 Welcome tonight. We are here to hear about Black History Everyday 3.9 Collective's Art of Research. That is what we're doing tonight. So thank you for being here. And this is part of our more than a month Black History Celebration. So it started in January and will run through February. So we have a lot more great events coming up. So please stick around. That link that I put in the chat box has all kinds of details about it. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Iloni Tribal people and acknowledge the many Ram Yutush tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards on the lands of which we reside here in our beautiful Bay Area. SFPL is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations. And we do this at the library by providing factual and useful information that link contains reading and resource guides and holding events similar to tonight's events all year round. You can let us know what territory you're coming from tonight in the chat box if you'd like. SFPL also wants to acknowledge that we are not a neutral institution and that we stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and support collective action to end structural systemic and institutional racism in our own house and in our own city and in our own community. We've been working a lot on a racial equity plan for the library and that is definitely public access and I can put that in the chat as well. Lots of stuff coming up and big time. This is our largest campaign that San Francisco Public Library does, the One City One Book campaign this year. Well, it's supposed to be annual but we're all in a time warp. So this is our 16th One City One Book, Chanel Miller, know my name, the story of her sexual assault on the Stanford campus and how she had to deal with the court systems and what life after sexual assault is like. So we also have amazing events lined up around this campaign. So heavy book, it's going to be some interesting programming. The program is going to be intense and also going to be healing and lots of art. So come by, we're going to be celebrating with Isaac Julian and Judith Butler and Celeste Marie Bernier who are scholars of Frederick Douglas and of course the amazing Judith Butler. So please come check that out. The Grilla Girls and this is all part of this One City One Book campaign. January and February, we have a bi-monthly read every other, you know, bi-monthly on the same page it's called and we are celebrating Namwali Surpells the Old Drift. Pick it up at your library to go or your favorite bookstore. We're highlighting borderland books and Marcus books this month. And like I said, this is part of our more than a month celebration and I'm going to just do the quickest breeze through all these amazing programs that we have coming up, including tomorrow nights, the young talk about Soul of the Nation, the exhibition that was there now two years ago. It's about our soulmates, the National Park Service. They're the librarians of the natural world. We love them so much and so they'll be doing an afternoon Faces of Resistance talking about National Park Service. Please try to come out for this one. It's an odd time and I really want to push it so like join Resistance, Photography and Poetry. February 10th, 3pm. Quit work early, come to this. And oh, I'm not going to pass this one. Melissa Valentine in conversation with Amber Butts. Melissa is Oakland native, has written this book about grief and trauma and her brother's death and it's painful again. So much painful stuff. Life is painful, but life is beautiful too because she wrote this amazing book and come, come. Moad, lots of stuff. But lastly, wear your mask too because the library is to go. My library family is out there working, getting books to people, protect everyone that works out there and mask it up. All right, to the event. We have made it Black History Everyday 3.9 Collective Art of Research, which I love this idea of being, you know, we have the library. So the mission of 3.9 Collective is an association of African-American artists, curators and art writers living in San Francisco and came together to draw attention to the city's dwindling Black population. 3.9 Art Collective bears witness to this phenomenon and seeks to reverse it by drawing attention to historical and ongoing presence of Black artists in the city and creative expressions in its Black communities. Through multiple forms of presentation and outreach, they create and claim spaces to display their art, nurture young artists and develop educational programs for students and write about and curate exhibitions meant to generate productive cross-cultural dialogues. Tonight's members of 3.9 will talk about the role of research in their creative practices. We will hear how archives, libraries, museums and dynamic contemporary communities are a resource and sources of deep knowledge. The panelists will talk about moving from engaged study and learning from others to interpretation and making. And tonight we're going to moderator is Jacqueline Francis. Jacqueline Francis is the author of Making Race, Modernism and Racial Art in America and co-editor of Romare Bearden, American Modernist. She's the co-executive editor of Panorama Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, a co-founder of the Association of Critical Race Art History, and at large member of the National Committee for the History of Art. Her curatorial projects include A Matter of Time, New Work by Adia Millett, Made in Hong Kong, Side by Side in the World and Where is Here. She chairs the graduate program in the visual critical studies at California College of Arts in San Francisco. She's the board president of the Queer Cultural Center, a San Francisco Bay Area community arts organization, a member of 3.9 and collective genus. Francis creates the occasional visual art project object. She received an individual artist commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2017. And we do have a lot of books by Jacqueline Francis in our collection that you can check out. So I will put that in link. And I am now done talking and turning it over to 3.9, our collective. Thank you, Anissa. And thanks for having us tonight at the San Francisco Public Library. Give me a second, everybody. I'm going to share my screen. Great. So we're greeting you, as Anissa said, from the traditional and unceded Chochenyo and Ramayatush O'Lonnie lands. We honor these native peoples. As Anissa said, tonight we're going to be talking about the practice of three of the seven members of the 3.9 art collective. As Anissa noted, we are an association of African American artists, curators and writers who live in San Francisco. In 2009, we came together to draw attention to San Francisco's dwindling black population. We bear witness to the presence of black cultures in the city. We seek to reverse the activists by drawing attention to the historical and contemporary presence of San Francisco black artists and creative expression in our communities here in San Francisco. And as Anissa said, 3.9 art collective creates and claims spaces to display our artwork, nurture young artists, and develop educational programs for students and to write about and