The Armory Show
Saturday Novemver 8th 2003, 4-7 PM##
A collaboration with POND
This show has become known as the U-Haul truck show. The worst rainstorm of the year happened through during our art show, so being resourceful as we are, we found a way.
This show is part of Crosswalks, a 12 venue Mission art walk. There will be openings at galleries and spaces between 14th and 18th streets and Mission and Guerrero.
This exhibition’s namesake originates from the first Armory Show in New York, 1913. Considered one of the most influential events shaping the history of ‘legitimate’ American art history, the original Armory exhibition showcased over 1500 works of European and American ‘avant-garde’ artists whose work was previously refused through official art channels. Despite the general audience’s responses of outrage at some of the more boundary-pushing artwork such as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ many of the featured artists (Picasso, Cezanne, Georges Braque, Duffy, Degas, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Lautrec, and Duchamp) were later considered the 20th century’s most significant artists.
While the original Armory Show was considered an edgy maneuver and avant-garde for its time, this November’s Armory Show goes further by reaching working people and its site specific relevance to its surrounding community in the Mission district. In the past 5 years, San Francisco’s Mission district has experienced an especially acute housing shortage attributed to the influx of Silicon Valley dotcommers and the mayor Willie Brown’s closing of several homeless shelters. Despite the displacement of Latino families, homeless individuals, and artists, the San Francisco armory reportedly has 22 fully equipped living quarters built for officers and an additional abundance of space. Located in the heart of the city’s struggle against gentrification, the armory thus symbolizes a cultural excess and cruel irony. Taking artistic control of a section of the Armory for 3 hours symbolically reclaims the city by its vibrant artistic community who has been fractured by displacement.
