API Cultural Center- San Francisco

API Cultural Center- San Francisco Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC) supports and produces multi-disciplinary art reflective of the unique experiences of API's in the US.

Check out APICC’s outdoor showcase at Sunset Night Market to see amazing performances by Alice Hur, DJ Yuka Yu, and NuTe...
05/28/2026

Check out APICC’s outdoor showcase at Sunset Night Market to see amazing performances by Alice Hur, DJ Yuka Yu, and NuTekno!

⭐ Alice Hur’s “For the Culture” is a 15-minute street dance performance featuring three women Asian American artists from the Bay Area street dance scene. This work explores cultural expectations amongst the AAPI diaspora and how individual stories of love, collectivism, and familial duty map onto our experiences as stewards and organizers within the common, multicultural ground of street dance. Drawing on art forms such as waacking, krump, and locking, and house, “For the Culture” probes complex Asian American family dynamics and examines how these dynamics are both reflected in and reimagined within other spaces of collectivist care. Featuring Alice Hur, Danielle Galvez, and Gladys Liu.

⭐ Nu Tekno will have a musical performance with a DJ, digeridoo and Di Zhi (Chinese flute), and visual art playing on a screen in the background, exploring a blend of Western and Eastern culture. Yuka Yu will DJ and play the Chinese flute and AL Yu will play the digeridoo. The visual art was created by Yuka Yu and showcased at the Asian Art Museum in April 2025 during her DJ performance at Yuan Goang-Ming’s Everyday War exhibition’s public opening. Yuan Goang-Ming is Taiwan’s leading video artist.

📅 Friday, June 12
⏰ Performances at 8PM and 9PM
📍 Sunset Night Market 2101 Irving Street
💫 More info at https://sunsetmercantilesf.com/sunsetnightmarket2026/

Join us for the exhibition closing of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated ...
05/23/2026

Join us for the exhibition closing of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. This event marks the celebration of three decades of cultural resilience and community organizing by APICC, showcasing the rich heritage and contributions of the Asian Pacific Islander community.

We'll have a small market of art vendors including.....
💫 sour soup society
💫 Agawidka
💫 REALSOUL
💫 Ancestral Dreams Collective

📆 Sunday, May 24
⏰ 1-3PM
📍 SOMArts Cultural Center
🌟 Performances by jazz musician Karl Evangelista and poet Amihan

Learn more about other events in this year's United States of Asian America Festival on APICC's website (Link in Bio)

Join us for the exhibition closing of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated ...
05/22/2026

Join us for the exhibition closing of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. This event marks the celebration of three decades of cultural resilience and community organizing by APICC, showcasing the rich heritage and contributions of the Asian Pacific Islander community.

🌟 Featuring performances by Amihan and Karl Evangelista! 🌟

Amihan is a q***r Pinay cultural worker--self-taught musician, poet/rapper and vocalist--born and raised in the City, reppin the Excelsior. Named after the peasant women organization AMIHAN in the Philippines and raised through community activism in San Francisco, her music is rooted in her people's struggle for land and liberation. She is a part of the anti-imperialist Pinay organization GABRIELA Excelsior as well as cultural groups Diwa & Diwata amplifying the movement for national democracy in the homeland.

Filipino-American guitarist/composer Karl Evangelista (b.1986) ranks among the vanguard of musicians pushing the traditions of jazz and experimental music into the future. Synthesizing the heavy legacy of contemporary improvised music with popular song and 20th century composition, Evangelista explores multicultural concepts with sonic intensity and political fervor.

📆 Sunday, May 24
⏰ 1-3PM
📍 SOMArts Cultural Center
🌟 Performances by jazz musician Karl Evangelista and poet Amihan
💫 Learn more about other events in this year's United States of Asian America Festival on APICC's website (Link in Bio) 💫

Asian American Theater Company became a pioneering home for experimental Asian American performance and helped lay the i...
05/20/2026

Asian American Theater Company became a pioneering home for experimental Asian American performance and helped lay the institutional foundation for the creation of Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center.

🌟 Spotlight on AATC 🌟

In 1973, the American Conservatory Theater sponsored playwright Frank Chin (whose Chickencoop Chinaman had just become the play first written by an Asian American to have a major New York production) to start an Asian American Theatre Workshop. Within two years, the workshop graduated from the ACT’s donated rehearsal space, moved into a building in the Richmond District, and became a professional theater company.

