Kearny Street Workshop’s Long San Francisco Legacy of Asian Pacific American Art

Kearny Street Workshop began in 1972 inside San Francisco’s International Hotel, an important setting for an artists’ collective emerging alongside the Asian American movement. More than five decades later, the organization remains identified as the oldest multidisciplinary arts nonprofit focused on Asian Pacific American issues.

The workshop’s stated purpose is both artistic and community-centered: to create and present work that enriches and empowers Asian Pacific American communities. That mission places KSW within San Francisco’s history of cultural organizing, where art has served not only as creative expression but also as a way to build community and advance a broader movement for representation.

KSW’s founding group included Jim Dong, Lora Joh Foo and Mike Chin, along with other early leaders connected to the Asian American movement. That movement, which developed during the 1970s, drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and supported a period of organizational and community formation.

The organization’s early relationship with public arts funding also reflected the era’s political tensions. Founders initially viewed government support with skepticism. Eventually, however, a $2,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, distributed through the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Neighborhood Arts Program, helped support the workshop. Bernice Bing served as the program’s liaison, and Jim Dong was among those who agreed to accept the funding.

Over the years, KSW has been associated with artists and writers whose work has contributed to Asian Pacific American cultural life. Participants have included author and Asian American studies scholar Russell Leong; playwright and author Jessica Hagedorn; author Janice Mirikitani; poet and historian Al Robles; and actor and filmmaker Lane Nishikawa.

The workshop’s history is therefore tied to several strands of San Francisco’s cultural landscape: the International Hotel, the city’s public arts infrastructure, and the Asian American organizing that shaped the 1970s. Its multidisciplinary approach has also allowed writers, performers and visual artists to share space within a common community-oriented institution.

For San Francisco residents seeking to understand how local arts organizations can grow from movement-based organizing, Kearny Street Workshop offers a significant example. Its legacy is not limited to a list of exhibitions or participants; it is rooted in the idea that art can help communities see themselves, sustain their histories and exercise cultural power.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “Kearny Street Workshop” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kearny_Street_Workshop The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oodjniUGGHo - https://www.library.ucsb.edu/special-collections/cema/kearny - https://www.mica.edu/About_MICA/Departments_and_Services/The_Center_for_Art_Education/Community_Arts_Journal/Visions_and_Voices_of_the_I-Hotel.html - https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Kearny_Street_Workshop_Press - https://www.kearnystreet.org/apature-faq/ - https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-21 Image rights Photograph description: Silkscreen artist and former Executive Director for The Kearny Street Workshop Nancy Hom take artwork out of the International Hotel, 848 Kearny Street in San Francisco a day after the hotel's tenants were evicted by San Francisco Sheriffs' deputies and police. Photo by Nancy Wong Creator: Nancy Wong. License: CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKearny_Street_Workshop.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.