“We must cultivate our garden.” - Voltaire
I am delighted to share an interview with artist Ron Moultrie Saunders, a resident of the 1240 Minnesota Street Studios, part of the Minnesota Street Project in SF.
Much of our conversation is about the ways in which he cultivates and tends to his many communities, with a focus on supporting African-American artists in San Francisco through projects like the Black [Space] Residency and the Three Point Nine Collective. We also talk about ancestors and ancestry.com, his giant plants, and his artistic process. This interview was recorded at The Space Program residency in July 2023.
In Voltaire’s most well-known text, Candide: or, The Optimist, a satire about the catholic church during the Age of Enlightenment, the French philosopher ended the book with a call to action by the protagonist: “We must cultivate our garden.”
The garden in this case was both a literal garden and a metaphor for maintaining a strong connection to the land and building a community that reflects the values of his fellow Enlightenment artists, writers, and thinkers.
This statement, and the entire novella, was in direct response to the church’s love and light BS of the time, which told its constituents that life was divinely guided, and “everything was happening for the best of all possible worlds.” So rather than fight the powers that be, it was best to accept your lot in life.
While I do believe there is some rhyme and reason to the universe, I agree with Voltaire’s sentiment that we are not supposed to roll over and accept oppression. And I love that the answer was creating a revolution through community.
If, as Toni Cade Bambara writes, our role as artists is to make the revolution irresistible, then Ron Moultrie Saunders has been in full gentle revolutionary mode since I met him. As I say in the episode, when I think of Ron, I imagine him with a backpack teleporting himself all over the Bay Area to check in on his friends and artist colleagues, the backpack acting as a booster to get him from place to place with snacks and a portfolio in tow (I assume). This community nurturing is some major emotional labor that cannot be, and yet often is, taken for granted even by Saunders himself.
I don't analyze how much I do or how, where I go on a daily basis, but when, for instance, I'm at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley working in their space, a couple of artists go like, ‘oh, you, you get around a lot.’
And I'm like, not really. I go to a couple of shows. They say, ‘Well, you go to a lot more than I do.’
I do tend to go to quite a few openings particularly. I want to support friends. And there might be new artists that I met and I want to see their work in person, so I consider that part of the community as well.
As an African-American man living in San Francisco proper, he is part of a dwindling community that makes up less than 6% of the city’s population, 40% of which are counted as housing insecure or houseless. Hence the need for organizations like the Three Point Nine Collective, which started after a 2010 study predicted that the percentage would drop below 4% in the next 10 years. (Luckily it hasn’t.)
Not only does Ron tend to his community, he literally tends to a garden in his home in the Bay View, and often uses plants in his artwork.
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