Fri, Jan 14 – Hip Hop Concert
Sat, Jan 15 – Indigenous Dancers, speakers, food and community award ceremony
Sun, Jan 16 – Mayan Ceremony

Details below:

FRIDAY – January 14, 2011

- HIP HOP POR LA PAZ -

8:00pm-12:00pm

@ Women’s Building

3543 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94110

$10 donation

Performing:

Reyes del Bajo Mundo – O.N.S. El Sonador – Amazon Blew – Geo Kiburym – Rap Squad – Santos – Inner City Dwellers Conflikto Armado – El Comandante Izalco – Wanako – Kingz & Marmota Fu – Browny Loco – Lirico Dios

Also included:

Alex Sanchez-Executive Director of Homies Unidos live via Skype, – Homies Unidos Callejeros Graff & Visual Art – Coperativa Cuscatlán via www.ustream.com

TV Channel/Cooperative Cuscatlán Radio Subersivar – Cinema Feliciano Ama – Question Everythink  – Tigres Y Violetas  – El Jorge

SATURDAY – January 15, 2011

- SPIRIT OF MEMORY –

14^TH Annual Commemoration of La Matanza

2:00pm – 7:30pm

@ Women’s Building

3543 18th St., San Francisco, CA 94110

$6 donation

After the tragic events of La Matanza in 1932, an unknown number of Salvadoran indigenous people perished, estimated between 10,000 and 30,000 people.  As a result, native communities in El Salvador took their ceremonies and culture into hiding.  78 years after these events, communities have re-emerged and are being recognized officially by El Salvador’s government.  We gather our collective Spirit of Memory with our Bay Area community and utilize it to discuss traditional culture and bi-nationality through discussion, song, and ceremonies.

Program:

Opening Prayer – JR Leywa, Wailaki, Round Valley Indian Reservation – Lenca-Poton Passage Song – Guanajuato Purepucha Dancers – Lenca Emplumado Dancers – Film: ‘Discovering Dominga’

Presentations:

• Julio Leyva—Comite de Izalqueños
• Dra. Concepcíon Saucedo-Martinez, Comisión De La Verdad 1932
• Dra. Robin Maria DeLugan, Assistant Professor-Anthropology, UC Merced

Community Honorees:

• Miguel “Gavilan” Molina – KPFA Radio “La Onda Bajita”
• Lizbett Calleros – Central American Resource Center (CARECEN)
• Tory Canby, Teacher & Artist
• Alejandra Calderon – former Executive Director, HOMEY

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Sunday, January 16, 2011 (9am)

- Mayan ceremony -

Conducted By: Pascual Yaxon Saloj & Maya Caqchiquel

@ Pine Lake Park – Sloat Blvd & Vale Avenue, San Francisco (by Stern Grove)

Free

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As the New Year approaches I have reflected on the past 12 years since Homies Unidos first opened its office in Los Angeles with the dream of helping youth affected by war and gang violence.  We developed programs specifically for these youth hoping that they may find empowerment in positive action, the support to transition out of gangs and a platform to address and change the inhumane treatment of the immigrant community.

We have maintained our doors open to serve over 6,500 youth and their families from the Los Angeles Pico Union’s Central American community.  What, began as a dream has become a reality and today Homies Unidos stands as a nationally recognized organization at the forefront of gang violence prevention and intervention.

As we witnessed through this last election cycle, our immigrant communities have once again become the scapegoat and trigger point for political fear tactics and gangs have been framed as the scary poster child of this debate.  Over the past two years there has been a 23% increase in suppression in our immigrant community by ICE, FBI and local law enforcement agencies, leaving countless families separated from each other and children parentless.

With the assistance of your generosity, Homies Unidos has successfully developed exceptional programs to challenge the effects of this violence. The Epiphany Project, Libertad Con Dignidad and Family Wellness programs brings together youth and their parents, affected by gang violence or deportation, to advocate for their rights. Together we helped strengthen their ability communicate and improve their family relationship to over 130 family members this year.

“Homies Unidos has helped me change my life around and has giving me the opportunity to give back to other youth, I now volunteer in organizing the Art activities and outreaching to over 15 artist so far”, Said Juan Canizales, a former graduate of our Epiphany Project program.

We are convinced that through Epiphany Project classes we our helping to create a new generation of peacemakers committed to a building a better world. The process of those transitioning into a better life is not simple; after completing our 12 week program, graduates endure a minimum of 6-10 laser tattoo removal treatments to shed the last of their former lifestyles off their bodies.

