Look at Her, She is HER(E)
An Exhibition from Western Neighborhoods Project and The Great Highway gallery
By Nicole Meldahl
Summary
Western Neighborhoods Project is proud to debut HER(E), a new exhibition that carves out public space along Great Highway for eight vibrant women found in the OpenSFHistory photo archive.
Presented in partnership with The Great Highway gallery and Friends of Great Highway Park, HER(E) reflects a deeply personal journey by Executive Director Nicole Meldahl, whose curation focused on women who felt like family. Her emotional connection to these women, “met” while working with the OpenSFHistory archive, has rooted her within a feminine legacy in San Francisco and helped her feel at home here. Yet this connection also made Meldahl sad that more women who have lived largely private lives–like her mother and grandmother–have been lost to Time.
By making these eight women visible on large banners installed on street lamps along Great Highway, we hope someone recognizes them and gives them back their names. The exhibition also helps to correct a city-acknowledged gender imbalance in San Francisco’s public art. Most significantly, it provides WNP an opportunity to talk about gender bias in archival practices and address gaps within our own collection.
Events
When: The HER(E) exhibition will be up August 23, 2024 thru March 2025.
Where: Street lamps along the eastern edge of Great Highway at the Lincoln, Judah, Lawton, Noriega, Pacheco, Rivera, Taraval and Vicente Avenue intersections.
Saturday, August 24th, 2024, 11am-2pm: Join us on Judah and Great Highway to celebrate these women as well as the women in your lives! WNP will be hosting a Memory Station where we can scan photos and capture stories about women you think deserve to hold a more prominent place in the historical record. We’ll also have new postcards available, light snacks from Butter Love Bakery, and a refreshments table featuring all-ages mocktails crafted by The Royal Cuckoo.
Saturday, November 23rd, 2024, 10am-12pm: Nicole Meldahl will be hanging out as a Historian in Residence at Java Beach Cafe, presenting info on the exhibition and other good old-fashioned west side history. Stop by for a visit on your way to the highway.
Thursday, February 13th, 2025, 4:30-6:30pm: We’re commemorating the closure of HER(E) with a Galentine’s Day party at Rusty Ladle. We’ll have soup shooters and sandwich bites available for attendees while supplies last, and the restaurant will be decked out with festive decorations. Special thanks to proprietor John Lindsey, who also designed and fabricated the banners, for letting us take over his restaurant! This event is free but registration is required.
Exhibition
HER(E) began with the discovery of one woman in the OpenSFHistory archive by Nicole Meldahl. Here she is.
In a short promotional film for HER(E) that was screened at the 4 Star Theater for Local Critique in August 2023, Meldahl explains:
I don’t know who she is but I met her in the OpenSFHistory archive and I fell in love. Immediately. When I see women like her I know Time is irrelevant, because this woman is my kin. Look at her. This is a woman who knows what she’s about, right. Outfit on point, head tilted back almost daring the camera to capture her. Look at her. She is radiant and she is still with us because that is the magic of film. I love her like an older sister who’s gonna teach me how to smoke and listen to punk music, and she’s transcended time because it’s an elastic illusion but also because some women are just powerful enough to break through from the past with just one look. Even without a name to call her by. Look at her. I love her.
And she is one of so many unknown women I’ve met in archives across San Francisco and beyond. Look at them. Look at these women.
Who are these women? Who are these women who lay lost and abandoned in archives across San Francisco and beyond. We describe what they’re wearing, what they’re doing, where they are, but so many of them don’t have names or a voice and it breaks my lonely only child heart. What if this was my mother? My grandmother? In a way, they are.
I hate how women like them have been silent and overlooked for so long. Generations of unknown women have had their entire history held hostage in their homes. At home, away from the gaze of public life. At home, tending hearth and habit. At home, remembered only as long as that home survives. I hate that I find these women full of life in sterile archives with bland descriptions, unknown women abandoned and buried inside The Museum visible for only the few of us who pause long enough to linger with them. I hate that gallery walls and museum halls are lousy with idealized depictions of a woman’s form, but it’s so hard to find real women, you know? …So what am I, a real woman in San Francisco, gonna do about it?
This is what she’s doing about it. HER(E) is a deeply personal outdoor exhibition curated by Meldahl that carves out public space for anonymized women. In August 2024, photographs of eight women elevated out of the OpenSFHistory archive debuted on banners installed on street lamps along the eastern edge of Great Highway, marking intersections at Lincoln, Judah, Lawton, Noriega, Pacheco, Rivera, Taraval and Vicente Avenues. Each banner is supported by accompanying QR-coded posters to catch the attention of passers-by at ground level, reminding them to look up.
WNP was founded in 1999 to preserve, interpret, and share the diverse history and culture of San Francisco’s west side. In support of this work, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit launched the OpenSFHistory program in 2014 to digitize and make accessible online thousands of historical San Francisco images. HER(E) is an expansion of WNP’s traditional history practice into the realm of the theoretical, and an evolution of OpenSFHistory as a space of interrogation; it occupies the liminal space between art and artifact, document and image, memory and memorial.
