Images of protests endure in Bay Area
As the United States continues reckoning with issues of race, equality and police brutality, images of protest are everywhere in culture. Photographs from Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the U.S. show people carrying signs emblazoned with the movement’s name and symbols associated with it ranging from the nowubiquitous portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, both of whom died in police killings, to the bold raisedfist graphic.
Art in response to the movement is also appearing in many Bay Area cities. Murals on boarded storefronts in downtown Oakland have become an artgoing destination, and there’s a plethora of notable works in San Francisco, including the now famous Black Lives Matter rock on Bernal Hill and a massive volunteerpainted Black Lives Matter message written down Fulton Street leading to City Hall.
I find much of the art powerful. Pancho Pescador’s mural of Brianna Noble, the “Black Lives Matter Equestrian,” astride her horse Dapper Dan in Oakland communicates the impact and resolve of Noble riding ahead of protesters on May 29. Kate Tova’s “Say Her Name” mural in front of Hotel Abri in San Francisco depicting Black female empowerment is striking as a massivescale portrait, with eyes fixed and steely. On Gough Street in Pacific Heights, I was even struck by the power of the chalk messages and drawings in support of Black Lives Matter that now fill the sidewalk following a viral confrontation where resident James Juanillo was accused of defacing private property by local cosmetics CEO Lisa Alexander.
These local responses don’t surprise me. Protest culture is Bay Area culture. Some of the most recognizable symbols of 20th century protest were created in the Bay Area, including the iconic Black Panther logo in Oakland and Gilbert Baker’s rainbow Pride flag in San Francisco.
“There is a lot of protest art that has stuck with us and shaped American culture,” says Lauren Palmor, an assistant curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Palmor, who was a curator of the recent “Soul of a Nation” Black protest art exhibition at the de Young Museum, says that, overall, specificity in art and message are key qualities that help it survive its initial time, and that ultimately “simplicity and symbolism endure.” This allows the work to be easily revisited and reinterpreted, carrying the conversation beyond the initial moment of activism.
But the simplicity of an image or symbol doesn’t just make it memorable, it also makes it easy to reproduce, an important quality when you’re trying to spread a message. The most effective protest images are ones that immediately summon a political philosophy when you see them, says Kwadwo Duane Deterville, a Black visual culture scholar and faculty member at San Francisco State University.
From the Black Lives Matter movement, Palmor says that the raisedfist symbol is the likeliest to endure because of how it “evokes earlier civil rights and Black Power movements and yet distinctly represents the current wave of demonstrations.”
There’s yet another protest symbol that has become a part of San Francisco’s culture and my own community: Every June for the past 25 years, Patrick Carney and a group of volunteers install a massive pink canvas triangle on Twin Peaks as part of LGBTQ Pride Week. It’s a symbol that fits all of Palmor and Deterville’s qualifications for enduring symbols: It’s simple, easy to reproduce and has immediate social and political associations. The pink triangle was first used as a badge in Nazi concentration camps for gay prisoners. In the 1980s, it was reclaimed by the Act Up AIDS organization for its famous “Silence = Death” campaign.
“The symbol started as a badge and an insult, but like the word ‘queer’ it’s something the community has reclaimed,” Carney says.
This year, the pink triangle will take a different form on S.F. Pride 50 Weekend, June 2728, because of social distancing restrictions preventing the normal installation. Instead, the triangle will be lit by Illuminate, the organization behind the Bay Lights.
The creation of the triangle was a renegade act its first year, says Carney, and by the second year it was a sanctioned event by the city. At 25 years, it’s a San Francisco tradition. The pink triangle inspires many of the same emotions for the LGBTQ community that the raised fist is beginning to inspire in the Black Lives Matter movement. Maybe in a few years we will see that symbol of the fist gracing the side of a hill somewhere in the Bay Area.