Blog

Join us in contending with the violent legacies of California politicians and colonialists and the monuments and institutions left behind to honor them. After a tour of Mildred Howard’s installations in Black Gold at Fort Point and at 500 Capp Street, led by artist Anna Lisa Escobedo, we will explore the web of connections between these political figures and the varied approaches Howard and other artists have taken to interrupt these monumental forms, through an exclusive workshop led by artist Weston Teruya. We will close by breaking apart and taking with us seed paper sculpture replicas of statuary objects, so that we might scatter them back into the earth.

We welcome audiences interested in anti-colonialist and anti-racist conversations about monuments.

Tour: 11 am to 1 pm at Fort Point
Workshop: 1 to 3 pm at 500 Capp Street
Tour and Bus Ticket
Workshop Ticket

About the Artists

Anna Lisa Escobedo is a visual artist, artivist, event producer, and community engagement director of the New Monuments Taskforce. She has worked across the Bay Area with numerous arts nonprofits and community organizations to create inclusive, intersectional spaces for cultural production, resistance, and celebration. Her practice spans murals, poetry, public programs, and monument reimaginings.

Weston Teruya is an artist and cultural worker whose installations and participatory projects examine power, history, and place. His sculptural works often use paper, pulp, and ephemera to explore collective memory, disassembly of monuments, and shared storytelling. Based in the Bay Area, Teruya is deeply engaged in creating art that questions institutional legacies and fosters community reflection.

Join us for a tour of Fort Point led by artist Anna Lisa Escobedo where, draped in vivid red fabric, the statues of Peter Burnett, William Gwin, and Francis Scott Key are transformed into ghostly silhouettes, haunting the underbelly of the Golden Gate Bridge. A free charter bus will leave from 500 Capp Street at 10:30 am and return at the end of the tour, limited seating available.

Draped in vivid red fabric, the statues of Peter Burnett, William Gwin, and Francis Scott Key are transformed into ghostly silhouettes, haunting the underbelly of the Golden Gate Bridge. The striking red shrouds symbolize alarm, violence, and the systemic White supremacy that underpins their legacies.

Howard’s work challenges us to consider: Whose stories have been elevated—and whose have been erased? These figures, once celebrated, are revealed to have played pivotal roles in upholding exclusionary laws and systems of oppression, truths rarely acknowledged in public monuments or mainstream historical narratives. Presented as part of Black Gold: Stories Untold, Hidden Truths urges us to confront the buried histories embedded in our public spaces. Through this powerful visual language, Howard affirms that art can be a vehicle for truth-telling, collective healing, and a more inclusive reimagining of legacy.

Bus departs 500 Capp Street at 10:30am
Tour: 11 am – 1 pm at Fort Point
Discussion: 1 – 3 pm at 500 Capp Street
Tour and Bus Ticket
Discussion Ticket

About the Artist

Anna Lisa Escobedo is a visual artist, artivist, event producer, and community engagement director of the New Monuments Taskforce. She has worked across the Bay Area with numerous arts nonprofits and community organizations to create inclusive, intersectional spaces for cultural production, resistance, and celebration. Her practice spans murals, poetry, public programs, and monument reimaginings.

Join us for a tour of For-Site’s Black Gold: Stories Untold exhibition led by artist Anna Lisa Escobedo. A free charter bus will leave 500 Capp Street at 11 am and will return at the conclusion of the tour, limited seating available. After the tour join multi-media artist Malik Seneferu for an exclusive workshop at 500 Capp Street starting at 1:00 pm.

In response to Mildred Howard’s new installation at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, artist and cultural educator Malik Seneferu leads a timely and transformative workshop: “Reclaiming Memory: Mobile Shrines & the Reversal of Harm.” This intergenerational, hands-on experience invites participants to construct Mobile Shrines that symbolically reverse the harm caused by Winnipecera (Junípero Serra) and the California mission system. These portable shrines serve as spiritual monuments, standing in contrast to the rigid, state-sanctioned statues that have long erased Indigenous and African-descended peoples from California’s historical narrative.

As part of the workshop, participants will engage with a photographic slideshow of historic places throughout San Francisco—a curated visual archive honoring sites of cultural significance in Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. This slideshow will serve as a memory map, connecting past to present and grounding the shrine-making process in a collective understanding of place, struggle, and resilience.

Participants will also collaborate with Seneferu to produce five 8”x 8” wall-mounted assemblage hangings, constructed from the salvaged furniture and symbolic objects. Each piece represents the soul’s enduring urge to be free, to rise from what has been discarded, silenced, or displaced.

