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Fine Arts Gallery presents new artwork reflecting on Ruth Asawa’s Garden of Remembrance on campus 

Eighty-two years ago, Japanese American students from San Francisco State College were forced to withdraw from classes, some taken to prison camps. Twenty-two years ago, San Francisco State University dedicated a garden to honor the Japanese American experience of incarceration during World War II, especially that of the 19 students, and the resilience of this community after their release, designed by acclaimed artist Ruth Asawa. This year, the garden is the subject of further artistic exploration in new works on display in the Fine Arts Gallery on campus. 

“Reflecting on Ruth Asawa and the Garden of Remembrance” features new commissioned works by artists Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Tina Kashiwagi, Paul Kitagaki Jr., Lisa Solomon and TT Takemoto.  

The exhibition opens on Saturday, Feb. 24, with a reception from 1 to 3 p.m., and concludes on Saturday, April 6. The Fine Arts Gallery is open Tuesdays – Fridays, noon – 4 p.m. Admission is free. 

Dedicated in 2002, the Garden of Remembrance is located between Burk Hall and the Fine Arts building. A waterfall cascading from behind the Cesar Chavez Student Center signifies the return of the internees to the coastline after the war. Ten large boulders in the grassy area next to Burk Hall represent each of the camps set up during World War II. The names of the 19 former SF State students expelled and the names of the camps are listed on a bronze, scroll-shaped marker. The marker also includes reproductions of official government documents regarding the internment. 

In an essay for the exhibition’s catalog, artist and cultural producer Weston Teruya describes “Reflecting on Ruth Asawa and the Garden of Remembrance” as a “relationship of care” to family, community and shared stories. 

“This collection of artworks is an intergenerational remembrance: a deep sensory reflection on ancestral practices and cultural traditions that are studied across veils of time and oceans, and the unearthing of elided histories and traumas from beneath stone memorials or out of the recesses of overlooked archives,” Teruya writes. 

“Reflecting on Ruth Asawa and the Garden of Remembrance” is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and SF State’s Instructionally Related Student Activities Fund. 

Learn more about the “Reflecting on Ruth Asawa and the Garden of Remembrance” exhibition. 

The Montford Point Marines were 20,000 African Americans trained in the 1940s 

To commemorate Black History Month, a San Francisco State University documentary team will debut four shorts about the first Black servicemembers in the U.S. Marine Corps. Each of the short films will be available on YouTube. 

The films are oral histories with surviving members of the Montford Point Marines, 20,000 African Americans trained between 1942 and 1949 in Jacksonville, North Carolina. The first recruits began one year after U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlawed racial discrimination in war industries, allowing Black men and women, although only in a segregated fashion.  

San Francisco State History Professor Trevor Getz, who produced the films along with Cinema Professor Daniel L. Bernardi, emphasizes the lasting legacy of the Montford Point Marines and the lessons that can be learned from them. 

“They fought the Second World War and the war against racism together. And then they went on to serve the country and their communities for decades after,” Getz said. “They want to pass on messages that are of great value to us today. The team of filmmakers led by Bernardi managed to capture those messages authentically. The results are powerful.” 

The Veteran Documentary Corps (VDC), an institute based in SF State’s College of Liberal & Creative Arts, created the films as part of its ongoing mission to tell authentic stories of the American veteran experience. Bernardi, VDC’s director, directed three of them, with Eliciana Nascimiento helming the other. Many other Cinema alumni and students also participated, including Andrés Gallegos, Hannah Anderson, Robert Barbarino, Joshua Cardenas, Jian Giannini and Jesse Sutterley.  

“The series in honor of African American contribution to the ideals of American freedom and civil rights was 95% SFSU: from faculty producers, faculty directors, faculty sound designer, alumni director of photograph, editor and animator to a crew of Cinema graduate and undergraduate students,” said Bernardi, who is a veteran of the Iraq war and a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves. 

Later this year, Oxford University Press will publish a related nonfiction comic book, “The First Black Marines,” by Getz and SF State History student Robert Willis. 

Watch the documentaries on YouTube. 

