Mama Says: QTPOC Lineage + Storytelling

MAMA SAYS: QTPOC Lineage and Storytelling
May 13, 2017
Galeria de la Raza
show @ 6pm
after party @ 8pm
$5-$20 sliding scale (No one turned away for lack of funds)

Featuring…
Indira Allegra
Myriam Gurba
Roberto F. Santiago
Grace Rosario Perkins
José Iñiguez

Indira Allegra is a recipient of the Oakland Individual Artist (2015) and Queer Cultural Center grants (2014) and has been honored with the Jackson Literary Award (2014), Lambda Literary Fellowship (2012) and Windgate Craft Fellowship (2015). Allegra’s commissions include works for the SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, Petty Biennial, SFJAZZ Poetry Festival, the City of Oakland and the National Queer Arts Festival. Her time-based works have screened at festivals such as MIX NYC (2013), Perlen Hannover LGBT Festival (2010), Bologna Lesbian Film Festival (2010) and Outfest Fusion (2009).Allegra’s writing has been widely anthologized, she has contributed works to Cream City Review, HYSTERIA Magazine, make/shift Magazine, Konch Magazine and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought among others. In 2014 she was the Dr. and Mrs. Ella Tag Lecturer at East Carolina University and a Lylle Parker Women of Color Speaker at the University of Oregon. Allegra has completed workshops and residencies at The Banff Centre in Canada (2012) Ponderosa Center for Movement and Discovery in Stolzenhagen (2016) and Takt in Berlin (2016). She is a 2017 Artist in Residence at Djerassi Residence Arts Program and the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba is a queer spoken-word artist, visual artist, and writer from Santa Maria, California. She currently lives and teaches in Long Beach, California. Her most recent novel, Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories, explores Mexican stories and traditions from a feminist lens.

Roberto Santiago
Roberto F. Santiago is a poet, translator, and lead singer in a solo act who produces his own music, and dances rips into his pants. Roberto received an MFA from Rutgers University, BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and is the recipient of the 2011 Alfred C. Carey Prize for Poetry. Currently, he works as College and Career Coordinator at a high school in San Francisco. Be it pedaling past the canals in Amsterdam or the smell of rain in rural Québec, he has begun to rewrite his own passport. Roberto also writes and produces his own music, and has been known to dance until he rips his pants. His frst full-length collection of poems, Angel Park, will be released April 2015 by Lethe Press. His poetry has been published in such anthologies/journals as Assaracus – Sibling Rivalry (2014), CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action(2014), Hypothetical: A Review of Everything Imaginable(2014), and Te Waiting Room Reader: Stories to Keep you Company – CavanKerry (2013).

Grace Rosario Perkins
Capturing feeling through her artwork in a multitude of ways, Grace Rosario Perkins creates visionary pieces by evoking thought, feeling and language onto mediums that allow us to create our own thoughts, feelings and language. Coming from a line of artists and having spent a majority of her time living on the Akimel O’odham Indian and on the Navajo Nation reservations, Grace’s upbringing has affected her artwork greatly through the years, and has created a unique spin on the way language and artwork come together. Repetitive motifs of women, mountainscapes, abstract patterns and shapes all built from a consciousness in which memory, familial identity, pop culture and obsessive mark-making are paired with texts.

José Iñiguez
José Luis Iñiguez is a Central Valley artist currently based in Oakland, California. He received his Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. Trained as a ceramist; yet, his practice is not solely that, he infuses his visions with tactile procedures and assemblage, utilizing found objects and waste. Iñiguez’s work is encircled with many planes of his identity. His recent investigation immersed his practice into a spiritual quest, weaving in his Roman Catholic upbringing with the occult.