AATC opened its 1989 season in a new home, a three-story building with multiple performance spaces at Clement and Arguello, only to close for a year due to damage from the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The costs of repairs and the loss of NEA funding forced the theater company to downsize to offices in the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California in 1996.

That same year, AATC co-founded the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, pooling its resources with its peer organizations. This has allowed AATC’s mission to outlive it, passing the baton to APICC to serve as a home for Asian American theater and performing arts.

💫 Learn more at the "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" exhibit at SOMArts Cultural Center curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. Join the closing ceremony on SUNDAY, MAY 24 from 1-3PM with a makers market and performances by jazz musician Karl Evangelista and poet Amihan! 💫

// Photo by Bob Hsiang of F.O.B. (1982) and Dance and the Railroad David Henry Hwang (1983) by David Henry Hwang (1982) //

05/18/2026

ONE MORE WEEK of "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" curated by Colin Choy Kimzey!

Haven't had a chance to check out the gallery? Catch our 🌟 CLOSING CEREMONY 🌟 on Sunday, May 24. This event marks the celebration of three decades of cultural resilience and community organizing by APICC, showcasing the rich heritage and contributions of the Asian Pacific Islander community.

📆 Sunday, May 24
⏰ 1-3PM
📍 SOMArts Cultural Center
🌟 Performances by jazz musician Karl Evangelista and poet Amihan
💫 Learn more about other events in this year's United States of Asian America Festival on APICC's website (Link in Bio) 💫

// Video featuring "Lineages of Organizing" opening reception by Higate Media //

Join us for the exhibition closing of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated ...
05/15/2026

Join us for the exhibition closing of Lineages of Organizing: The Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center at 30, curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. This event marks the celebration of three decades of cultural resilience and community organizing by APICC, showcasing the rich heritage and contributions of the Asian Pacific Islander community.

📆 Sunday, May 24
⏰ 1-3PM
📍 SOMArts Cultural Center
🌟 Performances by jazz musician Karl Evangelista and poet Amihan Redondiez
💫 Learn more about other events in this year's United States of Asian America Festival on APICC's website (Link in Bio) 💫

// Photo of "Lineages of Organizing" opening reception by Higate Media //

Our lineages of organizing include ancestors who made indispensable contributions to Asian American culture before leavi...
05/14/2026

Our lineages of organizing include ancestors who made indispensable contributions to Asian American culture before leaving this world. APICC owes its existence to the paths they forged. This altar is a vessel to process our grief as a community and honor their memory. We invite you to contribute your own photos and mementos; please remember to retrieve them before the exhibition closes on May 24.

Closing Reception for "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" featuring performances by Karl Evangelista and Amihan Redondiez
📆 Sunday, May 24
⏰ 1-3PM
📍 SOMArts Cultural Center

💫 Learn more at the "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" exhibit at SOMArts Cultural Center curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. Up now through May 24! 💫

// Photo of Community Altar by Jesus Rodriguez //

Founded officially in 1997 by Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu, First Voice created groundbreaking interdisciplinary work r...
05/12/2026

Founded officially in 1997 by Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu, First Voice created groundbreaking interdisciplinary work rooted in the Asian American experience and helped forge the artistic networks that later came together to form APICC.

🌟 Spotlight on First Voice 🌟

Playwright, performer, and storyteller Brenda Wong Aoki and composer and musician Mark Izu were pillars of San Francisco’s Asian American arts community long before they founded First Voice in 1997. As early as 1976, each was transforming their respective genre through the prism of the Japanese American experience, Aoki blending Noh and Kyogen theater with contemporary performance and spoken word traditions and Izu mixing Gagaku imperial court music with jazz. Individually and in collaboration, their hybrid forms expanded the frontiers of Asian American culture.

Izu curated the Asian American Jazz Festival from 1983 to 2001, first as Artistic Director, then as Executive Director of Kearny Street Workshop starting in 1989, and finally bringing it under the umbrella of First Voice in 1997.

Aoki and Izu founded their nonprofit as a container for the ever-expanding scale of their collaborations, daring to imagine a truly global culture. First Voice describes the first person voice essential to authentically presenting the stories and music of people like themselves, living between worlds. With symphonic work, plays, storytelling, jazz ensemble, chamber music, large scale pageant performances with traditional and contemporary dancers, solo monodramas, and live performance to silent film, First Voice carries forward the universal potential of the Asian American Movement.

