Orange skies. Toxic air. Relentless wildfire. Climate change has arrived and has landed with fury. So often, communities of color are hit the hardest. At YBCA we are urgently asking—how are artists, specifically BIPOC artists, responding to the environmental collapse that surrounds us, what futures are they envisioning, and how can we amplify their voices?

Presented simultaneously online and around the YBCA campus, AFTER LIFE (we survive) is a new presentation of independent curator and scholar Thea Quiray Tagle’s series of transdisciplinary exhibitions that respond to the dire effects of environmental collapse, policing and surveillance, health disparities, and loss of homes and land on communities of color by exploring speculative and real modes of survival.

AFTER LIFE asks: how can new media, visual art, and performance help us imagine new ways of surviving and thriving, and how can these creative proposals for more just and livable futures support and amplify the grassroots organizing led by LGBTQ, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the Bay Area and beyond?

The answers are multiple and multidisciplinary. Ten artists and collectives bring the YBCA building to life through projections, window displays, and interactive works, all of which will be viewable in-person and online. View artworks by alejandro t. acierto, Art 25: Art in the 25th Century (Lehua M. Taitano & Lisa Jarrett, with Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng), Jeremiah Barber, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, micha cárdenas, Coven Intelligence Program (Margaretha Haughwout, Suzanne Husky, and efrén cruz cortés), FIFTY-FIFTY (Lisa Bulawsky & Laurencia Strauss, with Dimitry Saïd Chamy), Courtney Desiree Morris, Super Futures Haunt Qollective (C. Ree, F. Sam Jung, and Angie Morrill), and Rea Tajiri, as well as conversations between the artists and curator on YBCA.org

AFTER LIFE (we survive)

Take 3D Tour