With The Roxie Theater, Center for Asian American Media, CounterPulse, Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, Kronos Performing Arts Association, and the Watsonville Film Festival
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, June 3, 2021 — Extending the themes of its current exhibition, Next to You(May 28 – December 4, 2021), McEvoy Foundation for the Arts announces a series of live engagements with a diversity of cultural arts organizations from June through December 2021. These collaborations with pillars of the San Francisco Bay Area’s performing arts communities honor their contributions to the return of the region’s live art experiences and invite the public to come together again through performance.
Next to You features a variety of painting, photography, and sculpture from the McEvoy Family Collection that explore notions of performance in collective and individual life. The upcoming events showcase film, dance, music, place, and technology in relation to ideas of sound, movement, touch, and language present in the exhibition and the Screening Room program Hearing Aids.
“It’s time to sing the praises of the Bay Area’s landmark performing arts community, known around the world and yet, silent throughout the pandemic,” Susan Miller, executive director, says. “It’s time to come together safely and celebrate the pleasure and delight of live arts experiences and rediscover how it feels to dance, laugh, and play together.”
Summer events launch on Saturday, June 12 with Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK. Created by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid, SOUNDWALK is a GPS-enabled work of public art that uses music to illuminate the natural environment of Golden Gate Park. SOUNDWALK features newly commissioned music by Kronos Quartet, Reid, and other musicians recorded entirely during shelter-in-place orders. Listeners can access the audio installation via a free smartphone app. SOUNDWALK is part of the 2021 Kronos Festival (June 11–18).
On Sunday, July 18 at the Roxie Theater, McEvoy Arts and Los Cenzontles, an artist-driven organization committed to amplifying the roots of Mexican culture through classes, events, media, and performances, present a community-benefit screening of the award-winning documentary Linda and The Mockingbirds. Featuring acclaimed musician Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and Los Cenzontles (“mockingbirds” in the Nahuatl language), the film documents their musical journey to Banámichi in Sonora, Mexico, where Ronstadt’s grandfather was born.
McEvoy Arts returns to the Roxie Theater on Sunday, August 15 with Jafar Panahi’s 1997 meta-narrative film The Mirror. Selected by Alison O’Daniel as an extension of her Hearing Aids program, The Mirror explores the interplay of imagination and reality when a first-grade student navigates the public transportation and bustling traffic of Tehran on a precarious, multi-sensorial adventure of the everyday. O’Daniel is expected to introduce the screening.
Fall events (September–December) include film screenings and performances with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Tiny Dance Film Festival, Los Cenzontles, Watsonville Film Festival, and CounterPulse.
Next to You’s public events are scheduled in Summer and Fall seasons from June through December 2021. Further program details are to be announced. For registration and ticket information, visit www.mcevoyarts.org/events. All in-person events are presented in accordance with current health guidelines.
June – August 2021
Performing Arts Events
Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK
Presented by the Kronos Performing Arts Association in association with McEvoy Arts
Saturday, June 12, 2021 – June 2024 | Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
Free, self-guided experience. Download the app at ellenreidsoundwalk.com.
McEvoy Arts joins forces with the Kronos Performing Arts Association to bring this unique self-guided, musical experience to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, launching as part of the 2021 Kronos Festival (June 11–18). Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK is a GPS-enabled work of public art by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid and San Francisco’s renowned Kronos Quartet that uses music to illuminate the natural environment. SOUNDWALK is tailor-made for its setting, created to encourage calm reflection and introspection, and can be experienced while following social distancing guidelines. The user’s location triggers a live, overlapping mix of musical motifs and works performed by Kronos, Reid, and other musicians, all recorded from home in 2020 during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order. Listeners can access the audio installation via a free smartphone app. Other editions of SOUNDWALK have previously launched in New York, Los Angeles, and several other cities across the country. SOUNDWALK will remain accessible in San Francisco through June 2024.
