“The artistic is political in SOMArts show of protest work”: Collective Memory included in SF Chronicle article

“The Power of Angela Davis” by Nannette Y. Harris-Jones is one of the pieces on display in “Making a Scene” at SOMArts.

The Bay Area Society for Art & Activism is so proud to be included in Ryan Kost’s San Francisco Chronicle article about SOMArts Cultural Center’s recent exhibition, Making a Scene: 50 Years of Alternative Bay Area Spaces:

Because so many of these spaces live on and for the margins, their histories and their stories aren’t always told or even recorded. The exhibition manages to address both, the first by existing at all and the second through an installation by Elizabeth Travelslight, a co-founder of the Bay Area Society for Art and Activism. Her group aims to preserve this sort of history.

“I turned 40 this year, and I really came of age as an activist in the mid- to late ’90s, which is a very pre-Internet era, definitely pre-social media,” Travelslight says. “A lot of the things we were doing just aren’t documented in a way that’s searchable via the Internet.”

Part of what’s so valuable about this tradition is that it has, in some ways, come to define the Bay Area. Consider René Yañez, a founder of Galeria de la Raza, or Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, all of whom contributed to the show, Travelslight says. Those artists and others who “were so active in the late ’60s and early ’70s really set the tone for the way that many people characterize San Francisco.”

More here: “The artistic is political in SOMArts show of protest work,” , August 4, 2015. http://www.sfchronicle.com/art/article/The-artistic-is-political-in-SOMarts-show-of-6424648.php?t=67cdb35ccdf294ee0d&cmpid=twitter-premium