The Quesada Gardens Initiative is an all-volunteer effort powered by an extraordinarily diverse group of residents who live near the gardens, and their nonprofit, governmental, and business allies. The organization addresses issues that diminish health, safety and quality of life, isolate residents, and reduce the experience of “community” that the 1700 block of Quesada has come to represent.
The Quesada Gardens Initiative has secured a Community Challenge Grant through the Mayor’s Office to leverage other physical assets on the block that are as rich with potential as the median strip was before community leaders turned it into a beautiful garden. QGI has engaged mural artists, allied arts organizations, and residents to create a deep community-building process that will culminate in a major painted mural on a 1,000 square foot wall, and colorful tile art decorating staircases associated with the mural site and the garden tile art created by Bayview children.
Wall and stairway as it looks today Photo: Tom Kennedy/ttdigital
Santie Huckaby and Deidre Defranceaux were chosen by the community from a pool of seven candidates. Both come to the work with enormous experience and talent.
Santie Huckaby, an African American, Bayview artist and recipient of the 2005 Mural Awareness Month Award, hopes to leave behind a legacy of education. “I want to do a history lesson of people who were here in life, and make the community great, and to make music to make people happy,” he says. His work – sometimes surreal, sometimes hauntingly realistic, but always beautiful – takes its cues from a wide range of styles and a plethora of artists to become something wholly original.
Deidre DeFranceaux is a San Francisco painter and sculptor whose figurative paintings, portraits, sculpture, and kinetic sculpture installations are nationally exhibited and widely collected. Her large scale public sculptures have graced the Playa at the Burning Man Festival, and her work has been featured in such publications as World Sculpture News, Art News and the Leonardo Journal. She has taught extensively, including with various non-profits working with at risk youth, and with groups of school children throughout the San Francisco Bay Area creating large scale murals.
Stop by to see progress on the mural and tile art in the coming months. And the garden is always open!
- Jeffrey Betcher, Quesada Gardens Initiative
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