Notes on Cultural Evidence is a multidisciplinary exhibition and reading room anchored in the out-of-print but influential poetry collection Cultural Evidence by Oakland-based Filipina American poet Catalina Cariaga. Published in 1999 by Subpress Collective, Cultural Evidence is considered a milestone work of diasporic feminist poetics.

Catalina Cariaga’s thoughtful, layered and many-voiced writing serves as the point of departure for new site-specific installations by four Bay Area- based artists–Cathy Lu, Cristine Blanco, Sholeh Asgary, and Viviana Carlos– that engage with the residues of memory, migration, survival, regeneration, and revolution through intimate gestures of collectivity and care that unfold with the passage of time.

Collected in the library are books, archival materials, and ephemera that reflect on the evolving and ever-shifting politics of cultural identity and its traces. Among these materials are texts selected by the artists that inform their creative practices, worldviews, and daily lives. During the exhibition, the library reading room will be activated as a site of learning, research, and collaboration through a series of readings, workshops, and gatherings.

- PJ Gubatina Policarpio

Notes on Cultural Evidence is curated by PJ Gubatina Policarpio and is the first in a series of six-month exhibitions and projects that will take place in the / library, each organized by Bay Area-based guest curators and artists with longer-term, archive-, research-, and community-based practices. Notes on Cultural Evidence will be accompanied by a commissioned essay by Berkeley-based author and historian Catherine Ceniza Choy.

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