What Cannot be Taken Away, Families and Prisons Project

Please join us for a Special Event for
What Cannot be Taken Away
Tuesday, April 24, 6:00-7:30 pm
Rosenberg Library, 2nd Floor, City College of San Francisco
Please join us for a brief presentation and
add your mark and story to the exhibition!

Evan Bissell
Artist Statement for What Cannot be Taken Away

What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project was a collaborative dialogue looking at the impact of incarceration on families that took place from 2009-2010.  For 5 months I met weekly with four fathers at San Francisco County Jail #5 in the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) and with four youth who have fathers who are or have been incarcerated and are part of the programs Project WHAT! or Roots (All three programs are run by Community Works West, who made the dialogue structure and project possible).  Not related and never coming into contact with each other, the two groups worked on the same exercises and prompts each week, accumulating ideas, furthering their dialogue and building community in the process.  The workshops centered around processes of reflection, writing, painting, drawing and recorded conversations that were subsequently played for the other group.  During the third month, participants began to design the narrative structures, composition and symbolism present in the pieces.  We then continued our dialogue less frequently – through letters and individual meetings, while I worked from their sketches for the following 3 months.  The timeline, interactive components and resource library offer bits of context to an endemic social problem that has deeply personal effects.

I came to this project through reflections on being a teacher, not through a personal connection to having a parent or child incarcerated.  My interest stemmed from the lack that I was experiencing in schools – the lack of buy-in for students, the lack of compassion and healing as part of learning, and the lack of imagination for dealing with ‘problem’ students.  The treatment of students who step ‘outside the bounds’ reminds me of the current mentality of incapacitation that characterizes the US prison system.  On this, Ruth Gilmore notes, “Incapacitation doesn’t pretend to change anything about a people except where they are.”  Through these mechanisms of separation, our society stokes fear of difference, the unknown, and unseen to create standards of being and living that renders pain invisible except in spectacle.  With an understanding that pain rendered invisible so frequently manifests in violence, WCBTA is an attempt to create an alternative communal education, one that is focused on dialogue, sharing and expression with the intention of positive change and healing.

The power of these portraits lies in each person’s honest confrontation of their experience and the freedom that comes from that.  I continue to be grateful for their wisdom and love – Ben, Cheyanne, Darren, Joe, Liz, Melvin, Sadie, and Vonteak.  Thank you as well to Community Works, Dee Morizono Myers, SOMArts, LEF and Penguin Foundation and the many individual donors.  A special thank you to the Rosenberg Library, Health Education Department, Interdisciplinary Studies, Kate Connell, Donna Willmott, Tim Berthold, Lauren Muller, Amber Straus, Nancy Elliot, Graphic Communications Class, and Lauren Porter for affirming the importance of this process.

-Evan Bissell, 2012
www.evanbissell.com

What Cannot be Taken Away Assignment and Book List

BYOB(ag)

BYOB(ag):
Creating Nutritional Awareness/Design for Social Impact

Project: Value Reduction and Stenciling

Class: Basic Design 125A
Instructor: Nancy Mizuno Elliott
Recycling an Assignment:

Last year I stumbled upon this project when perusing the blog Apartment Therapy. It was sponsored by AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) and originated from Moore College of Art and Design. I was compelled to “borrow” the concept; it had the rare combination of being both politically relevant and very cool.

Also, I’m a bit competitive. I had a feeling that first year CCSF design students could handle this project; even though it was initially intended for junior level graphic design students attending a private art program. My hunch was right.

Come into the Rosenberg Library and see what CCSF students produced!

Spanning the Gate: Celebrating the Golden Gate Bridge 75th Anniversary

Spanning the Gate
Celebrating the
Golden Gate Bridge 75^th Anniversary

Fred Brusati Working on the Golden Gate Bridge

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, a stupendous feat of engineering and design that has been called one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

Spanning the Gate offers a behind-the-scenes look at the complex construction process of this amazing landmark. The project required a multitude of skilled workers – carpenters, electricians, pile drivers, divers, ironworkers – along with many laborers who provided back breaking support work to these craftsmen.

Built hundreds of feet above the dangerously churning waters of the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge was an extremely challenging worksite. Several men lost their lives and many others were injured during the four and a half years it took to build the bridge.

 We salute the working class heroes whose skill and dedication brought the dream of spanning the Gate to fruition.

An Exhibit of Photographs from the Labor Archives and Research Center Collection.