curate exhibitions meant to generate productive cross-cultural dialogues. So tonight, three of the seven members of the 3.9 art collective will present about their work. First will be Kija Lucas. Kija uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Her work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, Anglin Gilbert Gallery, the Hedlin Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, California Institute of Integral Arts, Integral Studies, excuse me, the Palo Alto Arts Center, the Intersection for the Arts, the Mission Cultural Center, and Root Division, as well as in Venice Arts in Los Angeles. Lucas has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Green City Collective, and the Waseik Arts Residency. She is also a member of the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure. Kija Lucas received her BFA from San Francisco, the San Francisco Art Institute, and her MFA from Mills College. Following Kija, we'll hear from Ron Maltry Saunders, who is a co-founding member of the 3.9 art collective. Ron is a photographic artist and landscape architect. Originally from Jamaica, Queens, in New York City, he currently lives in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. He creates photographs, photographs that are made without the use of a camera. His artwork is in the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection for projects he completed for the San Francisco Library, the Linda Brooks Burton Bayview Branch, the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, Laguna Honda Hospital, and the Public Utilities Commission New Headquarters in San Francisco. He was commissioned to create works for VMware in Palo Alto and Dallas, Texas, and for the San Francisco Travel Association, formerly the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau. His art has been exhibited throughout the U.S., including The Secret Life of Plants, Solo Shows, San Francisco International Airport and Corden Potts Gallery, and group shows such as Self Skate at Middlesex County College in New Jersey in 2012, Exposed Today's Photography, Yesterday's Technology at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Measure of Time at the Oakland Museum of California at City Center. His work is published in several books, including Self Exposure, The Male New Self Portrait, and From Art to Landscape. Recently, Ron completed an Artist in Residence at Star, the Shipyard Trust for the Arts in Hunters Point. His studio is located at Minnesota Street Project Studio in the Dog Patch Area. Our last panelist will be William Rhodes. William was born in Baltimore, Maryland and attended the Baltimore School for the Arts. He later received a BA in Furniture Building and Design from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. His creative works are in the collections of various galleries and museums. Most recently, his work was included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Along with his studio practice, William dedicates part of his time developing community-based art projects and hosting art classes and tours throughout Italy. He is a co-founder of the Black Art Collective San Francisco 3.9. So starting us off will be Kija. Kija, I'm going to run your slides, so tell me when to go. Why don't we go ahead and get started? I have to say, even with you reading Jackie, which I feel like I could hear you read the phone book and be good with it, I feel like I need to edit my bio down. So my research for the project, I'm going to be specifically talking about the project body of work in search of home, although a lot of my work does involve research. But it started off about 10 years before I started working on the project when I was in an undergraduate class at the San Francisco Art Institute where my professor was an anthropologist and she had this page come up in a reader that was about the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus who came up, he had this book, several editions of it called Systems of Nature, and he taught, he sent people around the world and he himself recorded, made drawings of, and classified plants and animals around the world. In the 10th edition of his book, Systems of Nature, he actually created a systemic hierarchy of man. And so here we have on the right an image of that book that I actually got a chance to see at the exploratorium's skin ends of it, which was kind of interesting because I'd seen pictures of it, but never the actual thing. As you can see in this English translation, all of the classifications of man were incredibly hierarchical and racist, as were many of the pseudo scientists at the time in the 1700s when governments were looking to, and individuals were looking to find excuses for the incredibly racist practices of enslaving Africans and taking land and genocide that was happening. Oh, something's happening with the slides not showing. I'm pinned. Anyways, so that's my work started here and thinking about this. And for me as a person from a mixed race family, I grew up in, I was born in the late 70s and I grew up in what I call the melting pot generation, which was this incredibly, this time where I feel like people were trying to embrace diversity. However, what was happening is that we were asked to ignore our histories. And it was an inverting, but it was a really real part of my life. And this was the first time that I figured out a way to talk about, to talk about how race was an invention in order to continue a hierarchy between different races of people. Can you go to the next slide, please? So about 10 years after that time, or maybe fewer, I was with my friend Janelle. We are watching the Henry Lewis Gates series, African American Lives and looking at people who are actually learning about family history. And around that same time, my sister sent me this article in the farm column in the Grinnell Herald. I believe that's what it is. My mom's in the audience. She's probably going to correct me. You don't have to correct me, mom. It's one of those Grinnell Iowa papers. And this is a story about my dad's family history. So learning about where I come from, which was a thing that I feel like I wasn't able to get growing up. And so here's a story of my great, great grandparents. My great, great grandfather bought himself and then his wife and children from slavery. They moved to Iowa where three generations of my family lived. And this story is taking it, it's written by my great-grandfather about his dad. And so it gives a lot of information on my family. And my mom, who became a bit of a research assistant for me, even though she might not like that term, she actually transcribed all of this. And I went to the places that were in this article. Can you go to the next slide? So I also met several of my relatives. On the top left corner is my cousin, Edith Renfrow Smith, who that is on her 105th birthday. She was making herself a meal. And she will be 107 on July 4th. There's, and here are several other photographs of my ancestors. I'm incredibly lucky that my family was able to hold on to photographs or have photographs and also pass down these stories. Can you go to the next slide? I know I only have like 20 seconds left. And then so what I did