[2] Created during the Asian American Movement, it became an umbrella organization for a diverse group of young Asian-Americans seeking creative and new ways of intersecting artistic expression with political and community activism.

Basement Workshop’s formative years became shaped by a loose and disparate group of visual, performing and spoken word artists, writers, and politicized community advocates.

By offering inspiration, Basement Workshop emboldened many to test their own creative vision, whether personal or collective, within an activist context of racial injustice and political oppression.

Basement Workshop offered both a kind of mental and physical space which fostered the initiation of projects that later morphed into separate and independent artistic and cultural endeavors.

In this spirit, Yellow Pearl was soon followed in 1973 by the independent release of the record album, "a grain of sand," with songs written and sung by Chris Iijima, Joanne Nobuku Miyamoto, and Charlie Chin.

This list, truncated as it is, does not embrace the entire cadre of unnamed artists and community advocates whose participation helped give contour to Basement Workshop’s complexity.

CPW held weekend English language and citizenship classes for adult Chinese immigrants, taught by a group of young volunteers, who were mostly Asian American.

In the mid-1970s, when Basement Workshop members were caught up in fervent discussions and debates over the direction of their core organizational mission -- whether it should be more a political or arts organization[8] -- CPW volunteers remained tied to addressing some of Chinatown’s more elemental needs.

Basement Workshop ignited, incited, engendered, and influenced: Members and those on the periphery injected, rejected, refused, and infused; and ultimately the Asian American community received and conceived.