what i didn't mention above (and maybe should have) is that i've seen apature getting more ambitious and sophisticated in the last few years. that makes me sad--that there may be less room for the really, really young 'uns at apature. but it's also a relief, since i have no more time for that really early work myself, and would have to abandon apature permanently if that was all i was seeing.
no more perpetual revolution then. and if things keep going in this direction, something WILL have to replace apature, b/c there won't be anymore emergence at apature and a market gap will open up ;)
Posted by: claire | September 25, 2008 at 05:14 PM