This past summer I had the honor of being featured in an art show with a close friend, Nikhil Paladugu, commemorating the 40th anniversary of our high school. We were invited to do the show at the very beginning of 2015. This was a very formative period of time, dominated by the Black Lives Matter movement. My eyes were opened to my inherited life advantage as a white, highly-privileged, heterosexual, cis male in America. The suddenness and palpability of this revelation was profound.
As I began to define what art I wished to make for the show, I had only one guiding principle: the work had the have an external focus. I wasn't sure about medium or form, but I was sure that I had to use the privilege and platform of the show to highlight something bigger than "the art of Conor Ward."
Fortunately (read: unfortunately), San Francisco is absolutely ripe with societal issues. For a quick crash course on the contemporary dilemmas captivating SF artists and activists alike, take a stroll past the murals of Clarion Alley in the Mission District. These beautiful and thought-provoking monuments force one to stop and truly appreciate how the local tech boom is violently uprooting and destroying the lives of so many rightful SF residents. Far too often, those on the losing end of this city-wide process of rapid gentrification are people of color. A large reason why I chose to base my artwork on the current SF gentrification crisis was because I felt an overwhelming obligation to educate myself about SF's past and current histories relevant to the issue.
Unlike so many, I feel that my family has a secure residential foothold in San Francisco. This is largely due to our collective privilege as well-educated white people. I do not intend to completely discount my parents' hard work in life, however I feel that it is essential to acknowledge that their bank statements are inextricable linked to their whiteness. As someone who does not feel the trap of gentrification closing in on his family's backyard, I felt an obligation to lend my voice to the cause of those who do.
As I began producing work for the show, I decided that I needed to develop a metaphorical language in order to convey a compelling visual narrative. I've always been enamored with San Francisco's Victorian housing, having grown up in a late 19th-century Victorian in Pacific Heights. However, as I began to think more critically about how tenuous home ownership has become for so many residents, I came to a startling realization about my beloved Victorians. Undeniably ostentatious and caked in ornamental moulding, the quintessential SF Victorian is one of the city's most powerful and well-known symbols.
The famous Queen Anne Victorians on Alamo Square, commonly referred to as the "Painted Ladies" of San Francisco.
Due to its salience as a symbol for San Francisco, the Victorian house is an obvious choice for an emblem to represent SF housing. Due to its opulent, vibrant, and colorful exterior, the Victorian house is also a potent symbol for distraction. The ornate Victorian facade is a perfect metaphor for the way in which the superficial San Francisco landscape camouflages the heart-wrenching realities of foreclosure and eviction playing out every day in the city. All of SF's primary attractions (including the tech boom, the Golden Gate Bridge, the myriad lush parks, the incredible vantages, and the pleasant drought weather), along with the beautiful Victorian housing scattered throughout the city, make up a gleaming yet thin veneer that prevents many from seeing what's really going on. Due to their ostentatious decoration, imposing scale, and colossal price tags, SF Victorians are also apt symbols for SF's growing elite population and the ever-widening socioeconomic gap between old residents and newcomers.
Now that I had developed a complex symbol in the Victorian house, I needed to determine how I would depict "loss of home" in a compelling manner. I needed figure out how to represent those being displaced in a respectful way. One night, as I was walking home from the studio, I passed a ruffled but dignified group of pigeons. All of a sudden that moment that all artists crave happened. Pigeons were the perfect allegory for the strong, systemically oppressed and disadvantaged people being forcibly pushed out. Ever since high school, I've been fascinated by the city's pigeons; at some point during my senior year, I realized that I felt very strongly that pigeons were completely under-appreciated.
A ceramic pigeon I made when I was a high school senior. At the time, I was fascinated by the way that pigeons are constantly under attack in urban environments. We threaten their ability to nest by putting bird spikes on the tops of roofs and awnings; we pollute their homes endlessly and shamelessly; some of us even go out of our way to try to run them over in the same vehicles that we use to pollute their air.
You'll often hear pigeons referred to as the "rats of the bird world" and called "dirty" and "disease-ridden." I've been in many cars in which the driver has tried consciously to run them over. I've seen even more people try to kick pigeons in the streets and parks of the city. You might be thinking "it's just a dumb bird, what's the big deal?"
The big deal is that this hatred of pigeons is totally unjustified, and exposes a truly ugly tendency of human nature. Pigeons are incredibly tough and resilient animals, who seem to be able to adapt and survive in highly polluted, dangerous human urban environments better than the entirety of the animal kingdom, minus rats, mice, and a host of insects (all of which are smaller targets, with presumably smaller diets). Furthermore, to my knowledge, they are not responsible for any modern health/disease epidemics, despite not taking a daily bath and eating off of the street frequently.
One of the seven ceramic pigeons included in the "Dilemma Birds" installation, made Summer 2015.
So why is it that pigeons are viewed so negatively? Why, instead, aren't they seen in a more positive light, as a symbol of the toughness of the underdog/underprivileged. My best explanation is that humans struggle to identify with other creatures living under drastically different circumstances than themselves, both human and non-human. (Wo)mankind's egotism is perhaps its greatest flaw, and potentially its downfall. When we fail to identify with others, we often "other" and antagonize and distance ourselves from them (and their humanity, if they're human). Often we become their oppressor due to our lack of understanding/common ground. The way that pigeons are too frequently talked about employs the same language as when seemingly nice, hospitable people say things like: "isn't it nice that they've started to clean up the Tenderloin. It used to be so dirty and it had so many homeless people." Whenever a neighborhood is gentrified or "cleaned up," underprivileged people like the homeless are mercilessly and inhumanely mistreated and dehumanized. They are unfairly discriminated against because of aspects of their identity and appearance beyond their control, such as their personal hygiene. They are seen as an unsightly infestation, much like pigeons.
Panoramic view of the "Dilemma Birds" installation from my joint art show, Shifting Focus.
Wherever a human is suffering, there is an underlying systemic failure that contributed to that person's disenfranchisement. While it might be true that a particular homeless individual might smell badly, it is equally true that that individual is stronger and more resilient than all of their counterparts who have the privilege of a roof over their heads. In periods of rapid gentrification, we should obviously all do whatever is in our power to support the people who are being forcibly erased. The first step of supporting these valuable, dignified human beings is recognizing the adversity they face, the strength and dignity they exude, and the widespread misconceptions that often conceal that strength and dignity.
Detail of the "Dilemma Birds" installation, which was apart of my joint art show, Shifting Focus.