💫 Learn more at the "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" exhibit at SOMArts Cultural Center curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. Up now through May 24! 💫

// Photos: Brenda Wong Aoki's Storyteller’s Gown (Soul of the City), designed by Lydia Tanji and Mark Izu’s Leather Jacket. Photos by Jesus Rodriguez //

Founded in the aftermath of the Third World Liberation Front strikes, Kearny Street Workshop transformed radical student...
05/09/2026

Founded in the aftermath of the Third World Liberation Front strikes, Kearny Street Workshop transformed radical student activism into a lasting home for Asian American art, community, and cultural resistance. KSW nominated Asma Ghanem to represent them in "Lineages of Organizing," up through May 24!

Asma Ghanem is a Palestinian artist, experimental musician, and writer. She was born in Damascus-Syria in 1991. Asma has two degrees in audio-visual arts from the International Academy of Arts in Palestine in 2013 (BA) and a master's degree (M.A) from the University of Fine Arts in Toulouse-France (ISDAT) In 2016. She participated in numerous exhibitions, art residencies, and workshops worldwide. The works of Asma Ghanem are inspired by the imaginative nature of narrating the personal experience of the occupation in Palestine.

🌟Spotlight on KSW🌟

Co-founders Jim D**g, Mike Chin, and Lora Jo Foo brought their experience making art in the TWLF poster brigades back to their Chinatown community. Within a couple years, KSW’s initial focus on visual arts and the Chinese American community expanded to include poetry and performance and all of Asian America. KSW taught classes, painted murals, and printed hundreds of posters until it was evicted with the rest of the tenants in 1977. Over three decades wandering from space to space (including a five-year stint here at SOMArts), the organization compensated for the loss of its studio facilities with projects like the Asian American Jazz Festival, out of which emerged Asian Improv aRts and First Voice.

The oldest multidisciplinary Asian American arts organization in existence has been settled in its current home in the South of Market for sixteen years now, a welcome respite from its decades on the move. KSW cultivates the next generation with APAture, its annual festival of emerging Asian Pacific American artists, but it remains true to its historic commitments.

💫 Learn more at the "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" exhibit at SOMArts Cultural Center curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. Up now through May 24! 💫

// Photo of Asma by Higate Media. Photo of KSW poets with Manong Freddy by Bob Hsiang //

At our opening reception for "Lineages of Organizing," we welcomed a phenomenal performance by Kim Ip, who was nominated...
05/07/2026

At our opening reception for "Lineages of Organizing," we welcomed a phenomenal performance by Kim Ip, who was nominated to represent Asian American Dance Performances (AADP) by its former director, Claudine Naganuma. In 1996, AADP joined four groups to form APICC, creating a vital “Common Ground” for art, activism, and collective resilience.

☀ Spotlight on Asian American Dance Performances ☀

As with other art forms, the revolutionary cultural upswell of the Asian American Movement brought major innovations, transformations, and experimentations to the realm of dance. Ethnic dance experienced a renaissance, and artists trained in Western classical and modern dance collided with currents from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Pasifika. Avant-garde performance art and poetry mixed in promiscuously. It was in this ferment that movement artists (in both senses of the word) formed the Asian American Dance Collective in 1974, the first of its kind.

Led by co-founders Sachiko Nakamura and Judith Kajiwara, the collective offered low-fee dance classes to encourage young Asian Americans to enjoy dance. It served as a supportive environment for members of the blossoming dance scene to teach, choreograph, and perform.

The collective structure, once nurtured by the activism of the 70s, evolved as times (and politics) changed. In 1982, AADC started its own resident dance company, Unbound Spirit. Ten years later, it reorganized as a presenting organization and changed its name to Asian American Dance Performances. AADC continued to present dance companies that shared its roots in the Asian American Movement.

💫 Learn more at the "Lineages of Organizing: APICC at 30" exhibit at SOMArts Cultural Center curated by Colin Choy Kimzey. Up now through May 24! 💫

// Photos of Kim Ip's performance at the opening reception for "Lineages of Organizing" on April 23 by Higate Media //

Address

934 Brannan Street
San Francisco, CA
94103

Telephone

+14158299467

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when API Cultural Center- San Francisco posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to API Cultural Center- San Francisco:

Shortcuts

Share

Category