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Race and Place: Architectures of Segregation and Liberation Exhibit

Groundswell installed “Race and Place: Architectures of Segregation and Liberation (AoS/AoL),” an exhibition in the main lobby of the 91����¥ Mission Campus (March 14-August 4, 2016).

AoS/AoL examined 500 years of spatial injustice in the area between Canada and Mexico, known now as the United States mainland. Through photographs, artifacts, and literary text, the exhibition addressed conquest, slavery, incarceration, legal restrictions, public and private practices, and economic inequities that have enforced racial segregation. AoS/AoL also documented ongoing resistance, which has included multiple strategies: armed struggle and escape; protest and direct action; grassroots organizing and legal action; cultural work and cultural preservation.

The exhibition specifically focused on reservations, plantation slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps, suburbs and freeways, redlining, racial covenants, urban renewal, gentrification, and the resistance struggles that liberate space and people's lives.

Special programming linked to the exhibition:

Thursday, March 24, 2016
Lecture by USF journalism professor Teresa Moore on civil rights activist and journalist Ethel Payne.

Saturday, April 30, 2016
Teach-in on gentrification, featuring artist and lecturer Yolanda Lopez; community housing activists, faculty, and students.

EXHIBITION DATES:
March 14 – June 30, 2016
91����¥ Mission Campus, 1125 Valencia

Cloud Hall Reading Garden

Groundswell dedicated the Cloud Hall Reading Garden on the plaza between Cloud Hall and the Science Building at CCSF on March 26, 2009 to the memory of David Landes, 91����¥ Economics instructor, and community activist. The Women’s Studies Department led a collaborative team that included the Environmental Horticulture Department, the Interdisciplinary Studies Department’s Poetry for the People class, and the Art Department’s metal arts instructors and students.

In addition to plants and a low-rise folding screen bronze sculpture inscribed with lines from local poet Lucha Corpi poem “Winter Song,” the garden includes a poetry pedestal box that offers passersby bookmarks with Corpi’s poem in English, Spanish and Chinese and poetry broadsides from 91����¥ students.

Shell-ter Site: Housing Designs by Homeless Artists

Shell-ter Site: Housing Designs by Homeless Artists (1992-93)

A portable outdoor installation consisting of nine canvas panels arranged in a geometric spiral emblematic of the nautilusshell. City College art students painted the designs of six homeless artists onto the panels. A 91����¥ architecture student designed the exhibition space. Shell-ter Site gave its homeless participants a public voice. It also raised the consciousness of visitors to the site by calling attention to the basic needs for transitional/ traditional housing, celebrating talents among the homeless population, and reinforcing the principle of resident participation in housing designs. The installation has been mounted at Hunter'sPoint Open Studio, at the City College Visual Arts Center, on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco State Universitydiag. The Coalition on Homelessness maintains the exhibit. .

The Building Instinct Project

The Building Instinct Project (1998)

A multi-media installation in a local arts center, The Marsh on Valencia Street, in San Francisco's Mission District. Working with language and bird song, text and image, building materials and nests, The Building Instinct Project mixed metaphors and media in an attempt to construct a habitat that reflected The Marsh's desire to serve as the breeding ground for the research, development, and presentation of new creative work. In the raw storefront space of a former carpet and linoleum workers union hall, the installation incorporated video, sound recordings, and photographs of natural marsh environments along with the text from Groundswell's "Re-museum of Unbuilding and Design" statement and a prose excerpt about a place called "The Beginning." Print and slide documentation is available.

Architecture and Diversity Class at CCSF

Architecture and Diversity (1995-97; 2000-2008)

Building Basics, an experimental hands-on introduction to architecture and related fields for currently underrepresented populations–African American and Latino men, and all women–was offered at CCSF from 1995-97. Students met with a culturally diverse group of professional architects, engineers, and planners to learn basic building and design skills. Each semester their work culminated in an exhibit at the offices of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects. From 2000 to 2008, Groundswell collaborated with various departments at CCSF– Interdisciplinary Studies, Architecture, Art, Women's Studies, African American Studies, and Latino/a and Latin American Studies–on a revised version of the Building Basics course. In Architecture and Diversity, a team of art history, humanities, and architecture instructors gave students a hands-on introduction to architecture in diverse cultural contexts.