Conjuring Movements: Black Queer Activism Between Berlin and the Bay

Crystal Mason

Conjuring Movements: Black Queer Activism Between Berlin and the Bay

Join artist Crystal Mason in conversation with Juana María Rodríguez for an evening reflecting on Mason’s time in Berlin, including their work running a café at the Schokofabrik, a historic feminist and queer community space in Kreuzberg, and how that experience and their time in Berlin shaped their approach to activism, movement building, and community care within queer communities in San Francisco. Grounded in Mason’s lived experience as a Black, queer artist and organizer, the dialogue will explore how transnational encounters inform local struggles, tracing connections between Berlin and the Bay Area. Presented in collaboration, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) bring their concurrent exhibitions into conversation, inviting audiences to consider the shared and divergent histories of Black and queer resistance, visibility, movement building, and cultural production across geographies, contexts, and communities.

Presented by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)

About the Exhibitions

“Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements” is a multimedia exhibition presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in collaboration with the GLBT Historical Society that explores the resilient beauty, cultural richness, and fierce resistance of Bay Area queer and trans communities. Broadly organized as a journey through time, this multimedia exhibition explores how queer and trans communities harness creativity to build culture, sustain one another, and strengthen movements across generations. Across epic murals, rarely-seen documentary photography from the 1970s and 80s, and queer-futurist contemporary video work, Conjuring Power is a potent blend of art, archive, and imagination. Featuring artists including Ester Hernández, Serge Gay, Jr., Tanya Wischerath, Crystal Mason, and contributors to the Queer Ancestors Project, alongside materials from the GLBT Historical Society and the Elders Project, the exhibition is a vibrant mix of art, archive, and imagination. An alchemy of legacy and imagination, joy and defiance, Conjuring Power is a timely exhibition that will inspire, provoke, and revitalize communities across the Bay Area.

“BLACK IN BERLIN” is a portrait-based project by Ethiopian-born, Berlin-based photographer Yero Adugna Eticha, presented for its North American premiere by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco. Featuring a selection of images from an archive of more than 590 black-and-white portraits created over many years in his Berlin studio, the project forms what Eticha calls a “portrait cosmos”—an intimate, collaborative space that centers Black presence, self-expression, and community while resisting reductive representations. Though its roots trace back more than fifteen years, the project gained renewed urgency in the aftermath of Berlin’s 2020 Black Lives Matter silent demonstration, which brought 15,000 people into the streets following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Each portrait functions as both a personal and political encounter, archiving diasporic identity while affirming the complexity, resilience, and joy of Black life in Germany.
About the Speakers

Crystal Mason is a gender queer artist, culture tender, and community strategist rooted in Black, queer, fat, feminist, and liberatory traditions. Born and raised in Richmond, VA and shaped by time in San Francisco and Berlin, Crystal makes art to tell stories that often go unheard—stories of anger and love, grief and joy, danger and creation. For Crystal, art is both a declaration and a tool—against erasure, for memory, and toward a freer world.

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP, 2023); Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latinas Longings (NYUP, 2014); and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYUP 2003). In 2021, she was a John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin and in 2023, she was awarded the Kessler Prize for her lifetime contributions to LGBTQ studies.

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