Kearny Street Workshop presents INFINITE EXCHANGE, an exhibition by the AVA (APA Visual Artists) Lab 2025 cohort. 

On Display at ARC Gallery & Studios 1246 Folsom Street

July 19 - Aug 16, 2025
Gallery hours: Wednesday & Thursday 1-6pm, Saturdays 12-3pm.

Participating artists: Nicki Aquino, Ginger Yifan Chen, Vida Kuang, Bianca Levan, Joanna Malpica, Karin Hạnh Nguyễn, Bréana Parks, Tanza Solis, Tracy Jones, and Mariel Paat.

Events

Faculty Bios

Kim Acebo Arteche is an interdisciplinary community artist, educator, cultural worker, and healer. Born in Anacostan territory (DC-MD-VA), Arteche currently lives in Chochenyo Ramaytush Ohlone land, and hails from Tagalog-Batangueña and Bicol lineages. Arteche received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and MFA from San Francisco State University, where she received the School of Art’s Distinguished Graduate award. She is the co-founder of Balay Kreative, a future Filipinx American Cultural Center providing artist sustainability and professional development programs in SOMA Pilipinas, and has served on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council, SOMA Pilipinas’ Arts & Culture Committee, and was the Visual Arts curator for UNDISCOVERED SF. She has developed community-responsive programs with Bay Area arts organizations like Kearny Street Workshop, Southern Exposure, SFSU’s School of Art, ARTogether, YBCA, Artists at Work and more. She is Community Arts Panelist for the Zellerbach Family Foundation, is a Healing Justice Practitioner with the Anti-Police Terror Project, and is a 2023 Leaderspring LeadStrong fellow. Arteche is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, while creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists. As a healer, Arteche supports BI&POC community and cultural workers in standing from a place of wholeness and connectedness so they can live with balance, ancestral abundance, and empowerment.

Using acrylic, ink, aerosol and installations, Cece Carpio tells stories of immigration, ancestry, resistance, and resilience. She documents evolving traditions through combining folkloric forms, bold portraits and natural elements with urban art techniques. Her work is influenced by people she has met and places she's been. Cece paints everyday people who have been invincible in order to share their thriving presence, to show the dignity and power of their existence.

Cece has produced and exhibited work in the Philippines, Fiji Islands, Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Italy, Norway, Ireland, United Kingdom, India, Guam and throughout the United States. She has been awarded the Rockwood Institute Fellowship for leaders engaged in the Arts as critical agent of change. She also received New York Foundation of the Art Immigrant Artist Fellowship, a teaching residency at Café R.E.D & La Botica Espacio Cultural at Xela, Guatemala, and artist residency with KulArts at SOMA San Francisco.  The City of Oakland, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Oakland Museum of CA, have commissioned her work. She is currently working as the Galleries Manager for the San Francisco Arts Commission, and is a Public Art Advisor for the City of Oakland.She can often be found collaborating with her collective, Trust Your Struggle, teaching, and traveling around the world in pursuit of the perfect wall.

Angela Carrier is an arts and culture leader whose work centers on public engagement, creative placemaking, and cultural storytelling. As a founding member of Pulan Collective, Angela co-leads interdisciplinary programs that uplift Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and diasporic narratives. Through initiatives like 13 Moons 13 Meals—a series of virtual gatherings and published chapbooks—she cultivates space for ancestral knowledge, food traditions, and intergenerational dialogue. Angela has held leadership roles at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, including Director of Civic and Community Engagement and Director of Artist Engagement and Impact, where she deepened partnerships between artists, communities, and civic institutions across the Bay Area. Currently, Angela serves as Senior Program Manager for Monuments and Memorials at the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she stewards equity-focused public art initiatives, facilitates community dialogue around civic memory, and supports artists reimagining how legacy is represented in public space. Angela’s work weaves together grassroots cultural advocacy and public-sector leadership. She is committed to using the arts as a tool for healing, historical reckoning, and community power.

Dara Katrina del Rosario is a San Francisco–based nonprofit arts professional, curator, and cultural educator whose work centers on community storytelling, performance pedagogy, and equity-driven cultural programming. Dara has contributed to Asian Pacific American cultural programs through Kearny Street Workshop’s “We Won’t Move” podcast and co-curated exhibitions including “From My Body” (2018) and “Postcolonial Revenge” (2019). She has also organized exhibitions like Passionate Engagement: The Art of Nancy Hom and supported relaunches of publications such as Liwanag vol. 1. Rooted in frameworks of Community Cultural Wealth and Critical Performance Pedagogy, Dara’s practice amplifies underrepresented voices and builds intergenerational, cross-cultural dialogue. 

