Plantings and Poetry
Saturday, May 13, 2023 | 4 – 5pm
Location: /(Slash) 1150 25th st, Building B, San Francisco 94107

On the occasion of Notes on Cultural Evidence, the exhibition curated by PJ Gubatina Policarpio currently on view in our library, please join us for an afternoon of poetry and activities that center feminist poetics and collective world-building. Hear poetry from Bay Area-based poets Karen Llagas and Barbara Jane Reyes and join artist Cristine Blanco in a collective spring plant transfer.

This afternoon gathering takes place on the same evening as the opening reception of Weep to Water the Trees, the group exhibition curated by Aay Preston-Myint in the Slash main gallery. Join us!

Cristine Blanco is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, sculpture and installation. Her works take environmental injustices, the precarity of resources, and lineage as her starting point. Her labor intensive practice combines material and weight to explore both tension and care. Blanco holds an MFA. in Studio Art from Mills College. She has exhibited works at Alternative Space LOOP in Seoul, Korea, SF Arts Commission Main Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Kala Art Institute, and SOMArts Cultural Center.

Karen Llagas‘s new chapbook, All Of Us Are Cleaved, is recently published by Nomadic Press. Her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. A recipient of the 2022 RHINO Founder’s Prize, Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize, an Elizabeth George Award and a Hedgebrook residency, her poems, translations, prose and reviews have also appeared in various journals and anthologies. Born and raised in the Philippines, she has an MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College and a BA from Ateneo de Manila. Karen lectures at UC Berkeley and works as a freelance translator.

Barbara Jane Reyes is a longtime Bay Area poet, author, and educator. She is the author of Wanna Peek Into My Notebook? Notes on Pinay Liminality, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, Invocation to Daughters, To Love as Aswang, Diwata, Poeta en San Francisco, and Gravities of Center. She teaches Pinay Literature, and Diasporic Filipina/o/x Literature in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. She lives in Oakland.