In the past year, our ongoing programs have expanded and include a youth leadership and art program as an alternative to gang activity. We have developed these programs for inner-city youth and young adults as we also embark on a campaign to bring awareness of immigration and criminal justice issues affecting our community. Th e “Hip Hop for Peace” was launched on December 7, 2010 and will continue throughout 2011 with a series of events, bringing together local artist in music and art.

In these critical times, your support will greatly help in the success of our youth. Your ongoing support allows us to continue to provide our youth and their families with the skills and tools needed to overcome the obstacles they face in our community. As a non-profit organization, we rely on the generosity and compassion of our donors, like yourself, without whom we would not have the capacity to create peace in the schools, and keep families united in the community we serve. Please join us as a partner in making 2011 a better and more successful year for Homies Unidos.

Homies Unidos wishes you have a joyful holiday season,

Sincerely,                                                                                                                   Sincerely,

Alex Sanchez                                                                                                            Troy Garity                                                                              Executive Director                                                                                                Board Chair

In this spirit, the exhibition presents works that take place within and outside the gallery, seeking to reevaluate the relationship between cultural institutions and the communities they serve. It succeeds, not so much in reinvigorating the gallery space, but in raising questions about how such works might best be presented within its walls.

Organized by curator Robert Sain and artist Andrea Bowers, the show is supposedly structured around a series of questions on the relationship between “cultural institutions” and “community,” both of which are ill-defined. People have scrawled various answers, ranging from glib to smart-alecky, in chalk on the walls of the gallery. Although broadly participatory, it’s the least compelling part of the show.

The rest of the pieces were created by Bowers and eight graduate students from the Public Practice Program at the Otis College of Art & Design. The students, in pairs or individually, teamed with five community organizations to create projects that would both have a positive impact on their respective communities and produce a work to be shown in the gallery.

Rodrigo Marti and Felicia Montes worked with gang intervention program Homies Unidos to develop art workshops, a panel discussion, and a poster and sticker campaign supporting the legal case of the program’s director, Alex Sanchez, who was indicted in a gang-related case in 2009. In the gallery, posters, fliers and protest signs line one of the walls and visitors can contribute to the cause by purchasing T-shirts, stickers and jewelry at a makeshift self-serve kiosk. The work successfully turns the gallery into an information and fundraising center, even if its traditional activist aesthetic — high contrast graphics, long columns of text and slapdash construction — loses some of its urgency on the gallery walls.

Less effective are the results of Rachael Filsinger and Ella Tetrault’s project with My Friend’s Place, a drop-in center for homeless youth in Hollywood. Filsinger and Tetrault ran workshops with the center’s young clients, encouraging them to record all the places they had lived or visited on conventional printed maps. Mounted on sheets of plywood, some of the maps are annotated with expressions of frustration or political conviction, but the scrawled lines and dots are often so cryptic that one can’t help feeling that the real work lies elsewhere. The maps are the byproduct of a process that hopefully has had some positive influence on its participants; it’s too bad we don’t know more about it.

Projects like these point to some of the difficulties of representing community-based work within the walls of the gallery. Should artists behave more like documentarians? Or should activism and art remain separate? On the other hand, is it enough to simply move the signs, T-shirts and stickers indoors?

Jamie Crooke’s partnership with the Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic provides one possible answer. Crooke walked the streets around the clinic pushing a cart selling health-related items–bandages, apples, wheat grass seed, Emergen-C packets — in exchange for a dollar or a bit of conversation. In addition to examining the cart itself, gallery visitors can watch a video and flip through a photo book documenting the project. The cart also features a price list including the above mentioned items as well as the cost of one year of employer-provided health insurance (about $13,000) and the annual compensation of United Health Group’s CEO (more than $9 million). With this sly, humorous gesture, the piece makes its critical point about inequities in healthcare spending, whether one sees it on the street or in the gallery.

It’s impossible to ascertain whether Crooke’s project had a greater impact than the rest; she simply presented it more thoughtfully. It is more than enough to go out and help others or fight injustice, but communicating that accomplishment — giving one’s vision a life beyond the immediate moment — is where the institution, whether a museum, an archive or, ahem, a newspaper, plays a role. Yes, the museum is often a mausoleum, housing the remnants of more vital activity, but how else will the rest of us know what happened?

18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3711, through March 26. Closed Saturday and Sunday. www.18thstreet .org