Posted on June 3, 2021

By Zoë Christopher, Program Officer and Operations Manager

It’s right around the corner! I’m really excited about our upcoming gala and art auction, Drawing the Connections. All of the artwork is fantastic and I want to share a few of my favorites with you!

Have a look and then grab a ticket! It’s a wonderful way to both support our community’s artists and BCAction’s ongoing work toward health justice for all.

Three pieces of art for BCAction's event Drawing the Connections

Drawing the Connections
Opening Night Virtual Gala:
Thursday, June 17, 2021 at 5:30 pm PT / 7:30 pm CT / 8:30 pm ET

Alexis Amann – “Hands All Around” 
(9×13 print)

Alexis Amann was raised on the magical Oregon Coast and has called the San Francisco Bay Area home for over a decade. Her art is character-driven and rooted in storytelling and narrative, existing in a world that is part mundane, and part magic, full of everyday things, and wonderful weirdnesses.

She makes paintings, drawings, installations, illustrations, comics, and products that reflect this world—a place where you’ll encounter sentient turnips, searching and wise women, witches and hags, harpies, magic cottages, mermaids, plants, monsters, and beings that are in between all these things. Crocodiles drink martinis, giant toads fly to the moon, and women go on dates with ghosts. It’s a place where the mundane meets the fantastical and mythological, journeys are undertaken, and harpies fight and puke. It’s a funny, hard, imperfect but beautiful world, and everyone is just trying to figure it out the best they can.

Alexis’ artwork has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Seattle, Detroit, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Christy Chan – “All Is Not Lost” (12×18 limited edition archival print)

Christy Chan Headshot and work of art

Christy Chan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland and working primarily in video, installation, performance and oral storytelling. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Kala Art Institute, Southern Exposure, Root Division, SOMarts, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and in storytelling venues such as NPR.

She has been awarded residencies and support from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Project 387, Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts and Real Time and Space in Oakland.

She is working on the multimedia storytelling and film project, Pen Pals, which has been featured on NPR’s Snap Judgement and in The New York Times. Pen Pals is the story of Shelly, an 8-year-old girl who writes idealistic letters to the Ku Klux Klan after the Klan targets her family. Based on real-life events, Pen Pals draws on Chan’s experience growing up in a Southern town with a white nativism movement, an experience that continues to inform her ongoing explorations of race, power, and what it means to be an American.

Christy will be one of our featured speakers on opening night and will share with us her views on art and activism.

Rebecca Katz – “Spirit in the Sky” 
(20×20 print)

Rebecca Katz headshot and piece of art

I grew up with a spatula in one hand and a paintbrush in another, among a family of artists and cooks. I received my first watercolors at age 5, when I also observed my mother and grandmother transforming mounds of brilliant vegetables into delicious, comforting soups.

I’ve blended the two together, as chef/author of 5 award-winning cookbooks and a painter.

I engage in a life of exploration, inspiration and healing through food and art, and offering that to the world of people in search of both.

As a professional chef, I found my niche in food and healing. I played with flavor, color and texture to connect nutrition science to the plate, and pioneered an intelligent, novel and delicious use of food to promote health and wellness.

Today, I find making art and cooking creatively are both opportunities to be fully present in life, to pay attention to color, texture and composition. To be inspired by nature. To be so absorbed in tasks that time expands. Working in my kitchen or studio is an immersion experience, in a vibrant, reverent, tactile, visual world.

Join us at Drawing the Connections to support these artists
and the work of BCAction.

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