for in 2013, this is my road trip around the U.S., I drove 5,000 miles by myself, scanning botanicals from places where various parts of my family lived since entering the United States. And again, coming from a mixed race family, all of my ancestors experienced the U.S. in very drastically different ways. And what I wanted to do with this work was actually scan these botanicals that are from different parts of a hierarchy, too. Roadside weeds, cultivated plants, things that we find beautiful, but also things that we might discard. Anyhow, that's my time. So I'm going to stop now. Thank you. There's no rush for everybody. So audience members, what we're going to do is have each person kind of talk for five minutes to kind of give an overview about their process and or their art. And Keisha just finished hers, will be followed by Ron and then go with William. Then I'll say a little bit about Negro History Week, which was the origins of Black History Month. Then we'll go back to Keisha, Ron and William. So take us away, Ron. Okay. You want to go to my first slide? So good evening, everybody. I was commissioned by the San Francisco Art Commission to work on a artwork installation for the new library that was going to be built in the Bayview. And it's the Linda Brooks Burton Bayview Branch Library. And the inspiration for all of the work that I do and that I did for this particular project comes from place, history, and culture. So I always go into the community and start documenting images of what the environment looks like, what the community looks like, attend meetings if I can. So on the left, you'll see that there's San Francisco Chronicle. It's a poster and there was a community meeting where people were talking about what is your community going to look like 10 years from now? So that's an example of finding out from the community the types of things that they are looking for and with a lot of hope and for the future. And then the image on the right, on my right anyway, is that shows the ship is in the bay. And it's very visible when you go along the shoreline in the Bayview. Next slide, please. And so what I did for this project is I went to the, what's then called the Amma Walden Bayview Branch Library and dug through their rare books of articles and memorabilia about the community. And as you can see, there's a study of Bayview Hunters Point that I went through. There were articles and photographs of people from the community from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Then there were plans that were done by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency that was going to show how the future development was going to happen. And if you look really closely at the map that says Bayshore District, you can see Hunters Point, which was an area that became very popular for blacks who were migrating from the south to the Bayview and to San Francisco. And the photograph of the woman with the hat is Ms. Doris Vincent, who is a record keeper and very active in the community. And she provided me with tons of information about the community, the history of when she arrived there from Texas and told me about communities that came there from Arkansas and the ideas were medical clinics and housing. So there's a lot of research involved in just finding out who's in the community, what's the culture like, and just talking to people and finding out what's available. Next slide, please. So as you can see on the our part of town, a book, it's a file that I found at the Bayview Hunters Point section of the Rare Book Collection at the San Francisco Main Library. So I go digging pretty deep to find historical information for projects that I work on, because I think it's really important for the community to feel that they're being heard when I work on projects. And the photograph is actually showing the image of the shipyard. And you know, during the 40s and 50s and 60s, it was a very integrated community. So I do a lot of reconnaissance work looking at the environment, photo documentation. I visit the site a few times to get a sense of the community and the site where the work is going to go. There's also a community orientation meeting that happens during the meeting with the San Francisco Art Commission, the panelists and the community members. So that's another opportunity to gain information directly from the community about what they may be looking for. And then I follow up with some of the people from who presented this information during the community meeting to get more information. And this all feeds into the way that I create my work and the type of imagery that I want to think I want to create as well. And that's it. Okay. Hello, everybody. Thank you, John. Go ahead, William. I was just going to say, and now we'll have William Rhodes. Thanks, William. Go ahead. So thank you, everybody, for joining us today. So my research really started from just, you know, my fascination with San Francisco. So just really briefly, I'm originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore, Maryland is what you would call, or at least it used to be labeled as a chocolate city. So a strong African American population. So when I moved to San Francisco, you know, it was a cultural change. You know, when I got here in 2008, I did not see a lot of African Americans in San Francisco. But it was fascinating to me because I used to just hear stories. They were almost like rumors of at one time, there was this, this population that existed. And at one time, there were these large communities. But, you know, I came at a point where I didn't actually see these things. So I started to really try to do some research to really understand what happened. And two of the communities that I focused on was the Bayview Hunters Point community, and also the Fillmore. And the Fillmore, it led me to meet different people. And in this piece, so I, with my research, I'm showing you two images and not to confuse you. So one image is of a quilt that I produced. But the quilt, the reason why I wanted you to see that as far as my research, because these are some of the people that I actually met that started to tell me the history. So a lot of my research was based on actual events where I actually met people that were living, breathing people that experienced when San Francisco had a large, thriving black population. And then that led me to more research, which led me to really start looking at a book called Harlem of the West. Some of you may know about that book. And if you don't, it's just a fascinating book, which was mind blowing to me because it gave accounts of all of these nightclubs that existed in the Fillmore district and this bustling black community, shopkeepers, businesses, restaurants, and more than 24 jazz clubs. And I felt a strong connection with that because as I read, I began to hear about people that were reminiscent of where I grew up because Billie Holiday is from Baltimore, Cab Calloway is from Baltimore. So the fact that they would make their way out to San Francisco, and some of you may know this, that San Francisco was part of the Chidlin circuit, which was this circuit that African-Americans would travel along. And San Francisco