“The Worlds of Bernice Bing”: Film Screening and Panel Discussion
An exploration of Bernice Bing’s art, life, and enduring legacy, featuring some of the Bay Area’s most accomplished Asian American women artists and activists.
Learn more about Bernice Bing’s inspiring art and life through this film screening and panel discussion. Filmmaker Madeleine Lim’s “The Worlds of Bernice Bing” (34 min.) documents the importance of Bing’s work to American art history: from her studio in North Beach to her groundbreaking community work and later life in rural northern California, Bing chose not to follow the trends of the day, instead creating art on her own terms. Executive-produced by the Asian American Women Artists Association and the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, the film explores the many layers of identity — Abstract Expressionist painter, Beat-era existentialist, Buddhist, feminist, Chinese American, lesbian — that informed Bing’s art and activism. After the screening, explore the timeliness of Bing’s legacy in a discussion moderated by Jen Banta Yoshida, featuring contemporary artists and activists Lenore Chinn, Kim Anno, Nancy Hom, and Diana Li.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Madeleine Lim is an award-winning filmmaker with over 25 years of experience as a producer, director, cinematographer, and editor. Her films have screened at festivals including the Vancouver International Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, and Amsterdam Amnesty International Film Festival. In 2000, she founded the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project to enable queer women of color to tell their own authentic stories. Lim is the producer and director of “The Worlds of Bernice Bing”; her new feature-length documentary about Jewelle Gomez, “Jewelle: A Just Vision” (2022), continues to spotlight the transformative power of queer women of color artists as activists.
Kim Anno is a painter, filmmaker, and social practice artist. Anno founded Wild Projects, a non-profit whose mission is “to collaborate world-wide through fearless art, film, and performance to inspire resiliency in the face of adversity.” Her latest works are “Hour/Breath 2021,” “¡Quba!” (a documentary on the LGBT movement in Cuba), “90 Miles From Paradise,” “Water City, Ipswich,” and “Men and Women in Water Cities.” Anno’s work has been exhibited worldwide.
San Francisco native Lenore Chinn is a painter, photographer, and cultural activist. Chinn works to create structures of personal and institutional support that will both sustain critical artistic production and advance movements for social justice. Portraiture is at the core of her visual art practice, which employs both painting and photography. Chinn was a founding member of Lesbians in the Visual Arts, a co-founder of the Queer Cultural Center, and has been active in the Asian American Women Artists Association since the group’s inception.
Nancy Hom is an artist, writer, curator, and arts consultant. Born in Toisan, China and raised in New York City, she has been a leader in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since 1974. Through her posters, illustrations, installations, mandalas, poetry, and curatorial work, Hom uses the arts to affirm the histories, struggles, and contributions of communities of color. She has also nurtured the creative and organizational growth of over a dozen Bay Area arts organizations. Her long involvement with Kearny Street Workshop, an Asian American arts organization, includes serving as its executive director from 1995 to 2003.
Diana Li is an artist and arts organizer working in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has curated and managed multiple exhibitions and programs, including the United States of Asian America Festival (2018–-2022), Sowing Agency (2021), and Agrarianaa: Art Inspired by API Agricultural Roots (2019). Her art and video work has been featured at the Cantor Arts Center, SOMArts, and CAAMFest. She currently serves as Managing Director for the Asian American Women Artists Association.
Jen Banta Yoshida is a cultural worker and Bing scholar, committed to an intersectional framework that expands and transforms the conventional canon of art history. Her Master’s Thesis about Bernice Bing includes original research and interviews. She is one of the co-producers and project director of “The Worlds of Bernice Bing.” She has devoted over 10 years to supporting the Bay Area artist community as an accomplice and advocate for equity and visibility through her scholarship and work with La Pocha Nostra, Culture Clash, Galleria de la Raza, SomArts Cultural Center, the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, and the Asian American Women Artists Association.
Image: Bernice Bing in her North Beach Studio, c. 1958-1961. “Photo by: C.R. Snyder © The Beat Museum.”
