June is Pride Month!
June is Pride Month
The San Francisco Arts Commission celebrates and recognizes Pride
Learn more about pride Month activities happening in San Francisco
Featured Artists and Artwork:
Afatasi The Artist is a worlds-building visual artist, futurist and counterstory teller, investigating the nexus of being a proud generational San Franciscan of Black-American and Sāmoan descent. Her work is informed by her deep concern for the continued population decline of Black-Americans in her hometown over the course of her lifetime.
Artwork and Image Credits: H: "Modalities and Motifs: "Freedom Day Transfer" by Afatasi The Artist, Southeast Treatment Plant temporary Construction Fence Mural Project
Kimberley Acebo Arteche is an educator, cultural worker, and interdisciplinary artist working in photography, installation, social practice, and performance. 'Bodyless' explores the impact of colonialism on self-identity.
"Bodyless" by Kimberley Acebo Arteche, 2018, Courtesy of the Artist, Praxis of Local Knowledge
Lava Thomas tackles issues of race, gender, representation and memorialization through a multidisciplinary practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Drawing from her family’s Southern roots, current and historical socio-political events, intersectional feminism and African American protest and devotional traditions, Thomas’s practice centers ideas that amplify visibility, healing, and empowerment in the face of erasure, trauma and oppression.
Rendering of "Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman" by Lava Thomas
Juana Alicia has been creating murals and working as a printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, and studio painter for over thirty years. Her style, akin to genres of contemporary Latin American literary movements, can be characterized as magical and social realism, and her work addresses issues of social justice, gender equality, environmental crisis and the power of resistance and revolution.
Mural, Portrait of Juana Alicia by Marvin Collins, 1985, Courtesy of the Artist, Me Llaman Calle: The Monumental Art of Juana Alicia
Yumei Hou is a sculptor and renowned master of the ancient Chinese art of paper cutting. Hou has dedicated decades to learning, perfecting, and passing on the art of paper cutting in China and the United States.
"Yangge: Dance of the New Year" by Yumei Hou, 2022, Photo Image by Ehtan Kaplan, SFMTA Central Subway Chinatown-Rose Pak Station
With his own hand-built, large-format cameras, John Chiara (b. 1971; San Francisco, CA) exposes light directly onto photo-sensitive paper, manipulating early photographic processes to yield images of his surroundings that are at once recognizable and eerily distorted. Chiara developed his method while studying photography at the University of Utah, finding that his process lent greater weight to the object of the photograph itself, allowing it to slowly transform and mature as it moves through the artist's handmade apparatus.
Photo by John Chiara, Treasure Island Photo Documentation Project
Harvey Milk Bust by Daub Firmin Hendrickson, Collection of the City and County of San Francisco; Gift to the City of San Francisco from the Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial Committee
Using sculpture, painting, and installation, Jacob Hashimoto creates complex worlds from a range of modular components: bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, even astroturf-covered blocks. His accretive, layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology, while also remaining deeply rooted in art-historical traditions notably, landscape-based abstraction, modernism, and handcraft. "This Infinite Gateway of Time and Circumstance" by Jacob Hashimoto, Image by Ethan Kaplan
Kohei Nawa is a multidisciplinary artist whose diverse practice explores the perception of virtual and physical space and examines the relationship between nature and artificiality, and between the individual and the whole, illustrating how parts aggregate together, like cells, to create complex and dynamic structures.
"Ether" by Kohei Nawa, 2019, Image by Ethan Kaplan, San Francisco International Airport
"Thinking of You: A Día de Los Muertos Drag Show" SOMArts Cultural Center, 2019. Photo by Richard Lomibao