“Art into Auction” by the SF Coalition On Homelessness

October 1st-8th, 2020

 Megan Wilson

Growing up as a fifth-generation Montanan, Megan Wilson was surrounded by the mythology and iconography of the American West, and specifically that of the cowboy. Images of rugged men with their code of stoic endurance, self-reliance, loyalty, courage, and camaraderie, on horseback riding across the plains, wrangling cattle and spitting chew were everywhere – from the paintings of Charles M. Russell, Frederick Remington, and Will James to the landscape itself. However, the reality is the painful and violent history of manifest destiny that annihilated much of the indigenous peoples and wildlife of the West. The 19th-century doctrine gave American settlers the rationale of a ‘God-given destiny’ to expand westward across North America and beyond. Framed in the context of morality, divinity, freedom, and the presumed greatness of a white America, the ideology was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans from their land, the subsequent genocide of their people, and later, claims to Pacific islands. The mass migration also served industrialists who benefited from the labor force that established in the west to build the railroads, work the land, build the cities, and mine the natural resources.

Wilson’s latest body of work, The Stains and Misdirections of Manifest Destiny explores and calls attention to the painful history of manifest destiny and its lasting racist, imperialist influence on American social and political ideology today.

The Stains series uses the traditional craft of quilling (paper filigree) to create intricate drawings that evoke 19th-century quilt patterns set against a stained foundation. The handicrafts of quilling and quilting spread from England to the American colonies and then to the American West. Wilson began quilling as a child when her grandmother passed on the fashionable craft of her childhood to her granddaughter.

The Misdirections series counters the glorification of the west using revisions of existing historical texts branded into leather hides and stretched over wood placards to create new narratives and new directions for moving forward from a past rooted in the arrogance of manifest destiny.

Kemp-Greene-Wilson-Metzner is a series of suede works with narratives and ornamentation from Wilson’s ancestral history of pioneer families who migrated from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa to Utah, Idaho, and Montana in the 19th century as a protestant, Mormon, and Jewish settlers, homesteaders, miners, and railway workers.

Ronnie Goodman

Ronnie Goodman was a self-taught homeless artist and former distance runner living in San Francisco. He was inspired by the beauty of this city and its diversity, balanced with the struggles of human despair. With his brush, Ronnie tried to capture these raw emotions in painted images. Rest in Power Ronnie.

Jennifer Bloomer

Jen is an artist, facilitator, and founder of Radici Studios in San Francisco. For the past two decades, she has painted and taught art in Guatemala, India, Italy, Colorado, Eritrea, Thailand, Kenya, and California. Jen has a BA in Latin American Studies, a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting, and a Masters Degree in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has created art with people aged 1 to 81 giving space for them to find their unique creative voice in the world through the arts. Jen’s own activist art can be seen in local murals, at marches for social justice across the country, and across social media. Her work has been shown internationally by Amplifier Art and is included in the Library of Congress archive. Jen believes that the intersection of creativity, connection, and community holds the answer to our personal and collective healing.

 
Dina Zarif is an Iranian immigrant, performer, designer, and vocalist who combines Western classical singing with Middle Eastern styles inspired from her Persian roots. Some of her credits include SF International Arts Festival, Palace of Fine Art, San Jose Stage, Golden Thread Productions at Brava Theater, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, and the staged reading of Layla & Majnun at BAMPFA as part of the symposium with Mark Morris Dance Group and the Silk Road Ensemble. She tours both nationally and internationally as a costume designer and actress in the shadow light production Feathers of Fire. Dina is also a part-time architect and received her MA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Tehran, College of Fine Arts.