MAPP: The Mission Arts & Performance Project
The Mission Arts & Performance Project is a bi-monthly, multidisciplinary, intercultural community arts event that takes place in the South-East neighborhood of the Mission District of San Francisco. The MAPP connects visual artists, musicians, poets, dancers/choreographers, filmmakers, playwrights, and other artists, in an on-going collaboration with community organizers and local residents, placing art and performance on the street level through the use alternative spaces such as private garages, gardens, living rooms, studios, street corners, and small businesses, to manifest a non-centralized intercultural arts happening.
At its heart, MAPP shows how ordinary spaces, made extra-ordinary through creative techniques, can serve as improvised micro-centers of artistic and cultural exchange. The MAPP places cultural innovation directly into the hands of artists and local residents in partnership with one another, encouraging each to take ownership of the cultural development of their communities, to experiment with new models of community engagement, and to share in an ever more expansive dialog addressing the many issues that emmerge.
By transforming unlikely spaces into forums of creative exchange, the MAPP demonstrates that an integrated arts festival does not require an expansive budget, outside funding, and commercial marketing strategies, but can happen through the inspired efforts of artists and community members working together with a unified and inclusive vision. Through this processs the arts come to be seen and understood more widely, and deeply, as a vibrant, vital, and irreplaceable force, necessary to the health of our society.
While the Red Poppy Art House has played a critical role in the MAPP's development, today, the MAPP stands as its own independent community arts event. There is no organization, committee, individual, or group of organizers in charge, and there is no admission fee to pay. It is a free and open forum in which any individual artist, collective, or community member may actively participate. MAPP meetings open to anyone who wishes to get involved, and participants are equally encouraged to organize their own MAPP initiatives outside of the MAPP meetings themselves.
The MAPP invited us to imagine a cultural setting in which participation in the arts is woven in the fabric of community life, where the value and cultural significance of each and every community member is given voice, and shared, through honest and meaningful exchange. This is the ideal towards which we aspire.
How the MAPP Began
In October 2003, a meeting of artist of varied disciplines was called together at the Red Poppy Art House (then called Porfilio Is) to discuss the possibility of a monthly alternative multi-venue neighborhood arts & performance event. That meeting was the spark that caught to flame, the beginning of the “Mission Arts Party”, a name coined in this first meeting inspired by an idea of Peruvian Performance Artist and Videographer Adrian Arias, to paint a mural “map of emotions” on the Art House wall. Two months later the first MAP took place with four exhibit spaces; one garage curated by Luis Vasquez-Gomez and Koch, and three other spaces; the Art House, Musa Alda’s Little Spot Café (the basement), and Musa’s garage, curated by visual artists Veronica Blanco and Todd T. Brown, and with the help of the aspiring painter Martin Arslanian. With no budget and just basic flyering for promotion, the event was a great success. The MAP quickly doubled its size when, the following month, the Mission Cultural Center opened its doors to co-host a MAP exhibition in their main gallery. Also added to the MAP was the local AutoTech Garage, curated by Danny Stuepenagel. (complete with a salsa band, Featuring Rennea Josefina Couttenye and Co., and with cars on lifts towering above).
From that time the MAP continued to grow and change. Not long after, the name “Mission Arts Party” was changed to “Mission Arts & Performance Project" with the intentionof bringing the greater focus to process of bringing the arts to the community in a meaningul way. Performance took an essential role in generating the energy of the MAPP and constituted a significant difference from what would normally be considered just another “art walk”. Throughout 2004 the MAPP expanded with Raquel De Anda and Clara Cheeves joining in as curators. By mid 2005 the organizing body of the MAPP had grown from 3-4 people to 15 (aprox.). By the end of 2005, the MAPP had succeeded in incorporating three local businesses and a number of resident garden spaces. At the end of 2005 the first radio documentary (by nathanael Johnson) was aired on KALW radio. In 2006 the MAPP was awarded "Best Art All Over The Hood" by the SF Guardian's Best of the Bay.
Now, in its sixth year, the MAPP has produced over 34 community arts happenings, presenting more than 800 participating local artists, reaching audiences of 12,000+, and involving training and participation of more than 70 street-level organizing presenters.
Bravo to all of the artists, organizers, residents, neighbors, audience members, for continuing to bring forth this inspiring idea! With just six years, we have only just begun!
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