Second Helpings: Art Opening and Performances

June 7–9, 2014
Second Helpings
Alex Lannon & Fallon Young
SOMArts Cultural Center

Exhibition Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 2–5pm.
Theater Performance: Saturday, June 7, 6:30-8pm.
Gallery hours: Saturday & Sunday, June 7th & 8th, 12–5pm, Monday, June 9, 12–7pm.

$12–20 Theater Performance
FREE Gallery Admission
Brown Paper Ticket Link: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/670092

Second Helpings is a group visual art exhibition, a “fatinee” of multidisciplinary performance, and a queer intervention into American popular culture’s understanding of the fat body as a deviant body. Exhibiting artists fight the stigmatization of fat bodies, radically re-envision the notion of body diversity, and destabilize deeply embedded hierarchies of desire.

Second Helpings features works in many media by 20 visual artists, and 7 solo and ensemble performances. Selected works deconstruct and reassess body politics to foster a collective understanding of fatness that empowers and heals fat-bodied people emotionally, sexually and politically.

A new theatrical work humorously addresses the correlation between body shame and cultural imperialism. A 5-piece band named after pastries snacks ritualistically onstage. A debut video work explores racialized and gendered experiences of fat-phobia. A chubby drag queen pushes back on the ways her body is treated as a dystopian object of desire. Come ravenous. Help yourself.

For More information visit: http://www.somarts.org/secondhelpings

Exhibiting Visual Artists:
Sookie Bardwell
Kelsey Beyer
Adam Carlin
amy dame
Jes Espinoza
April Flores
Kate Getty
James Gobel
Sonia Guinansaca
Rory Hejtmanek
Jocelyn Kirkwood
Julz Hale Mary
Madsen Minax
Galadriel Mozee
Tricia Jameson-Rainwater
Julio Salgado
Jukie Sunshine
Amanda Vigil
Morgan Weinert
Rio Yañez
Fallon Young

Evening Performances by:
Nic Alea
Gus Allis
Celeste Chan, Tania Lee, Tara Shuai (video)
Maya Chapina
Jezebel Delilah X
Fatty Cakes and the Puff Pastries
Perra Pumps
Virgie Tovar (MC)

Curated by:
Alex Lannon & Fallon Young with support from Sarah Guerra & Virgie Tovar

Performer Biographies:

Nic Alea is a Bay Area based queer/trans* poet and educator. Nic has been published in “Word Riot,” “>kill author,” the “Evergreen Review,” & “Muzzle Magazine” and is a 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow and a semi-finalist in Button Poetry’s chapbook competition for “Portrait of a Cliff on Fire.” You can find poems and other thoughts at nicalea.tumblr.com.

 

Gus Allis is a writer, performer, and storyteller who has worked with Insurgent Theater, Are There Girls On This Server?, and The Barf Tour. Specializing in blunt prose, she enjoys changing minds and opening eyes through emotional oversharing, TMI-filled monologues, and mythological metaphors. Gus was born and raised in Milwaukee and recently moved back to her hometown after a 3-year stint in the Bay Area. When she was 5 years old, she cut off all the eyelashes on one of her eyes because she wanted to see if it would make half her face look like a boy. It didn’t. You can check out her anarchafeminist re-telling of ancient myths at bitchmyths.tumblr.com.

Celeste Chan is an Asian “artivist” and queer femme (you read that right). Chan is thrilled to collaborate with Esther Kim, Tania Lee, and Tara Shuai. Her writing can be found in “As/Us” literary journal and “Feminist Wire.” Her films have screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, MIX NYC, Frameline, Digital Desperados, and National Queer Arts Festival, among others. She’s honored to be the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels (a queer of color arts company) with her partner, KB Boyce. You can catch her new work in 2014 at CAAMFest (formerly known as SF Intl Asian American Film Festival), Queer Women of Color Film Festival, the San Francisco Public Library and beyond! More info: www.celestechan.com andwww.facebook.com/QRProductions

 

Maya Chapina, our lady of indulgence, is a Central American superhero powered by black beans, tortillas, and el pueblo unido. Over-educated and underpaid, she has over 10 years of performance, theater and curation experience investigating and celebrating the intersection of politics, media, art and love. She’s that working artist-educator that gets hired last minute because we really value arts and culture, but only on Cinco de Mayo, Pride, and Women’s History Month. She co-produced Peacock Rebellion’s show “Agen(c)y: Nonprofit Dreams and Disasters,” is a co-founder of Las Manas performance crew, and is currently at work writing the great hoochie feminist manifesto.

Jezebel Delilah X is a queer, fat, Black femme performance artist, writer, filmmaker, educator, and Faerie Queen Mermaid Gangsta for the revolution. She is the senior editor for Black Girl Dangerous, co-host of East Bay Open Mic, Culture Fuck, a member of the storytelling performance troupe Griot Noir, an English instructor at several local community colleges, one of the founding members of Deviant Type Press, and on the artistic core of Peacock Rebellion. She uses a combination of performative memoir, theatrical poetry, and feminist storytelling to advance her politics of radical love, socioeconomic justice, anti-racism, community accountability and liberation.

Fatty Cakes and the Puff Pastries is a musical and aesthetic performance experience. Fatty Cakes (Amber Fargano) as a performer is a fat bodied one-womyn band that has expanded into a body positive and all-inclusive group. The Puff Pastries, or the Quesadilla Angels within the Church of Fatty Cakes, include: drummer (Audrey Johnson), bassist and vocalist (Vishinna Turner) and back-up dancers and singers (Staci McDowell and Victoria Crow). Coming from diverse racial and class backgrounds and sexual orientations, these womyn have come together in solidarity as a musical grrl gang in order to bring the hungry masses back into the light of: FOOD.

Perra Pumps is the more fabulous and uninhibited half of performer, producer and writer Javier Luis. Perra’s work explores the delicious cleavage that exists between the intersections of, desire, identity and tradition through short narrative vignettes or performance art installations. In 2012, AS220 in Rhode Island and El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista supported the development of a solo play starring Perra Pumps, the first in a trilogy still in development. This year, Brava Theater Center and Galeria de la Raza have supported the development of the second instalment, scheduled to premiere at Galeria De La Raza in June 2014.