From interior decorator Edward Searles who donated the Mark Hopkins mansion at the top of Nob Hill to be used as an art school and gallery to photography department founder Minor White, SFAI librarian & archivist Jeff Gunderson and former SFAI (and SFPL) library staffer Jim Van Buskirk examine the role LGBTQ2+ artists, teachers, and students have played throughout the school’s history, exploring the lives and work of faculty such as Jerry Burchard and James Broughton, alumni like Bernice Bing, Catherine Opie, Win Ng, Annie Leibowitz, and Jess, and cultural fellow travelers including the Cockettes, David Dashielle, and Martin Wong.
Jeff Gunderson has been the Librarian and Archivist at SFAI’s Anne Bremer Memorial Library since 1981. Gunderson is the author of an essay on “The Art Education of Ed Hardy,” in the DeYoung Museum’s retrospective catalog, Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin, the title essay for The Moment of Seeing: Minor White and the California School of Fine Arts, and “A Combination of Accidents: The San Francisco Art Scene in the 1940s,” published in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 75 Years of Looking Forward, which won the Art Librarian’s Society Worldwide Books Award for 2010. His introductory essay to Black Power/Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch was published in September, 2012 by the Pirkle Jones Trust.
Jim Van Buskirk’s first library job was at the San Francisco Art Institute where he was active in the Gay League in the late 1970s. He helped co-found the Gay and Lesbian Interests Round Tables of both California Library Association and Art Libraries Society of North America, and served as an editor of the Bibliography of Gay and Lesbian Art published in 1994 by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the College Art Association. Van Buskirk worked as Program Manager of the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center from 1992 through 2007. He is the co-author of Gay By the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (Chronicle Books, 1996) as well as other books, essays and articles.
This VAS lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition series From the Tower: Collecting Queer Histories, on view October 16–November 3 in the Main Gallery at SFAI—Fort Mason Campus.
This event is sponsored in part by a grant from Grants for the Arts and by the Koret Foundation.
Image: Performance in the SFAI Courtyard, c. 1978. Photo by Ed Ritter. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Institute.
