PRAISE FRISCO: RESURRECTION BY DESIGN

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION

WILLIAM SCOTT
BORN 1964, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA; ACTIVE OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

Since he was a child, William Scott’s art has reimagined San Francisco as an inclusive utopia. Rendering architecture, urban plans, and social systems that counter violence, poverty, and illness, Scott proposes audacious futures intended to heal fractured communities. Praise Frisco: Resurrection by Design foregrounds Scott’s work as a designer, living with autism and a diagnosis of schizophrenia, through a collection of architectural models, paintings, graphic logos, letters, and plans that span three decades of advocacy for sites such as Hunters Point, where Scott was raised; Fox Plaza, a multiuse development slated for demolition; and San Francisco General Hospital, where Scott has received treatment. The artist draws these spaces repeatedly from memory, each time redesigning the site with amenities to revive body and soul. Through lavish balconies, pools, gospel centers, generous public goods, and his Skyline Friendly Organizations that resurrect wholesome citizens, Scott challenges the status quo while shaking loose profit-driven urban development strategies. Praise Frisco demonstrates Scott’s evolving multimedia practice, while debuting two new large-scale paintings and experiments with digital rendering software.

ACCESSIBILITY RESOURCES

The gallery is painted in a rusty reddish brown copper color and holds numerous works presented on the walls and on a table in the center of the room. There are two narrow walls that greet us along the sides of the entrance. On the left wall in the entrance way, a framed handwritten letter from the artist introduces us to the installation, Praise Frisco: Resurrection by Design. Beginning with “Dear Cooper Hewitt. Bayview Hunters Point Third Street plans to be shut down for construction for Disney wood resorts…,” – the artist reimagines the neighborhood of Bayview–Hunters Point in San Francisco, California as a place for “Peace makers” with 100 housing units for “the next generations good people and church folks.” On the right wall in the entrance, are three framed architectural line drawings made with ink on white paper. They are stacked vertically and the bottom two include text letting us know these are designs for Pebble Rock Village Gospel Homes, at San Francisco Bay View, Oakdale and Palou Avenue, The Next Hunter’s Point.  

Stepping into the gallery space we see how the right wall opens up to view the elaborate dark wood of the staircase that leads up to the 2nd floor. All along the walls of the room are drawings and paintings interspersed between the back windows, by wood details similar to Corinthian columns, and installed salon-style above and beside a marble fireplace with a carved wooden mantle. As a whole we see the artist’s flat graphic and colorful style pop against the warm orange-brown walls. Many of the works are filled with text, housing and skylines, smiling Black figures and utopian visions. A bright yellow sign for Denny’s restaurant hangs above a well-dressed couple against a deep blue background with slogans such as “The Good Bless and Peace,” “Praised The Lord” and “Hallelujah 1981.” One drawing, left partially uncolored, shows a person being apprehended by a Black female police officer. The cop car in front of them has a sign on the door that reads “Unique Positive Joyful Loving Police.” Small framed drawings show advertising logos for “The Gospelmania Televison Network,” “Zim’s restaurants,” “The Black Family Gospel Television Network,” and “Denny’s,” which frame a painting of a skyline of high rises with countless meticulously rendered windows and text in the blue sky reading “Praise Frisco Under Construction by 2028 Changing The Skyline in To Balconies Resorts.” Underneath, a bright blue painting shows “Monique The Peace Maker God” with a hand on her hip, dressed in a blue skirt suit and a blue wide brim hat with pink embellishments. Several other paintings depict joy and love for the lord, individual housing structures and larger plans for church homes with a crowd of people dressed in suits all with matching wide brimmed hats, and wholesome people packed into a bright multicolored hovering “Skyline Citizen Ship.” A small TV monitor also shows the artist in his studio wearing a shiny black cowboy hat as he zooms into a digital architectural drawing on his iPad and removes the paper covering one of his canvases.  

The roughly seven and a half by five and a half foot large table in the center of the room is covered by a tall glass case and contains a display of artwork and ephemera. A hand painted white and red sign facing the gallery entrance in the middle of the table reads “William Scott’s Workshop Studio.” In front of it are objects including a globe, paint in squeeze tubes, a watercolor set, paint brushes in plastic containers, and a hairdryer. Next to the supplies on the right is a painted cardboard architectural model built on a sheet of green cardboard of a building painted white with a black pointed roof. In brown paint it reads “1999 Old Millennium.” On the other side of the model structure, underneath a small cross on the roof and above the entrance, it reads “Fremont Baptist Church.” On the other side of the art supplies to the left, there is an arrangement of stacked works on paper. One larger paper shows a black and white drawing of towering buildings with countless windows from above. Signs on the buildings read “Hilton”, “Paramount”, and “Gospel Fest Lounge Town House”, and a label on the side gives context to the redevelopment proposal. Another stack of papers shows a printed image of an aerial view of buildings marked with an X with the written heading “Demolished San Francisco General Hospital”. Walking around to the opposite side of the table by the windowed wall, we see another architectural model of a housing building painted beige, copper, black, and white with no roof. Placed in front of the model is a drawing on a long horizontal paper with the heading “Alice Griffith Reconstruction” and “Praise Frisco Love in the City Joy And Peace Gospel City Future of San Francisco As Praise Frisco”. The work contains drawings of new development plans as well as line drawings and the faces of Black people showing joy. Some are line drawings and others are meticulously illustrated in color. The back left corner of the table includes two smaller color drawings laid flat and a larger drawing on a table easel depicting a couple in the colorful interior of their home. 

Acknowledgements

This installation is made possible with additional support from Creative Growth Art Center.