Irving Street Projects // October 5 - December 7, 2019

Taking the mid nineteen-sixties as its starting point, If All of This Were Silence reflected the conflicting and radically varied ways women have strategized to control the impact of patriarchal culture on their lives.

As part of the exhibition visitors explored “Permanent Library”, a piece that displayed hundreds of books written by women in a single room. “Permanent Library” documented women’s diverse lived experience and included everything from Angela Davis’ powerful “Women, Race and Class” to the best-selling dating book “The Rules” by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.

The exhibition also featured a recording booth where visitors could select and record passages from the “Permanent Library” to create an audio ‘exquisite corpse’.

During the closing event, “The Big Take-Away,” visitors dismantled the exhibition by taking away what they liked.

If All of This Were Silence asks questions about how women can be heard, politically, in their difference. Can women, an oppressed majority, create political, social and economic equality across the breadth of their experience?

The project was open to the public Sundays 1-5pm starting Oct 6 and running through Dec 1, 2019. The closing event "The Big Take-Away" happened Saturday, December 7 1-5pm.

Haug also taught a free workshop for high school students relating to the exhibition titled, “The Future is Female” at 826valencia.org.

If All of This Were Silence was supported by funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kate Haug is a San Francisco-based artist, filmmaker, and writer. She makes conceptually based works in print, film, photography and installation. Using experimental and narrative forms, her projects often investigate history— its presentation and consumption—through a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Her project "News Today: A History of the Poor People's Campaign in Real Time" originally developed at Irving Street Projects, has been shown at The Museum of Capitalism and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Recently, Haug and Ivan Uranga completed a Summer of Love-themed public art work for the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Her short films have been screened internationally at festivals including MOMA’s New Directors/New Films, the London International Film Festival, and the Sao Paolo International Short Film Festival.

Haug holds an MFA from UC San Diego in critical theory and experimental film. She was curatorial fellow at the Whitney Independent Study program where she co-curated, “Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine” at the Whitney’s Philip Morris Branch in New York City.

For several years, she taught in the Bay Area at University of San Francisco, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State, and the College of San Mateo.