was one of the last stops. And some of these people that I grew up knowing these names, they made their way here. So this book, Harlem of the West, really solidified and gave me an understanding of just how vibrant the culture was. And we're talking 40s and 50s in particular. Can we go to the next slide? Okay, perfect. Yep. So two things that I also responded to and had to really, as an artist, try to write a really, just really create something about that. When I was in the communities, certain communities, I started noticing people that were carrying a lot of things in suitcases. And I realized, you know, with some of these people that I actually saw traveling around with these suitcases, many of them being African-American, that they were homeless, and that their lives were in these suitcases. So my research also began with this whole process of actually sitting down, meeting people that were from the community. Many of them were homeless and hearing their stories and their connections to the community. And that within itself just gave me this amazing education and really just enlightened me with what, you know, what this community used to look like at one point. Now these are two pieces. I don't know if this part of the conversation we're talking about the work. Jackie, maybe help me with that because I can go into that. Can you hear me, Jackie? So anyway, if you guys can still hear me. So these two pieces are in response to some of that research that I've actually done. One piece is called MAN, MAN. The other piece is called Mother Gone. And these are both pieces that are direct responses to interviews that I had with living, breathing people in the community that told me their stories and the work really responded to that. So I think that's my time and I can go in more detail later. Great, William. Thank you so much. It's catching up to Zoom. So let me just say a few words about Negro History Month and I'm just going to jump back to this slide back here. So some of you might know that the figure that you see here at the top left was an editor of a publication called The Journal of Negro History. His name was Carter G. Woodson and he was a historian. He first established what was then called Negro History Week in 1926 to foster greater knowledge and appreciation of African American contributions and the building of African Americans into what is American life and thought. So in order to support an annual event that was just a week long in 1926, Woodson started to circulate literature, bibliographies of literature, and other related materials among African American institutions, colleges and universities, schools, public schools, private schools, newspapers, women's clubs, both in Washington DC where he was based as well as across the United States. So Woodson, who was the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, announced that the second week of February would be Negro History Week and we see a clipping here from a publication announcing to communities that there would be a Negro History Week observed. The dates of the second week of February were chosen because it was both weeks that honored the birthday of Frederick Douglass. He was born on February 14 as well as Abraham Lincoln and both the birthdays of Lincoln and of Frederick Douglass had been celebrated in black communities from the late 19th century. So from the very beginning, there was a primary emphasis placed on encouraging the teaching of black Americans in the nation's schools. And in Washington in the first week there was a kind of lukewarm response to this whole idea of a Negro History Week. But eventually it was taken up among Woodson's partners in terms of promoting Negro History Week were academics as well as intellectuals in places across the country, not just in Washington. And here I'm showing you a print that was cosponsored by the International Workers Order, the IWW, to promote Negro History Week among the leftist communities both black and non-black in the United States. I'm also showing you here that there were collaborators with Carter G. Woodson who were artists. You're looking at a photograph of Alma Thomas who was a historical painter who worked with Carter G. Woodson to promote Negro History Week at her school in Washington D.C. She was a teacher for many years before she retired in the 1960s and became a full-time artist. Thomas was an amazing figure. She not only taught black history in her classrooms but she encouraged students to study art both at Howard University's Art Gallery in Washington D.C. as well as in the government museums in Washington D.C. like the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere. She took her students there so that they could see art in situ and she also of course gave them opportunities to learn artistic skills. So really when we think about Carter G. Woodson as the father of Black History Month in the United States, I think we can also get a broader picture of how many people were his collaborators, his co-workers in propagating this idea which in the 1970s became Black History Month. So let's go toward more from the artists. I think should we go back to a slide, Keisha, or is there something else we could do? This is fine. Where you're at right now. Okay great. Talk about the work. So the work that I made coming out of that research that I did and research that is still ongoing actually I started this work in 2013 resulted in these images of scanned botanicals. I used the scanner as a camera for this work. I was looking at the early photographs of Anna Atkins who was using cyanotypes to make her images and she was using the Latin names for botanicals that Carl Linnaeus was using. Her book was actually the first photographic book ever made and so I started off making pretty precise images with as little dirt as possible but I would allow for maybe not the best specimen. You can see I'm using visual tropes of science here like the images look a bit like a scientific like you might see a specimen in a museum. They're printed quite large. These are about 30 by 40 inches and they could actually be printed the size of floor to ceiling which I hope to get to do one day. Eventually I started taking, I would go to a place and I would take multiple botanicals. I'd scan them each separately and then I would throw them all onto the scanner and it creates this like really sort of motion in the image like kind of this a little bit of chaos. I also left digital artifacting in the photograph so if there's a bug in one of the botanicals that's like walking around or like wind blowing you can see it by a little RGB line in the image. Go ahead and go to the next one. I started by only having like live botanicals things that I think would be used in that sort of like the research of Linnaeus or Anna Atkins but I started moving away from that. I would break my own rules. I started with a piece of dirt. I also took this piece of petrified wood from somewhere in Bristol, Virginia called the resting tree. There's many graves from enslaved people, some of whom were more than likely my ancestors who are buried under that tree. It said that an elderly enslaved man who was no longer able to work would watch the children and