A Juneteenth art exhibit featuring the works of eight Black artists from studios in San Francisco’s Hunters Point Shipyard opened this week in the historic Bayview Opera House.
Artist Dolores Gray hand paints a tile in her studio in San Francisco's Hunters Point Shipyard Studios. Gray founded a group called Black On Point to promote Black artists working in the shipyard.
Gray, who celebrated Juneteenth growing up in New Jersey via her Texan-born father, contributed several pieces to the Juneteenth exhibition. Her hope is the art exhibit will draw more attention to the Black artists who make up a small percentage of the total artists working in the shipyard. "The show at the opera house is I think important," Gray said,"because part of what we’re trying to do is make the neighborhoods here in the Bayview and the wide community more aware of what we are and do."
The Hunters Point Shipyard art studios are a cornucopia of artists working in different mediums -- from painting to sculpture to even stop-motion animation. In his studio in Building 101, artist Ahmad Walker creates stop-motion cartoons featuring handcrafted Black characters who appear in his series The Adventures of Brothers & Behr. Artist Ahmad Walker sits with characters he makes for the stop-motion films he makes in his studio in San Francisco's Hunters Point Shipyard Studios.
"There’s no representation for African-Americans in stop-motion," Walker said, flanked by the miniature sets where he painstakingly photographs his characters to create their movement for his films.