Members of Three Point Nine Art Collective, San Francisco-based Black artists, will talk about the role of research in their creative practices. Archives, libraries, museums and dynamic contemporary communities are resources and sources of deep knowledge. Panelists will talk about moving from engaged study and learning from others to interpretation and making.

The 3.9 Art Collective is an association of African American artists, curators and art writers who live in San Francisco, and came together to draw attention to the City’s dwindling Black population. The 3.9 Art Collective bears witness to this phenomenon and seeks to reverse it by drawing attention to the historical and ongoing presence of Black artists in the City and creative expression in its Black communities. Through multiple forms of presentation and outreach, they create and claim spaces to display their artwork; nurture young artists and develop educational programs for students; and write about and curate exhibitions meant to generate productive, cross-cultural dialogues.

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Jacqueline Francis  is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and a co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). She is co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, a co-founder of the Association of Critical Race Art History and an at-large member of the National Committee for the History of Art. Her curatorial projects include A Matter of Time: New Work by Adia Millett (Galerie du Monde-Hong Kong, 2020), side by side/in the world (San Francisco Arts Commission, 2019) and Where Is Here (Museum of the African Diaspora-San Francisco, 2016). She chairs the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She is the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center, a San Francisco Bay Area community arts organization. A member of the 3.9 Art Collective and Collective Genus, Francis creates the occasional visual art object. She received an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2017.

Kija Lucas is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Her work has been exhibited at Oakland Museum of California, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francico Arts Commission Galleries, California Institute of Integral Studies, Palo Alto Arts Center, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center and Root Division, as well as Venice Arts in Los Angeles, CA, La Sala d’Ercole/Hercules Hall in Bologna Italy, and Casa Escorsa in Guadalajara, Mexico. Lucas has been an Artist in Residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Grin City Collective and The Wassaic Artist Residency. She is a member of 3.9 Art Collective and the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure. Lucas received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Mills College.

William Rhodes is a sculptural artist trained in traditional woodworking and joinery with a fine arts background. Rhodes blends fine art, craft and design with meaning and function. His work explores themes of hidden knowledge, iconographic imagery and forms and how they can change meaning, depending on the cultural context. Rhodes received a BA in Furniture Building and Design from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Rhodes’ creative works are in the collections of various galleries and museums. Most recently, his work was included in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Rhodes, dedicates part of his time to art education, including art collaborations with schools in San Francisco, South Africa, Italy and Egypt. Rhodes is the co-founder of a Black art collective in San Francisco. 

Ron Moultrie Saunders, a co-founding member of the 3.9 Art Collective, is a San Francisco based photographic artist and landscape architect. He is being commissioned by BART to create artworks for the Market Street Canopies in San Francisco and for 19th Street Station in Oakland, CA. His art work is in the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection for projects he completed for the Bayview Linda Brooks-Burton Branch Library, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, Laguna Honda Hospital and Public Utilities Commission New Headquarters in San Francisco. His art has been exhibited throughout the US and his work is published in several books including Self Exposure: The Male Nude Self-Portrait, From Art to Landscape and INPHA 3 (International Photography Annual). He serves on the board for First Exposures and Black (Space) Residency.