then started burying dead under there and so this is a piece of petrified wood there. When I was in Bristol I kind of got there and didn't know what I was doing and was kind of like I thought I was supposed to feel this like I'm going to this place. I'm walking on the dirt where my ancestors walked. I'm supposed to finally understand who I am or like feel this connection to the land or feel some semblance of something and I really was just sort of questioning myself and I think I mean I don't think I'm the only artist that does this when we get to a point where we're you know sort of making work and just sort of out there on our own and I wasn't talking to anybody really but I spent three days in Bristol and I would go and sit under this tree every day and just in the shade it was really hot there. I had never been to the south before I went in the summertime so it was really hot and I really like felt like this pet piece of petrified wood from this very large oak tree was like super important as far as the history of that space. Can you go to the next slide? This is the piece of dirt that's from Bristol after going to the Historical Association and asking them for permission to go onto this land and having them say to me thank you for your interest in our rich history and I didn't know at the time how to deal with that. I bit my tongue. I wanted to go there and I just said okay I'm gonna go and I was lucky to be in Virginia and not in California where people are very strict with OSHA laws and stuff because when I was there I saw well first of all I have to admit I forgot the card for my camera in my hotel room so I got there and I was like oh shit what am I supposed to do so then I said you know could I come back later when there's nobody here but they let me take pictures while they were there and they let me come back later and so I'm wandering around this old house that they're refurbishing and like sweating and feeling like what the fuck am I doing here and I'm packing up the car eventually about after an hour and the sun's shining through the clouds onto the piece of dirt and I really thought about how my DNA is in this dirt like the blood and sweat of my ancestors is in this dirt and I just walked over to it the sun shining through the clouds just onto this clump of dirt and I just said you know what this is my fucking dirt and I took it and I took it back to my hotel room where I was staying and that's the first piece that I made for this body of work that I actually trusted that I knew what I was doing um could you go to the next slide I don't know I think I have another image um this is a brick uh this is one of the times where the dirt allowed me to feel like I can make pictures of other things besides botanicals other artifacts this is a brick from Buxton Iowa um Buxton Iowa is a place I think that um Cory Booker talked about his ancestors being from Buxton but it was an integrated mining town in rural Iowa outside of Grinnell about an hour and so this is right now it's this kind of dilapidated buildings in a big cornfield um there's a little bit of I don't know if it's stitchweed or purposeful weed growing there but I went there a couple times by myself it's a little bit out there I was a little scared I feel like they might have guns in Iowa and so I was very nervous but taking pictures um and I collected this brick um I can't I still can't find like what because a lot of bricks are stamped with something that has to do with the area or who made it but I still can't find what that is um is there one more slide I don't know I I'm sorry I didn't write it down nope that's it all right thank you so this is a project at the Linda Brooks Burton Bayview Branch Library and I had to come up with ideas to talk about the place the history the culture and so the images you're looking at here are actually in the interior of the library and it's called symbiotic relationships one through five um the top left is actually a homage to the Native Americans who were here before so the technique that I'm using as Jackie mentioned in my introduction is all done in the dark room without a camera and I and I lay objects on top of photographic paper and by doing that the object actually blocks the light and you get a white silhouette and it's very similar if you've ever done a sun print where you actually take objects outside and you put them on this piece of paper and you get white shadows with the blue background uh the brown created here is is steepia toning so again the first image with the feather and the head profile is an homage to the neighbor americans and the feather that I'm using is actually a turkey feather uh turkey is a native to the us and I thought it was important to use something that was native to the us the image in the middle are feathers and I wanted that to be a reference back to the natural environment uh the the wildlife that's in the area and still in the area it's a great migration area for birds um and then again talking about and thinking about the the communities of people that came from the south uh what did they do what did they used to do what did their what did their ancestors do so this is a figure this is a silhouette with cotton balls so again making reference to the black community that came from the south um and how do you represent that so those are some of the struggles that I was tackling with the image at the bottom that look like various things to people seed pods urchin sea urchins um um again it's talking about the plant life and and the nature that surrounds the bay view the bay view is an incredible area for nature there are lots of native plants on the hillside and along the water shore um then the image with the hairs coming out of the side is actually collage with sugar so again I'm thinking about african americans who worked on sugar plantations so I'm always looking for a way to incorporate the african history with the black american history and with the community of the bay can you go back to the previous slide and so this mural is actually in the courtyard um so these are permanent installations at the library uh you're welcome to visit them when the library reopens um and I was looking for ways to talk about the essence of of being human and also a connection to the waters that surround the bay view hunter's point area um and so the first figure on the left is collage with salt salt in the bay it's in the water it's in the oceans it's in the oceans that the the great migra uh the mid-atlantic the middle passage that occurred so again I'm looking for these different layers of information to put into these figures as well as their salt in our bodies the image in the middle the double panel I was looking for a way to talk about the work that we do or the work that people did at the shipyard so these are like little shavings of metal that float down when you're when you're carving when you're shaving when you're working with metal and again making reference back to the shipyard and the last image is the figure with water bubbles and those water bubbles again making reference back to the bay which was so important to the bay view hunter's point community also water that's in our bodies some looking