Meet the artists and performers featured at the Mayor's 2021 State of the City address
Alexandra Huynh
2021 National Poet Youth Laureate
Alexandra is an 18-year-old Vietnamese American poet from Sacramento, CA. She is one of Sacramento’s 2020 Youth Poet Laureates and is the 2021 National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. As a second-generation individual, Alexandra employs poetry as a tool of self-reclamation and social justice for marginalized communities. This fall, she will be a freshman at Stanford University where she aims to combine her passions for creative writing, science, and civic engagement.
Alexandra was previously honored by the Sacramento City Council after being announced as the 2021 National Youth Poet Laureate. You can watch her read her poem “Inheritance” in this video.
The Band Hayez
The Band Hayez, created in 2017 by lead singer Alicia Hall (Huff) is a collective of phenomenal musicians. Drawing inspiration from many genres like Funk, R&B and Jazz. This award winning group has graced stages all around California and the United States, spanning as far as New Orleans.
Follow them on Instagram: @the.band.hayez
Aida & Andrea Lizalde
Homes, Land Acknowledgement is a quilt made of found cotton, machine and hand-embroidered images and other cotton fabrics representing a nuanced idea of the home. This quilt was made as a collaboration between artist Aida Lizalde and her sister and home crafts expert Andrea Lizalde. Some of the imagery in this quilt is drawn directly from the artists’ childhood and immigration from Aguascalientes Mexico to Stockton, California in 2005 at age fifteen. Shortly after they immigrated to the United States, the economy went into a recession so they had to face assimilation in a period of extreme social and environmental shifts. The quilt represents the concept of home as a basis for cultural identity, as a malleable, geographically, and legally dependent concept and symbols of geographical locations juxtaposed with fragments of the history of migration, oppression, borders crossing people and housing insecurity.
Follow them on Instagram: @Aida_Lizalde & @goblinandwitch
Brandon Gastinell
Frida Lisa, 2021 and Glass Library, 2021 - Glass Sculpture 8”x10”
Available for purchase
Brandon’s work is saturated in modern pop culture with bold, bright colors and contrast. His work is all about staging compelling contrasts and juxtapositions of collage. The life and death in balance is something that flows through each piece as well as the blurred line between the beautiful and the monstrous. He exposes just how thin the line between the two can be. He, as always, intends to challenge the viewers perspective with his stylistic interruptions.
Follow Brandon on Instagram: @brandongastinell
Daniel Tran
‘State’ - 8’x4’x6’ - HDPE tubing and remnant plastics - 2021
Available for purchase
Trained as an architect, organic farmer & public servant, Tran is drawn to how rural/urban relations shape our climatic, cultural & ecological resilience. His artwork is collaborative, integrating mutual aspects of agroecology, green building, & community development. In 2015, Tran began augmenting greywater systems with irrigation tube sculptures to shift the dialogue in water reuse to broader audiences & to blur borders between art, agriculture, urban & rural.
Follow Dan on Instagram at @growetry
Curator: Faith J. McKinnie - Black Artists Foundry
Faith J. McKinnie is an independent curator and art consultant. Her curatorial practice is rooted in the care and prioritization of artists from the margins. Informed by her own experiences with race, gender, politics and sexuality, Faith wields the transformative power of diverse, equitable, accessible, and inclusive art in her projects, programs and exhibitions.
