50 Years of Pride

Curated by Lenore Chinn and Pamela Peniston

About the Exhibition

A collaborative exhibition conceived by the GLBT Historical Society and the SFAC Galleries at San Francisco City Hall, “50 Years of Pride” displays nearly 100 photographs to celebrate five decades of San Francisco Pride, the city’s most beloved public festival.

On June 27, 1970, a small group of LGBTQ people marched down Polk Street—then San Francisco’s most prominent queer neighborhood—to mark an event called “Christopher Street Liberation Day.” Commemorating the one-year anniversary of the historic Stonewall uprising on Christopher Street in New York City, the march was followed the next afternoon by an intimate “gay-in” at Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park. Fifty years later, this modest gathering has evolved into San Francisco Pride, a globally famous annual parade and celebration that welcomes hundreds of thousands of participants and spectators from around the world the last weekend in June.

Encompassing examples of photojournalism, portraiture, fine-art photography, posters and magazine covers, “50 Years of Pride” honors how San Francisco’s LGBTQ community has come into its own since that first humble Pride gathering. The exhibition explores how Pride has reflected and refracted the community’s priorities, responses and activism in times of hope and despair, triumph and setback. Images drawn from the GLBT Historical Society’s archives are joined by photographs held by other institutions, as well as works by over a dozen independent queer photographers.

The exhibition is curated by Lenore Chinn and Pamela Peniston, two San Francisco artists with deep roots in the city’s queer arts and culture milieu. “Culling through the archives at the GLBT Historical Society, we found a treasure trove of photographs, snapshots and 35 mm color slides that began to tell a story of the spirit and nature of Pride and what it has come to mean both locally and internationally,” Chinn says.

Thematically, the photographs document the impact of political events and social movements on Pride. They also illustrate the transformation and diversification of the event over the years into a celebration event that represents the full spectrum of gender, race, ethnicity, class, gender identity and expression, sexuality and ability. “Our outreach to photographers and their archives amplified our discoveries,” Chinn notes. “With the rise of gay power and an expanding movement, we saw more participation and more diversity along gender and ethnic lines.”

The following LGBTQ independent photographers are featured in the exhibition:

Chloe Atkins, Saul Bromberger & Sandra Hoover Photography, Cathy Cade, Adam Chin, Lenore Chinn, Jane Philomen Cleland, Greg Day, Rick Gerharter, Happy/L.A. Hyder, Mason J., Jim James, JEB (Joan E. Biren), Michael Johnstone, H. Lenn Keller, Tom Levy, James McNamara, Daniel Nicoletta and Adele Prandini.

Located in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Center, the SFAC Galleries makes contemporary art accessible to broad audiences through curated exhibitions that both reflect our regional diversity and position Bay Area visual art production within an international contemporary art landscape. By commissioning new works, collaborating with arts and community organizations and supporting artist’s projects, the SFAC Galleries provides new and challenging opportunities for contemporary art to engage with a civic dialogue. The SFAC Galleries was founded in 1970 and is the exhibitions program of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the arts agency of the City and County of San Francisco.

This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of San Francisco Pride. The mission of the San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration is to educate the world, commemorate our heritage, celebrate our culture and liberate our people. Our annual event on the last weekend of June is the biggest gathering of the LGBTQ community and allies in America as well as San Francisco’s largest outdoor event, consisting of a two-day Celebration in Civic Center plus a parade down Market Street with more than 280 contingents marching. Since 1997, SF Pride has awarded over $2.5 million in proceeds to local nonprofit LGBTQ organizations and those organizations working on issues related to HIV/AIDS, cancer, homelessness and animal welfare.

Additional support for “50 Years of Pride” is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and San Francisco Grants for the Arts.