The San Francisco Arts Commission and media organization CatchLight will open a two-part exhibition in City Hall next week, titled “Care in the Time of Covid-19: Inside our pandemic response and portraits of resilient San Franciscans.”
The exhibition will feature art and photography from CatchLight fellows and San Francisco’s COVID Command Center artists in residence that capture the hopeful spirit of San Franciscans during the pandemic.
“As chroniclers of the challenges faced by our hardest hit neighbors, their work uplifted communities where disaster service workers were deployed, shining light on those helping each other in times of need, sharing the best of San Francisco,” Director of Cultural Affairs Ralph Remington said in a statement. “It’s the perfect exhibition to reboot our SFAC Galleries program in City Hall.”
The CatchLight fellows featured in the showcase are Felix Uribe, who documented the Tenderloin neighborhood during COVID-19 in partnership with the Bay City News Foundation, and Yesica Prado, who worked with San Francisco Public Press to document life in the city’s vehicular living community.
The CCC Artists in Residence program, put on by SFAC and SF Public Library, hired local photographers and artists to document the happenings of the city’s COVID-19 operational headquarters, which frequently partnered with health care providers, residents and community organizations.
The showcase will feature the work of three artists in the program; Ajuan Mance, who interviewed and drew portraits of disaster workers, and Mabel Jimenez and S. Renee Jones, who both captured the city’s efforts to providing testing, vaccinations and information during the pandemic. The three artists are also in the SF Public Library’s COVID Community Time Capsule archive.
The exhibition, located on the lower level and North Light Court in City Hall, will be free and open to the public starting this Monday and running through April 15.