500 Capp Street
(David Ireland House)
Located in San Francisco’s Mission District, 500 Capp Steet’s mission is to encourage artistic experimentation, support new modes of living, and build community. 500 Capp Street holds the legacy of artist-driven spaces and Bay Area conceptualism through process-oriented and provocative arts programming.
As the 2025 Curatorial and Archival intern, I worked in David Ireland’s archive to curate works from his collection to put in coversation with Mildred Howard’s exhibit at our house. I installed all of the works and they were up for 8 weeks alongside Howard’s Collaborating with the Muses work. In addition, I created an imformational pamphlet about the works.
Curator’s Statement:
by Lark Chang-Yeh and Justin Nagle
Before obtaining his MFA at SFAI, Ireland partook in colonial acts of extractive collection through the import and sale of cultural objects and animal remains in his store Hunter Africa. Additionally, he led safaris in subsaharan African countries Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania---actions deeply entangled with colonial spectacle and exploitation. In light of this, we can understand that the works that deal with landscape, especially the abstracted painted photos of Skellig, could possibly operate as questions or attempts at reconciling one’s complicity in shaping landscapes through a colonial lens. As well as these attempts at understanding this legacy of colonial violence, they also ask questions of the viewer. Where do I fit within this landscape? How does the obfuscation leave open understandings beyond a white-colonial gaze, does it? Does abstraction, in both the photographs and sculptural objects, perpetuate or reorient this gaze/understanding?
These works, in conversation with the work by Mildred Howard, allow for deeper questions around violent legacies of religious oppression at the hands of European colonizers under the guise of helping the native population to become civilized, respectable, and/or worthy of citizenry. This connection is drawn not only through shared formal concerns of color, the red fabric of Howard’s work and the red paint/pigment of Ireland’s, but also in the religious idolatry, primarily of the cross, present in both.
Through my role as a the 2024 Digital Media and Programming intern at 500 Capp Street, I’ve learned how art organizations can build meaningful relationships between artists, art, and local communities. We’ve engaged community members through collective conversations and poetry readings about grief and decolonization, community walks with storytelling and tea, performances involving the public, and free writing workshops.
Below: A sample of my work for 500 Capp Street. I collaborated with one of our local artists, Champoy @champchampchampoy to document and film their mural on the outside of our building. We also had a mural walk through with the community and the artists---giving them a tour of two murals we did in the Mission District and explaining their context. We had conversations while painting their mural, also talking to residents and community members on the busy street corner. I took pictures of their mural and created a promotional video in the style of David Ireland painting the walls of his home, which was currently screening in our museum. I also created Instagram stories to promote the upcoming muralists.