Panel: Evolving the Archive

Presentation and a panel discussion exploring how artists and institutions are evolving archives to make room for more stories, more histories and more truths. Presentations will include projects that reimagine engagement with public spaces and public knowledge, and memory work practices for preserving and passing down culture. 

This program is the final installment of the Power & Public Memory: Shaping Legacy Program Series, which uplifts community stories and artists’ proposals for reimagined commemorative landscapes and inclusive spaces of public memory.  

Panelists 

• Adrienne Storey, City Archivist, SFPL 
• Yolanda Wisher, Senior Curator, Monument Lab 
• Christy Chan, Artist and Filmmaker 
• Moderated by Shamsher Virk, Program Officer, Performing Arts Program, Hewlett Foundation  

Bios:

Adrienne Storey is City Archivist, leading the Archives & Special Collections unit at San Francisco Public Library. She works to make archives more accessible, representative, and responsive to the communities whose histories they preserve. 

Her career spans public libraries, museums, performing arts, Tribal libraries, and academic libraries. Before joining SFPL, she served as Director of Archives and Art Resources at SFMOMA and Associate Director of Archives and Records Management at the San Francisco Symphony. At the Symphony, she advanced audiovisual preservation and led an institutional project honoring the first Black musician to play in a major U.S. orchestra. 

In northern California, Storey worked with the Karuk Tribe to establish Tribal libraries and develop Sípnuuk, a digital library, archives, and museum. Her work included developing culturally self-representative description and implementing technology to support Tribal management of cultural knowledge.  

At SFPL, she is developing community history initiatives that support both contributions to public collections and preservation of materials that remain in community hands. Her practice emphasizes community self-determination, equitable access, and the public responsibilities of archival institutions. 

Yolanda Wisher is a poet, musician, educator, and curator who engages history as living inheritance and provocation. She is Senior Curator at Monument Lab, where she leads the organization’s Fellowship program, supporting artists and cultural practitioners who are expanding how, where, and by whom monuments are made. Her curatorial projects include Bicentennial Baby, an oral history project exploring fifty years of personal and public history through the stories of Philadelphians born in 1976; Declaration House, co-curated with Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Paul M. Farber, which reframed the nation’s founding by centering Robert Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved valet; and The Re-Emancipation of Social Dance, co-created with Raja Feather Kelly, celebrating Black Philadelphians’ social dance traditions as practices of freedom and community. At Monument Lab, she is currently curating [birdsong], a citywide exhibition of environmental soundworks conceived as living monuments to Philadelphia’s birds. Wisher previously served as Co-Artistic Director and Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary and Director of Art Education at Mural Arts Philadelphia. A former Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, she brings a poet’s attention to her curatorial practice, attuned to what gets spoken, what goes unsaid, and what might become possible when we listen differently to the past and one another. 

Christy Chan is an artist and filmmaker working across video, performance, installation, narrative film, object design, community engagement, and public art. Informed by her early years in the rural South, her work uses both minimalism and tragicomedy to deconstruct and question the social codes and everyday power structures that normalize racialized violence in the United States. Her films and projects have been presented internationally in exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills Art Museum, and ICA SF in the Bay Area; Asia Art Archive of America and New York Arts Foundation in New York; Dresden Film Festival and Interfilm Berlin in Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Utah; Film Independent in Los Angeles, and other institutions. Chan is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2024 Creative Capital Award, 2025 Kenneth Rainin Fellowship. Her work has been profiled in The New York Times, NPR/PBS, Hyperallergic, San Francisco Chronicle, and BOMB magazine. 

Most recently, her independent, Oscar-qualified short film Somewhere To Be screened in 45 cities throughout the U.S. and Europe. She lives and works between the Bay Area and Brooklyn, New York. 

Shamsher Virk is the Hewlett Foundation's Program Officer for Performing Arts.

Shaping Legacy is a multi-year commitment to critically examine the monuments and memorials in San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection. The project will engage communities that have historically been excluded from discussions, produce an Audit report, create opportunities for artist-led activations in public space and support temporary installations that reimagine future monuments and memorials in our city. 

The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) is the City agency that champions the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts community, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy. SFAC programs include: Civic Art Collection, Civic Design Review, Community Investments, Public Art, SFAC Galleries and Art Vendor Licensing.

Banner image credits: Banner image credits: Adrienne Storey (photo by Isaac Ortiz/The Guardsman), Yolanda Wisher (photo by Mark Palacio), Christy Chan (courtesy of artist), Shamsher Virk (photo by Lydia Daniller)