Beneath My Skin is The History of My Beauty
The San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries is pleased to present a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Ron Moultrie Saunders in Café Valor, located in the lobby of the Veterans Building just steps from the SFAC Main Gallery. Beneath My Skin is The History of My Beauty employs storytelling as a gateway to talk about cultural history, as well as Saunders’ family mythology, and personal identity. Physical artifacts such as rope, cotton, snakeskin, and scale models of railroad tracks refer to my own family history, while the salt and water used in the creation of the work references circumstances related to the African Diaspora.
Saunders states, “I grew up believing that my heritage included a Jewish great-grandfather who married a Cherokee woman. However, I recently discovered that this is a family myth, not fact. This has challenged me to reconsider my own identity. How does this truth change me? How indelible is family mythology? Can this be a point of intersection with others?”
The works in this exhibition are photograms: photographic images created without the use of a camera. To create a photogram, objects are placed on top of light sensitive, silver-based photographic paper and then exposed to light, creating a silhouetted image. Saunders is drawn to this early photographic process because the resulting images emphasize form and structure.
About the Artist:
Ron Moultrie Saunders, a co-founding member of the 3.9 Art Collective, is a San Francisco based photographic artist, landscape architect and, teacher. BART has commissioned Saunders to create artwork for the Market Street Canopies in San Francisco and 19th Street Station in Oakland. His artwork is in the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection for projects he completed at the Bayview Linda Brooks-Burton Branch Library, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, Laguna Honda Hospital and, Public Utilities Commission New Headquarters in San Francisco. He has exhibited throughout the US, and has been an artist-in-residence at both the STAR (Shipyard Trust for the Arts) in the Hunter’s Point Shipyard in San Francisco and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. His studio is located at Minnesota Street Projects in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco.
Photo credit: Ron Moultrie Saunders. Emerging II