Public Talks

September 25, 7:30 pm

Art & Politics: Will Maynez Interprets Diego Rivera

Even if you don't know Will Maynez, you may know his work about Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity mural (1940). Over 600,000 people saw it while it was on display at SFMOMA from June 2021 to January 2024. Over the two decades prior, while housed in City College's Diego Rivera Theatre, Will collected mural stories and discovered an unknown episode of composer George Gershwin going to Mexico, where he got slightly politically radicalized by the artists he met. Will has written a play about a real-life party thrown for Gershwin and relates how the play came to be and shares selections from the work.

This is part of a series of solo artists giving a behind-the-scenes and indepth look at what inspires them in the interrelationship between art and politics.

All our Talks are free but we welcome donations. Donate now!

October 9, 7:30 pm

The First Post-Pandemic Political Era: After WWI

American Midnight author Adam Hochschild and Building the Population Bomb author Dr. Emily Merchant (UC Davis) A critical reappraisal of the first post-pandemic political era after WWI, with its brutal authoritarian assault on civil liberties, and overt racism bolstered by the pseudo-scientific Eugenics movement (that continues to lurk in today's AI, Hi-Tech "TESCREAL" madness), and the white supremacist hysteria about a “foreign population bomb.” This history rhymes a month before the 2024 election with the racist anti-immigrant bombast of the Republican campaign.

All our Talks are free but we welcome donations. Donate now!

Sunday, October 13, 3-6:30 pm

Potrero Hill, Then and Now:
Photo Hunt!

A SPECIAL OFFSITE EVENT!

RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org to participate.

Shaping SF, Center for the Book, Potrero Hill Archives Project host a “Get to know your neighborhood” local culture gathering/photo taking exercise which takes the form of guerrilla history in north Potrero and Showplace Square. We will post 10–20 historic photos where they were originally taken. Participants traverse Mission Bay to Potrero Hill taking current photos as the "treasure" they hunt for and collect. Folks end up at Center for the Book with their collection to share and enjoy nosh and drinks and mingling.

Event is free but we welcome donations. Donate now!

October 16, 7:30 pm

Rebel Airwaves: Looking back at 75 years of KPFA

In 1949, a group of pacifists launched America’s first listener-supported radio station. Despite government repression, infighting, and countless financial crises, KPFA has managed to survive 75 years. Join Liam O’Donoghue, host of the East Bay Yesterday podcast, as he explores stories of the people who helped the station achieve this remarkable milestone.

All our Talks are free but we welcome donations. Donate now!

October 23, 7:30 pm

Anti-Apartheid Organizing Then and Now

With the explosion of campus-based organizing and occupations against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we juxtapose historic anti-Apartheid organizing with the current events. With deep knowledge about the historic efforts to overthrow South African Apartheid in the 1980s, Dr. Peter Cole, author of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, teams up with local scholar and activist Eddie Yuen (a student at UC Berkeley during the original movement, and who knows the decades-long history of alter-globalization and radical movements better than most), and the Arab Resource Organizing Committee’s own Lara Kiswani, a key organizer in the Bay Area’s robust efforts to block the Gaza genocide and to fight for Palestinian liberation, to present an historically informed look at the dynamics of current protest and politics. Co-sponsored by Left in the Bay.

All our Talks are free but we welcome donations. Donate now!

December 4, 7:30 pm

Refusing Silicon Valley

Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley pulled back the façade on the Horatio Alger myths surrounding tech work and start-up culture and left no doubt about the emptiness of life in that world. Erin McElroy, a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, has turned her prodigious analytical skills to the expansion of the tech industry to the periphery of the former Iron Curtain in Romania in their new Silicon Valley Imperialism. As San Francisco gropes its way through yet another faltering tech bubble pushed by AI hucksters and grifters, join us for a blisteringly honest look at what the titans of silicon are really promoting.

All our Talks are free but we welcome donations. Donate now!