INTERPRETING FORT MASON CENTER

Built on landfill at San Francisco’s northern waterfront, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture has an astonishingly rich array of stories.  They begin with the Ramaytush Ohlone, the original inhabitants of this area, whose living culture still connects to San Francisco’s waterfront.

In the early 20th century, the land was created for military use and helped to shape the nation’s rise as an international power.  As the needs of the late 20th century military evolved, this place became Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, an innovative community space for arts and culture. Fort Mason Center’s transformation set a groundbreaking example for repurposing former military facilities across the country. Former Army piers, warehouses, and machinery shops now provide space for art galleries, music schools, theaters, restaurants, and community events.

I worked with Hunt Design and FMC staff to develop an extensive interpretive and wayfinding program that spans the campus and will be installed in 2024.

Transforming the parking lot into a drive in theater offered safe communal experiences during the Covid19 pandemic.

During WWII, more than 1.6 million people sailed from Fort Mason’s docks to military outposts and battlefields across the Pacific.

Fulbright Specialist Project in England

“Can heritage resources play a larger role in climate change education while inspiring action toward a more just and sustainable future?” This is the question I brought to the U.K. in May-June 2022 as a Fulbright Specialist hosted by the University of Essex History Department. I was able to explore ideas about expanding heritage’s role in addressing climate change with heritage organizations around England in the contexts of industrial heritage, displacement and cultural heritage, policymaking, and more.  

In addition to on-campus talks and consultation with Essex faculty and students, we organized several events in association with my Fulbright project. Faculty and graduate students in the University’s history and wild writing programs explored an area of the Suffolk coast that includes The Long Shop Museum (and industrial heritage site), Sizewell nuclear power plant, and the Minsmere Bird Sanctuary. Our focus was on finding and conveying connections among local environmental history, industrial history, social history, social justice, sea level rise and other manifestations of climate change.

In partnership with the University of Derby’s Public History Program we organized a “Roundtable on Industrial heritage and Climate Change” that focussed on the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site. Participants shared insights about how the Derwent Valley can connect its world-renowned industrial and natural heritage to greater understanding of the roots of climate change and new strategies for addressing its challenges. Participants include representatives of the Derby Museum of Making, Scotland’s Cateran Ecomuseum, Ironbridge Gorge, Historic England, and the National Trust. Partners from both University of Essex and University of Derby presented our project as part of the biannual “Manchester Histories Festival,” which chose “The History of Climate Change” as their theme.

I also had the opportunity to present my work at a climate change conference organized by the US-UK Fulbright Commission and the University of Sheffield.

Specialists are selected by the U.S. State Department and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board on the basis of their academic and professional achievement, demonstrated leadership in their field, and potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the U.S. and abroad. 

Students, faculty and volunteers at the Long Shop Museum.

San Francisco Counterculture Study

Graves worked with San Francisco Heritage to research places associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Five decades after the “Summer of Love,” the project sites that convey the many dimensions of this complex youth movement that proposed new ways of thinking about work, art, health, the environment, spirituality and more. The “SF Counterculture Historic Context Statement, 1965-1975” was adopted by the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission in July 2024.

Photo: stu_spivak and SFCurbed

Citywide Historic Context for New Deal San Francisco

Graves and architectural historian Christopher VerPlanck developed a citywide historic context statement on New Deal era buildings, artworks, open spaces and infrastructure.  The project also includes city landmark nominations for three schools built or enhanced with WPA funds: Theodore Roosevelt Middle School, the Sunshine School (for students with disabilities) and George Washington High School, which have inspired protest campaigns about racial representation.

Photo: Amanda Law

The 1936 mural cycle “The Life of Washington,” by Victor Arnautoff show the first president's life and work in San Francisco's largest fresco project. Recently they’ve become the focus for protest by Indigenous and African American residents who point to depictions they argue demean their histories and present status. Our study recounts an earlier episode when similar critiques were leveled at the murals, and the SF Unified School District addressed them by commissioning new artworks.

Photo: Donna Graves

Arnautoff, an active leftist, included several scenes of African American workers. In the 1960s, the murals became a source of outspoken anger from students who found the depictions of enslaved African Americans shucking corn, picking cotton, and loading barges as servile and humiliating.  The school's Afro-American Club convinced the SF Unified School District to commission response murals by the young artist Dewey Crumpler. His series of paintings, Multi-Ethnic Heritage: Black, Asian, Native/Latin American, were installed in 1974 (below).

Photo: Amanda Law

The Life Washington (detail). Photo: Donna Graves

This mural detail, Arnautoff’s own critique of what we would now call colonial settlerism, was the catalyst for recent protests against the murals.

Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, UCSF

Graves led a team documenting the social history of UCSF's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. Project collaborators include historian Susan Stryker, archivist Mimi Klausner, researcher Harrison Apple, and architectural historian Stacy Farr. The project produced a comprehensive social history of LPPI, Historic American Building documentation, and a preliminary plan for interpreting the building's history.

San Francisco became an important center for the study of gender and sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s through the work of the Langley Porter Clinic (401 Parnassus Avenue; later the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute LPPI). The UCSF Medical School and the California Department of Institutions, which oversaw the state’s psychiatric hospitals, founded the clinic in 1941 as a joint venture.  In 1949, LPPI Director Dr. Karl Bowman led a comprehensive statewide investigation into “sex crimes and sex deviants,” initiated and funded by the California State Legislature. The resulting reports, coauthored by Bowman and UCSF research associate Bernice Engle, represented a newly liberalized attitude meant to shape future legislation and therapeutic recommendations. 

Another of Bowman’s key collaborators was Louise Lawrence, who had been living full-time as a transgender woman since 1942. Lawrence lectured on transgender topics at UCSF and created an expansive international network of transgender people. She, along with Virginia Prince and others, published the first incarnation of Transvestia, a pioneering transgender publication, in 1952.  Lawrence’s address book provided the initial subscription list and she was instrumental in connecting transgender people to pioneering sex researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Harry Benjamin.

Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic, ca. 1942. Photo: UCSF History Collection