Ralph Remington

spaces where they make contact, Remington is focused on ensuring that the arts landscape that people return to is significantly more vital and equitable than they left it.

sM | How is the SFAC contributing to the equity and diversity efforts of San Francisco arts organizations?

RR — SFAC has a legislative mandate that dates back to the early nineties, requiring our public funding to prioritize BIPOC communities and artists as well as women and people with disabilities. So this cultural equity endowment fund is one of the first of its kind in the nation. We give millions of dollars a year to these historically underserved communities. But our work has evolved to do even more over the last decade; we’ve upped our game in terms of outreach and technical assistance to ensure that the artists we commission for public art, who exhibit in our galleries, or those we fund through our grants are representative of these BIPOC or LGBTQ communities that define San Francisco’s rich diversity.

The cultural centres we support are rooted in communities of colour, and more recently, San Francisco voters passed legislation to stabilize arts funding from year to year with an emphasis for funding BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving organizations. We’re also going to roll out, in the coming weeks, funding to serve the Black community as part of the city’s effort to reallocate funding from law enforcement. Post-George Floyd, Mayor London Breed moved $120 million from law enforcement to cultural efforts. So doing our work with an anti-racist lens is ongoing because inequities will remain for a long time. Our country was built on it—in fact, I almost left and went to Canada if the election had gone otherwise [laughs]. Fortunately it didn’t, not that I wouldn’t have wanted to live in Toronto.

The fund reallocation is pretty exciting and forward-thinking. The whole Defund the Police movement is really taking shape with a practical lens. It’s one thing to say “Defund the Police,” but it’s another thing to ask: if resources are going to be reallocated, where are they going? And I was a city councillor in Minneapolis; George Floyd was killed right down the street from where Pillsbury House Theatre is, the theatre I founded in Minneapolis, so I knew that community intimately…yeah. Life is wild.

sM | What are some affordable and impactful goals that the Commission might pursue to support the city’s artistic community?

RR — COVID hit the arts community hard; our artists and arts organizations are hurting, and the end of financial duress is not yet in sight. What the SFAC did was administer, through a non-profit organization, a Universal Basic Income grant that supported 130 artists with $1000 a month for 6 months. And we provided funds for organizations to reopen safely so they can get back to serving the public and earning revenue. We provided arts educators with the supplies and support that they need to do their work in a digital environment now, and we’ve pivoted just about all our funding and general operational support so that organizations can use these grants for their most pressing financial needs like salaries and rent. So the city of San Francisco is incredibly committed to its non-profit arts sector because we know that the arts are a cornerstone to recovery—not just for our sector but for the city as a whole.

This pandemic has made everyone think differently about what is a workplace, what is the role of society, what is the role of government in a society for everyday people? How does government work? Canada has a great history of subsidization and the United States has just depended on the free market in a lot of cases, just letting people fend for themselves in a Darwinian way. San Francisco seems to have more of a commitment to humanity and to the soul of individuals, and realizes that artists drive a society. Artists not only tell us who we are, but also who we were and who we aspire to be. That’s why arts and culture are so important and why people fight over it, why they fight over statues coming down because they sometimes have an erroneous idea of who we are or who we were, and they have a discordant idea about where we’re going and what that’s based on. Is it based on white supremacy, or is it based on some new future that we can imagine together as a progressive society? Those are the battles; that’s what we’re fighting for right now.

But the U.S. is in a worshipful relationship with money; and not just the U.S., but the western world worships money in a way that’s unhealthy. It’s given us technology and benefits too, but the bad things, the greed, the colonialism, taking over space and pushing people out of space, the space itself becoming unaffordable…It's a crucial problem that we need to get our arms around to become a better place in the future. We often say in the United States, “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” but do we really mean that? I’m assuming that we do, so let’s put our money where our mouth is.

sM | How will the SFAC evaluate which of the city's monuments should be retained, and what will you bring personally to the process?

RR — We are launching the Monuments and Memorials Advisory committee process that engages the public in determining the guidelines we as a city should follow, especially when considering which monuments should come down and which should stay up—and that they have additional didactics that tell the full historical narratives which are so often whitewashed with these statues. So it’s important that the city doesn’t make those decisions in isolation because it's the public that we’re serving.

Too often, Black and Indigenous communities are traumatized by seeing the ideal of white supremacy venerated in the public realm. We can talk about equity and representation but until we address the celebration of colonialism, slavery, and violence embedded in the narratives of these monuments, then it’s just talk. So we’re looking at how the future monuments can venerate ideals, events, and individuals that speak to inclusion, racial equity, and feminism in these public artworks. That’s the focus, and I’ll be co-chairing that committee.

My personal mantra is to try to give space and voice to marginalized and disenfranchised people, to provide a platform for them. To me, in this new role with SFAC, if we centre the BIPOC community then we are centering America, and ostensibly the globe as well. It’s only when we don’t centre BIPOC people that we aren’t actually centering the country, that we aren’t centering the globe. And if we don’t centre women, we’re not actually centering the country. It’s by centering marginalized and disenfranchised populations—the LGBTQ community, the disabled, the economically disenfranchised, youth, our senior community—these are people that are often forgotten or abused or misused and pushed to the margins. If we don’t centre them we’re not actually centering America and we’re not adhering to “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” And that’s what we should be doing. That’s who we are. That’s who I am.