“All right. I’m walking south on Bryant, towards 19th again. Where is this place?”
My friend was calling a second time. She’d given up and had the cab drop her off up the street. Camouflaged by graffiti and vegetation, smack-dab in the middle of Bryant Street, Cell Space makes a fitting venue for Hidden Histories, a multifaceted, collaborative series of projects exploring the familiar but obscure in “San Francisco’s Eastern landscape.”
The exhibit is less a traditional art show than a series of investigative adventures and attempts to reconsider the past and imagine the future of the city’s east bank — each including an ambitious outreach component. The walls are decorated with the debris of the artists’ journeys: newspaper clippings from the 1800s, weathered maps, examples of plants native to the Mission, transcribed oral histories from its residents, and an impressive stack of flyers, postcards and pamphlets detailing a tour of the area and inviting the reader to take part in imagining its future.
At the far end of the room, The Counter Narrative Society has placed a truncated map of the Mission District. A note invites the viewer to mark the map with multicolored stickers, each color representing a different mood, emotion or sensation, creating a color-coded grid that documents where folks feel the most and least comfortable in the neighborhood. The Society, represented tonight by artist Mabel Negrete, has been soliciting and recording oral histories of the Mission District, in particular, of Valencia and Mission, its two parallel, but wildly divergent, sister streets. Tonight they are busy working on the Thinking of You: Mission and Valencia project, collecting personal stories from folks who have lived in the area for over ten years. A camera and a couple dozen wide-eyed gallery-crawlers are gathered around a table, listening as neighbors reminisce about the barrio and the changes that have taken place in the last several decades. Some casually flip through a binder of newspaper clippings and transcribed oral histories from the area’s residents. On September 14th & 15th, the Society will return to help build a community scrapbook of the Mission. And on the 29th, The Counter Narrative Society has scheduled another outing to collect stories and tour the neighborhood, to discuss, draw, and create collage about the Mission’s potential future.
Across the room, another, somewhat smaller, collection of art-goers gather around another, somewhat smaller table, where Amber Hasselbring has laid a vexing jigsaw puzzle over a glass-covered map. Little progress has been made on the picture, but a gaggle of folks are struggling to mesh the puzzle pieces together. Surrounding them is a small garden of plants, each native to the Mission area, and each a potential substitute for the concrete that now trickles between Dolores and Franklin Parks in place of the creek that once flowed roughly along the same channel. Hasselbring’s Mission Greenbelt Campaign hopes to inspire and encourage homeowners to take advantage of the city’s newly enacted Sidewalk Landscaping Permits to create a stream of vegetation between the two parks.