Community Screening: Linda and the Mockingbirds
Co-produced with Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy and the Roxie Theater
Sunday, July 18, 2021 • 2pm | Roxie Theater, San Francisco
$10 General Admission • $9 Seniors w/ ID | Free admission for children 11 and under
Linda and The Mockingbirds pairs acclaimed musician Linda Ronstadt with Los Cenzontles (“mockingbirds” in the Nahuatl language), a band and music academy for young people in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this documentary by award-winning director and producer James Keach, Ronstadt, musician Jackson Browne, and a busload of Cenzontles journey to the little town of Banámichi in Sonora, Mexico, where Ronstadt’s grandfather was born. The film details Ronstadt’s long friendship with Eugene Rodriguez, a third-generation Mexican-American and musician who founded Los Cenzontles thirty years prior to reconnect working-class kids with the dignity and beauty of their ancestral music and culture. Along the way, the pounding feet of zapateado dancers, the strumming of jarana and guitar, the clacking buzz of the quijada, a donkey jawbone, and a chorus of soulful voices celebrate pride and self-knowledge with a solid, rootsy groove. “This is not Latin-ish ‘Dorito music,’ Ronstadt says of the film’s musical backbone. ‘This is Mexican music.” Good Morning Aztlan, a short film by Les Blank and Maureen Gosling featuring Los Cenzontles and Los Lobos performing the Los Lobos’ classic 2002 song, precedes the feature film.
The Mirror
Co-presented with the Roxie Theater
Sunday, August 15, 2021 • 2pm | Roxie Theater, San Francisco
$10 General Admission • $9 Seniors w/ ID
Hearing Aids’ curator Alison O’Daniel selects Jafar Panahi’s 1997 narrative film The Mirror. Panahi explores the interplay of imagination and reality in this slyly inventive meta-film marvel. When her mother is late to pick her up from school, first grader Mina (Mina Mohammad Khani) takes matters into her own hands, navigating the public transportation and bustling traffic of Tehran on a precarious adventure of the everyday. But what begins as a charming child’s-eye portrait of Iranian society soon reveals itself to be something even richer and more surprising, as Panahi turns the conventions of narrative filmmaking inside out. Like the films in Hearing Aids, The Mirror offers a multi-sensorial view of urbane life that complicates our relationship between the aural and the visual, introducing viewers to a spacious view of sound not always rooted in the ear.
September – December 2021
Performing Arts Events
McEvoy Arts’ Fall season begins in September with co-productions with CounterPulse, Los Cenzontles, and the Watsonville Film Festival. October programming features the Center for Asian American Media and Tiny Dance Film Festival. Further program details are to be announced.
Exhibition & Screening Room
Next to You
May 28 – December 4, 2021
Next to You is an exhibition of modern and contemporary artworks from the McEvoy Family Collection that celebrates the joy, vitality, and healing power of the performing arts. As the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic and its requisite isolation, Next to You acts as a farewell ballad to a strange and challenging time and a look towards a future where we are reunited. With the performing arts cultural sector largely inaccessible during the pandemic, the exhibition showcases dance, theater, music, circus arts, film, and other creative forms.
In the Screening Room, Alison O’Daniel guest curates Hearing Aids, a program of short films and videos that consider a new sensory sensitivity to our surroundings and a greater awareness of the body’s intricacies of communication. The films, spanning the 1970s to the 2010s, explore sensory experience in relation to topics as varied as urban surveillance, the natural landscape, and Indigenous history. Session 1 screens daily from May 28 through August 31, 2021. Session 2 debuts September 1 and runs through December 4, 2021.
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Partners
The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) has been dedicated for 40 years to presenting stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences to the broadest audience possible. As a nonprofit organization, CAAM funds, produces, distributes, and exhibits works in film, television, and digital media. CAAMFest, formerly the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF), celebrates the world’s largest showcase for new Asian American and Asian film, food, and music programs.
