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Walking Through San Francisco Labor History |
From the Marines Memorial Theatre to the Lusty Lady, San Francisco’s great unionized performance and art houses are getting visits today during a 13-site walking tour through labor history.
The ”Bay Area Now 5″ annual exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is featuring the walking tour and gallery installation it calls “Syndicate.” Along the way, artist Jessica Tully will be installing sidewalk stencil images of union workers based on historic photos in front of major theaters and art museums throughout the city.
The sponsors say the walking tour “unearths the sometimes historic, sometimes mundane and sometimes downright sexy union organizing occurring at each venue.”
The San Francisco Museum of Modern art, for example, opened in 1935, but workers didn’t have a union until the 1980s, when a female assistant curator and librarian led them in joining Office and Professional Workers Local 3. As unionized workers, they negotiated contracts protecting their wages, health care and pensions, and went on strike in 1995 to protect their jobs.
Dancers at the Lusty Lady, fed up with the exploitive aspects of the adult entertainment industry, organized with SEIU in 1997, more than 20 years after the Lady opened.
The walking tour starts at noon today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and will be led by Tully, Kim Munson and historians from the Labor Archives and Research Center.
Today’s walk will hit seven of the sites, and the tour of the remaining six sites is slated for Oct. 4. For more information, visit the art center’s website.
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