Memory Cafe in San Francisco — 9/16/2025
Tuesday, September 16 @ 1:00pm – 3:00pm
Free
Join us at the Catharine Clark Gallery to view three dynamic solo exhibitions: Joel Daniel Phillips’s A Compelling Narrative, Gil Batle’s Almost Sanctuary, and Nanci Amaka’s Cleanse|Windows. These exhibitions reflect on artmaking as a form of record-keeping and a means of revealing unseen histories.
Caring for a loved one with memory loss doesn’t have to be a lonely job. Memory Cafe is a gathering for people experiencing mild to moderate memory loss and their caregivers (spouses, family members, or friends). Enjoy time with your loved one and meet others who are dealing with similar issues in a supportive and welcoming environment.
San Francisco Memory Cafe meets on many Tuesdays at different locations. Participants must be accompanied by their caregiver.
Please RSVP in advance to Amy Takemoto by emailing her at: MemoryCafe@jfcs.org.
About this outing:
Joel Daniel Phillips’ exhibition A Compelling Narrative continues his research into the Library of Congress’s photographic archives from the 1930s, created during the New Deal by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). His acclaimed series, “Killing the Negative,” responds to the lesser-known process by which FSA photographs were selected for publication. Through a deep dive into the archive, Phillips discovered who made these choices and what happened to the negatives of photographs deemed unworthy of publication. The head of the FSA during this era was Roy Emerson Stryker. Stryker would “kill” images he felt were unsuitable for publication by punching a hole in the original negative. The current political debates about race, class, labor, compensation, land ownership, socioeconomic stratification, and ecological protection deeply resonate with issues of that era, many of which are embedded in the original censored FSA photographs.
Gil Batle’s Almost Sanctuary is the artist’s debut exhibition. Born in 1962 in San Francisco to Filipino parents, Batle spent 20 years in and out of five different California prisons for fraud and forgery. He now lives on a small island in the Philippines. Batle’s self-taught drawing ability evolved behind bars into sophisticated and clandestine tattooing skills that protected him from murderous gang violence in prisons such as San Quentin, Chuckawalla, and Jamestown—the “Gladiator School” as it’s known to the unfortunate cognoscenti. In racially segregated cell blocks, where Bloods, Crips, and Aryan Brotherhood gang members rule with intimidation and threat, Batle’s facility for drawing was considered magic by the murderers, drug dealers, and armed robbers whose stories he now recounts in minutely carved detail on fragile ostrich eggshells, clay, and paper.
Nanci Amaka’s video work exists in the space between looking, seeing, and knowing. Her performances explore the concept of being a spiritual being living in the present moment while laden with memories and future imaginaries. She is interested in the limitations around awareness; in the psychological and philosophical nuances of visual language; in oral indigenous histories; and in ancestral knowledge inherited into our corporeal physiques.