for ways to talk about the history the culture and also the human experience and the human body next figure and so this was this happened two years after the library opened there was um designer physical trolley dances would jump on muni and they would dance on platforms well the choreographer found this work at the library and decided to expand their dance performance into the library and I found this incredibly inspiring and it really told me that people in the community respond to art when it's presented to them and they respond in different ways and I love the fact that they decided to incorporate their bodies with this artwork that's in the outdoor courtyard that's it great um william should I go back now for you yes please that's that's perfect so the the I keep skipping over something for you hang on a second all right that's perfect okay there we go so so that's the quilt is just one example so this when I after doing all of the research I really came up with this idea of calling it that my series of works the out migration and one of the things that I started to focus on was creating a series of quilts which is still ongoing um I felt like quilting was number one a way to really connect with the community and also I come from a tradition of having family there were quilters and you know it's a strong african-american tradition so I wanted to continue that but I wanted to really connect that community this community I was the foreigner I was kind of the guy the new alien to the community and what was my my role in that so by meeting people interviewing a lot of these elders I started to incorporate their portraits in these quilts and for me it started off in the beginning it wasn't the most easiest process because again I was the outsider and I'm asking people some people that are living on the streets hey could I you know do a portrait of you and add it to a quilt and you can only imagine the responses that I got but over time I started to kind of gain more trust and I started to to include more people in these quilts and now I've been doing this process for the past six years so this is just one of the quilts this is called the Sankofa quilt um and again there are people from the community some of you may recognize some of the people in these portraits um but for me I really knew that this was an important project because I would walk around the neighborhood and then I would have people stop me and say hey you know what's going on with that quilt you know did you finish my portrait they started to actually ask me about it so then when I produced the quilt then it became this whole community pride which to me was just so amazing and just I mean I just felt so honored to have so many people in the community start to really invest in this project and feel like they are a part of this community quilt these community quilts um can we go to the next one yep perfect so the the two pieces that you see in front of you they're still part of the out migration series the uh gone mother the one piece which is a shoe it was based off of this interview you know there was a lady that used to be right off a third street I would see her there she had a at a suitcase and she had a little dog and um you know this lady had had an amazing story she was homeless but she had this entire life where she had a history her family owned property had businesses in the bay view community and she was in on this corner every day and you know this person who people just walked by every single day was a you know had so much history and was a fixture in that community so I wanted to do a piece dedicated to her and um so in the area where she she pretty much stayed there was always objects around you know shoes pieces of clothing um bags they were just always in this area and I was able to get a shoe which was left it wasn't her shoe I didn't take her shoe just want you to know but there was this object that was a throwaway object which was a shoe and I felt like it really what gave kind of the energy of that of that area and with that shoe I was able to put a um a portrait on fabric I sewed it inside of the the uh insole of the shoe which you can see and I included neon for me neon was really important because of you know it's one of the early lighting sources um and to me neon also has a mystical quality to it you know and as many of you may know the process but you actually just really quickly we you actually blow glass tubes and then you put gases in the tubes based on the electricity that hits that gas you get a certain color so the whole science of that is amazing and for me taking this throwaway object putting these portraits inside of it and including the neon gives it a whole different element because even if you walk past this artwork this neon will draw you in and that was the whole purpose my my whole really statement is that these are people that we walk by every day and we may not see any value in them but they have so much value to the community and they're holding the community together the next piece is called man and this piece was man because one of the the uh homeless persons that I interviewed he told me his name was man and I said okay well what is your birth name he said I just told you it's man and he described to me that he his family gave him the name man because they were tired of him being referred to as a boy and they said if you're called man no one can ever refer to you as a boy and he was a person who was in the war he was a war hero he had a whole entire history this is a person was a veteran and dedicated his life to serving our country and he ended up for various circumstances a homeless person so that was just so fascinating to me so I included a portrait now that's not a portrait of man he would not let me take a picture of him but I found someone that reminded me of that in a in a stack of old photographs that my family had so this is a person from war war two he's an african-american veteran and the background of it you could see kind of us behind that fabric there is a some writing on a piece of cloth that is an actual duffel bag from world war one i'm sorry from world war two an african-american soldier in my family that was their duffel bag so I wanted to include that to create this energy in this piece so I built the suitcase and wanted it to have a very old vintage look as if it was uh some type of a war chest and I took an american flag and of course incorporated that in the piece and with this neon man again you can't underestimate man because you could walk past the million times when you plug in this piece the first thing you're going to see is that neon man so I wanted that to really kind of give reference to this person that I interviewed and just show how much respect and honor that I had for him I think that's it yep I just have those slides thank you thanks William um we're going to take some questions um and some comments um in the chat we invite people to type in and I'm going to stop uh sharing the power point in a second but before I do that I just want to show you this last um bit of information here that the 3.9 art collective has the members Rodney Ewing, Me, Jack, Will and Francis, Keisha Lucas who you heard