Barnali Ghosh is a California-based designer, landscape architect, artist, and community historian dedicated to transit equity, public art, and radical storytelling. A Berkeley native and UC Berkeley graduate, she co-founded the acclaimed Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, showcasing four generations of immigrant activism rooted in archival research and oral history. She also led a campaign to rename Shattuck Avenue East as Kala Bagai Way, the first downtown Berkeley street named after a woman of color. As an artist, Barnali created the "Unfaithful Re/creations" photo series—self-portraits blending California native flowers with South Asian textiles and Odissi dance—exploring identity, home, and cultural connection. Barnali’s multifaceted career bridges design, policy, arts, and activism—grounded in her personal experiences as an immigrant transit rider and her deep commitment to climate justice, racial equity, and community storytelling.

Nancy Hom was born in Toisan, China and came to the United States when she was five years old. She grew up in New York City and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971. She moved to San Francisco in 1974. She is an artist, writer, organizer, curator, and arts consultant with over 35 years of experience in the non-profit arts field.Her art has been exhibited in numerous galleries, locally and internationally, including the de Young Museum, Euphrat Museum of Art, Stanford University, Oakland Museum, Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, De Saisset Museum, Intersection for the Arts, C.N. Gorman Museum, California Historical Society, SF International Airport, Asian American Arts Centre, New York City, Exhibits USA, C.A.L. Valeyre, Paris, France, and Somart San Angel, Villa Obregón, Mexico City.

Johanna Poethig is a visual, public and performance artist who has exhibited internationally and has been actively creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations for over 40 years. Her practice plays between realism and abstract forms, architectural and intimate scales, historic and present day politics, futurist musings, humour and satire, a feminist point of view, collaborative processes and cultural critique. In her current work, in the midst of climate crisis, the mathematical patterns in nature’s terrestrial and extraterrestrial life systems are expressed by creating experiential landscapes,  surrealistic portraits and texts that come together in a speculative storytelling. Communication across species crosses technology, plants, fungi and lichen in ceramic and painted  microphones coming together for the Plant Press Conference. Poethig’s public art works intervene in the urban landscape, on freeways, transit corridors, in parks, hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, cultural centers and civic buildings. She has worked in collaboration with other artists, architects, urban planners, design teams, arts commissions, specific communities and cultural groups.  She has received numerous commissions and awards for this work ; in 2021 the California Arts Council Individual Artist Legacy Award. She has curated, produced and participated in performance events that mix feminism, global politics, costume, cabaret, experimental music and video. Poethig is Professor Emerita of the Visual and Public Art (VPA) department at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). As an arts educator and socially engaged artist she deconstructs boundaries in a collaborative artistic process grounded in research, production, critique, improvisation and reciprocal learning.  She was raised in the Philippines and has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland since coming to the United States. She received her BFA at University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her interest in the dialogue between the public and personal, politics and aesthetics, the mathematical and the mystical, the ridiculous and the sublime and an inclusive cultural life inform her process and inspire her work.

Astria Suparak’s cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science-fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Straddling creative and scholarly work, her projects often take the form of publicly available tools and databases, chronicling subcultures and omitted perspectives. Her multimedia performance Asian futures, without Asians, an incisive taxonomy of film tropes that delves into the histories of architecture, fashion, religion, and science was described as “cathartic, brilliant” (Variable West) and “a compelling yet brutally honest exploration.” (The Michigan Daily). In the last four years, Suparak’s installations, videos, and performances have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and ArtScience Museum, Singapore. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances that are “visually and conceptually stunning” (Hyperallergic) with “savvy political consciousness,” for institutions and festivals including the Liverpool Biennial; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; MoMA PS1 and The Kitchen, in New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Expo Chicago, as well as for unconventional spaces such as roller-skating rinks, sports bars, and rock clubs. Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award and is based in Oakland, California.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally, and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and appalachiapacific, which won the  Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. Taitano has received fellowship support from Submittable and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat and as a Curatorial Council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Art's Triennial exhibition of contemporary art. She is the current Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.

Christine Wong Yap is a visual artist and social practitioner who works in community engagement, drawing, printmaking, publishing, textiles, and public art. Through her hyperlocal participatory research projects, she gathers and amplifies grassroots perspectives on belonging, resilience, and mental well being. She is a 2025 Creative Capital Awardee. From 2023 to 2024, she served as Neighborhood Visiting Artist at Stanford University (Stanford, CA). She has developed projects with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, For Freedoms, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, Times Square Arts, and the Wellcome Trust, among others. Holding a BFA and MFA in printmaking from the California College of the Arts, she lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, after a decade of living in New York City.