Through tapestry, archival media, and contemporary works, two new exhibitions explore themes of queer identity, migration, and collective resistance.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) presents two new exhibitions this month: Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night and Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements. Fifteen tapestries created since 2020 will be included in gather tender night, which is Brackens’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area. Conjuring Power is a group show exploring how queer and trans communities have harnessed creativity to build culture, sustain one another, and strengthen movements across generations.
‘Gather tender night’
The tapestries of Diedrick Brackens tell stories executed on the loom in hand-dyed cotton, fiber, and acrylic yarn. Single and paired figures occupy lush natural settings, merging with depictions of water, flora, and fauna. For Brackens, nature represents sensuality, freedom, and a space where queer folks can be themselves.
In soft, dark, demigod (2021) a figure bends over inside a field of roses in bloom. He rests on the tips of his fingers and toes, pushing upward toward the sky like the growing foliage surrounding him. Undergrowth understory (2025) continues the allegory of growth, nature, and fecundity as a figure merges with a canopy of vegetation.
Central to the exhibition is a woven diptych comprised of the works commitments (2025) and help is available (2025). In commitments, angel’s trumpet plants envelop two figures sitting cross-legged in a position suggesting prayer or meditation, arms reaching skyward in supplication. Help is available (2025) continues the theme with a single figure, arms outstretched for rescue from a bush of jimsonweed, (devil’s trumpet). For Brackens, characters in his works do not hold fixed meaning and instead act as “vehicles to register certain effects or ideas.”
Gather tender night contains three new works that consider tenderness, migration, and connection to the earth. The pieces elaborate on the artist’s return to the Bay Area. In the first, bay windows suggest a domestic interior and the artist’s nesting instinct to create a space for himself. A second work reflects on Brackens’s southern roots where a bottle tree stands guard to ward off evil spirits, framing two figures whose hands barely brush, reminding us that we are not alone.
‘Conjuring Power’
Conjuring Power presents queer and trans movements as living, evolving forces that are inseparable from San Francisco’s history. The exhibition is in collaboration with the GLBT Historical Society and brings together artworks alongside rare archival materials, films, and oral histories, pairing personal testimony with public protest, and everyday acts of care with collective action. Nasty Liberty (2017) by Ester Hernandez depicts Lady Liberty adorned with hoop earrings and tattoos, spray-painting the word RESIST in blood red, her raised arm holding a spray-paint can as an updated beacon of freedom, replacing the torch carried by the historic sculptural monument.
Arina Sarwari-Stadnyk is a queer Afghan-Ukrainian writer and printmaker. Her linocut Diasporic Griefscape (2022–23) is a haunting image of a woman in an underwater dreamlike state, floating on fields of lily pads, carrying an undercurrent of anguish associated with migration and displacement.
The exhibition includes archival films such as Marlon Riggs’s iconic Tongues Untied, and audio clips from De Robertis’s oral histories with the groundbreaking Elders Project. The stories of queer and trans elders are presented as cultural beacons that connect past struggles to present-day calls for justice.
“San Francisco has always been a place where art and activism are inseparable,” said Tina V. Aguirre, 2025 Walter & Elise Haas Fund Creative Power Award winner, cocurator and cultural district director of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District. Conjuring Power reflects that legacy while highlighting how queer and trans movements lead with magic to build resistance, resilience and hope.”
Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night and Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements will open March 13 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.