SF Artist Curates Exhibition That Amplifies Reparations, Reclaims the City’s Black History

Editor’s Note: This story is part of KQED’s coverage of reparations in California. For more information on the project, click here.

Auttrianna Ward was walking around Fisherman’s Wharf with her father when she picked up a map of the city. Ward, then 8, couldn’t find Hunters Point, the neighborhood her family had lived in for generations, on the map.

It was left off.

“At first, I was confused,” Ward, a 35-year-old artist and curator, recently told KQED. “This is the city I grew up in, but the neighborhood I lived in wasn’t on the tourist map. I realized in moments like that that they didn’t want us to be seen by other parts of San Francisco or by tourists.

“They didn’t want us to be a reflection of the city.”

The omission of Hunters Point, once a predominantly Black neighborhood, stuck with Ward, who was raised around activism. A new art exhibition taps into that spirit.

The Remedy is Solidarity: A Global Multimedia Anthology on Reparations Volume 1.1: Too Much Like Right, an art exhibition in support of San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee and curated by Ward, with Malik Seneferu, opened Saturday. The exhibition seeks to spark dialogue about reparations, as well as highlight the history, displacement and trauma of the city’s Black community.

Too Much Like Right is the title of Ward’s experimental film that takes on the systemic injustices incurred by Black families in San Francisco through family interviews, archival footage and more. The Remedy is Solidarity is associated with the Museum of the African Diaspora’s “Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week,” which begins Oct. 1.

“We want to make reparations irresistible,” Ward said. “Art is a way to make those ideas accessible and to open up the imagination to what reparations can look like.”

ZEAL, a creative arts alliance and social impact studio, produced the exhibition.

“The Remedy is Solidarity is a growing collection of exhibitions, scenes, photo text essays, short artistic films that give a contemporary, fresh look at the reparations movement today,” ZEAL’s co-founder, Allen Kwabena-Frimpong, said. “We’re seeing the opportunity for people to be able to grapple with that process, hopefully from a space of joy rather than a space of burden.”

Ward, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, is a descendant of the Rogers family — a family of activists, community leaders and artists. Her great-uncle, Adam Rogers, was a street activist who was credited with helping to ease tensions during the Hunters Point racial uprising of 1966. His son, Terrell Rogers, was an anti-violence activist and founder of the Peacekeepers, a nonprofit group.

The Rogers family was part of the Great Migration. Seeking relief from racial segregation, discrimination and lynchings, the totems of Jim Crow-era laws and racial terror, an estimated six million Black Americans left the south for more hospitable treatment in other regions from about 1910-1970.

Hundreds of thousands of Black people relocated to California, settling in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, securing wartime jobs and building communities. In San Francisco, Black people and other racial minorities were segregated in neighborhoods like the Fillmore, the Western Addition and Hunters Point.

The Fillmore became known as the “Harlem of the West” because of the large number of Black businesses and entertainment venues in the area. Black people thrived for decades in the Fillmore until the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency embarked on one of the largest projects of urban renewal on the West Coast. More than 13,000 residents were displaced, leading to the loss in homeownership and household wealth.

The theft of land, displacement and erasure has tormented Black people since emancipation.

Since the early 1970s, much of San Francisco’s Black population has been heavily concentrated in the Western Addition and Bayview-Hunters Point. Black residents became more isolated, because restrictive housing covenants denied them the right to own homes in other neighborhoods.

“People didn’t know that we existed,” Ward said. “This is a story many Black natives know, but it is not a part of the story told about San Francisco nationally or globally.”

In 2021, California launched the first statewide task force to study reparations for Black people, which KQED has reported on since its inception. The task force’s final report, published in June 2023, had over 100 policy proposals, as well as a plan to provide direct cash payments to eligible residents.

In February, the California Legislative Black Caucus announced the 14 reparations bills it was prioritizing, a curated list to test the limits of the state Legislature’s commitment to racial justice. None of the introduced bills included cash payments.

The centerpiece was a bill that would have formed the California American Freedman’s Affairs Agency to administer reparations programs, which faced little opposition from lawmakers. Last-minute pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s staff to change the bill divided Black lawmakers and stalled the bill.

In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors formally apologized to Black people and their descendants for the city’s role in perpetuating racism and discrimination in February. But that is the only recommendation, from more than 100 proposals made by the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee, that has won approval.

The Remedy is Solidarity kicked off Saturday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with Ward’s film and a panel discussion moderated by Eric McDonnell, chair of the city’s reparations committee. A group show featuring visual artists also opened at the Swim Gallery.

Today, ZEAL will host a reparations summit at Yerba Buena, including a panel titled “On the Issue of Compensation: Our Cultural Value in the Creative Economy.” The panel, moderated by Anshantia Oso, senior director of Media 2070 and a ZEAL co-founder, will feature Ward and Frimpong.

They will be joined on the panel by Monetta White, executive director and CEO of MoAD, and Otis R. Taylor Jr., KQED’s managing editor of the news and enterprise, and the editor of “The Road to Reparations,” the organization’s project chronicling the reparations effort in California.

The Remedy is Solidarity’s programming includes collages created by youth from the Alice Griffith housing redevelopment project in the Bayview that will be projected in the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

The project will close on Oct. 20 with a healing day at Adam Rogers Park in the Bayview. The park is named after Ward’s great-uncle, who was referred to as the Mayor of Bayview by some residents. Dr. Cheryl Grills, a member of the California Reparations Task Force, will lead the conversation in the context of the film Pathologizing the Black Family.

In Ward’s household, as well as other Black homes in the city, “too much like right” was a common expression, she said. It refers to the most logical or obvious course of action — like an opportunity to address or repair harm — not taken. The koan inspired the project’s title, which Ward offered as both an invitation and a challenge to San Francisco.

“Why wouldn’t we want a better version of our community? Will San Francisco do what is right or would that be too much like right?” she said.

For more information on “The Remedy is Solidarity: A Global Multimedia Anthology on Reparations Volume 1.1: Too Much Like Right,” visit TheRemedyisSolidarity.com.