Keyword Black Arts

A notorious outlaw being escorted to prison by a homesteader and his wife turns out to have satanic powers. He uses them on the man's wife to try to possess her and help him escape.

The life and work of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat have been marked by a long quest for identity, by his Haitian and Puerto Rican family origins and by a founding trip to Africa. To portray this major painter of the 20th century, who died in 1988 at only 27 years old, is also to evoke the place of black American artists in the conservative and racist America of the Reagan years.

Ian James has been creating leather goods for nearly a decade, but only recently realized his dream of opening his own shop. When James got laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic, he took the plunge and opened his namesake boutique in San Francisco. James calls the shop—which includes both custom pieces and items that can be bought off the shelf—a “safe space for black people,” where culturally relatable creativity blooms in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Afatasi The Artist is a San Francisco based mixed-media conceptual artist and futurist. Her artwork—which includes textiles and fine art tapestry, small paintings and murals, metal work and clothing design—is a continuous exploration of the intersectionality of race, culture, gender, class, and geopolitics. “I like to create these things because there were so many who weren’t allowed to live this loudly,” Afatasi says, "and I know how much better the world would be if they had.”

Zakarya Diouf, winner of the San Francisco Foundation 2005 Community Leadership Awards (Helen Crocker Russell Award) - for his vision in unifying the African cultural arts community, for serving as a mentor and educator of young artists, and for his artistic contributions to the development of African-based performing arts.

Born in Ozan, Arkansas in 1933, White traveled the world observing and documenting the Black experience from Nigeria to France to Chicago. He arrived in the Bay Area in 1958, and opened the first Black owned art gallery in San Francisco.