from tonight, Seron Norris among the founding members along with Rodney and William, Ramakhan O'Arwisters, William Rhodes and Ronald T. Saunders you can find us at uh on email via emailing us on Facebook via Instagram as well as um on the internet at 3.9 art collective.com backslash so I'm going to stop sharing my screen right now and then we can go to looking at each other so uh let's see if there's any questions in the chat there are two in the q and a function great I saw that at one point and for some reason I'm not seeing it now one of the questions is that one question that we always get yes this will be recorded and available on YouTube and I will put that link in the chat one again and again and again great thank you thank you Joan Kung for that question question from Teresa Moore for William is that the Sankofa bird in the middle of the quilt thank you Teresa um yes it absolutely is a Sankofa bird and um as we know about the Sankofa bird I mean that is a strong image uh symbol in uh African and in African uh folklore you know the Sankofa bird is really the symbol that brings us back to our connection our origin of things um and it's always this discussion of us many of African people that have been experiencing you know all of the trauma and things over the years the hope and the wish is to bring in us bring us back to the source so thank you for recognizing that yeah I think that's a great um symbol for everything that the three of you presented tonight um that um asante symbol from Ghana Sankofa it's uh one of these um proverb images that means go back and get it go back and retrieve it and I've heard in your presentation William in terms of interviewing people learning about people's histories that you are retrieving histories of people in San Francisco people of African descent he just talked about retrieving histories in terms of family histories by traveling across the country and of course Ron um retrieving histories that are both personal as well as environmental in terms of your research in um San Francisco I think there's a resonance about retrieving through each of your presentations tonight um I wanted to ask you um in terms of what you're doing especially in this time on the month of Black History Month 28 days 29 days in a leap year um especially in this time of Black Lives Matter especially in this time of insurrection at the Capitol especially in this time of victories in sort of instance in Georgia with two um progressive democratic senators um you know this is a really um peak in time and I just look back and think back to when um Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week in the late 1920s it was also a really peak in time it was the Great Depression starting in 1929 it was the era of Gone With the Wind first the book and then the movie and all of this romanticization about the lost cause of the Confederacy and how great things were for Black people under slavery and it wasn't so bad and I wonder if each of you could think about your projects as you shown them tonight as responding to the sort of peak incy and the and the the tenor of our moment in 2021 um well I can tell you this so I feel in some ways in particular with my quilt I feel like that is the response with that is is again going back to the source and people for wise counsel so not only with my project do I actually um just do these portraits I'm having conversations with seniors and just to let you know I have seniors at range and I and I don't want to insult anyone because I'm getting close to this age myself but I'll tell you the starting age is 64 and I have I have people on the quilt that are 104 103 no 104 yep so it's a long range so for me as far as the response going back to the source and really sitting and asking these people questions because they live through all of these changes that took place whether it be the civil rights movement some even Jim Crow era um and really asking them questions and they actually are you know they are some people before the pandemic I'm watching TV with people as these things are unfolding and they're talking to me live telling me you know hey baby this is what's gonna happen you know sweetheart no you know I saw this before I know what's gonna happen so I'm even unconsciously recording these things into those quilts you know that history so for me that's kind of my way of I don't know if that's so much a response we're really dealing with this and gathering that information it's so funny because right right now like my mind's drawing a blank because I'm like what am I doing I think now um but I think with in respects to this work um like William said I really appreciate talking to elders and just like listening to what they have to say I feel really lucky to have access to family stories and understanding part of my family history going back to the early 1800s which I feel like a lot of people with um uh African American descent don't necessarily have access to that like into the back into the 1800s back into the 1700s and like really understanding sort of places where my family were um and also um somebody's told me once like well your work's not so political and and I was like well maybe if you look at it as botanicals it's not so political but it's kind of sneak attack political and that when you get into it and you're like oh here's this thing and then I'm gonna have a conversation with you about how race is an invention and yes it exists because of that but how it's still affecting us today and when I talk about heritage and inheritance in my um bio or in my artist statement I'm not talking about money I'm talking about ideas that we inherited over generations I'm talking about the experience of my seventh generation grandmother and how that affects my life today and how experiences of our ancestors in this world and in this country affect our lives today not only like socio-politically but also individuals decisions and individuals situations that they were put in outside of their control as well so I feel like by looking into this history I'm saying you have it's almost like being a flashlight or a highlighter and being like no here's this thing and we're going to talk about it now but I invited you in with something that's beautiful that feels approachable to you and now we're going to have this conversation that maybe you didn't expect to have when you were looking at a picture of a plant um and so um I feel like that's my way of approaching this and I feel like although it's like not necessarily a story that we like that everybody thinks of I just feel like it's a very um like going into my own family history is the way that I can approach these things and also that I feel like the other folks inviting other people to like look into that too because I don't I'm not everybody has thought about it or it has like decided to be interested in that um yeah in their life so yeah um Ron yeah I mean it's it's interesting I recently got a chance to work on a art proposal for another project in the Bayview and I had an opportunity to actually talk to young people who grew up here um and and it's the Bayview is changing it's an incredibly rich cultural environment filled with amazing history