San Francisco Opera made a journey to the south and brought back all sorts of creative wisdom.
At the corner of First and William in downtown San Jose, one sees an old roll-up garage door on the side of a former ’60s car dealership now housing MACLA, a contemporary Latino and Chicano art space. Inside, at an undisclosed back-office location, one will find the headquarters of Art Builds Community (ABC), a women-led, nationally operating public art planning, consulting and curatorial firm. There is no sign anywhere.
ABC brings critical thinking and artists’ perspectives to the creative design of cities, buildings and infrastructure. Now it can add opera to that list.
Beginning this weekend, when SF Opera unleashes the world premiere of The Monkey King, the production will include a curated art gallery inside the opera house as well as an outdoor public market during the final two performances, November 28 and 30. The gallery features artists reimagining the classic Monkey King story through their own creative lenses, while the market includes cultural demonstrations from Bay Area creators.
The opera specifically engaged ABC to curate the gallery and the entertainment for the public market. ABC has its own at-large pool of curators, but in realizing the opportunity for entry-level experience, they brought on a new person to help fill out the gallery.
“It was an opportunity for emerging curators, people who are interested in curating their own show but are too shy to go about it, or don’t know how to go about it, or curators who curate in shops or boba shops,” said Quynh-Mai Nguyen, ABC’s co-founder.
Such experience is important, Nguyen continued, not just for the artists, but for people that may want to partner with ABC in the future.
“So we brought on a co-curator who was paid to work with us and learn about the different ways of producing and exhibiting artwork, especially in a space that’s not a traditional art gallery,” Nguyen said.
As the immortal trickster of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, the Monkey King is one of the most iconic and beloved characters in all of China, and perhaps all of East Asia. Born from a stone, the restless, impulsive monkey travels to India in search of selected wisdom and overcomes a variety of obstacles along the way before returning a wiser, more awakened and self-enlightened figure. The story has inspired countless interpretations in popular culture for hundreds of years, most recently, the 2024 blockbuster video game Black Myth: Wukong, which sold 18 million copies in its first two months.
Opera was the original multimedia artform and Chinese opera is at least 1,000 years older than Western opera. In addition to a production that already unites the disciplines of opera, dance and puppetry, The Monkey King simply necessitated a Bay Area-wide creative alliance. This is why ABC became a perfect collaborator.
About half of the artists ABC curated for the gallery are from the South Bay. Silver Creek High School graduate Draco the Juggler, who specializes in Chinese yo-yo, will also perform at the public market. All of this was by design.
“Often, we all know this, when things are happening in the Bay Area, or when people see ‘San Francisco Bay Area,’ it does not include the entire Bay Area, so South Bay artists or organizations often get excluded or overlooked,” Nguyen said. “And so the fact that we have South Bay representation in the San Francisco Opera, that’s huge. It doesn’t normally happen.”
Even though the artists curated by ABC are not singing on the actual opera stage, just an affiliation with a San Francisco Opera production is an amazing experience, Nguyen said. It will only open up more opportunities, both for the artists as well as ABC, still a relatively new organization hidden in a building at First and William in downtown San Jose without even a sign.
“We’re fundraising for that,” Nguyen said. “We’re saving up money to have a proper sign on the outside so that when people pass by, they know where we’re at. Right now we’re just telling people, ‘Hey, we’re that gray roll-up garage door on the side of the MACLA building.’”
