“When I found out that people actually didn’t know, it made me wonder what was going on in their communities that I don’t know about,” said Shuck, San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate (2017-20). “How do you find out about things that aren’t reported from particular perspectives? By talking to each other.”
The brainchild of Shuck and Megan Wilson — co-director of Clarion Alley Mural Project — and co-curated by Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, “Manifest Differently” includes 38 visual artists and poets, many of whom are Indigenous Americans. It spans several locations throughout The City, including Clarion Alley — where CAMP has maintained a steady rotation of murals in the heart of the Mission District since 1992 — to the San Francisco Public Library. The project began in September and continues through April.
The latest installment is a visual art exhibition at Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch. It fills the building’s two-floor atrium with paintings and murals, each offering an example of what it means to “manifest differently.” The spirit of protest art as murals, poetry and books fills its second-floor space.
Wilson’s own “Broken (18 California Treaties),” made in collaboration with López Custom Workroom, features 18 textiles, each featuring text from a different treaty that Indigenous Californians were forced to sign by the United States government between 1851 and 1852, relinquishing rights to their land in exchange for designated land reservations and goods. As the title suggests, these treaties were broken.
“It’s never too late to apologize,” Wilson writes, “to make reparations, to give land back, and to make peace.”
Barbara Mumby-Huerta’s portraits of women of color from her community reclaim space inside the gallery. By subverting a history of affluent, white, male privilege in portrait painting, Mumby-Huerta’s triptych of colorful, oil-on-canvas portraits aims to “give voice to people who aren’t normally given voice to,” she said.
Manifesting differently “is about shifting narratives and shifting power,” she said. “Normally, your stories are told by other people about you.”
Victoria Canby, installation view, Minnesota Street Project. Photo credit: Rob Divers Herrick, courtesy Clarion Alley Mural Project.
Photo credit: Rob Divers Herrick, courtesy Clarion Alley Mural Project.
Victoria Canby’s landscape of Farmington, New Mexico, also features a portrait of her grandmother, who attended boarding school there from age nine onward.
The work mourns the loss of Indigenous language and traditional culture while maintaining “a deep love of the landscape in Farmington,” Canby said. “The majority of my family is buried at that boarding school.”
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Canby hopes visitors to “Manifest Differently” will ask themselves “why the artists are making what they’re making,” she said. “When you start to wonder about that, you start to look at the story they’re telling and the history you may need to relearn. The underlying message doesn’t just reach to the indigenous people of North America and Canada, but to all indigenous peoples who have been colonized.”
In addition to her mural, Canby printed posters with the slogan “From Palestine to Turtle Island, Colonization is a Crime.” She isn’t the only artist drawing parallels between Manifest Destiny and the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Chris Gazaleh’s mural features a map of Palestine alongside portraits of youth and elders protecting and clutching their homes, dancing and playing music. It is as much an image of resistance as a celebration of a culture and community.
For the Palestinian-American artist, manifesting differently “means normalizing our resistance to oppression,” he said, “documenting our history and representing our current situation as people all around the world, meaning all groups of people who’ve had to struggle for freedom.”
Vaimoana Niumeitolu, whose husband is Palestinian and currently in Jenin camp, lived and worked in Gaza in 2017, teaching theater and painting murals of Palestinian martyrs. When she attempted to return in 2018, she was barred from entering the West Bank.
Chris Gazaleh, installation view, Minnesota Street Project. Photo credit: Rob Divers Herrick, courtesy Clarion Alley Mural Project.
Photo credit: Rob Divers Herrick, courtesy Clarion Alley Mural Project.
“To live under occupation was devastating, horrifying and traumatizing on so many levels,” she said. “Several of my [former] students there have been killed since then.”
For her contribution to “Manifest Differently,” she painted a mural of a 2001 photograph by documentary photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer, showing an elderly Palestinian couple embracing. She desires to “create moments of softness and tenderness inside of a total absence of hope and love.”
This comes at a time when another major art institution in The City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has been criticized for censoring the work of artists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“Palestine was always going to figure prominently, regardless of what happened on October 7th,” Wilson said.
However, the project isn’t only about communicating current issues more openly. It’s also about where to go from here.
“Bring your pain, bring your hope, and show us on the art where it hurts,” Shuck said. “Then maybe we can do something about it. I don’t think anyone cries out for help without thinking it might come.”