Making real women from the OpenSFHistory archive visible in this way helps to correct a gender imbalance acknowledged by the City of San Francisco. In an introduction to the 2022 Representation of Women in City Property Report, Kimberly Ellis, Director of the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women (DOSW), writes that “women are still vastly underrepresented, compared to men, in public spaces across San Francisco.” Consequently, DOSW recommended that “all new representations of historical figures in San Francisco be named after, or represent, women, girls and nonbinary people.”
This imbalance is mirrored in archives throughout the world, including OpenSFHistory. A work of remembrance and mourning, HER(E) celebrates photography archives as sites of collective memory that are inherently destabilized by archival patriarchy. As Jane Freeland and Christina von Hodenberg wrote in “Archiving, exhibiting, and curating the history of feminisms in the global twentieth century: an introduction”:
The archive is not only a physical space where records are collected, cared for, labelled, ordered, and sometimes discarded. It is also a conceptual realm of narrative, memory, and memorialisation. To archive items means taking part in a process of shaping and evidencing histories that is entwined in epistemic hierarchies of power…Indeed, the (in)visibility of women and sexuality in the archive drove scholars to challenge the archive as a site of the reproduction of violent patriarchal and colonial orders.
The Elevated Eight
With equity in mind, WNP acknowledges curatorial bias in highlighting the eight women featured in HER(E). Selections were constrained by formatting limitations, since vertical shots translate best to the verticality and standard dimensions of the light pole banners. The limited scope of the OpenSFHistory archive–the majority of which emerged from the holdings of one white, male private collector–also presented challenges.
It’s also important to note that curatorial decisions are situated firmly within a deeply personal gaze, as Meldahl specifically chose women who feel like kin. Meldahl was born and raised in Southern California, the only daughter and survivor of Janis and Robert Meldahl. Her mother assumed a traditional stay-at-home parent role while her father worked as a jockey’s agent at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California and Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in Del Mar, California.
Meldahl moved to Northern California in 2002 to attend San Francisco State University, where she studied American History, eventually earning her BA in 2008. She’s worked (oftentimes simultaneously) as a journalist, archivist, museum technician, historian, and curator since 2006. She began volunteering with WNP in 2012, eventually joining the organization’s Board of Directors in 2014 before taking on the role of Executive Director in 2019. It’s this work that has helped her survive the loss of critical family members–her father in 2010, her grandmother in 2013, her mother in 2018, and a beloved uncle in 2019.
Again, Meldahl in her own words, adapted from the HER(E) promotional film:
I came to worship at the Church of San Francisco. I came here in ‘02 to figure out what I was supposed to be in the fog of San Francisco. I was 17 and I wrote poetry and I ran as fast as I could to North Beach as a North Star and it helped, it certainly helped, but I didn’t really find my way until I found History—Capital H. Now that’s the altar at which I pray.
And I know what you’re thinking, “What does this all have to do with her, the woman [in the photograph that started this project]?” Well, I kinda met her in the halls while walking through the Church of History. And thank goodness we crossed paths because she makes me feel a whole helluva lot less alone, because in the past 13 years I sure got a whole lot more alone. In that time, I’ve buried all the people that made it all make sense, you know? And I’m an only child so now I need History more than I ever did before, I rely on history to make it all make Sense. Capital S.
HER(E) is an act of archival meditation and reclamation. In “meeting” the featured women, preserving their presence in perpetuity, and getting to know them better when research was reachable, Meldahl has been able to feel at Home as part of a feminine legacy in San Francisco. These women, who have been overlooked by the public record, much like Meldahl’s mother, have a resonant presence. They are joyful and fierce, commanding the frame even beside San Francisco landmarks. They either stare straight at the camera or stand to the side, with a watchful eye on their children in an act of maternal deference. They are not constrained by the stiff archival medium in which they’re presented; instead, they are very much here. Of the eight women made visible through this installation, Meldahl has only been able to identify one of them–Norma Ball Norwood (above). You can learn more about Norma on OpenSFHistory.
Women like Norma deserve to be seen, to be heard, to hold space here in San Francisco. In the short term, the purpose of installing the images of these women on Great Highway is to help WNP identify them–to restore their names and find their history. The broader goal is to expose and remedy gaps in not just the OpenSFHistory archive but in citywide archival collecting practices. Over the course of this project, WNP hopes members of the public will contribute photographs of the women in their lives to WNP and beyond to other nonprofits that maintain a permanent collection, thereby adding their stories to the History of San Francisco. In the long term, this installation is envisioned as the first of many, with a diverse array of successive curators daylighting more women from more archives.
If the Society of American Archivists defines archivization as “the process of selecting records for retention in an archives and preparing them for research use,”1 then HER(E) is our way of selecting overlooked women from the OpenSFHistory archive and transforming them into public monuments.
Look at her. HER(E) she is. Here she is in San Francisco.
Notes:
1. https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/archivization.html#:~:text=n.,for%20research%20use%20(View%20Citations)