ART, ACTIVISM & EQUITY:
A RETROSPECTIVE ON SAN FRANCISCO’S CULTURAL EVOLUTION
INTERVIEWS with ARTIST and ARTS PRODUCERS
See Video of Panel
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 to UC Santa Cruz’s Arts Research Institute.
ARTIST INTERVIEWS: SFAC Cultural Equity Initiative
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Featured Photo at top of page: Geloy Concepción, 2023. Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: How are you doing today? Guillermo Gómez Peña: We’re doing well. We just got back to San Francisco after a three week tour in Texas. Emma will join us to help me answer a few of...
Greg Day
Greg Day is an artist, activist and cultural equity advocate. The camera has been an integral part of his journey in America and Europe for over half a century. As a photographer and cultural anthropologist, he has documented some of the most important cultural...
Keith Hennessy
Keith Hennessy, MFA, PhD, is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of dance, performance, activism, affordable housing, and sexual healing. Raised in Canada, he has lived in Yelamu/San Francisco since 1982, and tours internationally. ...
Marga Gomez
Marga Gomez is the writer/performer of 14 solo plays which have been produced in New York at La MaMa ETC, Dixon Place, Under The Radar Festival, and internationally at the Edinburgh Fringe and Montreal’s Just For Laughs Festival. She is an artist-in-residence at Brava...
Krissy Keefer
KK: What do you want to know? JJ: Hi, Krissy. First your basic bio, like where were you born and where did you go to school? KK: I was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. My parents met at the University of Vermont and my mother got pregnant and had to leave...
Rhodessa Jones
In 1989, on the basis of material developed while conducting classes at the San Francisco County Jail, Rhodessa Jones created "Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women", a performance piece based on the lives of the incarcerated women she encountered. During the work's...
Susan Stryker
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Susan Stryker: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here. Jeff Jones: Hi Susan. Let's start with your life before you moved to San Francisco. SS: I did not grow up in a family that prioritized...
Adele Prandini
Adele Prandini has spent most of her life as a theater artist. For ten of those years she was Artistic Director at Theatre Rhinoceros. Prior to that she was a founding member of It’s Just A Stage, a lesbian theater company that began in 1974 and continued producing...
Lenore Chinn
Lenore Chinn was born in San Francisco and has spent her entire artistic career as a painter and photographer living in the City. Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle (B&A): Lenore, please introduce yourself and describe your work and career? Lenore Chinn...
Pamela Peniston
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle: So, should we get started? Pam Peniston: Let's do it! B&A: So Pam, where were you born, and where and how did you grow up? PP: I was born in Newark, NJ, but I spent my whole childhood in East Orange, New Jersey, which...
Marie Acosta
SFAC Equity Interview: MARIE ACOSTA Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle (B&A): Welcome to our archive, Marie! Jeff Jones (JJ): Let's start with when you moved to San Francisco and why. Marie Acosta (MA): I moved to San Francisco in 1974 to work with a political...
