Drawing inspiration from jazz, blues, traditional Ethiopian melodies and rhythms, poetic texts and trans-cultural melodic scores, Nefasha Ayer joins the continents of Africa, South Asia and America to produce a uniquely San Franciscan form of music. Musicians include Art House Directors and Resident Artists Meklit Hadero and Todd Brown, South-Indian Carnatic Jazz composer/saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan, composer/bassist/flautist Eliyahu Sills and composer/bassist Miles Jay. The Space of In-between was commissioned by Red Poppy Art House through grants from the San Francisco Foundation and the Fund for Artists.

As part of their BAN 5 residency, the Red Poppy Art House (RPAH) explores the power that small spaces hold as vibrant centers where artists gather, create and make their home. Conceived as an on-site neighborhood experiment in cultural innovation, the RPAH acts as a meeting ground for artists of all disciplines, while engaging the complex social and economic issues of the arts landscape. In YBCA’s Room for Big Ideas (RBI), the Art House presents a month-long program of artists spanning disciplines and musical traditions of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, joining the traditional to the contemporary, and exploring the ways in which design and arrangement of physical space invariably come to represent, if not impose, our values in material form.

This Public Program is supported by a generous grant from The Wallace Foundation.