INTERVIEWS with ARTIST and ARTS PRODUCERS
We work in many different ways on many different kinds of projects. One of the things we love to do is to create, preserve and share the archives of artists, sex workers, scholars, and the people we love and admire who have made contributions to the society we want and cherish.
Come take a deep dive into the how San Francisco’s BIPOC, Queer artists, activists and their allies, changed the cultural equity narrative from exclusion to empowerment, transforming San Francisco and the Country. This local arts history tells the untold stories of how a group of underdog outsider visionaries transformed the climate for arts funding during the 1960s through to the 1990s.
Fighting for Cultural Equity in the arts has been a long-term strategy for creating a multiracial, democratic, sex positive and gender inclusive nation. Learn about the people that were rocking the racist and classist, homophobic funding boats, of how the San Francisco Arts Commission was pressured into creating the Cultural Equity Grants, how radical artists managed to wrangle more funding for their dance and theater pieces, art installations, performance art, and parades through protest and politics. And how venues such as Theater Rhino, African American Cultural Center, and Somarts were created and funded.
We have interviewed arts elders, with the help of legendary grant writer Jeff Jones who was there at the forefront.
Special thanks to Sam MacGinnis for organizational help and copy editing.
Thanks to the San Francisco Public Library, and events coordinator Anissa Malady for hosting a panel where we launched this archive. This project was supported by a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Cultural Equity Grant and a UC Santa Cruz Arts Research Institute Major Grant.