Los Cenzontles is a grassroots artist-driven organization committed to amplifying the roots of Mexican culture through classes, events, media, and performances. Founded in San Pablo, CA in 1994 by musician and educator Eugene Rodriguez, Los Cenzontles provides the local community with a family-friendly setting for traditional arts education and cultural events. The Los Cenzontles Academy connects students of all ages with maestros of traditional Mexican genres instilling a sense of cultural pride and participation in living traditions. Our full calendar of events features performances by our students, our own professional touring group, Los Cenzontles, and well-known world musicians and visiting artists. Los Cenzontles documents this journey of continuing the long tradition of authentic Mexican art with CDs and DVDs to share with the world and future generations.
CounterPulse is building a movement of risk-taking art that shatters assumptions and builds community. It provides space and resources for emerging artists and cultural innovators, serving as an incubator for the creation of socially relevant, community-based art and culture. CounterPulse acts as a catalyst for art and action; creating a forum for the open exchange of art and ideas, catalyzing transformation in our communities and our society. It works towards a world that celebrates diversity of race, class, cultural heritage, artistic expression, ability, gender identity, and sexual orientation and strives to create an environment that is physically and economically accessible to everyone.
Kronos Quartet—David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience for more than 45 years. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world’s most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than sixty recordings, collaborating with countless composers and performers, and commissioning over 1,000 works and arrangements for string quartet. The group has won over forty awards, including three Grammys, and the prestigious Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvre Prizes. The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association manages all aspects of Kronos’ work, including the commissioning of new works, concert tours and home season performances, education programs, and the annual Kronos Festival. In 2015, Kronos launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, an education and legacy project that is commissioning—and distributing online for free—50 new works for string quartet written by composers from around the world.
Ellen Reid is a composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, ensemble and choral writing. She was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m, and along with composer Missy Mazzoli co-founded the Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program for young female, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming composers. Since the fall of 2019, she has served as Creative Advisor and Composer-in-Residence for Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Reid received her BFA from Columbia College, Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts. She is inspired by music from all over the globe, and she splits her time between Los Angeles and New York. Her music is released on Decca Gold.
The Roxie Theater, a San Francisco landmark in the Mission District that reopens in May 2021, brings people together to meet and connect through distinctive cinematic experiences. Guided by the passionate belief that engaging with a movie doesn’t end with the credits, the Roxie invites filmmakers, curators, entertainers and educators to interact with our audiences. The Roxie provides inspiration and opportunity for the next generation and serves as a forum for the independent film community reflecting the spirit of the diverse Bay Area population.
Tiny Dance Film Festival is a film festival based in San Francisco that features short dance films from across the globe. TDFF prioritizes films that upset the trend, stretch into new territory, challenge dominant narratives, and most importantly—embrace brevity.
The Watsonville Film Festival (WFF) showcases Latinx filmmakers and stories that illuminate our shared humanity and inspire positive change. Founded in 2012, WFF believes that stories matter and film is a powerful tool to connect people, spark conversations and transform communities. Located in an agricultural town along California’s Monterey Bay, the Watsonville Film Festival spotlights Latinx filmmakers who tell new or overlooked stories, weaving a vibrant tapestry of what its world really looks like.
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McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presents exhibitions and events that engage, expand, and challenge themes present in the McEvoy Family Collection. Established in 2017, McEvoy Arts creates an open, intimate, and welcoming place for private contemplation and public discussion about art and culture. Rooted in the creative legacies of the San Francisco Bay Area, McEvoy Arts embodies a far-reaching vision of the McEvoy Family Collection’s potential to facilitate and engage conversations on the practice of contemporary art. McEvoy Arts invites artists, curators, and thinkers with varied perspectives to respond to the Collection. Each year, these collaborations produce exhibitions in the Foundation’s gallery, new media programs in the Screening Room, as well as many film, music, literary, and performing arts events each year. Exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Visit
McEvoy Arts is dedicated to providing a safe environment for all by following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, the state of California, and the city and county of San Francisco. Admission is free by timed-entry reservation or with a walk-up reservation (limited quantities available). For more information, please visit mcevoyarts.org/visit.
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