Against the odds, two San Francisco institutions have long collaborated on a grassroots level 

“You’re a stranger now in your home town / With strange faces on once familiar streets.”  

These lines from San Francisco State University Professor Emeritus Alejandro Murguía’s poem “Silicon City” evoke the feelings of many residents of San Francisco’s Mission District, where gentrification has torn apart the community for decades. The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts remains a fixture despite the changes, and it wouldn’t have happened without artists and activists like Murguía. 

“As a marginalized community and community of color, we’re always going to be held to different standards,” said Murguía, the center’s inaugural director who later would earn two degrees from San Francisco State. “And so we always have to come out on top — sobre pasar, go above them — in our talent and our skill and our ability to organize our community so that we can survive.” 

Established in 1977 as inequity and displacement had taken shape in the neighborhood, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (MCCLA) provides a full array of free, affordable classes and programming that cover Chicanos, Central and South America and the Caribbean. More than 10,000 people visit every month. Housed in a 37,500-square-foot building honored on the Historic Register of Historic Places, the MCCLA includes an art gallery and studios, a print shop, classrooms and a theatre. It also plays key roles in the annual Carnaval, offering music and dance courses to teach people to perform in the parade. 

“Coming out of the civil rights movement, people of color were finding their voice in this country. Activists were fighting for ethnic studies programs,” said Martina Ayala, MCCLA executive director. “Thanks to those artists and community activists, we can look back at the Mission District and find multiple anchor institutions that were established by young students, many of them at SFSU, who had a long-lasting impact.” 

Coinciding with student activism at SF State in the 1960s, organizers made a major push for the San Francisco government to establish community centers throughout the city. Murguía (B.A., ’90; MFA, ’92), fellow future SF State Latina/Latino Studies Professor Carlos Cordova (B.A., ’74; M.A., ’79) and other students were among those organizing in the Mission.  

“All these cultural celebrations we enjoy today are great, but the history behind them, they came at a cost. And they came at a cost that many college students paid,” Ayala said. “And I can’t thank them enough for their courage to fight for what they believed in.” 

Over the years many SF State faculty have selected the MCCLA as the venue to feature their creative work. Professor Emeritus Carlos Barón (M.A., ’88), once the MCCLA theatre and dance coordinator, premiered his play “Death and the Artist” there. Music Lecturer John Calloway (M.A., ’03) has been performing at the center for decades. 

Murguía says it continues to serve community needs in multiple ways despite existential challenges to the Mission. Gentrification remains the most persistent in the once working-class neighborhood, which was at its peak majority Latina/Latino but continues to decline. 

“It’s a real hotbed of community activism and culture and helps ground the Mission District community through all these phases of gentrification that it’s gone through the past 47 years the cultural center has been around,” he said. “Nationally, it’s a huge magnet for artists from other parts of the country, and even Latin America, to show up in San Francisco and have a place immediately that grounds them in their art, that supports them in their art, that allows them a foundation.” 

MCCLA and SF State faculty and students continue to share a symbiotic relationship, promoting similar grassroots and progressive values. The center frequently employs SF State students as interns, including several this year. SF State Dean of Students Miguel Ángel Hernández has been invited to join the center’s board of directors.  

“Any cultural event that we create — whether it’s a poetry reading, a gallery exhibit, a Carnaval, a music concert — it’s all part of not just our resistance to the antagonism to our community, but an affirmation that we have been here longer than the Pilgrims,” Murguía said. “And that’s super important that we realize that. Every act of culture, whether it’s a mural or a poetry reading, is in fact an act of resistance — doubly so, in our times, when not just our community is being attacked, but arts, reading, literature and books are under assault.” 

MCCLA’s city-owned building needs much maintenance, which will force it to move temporarily beginning July 1. Ayala says she and other MCCLA supporters are using their activism skills to ensure the city government provides written assurance that allows them to return to the city-owned building once retrofit and repairs are completed, honoring the rent of $1 per year.

“I always tell people that the Mission Cultural Center is the hospital of the soul,” Ayala said. “And we all know that during the pandemic, without the arts we would not have been able to survive. When we’re confined in a space, we need to find a spirit.” 

Learn more about SF State’s Latina/Latino Department.