As part SFAC’s “Shaping Legacy: San Francisco Monuments & Memorials” project, the TL-based community arts collaboration Skywatchers shares a screening of their film, Reimagining the City as Our Own: Towards an Architecture of Inclusion, followed by a panel discussion and community dialogue / response facilitated by Preethi Ramaprasad.

Who has the right to the city? Who is allowed to linger on its streets, to see oneself in its landscapes, included and represented in its conceptions of ‘the public’? Who gets to participate in the conversation about what our cities should be? These are some of the questions explored in Reimagining The City As Our Own: Towards an Architecture of Inclusion, a film by Irene Gustafson in collaboration with the Skywatchers Ensemble, a cross-cultural, intergenerational, mixed-ability community arts collaboration that was founded in the tenant lounge of a Tenderloin SRO and believes that relationships are the first site of social change.

The community-centered creativity depicted in this film also provides an inspiring framework with which to critically consider a very particular aspect of the public realm: monuments and memorials. As such, a screening of Reimagining … will serve as a springboard for community gathering and panel discussion at a Tenderloin Museum public program organized for Shaping Legacy: San Francisco Monuments & Memorials, a project of San Francisco Arts Commission.

In 2024, Tenderloin Museum was selected as a Community Collaborator in the Shaping Legacy project, a multi-year equity-focused initiative by SFAC to critically examine the monuments and memorials in San Francisco’s Civic Art collection. TLM’s role included assembling and facilitating an “Artist Circle”--a cohort of artists from our community with deep experience and diverse perspectives–to participate in the Shaping Legacy discourse, produce public programs, and ultimately inform future requests for proposals from the Arts Commission. TLM’s Artist Circle includes Skywatchers, Bharatanatyam dancer and researcher Preethi Ramaprasad, interdisciplinary artist/curator and community advocate Mattie Loyce, and the sculptor, fiber artist, and progenitor of “Crochet Jam” Ramekon O’Arwisters. All have deep and active relationships in the Tenderloin and to San Francisco’s broader arts scene, as well as thoughtful practices that explore “community” in the arts.

Monumentalizing Community is the first of the TLM Artist Circle’s programmatic offerings for Shaping Legacy, which seek not only to share the work and practice of TLM’s Shaping Legacy “Artist Circle” but to invite the public to participate in their practice and to join the discourse of how art can shape the civic realm, public memory, and community. The event will also feature a panel of community members from the film; fellow Artist Circle collaborator and fellow movement-based artist Preethi Ramaprasad will facilitate the conversation.

This program is part of a broader city-wide series of public programs organized by Community Collaborators for the Shaping Legacy project; for more information, visit sfartscommission.org!