Southern Exposure
2015 – $10,000 General Support
2008 – $10,000 Vapor Exhibition
Located in San Francisco’s Mission District, Southern Exposure (SOEX) has been presenting a diverse, innovative, contemporary art, arts education, and related programs and events for over 34 years. SOEX reaches out to diverse audiences and serves as a forum and resource center to provide extraordinary support to the Bay Area’s arts and educational communities. Activities range from exhibitions of local, regional, and international visual artists’ work, education programs, and lectures, panel discussions, and performances. Southern Exposure is dedicated to giving artists—whether they are exhibiting, curating, teaching, or learning—an opportunity to realize ideas for projects that may not otherwise find support.
The exhibition, Vapor, surveyed art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work. Often inspired by forms of activism, the works reacted to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies – sensors, databases, and communications equipment – that were only recently accessible outside a lab. In this sense, the show’s title also referred to the growing means by which this art is being produced, in addition to the ubiquity of greenhouse gases and other air conditions that serve as this art’s medium. Vapor proposed new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions.