Chinese Cultural Center receives $100,000 grant

Chinese Cultural Center receives $100,000 grantArtists and community leaders at announcement celebration. | Photo: Chinese Culture Center
Nathan Falstreau
Published on July 23, 2018

The Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC) has been selected as one of five Bay Area arts organizations that will receive funding in a collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the center announced last week.

“We are beyond thrilled to be a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts," said CCC artistic director Abby Chen in a statement. "This honor must be shared with our artists, whose work challenge stereotypes, shift narratives through creativity and imagination."

Support from the foundation, $100,000 to be offered over the next two years, will go toward CCC programs such as the Museum Without Walls initiative, which brings art into public spaces, and Present Tense: Task of Remembrance, a ten-year anniversary exhibition set to debut in 2019.

The exhibition is "highly relevant in today's climate," Chen said at a media event last Wednesday that highlighted the importance of remembering dark periods of American history such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese American interment. 

“These are a succession of events that highlight the histories of individual people, communities, migrations, nations, and all of humanity.”  

The Chinese Cultural CEnter of San Francisco. | Photo: Ann L./Yelp

Other local recipients include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the African Diaspora, Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California at Santa Cruz, and Aggregate Space in Oakland. 

At the event, CCC Artistic Director Abby Chen credited artists and collaborative work with various organizations like the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), Chinese Historical Society of America Museum and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).

“[The artist's] creativity and imagination helps us reshape how we look at stereotypes and challenge dominant narratives of Chinese-Americans in this country,” said Chen. “It really takes a village to build a vision.”

Abby Chen recognized artists and upcoming projects supported by the Warhol Foundation. | Photo: CCC

Sunny Angulo, aide to District Three Supervisor Aaron Peskin, said CCC supports "other arts organizations through a community-building process connecting not only those in Chinatown, but also the SOMA Pilipinas to the Chinatown Area Plan."

Andy Warhol Foundation program director Rachel Bers said her organization was "excited to support CCC's exhibitions and new public practice initiative, which together will help the organization to connect its long history of civic engagement with contemporary artistic concerns."

Said Chen, "it is great to be reaffirmed by the country's most prestigious institution."