Saturday, July 20
Bus departs 500 Capp Street at 10:30am
Tour: 11 am to 1 pm at Fort Point
Workshop: 1 to 3 pm at 500 Capp Street
Price: Free

Tour and Bus Tickets
Workshop Tickets

About the Artists

Anna Lisa Escobedo is a visual artist, artivist, event producer, and community engagement director of the New Monuments Taskforce. She has worked across the Bay Area with numerous arts nonprofits and community organizations to create inclusive, intersectional spaces for cultural production, resistance, and celebration. Her practice spans murals, poetry, public programs, and monument reimaginings.

Malik Seneferu is a self-taught African American artist from San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. His work has been exhibited globally and includes vibrant paintings, murals, and mask-making workshops that engage youth and communities in processes of cultural reflection and creativity.

Join us for Subverting Colonial Machinations, a reading and conversation organized by Jonathan Cordero (Ramaytush Ohlone) and Tricia Rainwater (Choctaw), in dialogue with Native leaders and cultural workers Corrina Gould, Sabrina Garibay, Deja Gould, and Melanie C. Lacy Kusters. This gathering is presented as part of Collaborating With the Muses: Part Two, a powerful new installation by Mildred Howard at 500 Capp Street.

Held in the presence of Howard’s reimagined Junípero Serra monument, draped in red textile as both shroud and signal, the evening invites reflection on the legacy of colonial violence and the symbolic dismantling of empire through literature, history, and art. Together, participants will explore how public monuments, collective memory, and Indigenous resurgence intersect—using creative practice to confront the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.

This is a space for truth-telling, reckoning, and imagining life beyond the remnants of conquest.

Saturday, July 12

5:30 – 7:30 pm

Free

Tickets Here

Biography of participants:

Dr. Jonathan Cordero (Ramaytush/Chumash) is Chairperson of the Ramaytush Tribe and Executive Director of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Cordero is co-lead editor of the forthcoming Critical Mission Studies Handbook, which revises previous scholarship on Spanish and Mexican colonialism. Dr. Cordero is a leader, speaker, artist, and activist in the broader Ohlone and Chumash communities. 

Tricia Rainwater is a mixed Choctaw Indigiqueer multimedia artist based on Ramaytush Ohlone land. Her interdisciplinary practice weaves visual art, community engagement, and decolonial activism, centering Indigenous resurgence and queer futurities.

Corrina Gould is the Tribal chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. Born and raised in her ancestral homeland, the territory of Huchiun, she is the mother of three and grandmother of five. Corrina has worked on preserving and protecting the sacred burial sites of her ancestors throughout the Bay Area for decades. Corrina is also one of the co-founders of Sogorea Te Land Trust, the first urban Indigenous women’s land trust in the country.

Sabrina Garibay is a Tribal member of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation.  She is a mother and grandmother as well as a culture bearer for her Tribe.  Sabrina is an educator that has participated in providing presentations on her Tribes traditional ecological knowledge through cordage demonstrations at schools, cultural events and through media.  For many years Sabrina witnessed the desecration of ancestral Sacred Sites and the reburial of her ancestors as a Tribal monitor.  She is the oldest granddaughter of one of Lisjan Nations matriarchs, Ruth Orta.   

Born and raised in her traditional territory in the East Bay, in the village of Huchiun.  Deja Gould is the Chochenyo language carrier for her Tribe the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, creating relationships with other indigenous language keepers across the country as well as internationally.  She is active in all parts of the Tribe and also serves at the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO), consulting on Sacred Sites in the Tribal territory. Along with her Tribal duties, she also works for the Sogorea Te Land Trust as the land manager as well as administratively. She has also been a lead  organizer for the Run4Salmon ceremony in her traditional territory for the past 5 years.  As a mother she enjoys bringing her children to the land to connect with soil and life around them, seed, save, and learn about traditional plant use. She was instrumental in bringing Tribal members together to create their first Tule boat that was launched on their waters for the first time in over 100 years.  

Melanie Lacy Kusters is a Bay Miwok Ohlone artist and long-time resident of Yelamu (San Francisco). She received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and her Master’s of Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in 2007. The artist’s work centers on memory, heredity, and how women have historically expressed themselves artistically. The artist’s current body of work examines Ohlone artifacts housed at museum institutions, and recreates those objects with a fine art lens.