that is being lost and the young people I was talking to realize that they don't want to lose a sense of what the black community was like here and they're also learning about their community you know through these historical moments and you know back in the 60s there was a major riot here that only gets talked about when it's an anniversary time and it was talked about back in 2016 when the federal marshals and all of these police forces came in and shut down the Bayview um people had to be reminded of that history and so these young people like we don't want to be forgotten and it's becoming so diverse that there are other communities that I'm learning about like the Polynesian community is actually increasing in numbers they want they want to be heard they want to be seen and the other side you have people like Miss Doris Vincent who's in her late 70s at late 80s who has amazing amount of history that she can tell you as well as has collected and uh there's Oscar James who's in his late 70s who has information about what happened here in the past so so so balancing and both of those communities at the same time and you know like William's in a great place because he's doing intergenerational work so these young people can actually benefit from hearing what happened when you guys were here in the 50s and 60s and and see that there's a relationship between the past and the present black lives matter really brought that out and people want to have a sense of pride of their community and they also want to have a sense of pride for their history and they don't want other people to forget it and you know during this you know I probably put the commission in jeopardy for myself but I said you've got to stop giving Bayview temporary art installations they fade you don't come back in to repaint them they need to be permanent materials so that they stay here and so that people feel a sense of pride for their communities thanks Ron thanks Keisha thanks William I'm going to check the Q&A from Vivian was Todd Shipyards in Richmond similar during World War II as SF as South SF Shipyards was the neighborhood dynamics changing as the Shipyards were no longer active note I have enjoyed open studios at the Shipyards as well as Recology Center shows I don't know if I can respond to that question about Todd Shipyards in Richmond during World War II as well as the South San Francisco Shipyards maybe one of the audience members can and we'll check back to see if I mean so I mean it's really interesting there actually is a connection between the communities in Richmond and the communities in Bayview and you'll hear about families that came here from the south looking for jobs and if there weren't jobs available at the San Francisco Shipyard they would go to the Richmond Shipyard so there there is a connection between both of those communities thanks Ron um anonymous attendee asks how did William get the portraits on the fabric I use and I'm telling you guys a secret I shouldn't tell you this but I do the old fashion technique which is pretty much like a transfer machine which is a good old-fashioned projector I take the photographs lay the image on the projector and shine it on a piece of fabric keys of cotton fabric then I go back in and I do the painting in the drawing uh to you know more line work and everything else each one is done by hand but yeah I'd like to say I'm an old master but you know what I use the the old techniques the projector thanks William um we have a couple of minutes um Joan Kong has another question is the SF arts commission supporting community artists like me I think we need to expand the art to all San Francisco they are trying to be supportive they have set up a Bayview artist registry so that projects that happen in this community are actually connected to artists who are connected to the Bayview so that's that's one of the things that they are doing they're they've increased their outreach to artists who have some connection to the Bayview yeah and I can say as Anissa said during the introduction you know I've received an individual artist commission to work on a collection of short stories um about four years ago so um in that way the commission has supported my creative practice Keisha yeah I also have received an individual artist commission um as well I think William too and maybe wrong yeah I've received two we have another question we're coming up on ending the broadcast tonight it's 8 14 um question for Jacqueline Francis from Emily hi Emily could you also share how you see the work shared tonight in light of the present moment um you know in the obvious thing is to show the um the variety of practices amongst the three artists here tonight which I think is really interesting um obviously photography is important to a lot of the work that they do um in terms of beginnings and maybe even to some extent the finished project um but I do think what um works to is the idea of um a sense of representation here um we see figural extraction in in quite a few of the projects we saw tonight um but we see a strong sense of the figure whether it's um the flora of the world um or human figures here I thought that was quite interesting that each of the artists showed work in which the figure is part of what they're presenting um some of Ron's work is um non-objective but it starts with figure and we don't lose the sense of figure it's not totally non-objective I thought that was really interesting especially when we often think that we have a sense of what black looks like and what black is much less what artists who are black present so I think I should turn it back over to Anissa for the final um words here I come all right Kija, Jacqueline, Ron, William thank you so much that was so great and informative and all of your work is beautiful Jacqueline we can read your work um thank you for being the moderator again controlling the situation and we do have members of 3.9 coming up um February 16th we'll have Cheryl and Ramicon talking about um the history of black craft and folk art influences and then the library spotlights you know we're on this calendar of cultural awareness calendar we call it so black history month we stretch it out for two months but we try to get artists to kind of go with our graphics and um share their spotlight and try to shine on them as much as we can you know give them that tiny honorarium but we love doing that and so Ron we've used many times we love Ron so his artwork is all over our library but this time around we have Rodney Ewing has agreed to share his artwork so you can find all of his art on our webpage right now and a little bit about him but we're going to have an artist spotlight with Rodney on February 25th so I hope you all come out for that and that link again that I shared with you has all of this information as well as one more time shared yes you can see this on YouTube tomorrow or tonight even after this like you can just watch it again so thank you 3.9 Collective we are in great appreciation of you and sharing your art and we look forward to to what you do next all right good night good night everybody thank you there's lots of love and claps out there it's all in the chat the chat river