Take This Hammer at YBCA @ Hyperallergic
SAN FRANCISCO — Just around the corner from the newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — a veritable temple to wealth amassed in the form of contemporary artworks — the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) has mounted a very different kind of installation, one which monumentalizes activism. Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area highlights artworks that attempt to make visible the crippling inequity of wealth distribution, racial displacement, and growing grap between the moneyed elite and, increasingly, everybody else in the Bay Area.
Much of the work on display is data-driven, drawing from the radical disparities arising in the Bay Area due to the disproportionate wealth of tech-based industries. Though the tech bubble, currently in its second wave, is nothing new, San Francisco’s determination to maintain picturesque, low-density housing has led to a severe shortage in affordable living accommodations, sending prices sky-high and driving longstanding and low-income residents out of their homes all throughout the city, the East Bay, and communities to the north and south.