Saturday April 21, 2007 to Sunday April 22, 2007
Bayview Opera House

Exhibition organized by the California College of the Arts MA Curatorial Practice Program

A VISION FOR PRAISE FRISCO
A collaboration between William Scott and Kyu Che

In November of 2006 I was invited to participate in The San Francisco World's Fair of 2007 organized by CCA's MA Program in Curatorial Practice. I was introduced to William Scott, an accomplished artist of Creative Growth Art Center, which serves physically, mentally and developmentally disabled adult artists. William had been creating a body of work relating to buildings and housing developments and had expressed interest in working with an architect.

My education, training and professional career in architecture provided me with building knowledge and practice but my personal conceptual work was a bit "way out" for conventional architecture. The open mindedness of the art world welcomed these experimental ideas. Recent commissions in San Francisco art venues such as New Langton Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts enabled built executions of my conceptual environments as artwork collaborations.

William and I were brought together for collaboration. Initially, I didn't know too much about his work but what struck me immediately upon seeing his paintings was the light, in the sense of a positive optimism that radiates from the works. From January to April of 2007, I visited the Creative Growth Studio in Oakland regularly flying back and forth from Seattle to work alongside William.

William and I have spent many days getting acquainted and sharing our work. He wanted to learn more about architecture and we visited construction sites, purchased triangles, scales, and vellums at the architectural supply shop, and made lots of prints at a local blueprinting service. I shared architectural techniques - everything from sketching on trace to blueprint drawings to building maquettes.

In delving deeper into William's work, I came to understand his consistent message. The paintings of Praise Frisco - the colorful housing projects, his divas, and dancing policemen - are all communicating a genuine desire and commitment to improving his community in the Hunter's Point area where he was born and raised. I was deeply moved by the sincerity and goodness of his vision. He asks me almost daily to fax his letters to the Mayor of San Francisco trying to convey the problems in the neighborhood, and requests that we arrange meetings with developers, engineers, and city officials so we can urgently begin building a new city. In William's world of Praise Frisco, there are "no crimes, no killing, no name calling,.." only "joyful, loving, wholesome, positive lifestyles."

During our period of collaborative exploration, William produced numerous sets of architectural drawings in his distinctive style, as well as a large and beautifully detailed painting of the Praise Frisco cityscape, complete with portraits of gospel divas. This painting was produced to "get the message out" and was created with the intention of reproducing it at billboard scale.

Inspired by his works and the Hunter's Point urban landscape, I created designs of conceptual habitats that utilize interstitial spaces within the disparate urban fabric - a dwelling within an abandoned shipping container, and a billboard that houses an experimental shelter within it's structural trussing that enjoys the abandoned and overgrown spaces behind billboards as lush natural gardens. We hope to have the opportunity to build these with William's mural and other inspiring artworks (such as the billboard graphic that you see at the Opera House as part of the World's Fair) in the future.

I'm grateful to Kate Fowle and the visionary team of curators of CCA's MA program in Curatorial Practice and to Creative Growth Art Center for making possible a truly inspiring and rewarding collaboration and friendship with the extraordinary artist and community leader, William Scott.

Kyu Che

www.sfworldsfair.org
www.creativegrowth.org