RACE AND ART

The map below shows the major museums of San Francisco. Boxes 1 through 5 designate existing museums. Box 6 designates the approximate location of the proposed new Fisher museum of modern art.

1. DeYoung Museum
2. Academy of Science (natural history museum)
3. Legion of Honor
4. Exploratorium
5. Museum of Modern Art
6. (Proposed) Fisher Museum

Note that the proposed site of the Fisher Museum (#6) is just south of the Golden Gate Bridge, which makes it closer to Marin County than to the southeast corner of San Francisco. The neighborhoods that surround the proposed site are, like Marin County, almost all white and affluent.

The proposed site is as far away from the poor, mostly non-white, high crime neighborhood called Bay View Hunters Point (BVHP), near the arrow-tip.

Recently there has been much discussion of “environmental racism” in BVHP, both past and present. Currently Lennar Corporation is the general contractor of a massive redevelopment effort in the BVHP.

Some BVHP residents have complained about health problems caused by unmitigated dust from the construction. There is also generalized distrust of the Lennar effort, since to many in San Francisco “redevelopment” has meant “negro removal.”

It would go some way toward demonstrating good will if City Powers could locate the new museum, with its jobs and educational opportunities, in the BVHP redevelopment area.

To place yet another museum in the white, affluent part of San Francisco, insinuates that black, poor people don’t or can’t appreciate art or other museum fare. Why can't there be even one museum in the southern half of the city?

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