Riverside Here and Now

As part of A Sense of Place: Remembering Riverside's Chinatowns Sweeney Art Gallery hosted an incredible dance performance and presentation at Bre Dance Studios. The space is located on 9th Street & Orange in downtown Riverside, the former site of the 1880s Chinese Quarter. The audience was treated to choreographed hip-hop dance and Chinese traditional dance put together by Clifford Breland and Szu-Ching Chang respectively. Storyteller and singer Karen Wilson followed with a moving narrative tying together the diasporic journeys in America of both Chinese and African immigrants. Afterward, there was a buffet Chinese dinner and street music. On the political front, a Riverside City Council meeting on 10/07/08 will determine the fate of Riverside's second Chinatown site on Tequesquite and Brockton Avenues. Grassroots activists hope to have the land saved for further excavation and a memorial park.


The co-chair of the Riverside Chinatown Cultural Preservation Committee (RCCPC), Dr. Deborah Wong professor of music at UCR talked with Ching-In Chen about the history of Chinese immigrants in Riverside and the on-going controversy surrounding development on the Chinatown site. Check out the podcast interview on KCET.org as part of ARTSblock Live! available throughout the month of October. KCET, also Asian American Riverside.


The next ARTSblock Live! podcast slated for November will feature "desert noir" author Ruth Nolan who is currently leading a series of workshops for the Inlandia Institute focusing on desert region writers. Ruth is also developing narration for an upcoming experimental video on Joshua Tree National Park with images taken as part of the annual Photographic Excursions project sponsored by UCR/CMP. The video is scheduled to premiere during 1st Thursday ARTSwalk on 11/06/08 at 7:00pm. Check out Inlandia!