Before the Polo Fields, before Hippie Hill and before becoming a staple of the festival circuit, SF’s Golden Gate Park was literally a pile of sand.
It was late-19th-century designers, not nature, that created the thousand-acre green space with imported flora and fauna. Even the squirrels were shipped in from the East Coast.
At the park’s de Young Museum, artist-in-residence Jane Kim’s Ink Dwell show ‘(non)Native‘ explored the tension between old and new that built, shaped and is reshaping San Francisco. This show, like a lot of her art, crosses over easily into mainstream conversations in pubs like National Geographic and Fast Company.
Take a look at her piece ‘Turf Wars’. A fox and coyote fight over a Facebook lanyard. Both the fox and the coyote are natives of Northern CA, but there have been calls for the coyotes to be removed from the land out of fear of attack while the foxes have largely gotten a pass. Both animals are in fact necessary to local ecology and potentially dangerous to humans. Foxes benefit from their public perception as cute and non-threatening while coyotes get a rap as bloodthirsty.
If this is starting to sound familiar that’s good. Cause the FB lanyard isn’t an accident—tech gets a bad rap in SF. Some of it is deserved. But is it really the singular cause of the city’s problems? Not hardly. Just like the hipsters, dot-commers, hippies, beatniks, or ‘49ers—and just like the coyote and the fox—the techies aren’t inherently good or bad for San Francisco.
San Francisco isn’t unique here. America, too, was built and shaped by its people. And it will continue to be built and shaped by them. It’s up to the public (us!) to come together and decide what to save of ‘old’ America and what the new version will be. Then, like the people who lived and loved this country before us, we get down to work.
Jane and her work hit the heart of what we’re doing at New Sincerity. Our resistance is in seeing past stereotypes and moving forward together.
