Recent Free Public Talks
Video Archive
2026 (February-December)

Wed., May 27, 7:30pm

AI and Empire Building

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

We bring together several sharp critics of the hype machine that has long characterized the internet and our successive tech booms, currently blowing up in the AI bubble. Lost in the hand wringing over the more exaggerated claims of boosters and doomers is the ongoing reproduction of a colonial seizure of what should be our common wealth. This process has long historic roots and in some ways it is thanks to our amnesiac culture that the current crop of billionaire investors and tech bros have gotten away with doing it all again. Wendy Liu, Alex Hanna, Tamara Kneese, and Elizabeth Travelslight.

Video here.

Saturday, May 16, Noon-2 pm

Wide Open Town

A Walking Tour

Author Nan Alamilla Boyd journeys with us through the 20th century San Francisco of gay men and lesbians, examining the culture that developed around the bar scene and homophile activism when the “City That Knows How” became a town where anything goes. Boyd's Wide Open Town is a vivid re-creation of bar and drag life, an absorbing portrait of central figures in the communities, and a provocative chronicling of this period in the country's most transgressive city. Learn about early history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement prior to 1965 as we walk together along Polk Street and into the Tenderloin.

Video here.

Thursday, April 16, 7:30pm

San Francisco: A Liberal Oligarchy?

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

New tech oligarchs have thrown their money around to shape city politics for the past decade. We now have a billionaire bluejeans heir for mayor. We explore how organized money and corporate power managed to steer San Francisco going back through the post-WWII cold war, the long decline of Catholic morality, and the explosion of social movements and the sexual revolution the city is known for. Join political scientist Lincoln Mitchell, former supervisor and Mayoral candidate Tom Ammiano, and neighborhood activist and writer Romalyn Schmaltz for a spirited romp through the tangled and conflicted histories of the past few decades.

Video here.

Wednesday, March 25, 7:30 pm

Talking Monument—Mobile Multimedia Installation

A Public Talk at 518 Valencia Street

Chris "L7" Cuadrado's artist activation uses multimedia technology to create an alternative statue emerging from the rubble of what has been torn down. Chris investigates the act of reappropriation to rebuild the memory of Junipero Serra. Based on collected ephemera, photographs, video footage, and sourced miniature replicas related to the statue, a screening and sound sculpture is a meditation on the figure of Padre Junipero Serra. Attendees will be invited to reflect on monuments, legacy, and public space.

Part of Shaping Legacy: San Francisco Monuments & Memorials, a project of San Francisco Arts Commission, with Adriana Camarena, Kim Shuck, and Chris Cuadrado. Thanks to Association of Ramaytush Ohlone for guidance throughout the year.

Video here.

Wed., March 11, 7:30pm

City of Redwood

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

James Michael Buckley’s 2024 City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry reconnects us to the built environment from San Francisco all the way up to Eureka in the far north of California, past and present. David Schmidt’s brand new majesterial San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History contains a close look at the historic forests of the Bay Area and how they were cut down to help build the region. Together these speakers will help us see how profoundly the iconic trees of the west coast literally undergird our everyday lives even today.

Video here.

Wed., February 25, 7:30pm

Memory Keeping from Indigenous Perspectives

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

Shaping San Francisco’s year-long case study of the Padre Junípero Serra statue included a folklife-based, community-led research process centered on memory-keeping practices. Indigenous community researchers explored everyday practices from their own cultures that carry collective knowledge. The researchers included members of Urban Native communities, Indigenous migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, and urban youth. Their research invites reflection on how genocide, relocation, and migration continue to erode Indigenous ways of knowing, and how communities continue to protect and hold on to them. The process was facilitated by storyteller Adriana Camarena. Several community researchers will share their findings. The discussion will be presented in Spanish and English.

Part of Shaping Legacy: San Francisco Monuments & Memorials, a project of San Francisco Arts Commission

Video here.

Wed., February 11, 2026, 7:30pm

The Priest, the Imperialist, and the Sculptor

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

Please join us in closing a year-long case study of the Padre Junipero Serra statue. Jonathan Cordero (Association of Ramaytush Ohlone) critically examines the romantic myth that supports the veneration of Serra and reveals the actual calamitous impact of the mission system. Chris Carlsson explains how an unlikely series of events led to the so-called “Mission Revival”, the commissioning of the statue by James Phelan, and giving Serra an undeserved new role in a manufactured public memory. He reveals that the statue's placement in Golden Gate Park in 1907 in fact bolstered a white supremacist agenda at the dawn of the 20th century. LisaRuth Elliott explores Douglas Tilden, the cosmopolitan sculptor revered in the deaf community, and his many other contributions to the SF civic art collection and beyond. This evening is a chance to talk about the reanimation of a man through a monument, the fraught relationship between a patron of the arts and his protegé, and how these honorific likenesses and what they are supposed to signify become part of our urban space.

Part of Shaping Legacy: San Francisco Monuments & Memorials, a project of San Francisco Arts Commission

Video here.