Show at Civil War-era fort spotlights California’s Black history from the 19th century to today

Poised under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Fort Point is the only remaining Civil War-era fortification on the West Coast and offers a compelling environment for the exhibition Black Gold: Stories Untold, opening today (until 2 November). Works by 16 contemporary artists and one collective explore 19th-century African American life in California, including stories of little-known entrepreneurs, human rights activists, soldiers and musicians, dating from the 1848 Gold Rush onward.

The setting “is almost like a portal—it just seemed appropriate because the conversation is exactly the time period of when the fort was built and occupied”, says Cheryl Haines, the founding executive director and chief curator of For-Site, a San Francisco-based non-profit organisation dedicated to presenting art about place. “We activate historic sites and give artists opportunities to do things that maybe they can’t or wouldn’t in a white-box environment.”

Throughout the three-tiered brick fortress—constructed between 1853 and 1861 to defend San Francisco Bay and the area’s newfound wealth—Haines has installed recent works by the artists Carla Edwards, Isaac Julien, Alison Saar, Yinka Shonibare CBE and Hank Willis Thomas, as well as new commissions by a dozen others including Demetri Broxton, Adrian L. Burrell, the artists of Creativity Explored, Mildred Howard, Tiff Massey, Umar Rashid and Bryan Keith Thomas.

Two years in the making and privately funded, Black Gold opens at a time when the administration of US President Donald Trump has aimed to curtail multi-perspective approaches to American history at educational and cultural institutions.

The exhibition is the sixth collaboration across more than 15 years between For-Site and the National Park Service and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and is “exactly the kind of work we’re committed to”, says Christine Lehnertz, the president and chief executive of the parks conservancy. “National parks aren’t just scenic spaces—they’re platforms for storytelling that challenge, heal and inspire and Black Gold does exactly that.”

Haines assembled a nine-person advisory committee of Black historians and curators, including Susan D. Anderson from the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, who were instrumental in providing research and vetting materials made available to the artists. “Being a white curator and talking about a cultural heritage and history that is not personally my own, I thought it was really important to have some people advising us on the content of the show,” Haines says. She also credited the project Gold Chains: The Hidden History of Slavery in California, produced by the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and challenging the mythos of California as a “free state”, as one inspiration for the show.

New commissions by Akea Brionne and Cheryl Derricotte, juxtaposed in Fort Point’s former officers’ quarters, both address the life of the abolitionist and entrepreneur Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814-1904). She moved to California in 1852 and owned several boarding houses, becoming the richest Black woman during the Gold Rush. She also won a court case after being prevented from boarding a streetcar by a San Francisco public transit operator—a century before Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a public bus in Alabama and helped spark the civil rights movement.

Brionne has captured Pleasant’s confident, regal bearing in a large-scale textile portrait of jacquard weaving embellished with glitter and rhinestones. Derricotte has recreated a dining table with a place setting of handmade glass, equal to what one might have experienced in one of Pleasant’s boarding houses. It is accompanied by a sound installation with some of her known statements—including that Pleasant set the city’s best table.

Adam Davis makes portraits of contemporary Black people using the historical wet plate photographic technique of tintypes—a popular medium during the Gold Rush—as part of an archive he is building to celebrate his community. At Fort Point, Davis has transformed a former jail on the top floor into his portrait studio and lounge area to welcome sitters. Their tintypes will accumulate throughout the run of the show.

The history of Buffalo Soldiers—Black men who served in the US army after the Civil War—is another entry point to this period for artists. Cosmo Whyte transposed an 1860s photograph of two anonymous Buffalo Soldiers onto an ethereal curtain of hand-painted steel beads, suspended from a steel frame and inserted in the fort’s historic barracks that would have been for white soldiers.

Trina Michelle Robinson made a short film chronicling the life of Charles Young (1864-1922), a Buffalo Soldier who rose to become the highest-ranking Black officer in the military and the first African American superintendent of a US national park. Young was also a brilliant pianist and Robinson scored her film—shown as a two-channel installation in one of the fort’s bastions, where cannons were positioned—with one of his original compositions.

“Robinson’s great, great uncle was a Buffalo Soldier and actually is buried at the graveyard here in the Presidio,” say Haines, referring to the national park site where Fort Point is located and where 450 Buffalo Soldiers are buried. “She is a perfect example of someone who is taking personal experience, historic research and site, and creating a work that is deeply resonant.”

• Black Gold: Stories Untold, 6 June-2 November, Fort Point National Historic Site, San Francisco