Note from Seth

Hey beautiful people. It’s been an incredible 2022 and I’m excited to share great news as we close out the year and ask for your support to launch our much anticipated OUT of Site production, Sylvester, The Mighty Real in 2023!  Yes!!  It’s true! We received a Gerbode Foundation award and a Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant to work with the amazing Marvin K. White as the writer of the new show to premiere next summer! We are super stoked to be working with Marvin and really so honored for our project to have been chosen for these two very special awards. I’m still pinching myself because if you know me, you know Sylvester is my all time favorite artist and Marvin, a favorite Bay Area writer. A dream project, for REAL! 

We are taking a huge leap to run this show for 5 months to bring this history to the streets of SF so locals and visitors alike can experience this history, live. We are partnering with San Francisco Heritage and invite you to be part of this very special time in our 16 year history. It’s going to take a village to make this dream a reality and employ many artists and staff to get this baby on its feet. So we are starting now by inviting you to join us as a sponsor this month with all kinds of fabulous perks.

I want to gush a bit and share that we just had one of our most exciting years to date. We dedicated this year to our FabLab QTBIPOC ancestor playshop program led by seven amazing artists including Tina D’Elia, Rotimi Agbabiaka, Réal Vaggas Alanis, Meliza Bañales, Tiff Lin, Aléta Mascorro, and Enormvs Muñoz. They invited visitors into the living legacy of cultural ancestors Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Kapaemāhū, Walter Mercado, and Guan Yin through performance and interactive creative activities and performances culminating in the three-hour event at YBCA. Check out last year’s FabLab page to take advantage of the e-zines we created about each ancestor. And stay tuned for December’s playshop with FabLab superstar April Axé Charmaine of Sol Vida leading a playshop on Audre Lorde.

In June we celebrated our 16th anniversary of making queer history visible with our Sweet 16 Gala celebration with performances and guest appearances by Leigh Crow, Landa Lakes and Tina D’Elia.

And after Jax Blaska and I spent a year working in the archives of Eye Zen’s beloved friend and composer, Jewlia Eisenberg who died in 2021, Marika Hughes and I produced an immersive 5 part indoor-out-door installation and concert at The Contemporary Jewish Museum. The exhibit paid tribute to Jewlia’s life, work and musical canon drawing from her archives and queering the Song of Songs. We got this great write up in the Chronicle and hope to tour it to other cities. 

As some things in the world seem to be falling apart, we invite you into our incredibly blessed community of artists and fans working to protect and promote the histories of our queer ancestors and conjuring radical joy.  Please join us.

Seth