Edited by Erick Lyle
Due out from Booklyn in May!
Preorder now and get 20% off! Just go to Buy.Booklyn.org; and enter the promo code: PRESTREET.
After San Francisco’s new mayor announced imminent plans to “clean up” downtown with a new corporate “dot com corridor” and arts district—featuring the new headquarters of Twitter and Burning Man—curators Erick Lyle, Chris Johanson, and Kal Spelletich brought over one hundred artists and activists together with neighborhood residents fearing displacement to consider utopian aspirations and to plot alternate futures for the city. Opening in May 2012, the resulting exhibition, Streetopia, was a massive anti-gentrification art fair that took place in venues throughout the city. For five weeks, Streetopia featured daily free talks, performances, and skillshares while operating a free community kitchen out of the gallery.
This book brings together all of the art and ephemera from the now-infamous show—featuring work by Swoon, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, Monica Canilao, Rigo 23, Xara Thustra, Ryder Cooley, and many more. Using the format of an exhibition catalog as a jumping off point, the book also includes essays and interviews with key participants that consider the effectiveness of Streetopia’s projects while offering a deeper rumination on the continuing search for community—and for Utopia—in today’s increasingly homogenous and gentrified neo-liberal cities in an era of unprecedented wealth disparity.
Includes writing by Rebecca Solnit, Chris Kraus, Sarah Schulman, Sam Green, Chris Johanson, Erick Lyle, Renny Pritikin, Sy Wagon, Ivy Jeanne McClelland, Jesse Drew, Daphne Gottlieb, A.C. Thompson, Micah Bazant, Lewis Wallace, The Water Underground, Roxy Monoxide, Marshall Weber, Veteran’s Mural Project, and many more!
“Streetopia’s projects were futuristic, idealistic, historically sensitive, and surprisingly practical. They offer enough ideas to keep anyone who cares about public life, culture, and art busy for the next decade.” —Chris Kraus, author of Where Art Belongs and Summer of Hate.
