Southern Exposure is thrilled to introduce the Alternative Exposure Round 18 cohort of grantees!
We resist tyranny by coming together, supporting each other, and building solidarity. Southern Exposure is proud to support the important work being done in our community right now.
In Round 18 of the Alternative Exposure grant program, Southern Exposure is awarding $65,000 to 16 projects. Alternative Exposure grants fund the independent work of artists and collaboratives who invigorate and transform the Bay Area arts community. The awarded public projects will take place in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, or Sonoma County.
This year we are also honored to present the third Alternative Exposure Award in memory of Jonathan Bernbaum. Multimedia and video artist Jonathan Bernbaum tragically died in the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship Fire. This year’s Jonathan Bernbaum Memorial Award recipient, Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues at Shapeshifters Cinema, was chosen from among the pool of Alternative Exposure applicants.
The 2024 grantees were selected by jurors writer, artist, and Program Manager for the Velocity Fund regional re-granting program in Philidelphia, Connie Yu; curator, educator, and community organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio; and Lian Ladia, Curator for Exhibitions and Programs of 500 Capp Street and Round 13 AltEx grantee.
To date, Southern Exposure has awarded over $1.2 million in Alternative Exposure grants distributed to 360 artist-led projects, thanks to major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Thank you to all those who applied. Our panel was impressed by the caliber and variety of work submitted.
Black & White Projects:
Black & White Projects (BWP) will create a series of publications documenting three multidisciplinary, multi-year artist-led projects—Red Clay Sound Haus, Cinema Insomnia, as well as Black & White Projects itself. These three projects have deeply impacted culturally-specific communities and are all led by Black and Brown artists through collaboration, perseverance, and resourcefulness. We wish to create lasting, distributable documentation as evidence of our creative work, our methods of equity and collaboration, and the people who have co-created these unique projects.
CALMA’s Stories of Survival: Threads of Resistance
CALMA’s Stories of Survival: Threads of Resistance is a collaborative platform for artistic and cultural production centered on migration, labor, and asylum-seeking communities. In conjunction with CALMA’s ongoing efforts, this initiative will create a series of programs for local artists and activists to exhibit, perform, and engage in public dialogue on migration and social justice. The project envisions a limited-publication, a multimedia exhibition, and community performances hosted in the Bay Area. This initiative aims to serve as a cultural intervention, bringing together artists working at the intersection of political activism, migration, and visual art to foster a truly community-driven exchange.
Colectiva Libre
Colectiva Libre will create a safe, open, and inclusive space for historically marginalized artists through a series of multidisciplinary art sessions held bimonthly over a period of eight months at Tradicion Peruana Cultural Center (TPCC) in San Francisco’s Mission District. These sessions will grant marginalized artists the space and resources to create, network, skillshare, and build camaraderie. The project will conclude with a cumulative art exhibit at TPCC. This exhibit will be a communal celebration highlighting participants’ collective work created throughout the eight months.
Escolar
Escolar is an art and design research collective working at the intersection of regenerative agriculture and cultural production within an anti-capitalist and de-colonial framework. We maintain a curatorial practice and an exhibition venue, a residency with production facilities and support, provide design and fabrication support for local artists and maintain a one-acre experimental farm with an emphasis on native flora.
Free Palestine Poster Project
Free Palestine Poster Project is an exhibition of print work about the freedom of Palestine. It will look at the messages of visual language, sloganeering, and photography from protests and actions that have emerged around the world since October 7th. It will seek historical context for these actions and the artworks that have been birthed by bringing these print materials into conversation with printed ephemera from Community Archive Resource Projects’ library. This exhibition is a gathering point for reflection and new creation for more clear and incisive messaging to counter genocidal propaganda from the US, Israel, and other countries around the world.
gatherings
gatherings is a an artist led workshop series, and this Fall/Winter 2024 will focus on local and global BIPOC community members over 6 different sessions at BANDALOOP’s Studios in Oakland. Teaching artists engage in a multi disciplinary practice that combines drawing, movement, poetry/writing, and performance. These workshops are offered on a sliding scale or free entry, fostering a space that is growing and thriving through collective participation. Movements are taught and devised alongside a team of creative collaborators who identify as Latine, rooted in a movement practice that dismantles and questions embodied eurocentric aesthetics and values.
Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues
Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues is a film series dedicated to exploring the visions, voices and concerns of women, non-binary, genderqueer, and trans artists through public film screenings, workshops, and conversations presented over the course of 18 months at Shapeshifters Cinema. Each program in the series explores a different theme, pairing films selected from an open call with works by other filmmakers spanning temporal, geographic, and demographic boundaries to explore continuities of feminist discourse, instigate cultural, political, personal, and creative conversations and help illuminate a broader map of filmmaking practices by feminist filmmakers.
Hamesha Project
Hamesha Project will host a stipended Bandhani workshop for queer and trans South Asian artists. Over the course of four weeks, the organizers will pass down the lessons of an ancestral craft tradition to which the participating artists might not otherwise have access. Participants will learn about South Asian textile traditions, the fundamentals of natural dyes, and Bandhani tie techniques. This workshop will culminate in an exhibition, where artists can showcase their work and share their process with the community.
Hub
Hub is a mobile exhibition series inside a closed container cargo trailer, offering an alternative platform for artists. Each show will feature one-day exhibitions and video screenings in two Bay Area cities. Due to the flexibility of location, the project will support site-specific work. Future shows will include different locations throughout the Bay Area. For each exhibition, we will pair mid-career and emerging artists, including recent graduates and students, which we believe will foster mentorship and meaningful interactions.
Hye There
Hye There (“Hye” means Armenian in Armenian) is a series of public workshops led by queer Armenian artists centered around healing the pain of diasporic Armenians in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Armenians in Artsakh. These workshops will include cultural Armenian dance, drag, and narrative, poetic, and comedic writing led by local and visiting artists in the San Francisco Bay Area in Fall 2025. The workshops uplift the queer diasporic Armenian experience while showcasing the resiliency and beauty of these complex interwoven identities.
Light Field
Light Field is an artist-run and collectively organized exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on celluloid, with a focus on expanding the dialogue between a network of international artists and our own vibrant community here in the Bay Area. Since 2016, Light Field has organized events dedicated to cinema as a sight-specific and durational medium, embracing the communal aspect of film viewership and striving to create a space that is contemplative, committed, and intentional.
Rebel Kings of Oakland
Rebel Kings of Oakland, the longest running Drag king troupe on the West Coast, has been cultivating safe creative space with a focus on QTBIPOC performers for almost 15 years. Each year we produce four performance showcases highlighting and uplifting Black, Latinx, AAPI, and Indigenous Bay Area based performers to explore and expand their artistic and performance practices through their queer and cultural lenses.
Salon Salon
Salon Salon is a monthly artists’ gathering held in an intimate apartment in Oakland. Each month, a local early- or mid-career artist presents work or works in progress and gives a casual artist talk or leads a conversation about their work, process, or another topic of their choosing. Salon Salon is open to artists by invitation with openings to the public and seeks to cultivate community among emerging and early-career Black queer artists.
The Underground Rainbow Experiment
The First Time I Saw Me: Stories of Black Trans Emergence (TFTISM), is a three-day pop-up visual arts exhibition by the Underground Rainbow Experiment that explores self-acceptance in gender non-conforming Black bodies deemed unacceptable within white supremacy. TFTISM will be held in October 2025 and will display how the practice of self-love for Black Trans people is a radical tool, which when used alongside community can create new collective truths that cultivate cultures of care for Black Trans people. The inaugural URE visual arts exhibition will present pieces from Black Trans emerging Bay Area artists ages 18-35.
Winslow House Project
Winslow House Project (whp) is an artist residency and performance space that resides in a historic farmhouse in Vallejo, California. Each year we house four one-month long residencies, offering time and space for artists. Each residency culminates in an open house to the public which accommodates 50 guests. Throughout the rest of the year whp hosts writing days, community conversations, listening events, poetry readings, film screenings, workshops, performance projects, and live music.
zinedogs
zinedogs is a trans arts and activist collective that writes, designs, prints and produces zines in SOMA, SF. They aim to inspire and interrogate while bringing a wry humor and queer sensibility to a variety of topics. Their work touches on intersectional liberations, especially animal liberation, future imaginaries, and revolutionary dreams. zinedogs’ 2024-2026 project is to expand operations, enhance printing capacity, and develop new, interactive distribution methods for their zines. They plan to create a zinemaking station for the community and install semi-permanent zine distribution racks for their zines and others at queer cultural centers in the Bay Area.
Jonathan Bernbaum Memorial Awardee:
Gravitational Lensing: Feminist Film Dialogues at Shapeshifters Cinema