How Do We Map Cities? Considering Geographies of Conflict

Description

Students in “Tales of the City” seminar, co-taught by JD Beltran and Terri Cohn
This exhibition will consider a range of stories about life in the city--historical and contemporary--and the many ways in which those stories can be told. Artists will consider how stories have produced--or map--cities and the people who have lived in them, and how, in turn, cities produce stories and their forms. The visual art, and performed and written projects, will reveal ways in which experience, memory, and desire inspire rich relationships between stories and the city. The focal point of the exhibition will be various approaches to mapping, and how each artist expresses their experience of places through powerful experiences of conflict. The works will evoke such questions as, how are we affected by these sets of experiences, and, how do we map cities based on those experiences?

The artists’ mapping of geographies of conflict will explore such metaphors as expanding and contracting notions of cartography and geography, and bridging the vast scale of cities and individual relationships to them. The projects range from an interior wall diary of one artist’s day-to-day conflicts in San Francisco and a storytelling textile of a Somali, Kenya incident, to an exploration of the dichotomies of the lives of working and consumer classes in Noe Valley, and a photographic installation of the fight for the right to gay marriage in California. The “locations” of artists’ stories—geographies of conflict--will be mapped in ways that diagram the exchange of ideas among class members, and by extension, create a portrait of the group and a map of the exhibition.