"Who's Afraid of San Francisco?" is a head first plunge by a broad sampling of Bay Area artists into our biggest anxieties. Each contributing artist is looking not just at fear, but at what drives and motivates the most far-reaching fears that our city instills in the popular media, and thereby, in our local populace and that of the rest of the country. These artists range from internationally famous icons to maverick emerging talent and work in a wide range of materials, exploring a tremendous breadth of ideas. How are our challenges to the contrasting values of other parts of America manifesting themselves? How can they be tinkered with through pictures and inventive objects, through tropes that tease out fear of change, fear of shifting identities, ideas of family and communal responsibility? Ultimately the work here asks us to consider if San Francisco is a vanguard for America's most hopeful future or a relic of liberal dogmatism.

Gay marriage and San Francisco as the Gay Mecca, old and new anti-war movements, workers' rights and social activism, massive earthquakes and their cultural scars, intravenous drug use, medical marijuana, our immigrant history and racial injustice - all of these aspects of life in the Bay Area in some way pump up the nation's blood pressure or offer a contrasting, potentially frightening new way of seeing, and all of them inform specific works in the exhibition.

Drawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border in the late 70's, and also in Europe in the late 90's, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters Chagoya examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that continues to riddle contemporary American foreign policy. He is currently associate professor at Stanford University's Department of Art and Art History and his work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others.

Phillip Dvorak's fractured drawings are rooted in the emotive and erotic expressiveness of the human body, to which he has always returned as a limitless source of inspiration. A recent recipient of a Ragdale Grant, Dvorak also appeared in the Arnot Art Museum's "Re-presenting Representation VIII" which closed in January, 2006. For "Who's Afraid of San Francisco?" Dvorak has chosen to investigate the generally discomfiting themes of sexual bondage (both gay and straight).

Rodney Ewing has contributed the following statement, reflecting on a series of "Raised Fist" images he is creating for the exhibition:

I have been watching the news lately regarding the protests relating to immigrants' rights. I started to think about how the Bay Area has always been the seat and the center for protest, as well as the most vocal about change. One symbol of protest and perhaps the most obvious and consistent has been the clenched fist. John Carlos and Tommie Smith held theirs up during the 1968 Olympics to call attention to the plight of African Americans. For the Black Panthers it became a symbol of resistance as well as unity. This symbol is universally recognized, when this hand is "thrown up" anywhere in the world people pay attention not with fear but with respect.

The pieces I'm making for the exhibition will honor the Bay Area's tradition of protest and activism, by illustrating the fist as a tidal wave or "tsunami" that constantly moves from shore to shore. But instead of landing with destructive force, it falls with the capacity for justice and change. I am a big fan of the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai, the piece I am proposing will be executed in a similar style.

Laurel Roth and Andy Diaz Hope will collaborate on two projects for this exhibition. The first relates to intravenous drug culture and the second to California's history of "Sundown Towns," communities that posted warnings to minorities, most often African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese and Jews, that they were expected to vacate the town by sundown. Laurel Roth's work is about finding patterns of adaptation, ecology and anthropology in an urban environment. Her sculptures are made from leftovers of city life - second-hand billiard balls and salvaged acrylic block, pharmaceuticals, 99 cent store beauty products, and fragments of street plants - deconstructed, carved, polished, and reassembled. Andy Diaz Hope's two most recent series are "Everybody is Somebody's Terrorist" focusing on hand knit balaclavas that transform their wearers into terrorists, documented in photos and films, and "The Morning After Portraits," portraits of strangers and friends using rows of custom manufactured colored capsules glued to a white foundation.

Hung Liu's paintings derive from her experiences as a culturally aware artist and intellectual born into the melee of China's civil war, educated through the crucible of China's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and arrived as an iconic figure and one of the most important artists currently working in the Bay Area. She is an exceptional draftsman and trained muralist accustomed to working in a large format. Three self-portraits focusing on three identities (complete with reproductions of identity cards) will hang in the show. The three, mixed creations of collage, paint and printmaking, are called "Immigrant, Proletarian and Citizen," and constitute a reflection on Liu's life. Almost every Bay Area museum has at some time exhibited her work and it is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Smithsonian among many others.

All of Frederick Loomis' work can best be understood as a manifold expression of a singular project and vision, a vast "Third Testament" in the ecstatic tradition of Henry Darger and William Blake, and incorporating pseudo-mythological elements such as ideas from George Lucas' Star Wars saga. Recently featured in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts "Bay Area Now" exhibition, Loomis creates highly diagrammatic drawings (either schematics for future computers or mind maps), illustrations, tarot cards and documentation (business plans and project proposals), all under the pseudonym of Edward Mathew Taylor. Such illustrations lead to prophetic writings that make up the bulk of this magnum opus. Taylor works through a trans-dimensional medium (a gold-skinned woman named Miriam) relating a startlingly detailed vision of the rise of "human computers," sentient humanoid computers who achieve souls, their banishment and exodus from earth some one thousand years from now and their return to claim the earth as their promised land. The vastness and specificity of Loomis' ideas speak to long-standing Bay Area traditions of the syncretic creation of new religions, often incorporating concepts from the three traditions of the book (Islam, Christianity and Judaism), agnosticism, science-fiction and various veins of Asian esoteric mysticism.

Michele Pred is a conceptual collage/installation artist who works with recycled, confiscated and found objects that are imbued with cultural and political meaning. A recent series focused specifically on blades, toe-nail clippers, lighters and other "dangerous" objects confiscated at SFO during the heightened security after 9/11. One piece in particular, an American flag comprised of confiscated straight razors was reproduced in reviews and publications across the country � this image continues to spark discussion and debate about the nature of fear, danger and patriotism. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, Art Week, Art Net, The San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Corriere della Sera in Italy and by numerous Swedish mass media outlets.

Pred is featured in "Smitten, A Love Story About Art," a PBS documentary featuring renowned Napa Valley collector and California art patron, Rene di Rosa. For an overview of the documentary, see http://www.pbs.org/smitten/. Featured artists, see http://www.pbs.org/smitten/gallery_1.html and to view Pred's work, see http://www.pbs.org/smitten/gallery_pages/work_01.html

Douglas Schneider is a Bay Area painter and collage artist who has shown throughout the United States and internationally. His work encompasses abstract and representational imagery and occasional conceptual objects. Schneider's work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and is held in numerous private collections in both Europe and the United States. For "Who's Afraid of San Francisco?" Schneider will be contributing collaged, painted and silk-screened canvases dealing with the history of war protest in San Francisco, an iconic symbol of gay culture and a conceptual work related to the recent centennial of San Francisco's 1906 "Big One."