Spanning the Gate Assignment and Book List

The Growth of a Book and the Women’s Health Movement

Celebrate Women’s History Month
+ 40 Years
Of Our Bodies Ourselves

We’re celebrating the 40^th Anniversary of the publication of this groundbreaking book empowering women with health information about our bodies and our selves.  Since 1971 it has grown in size from the skinny black and white (now yellowed) publication you see on the top of the book pile on the right, to the nearly 2 inch thick publication right below it.  It continues to serve, as The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective says “as a tool which stimulates discussion and action, which allows for new ideas and for change….to change the health care system for women and for all people.” 

Multiple women’s voices make Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS) accessible and representative of many points of view.  It has been translated into 25 Languages—but not just translated linguistically, translated culturally—adapted to the culture of the countries by women in those countries.  For example, for the Serbian edition the “experiences of Bosnian refugees who had been raped during the war shaped their book’s approach to sexual violence and drove home the knowledge that women’s health and lives are tightly linked to the social and political context in which we live.”  The Indian Bengali language version published the first health information in Bengali on safer sex practices in same sex relationship “defying the obliteration of sexuality from the common language.”  The Israeli version brought together Jewish and Arab women to publish 2 books, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic. 

“Each edition more closely mirrored what we teach in Women’s Health Issues” says Robin Roth, longtime City College instructor who chose OBOS as a text book for Health 25 classes because of the comprehensive approach to women’s health and for its progressive feminist perspectives on women’s health issues: reproduction, sexuality, aging, nutrition, exercise, body image, relationships, and gender identification, among many. A quick look at the table of contents for issues over the years shows how the field of women’s health has grown and changed. The first table of contents fills less than a page; more recent editions’ are several pages long. Additional publications on pregnancy and menopause expand women’s access to easily accessible and detailed information on these subjects.

Our Bodies, Ourselves in available in print, Braille, audio, digital and social interactive formats. 

The OBOS  Website:  www.ourbodiesourselves.org  has great information, check it out! Go to the Resources page for more information on women and health.

Search Our Bodies Ourselves 40th anniversary global symposium on www.youtube.com to see inspiring videos.

Special Event: One of OBOS’s authors, Ellen Shaffer, will be speaking at a Women’s History Month event in Roth’s class on April 4^th at 2:30 in MUB 361. The topics are Reproductive Justice and also Health Care Reform. You are invited to attend.

Find out more about Women’s Health:
OBOS Book List and Assignment

Spring-Fall 2012

Coloring Outside the Lines: Black Cartoonists as Social Commentators

November 11, 2011-April 7, 2012

This exhibition, curated by Kheven LaGrone includes the work of:

Jerry Craft
Barbara Brandon-Croft
Brumsic Brandon
Keith Knight
Nate Creekmore
Cory Thomas
Darrin Bell
Morrie Turner
Makeda Rashidi

Keith Knight

The best cartoons expose some truths and, to quote the Bible, “the truth will set you free.”               -Kheven LaGrone

I’ve been censored too many times to mention. Mostly in the Bay Area.
-Keith Knight

When his art is released, the artist has no control over how a viewer may react.  Not everyone will understand what the artist is trying to say or do and in most cases an artist will displease as many people as he pleases.
–Nate Creekmore

DURING “LUTHER’S” VERY EARLY DAYS, HATE MAIL UNWITTINGLY SUPPLIED ME WITH A MOTHERLODE OF MATERIAL.   
–Brumsic Brandon

I don’t feel that I’m any more or less of an outcast than any other individual.  No one is without his or her quirks. Maintaining very much focused on the idea that we (people, groups, individuals) are all equally absurd.
-Nate Creekmore

-

Download: Coloring Outside Assignment and Book List

The Men Along the Shore and the Legacy of 1934

October 21, 2011-April 1, 2012

The Men Along the Shore and the Legacy of 1934.

At the beginning of the 20th century, employers launched an all-out campaign to crush the labor movement. Union organizers were portrayed as un-American in the media, and union members were subjected to a reign of terror, including vigilante violence, mass arrests, deportations, and lynchings. Radical union leaders were driven underground and many workers were forced to join company unions.

In 1934 the workers fought back. In May, maritime workers went on strike, shutting down the entire West Coast. A new labor movement was born. It was a birth paid for in blood. Police and vigilantes opened fire on strikers and demonstrators, killing and wounding workers in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and San Pedro.

This unique display of historical photographs, graphic arts, newspapers, artifacts and documents was originally commissioned by the Longshore Division of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to portray the union’s origins in the historic 1934 strike. Historical materials were gathered from the ILWU library in San Francisco and union sources in San Pedro, Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle. Additional items were obtained from museums, historical societies, public libraries, universities, and the personal collections of ILWU members.

The exhibit pays tribute to those who sacrificed and gave up their lives so that future generations could live in a more just world and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

D0wnload: IlWU Assignment and Bibliography

Link to the Labor and Community Studies Department at City College of San Francisco