BROWN PALMS, YELLOW BALMS

Reinventing Caregivers of Color

USAAF 2025 Kick-Off Event & Opening Reception: Thu, April 24, 6–9 pm
Closing Reception: Sun, May 25, 1-3 pm
Exhibition Run: April 24–May 25, 2025

at SOMArts Gallery, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

Co-presented by AAWAA

"Can brown palms and yellow balms cure the planet’s deepest wounds? The caregiver— she who opens a newborn's eyes and closes the eyes of the dying—remains overwhelmingly female and disproportionately a person of color. Fate casts Asian and Asian American women into a culture of service, entrapping them as designated doulas, named nannies, and overburdened overseas workers—sacrificial figures dissolving self for the sake of family. The gender bias is familiar; the lopsided burden these women are expected to bear not examined enough.

The Brown Palms, Yellow Balms: Reinventing Caregivers of Color exhibition unfolds in ever-expanding circles of caregiving, mirroring the Buddhist Metta practice—beginning with the body as the most intimate site of care and spiraling outward to embrace family, community, collective archetypes, deities, and the environment.

Immerse yourself in depictions of nurturing, nursing, birthing, mothering, mending, comforting, restoring, resuscitating, protecting, soothing, cheering, reclaiming, and empowering—not just the Self, but Society and the Cosmos—all viewed through the lens of AAPI cultural heritage, history, and socio-political landscapes.

Celebrate with us the ancestral wisdom and cultural practices, poultices and potions, talismans and taboos, superstitions and spiritual practices, deities and demons that keep our spirits fierce, shape our bonds, and keep both humanity and the planet afloat."

 - O.M. France Viana, Lead Artist & Curator
 

Artwork credit: Self Portrait with Jasmines, Sweetpeas and Woman and Child by Fatima Ronquillo