Ohlone Tribe Artwork Makes It To Market Street

Image: Katie Dorame via SF Arts Commission

Here in San Francisco, we are on Ohlone People’s land, though this doesn’t get acknowledged much. But it’s getting some acknowledgement now, as the Chronicle reports that six Muni bus shelters on Market Street now have Ohlone-inspired artwork, designed by Oakland artist Katie Dorame.

The Ohlone people, who have lived in San Francisco for thousands of years, never got a single monument as a token of gratitude from the settlers who took their land.

So artist Katie Dorame has given them six. 🎨🙌

Read more here:
via @SamWhitingSF https://t.co/bXNNS0lI2M

— SFChronicle Datebook (@SFC_Datebook) April 5, 2021

Dorame, an Indigenous artist herself, was inspired by the removal of the racist “Early Days” statue in 2018. “I was like, ‘If they are going to take something down, they need to put something up because I’m sick of erasure being the only solution,’ ” she told the Chronicle. “I like that they removed the problem, but there needs to be follow-through about what to replace it with.”

Now up on Market Street! Katie Dorame's “We Are, We Were, We Will Be,” a collection of imagined future monuments that honors Native Californian tribes, part of the 2021 Art on Market Street Poster Series.
Images courtesy of Katie Dorame. pic.twitter.com/vMzaJjY8qx

— SF Arts Commission (@SFAC) April 2, 2021

The images are part of the SF Arts Commission’s 2021 Art on Market Street Poster Series. The commission describes the works as “a series of weightless monuments, floating over San Francisco. Each poster consists of three layers that intertwine collaged images of Native Californian iconography.”

Image: SF Arts Commission

“The resulting work honors the Indigenous people whose land we now occupy, while also acknowledging the history of displacement that allowed San Francisco to be built,” they say in a release. “A text at the bottom of each poster reads, ‘You’re currently sitting, standing, or walking on Ohlone land.’”

If you want to see all six original works in their original form, instead of Muni bus shelter form, they’re here on the SF Arts Commission Flickr page.

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