TELL THEM WE WERE HERE

Tell Them We Were Here (2021), a film by Griff & Keelan Williams, chronicles visual/multidisciplinary artists currently living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area and how they extend the historical legacy of Bay Area creativity, activism, and community. Reflecting the spirit of Fort Mason Center and its vibrant connection to local art and artists, the film centers the idea of art as a reflection of the place from which it emerges, and helps to define the unique character of the Bay Area scene over the past 25 years.

The film follows the work of Sadie Barnette, Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers), Jim Goldberg, Tucker Nichols, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Alicia McCarthy, ), and Michael Swaine, a select group of artists who have chosen a less worn path. It touches on the disappearance of cultural communities due to gentrification and economic instability, while reminding us of art’s power to transform and how vital creative communities are to healthy societies and political change.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with director Griff Williams, artists Amy Franceschini and Tucker Nichols, and curator René de Guzman (all featured in the film), exploring how the local art scene has continued to evolve in the five years since the film’s premiere.

PANELISTS:

is an American painter, publisher and gallerist. In 1993 he founded Gallery 16 and the pioneering fine art printmaking workshop Urban Digital Color in San Francisco. The exhibition and publishing program has worked with hundreds of artists including Lynn Hershman Leeson, William Kentridge, Deborah Oropallo, Jim Isermann, bell hooks, Rex Ray, Margaret Kilgallen, Mark Grotjahn, Paul Sietsema, Arturo Herrera, Michelle Grabner, Ari Marcopoulos. Williams has also designed and published dozens of acclaimed books with the Gallery 16 Editions imprint. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums including San Diego Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, San Jose Museum of Art. His work has been reviewed in , , and . He co-directed Tell Them We Were Here with his son, Keelan Williams, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

René de Guzman is a longtime Bay Area curator, artist, and arts consultant. He was one of the founding curators at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as Visual Arts Curator and Director of Visual Arts, serving from 1993-2007, and subsequently served as the Senior Curator of Art and Director of Exhibition Strategy at the Oakland Museum of California from 2007-21. He also served as Deputy Director for Programs and Engagement at Headlands Center for the Arts, overseeing artist residencies and public programs. For over three decades, he has developed innovative and popular exhibitions for a wide public, and is currently Co-Director of Art + Water in San Francisco.

Amy Franceschini is an artist whose work facilitates encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the "certainties" of a given time or place where a work is situated. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers as a collaborative platform to consider the social, political and environmental organization of space. Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, education... Through this disassembly they find new narratives and reconfigurations that form alternatives to the principles that once dominated these systems. Amy received her BFA in Photography from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Stanford University. She has taught in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Stanford University and in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy. Amy is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow and a 2017 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts.

Tucker Nichols is an artist based in Northern California. His work has been featured at the Drawing Center in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. A show of his sculpture, Almost Everything On The Table, was recently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. His drawings have been published in McSweeney's, The Thing Quarterly, The New Yorker and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books, Crabtree (with Jon Nichols) and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray (with Dave Eggers). Flowers for Sick People, his ongoing multimedia project, was featured on the PBS Newshour and the subject of an exhibition at SFMOMA, Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis, an exhibition highlighting seven local artists’ responses to the pandemic. He is represented by ZieherSmith in New York and Gallery 16 in San Francisco.