Issue Date: June 1, 2023
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SAN FRANCISCO, June 1, 2023—The Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) is excited to announce the augmented reality poster series Market Street Stories which will debut as a pop-up exhibit on Saturday, June 3, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the JC Decaux newsstand on the corner of Fourth Street and Market Street in Downtown San Francisco. This multimedia art project partnership unites the San Francisco Department of Public Works with Project Artivism, the Haight Street Art Center, Grants for the Arts, and JC Decaux by converting Market Street into a live canvas for social engagement, poster creation, and augmented reality interventions reflective of the deep history of parades, activist marches, and city celebrations that have taken place on Market Street over the past 150-plus years.
CHSA’s Market Street Stories is a months-long creative exploration between youth artists and mentor artists that challenged participants to tell their own unique personal stories and histories by examining a vast archive of images that highlight San Francisco’s passion for social justice, equality, and cultural diversity. Accessing these collections, artists considered their own current places in these ongoing actions and conversations that make Market Street the city’s center for civic action.
To help uncover history matching the current social climate and passions, CHSA invited Project Artivism’s Artivate program to its museum to review the artifacts in the CHSA collection, learn silkscreen printmaking, and discover storytelling and public engagement in the form of poster design and augmented reality publishing. The work created for the Market Street Stories project is meant to educate, inspire, and create calls to action for people who traverse Market Street, giving them the platform to express themselves and take away creative works from the program. At the Market Street culminating event on June 3, passersby are invited to experience these collaborative collages firsthand on a three-foot wide-by-32-foot-long custom-built table. Resembling the length of an actual parade, this one-day-only collage installation invites visitors to add their own stories and voices, with a call to action of their choice to add to the conversation. Using a bicycle-powered machine, visitors can create silk-screened posters that they can take home. The posters will link to a QR code that allows viewers to bring the posters to life through custom augmented reality.
CHSA’s Executive Director Justin Hoover states, “Market Street Histories is an example of history leading young people to investigate their shared pasts and reimagine how our future can look like. This collaboration achieves something extraordinary — it melds historical archive research with contemporary new media technology and provides a voice for young people to share in public space. And doing so with strong community partners like Project Artivism and the Department of Public Works makes this program that much richer.”
“We are thrilled to collaborate with the Chinese Historical Society of America for this event,” said Tony Garnicki, founder and chairman of Project Artivism. “Our participation in this celebration not only allows us to engage with the vibrant community of Chinatown but also provides an opportunity for attendees to
explore their creativity, express themselves, and take away meaningful works created through our Artivate program.”
Artivate brought screen-printing workshops to the public with CHSA, Market Street Stories, and the Joy On Joice Street Fair held earlier in May. Attendees were provided with an interactive experience learning the art of screen printing, creating their own unique posters, and engaging with augmented reality artworks created by the youth cohort of artists. Market Street Stories is led by artists Chris Treggiari, Amy Berk and Mark Hellar with help from Cheryl Meeker, Pat Kelley and Kerra Hendrickson and features young artists Julien Allen, Filippo Cerboni, Amaris Medina, Camille Tessien Gonzales, and Kim Lee.
Market Street Stories will be on display for the month of June along Market Street. For more information, visit Project Artivism.
For media images, download here.
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About Chinese Historical Society of America
The Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco is the oldest organization in the country dedicated to the presentation and preservation of Chinese American history. Since 1963, CHSA has strived to be a responsible steward of the remarkable narrative of the Chinese American community through education, exhibitions, and programming. Visit CHSA.org.
About Project Artivism
Project Artivism is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to promoting social justice and community engagement through creative initiatives and public art programming. Through its diverse programming, including mural projects, educational workshops, and community collaborations, Project Artivism provides a platform for artists and community members to address pressing social issues, celebrate cultural diversity, and inspire positive change.
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Market Street Stories: A People’s History AR poster series team
Chris Treggiari’s artistic practice strives to investigate how art can enter the public realm in a way that can engage people in our communities. Chris focuses on highlighting diverse community experiences, histories, and personal stories through participatory, mobile platforms that encourage exploration from the viewer. Often these participatory platforms entail creative methods, which aim to turn the passive viewer into an active art maker who can participate in sharing their personal voice in a community dialogue. Chris has shown internationally including the Venice Biennale 2012 American Pavilion as well as nationally at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Jose Museum of Art, and The Oakland Art Museum to name a few. Chris has received grants from the San Francisco and Oakland Arts Commissions, the Creative Work
Fund, The Rainin Foundation, The Seattle Center Foundation, and the Zellerbach Foundation. Chris has been teaching at the California College of the Arts since 2013.
Amy Berk is an artist and art educator who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 2006, serving as Chair for the Contemporary Practice program from 2011 to 2013. She directed the award-winning City Studio program which engages underserved youth in their own neighborhoods through sequenced art classes that are both rigorous and joyous. In 1996, she co-founded the innovative Meridian Interns Program serving inner-city teens and has taught in the Post-Baccalaureate program at UCBX since 2004. She has shown her work internationally, was one of the founders of the web journal stretcher.org and the artist group TWCDC.com. Since 2019 she and Chris Treggiari have collaborated on ARTIVATE which creates opportunities for youth to explore artmaking and citizenship in the public sphere. Amy has recently taken on a Program Director role at Industrial Design Outreach and is running a mentor-driven project creating light sculptures at Academy High. She remains committed to giving teens (and adults) a much-needed voice, a safe place in which to speak and helping them find the proper tools to do so.
Mark Hellar is a creative technology consultant for cultural institutions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond and the owner of Hellar Studios LLC. He specializes in innovative yet practical digital media and software-based solutions for multimedia artists and the institutions that support their work, emphasizing developing systems and best practices for exhibition, documentation, and long-term preservation. Mark is a consultant on new media conservation initiatives at SFMOMA, including the conservation and care of their software-based artworks. In addition, Mark has presented on the preservation and exhibition of computer-based artworks at Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institute, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the DOCAM research alliance, and the American Institute of Conservation. He is also faculty at the Gray Area, Academy of Art University, and San Francisco Art Institute(formerly), where he teaches on the topics of virtual reality, augmented reality, and physical computing. Currently, he is leading the Open Metaverse Intensive, a 10-week Online Course in Decentralized Worldbuilding.
Cheryl Meeker is a visual artist based in San Francisco whose work ranges from photography to installation, drawing, painting, archives, video, interactive web projects, and social sculpture often touching on the fundamentals of sustenance in our environmentally destabilized world. A founding member of Stretcher.org, she has frequently collaborated with artist Dan Spencer as the art team Dan and Cheryl, producing actions, panel simulations, and video. Her ongoing activism with the housing and climate justice movements and recent work in the public library system inform her approach. She was one of the organizers of “Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It,” and her work has been exhibited at ATA, Mission 17, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Oakland Art Museum and online at SFMOMA project open space and the Richmond Art Center. Her writing has been published in NYFA Current, Stretcher, and Art Papers. Find further information at https://cherylmeeker.blogspot.com/
Patrick Kelley is a California artisan and orchardist. Born and raised in the Bay Area, he’s currently working post-SFAI in the art and technology fields as a painter, mural artist, photographer, graphic designer and mentor to youth. His studio work often comments on generative identity, marginalized narratives, ecology and contemporary San Francisco politics. Portraiture and the Bay Area Figurative Movement is his jam! However, in practice he’s just in love with making stuff, bouncing ideas around the table, and seeing all our present future(s) being created.
Download or reference media assets here.